Robert Frederick Knapps Jr., a young man of 21, was an inmate at the United States Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, a place with a long and storied history as the nation's first maximum-security federal prison. From the Leavenworth area, Robert was navigating life within the formidable walls of the institution. On September 2, 1979, his life was violently cut short inside the prison, a victim of one of the federal system's most notoriously violent inmates.
His killer was Clayton
Anthony Fountain, a man already serving a life sentence for a murder he committed as a U.S. Marine in the Philippines in 1974. Fountain's transfer to the federal prison system did nothing to curb his violent tendencies. A member of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang, Fountain was on a path that would see him become a serial killer, responsible for at least six murders behind bars. His methods were brutal and direct, often involving bludgeoning, stabbing with makeshift weapons, or shooting.
On that late summer day, Fountain and at least one accomplice targeted Robert Knapps. They attacked the young inmate, bludgeoning him to death. The specific motive for the attack on Robert is not publicly known, lost within the complex and often ruthless social structure of a maximum-security prison. What is clear is that Robert, at just 21 years old, became another victim of Fountain's escalating reign of terror within the prison walls. The killing was a stark demonstration of the ever-present danger inmates faced from predators within their own population.
The investigation into Robert's murder was contained within the prison system. For Clayton Fountain, already imprisoned for life, the consequences of this additional homicide were largely academic. He would continue his violent spree, murdering other inmates in 1981 and 1982. His violence culminated in 1983 at the high-security penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, where, on the same day a fellow Aryan Brotherhood member killed a guard, Fountain stabbed and killed a correctional officer named Robert L. Hoffmann. These murders led to a decades-long lockdown at Marion and were instrumental in the creation of the nation's first "supermax" prison, ADX Florence, designed to house the most dangerous and uncontrollable federal inmates.
Clayton Anthony Fountain was eventually convicted of five counts of first-degree murder and one count of second-degree murder for his string of killings. He received four life sentences and was ultimately transferred to the United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri. There, he was kept in extreme isolation until his death from a heart attack on July 12, 2004.
Little is publicly recorded about Robert Frederick Knapps Jr. beyond the brutal manner of his death. He is remembered as a young man from the Leavenworth community who fell victim to a hardened and remorseless serial killer while incarcerated. His death serves as a grim footnote in the violent career of Clayton Fountain and a somber reminder of the dangers lurking within the federal prison system during a particularly turbulent era. The case is officially closed, with Fountain held responsible for the murder, but the story of the young man whose life was taken remains largely untold.
