On the morning of September 22, 1991, a violent, planned riot erupted in the maximum-security unit of Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge. When the four-hour uprising was quelled, five inmates were dead. One of them was Vern Travis Baker, a 24-year-old male from Great Falls, Montana. He and the other victims had been housed in a protective custody wing of the prison, a section meant to keep them safe from the general population.
Instead, it became their death trap.
The riot was a brutal and calculated event. Inmates managed to break out of their cells, overpower guards, and take five of them hostage. A group of prisoners, armed with homemade weapons like sharpened broomsticks and mop handles, specifically targeted the protective custody unit. Reports from the time indicated that the men killed were targeted because they were believed to be informants. In the chaos, Vern Baker and four other inmates—Edmund Davidson, 33; Gary Evans, 26; Ernest Holliday, 38; and Ernest Mazurkiewicz, 32—were beaten and killed with such savagery that it shocked hardened law enforcement officers.
At the time of his death, Vern was serving a lengthy sentence out of Missoula County. A 1989 court record shows he had been convicted of felony theft and tampering with a witness, resulting in a 50-year sentence at the state prison. His placement in protective custody suggests he may have been threatened by other inmates prior to the riot.
The investigation identified the main perpetrators of the murders as inmates Douglas Duane "Doug" Turner and William Jay Gollehon. Turner was already a convicted serial killer, despite his young age. In 1987, just after his 16th birthday, he had murdered three of his neighbors in Glendive. By the time of the 1991 riot, he and Gollehon were also responsible for the 1990 murder of another inmate, Gerald Pileggi, for which they both received death sentences. Turner was a proven nine-time killer.
For their roles in the five murders during the riot, both Turner and Gollehon were convicted of deliberate homicide and received multiple life sentences on top of their existing sentences. Thirteen other prisoners were also convicted on various charges for their participation in the bloody uprising. The state never had the chance to carry out Turner's execution; on July 8, 2003, while still on death row and with appeals pending, the 31-year-old hanged himself in his maximum-security cell.
In the years following the riot, the State of Montana faced legal consequences for the security failures that allowed the violence to occur. A Powell County District Court judge ruled that the state had been negligent in its operation of the maximum-security unit, finding that officials had ignored warnings of a pending riot. Lawsuits were filed by the families of the slain inmates. The state ultimately paid a settlement of $880,000 to be shared among the families of Vern Baker and Edmund Davidson and eight other inmates who were injured during the attack.
