In the fall of 1991, Edmund Davidson, a 33-year-old male inmate at Montana State Prison, was hopeful about the future. He had served 12 years of a sentence for raping a woman at knifepoint and believed he was on a path toward parole. Two years prior, he had married his wife, Julie, in a ceremony within the prison walls. She believed he had truly started to turn his life around after they met.
But his hopes for a life outside of prison were violently extinguished on September 22, 1991, when he became a target in one of the deadliest prison riots in United States history.
The uprising at the Deer Lodge facility was not a spontaneous burst of violence but a calculated and brutal attack. A group of inmates, including the prolific serial killer Douglas "Doug" Duane Turner and his accomplice William Gollehon, orchestrated the riot to target and eliminate fellow prisoners they believed to be informants. Davidson was on their list. He had been moved to the protective custody unit after providing investigators with information about the 1990 murder of another inmate, Gerald Pileggi, who was beaten to death with baseball bats in the prison yard. Turner and Gollehon were responsible for that killing.
Life in protective custody was restrictive, and Davidson hated it, but he also lived in fear. His wife recalled that other inmates would run their fingers across their throats in a threatening gesture whenever they saw him. His fear was tragically justified. During the chaotic four-hour riot, inmates managed to seize control of the maximum-security building, taking five guards hostage. While the guards were ultimately freed unharmed after a tactical unit stormed the block, the same could not be said for the men in the protective custody unit.
The rioters unleashed their rage on the inmates housed there. When prison officials regained control, they found a horrific scene. Five inmates were dead, and eight others were severely injured. The victims had been beaten with fire extinguishers and makeshift weapons like sharpened broomsticks, stabbed, and some had their throats slashed. Three of the slain men, targeted as "snitches," were found hanging by electrical cords from a second-floor balcony. Edmund Davidson was among the five killed, his life taken as retribution for cooperating with authorities.
The man primarily responsible for Davidson's death, Doug Turner, was already a convicted murderer many times over. His killing spree began in 1987, less than a month after his 16th birthday, when he shot and killed three of his neighbors in Glendive, Montana. For those crimes, he was sentenced to 100 years in prison. Inside prison, his violence only escalated. He and Gollehon murdered Pileggi in 1990 and then led the murderous rampage during the 1991 riot, killing Davidson, Vern Baker (24), Gary Evans (26), Ernest Holliday (38), and Ernest Mazurkiewicz (32). In total, Turner was a proven nine-time killer.
In the aftermath of the riot, the state of Montana faced numerous lawsuits from the families of the slain inmates and those who were injured, leading to settlements totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars for negligence in running the facility. For his role in the riot, Turner received additional life sentences. He had previously been sentenced to death for the 1990 murder of Gerald Pileggi. However, the state would never carry out the execution. On July 8, 2003, with his legal appeals still pending, 31-year-old Douglas Turner was found hanging in his maximum-security cell, having committed suicide before justice could be served.
