Mark Schreiber, a longtime Missouri Department of Corrections employee turned penitentiary historian and author, will forever be connected with the Missouri State Penitentiary (MSP). Mark was hired at MSP as a corrections officer in 1968 and retired as the deputy warden in 2010. From 1989 to 2004, he was directly involved with the execution process. More specifically, he was one of the two people responsible for administering the lethal injections used to carry out executions in Missouri.
“It was a very hard thing to do, but it was part of my responsibility,” Mark says.
For a time, Mark left MSP to work as an investigator for the Cole County Sheriff’s Office and the Cole County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, which investigated crimes that occurred at MSP. One of the most horrific cases he investigated was the 1975 murder of Lt. Harold Atkinson, who was stabbed by inmates 69 times. That case was particularly personal to Mark. Harold had once been Mark’s supervisor at the prison.
“That case had a great deal to do with the reinstatement of the death penalty in Missouri,” Mark says.
Mark has seen horrific things during his career, but senseless acts were what troubled him the most. Caseworkers routinely asked new prisoners if they had any known enemies in the system to determine if they could live among the general prison population. When a young inmate was being processed, he told his case worker he had no known enemies.
“The very day he got out of the intake unit, he was stabbed to death because somebody was waiting for him,” Mark says. “Those kinds of things always really bothered me.”
Mark retired having experienced a broken nose, a few cracked ribs, and a knife wound to his hand. His closest call came during a manhunt for an escaped convict. He and another officer spotted the escapee lurking near a house on Bald Hill Road. Mark knew the inmate and called for him to stop running and put his hands in the air. Instead, the prisoner began walking toward Mark, reaching underneath his shirt to pull out a large butcher knife.
“Had he kept coming toward me, I’d have had no choice but to shoot him,” Mark says. Fortunately, the convict surrendered.
Despite the negative nature of incarcerated life, Mark is quick to note the positives. One time, a corrections officer was severely stabbed by an inmate and was too wounded to be moved to a local hospital. The officer was taken to the prison’s surgery ward, where an inmate trained as a military medic kept the officer from bleeding to death. Though the officer was left partially paralyzed, he lived thanks to the aid of the prisoner.
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