While in prison, he remained a very active chess
player, playing a large number of correspondence games and rated games
with other inmates. Over time, he achieved a very high ranking in the
United States Chess Federation (USCF). Some allege he accomplished
this by manipulating the ratings system in use at the time.
Bloodgood was an active chess organizer in Hampton
Roads, Virginia in the late 1950s. He was the rating statistician for
the Virginia State Chess Federation, where he rated himself at an Elo
rating of 1956.
In the early 1960s, he was twice convicted of
burglary and served prison time in Delaware. He was also convicted of
forgery of his parents' accounts, and spent more time in jail. In
1969, just nine days after being released from prison, he murdered his
mother, Margaret Bloodgood (whom he later claimed to be his
stepmother). According to reports, he rolled her body in a carpet and
left it in Dismal Swamp, where it was soon found. His death sentence
was ultimately commuted to life imprisonment when the U.S. Supreme
Court found the death penalty, as then administered, to be
unconstitutional.
From prison, Bloodgood played thousands of chess
games by mail, as well as thousands with fellow inmates. He also
published three books on chess openings, including The Tactical Grob
(on 1.g4).
In 1974, Bloodgood and fellow inmate Lewis
Capleaner received a furlough to play in a chess tournament. They
overpowered the single guard assigned to them and escaped, but they
were recaptured after a few days.
Bloodgood filed two petitions for habeas corpus
with the Supreme Court of Virginia. His contention was that the death
sentence, later commuted to life, was based in part on the fact that
he was a repeat offender, having been convicted twice of burglary in
Delaware. But these convictions had been obtained before the U.S.
Supreme Court decision of Gideon v. Wainwright which guaranteed the
right to counsel. He argued that since no defense attorney had been
assigned to him in the Delaware cases, the two convictions were
unconstitutional and thus the Virginia death sentence was
unconstitutional as well. The court rejected his contentions,
resulting in two decisions of the Virginia Supreme Court in Bloodgood
v. Virginia and Bloodgood v. Garraghty, 783 F.2d 470, 475 (4th Cir.
1986).
Bloodgood organized chess games within Powhatan
Prison, which were by necessity with fellow inmates. Many of these
inmates were taught the game by Bloodgood, and thus began as unrated
and inexperienced players. Bloodgood obtained USCF memberships for
them. Some accused Bloodgood, with his intimate knowledge of the
rating system, of rigging their ratings.
The accusation was that he arranged for new
prisoners to play rated games against other prisoners, who would
deliberately lose, thus giving the new inmate an inflated USCF rating.
Bloodgood, it is further alleged, then played rated games against the
new highly rated prisoner, and each time he won, gained a few more
rating points. This continued for several years, and by 1996 his
rating rose to 2702, making the 59-year-old Bloodgood the second
highest rated player in the nation. In comparison, at his retirement
Bobby Fischer's rating was 2760, and several leading grandmasters were
in the 2600s.
This is all a matter of considerable controversy
even today. Bloodgood himself vehemently denied these accusations, and
said that he played chess in the only competitions available to him,
prison tournaments, and won almost every game because he was the
strongest player in the prison system.
As his rating rose, he wrote the USCF to warn them
that its system was prone to "closed pool" ratings inflation. But
nothing was done until Bloodgood's rating skyrocketed. Virtue of his
high rating, Bloodgood would have qualified for entry into the U.S.
Chess Championship, a prestigious invitation-only event intended for
the best 16 players in the country. This caused an investigation by
the USCF, which debated extensively what to do about the situation. In
the end, Bloodgood wasn't invited to the event (which he could not
have attended anyway), and the USCF changed its ratings system rules
to attempt to prevent "closed pool" ratings inflation.
Late in life, Bloodgood made a variety of claims
that seemed designed to obtain a release from prison. For example, he
claimed to have been born in 1924 and asked for a furlough based on
old age. He claimed to have been born in Germany or Mexico and asked
to be extradited to those countries or to be involved in prisoner
exchange. He also claimed to have been a Nazi spy during World War II.
He often gave interviews, trying to convince the interviewer that he
was completely innocent of his crimes and a victim of mistaken
identity. Bloodgood died in Powhatan Correctional Center of lung
cancer on August 4, 2001.
The Cleveland Public Library houses the Claude F.
Bloodgood Collection, which "contains the personal papers of Claude F.
Bloodgood, including legal documents, medical and other prison
records, and chess related items."
He is serving a life sentence in the US for the
brutal murder of his mother, but he is quite unlike any other inmate.
His tale leads from a seaside town in Mexico, to Nazi Germany and
Hollywood. And he's a chess grandmaster. Julian Borger follows the
bizarre trail of Claude Bloodgood
The prisons of Virginia are strung out like dark
farmhouses across the pastures west of Richmond. Cattle graze and
horses forage behind white wooden fences lining the road. It would be
an American idyll were it not for the ubiquitous razor wire and the
fact that the ranch-hands here march to work double-file under armed
guard.
The Powhatan Medical Unit is set in the midst of
this high-security pastoral scene. It is a squat brick building on a
hilltop by the Appomatox River, ringed by high metal fences. This
sunny morning, no one is manning the gate, but after a few minutes of
silent waiting, a disembodied voice rasps from an unseen loudspeaker -
'You here to see Bloodgood?' Visitors are allowed only personal
identification and something to write with. The inmates may be ailing
but they are convicted murderers, one of the 'correctional officers'
explains. Inmate number 99432 is serving a life sentence for the
brutal murder of his own mother. But the guards seem to like him. They
all call him Claude. Even his former jailers ask after him and send
their regards.
Claude Frizzell Bloodgood III is quite unlike the
other thugs and killers locked up in Powhatan Correctional Facility.
For one thing, the elderly prisoner has the reputation of a reformed
man, a gent. He is also an undisputed chess genius.
Since 1970, when he began his incarceration for the
beating and strangulation of Margaret Bloodgood in an apparent feud
over family money, he has blossomed from chess hustler to senior
master. In 1996, the US Chess Federation (USCF) ranked him second in
the country. Even these days, with his abilities fading fast, his USCF
points rating of 2,639 makes him a grandmaster. He is the author of
three books on chess gambits.
Almost all the chess he plays these days is by
post. Codified moves travel between Powhatan and his opponents around
the world in slow-moving stamped envelopes. A game takes on average
eight months. Bloodgood garnered a handful of British headlines
earlier this year when it emerged that he had been playing postal
chess for 28 years with John Walker, a town councillor and Methodist
lay preacher from the Staffordshire town of Burntwood. In that time,
they had managed to complete just 10 games. The first lasted seven
years before ending in stalemate. The two men are finally due to play
face-to-face when Walker travels to Virginia this summer.
My first glimpse of Bloodgood was the pale dome of
his perfectly smoothly bald head as he is wheeled past a counter and
into the stark, barred visitors room. Slumped in a wheelchair in
striped pyjamas, he was bloated by the enforced inaction of his
chronic emphysema.
'My health has got very bad. I can't walk four or
five steps before I start wheezing like a son of a bitch,' he said.
Bloodgood talks in a murmuring Southern drawl. He gulps for breath
after long sentences. He believes he is entering the last months of
his life and he wants desperately to tell his story.
Bloodgood's tale is as bizarre and picaresque as
any you could find in fact or fiction. It leads from a seaside town in
Mexico to Nazi Germany and then to Hollywood in its golden age, years
of desperate hustling and theft culminating in murder and the confines
of a Virginia prison cell. Running through it is the single unifying
thread: his obsessive passion for chess.
It was a story that was to drive me across the
country for weeks, ferreting through archives and files in search of
some decisive truth about the man. As it turned out, the pursuit would
prove as frustrating - to use a southern expression - as nailing jelly
to the wall.
The prison guards had wandered off and left us
alone. Bloodgood, leaning forward in his wheelchair and smiling as he
relished his moment, announced: 'This is where it gets interesting. 'I
was born Klaus Bluttgutt in La Paz on the Baha peninsular in Mexico.
My father's name was Klaus Bluttgutt too. He was an agent for the
Abwehr - German military counter-intelligence.' By the late 1930s,
father and son had wound up in the Virginia port of Norfolk, the
headquarters of the US Atlantic fleet, where they established
themselves, with now perfect English and forged documents, as the
Bloodgoods. His father, by now a Nazi, called himself Claude Jr,
implying long family traditions. Klaus the younger became Claude III.
Claude Bloodgood Jr got himself a job in the navy yards and married a
local woman, Margaret.
By 1941, when America's war started, Claude, at the
age of 14, had been secretly packed off to Germany. Margaret and the
neighbours were told he was at boarding school. In fact, Bloodgood
says, he was at boot camp at the Naval Academy at Kiel, Germany,
learning his father's trade.
By 1942, Bloodgood was given his commission after
first joining the party. He gives his Nazi party number as 1098201. As
a fresh-faced teenager, he was put to work as an Abwehr courier, 'a
gopher' as he puts it, ferrying secrets and money between his father
and their Nazi spy-masters.
'I went over in
U-boats a couple of dozen times. I would come ashore and go straight
up to the Waltonian, which was a gun club up near Willoughby Spit (on
the coast of Virginia). I would ring my father from there and he would
come and get me.' This family business lasted until the end of the
war. On his last mission in 1945, he says, the U-boat carrying
Bloodgood ran aground off Willoughby Spit. Some of the submariners
drowned. Others were picked up by the US coastguard. Bloodgood was the
only one to get away. By the skin of their teeth, the Bloodgoods
survived with their secrets intact.
After the war, Bloodgood drifted away from his
family. He joined the marines in 1954, and they helped him take his
high school diploma. He was a poor student, but already an inspired
chess player.
His father had played him since he was a
five-year-old, and they had taken a set with them wherever they went.
In Germany, the Abwehr had treated him as a prodigy, showing him off
to VIP visitors. In his meticulously-kept chess log, he records games
with Admiral Wilhelm Canaris ('a dignified man with a limp'), General
Erwin Rommel (he recalls a neat scar on the Desert Fox's face) and
Heinrich Himmler ('his eyes were dead'). In the marines, chess
continued to drive his destiny. In 1955, he was recovering from a foot
injury at Camp Pendleton marine hospital outside San Diego, when a
band of Hollywood actors breezed through 'to cheer up the boys'.
Humphrey Bogart was among them.
'I was playing chess and he heard I was playing for
money. We played a few games there and a while later, he would have me
driven down for the day to these beach houses in Santa Monica and Van
Nuys, and I would play him there.' The encounter with Bogart proved an
introduction to the Hollywood set at a time when speed chess was in
vogue. The stars could be found swopping moves with chess hustlers in
the House of Pancakes restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard.
Among the long list of celebrated opponents
Bloodgood claims to have played are Gary Cooper, Richard Widmark,
David Niven, James Mason and James Cagney.
Bloodgood tried to hold on to his Hollywood niche.
He tried his hand at acting and writing plays with no real success. He
drifted again, earning money by hustling chess games.
By the early sixties hustling had become crime -
forging documents, trying to defraud banks and breaking and entering,
for which he spent time in a Delaware prison in 1962. His father
despaired, but they stayed in touch. Bloodgood admits it was less a
matter of sentiment than his own determination not to be written out
of his inheritance.
He believes his father pocketed Abwehr funds left
in a Swiss bank account after the war. It is an obsession. He even had
the account number 10-22004-1 tattooed on his right wrist. It was this
Nazi gold which led to the murder, according to Bloodgood. When his
father died in December 1968, Claude was a peripheral presence in the
family, but fixated on the family money. His father had bequeathed him
only $100.
A few months after the funeral, Margaret Bloodgood
accused him of forging one of her cheques. His fury and contempt
exploded in a stream of threats under the nose of a Norfolk judge. 'I
said: 'I'll kill you'... and in the end that killed me,' he said. When
her body was found rolled inside a rug behind a country road several
months later, he was a prime suspect.
He was arrested in Portsmouth, Virginia two months
later and confessed to the murder. But at his trial he recanted and
claimed to have owned up only under duress. Nevertheless it took the
jury just 45 minutes to sentence him to death.
Bloodgood owes his life to the Supreme Court, which
suspended capital punishment in 1972. By that time Bloodgood had
several times flirted with his assigned day before winning stays of
execution from the governor. His parole has been turned down every
year since 1972.
He blames his bad luck on his jail-break. In 1974,
the two leading lights of the Virginia Penitentiary Chess Club
(chairman and founder, Claude Bloodgood) made a run for it while out
supposedly preparing for a tournament. Bloodgood and another
chessmaster-murderer, Lewis Capleaner (convicted of stabbing a woman
17 times), led the authorities on a chase across a dozen states before
being caught. He still talks about the possibility of parole, but more
often about the prospect of dying in jail.
As he is being wheeled
away, he promises to write and begin a postal chess game. A few days
later, an impeccably neat letter arrived on yellow legal paper, with
advice on how to corroborate the bizarre details of his life and an
opening move:
1. N-KB3
The unorthodox opening is the Bloodgood trademark.
Donald Wedding, who has been playing postal chess and occasionally
live chess against Bloodgood for years, explained: 'They're the kind
of openings you play if you're a hustler. It's the chess equivalent of
street fighting, when you point at something and say look up there,
then you hit them.' I sent back:
1.P-Q4
... and set about trying to discover whether
Bloodgood was a unique fragment of the century's history or a
particularly gifted mythomane.
Under normal circumstances, anyone claiming to have
played chess with Himmler, Rommel, Bogart and Charlie Chaplin would
not be worth spending much time on. But in Bloodgood's case, a handful
of niggling details suggested the tale could not be so quickly
dismissed.
A large number of the FBI's voluminous Bloodgood
files had been withheld. The remaining documents variously recorded
him as being born in 1937 in Norfolk or in La Pax (sic), Mexico, in
1924. He said he had forgotten most of his German, retaining only a
handful of phrases, but one of his former jailers, Henry Billings, who
had been stationed in Germany as a soldier, swore that Bloodgood had
been fluent.
'He had a sort of High Berlin, aristocratic
accent,' Billings told me. 'I have no doubt what he says about himself
is true.' There had indeed been U-boat landings of German agents along
the US eastern seaboard during the war. They were part of a campaign
of espionage codenamed Operation Pastorius, masterminded by the
Abwehr's wily Admiral Canaris. And although it is now close to
invisible, the FBI records from 1974 mention a code or account number
tattooed on Bloodgood's right wrist.
As far as it was possible to tell, the dates of the
chess matches Bloodgood claimed, squared with where the celebrity in
question was at the time. Eric Lax, Bogart's biographer, checked his
files and found the details offered by Bloodgood seemed to match.
'I would say it is quite probable. Bogart loved
playing. The game you see him playing in Casablanca was a postal game
he was engaged in at that time,' Lax said.
But the most striking splinter of evidence from the
FBI files turned out to be something and someone Bloodgood had not
mentioned. In May 1966, he was arrested in Tijuana on suspicion of
some unnamed crime and deported to the US, where the FBI was looking
for him for violation of parole in Virginia. The desk officer noted:
'During this investigation, Bloodgood was in contact and allegedly
married Kathryn Jane Grayson... ' Kathryn Grayson was the star of hit
Hollywood musicals in the 1950s, including Showboat and Kiss Me Kate.
But Bloodgood was not inclined to talk about her. He had called
collect from Powhatan, and was keener to talk about his career in
espionage. He said he was afraid of angering Grayson, believing she
was somehow capable of intervening to quash his hopes of parole.
'There was a bunch of us down in Tijuana for the
races, down for a sort of party weekend, and me and Grayson sort of
got together,' he said. 'We got married sort of as an afterthought.
But it created a real problem for her when she found out I had a
record. She got her lawyers to annul the marriage.
There was no record of
the annulment at the Santa Barbara court where Bloodgood said the
annulment was filed. Grayson herself is still alive, reportedly
pursuing a very private existence in Santa Monica. She could not be
contacted for comment.
Bloodgood began calling regularly. The calls would
announce themselves with a recorded woman's voice, stating: 'This call
is from a correctional institution and is subject to monitoring and
recording.' Then Bloodgood would come on the line, only to be
interrupted five seconds later by another recorded warning.
He wanted to run through a few moves of our game at
once, and I scrambled to keep up with him. He had the changing map of
the board in his head, and he was in hustler mode.
2. P-QN3 P-QB4
3. P-K4 PxP
4. N-K5 Q-Q5
5. B-QN2 QxB
6. N-QB3 Q-QR6
It was already clear my cavalier insouciance had
led my queen into a trap which was beginning to close around her.
'At speed, all the grandmasters make glaring
mistakes,' Bloodgood told me once, boasting: 'I will play five-minute
chess against anyone in the world, even today.' After a handful of
moves, he would ask how the research was going, whether we were
winning or losing, as if we were engaged in our own battle of wits
with the authorities to tease the truth out from them.
In truth we were losing. There was a stalemate over
Bloodgood's Hollywood era. No one could recall him, but there was
nothing to disprove his account either. But we were suffering setbacks
over Germany.
The Bundesarchiv wrote back saying they had checked
their files and found no trace of Bloodgood. A brief reference to his
father in the FBI files suggested he was born in 1910, making him too
young to have a son born in 1924. Meanwhile the Simon Wiesenthal
Centre found no trace of the supposed bank account number on
Bloodgood's wrist and judged his Nazi party number to be far too low
for someone who was supposed to have joined as late as the 1940s.
Research into Norfolk's wartime history produced
nothing to corroborate Bloodgood's tales of espionage, but it did
throw up anecdotal shards that could conceivably have burrowed into
his memory or imagination.
There was indeed a long cylindrical wreck lying on
the beach at Willoughby Spit, which most young boys growing up in
Norfolk after the war believed to the remains of a German U-boat. Al
Chewning was one of them, but when he set out to write a book about
the undersea war off the US coast, he was disappointed to discover
that it was the remains of a railroad tanker that had accidentally
slipped off a ferry. 'There is no way a sub could have come that close
in, with all the defences and submarine nets they had there,' Chewning
said.
The FBI did in fact suspect Bloodgood of espionage
in 1959, but the context was quite different. While serving as a guard
at the Norfolk naval arms depot in 1959, he was pursuing a postal
chess game with a Russian player called Vladimir Kostikov. Someone
informed on him and the FBI investigated. It was finally decided that
the correspondence was harmless, with no sign of any codes. Bloodgood
was briefed and told to report any suspicious requests from his
Russian opponent.
Earlier this month Bloodgood called to play the
end-game. It proved a perfunctory coup-de-grace.
7. B-QN5 (Ch) B-Q2
8. N-QB4 Q-QN5
9. BxB NxB
10. P-QR3.
My queen was cornered. I resigned.
Bloodgood urged me to start a new game, and to keep
pressing on with the research. He was disappointed with the results to
date, but was sure that persistent pressure on the ramparts of the
establishment would vindicate his personal narrative.
His faith in his life story seemed so fervent that
I was reluctant to voice my deepening doubts, and in any case, there
were those stubborn details, like his now-faded 'High Berlin' German
and his apparent liaison with Grayson, which added undoubted weight to
his claims about Bogart and Hollywood.
Ultimately I decided that, over time, truth and
fiction had become the indivisible weft and warp of Bloodgood's life.
On one side there are the sad, yet extraordinary facts - the talent
wasted by criminal compulsion. At the other extreme, there is gaudy,
unadulterated invention. The centre appears a blend of both, woven
together so tightly it is virtually impossible to separate.
It seemed almost unfair to try, attempting to
unpick the stories of a dying man who thrived on the telling of his
tale, and the amazement it drew.
I asked him once what he would do if Powhatan's
gates were suddenly flung open. First off, he said he'd go looking for
a good steak.
'I'd love to get a decent meal. Then I'd play chess
with the people I've known over the years, but face to face. Most of
people I've known are dead. I've got to look for another generation of
friends - some people who would remember me after I'm gone.'
Play it again, Claude
Bloodgood v Bogart (1955)
Bogart chose what he named the Maltese Falcon
Attack after one of his films; this was a gambit against the Dutch
Defence, which was fashionable at the time. In the Maltese Falcon,
White sacrifices a central pawn so as to gain fast development of his
queen, bishop and knight, which then combine against Black's king. The
Maltese Falcon is serious enough to be included in Nunn's Chess
Openings. It was once tried against Vassily Smyslov, a former world
champion, who (unlike Bloodgood) cautiously declined it and preferred
slowly to develop pieces. Bogart v Bloodgood gave White a vicious
attack. Bloodgood's king was chased around the board as Bogart hunted
the monarch down with queen and rook. At one point, Bogart could have
taken his opponent's queen for nothing but sadistically preferred to
continue hunting the king until Bloodgood resigned the board position.
Bloodgood v Borger (1999)
In this game, the
Guardian's man falls for one of Bloodgood's favourite traps. (One of
Bloodgood's books is called the Norfolk Gambit, after the Virginia
port where his father had spied.) At first White's play seems crazy,
since Black's obvious fourth move Qd4 wins a bishop or a knight. But,
in fact, the game is an exact rerun of a game Bloodgood had won in the
Virginia State Open in 1957, which was published in England in 1961 in
the magazine Chess. As events unfold, it becomes clear that, after
Black takes the bishop, his queen is trapped by White's knights and
pawns. With hindsight, Black would have done better to develop his
king's knight at move two; Bloodgood had analysed this move, too, in
his Norfolk Gambit book. The knight can take White's central pawn, but
Black still has to face a strong attack. - Leonard Barden
