[2] Coy was a native of Kentucky who turned to crime during the Great Depression and, in 1937, was sentenced to 25 years' imprisonment for committing a robbery with a sawed-off shotgun.

This relative freedom allowed him to spot a tiny flaw in one of the prison's security features, the bars of the gun gallery overlooking the cell house.

Coy along with Joe Cretzer, Marvin Hubbard, Sam Shockley, Miran Thompson, and Clarence Carnes[3] planned to break into the gun galleries to steal weapons, take hostages and then flee to the dock.

Coy was successful in creating a makeshift bar-spreader devised from toilet fixtures in the prison workshops which he hid in a cloth bag inside his mouth.

This device enabled him to create a gap of approximately ten inches between the relatively weak bars that protected the gun galleries, then enter and overpower the unsuspecting guard on his return from investigating a fabricated incident caused by Shockley in the prison's secure unit, D-Block.