Prison Break

In this episode, I will describe how an inmate escaped from one of the most secure prisons in the state.  

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Hello, and welcome to Inside the Criminal Process, the podcast where I discuss and explain the criminal justice system in America using real-life examples in true crime cases. My name is Scott, and I'm a 29-year veteran law enforcement officer and a licensed attorney. I've worked as a patrol officer, a crime scene investigator, a field training officer, a detective, a parole officer, an investigator, a polygraph examiner, a crisis negotiator, and an administrator. I've also taught college-level criminal justice classes. So I don't have any questions for you for this episode because I have kind of a long story to talk about today in this escape episode. And my next episode is going to cover questions I've gotten from listeners. That's going to be, it's the whole episode is going to be dedicated to answering questions that I've that I've got from listeners. So let's jump right in and talk about the prison break. So I assisted with this prison break, and it was the most interesting and impressive escape that I've ever seen in my life. I was going to discuss several cases, escape cases, but this one's going to take enough time that I'm just going to cover this one escape for now. I will do another episode on a few other escapes later on, probably after the next episode. So I do want to ask for input from you guys on the length of my episodes. I've had some feedback from people who would like them to be longer. I kind of selfishly assumed that people were like me. I get distracted easily. So I enjoy podcasts that are between 20 and 30 minutes. And uh I do find myself limiting some of the information because I try not to go over 30 minutes. But if I get feedback that longer episodes, episodes are okay, uh, I won't focus so much on on limiting the episodes to to under 30 minutes. Again, for for the feedback, the email is inside cp81 at gmail.com. So if you just drop a note in there and and put questions as well, since I'm devoting the whole the next episode completely to questions from listeners, um, now's a great time to put drop some questions in there. So let's get to the escape. First, I kind of need to explain how the corrections department in the state decides where to house inmates. There, there's, I think there's 22 facilities in this state, and all of them are managed by the state and run by the state, except for two. There's two private prisons, and they're still subject to government oversight. They still have to follow the same laws as the state. But the staff are employees of a private corporation, and the and the business is for-profit. So the private public prison issue is an issue I'm going to have to devote some time to. So I'll address that in a later episode. For now, just know that the private prisons have to operate exactly like the public ones because of their contract with the state. So inmates have the same rights, same policies and procedures are in place at both the private and the public facilities. And there's a unit within the Department of Corrections that oversees private prisons, and they make sure they audit them and make sure that they're they're doing everything in accordance with the policies and procedures that the state is is bound by as well. There's only two female prisons in this state, so there's only two places to house them. Um they do go through the same classification system I'm going to describe. And there's also one prison that's used to house those with serious mental illness and other issues that may classify them as at risk or or if they have special needs, they may be placed in this this other prison. It's still run by the state, though. It's one of those 22 that I that I mentioned. When an inmate comes in, come in from the jail to do the initial processing for state prisons, he or she goes through a week or several weeks of processing. They get issued prison prison clothing and shoes, boots, a duffel bag. They get accounts set up for money because they can't have cash in prison. They get their phone account and they're issued a pen, which is a personal identification number, and that's how they make calls. It's the calls are made on like pay phones and they punch their pins in because there's no cash that that changes hands in the prison. Um they go through mental health, scholastic, and physical assessments. Uh they're also questioned about custody issues they may have, and the custody issue is any any issue you may have with somebody else who's also in prison. So a specific example uh that I dealt with was the a mother of a murder victim was incarcerated in the same prison as the woman that murdered, murdered him. So obviously that can create an unsafe situation. Uh in that specific case, though, the mother had no issues with her daughter-in-law, and uh they were actually able to serve time in the same prison. They weren't cellmates or anything, but they they certainly weren't enemies. Inmates are issued a classification number based on all that information that's gathered, as well as the crime that they they came to prison for, the criminal history, drug and alcohol use, level of education, social support system, conduct during periods of incarceration, including escape history, any mental illness or significant health-related issues, and and maybe some other things that I'm that I've forgotten about or I'm I'm missing. The facilities themselves are set up to house certain classifications of inmates. Obviously, the more secure prisons house the most at-risk individuals or those that are difficult to manage. And there are uh several minimum facilities where uh people who typically aren't at high risk for failure or or escape, um, they can go to these camps or these these uh minimum facilities. The inmate I'm gonna talk to you about today had a history of escaping from some pretty secure prisons. It had been some time, and his classification level allowed for him to be housed in a minimum center. But the minimum center was part of the largest prison in the state that also included housing classifications. It included from minimum all the way up to maximum. And the prison, the entire facility, uh there's different housing units that house the different classifications, but but the entire facility was surrounded by a lethal fence, um, including this minimum area where this inmate was housed. The fence was designed so that it would initially send a non-lethal electric charge to the wire when first contract contacted, and it would obviously send the person reeling, and then the electricity would amp up to deliver a lethal shock if it was contacted again. So if somebody just bounced back and said, Oh, I can take that, I can let me try that again, it was it was going to be a lethal dose of electricity that they got. There's stories of people telling inmates, hey, if you can survive that first shock, um, the electric electricity shuts off and then you'd be able to escape. I don't know if that's true. I mean, there's a bunch of rumors about stuff like that. Uh as far as I know, there had never been anybody who had been shocked by the fence. And, you know, people talk and they uh they tell lies quite a bit. So I don't know if people actually ever told inmates that. I I think the inmates would know it know better, anyways. So this lethal fence was between two chain link fences with razor wire on them. So the inmate that escaped, again, was on the minimum side of the prison, and it was still, it still had the lethal fence around it. He worked in maintenance and was a very manageable inmate. He had no behavior issues, no um, he wasn't hard to manage. He did what he was told and and what it was expected of him, and just kind of minded his own business. He had very few incidents of misconduct that he had been for written up for in recent in his recent incarceration. And um, he did have that history of escaping many years prior, but I don't know, maybe they felt that he had outgrown that, outgrown his desire to escape. Um, and I don't know if the escapes had been so far in the past that they just didn't include them on his present classification, his then-present classification. So anyway, the inmate had been working pretty much unsupervised in areas where there was a lot of copper tubing. Um, he was doing a lot of plumbing work, and he had been cutting lengths of copper pipe and storing and hiding them and taking a few back to his cell every day, stuffed in his pants. He was he was replacing the pipe, the copper pipe with those flexible plastic extension hoses used on vacuum cleaners, and there had been a closet full of these, full of this plastic, it's like flexible, it's corrugated flexible plastic tubing, and they had all been stored in a closet in his work area. So he would take a length of copper pipe and then tape this flexible hose as a as a patch so that the the water would still go through there. And he had been working on making a ladder by lashing the copper pipe with strips of bed sheets. He stored the ladder under his bunk, he attached it to the bottom of his bunk in his cell with like thin wire. He he wired it to the bed, the box spring, and to the ladder, and it was up so that if you just looked in the cell from the window, you couldn't see that far under the bunk. You would have had to get in the cell and get down on your knees and look under the bunk to actually see it suspended from the bottom of the bunk. He had also assisted with replacing windows in his building. And uh instead of riveting the windows on his cell, he had used like a non-industrial glue to make it and and just rivet heads to make it look like the window was riveted on there, but it it actually wasn't. So he had also fashioned, this was ingenious, he had fashioned two protective shields of cardboard lined with rubber shower curtain. And the cardboard pieces had so they had hard, sturdy protective covers used on hardcover books. He used those as handles. He attached those to the pieces of cardboard. And the the cardboard pieces were, I don't know, maybe twice the length of his arm from his fingertip to his elbow, and he had attached the hard pieces of the hardback books to one end to hold them with his hands. He then layered the rubber shower curtains between those pieces and attached another piece of cardboard to each of the other pieces. So he had these two things that he was he was gonna use to sandwich the wire, the live wire, the of the leak of the lethal fence, and push it up so he could scoot his back under the electrified wire. I hope I'm describing that okay. Um, but he folded this, the cardboard and the rubber over and then held it with these hardcover books and pushed the electric wire up and scooched, scooched underneath that wire. Because there was only, I think there were three or four electric wires that were part of the electric fence. It wasn't the entire chain link fence, which is what I always thought it was initially. So when he decided to run, he waited until the perimeter vehicle passed by his housing unit. He just pushed his window off, um, put the ladder on his back. He had two pieces that would attach together that were going to help him over the razor wire. And he also had the two cardboard insulators that he made. He made it over the first fence, crawled under the electric fence using the cardboard and rubber insulators, and got to the top of the razor wire on the second fence, and he put the ladder up there, and as he was going over it, it bent. So he had to leap from the top of the razor wire, and he had a pretty nasty gash on the outside of his leg. Um, but he was he was then outside the walls of the prison and he just started running. The investigator assigned to the prison put out a message that there had been an escape and that the inmate defeated the lethal fence with with cardboard. And I just I had visions of wily coyote sneaking up on the Roadrunner in an acme box, you know, like lifting up and running and then dropping down, um, moving along the fence, stopping when the spotlight from the prison tower swept by. I had no idea. Um, I thought that the investigator had either been drinking or was planning on on retiring and was playing a joke on everyone because that that prison was the one that was least likely in the state to experience a success successful escape. So we were all called to the prison, started trying to figure out how the escape unfolded, searched his cell, interviewed people, watching video, listening to phone calls. I figured he had gotten into a car and was long gone by the time they even realized he was gone. There had been a suspicious vehicle scene when people were reviewing the video, surveillance, the surveillance video. The vehicle drove down the street in front of the prison and stopped about where this inmate's housing unit was located. It turned its lights off, lights off and made a U-turn and then pulled over to the opposite side of the road. At about the time the inmate would have been going over the fence, the lights on the vehicle came on and it sped away going the direction that it had come from. So I assumed that the inmate had likely uh seen the car, jumped the fence, and then got in a car and was long gone. So good thing nobody listens to me though, because that's not what happened. Um, we never did figure out what the driver of that car was doing. I don't know if he saw the inmate going over the fence, and that's what made him stop and shut his lights off. Him or her. I don't know who it was. Um, but if they did, they never called, they never called the police or the department of corrections. So the inmate had only one person on his phone and visiting lists. It was his brother who lives, who was kind of a hermit and lived up in a remote kind of cabin in the mountains. The inmate hadn't talked to the brother or had a visit in many years. There was only one letter in the inmate's cell, and that was from an inmate advocate that lived about 100 miles away from the president. Had nothing to do with an escape or anything. It was just general chatter. And um if the inmate had communicated with anyone about his plan, he had done it uh covertly because we couldn't find anything. And in interviewing it, nobody was people claimed they had no clue. All the inmates said he basically kept to himself. They'd go out for yard time, and this inmate would just run around the the circle constantly working out and running. Um he did have, he had, he was missing part of his foot. Um, the inmate was, but he had left his prosthetic device in his cell. And he was on he only had one of those. So the cell was really easy to search. He didn't have a whole lot of stuff. Investigators went to this brother's house and uh he lived alone. He told investigators he hadn't heard from his brother in many years. The guy was a drinker, and over the course of the next couple days, he would call one of the investigators and tell them that his brother had called him and said he was on his way to his residence. So, of course, everybody, you know, pack up, get in your cars, the the escapie is going towards the brother's house, let's go get him. They they finally figured out that he was making false reports for his own entertainment. He was enjoying it, seeing all these cars come up there and flying up there, and and uh he got a lot of laughs when the investigators showed up looking for the inmate. I don't remember how they figured it out that he was lying. I think someone eventually checked his landline phone records and saw that he had received no calls. And and so they figured out that he was making it up. That was after several false alarms. The DOC put out a press release uh that there was a $10,000 reward for any information leading to the capture of the inmate, and the FBI stepped up and said, well, we'll add another 10 to that. So there was a $20,000 reward total. And I I gotta hand it to the tracking teams and the canine teams or the escape teams. They tracked this inmate to a small town that was about 32 miles away. And uh they were searching for him in this small town, asking everybody to go in their houses so the dogs could try to find the the scent. The dogs were being kind of distracted by the by the residents. Everybody's out there trying to figure out what's going on. And um he had followed. We found out later that he had been following the cell towers and running through these these cornfields to get to this small town. So there was a lady that was at home. Her husband had left for something. I don't know if he went to work or what, but she was she was out working in her garden with her dog, and the teams that were searching for the inmate asked her to go inside. And her and her dog went inside, and when she closed the door, she looked and standing right there in front of her, pointing a gun at her, was this inmate. He told her, keep quiet, and uh he held her at gunpoint while he got something to eat, and then he took some clothes, some of her husband's clothes, and put those on. So the lady's brother lived in the a neighboring town, not too far away. I think it was probably five, ten miles away. And he had seen on the news what was going on, and I think he saw her house, so he called her, and um, she didn't answer the phone. So he decided to go there and check on her because he knew she was home. He he threw a shotgun in the back of his truck and he was uh he was going into this small town and there was a roadblock there. Uh he demanded, let me let me go. I need to go check on my sister, make sure she's okay. And he explained to the sheriff. The sheriff was actually at the roadblock. They called him up there because this guy was so adamant. And um he told the sheriff I need to check on her because uh it's highly unusual for her not to answer her phone. Um the sheriff agreed to accompany him to his sister's house. They knocked on the door and the sister's dog barked once and then went silent. And the brother's like, that's it. That's that's completely out of character. I'm going in. So he went to get his shotgun out of the truck, and the sheriff was following him, and he said, Look, that dog barks until someone opens the doors. There's something wrong. We need to go in there. So the sheriff was able to actually convince the brother to let a tactical team enter the house and check on her, um, even though he had told the brother, we just saw her, she was fine, you know, she's probably asleep. The brother was like, No, no, no, no, no. So while they were getting ready to enter the house, um, the back door opened and the inmate walked out with his hands in the air, giving himself up. He said, Here I am, you guys got me. Um the dog was fine, by the way. He didn't do anything to it. He just he just made the lady grab the dog to keep it quiet. The inmate was taken back to the prison and interviewed. He really had had no plan and no help from anybody, inside or outside the prison. Uh he said his biggest concern was getting stuck in the razor wire and that he knew that he could defeat the lethal fence because somebody had done it in another state and he was aware of it. So the inmate was close to getting out, but he there was a re uh detainer on him. He was going to be sent to federal prison because he had been convicted of kidnapping in the federal system during one of his previous escapes. And he had done something similar. I think he went into a house and there was somebody there and he held them them um and stole some things from them. I'm not sure what the exact uh situation was, but so he had been convicted of kidnapping in that case, and the feds would would come and get him when he got out of the state prison. He told investigators he wasn't sure he could escape from a federal prison, so he decided to try to get out of the state prison before he was released. Afterwards, the brother demanded that the FBI and DOC give him the rewards that had been offered for information leading to the inmates' arrest. Both agencies refused to give him the rewards. But then the boss, my the boss came to me and said, Hey, I need you to look into this and see like if this guy actually deserves these rewards if he if he met the uh the burden that he needs to meet to get these rewards, which is basically his information led to the capture of this inmate. So I called the brother and talked to him, and then uh I called the sheriff and and talked to him. And he said that the brother, had the not the brother not been so adamant about going into the house, he didn't think they would have focused on that house or done a house-to-house search. And he said we'd seen her walk, we had seen her go in there with her dog. There was no reason for us to think there was anything going on uh in that house. So they ended up paying the brother the reward, and then according to the warden of the prison that the the inmate escaped from, he went and spoke to the man's sister and the and the brother-in-law and asked them if the brother had give given them any of the reward money, and they said, uh, no. He gave them he gave them zero. And I mean, these are like like kind of out-of-the-way towns. They're not they're not areas where real wealthy people live. So the brother may have eventually shared some of the money with his sister and her husband, but at the time he hadn't uh he hadn't given them anything. That's the end of it, this episode. Again, in the next episode, I'm just gonna cover questions I've received from listeners. If you have any questions, anything at all, just send it to the email again, inside cp81 at gmail.com. Um, and then if if if you do get on there to put questions in there, just tell me whether or not uh the podcast episodes are are a good length, they're too short, they're too sh too long. I just I'd like to get some feedback on that. So thank you for listening and take care.