The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison

by Pete Earley

  Guards were supposed to put a ticket inside a clear Plexiglas box at the head of the serving line before eating. Bucklew had made a practice of standing in view of the box so he could tell which guards had paid and which had simply passed their hands over it without depositing a ticket. Officials later acknowledged that the cafeteria frequently served more meals than there were tickets for, but they said the amount was insignificant.

  Like most other inmates, Bucklew hated guards. “They are my sworn enemy. The lowest form of life,” he said, “even worse than cops.” When Bucklew was a teenager growing up in New Jersey, he had heard over his car radio one afternoon that a hitchhiker had just shot a state police officer and was on the run not far from where Bucklew lived. Bucklew drove immediately to the area being searched. “I wanted to find that guy and give him a ride,” Bucklew said. “Anybody who killed a cop was okay with me.”

  Bucklew was twenty-five when he went to prison for the first time, in May 1974, to begin serving a life term for the murder of an armored-car guard during a bungled robbery. He was put in one of the oldest prisons in America, the state prison in Trenton that had first opened in 1797. As far as Bucklew was concerned, it hadn’t changed much. “It was like a fucking dungeon,” he recalled. “It was noisy and dirty and there were cockroaches everywhere and rats and I’m thinking, hmmm, this is it. This is my fucking home for the rest of my life!”

  Two days after he arrived, an older inmate invited Bucklew to a meeting of the “Lifers’ Club.” It began much like a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, with each man standing, giving his first name, and then telling how much time he had served.

  “The first one says, ‘I got twenty-two years down,’ and the next says, ‘I got twenty-five years in,’ and on and on,” Bucklew recalled, “and I’m thinking, ‘Shit, these guys have done some serious time in this rat hole.’ ”

  When the meeting ended, an inmate stopped Bucklew.

  “Hey, ain’t you the kid who robbed the armored car?”

  “Yeah,” Bucklew replied proudly, “that’s me.”

  “I robbed one myself back in 1950. Killed a guard too.”

  “We talked for a while,” Bucklew remembered, “and then it hit me. This dude had done twenty-four calendar years—twenty-four—in prison. I thought, ‘I’m in trouble. I’m in serious trouble here. They are going to make me stay here for at least twenty-five years,’ and then I thought, ‘Fuck this, if my legal appeal is rejected, I’m going to escape.’ ”

  Nearly two years later, Bucklew lost his appeal. He immediately went to work planning an escape. It had been fifteen years since anyone had successfully escaped from Trenton, although several had tried. Sitting on his bunk, Bucklew looked at every inch of his cell. There were only two openings: the air vent, which was much too small, and the toilet. When Bucklew walked over to the toilet and got down on his knees, he noticed that the water pipes leading to it passed through a steel plate welded to the back wall of the cell.

  The next morning when he was released to the prison yard for exercise, he offered an inmate who worked in the carpentry shop a bag of marijuana in return for a hammer and chisel. He got the tools a few days later. Bucklew then jammed a piece of wood into the lock on his cell door so that it wouldn’t work. Later that day, guards sent an inmate orderly to knock off the weld and the bolts on the lock so that a locksmith could fix it. Once again, Bucklew used marijuana as a bargaining chip and convinced the inmate to take his time breaking open the lock. Disconnecting the toilet, Bucklew got out his hammer and chisel and began removing the weld from the plate on the wall. “I timed my licks with my hammer to his, lick for lick, so the guards couldn’t hear me.” By the time the inmate had sprung open the lock, Bucklew had finished chiseling the weld from the plate. Bucklew had bought several marshmallow-filled candy bars from the prison commissary, and he chewed them and used the goo as putty to replace the weld. He painted the sticky mixture silver so it looked as if the plate was still welded in place, and slid the toilet back in position.

  Working in the dark later that night, Bucklew disconnected the pipes that led to his toilet and pulled off the steel plate. Beneath it was a nine-by-seventeen-inch-square hole that led through the concrete wall into an open space between Bucklew’s cell and the cell directly behind it. The space was filled with pipes and electrical wires. Bucklew stuck his hand into the hole, but couldn’t reach the other side. He stuck his leg in, too, and couldn’t touch it. He now knew that the space was big enough for him to crawl into, although he didn’t know where it led. “I couldn’t fit through the hole, though,” Bucklew recalled, “I was too big. I started running, and quit eating. Every day, all I ate were two tins of sardines, a half orange, and four crackers.” Bucklew weighed 220 when he started his crash diet. He calculated that he needed to lose at least 30 pounds to make it through the opening in the wall.

  One day while dieting, Bucklew was in the prison law library typing a letter when he decided to replace the machine’s ribbon. He couldn’t free it from the machine, so he decided to break it. Despite his tremendous strength, Bucklew couldn’t tear the ribbon. “That sucker was made out of nylon—just like a rope.” He began stealing a few typewriter ribbons each week and wove them into rope back in his cell.

  When Bucklew’s weight reached 190 pounds, he was able to force himself through the hole behind his toilet. He struck a match and discovered the chamber was five feet wide, six stories high, and filled with pipes and wires. Bucklew had worked at his father’s television repair shop as a youngster and had spent summers installing antennas. He was used to climbing and he soon found a pipe that was big enough for him to shinny up. It was a difficult climb, but when he reached the top and managed to strike another match, he found the ceiling covered by a row of bars to prevent anyone from cutting through to the roof. He climbed down, slipped back through the hole into his cell, and sealed the entry to his secret passage with marshmallow goo.

  The next day, Bucklew traded marijuana for six pieces of a hacksaw blade. That night he squeezed into the chamber again, climbed the pipe, and, hand-overhand like a child dangling from monkey bars, made his way across the bars on the ceiling until he was hanging directly under an air vent that led out onto the roof. Bucklew tried to use one of the hacksaw blades to cut the ceiling bars, but it was impossible for him to cut with one hand while holding onto a bar with his other. If he lost his grip, he would fall seventy feet. Disappointed, he returned to his cell.

  All the next day, Bucklew puzzled over how he could support himself under the air vent long enough to saw through the ceiling bars. By late afternoon, he had a solution. He stole a steel roller from a law library typewriter and took an inch-wide strong canvas belt from a wire gurney that was hanging in his cellblock. He sewed two loops on the end of the belt, tucked the roller in his pants, and crawled through the opening in his cell wall. This time when Bucklew reached the air vent in the ceiling, he flipped the canvas belt over several bars and slipped the steel roller through the loops. The contraption looked like a trapeze. He put one leg through and shifted his weight on the roller. It held. Now, he could cut through the ceiling bars.

  Bucklew decided to only cut for thirty minutes each night in case guards happened by his cell during a surprise check. Each morning he marked his progress on a calendar in his cell. “I kept a running total on the calendar in plain sight. I knew the guards wouldn’t figure it out.”

  Bucklew calculated that it would take him one week to cut through the bars, but when he finished, he discovered there was another row of bars inside the air vent itself that he would have to cut, and these were much thicker than the first row. There was another problem. Even after he cut the bars, Bucklew was going to be too big to get through the air vent. He would have to lose even more weight. For more than a month, Bucklew had only been eating sardines, crackers, and half an orange. Now, he cut his diet to the half orange and four crackers per day.

  Bucklew figured he could cut through the second set of ba
rs by August 10, 1976, a good night for an escape because there was no moon. By August 8, he had sawed through one bar and halfway through the next. He was right on schedule. All he needed was two more days, but on August 9, Hurricane Belle hit Trenton, knocking out the spotlights in the prison yard. Bucklew decided to take advantage of the hurricane and leave early. He put a papier-mâché face partway under the covers on his bunk, bunched them up to simulate a body beneath them, and then slid the toilet out of the way. Just as he was about to crawl out of his cell, Bucklew stopped, went over to the calendar on his wall, and wrote “Goodbye!”

  He slipped into the chamber, climbed the pipe, made his way to the air vent, and began sawing the final bar. Rain pelted against the vent, and wind made its louvers chatter like hands clapping. Bucklew cut for several minutes and then began pushing against the bar trying to break it, but it refused to budge. He sawed some more and was able to bend the bar this time, but it still wouldn’t crack. He tried to push himself through the opening, but he was too big. He began pulling down on the bar with all his weight and strength and it broke suddenly, causing Bucklew to fall. Luckily, his leg caught the canvas belt on his trapeze, leaving him hanging upside down like a circus performer. Bucklew swung himself upright and began crawling into the air vent. His head passed through without difficulty, but his shoulders and chest were too big for the opening. “I had to go,” he recalled. “It was too late to turn back.” With a great push, he forced his chest through the vent, scraping the skin, and within minutes he was on the slate roof in the rain. As he started across, he slipped on the slate and almost slid off. He removed his shoes for better traction and proceeded slowly to the edge, where he used his typewriter ribbon rope, woven of thirty-eight ribbons each fifty feet long, to lower himself to the prison yard.

  Bucklew assumed correctly that the guards had organized foot patrols to compensate for the blacked-out spotlight. He slipped a shank from his pants. “I would have killed anyone who tried to stop me,” he said, “and I’m certain they would have killed me just as quickly.”

  Bucklew raced across the yard to the “Death House,” so called because it was where convicts were executed. It was a one-story structure built close to the stone wall that circled the prison. Once he climbed onto the Death House roof, there would only be a seven-foot wall between him and freedom. But there was still an obstacle in his way. A guard tower loomed directly over the Death House, and when Bucklew reached the top of the prison wall, he would be on the same eye level as the guard inside the tower. The guard would have to be blind not to see him. “I figured I had a fifty-fifty chance of killing this guy first,” Bucklew said. “I figured this guy was trained to reach for his shotgun, and if he did that, he’d be mine because I could crash into the tower and grab the gun as he was swinging it around. But if this hack was smart enough to pull out his pistol, he’d kill me first.”

  As Bucklew climbed onto the Death House roof and started up the outer wall, he suddenly realized that it was raining so hard that he couldn’t see the tower guard. He couldn’t even tell if a guard was in the tower. “I snapped. If I couldn’t see him, he couldn’t see me.”

  Bucklew jumped down from the wall and ran as fast as he could across the wet grass outside the penitentiary. It was several hours before anyone knew he had escaped, and he wasn’t recaptured for a full year.

  “I swear to Christ, I have never felt like I did when I hit that ground,” Bucklew said, as he added a few more onions to his spaghetti sauce in the officers’ mess. “Give me a motorcycle and I will go as fast as it can possibly go. I’ve flown airplanes that way too. I like the feeling and sensation of speed. I like the feeling of making it with a woman who is right on that same point with you, so you come together. And there is no feeling like having a big pile of money, or listening to a hard rock band after doing two or three tabs of good acid.

  “But none of those feelings or even all of them combined can touch the feeling of real live freedom. It’s something you only understand when they have taken it and suddenly you reclaim it. I felt like I suddenly got my whole life back.”

  Bucklew’s escape was so ingenious that even the prison officials in Trenton whom he embarrassed paid him a certain amount of grudging respect. They also wondered what Bucklew could have accomplished had he chosen to be law-abiding. The judge who sentenced him had made a similar observation in Bucklew’s record. Bucklew appeared to be a natural leader, the judge wrote, yet he had chosen to squander his abilities. Bucklew didn’t see it that way.

  “I don’t respect the law,” he explained, “because laws are for people who are weak and need them. If someone comes into my house and takes something, I’m not going to call a cop, I’m going to deal with it, and if I’m not man enough to get it back, then that guy has a right to take whatever he wants because I don’t really deserve to own it. That’s how society should be. If justice needs to be applied, I will apply it, and the reason that I have a right to apply it is because I have the power to do it. Having the power gives me permission.”

  Bucklew paused and then said, “When I was little, I was taught to question authority, and I always have. I’m not about to accept what you tell me unless I want to. When you’re a kid, everyone thinks that’s great, but when you grow up, you are supposed to become a sheep and follow blindly. Now if a psychologist was sitting here, he’d tell you I’m immature and my development isn’t right. He’d say I had grasped something as a child and never risen above it. Well, excuse me, but as a child I was taught not to be a stool pigeon. Don’t tattletale on other kids. I was taught if someone hits you, you hit them back, and if they even think about hitting you again, you make them never want to see you again. That is what John Wayne always did and everyone in the country thought John Wayne was right. So you tell me—what changed? Who switched the rules? When did these things I was taught as a kid suddenly become the wrong thing to do? I might die in prison, but I’m not going to become an upstanding member of your society, because in order to do that I would have to become a stool pigeon and always run to the cops, a coward afraid to settle my own problems without hiring a lawyer, and a shitbag who blindly follows every goofy guy who gets elected to the White House.”

  Six other inmates joined Bucklew at this Sunday spaghetti dinner. The conversation centered on guards and how much they hated them. As I listened, I realized that it was not much different from the conversations that I had heard among guards at Benny’s, only the guards had talked about how loathsome the convicts were.

  “You gotta understand most of these hacks were the guys in high school who everyone picked on—you know, the buttheads who got a jock put on their head in gym class,” one inmate explained. “That’s why they’re hacks, because they are still trying to prove their manhood, and they think by coming in here and acting tough they are real men. Most would shit if you got in their face.”

  Someone mentioned that Carl Bowles had been fired as the hospital gardener and, just as quickly, an inmate made a crack about “Mrs. Bowles,” but no one laughed and the room was quiet for several seconds. It wasn’t smart to talk about another convict behind his back, especially Bowles.

  By three o’clock, everyone except Bucklew had gone into the auditorium to watch a rock concert taped the night before off MTV.

  “When I was little, maybe four or five,” Bucklew said as he cleaned the tables, “I would wait at the door for Pops to come home. I had my cowboy hat on, my boots on, and my gun on, and he’d come in and I’d give him a gun and this guy would say, ‘Draw!’ Now, obviously a twenty-five- or twenty-six-year-old man is going to beat this five-year-old kid to the draw, but what amazed me was that every day, every single day, when he beat me to the draw, he made me put my hands up and turn around and face the wall. Then he would shoot me in the back. Every single fucking day we’d do this, and one day, I reared up on him and I said, ‘What’s the sense of facing the wall? You are going to shoot me anyway.’ And he says, ‘Well, maybe today I won’t.’ So I turned
around and he shot me in the back and he did that every day after that Never once did he not shoot me.

  “I thought about it a long time,” Bucklew said, “and finally I decided there was a message there. When he came home from work, I shouldn’t have been waiting for him. I should have been hiding behind the door or behind the couch. I should have shot him as soon as he came in. Fuck giving him a gun and fuck giving him a chance. You see, I think Pops was trying to teach me something. In life, you can play by someone else’s rules or you can play by your own, and if you play by someone else’s rules you are going to get fucked every time because they were designed for them, not you. Yeah, that’s what old Pops was saying, and it may sound like a stupid point, but I think he was right.”

  Chapter 22

  THE LIEUTENANT’S OFFICE

  The sound of a woman’s voice singing about the love of Jesus Christ drifted through center hall early one Sunday morning. Lieutenant Michael Sandels decided to leave the operations desk in the lieutenant’s office and see how many inmates were attending the eight A.M. service in the prison chapel. He found about fifty convicts sitting in the wooden pews listening to the lead female vocalist for a Mexican evangelical band from Texas that was touring several prisons. Fifty was a big crowd for Sunday morning. The only religious services that attracted more were the followers of Islam and members of the Moorish Science Temple. They sometimes had as many as one hundred when they met during the week. Most guards didn’t consider the Moors, as they were known, a religious sect even though its members were officially recognized as such by the bureau. Nearly all the Moors at Leavenworth were members of the D.C. Blacks gang, and most officials saw the church as a front for gang activity despite protests from its members.