The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison

by Pete Earley

  Kane had spent months preparing for the June parole meeting. She had found two employers who promised to hire Post if he were released. She had solicited dozens of letters of recommendation for him. She had even cajoled her ex-husband into writing a favorable letter in Post’s defense. Despite her illness, Kane continued to make calls to various public officials on Post’s behalf.

  The most touching pleas presented to the parole commission, however, came from Kane herself and her two children, particularly her daughter, Kimberly. Written in the large scrawl of a seven-year-old, Kimberly’s letter to the commission said:

  I need my daddy. I love my daddy. I know he has done wrong but he has been good now. I beg you to let him come home so he can hold me in his arms without having to always leave me alone. He cries when I leave and I cry too. I love him.

  Priscilla Kane’s four-page handwritten note was equally poignant:

  I don’t trust easily especially where my life or the lives of my children are concerned. But after knowing Bill for over three years and being his wife for over sixteen months, I have found that no one could be a better husband or father than Bill. He has never had a family of his own before, it does make a difference. Our children need him, I need him too. Kimberly has brought his picture to the table at meal time many times and announced ‘Daddy is having dinner at home tonight.’ This baby has vowed not to cut her hair until her daddy is home. Her hair is well below her waist now! Please let Bill go!

  It was during this period that Post had attempted various therapy groups, gotten his college degree, and won the accolades of the teachers who taught in prison. He had kept out of trouble, too. In short, he seemed to be the perfect candidate for parole.

  “I was so convinced that he was going to be released that I didn’t even consider what would happen if the commission said no,” Kane said.

  It did.

  Kane and Post were dumbstruck. “We had worked so hard and it seemed so unfair. There just didn’t seem like there was any reason for him not to be set free,” said Kane. “I was furious and my children were crushed.”

  Kane wanted to visit him, but she couldn’t afford the trip. A friend telephoned Prison Fellowship Ministries, the national organization founded by former White House Special Counsel Charles W. Colson, who had served time in prison for his role in the Watergate scandal. Colson’s organization paid to send Kane and her children to Leavenworth. “It was a miracle,” Kane recalled, “a true miracle.”

  The first day of the visit was wonderful. “I was so happy just to be with him.” But the second day turned ugly. Post began arguing with Kane’s children, at one point threatening to spank Kimberly. “He no longer had any patience with them.” Even more disturbing to Kane was the fact that Post asked her to help him escape. “He asked me to bring him a handcuff key,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it. I told him, ‘Look, I’m not a gun moll. You had that with Glenda Thomas, but I’m no Bonnie and Clyde. I love you. I will stick with you, but I’m not going to do anything illegal.”

  Kane thought Post would be happy when she told him on the third and final day of their visit that she had found an apartment in Leavenworth and was planning to move to Kansas. But he suddenly became cold, and when she returned to Stockton, he telephoned her. “I want to put the marriage on hold,” he said.

  During the next few weeks, Kane received a number of strange telephone calls from him. “I’m not a prude, but he wanted me to do things that I wouldn’t do, sexual things over the telephone that I wouldn’t do.” He also sent her letters that included the numbers of stolen credit cards and asked her to use them to buy things for him.

  “I didn’t know what was happening. It was like this was a different man from the one I married and loved.”

  Overnight, Post stopped writing and calling. Her letters went unanswered. Even her children couldn’t get Post to reply. A few months later, Kane received a copy of divorce papers from Post in the mail. “We always had promised if we ever parted, we’d tell each other face-to-face,” she said. “Then these papers arrived with no explanation, nothing.”

  Several years later, when Post was asked about Kane and her children, he said that he had loved them, but had intentionally ended the relationship after his parole was denied.

  “It was hard to cut it off, particularly because of the little girl,” Post said. “She [Priscilla Kane] was really special, but when I realized that I wasn’t getting out, I knew I had to end it. She was such a loving person that she would have stuck with me and would still be here today if I hadn’t driven her away, but what was the point? What kind of life could she and those kids have had waiting for me? I decided to drive her away. I had to do it, if not for her, then for my own sanity. It is much harder to do time if you are looking to the future, particularly if you know there isn’t any future out there.

  “I don’t know how she feels about me, but the truth is that ending the relationship was probably the only decent thing I have done in my life.”

  For three years Kane grieved over Post. “I felt so stupid,” she said. “I used to look in the mirror and say, ‘You were a straight-A student, you are intelligent, how did you let someone do this to you?’ ” During her five-year relationship with Post, she had given him nearly $10,000. But it was the emotional toll on herself and her children that hurt the most, she said. “My son and daughter idolized this man. He was their father! And then he just walked away. They couldn’t understand how anyone could be so cold, and neither could I.

  “Most women I met at prison were abused, mistreated, and misunderstood in the outside world,” Kane explained. “All they wanted was someone to love them, and then they fell into that trap where the man that they loved used them.… I thought we were different—I knew we were different. But after all these years, I honestly don’t know if Bill really ever loved me or was simply using me to get a parole.

  “Can you believe it?” she asked. “I loved this man, married this man, planned to build my future with this man, and believed in this man, and today I still don’t know whether he loved me or was simply using me.”

  PART FOUR

  Cain said to Abel his brother, “Let us go out to the field.” And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him. Then the LORD said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” He said, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?”

  THE FIRST MURDER

  Genesis, chapter 4,

  verses 8–9

  The Holy Bible

  Chapter 43

  THE LIEUTENANT’S OFFICE

  Lieutenant Monty Watkins was typing a report early Sunday morning when the control center sounded an alarm. Watkins dashed down center hall, through the rotunda and steel gates, and into the lobby of the administration building where an elderly, heavyset woman was lying on the floor. She had collapsed while waiting to go into the prison visiting room. Vandell Racy, the guard stationed in the lobby, was administering CPR.

  The woman had come to visit her son, a bank robber. She had thin silver hair, cut short, and was dressed in a baggy and badly faded paisley-print dress. When she collapsed, her skirt had pulled up above her knees, revealing pale, flabby skin and numerous varicose veins. A woman in her forties, later identified as her daughter, was kneeling next to the woman.

  “Oh, Mama! Mama!” the daughter wailed. “Is she gonna be all right? Is she gonna make it? Oh, Mama, Mama! Do something! Did you call an ambulance? Is a doctor coming? Oh, Mama, Mama, please don’t die. Is the ambulance coming?”

  No one answered her questions nor did she wait for answers. As Racy continued to push on the woman’s chest, her daughter continued screaming, “Oh, Mama, don’t die! Don’t die!”

  Standing at the feet of the old woman was a little girl with Down’s syndrome. She was about the size of an eight-year-old and clutched a well-worn doll in her left hand. The doll was wearing a dress made from the same paisley fabric as the elderly woman’s. The child spotted Watkins and stared a
t the huge black lieutenant as he lifted his portable radio to his mouth and asked if an ambulance was en route.

  As soon as the shrieking daughter heard Watkins talk into the radio, she turned on him. “It’s all your fault. The chair outside don’t work. I told her not to climb them steps today. Yesterday, she felt dizzy all morning and sick, but she’s got to see her son. We drove three days to see him. Why didn’t you fix that chair? I’m telling you, it’s your fault.”

  The woman was referring to an electrically driven chair outside the penitentiary that was supposed to carry elderly and handicapped visitors up the forty-three front steps. The chair ran along a track beside the handrail, but it never had worked well and had been inoperative for some time.

  “Oh my God! Is she breathing? I don’t see her breath!” the daughter cried.

  “She’s breathing,” Racy replied calmly.

  An ambulance pulled in front of the penitentiary and two paramedics ran into the lobby. “I got a pulse,” said one, as they lifted the old woman onto a stretcher and carried her out the glass front doors. The daughter grabbed the little girl’s hand and pulled her toward the exit. Before they left, the daughter turned and again yelled at Watkins: “It’s your fault.”

  The little girl, still clutching her doll, smiled at him.

  Watkins looked at his watch: 8:52 A.M. When he returned to the lieutenant’s office, the phone rang. It was the control center calling.

  “What time?” Watkins asked, scribbling a note. “9:04. Okay, got it. How old? Eighty-four. Is the chaplain around? Well, someone needs to tell the inmate that she’s dead. Okay. Thanks.”

  The old woman had died before reaching the Leavenworth hospital. She had suffered a heart attack. Watkins slipped a sheet of paper into the typewriter and began writing a report about the incident.

  “If her son hadn’t been in prison, she wouldn’t have had to walk up the steps to visit him,” he said. “Don’t see how she can blame me.”

  The next day a maintenance crew fixed the chair.

  Chapter 44

  EDDIE GEOUGE

  “My name is Geouge. I’m the disciplinary-hearing officer,” Eddie Geouge explained to an inmate who sat, hands cuffed behind his back, on the edge of a metal chair across the table from Geouge. They were in an office in the Hole. The prisoner had been accused of assaulting a guard and had been brought before Geouge for a hearing. His was one of ten cases that Geouge was scheduled to resolve on a Tuesday in late December 1988, in his new role as the DHO at Leavenworth. As such, Geouge would determine whether the man was guilty and then recommend a punishment. Geouge’s report would be sent to his boss, Regional Director DuBois, for approval. A copy would go to Warden Matthews. In the bureau’s eyes, the fact that Geouge worked for the regional office rather than directly for the warden insured the DHO a certain independence.

  “You are accused of—” Geouge continued, but the convict interrupted him.

  “This is a joke,” the convict declared. “I didn’t do a damn thing!”

  “Now listen,” Geouge said sternly, looking straight at him. “I’m going to read you this charge. Then I’m going to ask you how you plead. You will get—”

  “Didn’t do a damn thing. Ain’t fucking right,” the convict interrupted again, louder this time, totally ignoring Geouge. “I ain’t gonna sit here and—”

  “You’re right about that,” Geouge interjected, “because I’ll have you removed if you can’t control—”

  “Shit, all this is—”

  “Look,” snapped Geouge, “I’m trying to read this charge. Now, you aren’t going to run this hearing, I am going—”

  “Fuck those papers!” the inmate yelled, lunging forward from the chair. A guard standing behind him grabbed his left shoulder and pulled him back. Another guard stepped forward to help.

  Geouge tried again. “You are not going to run this hearing,” he repeated. “Now, let’s start this again, and this time you let me finish and then I’ll be polite and let you say what’s on your mind. The charge against you is—”

  “Fuck the charge,” the inmate declared. “And fuck you.”

  “Get him out of here,” Geouge ordered. The guards took the inmate’s arms and escorted him out the door and down the tier to his cell. He continued yelling profanities at Geouge as he was taken past other cells.

  “You tell ’em, brother,” an inmate shouted.

  “Fuck ’em,” called another.

  Back inside the conference room, Geouge turned to his secretary: “Be sure to note that I told him three times to be quiet, but he refused and lunged forward.” Geouge examined the inmate’s thick prison record and read several written statements the guards had filed about the alleged assault. “I find this inmate guilty and sentence him to thirty days in the Hole and recommend a transfer to Marion,” Geouge said. The secretary noted his decision. Only the regional director could approve a transfer to Marion, but most were automatically granted if they were recommended by a DHO.

  The confrontation annoyed Geouge. As he walked over to a stainless-steel coffeepot that looked as if it had never been cleaned and filled his cup, he said, “Most of these guys hate the police when they’re on the street, so why would anyone think they’d change when they come in here? There’s not much I can do when one of them wants to be a shit but haul his ass out of here.”

  According to bureau regulations, Geouge was the only official at Leavenworth with the authority to sentence an inmate to the Hole. Guards, lieutenants, and Warden Matthews could send an inmate there temporarily, but after sixty days he either had to be released or formally charged and taken before Geouge for a hearing. These internal sessions were much different from court hearings and were intentionally stacked in the guards’ favor. Statements by staff members were automatically considered more credible than those by inmates, and while inmates could call witnesses to speak in their defense, they were not allowed to question the guards. If an inmate wished, he could ask to be represented by a staff member who could ask questions on his behalf, but the bureau did not permit inmates to interrogate a guard directly, nor did it allow convicts to hide behind legal technicalities and other niceties afforded them in a regular court. If a guard said an inmate was guilty, that was good enough for the bureau. Because the process was so skewed in favor of the guards, inmates often claimed that the hearing process was a sham. They complained that nearly everyone who was brought before a hearing officer was found guilty. In the bureau’s defense, nearly all of the inmates arrested were guilty and the cases against them so blatant that it would have been impossible for a hearing officer to rule any other way.

  But unlike his predecessor, who had a reputation for rubber-stamping cases, Geouge grilled the accused and the guards to make certain each was telling the truth. Although he had only been the hearing officer for a few months, he had managed to irritate some guards by rejecting their incident reports, commonly called “shots,” which outlined the charges against the inmate.

  When Geouge saw the next inmate being brought into the room, he figured his day was going from bad to worse. This prisoner had been accused of making a bomb out of thousands of sulfur match-heads he had hoarded, packed into a can, and then wrapped with roofing nails. Guards claimed he planned to attach the bomb to the light socket in another inmate’s cell so that when the man flipped the switch, the electric current would ignite the match-heads, causing an explosion that would shoot the nails across the cell like shrapnel. Geouge read the charge and the statements by four guards who claimed the inmate had started running when a guard decided to frisk him. During the chase that followed, the inmate stripped off his pea-green jacket and threw it to the floor. Officer Bill Terrell looked through the pockets and found the bomb, which he cautiously carried outside the prison. The device was later destroyed by the Leavenworth bomb squad.

  “This charge is a bunch of shit,” the inmate said after Geouge finished reciting the details of the case. “I wasn’t wearing a coat and I can prov
e it.” He had three eyewitnesses, he said, who were willing to testify that he was being framed by a guard who didn’t like him. Geouge called the witnesses into the room one by one and listened to their statements.

  “Did you see him throw down his jacket?” Geouge asked the first one.

  “No, sir,” came the reply. “Why, he wasn’t wearing a jacket.”

  Geouge rephrased his question when quizzing the second.

  “What color jacket was the inmate wearing?” he asked. But the witness saw through the trick.

  “I don’t remember him wearing a jacket,” he testified. “No, sir, I’m sure he wasn’t.”

  When the third witness was brought in, Geouge tried a new tactic. He asked him to describe what the inmate was wearing, beginning with the color of his shoes.

  “He was wearing black shoes, green pants …” the inmate said.

  “Wait, you said black pants and green shoes?”

  “No, green pants and black shoes.”

  “Black shoes?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And green pants?” asked Geouge. “Okay, I got it. Now, was his jacket black or green?”

  “Oh, it was green, pea green, you know,” the convict blurted out before realizing his blunder. “I mean, uh, it wasn’t green, it was, uh, well, he didn’t have no jacket on.”

  Geouge dismissed the man and quickly turned to the accused. “Do you go by the nickname ‘The Hated One’?” Geouge asked.

  “Never heard that before. Man, that’s really cold. Who’d go by something like that?” he replied cockily.

  “Your prison record says you have used that nickname for several years.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “Four officers said they saw you throw down the jacket.”