The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison

by Pete Earley

  A few days after his conviction, guards told Scott that he had a visitor. He assumed it was Mark Works coming to say good-bye. Despite the fact that Scott had wanted the young attorney fired, he liked Works. But waiting in the visiting room were Scott’s daughter, Star, and his two granddaughters, ages two and three. It was the first time that Scott had seen his grandchildren and he spent the entire day bouncing the two girls on his knees, playing games with them, and fetching them treats from the candy machine. “I looked like I had been through a war by the time I got back to the cell,” he said later, proudly.

  The visit had caused a flood of memories. “When I was in prison in Lompoc, my wife came to see me with my son, who was then fourteen,” Scott recalled. “I remember looking at that kid, and he looked just like me and I could hear my voice in his voice and he was a pretty hep kid, a sharp kid, and we were bullshitting, and all of a sudden, I looked at him and thought, ‘Damn, I was fourteen the first time I went into the Dallas County Jail.’ I’m looking at my kid and I think, he has got to be similar to what I looked like and he looks like a baby to me. It set me back, ’cause I wondered, ‘How in the hell did I survive back then? How did I make it all those years?’

  “It also made me sad because I realized that I’ve spent my entire fucking life behind bars. I’ve been convicted of two lousy bank robberies, yet I’ve never really gotten out of prison. I really have missed everything a normal person gets to do, like raise kids and just walk the streets.”

  There was a sadness to his voice. “This gets so old. You get tired of all the silly-ass games—the young bucks who come in here thinking they’ve discovered something new by being tough, the fucking guards, the bureau always fucking with you.

  “But after all these years, what else do I got? If I were to get out tomorrow, do you actually think I could change? You think the government is going to give me Social Security? You think I’m going to be happy working at some fast-food joint flipping burgers with teenage kids? Fuck, no. I went down a path a long time ago and all them doors have been closed, but I never thought it’d end up this way. I never thought I’d spend my life in prison.”

  Scott knew that he was going to be sent back to Marion. He also knew that even if he did somehow prevail and get his 1976 bank robbery conviction overturned, he still faced another 17.5 years in jail, and that was equivalent to a death sentence. His recent bout with hepatitis had reminded him of his own frailty. He recalled the doctors’ estimate of his life expectancy back in 1983 when they had first diagnosed his liver problem. Ten more years at most. He was going to die in prison, probably Marion.

  “I’m going to keep fighting them,” he said. “I ain’t dying on someone else’s schedule. I know I may not ever get out of here. It don’t look like it now. The rest of my life, I am probably going to spend in a cell locked up twenty-three hours each day by myself. But with all my failures by society’s standards, I’m not a failure to me—in my own eyes—and that’s what really counts. Have I robbed banks? Yeah, fuck yes. Am I an outlaw? Yeah, fuck yes. But so what? You think I invented stealing?

  “When I’m laying down sucking that last breath of air, I’ll be doing it alone, and I’m the only one that I got to answer to, and when that time comes and I’m thinking about my life, the robberies and this and that, I’ll be able to say, ‘Hey, I can live with that.’ I never harmed anyone, never stole from anyone poorer than me, never went out of my way to fuck with anybody, and I never let the man beat me. I never ratted on anybody, never kissed a guard’s ass. I stuck with my principles. They sure as hell aren’t society’s principles, but I stuck with them, and that means I can die with a clear conscience.”

  A few days later, Scott was transferred to Marion.

  Chapter 52

  NORMAN BUCKLEW

  Few inmates enjoyed Robert Litchfield’s escape more than Norman Bucklew. The fact that Litchfield had made a fool out of the Hot House guards tickled him. The only thing better, he said, would have been if he had been the one who escaped. “I know I would have stayed out longer than he did,” Bucklew remarked.

  Bucklew had lived two separate lives. He had grown up in New Jersey, married his neighborhood sweetheart, fathered a son, used drugs, killed an armored-car guard during a bungled robbery, and been sent to Trenton State Prison. But as soon as Bucklew crawled over the prison wall during Hurricane Belle in August 1976, he had started a new life. He assumed the police would expect him to go home to his wife and son—then five years old—or to contact his parents. Instead, he took on a new identity, headed west, and never looked back.

  Bucklew was twenty-seven and, if he had decided to go straight, he might have succeeded in disappearing. But as soon as he reached St. Louis, Missouri, he began robbing banks. He also fell in love, got married, adopted one daughter, fathered another, and eventually got caught.

  In the spring of 1988, Bucklew learned that his two daughters from St. Louis were coming to visit him in Leavenworth. He had not seen Heather and Sarah, now ages eighteen and nine respectively, for three years, and on the night before the visit he was as excited as a child on Christmas Eve.

  Most Friday nights Bucklew got drunk, but not tonight. He sat at the metal desk in his cell and made notes about what he wanted to say to his daughters. “Most kids get to know their parents by being with them every day,” he explained. “I don’t got that luxury. I want to give them some understanding about who I am and what I believe.”

  He especially wanted to explain himself to Sarah, who had only been three weeks old when he was recaptured. Heather was eight, so she could remember a few things about the year that he spent with her and her mother, Laura Ashmore, before he was sent back to prison.

  As he sat in his cell, Bucklew recalled how he had met Ashmore only one week after he escaped from Trenton. He was in a bar when he saw her, then a twenty-three-year-old bleached-blonde beauty, sitting at a table with her girlfriend. Strutting over to the two women, Bucklew asked, “Which one of you girls wants to pick me up?”

  Ashmore had laughed and invited him to sit down. “We were both intimidated by Norman’s size,” she recalled. “He was so big and strong.” She and Bucklew spent the next few hours talking. It got so late they decided to have breakfast together at a diner and then Ashmore agreed to go with him to the trailer he had rented.

  “I don’t know you and I’m not going to have sex with you,” she said. “I just want to get some rest.” Bucklew rubbed her back while she fell asleep. “He didn’t pressure me or come on strong and we didn’t have sex,” she said later. “He just wanted me next to him.”

  Ashmore had grown up in St. Louis, married when she was sixteen, and later divorced. She was raising Heather, then five years old, and living on welfare checks. Bucklew wanted to meet the child, so the three of them got together at a public park. “My daughter was hyperactive and most guys couldn’t stand being around her, but he loved all her energy. He wore her out running around the park with her,” Ashmore recalled.

  At one point, Bucklew put his arm around Ashmore and she reciprocated by reaching her arm around his waist, but she jerked her hand away when she felt the grip of a gun sticking out of his belt under his bulky sweatshirt. She didn’t ask why he was carrying it, but Bucklew volunteered an explanation. “I’m afraid someone might hurt me,” he told her with a smirk.

  Bucklew sent her flowers, bought her clothes, and spent hours playing with Heather. Ashmore was happy, but she knew there was something odd about her new boyfriend. One afternoon she introduced him to a girlfriend, and after he left, the woman asked her if Bucklew had been in prison.

  “I don’t know,” Ashmore replied. “Why?”

  “Because my brother was in prison and they walk the same way. You know, like animals looking to pounce on someone or have someone pounce on them. Haven’t you noticed?”

  Ashmore began watching Bucklew more closely. He did walk funny, she noticed. He also ate with his arm resting on the table beside his plate, as if he were gua
rding it. Whenever he saw a police car, he always made some profane comment about it.

  Despite all this, Ashmore moved into an apartment with him three weeks after they met. “Months later, after Norman was arrested, people asked me how I could live with a bank robber,” Ashmore recalled. “It made me mad. Hey, this bank robber took care of my daughter. He fed her and clothed her and loved her and that was more than her father had ever done for her. Everyone thought my first husband was great because he came from a religious family, but he was a drunk and he used to beat me up. His mother would come over to our house, and he’d smack me around, and she’d just sit there and say it was my duty to take it. He gave me two black eyes once and this woman blamed me for not being a good enough wife. She said the Bible said I should obey him.”

  In Ashmore’s eyes, Bucklew treated her like a princess. “I know what broads are for, okay?” Bucklew explained later. “They are for taking care of and being used. I know there are a lot of little girls out there who want to run the world and I just stay away from them. I want a woman who is worried about whether I am going to like what she is wearing, is worried about fixing her fingernails and hair because I like the fingernails and hair fixed. I like to take them shopping and I like to watch them trying on clothes, and I particularly like how they feel after you are done buying them.

  “Now, this broad is a fucking dingbat. She is real good in giving pussy. I’d give her four and a half stars on that. She’s real good at cooking and cleaning house and is the best mother ever to live, but give her a job, even something simple like sitting down and taking tickets at a movie theater, and she is going to be sick on the second or third day. That’s okay with me, though, ’cause I don’t want no broad of mine working. I’ll take care of all that. All she has to do is keep me happy.”

  Ashmore was not allowed to speak to any other men unless it was okay with Bucklew. When the two of them went into a restaurant, he walked ahead, she followed. He also ordered for her, told her what to wear, how to fix her hair.

  Ashmore loved it.

  “When I was little, I was sick a lot, and my daddy took care of me because Mama worked nights. I was always Daddy’s little girl and I liked having someone take care of me,” she said. “I felt secure. I knew he wouldn’t let anyone harm me.”

  One night, Ashmore and Bucklew were out with some friends when Ashmore said something that one of the men didn’t like. “Mind your own business,” he snapped.

  Ashmore began to cry.

  Bucklew had been out of the room when this exchange took place, but when he found Ashmore in tears, he grabbed the man by the throat.

  “You apologize to my old lady or I’ll rip out your windpipe!” he yelled. The man quickly complied. Bucklew told Ashmore later that he was going to kill the man but she talked him out of it.

  A similar incident happened months later after Bucklew was recaptured and put in Marion. “I was waiting to visit with him,” Ashmore said, “and an inmate walked past me and said, ‘Hey, lady, nice ass.’ I never told Norman, but another convict mentioned it to him, and the next week when I visited him, Norman said, ‘Hey, I heard some guy said you had a nice ass last week,’ and I said, ‘Yeah,’ and he said, ‘I hear that guy got hurt this week. Someone beat him up real bad.’ I said, ‘Is he dead?’ And he said, ‘Naw, but he probably wishes he was.’ I said, ‘Did you do that?’ and he laughed. He was proud of the fact that he had beaten this guy up for offending me. And you know, so was I. I’d never had anyone care enough about me to do something like that. I was proud.”

  But Ashmore hadn’t been so thrilled when Bucklew became violent with her when they lived together. “We were driving down the street once and he suddenly backhanded me,” Ashmore remembered. “I asked him why he hit me and he said because I had been looking at some guy, but the truth was, I was just daydreaming.” Bucklew recalled that same incident later. “I cracked her a good one,” he explained, “because she had it coming. Now, I don’t believe in beating up women, but if my old lady is talking to some man, she’s gonna get knocked to the floor every time because I know old ladies are good for three things: giving pussy, cooking, and taking care of kids, and if I see her talking to another man, I know she ain’t cooking, I know she ain’t taking care of his kids, so she and him must be talking about pussy.”

  The entire time that he and Ashmore were living together, Bucklew was robbing banks. He would spend most days driving around different sections of town noting how close the police stations were to banks. He kept two police scanners in his car, and maps marked with potential getaway routes. He always used the same method for each robbery. He would drive to a bowling alley the night before the robbery. “A guy gets out of his car wearing a yellow shirt on his back that says ‘Mac’s Pizza’ and you know he is going to be inside for at least two hours bowling in some league,” Bucklew explained. “That gives you time to steal his car and get it out of the neighborhood.”

  Bucklew always stole an older car, preferably a station wagon, which he parked in the lot of an apartment complex or hospital about two miles from the bank that he intended to rob. “No one pays attention if an old station wagon shows up parked in their lot, but if a Lamborghini is there, everyone notices.” The following day, Bucklew would drive right up to the bank’s front door. “I wanted everyone inside the bank to notice that car, to focus on it, because two minutes after the robbery, I was going to dump it and be in a different one.” Bucklew would run into the bank wearing a mask and waving a shotgun. “Open your drawers!” he’d yell as he leaped over the counter. He would grab the cash in the tellers’ drawers and run out of the bank. “I had it timed so I could be in and out of a bank within one minute,” he bragged. He would drive the stolen car back to the apartment complex and switch cars.

  “Robbing banks is easy,” said Bucklew. “What other business tells its employees to hand over the money if someone comes in and asks for it?”

  Robbing the Boatmen’s Bank of Concord Village in St. Louis, on May 27, 1977, proved to be the exception. An off-duty policeman, Ray McDonough, happened to be one of the bank’s customers when Bucklew came charging in with his shotgun and jumped up on the counter. McDonough pulled out his .38 caliber revolver and shot Bucklew in the chest. “I heard the bang and then I see this fucking gun bounce out in the middle of the floor and a pair of legs scrambling under a desk,” Bucklew recalled. “But I didn’t know I’d been shot.” The bullet had hit him in the abdomen, but missed his vital organs.

  The feet that Bucklew spotted under the desk belonged to McDonough, who had ducked for cover after his bullet failed to kill Bucklew. He thought Bucklew was wearing a bulletproof vest. “I could have ground-swept him with the shotgun,” Bucklew recalled, “but there is a broad standing on one side and another broad on the other, and if I pulled that trigger, I would have killed him and definitely one of the broads, and I didn’t know I had been hit so I didn’t fire. I just grabbed the money and ran.” Bucklew escaped with $48,146 and it wasn’t until he was driving away from the bank that he realized he was bleeding.

  When he got home, he stuck a Tampax into the wound and scribbled a telephone number on a pad for Ashmore.

  “If something happens and I die tonight, call this number,” Bucklew told her. “Have the guy who answers take me out in the woods and dump me somewhere. Take what money we got and start over.”

  Ashmore, who was seven months pregnant at the time, was terrified. “I’m madly in love with him,” she recalled. “Heather is in the next room asking what is wrong with Daddy, blood is coming out of his side, and he wants me to dump him in the woods somewhere. It was crazy.”

  The next morning, Bucklew flew to Las Vegas on a commercial flight, rented a car, and drove to Bullhead, Arizona, where he told a doctor that the bullet wound was caused by a ricochet during target practice.

  Back in St. Louis, the shooting and robbery had caught the attention of the media, who dubbed the robber “the Bionic Bandit,” because he seemed invincib
le to gunfire. The police claimed the Bionic Bandit had stolen $117,500 from seven banks. All this attention worried Bucklew. He wanted to leave St. Louis, but Ashmore wanted to wait until after she had their baby.

  On June 26, Sarah was born. Bucklew was stopped during a routine traffic check three weeks later and arrested when police spotted several weapons in his car. A fingerprint check showed that he had escaped from Trenton State Prison.

  Bucklew was taken to a cell in the St. Clair County Jail in Belleville, Missouri, but when the jailer started to open the cell door, Bucklew stopped him.

  “Hey, you put me in a cell with these four niggers, and you’re gonna find cold bodies tomorrow,” Bucklew said. “I don’t cell with niggers.”

  The jailer didn’t know what to do, and neither did the black inmates inside the cell.

  “I’m telling you, someone’s gonna be killed if I go in there, and it ain’t gonna be me,” Bucklew repeated.

  He was taken to a different cell.

  “Most whites fuck up right away when they come into prison, because they try to be friendly,” Bucklew said later. “Let’s say a white dude is put in a cell with maybe fifteen niggers. If he says hello or even nods to them, then he’s already doomed. You see, half of them will think he is just being polite and treating them with respect, but the other half will know he is weak and afraid, because they know that a white man isn’t even going to acknowledge them if he’s been in prison before, because whites don’t speak to niggers in prison. These niggers are going to move on that guy as soon as the hack disappears.”