The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison

by Pete Earley

  The St. Louis police were able to link Bucklew to five bank robberies. He received the maximum sentence of 125 years. Ashmore was not charged with any crimes. Bucklew was turned over to the bureau and taken to the control unit in Marion because of his history of escape attempts, including several tries while he was awaiting trial. Ashmore followed him to Marion, and one year later, she and Bucklew were married in the prison’s visiting room. “I wanted Sarah to know her father,” Ashmore explained, “and I still loved this man.”

  But the marriage didn’t last. Bucklew sent all his prison earnings to Ashmore, but it was barely enough to pay the rent and she couldn’t keep a job. She divorced him and married a longtime friend. “It wasn’t love. I still loved Norman, but I needed someone to support me and the girls,” she said. Bucklew stopped talking to Ashmore, although he continued writing and telephoning his daughters.

  Bucklew tried to escape from Marion twice. On January 13, 1982, he was caught as he was cutting his way through the prison’s wire fence. On September 17, 1984, he was convicted of conspiring with another inmate to hire a group of Puerto Rican terrorists to launch an armed assault on Marion.

  Bucklew had mellowed since then, enough so that the bureau had sent him to Leavenworth. Now, as he sat in his cell thinking about his upcoming visit with Heather and Sarah, Bucklew wrote at the top of a notepad:

  1. Hacks.

  “I got to warn Heather about the hacks around here,” he explained. “She might go into a bar, you know, and she’s got to understand that these hacks and the police are my sworn enemy. They aren’t fooling and neither am I. Someday a hack or cop is going to kill me, and if one of my daughters married one of these bastards, it would be all over. It would be the one thing I couldn’t ever forgive.”

  Next on the pad, Bucklew wrote:

  2. The killing.

  Sarah, he explained, had asked him on the telephone one day if he had ever killed anyone. He had said yes and promised to tell her about it. “I’m not a bullshitter,” Bucklew said. “I’m gonna tell her tomorrow when we visit exactly what I did and let both of them know that, yeah, I am an evil bastard, but I am also their father and I love them.”

  While Bucklew was making his notes, across town in a Leavenworth motel Heather and Sarah were eating pizza and talking about their father.

  “I remember once I was all dressed up in a blue outfit, like my very best dress, and I went to get a drink of milk from the jug and it spilled all over my dress and I had to, like, change and I cried because I wanted my dad to see the dress and see how pretty I looked,” remembered Sarah. She had brought a special dress for this visit too. Her mother had helped her pack it, and even though she was only nine and too young to wear nylon hose, she was going to wear the dress with flats and no socks because she wanted to look “sophisticated.”

  Sarah was a skinny, freckle-faced girl with brown hair cut in a Buster Brown. She had a pixie’s grin, made friends quickly, and was always moving about. In contrast, Heather was reserved and naive. She had given birth to a son only a few months earlier, but had decided not to marry the father because she felt he was irresponsible. Even though she was a mother, she seemed like a child herself.

  Sarah, Heather, and Heather’s baby lived with their mother. Laura Ashmore, who had divorced her third husband after having another baby, collected welfare, and babysat to earn extra money. They rented an old two-story house in a seedy area of St. Louis.

  “When my dad was first arrested and it was in all the papers and on television and everything, the kids in school gave me a hard time about it and made fun of me,” Heather recalled. “They said he killed people and called me the ‘killer’s kid.’ But I never knew him when he killed anybody. I just knew him as my dad and I always have loved him.”

  Heather had written Bucklew faithfully, usually two letters a week, since his arrest ten years ago. “Me and Mom fight a lot, really scream at each other, and my dad is really the only person I can talk to, ’cause it’s always been easier for me to write on paper what I felt than to really say it,” she explained. “I write him long letters and he always writes back.”

  Sarah interrupted: “My mom told me once, like, they’d had an argument over where my baby bed was going to go because she wanted to put it where he kept his motorcycle.”

  “That’s right,” added Heather, giggling. “He had his Harley on one side of the room, a punching bag in the middle, and furniture on the other side. I remember.”

  “My mother told me, like, he used to do all these exercises,” Sarah continued.

  “Yeah, he always wanted Mom and me to go running with him and he’d go for miles and miles and miles,” interjected Heather.

  “And my mom told me, like, he used to make Heather drink carrot juice …” Sarah added.

  “Worse than that, beet juice …” said Heather.

  Both girls were quiet. “I think we’re both so excited, I don’t know if we can sleep at all tonight,” said Heather.

  Bucklew forgot all about his script the next morning when guards let him inside the visiting room to see his daughters and grandson. Instead, he fussed over the baby, played chess with Sarah, and talked to Heather about her future.

  “You got to get out of this welfare world your mother is in,” he lectured. “Go to junior college, learn how to talk right. You don’t need to be falling in love with a motorcycle-riding dude like I was. You need to find a dude, you know, maybe he’s been married once, got a few kids, someone who’s responsible, give you some security. A guy like me, hey, he’ll give you a good time, a great time, but he’ll never give you security.”

  During the conversation, Heather let slip that her sister was having trouble in school. A bully had been taking Sarah’s lunch money from her.

  “What ya going to do?” Bucklew asked Sarah.

  “I think I’ll tell the principal,” replied the nine-year-old.

  “Whoa there,” Bucklew replied. “No daughter of mine is going to be a rat. You got to solve your own problems.”

  “Well, she’s bigger than me,” Sarah said.

  “You could go get a sock and put a dollar’s worth of pennies in it and sneak up behind her and whack her a real good one in the head with it.” Bucklew was serious.

  “Daddy, they’d put me in reform school.”

  “Well, maybe they would, maybe they wouldn’t, but I’ll bet she wouldn’t bother you anymore.”

  Sarah seemed unconvinced and the subject was dropped. The next day went quickly and it was soon time for them to leave. The guards permitted each girl to hug and kiss Bucklew, and then he was taken back inside. Heather started to cry outside the prison. “When I was growing up, I always had the same dream,” she explained, “that someday my dad would get out and he and my mom would get married again and we would be a family again. I used to wish it more than anything and think about it night after night. But I’m older now and I don’t think it will ever happen. It’s too late, at least for me, because I have a son of my own now and will have to move out.”

  “I don’t think my dad would do anything wrong if they let him go,” volunteered Sarah.

  Heather disagreed. “I asked him once what he’d do if he got out and he said, ‘Grab a pillowcase.’ Maybe he was joking, but I think he meant he was going to rob banks again. That’s just how he is, I mean, he’s my dad and I love him, but sometimes he thinks funny, but that don’t mean I don’t wish he was with us.”

  When Bucklew was caught in St. Louis, the newspapers had published a story that described the armored-car guard Bucklew had killed in New Jersey. The guard had been married and had a young daughter. When Heather read the story, it upset her. Sometimes she wondered what that girl was like. They had something in common, she decided. Both were growing up without their fathers.

  “I don’t think my dad is bad, but I wish sometimes he wasn’t the way he is,” Heather said. “I know he did wrong, but I miss him a lot and it hurts because he’s not with us.”

  B
ucklew felt the visit had gone well, even though he’d forgot to mention almost everything on his notepad. When I asked him if he didn’t feel guilty about being in prison and not being with his daughters, he said, “No. I’m not here because I deserted them or because I don’t love them. Maybe they think I deserted them, but I was a criminal before they was even born, and that’s who I am.

  “Look,” he continued, “I don’t want them to think that I’m a fucking nut, but I am compared to everyone else in the world and that’s something I can’t change.”

  Can’t change or don’t really wish to change? I asked.

  “Can’t,” replied Bucklew.

  A short time after the girls’ visit, a fire started in the prison kitchen. When a food steward tried to put out the blaze with a fire extinguisher, the flames shot up as if they had been doused with gasoline. Bucklew and the other inmates burst into laughter. After the fire was out, guards discovered that someone had removed the fire-fighting chemicals from the extinguisher and hidden hooch inside it. Everyone knew it was Bucklew, although there was no proof.

  When I asked him about it, he grinned. “Hey, I don’t even drink,” he deadpanned. And then he added, “Hey, I came into prison a cowboy, and there isn’t anything these bastards can do to change me. I’m going out a cowboy too.

  “I am who I am.”

  Chapter 53

  CARL BOWLES AND THOMAS LITTLE

  The medium-security prison at Marianna, Florida, was much more relaxed than the Hot House, according to the weekly letters that Thomas Little wrote faithfully to Carl Bowles. “These guys don’t know nothing about jailhouse respect,” Little complained in one. “Guys in here will snitch right in front of you. They’ll walk right up to the man and rat on you while you’re watching them do it! Nobody thinks nothing about being a rat in here. It’s more like a Sunday school than a prison.”

  Bowles always replied with the same advice: “Watch your back. Don’t trust no man.”

  Much to everyone’s surprise, Bowles had not chosen a new cell partner from the fish tank after Little left Leavenworth. Some younger convicts had arrived, but Bowles didn’t pay any attention to them, and other white convicts classified by the bureau as sexual predators took the fish for their own.

  One morning in early June, Lee Connor received a telephone call from an excited lieutenant at Marianna.

  “We have information that Carl Bowles is planning an escape,” the lieutenant announced.

  A confidential informant in Marianna had tipped off guards to Bowles’s plans. He was supposedly digging a tunnel from the storeroom in the west yard under the prison wall.

  Robert Litchfield’s escape from Leavenworth was still fresh in Connor’s mind and he didn’t intend to take any chances. As soon as Connor put down the receiver, he sent guards to arrest Bowles and dispatched a team to search for the tunnel.

  “I don’t know why I’m in the Hole,” Bowles said after his arrest. “They just came and got me … But what’s really worrying me is Tom. If they are locking me up, they’re probably locking up him too and he don’t need this. He don’t need to be sent back here or sent to some other pen.”

  Bowles was silent for several minutes and then he said, “I’ll guarantee you of one thing. I know Tom didn’t say anything to get me in trouble. Connor himself could walk in here and tell me I’m locked up because Little put out a story on me and I’d say, ‘Yeah, sure.’ But I wouldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t care if they brought a signed statement to me, because I wouldn’t believe them—because I believe in my heart that Tom cares about me. I know he does.”

  When news of Bowles’s arrest spread through the Hot House, several inmates began to chuckle. They figured Little had said something to get Bowles locked up. “That’s what these sissies do,” explained one inmate. “Once they get away and the convict can’t get to them anymore, they get revenge for all those nights they were fucked in the ass.”

  The day after he was taken to the Hole, Bowles knew that guards were looking for a tunnel. He had heard it through the prison grapevine and seen guards from a window in the Hole as they searched the prison grounds near the storeroom.

  “There ain’t no tunnel,” he complained. “Somebody set me up.”

  Connor called off the search three days later after guards were unable to find any trace of a tunnel. It was a hoax, he decided. Officials in Marianna had reached the same conclusion. The lieutenant there had been hoodwinked by his confidential informant who, it turned out, had been Little’s cell partner. The informant had concocted the entire story in order to get a transfer from Marianna to the prison in Talladega. He had used information that Little had told him during their casual conversations to piece together the story and make it plausible. His ruse had worked. The informant had been transferred shortly after he tipped off the lieutenant.

  What no one in Leavenworth knew, except for Connor, was that Little had been arrested on the same night as Bowles and put in the Hole in Marianna. The lieutenant had wanted to scare Little and had figured that he would squeal on Bowles. He had figured wrong. Instead, Little had tried three times to send Bowles letters warning him about what was happening. The guards had read the letters and then returned them to Little after deciding that they didn’t contain any incriminating evidence, but they would not mail them. They were surprised at Little’s fierce loyalty to Bowles. They found it alarming.

  While Little was still being held in the Hole at Marianna, two FBI agents interrogated him about a series of threatening letters that had been mailed from the prison to a federal judge. The FBI suspected him, but it became clear during their conversation that he wasn’t the letter writer. What also became clear to the agents was that Thomas Little was totally absorbed by his friendship with Carl Bowles. “Carl Bowles and me are the best friends ever in the history of mankind,” Little bragged. “He has helped me more than any man alive.” And then he added, “When I get out, I’m going to do whatever is necessary to help him.” Little was scheduled to be released no later than 1994, and the longer he talked to the FBI agents, the more convinced they became that Little intended to someday break Bowles out of the Hot House.

  The FBI agents told the bureau about their conversation with Little, and officials decided to forbid the two men from writing to each other. They were told as soon as they were released from their respective Holes. Little protested. “I don’t think the bureau realizes Carl helps me with my head and it makes my time easier,” he said. “All I want is to be able to stay in contact with my friend.”

  The bureau claimed Bowles had “brainwashed” Little, and it said that the two men had spent their time in Leavenworth plotting future crimes that they could do together.

  “We really underestimated Carl Bowles,” a guard in Leavenworth said. “We all sat here and laughed about how Bowles was simply using Little as his sissie, but it seems old Carl was playing a much bigger game. This whole thing wasn’t about sex at all. It was about Carl turning that kid into a little Carl Bowles. It wouldn’t surprise me if Little did try to break him out of here or died trying to.”

  Bowles was irritated when he heard the brainwashing accusation.

  “Look around here,” Bowles said, scanning the cellhouse. “Do you really expect me to believe that in two hundred years of dealing with people, this prison is the best that society can come up with to deal with criminals like me? I don’t. Even a cold blooded killer like me knows that if you want to touch or influence someone, if you want to change them, you got to get down in their life. You want to change me, rehabilitate me, save me? Okay, you got to understand what makes me tick, what I feel, and why I think like I do.

  “But that takes putting your ass on the line. That takes actually getting to know another person. It’s easier to build a prison than to really get involved in someone’s life. It’s easier to lock me up than really care about me.

  “Have you ever given freely, unselfishly of yourself to another without thoughts of material gain, even if it c
ould mean risking your life?” Bowles continued. “Have you ever felt or shared your life so closely that you eat, sleep, work, and experience the same stimuli day after day? I don’t mean passing time like on the streets, with a thousand contacts with people and things. I mean one-to-one communication like in a prison. You know, like when the food gives you heartburn, well, you both eat it, you both feel it. That’s being the same. Bad weather, well, you both see it, feel it. The same. The lights go out—you’re both in the dark together. If the shower water is cold, you both get uncomfortable together. You’re gonna speak up for him. Him you. He’s gonna cover for you, you him.

  “That’s how it is with Tom and me. I touched Tom’s life like the bureau can never touch it, like society can never touch it, like no one can ever touch it, because I was in here with him and I cared! I mattered, he mattered.

  “Do I know Tom, truly know him? Hell, I lived as Tom in here, Tom lived as me. That’s something you never forget. He won’t, never will. Neither will I. Tom and me, me and Tom—the same. Tom knows what I mean and so do I. That will never change. We are one, and as long as one of us is in chains, we both are. Tom understands that and so do I. That ain’t brainwashing. That’s love.”

  A Voice: MURDERER, AGE 39

  The first time I was fucked I was sixteen in a county jail. Three of ’em grabbed me, two held me by the arms, the other one pulled down my pants. They took turns. But by the time the first son of a bitch got off of me, it wasn’t the getting-fucked part that hurt, it was the fact these fuckers could just do it to me like I was a piece of meat.

  The next day I was angry and scared. There wasn’t much in this cell, but there was this wire screen over a vent and I noticed a piece of it was loose, so I reached up and bent it back and forth until it busted loose and then I had me a piece of wire about as long as a short pencil. I waited until one of these bastards took a nap after lunch and I took the wire and stabbed him in his face. I was aiming at his eyeball because I wanted to blind this bastard, but I missed and it hit him right by his nose and hit the bone there and bent and came right out the side of his cheek like a fishhook. He starts screaming and grabs his face and I started smacking him and the guards came and hauled my ass out of there and took him to the hospital.