by Paul Simpson
Both men were assigned to work in the prison manufacturing facility, making road and street signs. These were packaged up, and taken through the front gates – past the barbed-wire-topped fences – to the local post office, from where they were despatched around the country. Because the carts of signs went through on a regular basis, the guards tended not to check them too rigorously, and the two lifers thought that they might be able to conceal themselves inside a cart and effectively mail themselves to freedom.
They realized that they could not simply hide underneath the post: the extra weight of two grown men would easily be spotted. So they changed the labelling on the packages to state that they were much heavier than they were, giving a total weight for the cart that would equate to the parcels plus themselves.
On the morning of their break out, 16 March 2001, Davis and Gray prepared the packages as normal between 9.30 and 10.30 a.m., and then fellow convicts helped them to hide inside the specially rigged cart. This was wheeled out as normal at 1.30 p.m. and placed in the mail truck. And despite the correctional facility supposedly having an absolute rule that no vehicle left the premises until it had been thoroughly searched and unless the guards were sure that all the inmates were accounted for, the mail truck was waved through. The guards on the gates believed that it had been checked by their colleagues inside. At 1.55 p.m., the prison received a call from the mail supervisor at the String-town post office. Two inmates had jumped out of the cart, pulled a knife on him, and taken the vehicle.
They didn’t keep it for long; they abandoned two other vehicles they stole shortly afterwards and soon headed into the wooded hills that surrounded the prison. There they stole guns, ammunition and some of her husband’s clothes from seventy-six-year-old Ida Dunn, who lived in a trailer in an isolated spot in the forest.
While a major manhunt was under way for them, with tracking dogs and helicopters coping with the wintry conditions, the two men kept out of sight, sleeping in the snow-covered woods, and stealing food where they could. Eight days after their escape, they came across a ranch belonging to Jack Sheffield. When the rancher came to check on his cattle, he was jumped by the two men. Although he believed initially that they were going to shoot him, he was bound by Gray and taken hostage as they drove his pickup truck the 150 miles toward Oklahoma City.
However, about twenty miles before they reached their destination, Davis and Gray pulled into the side of the road and tied Sheffield to a post before driving off. He freed himself quickly and ran for ten minutes to Arcadia, a small town near Edmond, where he raised the alarm. Soon after, realizing they had been spotted by the police, Davis and Gray abandoned the truck and ran into the woods.
They soon came upon the home of Mildred and Gilbert Tuepker. Seventy-two-year-old Mildred was chatting on the phone with her daughter Jan, who lived in Delaware, when she spotted the two men approaching the house. She told her daughter to call the police, and before the connection was cut off, her daughter heard one of the men say, “We’re running from the police. Get inside.”
Alerted by Jan Tuepker, Oklahoma police and SWAT units raced to the scene, where Davis and Grey were holding the two seniors hostage. They evacuated the neighbours from their properties, and settled in for the siege. What they didn’t realize was that the two fugitives had vowed to commit suicide rather than be captured and returned to prison.
The police sent a “throwphone” into the property, rather than use the landline that Mildred Tuepker had been using previously. Throwphones were part of the arsenal of law enforcement agencies at that time: whereas with an ordinary phone, the hostage taker had the option of simply not using it, the throw-phone consisted of a microphone and a loudspeaker. If Davis and Grey said anything, the police could hear it, even if the phone was switched off.
Edmond police officer Kris Fite was appointed negotiator, and found Gray a difficult person to talk to initially. Gray warned the police that the two hostages would be harmed if they tried to enter the house, and for over five hours Fite tried to calm the men down and coax them out of the house. Eventually, he was able to persuade Gray to release Mildred Tuepker in return for being allowed to speak to his mother, who tried to persuade her son to release the hostages unharmed.
After Mildred was sent out of the house, negotiations continued. Davis asked for a pizza and the men asked if they could finish watching The Net, a thriller that was being broadcast on TV. It seemed as if the situation was slowly winding down.
But then everything took a turn for the worse. Police became highly concerned when Gray revealed the existence of the suicide pact between the two men. After Gray put the phone down, he took Gilbert Tuepker into a bedroom, and asked him where the best place in the house would be for them to shoot themselves. Gilbert told them that the kitchen was probably the spot to choose. He waited in the bedroom as first one, then a second shot rang out.
Not knowing whether this meant the two fugitives had followed through with their pact, or if Gilbert had been shot, Oklahoma County Sheriff John Whetsel came close to ordering a strike on the house. But then Gray came back on the phone, and told Fite that Davis had tried to kill himself but failed. Gray had therefore put his friend out of his misery, shooting him in the head. Gray sounded increasingly depressed but Fite continued to argue with him, and eventually, eight hours after he first took the Tuepkers hostage, Gray surrendered to the police. “Everybody is going to think I’m a coward,” he said, as he was led away. He received an extra forty-year sentence for the escape. Gilbert Tuepker walked out of the house unharmed.
Sources:
Deseret News, 26 March 2001: “Couple’s captivity ends with one suicidal fugitive dead, one in custody”
Amarillo Globe-News, 26 March 2001: “Oklahoma escapees had made agreement to commit suicide”
Mack Alford Correctional Center prospectus
Real Prison Breaks, Cineflix Productions, 2011: John Sheffield, Kris Fite interviews
A Final Smell of the Grass
The use of capital punishment by society has always been a matter of considerable debate. Do we subscribe to the principle of “an eye for an eye”, and those who take a life deserve to forfeit their own? Or should there be compassion? Or, indeed, is keeping someone locked up for the whole of their natural life a harsher, and more appropriate, punishment than being put to death? Those on death row have their own unique perspective on the question, and understandably, many of them are constantly seeking ways in which to escape from prison and experience freedom once more.
One such person was Charles Victor Thompson, who was convicted of the murders of his former girlfriend Dennise Hayslip and her new partner Darren Keith Cain on 30 April 1998 (Hayslip actually died a week after being shot, giving her enough time to name her killer to the police). He was sentenced to death the following year, and after the Texas Court of Appeals allowed a new punishment hearing, a second Harris County jury upheld the original decision on 28 October 2005. Before the new verdict, Thompson had written, “From the day you hear the decision that the death penalty will be sought, a little part of you dies silently.”
Less than a week after it was confirmed that he would receive the mandated death sentence, Thompson simply walked out of the Harris County Jail, much to the consternation of those jurors who had been assured by the presiding judge that Thompson would be isolated and would have no means of escape. During the period Thompson was free, the relatives of his victims, as well as the jurors, went into hiding; Thompson himself claimed – in an interview he gave a month after his capture, and via the book written about his trial and escape, The Grass Beneath His Feet – that he vowed to himself that he would not do anything violent when he was on the outside. Given the vicious nature of the double murder, and the threats that he had purportedly made during his trials, perhaps it is not surprising that those possibly affected chose to err on the side of caution.
According to an editorial in the Houston Chronicle a few days after Thompson’s recapture, he was one o
f at least nineteen prisoners who had absconded from the Harris County Jail in the preceding ten years, but because he was officially on death row, security around him should have been correspondingly tighter. County Commissioner Steve Radack even admitted, while Thompson was still on the run, “It’s amazing to me that we don’t have more incidents like this. You have to bear in mind there’s constantly people coming into our jail at the same time there’s constantly people leaving as people are arrested and make bond. It’s a continuous dynamic and a lot of work.”
Thompson took maximum advantage of that dynamic, and the overcrowding in the prison, which had led to the prison being decertified by the state previously, meaning that staff simply couldn’t keep track of all the new faces that were around. “The day you’re sentenced to death, [escaping] is on your mind, regularly. You know you’re going to die,” he told reporters afterwards. He knew that getting out of death row in Building 12 at the Allan B. Polunsky Unit would be nigh-on impossible: the harsh conditions within the unit and the regular changes in routine would prevent any sensible planning. However, the 1200 Jail in Harris County was a completely different affair. A new building, only opened in 2003, on Baker Street in the heart of Houston, it isn’t that far from the Amtrak yard, and security certainly seemed to be lax. He needed to get away from there before he was handed back to the warders at the Polunsky Unit.
The convicted murderer was still having meetings with various attorneys, which were held at the 1200, while he was waiting to be transferred. To get out of the jail, Thompson knew he had to pass various checkpoints, and obviously he could not wear handcuffs or his prison uniform. However, he also knew that he would have a chance to change, since guards didn’t stay in the room with prisoners during legal consultations – as long as he could get out of his handcuffs – and legal papers weren’t searched. He therefore kept hold of the civilian clothes – dark-blue shirt, khaki pants and white tennis shoes – that he had been permitted to wear during his resentencing hearing: he had managed to secrete them inside his file of legal papers following his court appearance at the end of October.
This wasn’t the first time that he had tried to keep hold of civilian clothes. A set had been found in his cell four days after he was transferred into the Harris County jail prior to the resentencing hearing. According to Thompson, he was assured by Sergeant James Watson that the district attorney’s office wouldn’t be told about the discovery before his resentencing and that it would be simply dealt with as a contraband violation. The sheriff’s office denied this, saying that the DA’s office told them that the mere discovery of civilian clothes wasn’t enough to sustain a charge of attempted escape.
Thompson also claimed that he brought a handcuff key from the prison within the accordion file of papers. He has never admitted how he got hold of the key in the first place (“I’ll take that to my grave,” he swore after his capture), although many people were highly suspicious that Petra E. Herrmann, the chairwoman of Alive e. V., an anti-death-penalty organization, visited Thompson the day before his escape. It should be made clear that the police cleared her and other visitors of any involvement, but the fact that the authorities at the Polunsky Unit were adamant that the metal detectors used on Thompson before he was sent to Harris County would have revealed the presence of the key does lend credence to the theory that Thompson was aided by someone whom he saw in Houston.
One item that he definitely brought from the prison was his death-row identification badge, which had his photo on it. It was the basis for his most audacious bluff.
On Thursday 3 November 2005, Thompson had a meeting with James Rytting, a new attorney, after being granted permission to seek fresh counsel following his trial. He had watched the routines at the jail carefully, and, as he pointed out after his arrest, many of the staff simply weren’t doing their jobs properly. Certainly, he should not have been left in the room with the lawyer with the door unbolted. But Deputy John Thurman didn’t lock the door, so when the lawyer left, Thompson remained in the open room, unsupervised. Rytting claimed that he told guards after the meeting that he was “done with Thompson”, which should have led directly to him returning to his cell. Instead no one went to check on the prisoner.
After checking to ensure that he was right in his belief that the guard outside the door had gone to supervise the inmates at recreation – and that therefore there was no one around to catch him in the act – he used the key to unlock the handcuffs, and removed them. He stripped off his prison uniform, changed into his civilian outfit and hung his prison identification on his collar.
And then, quite brazenly, he walked to the elevator, and took a ride to the first (ground) floor. When he was asked for his identification, he showed the death-row badge, on which he had made one minor, but significant alteration: the word “offender” was covered in tape, which he hid with his fingers. Deputy Tonya Ward escorted him to colleagues, as she had done on previous occasions when she saw a non-standard form of identification. When those deputies queried what Thompson was holding, saying that they’d never seen one of those badges before, the escaper claimed that he was from the Texas Attorney General’s office carrying out an undercover internal investigation at the jail – something that had happened with some frequency since it opened – and needed to go outside to meet his partner. Not wanting to get in the way of such a person, the deputies opened the door. As simply as that, Charles Victor Thompson was a free man.
Consciously telling himself to walk, not run, Thompson strolled out into the Houston heat, and wandered down the road, all the time expecting the hue and cry to begin. After a short while, he ducked out of sight, stripped off his shirt and trousers, and looking like one of the many joggers out on the streets, started to make his way towards the train tracks. As a grain train passed him, Thompson ran alongside it to match its speed, then hauled himself onto a ladder. He stayed on that train for about twenty minutes, jumping off when it stopped in the suburbs. After a brief attempt to carjack a vehicle – and being discovered by its female owner before he could work out how to operate the security device on the car – he decided to head back onto the trains, and after keeping out of sight underneath a freeway until it was dark, he jumped on board another train. He was heading through East Texas on his way out of the state. “I was pretty dirty and happy,” he said of that train ride. “The scenery was nice, and it was nice to be free.”
Once Thompson’s absence was discovered, a major manhunt began. The primary concern was that he would go after those he had threatened. Dennise Hayslip’s mother was blunt: “They say all he wants to do is run. I don’t believe that. I really think he wants to get revenge,” she told reporters before heading for hiding.
Finding no trace of him in Houston, apart from the clothes he had abandoned behind one of the other jails, the search was widened. On 4 November the US Marshals office offered a $10,000 reward for his capture, and charged him with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution, designating him a federal fugitive and allowing them to bypass normal extradition proceedings between states. They believed that the discovery of the clothes he used during the escape meant that he had an accomplice who had provided him with a fresh set, not realizing he had simply lost a layer of clothing.
There were various sightings that the marshals investigated: deputies were sent to Tidwell, north-east of Houston, after a county employee thought she had seen Thompson. It turned out to be another convict, but one released properly. Thompson was in fact miles away. He was well on his way through the southern states: on Friday morning the train on which he was travelling entered Louisiana, and Thompson saw up close the effects of Hurricane Katrina, which had devastated the area at the end of August that year. When the train reached the end of the line in Shreveport, Louisiana, on Sunday morning, Thompson masqueraded as a worker trying to get home after the storm. People took pity on him, allowing him use of a shower, and feeding him – they even gave him $25 to help him out and gave him a lift to a truckstop. The money was t
o prove his downfall.
Thompson knew he needed larger sums of money in order to escape out of the country, probably to Canada. He therefore located a pay phone and made contact with what he would only describe later as “an international assistance agency” that promised they would arrange funds via Western Union. Thompson would need to call them later that day to receive the code word that he’d have to give in order to collect the money.
While he was waiting, he bought a six-pack of Natural Light, a beer with about 4.2 per cent strength. It was the first alcohol he had drunk in a long time. Borrowing a bicycle from in front of a store, he cycled to a nearby park and had a drink. That went straight to his head, and when he returned to the payphone to make the call, he was drunk.
And that’s where the US Marshals found him just after 8 p.m. on 6 November, speaking on the phone. The Gulf Coast Violent Offenders Task Force tracking Thompson had received a tip that he was in Shreveport, and contacted the local US Marshals office. According to Deputy US Marshal Mickey Rellin, who carried out the arrest, Thompson didn’t try to get away. “I asked him, ‘Who are you?’ No answer,” Rellin recalled to CNN. “‘Who are you?’ No answer. ‘Who are you?’ I then made sure that he could see my badge and my credentials, and he said, ‘Are you the US Marshals Fugitive Task Force?’ And I looked at him and said, ‘What do you think?’ He says, ‘Then you know who I am.’ And I said, ‘Well, who are you?’ And then he said, ‘Yes, I’m Charles. I know you’re looking for me.’”
Thompson’s own account mentions the beer, but plays down the effect it had on him – he blames the woman to whom he was speaking on the phone for his arrest. She had just mentioned the $10,000 reward she had seen on America’s Most Wanted when the marshals arrived. She’s not named, but “was not only a friend, but a woman Charles had come to love and respect. She was a woman he entrusted with his life and his future.” Certainly, he was in contact with a woman named Kyla based in Australia, who vigorously defended Thompson in an online forum after the resentencing hearing but stopped posting about him once the escape was under way. All he had left to his name when he was captured were the contents of his pockets: a black shoelace and a bottle of shampoo.
