The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks

by Paul Simpson

  His lack of resistance surprised the officers involved. “You got to keep in mind he’s been twice sentenced to death,” Harris County spokesman Lt John Martin told CNN the night he was arrested. “He has absolutely no incentive to cooperate with law enforcement officers, and frankly, nothing to lose by strenuously resisting being taken into custody. So you know, of course, we imagine the worst. We imagine him putting up a fight, maybe gaining access to some type of weapon. And you know, my big concern was for the safety of the officers while they were trying to take him into custody, as well as the general public who’s obviously in danger just by him being out there on the streets. So again, we were greatly relieved that he was taken into custody without incident.”

  The fugitive was taken to Caddo Parish Jail, and from there he went back to Harris County Jail. On 8 November, a judge ordered that he was barred from contact with the outside world, except to meet with his lawyer until he was returned to death row, and while he was in Harris County, he was to have a two-deputy escort when he left his cell and to be strip-searched when he returned to it. Lt John Martin drily commented, “I think he should immediately recognize the futility of future escape attempts. He will be much more scrutinized. This will not happen again.”

  There were multiple repercussions following his escape, which the Harris County law enforcement authorities put down to human error. According to Lt Martin, “We have a number of procedures that simply weren’t followed.” Sheriff Tommy Thomas fired a twelve-year veteran of the sheriff’s office for not restraining Thompson properly and failing to lock the visitor booth. One sergeant chose to resign rather than face disciplinary action. The others – who had unwittingly aided Thompson by not scrutinizing his documentation carefully and buying into his story – received punishments ranging from a letter of reprimand to a ten-day suspension without pay.

  It was a little embarrassing for the Houston authorities when it was revealed two weeks after Thompson’s return that they had lost track of another convicted felon, who was based at a halfway house in the city. Christopher Wilkins, who was imprisoned for firearms offences, walked out of the Leidel Comprehensive Sanctions Center on 2 October 2005, and didn’t come back. US Marshals were alerted but in the six weeks that he was on the run, he became a suspect in three murders, an aggravated assault and two auto thefts. At least Lawrence Darnell Thomas, a carjacker who managed to get away from members of the Houston Police Department as he was being transferred to jail on 15 November, was recaptured within hours.

  In October 2008 Thompson lost one of the statutory appeals against his sentence. As of this writing he remains on death row. “I think my second bite at the apple was my retrial,” he told the Houston Chronicle a month after his escape. “I think my fate is determined . . . But, I’m a prisoner of hope.”

  Sources:

  Rodriguez, Robert: The Grass Beneath His Feet (AuthorHouse, Bloomington, Indiana: 2009)

  Houston Chronicle, 7 November 2005: “German group not involved in escape, authorities say”

  Houston Chronicle, 14 December 2005: “An interview with escapee Charles Victor Thompson”

  USA Today, 5 November 2005: “Search on for Texas death row inmate”

  Houston Chronicle, 4 November 2005: “Victim’s mom says the ‘Chuckster killer’ wants revenge”

  Houston Chronicle, 5 November 2005: “Somebody is helping him”

  Houston Chronicle, 7 November 2005: “Escaped killer is captured”

  Houston Chronicle, 9 November 2005: “Thompson had no money when arrested”

  Current status: http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/stat/dr_info/thompson-charles.html

  CNN, Nancy Grace show (broadcast 7 November 2005)

  Details on the murders: http://www.murdervictims.com/Voices/CainHayslip.htm

  Houston Chronicle, 15 December 2005: “Thompson says jailbreak was easy”

  Prisontalk Online Community Forum: “Charles Thompson Resentenced to death (my side of the story as well)” archived September 2012

  Houston Chronicle, 29 October 2005: “Jury sends Tomball man back to death row”

  Houston Chronicle, 23 November 2005: “Fired deputy faults jail policies”

  Houston Chronicle, 22 November 2005: “Deputy fired, 7 others disciplined over jailbreak”

  Houston Chronicle, 9 November 2005: “Judge limits visits, tightens security around killer”

  Houston Chronicle, 9 November 2005: “Jailhouse ramble heads should roll after killer’s escape revealed intolerable negligence”

  Houston Chronicle, 8 November 2005: “Captured killer back home”

  Houston Chronicle, 24 November 2005: “Escape of suspect in 3 killings sparks outrage”

  Houston Chronicle, 15 November 2005: “Escaped suspect captured”

  Escaping a Dog’s Life

  The Lansing Correctional Facility, originally known as the Kansas State Penitentiary (KSP), has housed many well known and infamous prisoners since it opened its doors in July 1868. The Barker-Karpis Gang that terrorized Americans in the early 1930s was formed when Al Karpis (aka Alvin Francis Karpowicz) met Fred Barker when they were both serving time within its walls. Truman Capote’s novel In Cold Blood gave publicity to the case of Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, who were held at the prison following their murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, in November 1959. Serial killers Francis Donald Nemechek and Richard Grissom, Jnr have both been incarcerated at the KSP.

  It is also the home for a different sort of prison industry – the Safe Harbor Dog Program, which helps bring new life to dogs who would otherwise be destroyed. Safe Harbor began in 2004, when a small group of unwanted dogs was taken into Lansing. Since that time, around a hundred inmates have been trained as dog handlers. They start by socializing the animals, and then, once they are better equipped to deal with others, they house-train the animals and work on obedience training. Safe Harbor has operated for nearly a decade – but nowhere on their website now will you find reference to the woman who set it up and was the primary force behind its growth.

  That’s because on 12 February 2006, Safe Harbor’s founder, Toby Young, assisted murderer John Manard to escape from Lansing. She went on the run with him, and, after a high-speed car chase, was captured alongside him. Toby Young is not the sort of role model Safe Harbor wants to adopt.

  The problem was that John Manard said what Toby Young wanted to hear. As “Jennifer”, a former Lansing correctional officer, posted at the time of the escape (before Young’s complicity was confirmed):

  “IF” (sic) she is guilty (innocent until proven guilty), yes, it wouldn’t surprise me. In the time I worked at LCF, I saw many staff ‘walked out’ for getting caught up in an inmate.

  All it takes is one mistake, and a clever inmate will use it against you. If you give an inmate something they shouldn’t have, no matter how innocent, they have something to use against you, and it is all downhill. They have blackmail material, and life as you know it is over. That is just how things are.”

  Prison volunteers, like correctional officers, receive training that is supposed to help them to deal with this sort of situation. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the training is going to stick, particularly if an inmate does their best to make them feel special. Toby Young fell for Manard, hook, line and sinker.

  John Manard was found guilty of what Judge Peter Ruddick described as a “vicious, unprovoked and totally random” felony murder and aggravated robbery. Aged just seventeen, Manard and his friend Michael Yardley shot Donald England on 13 June 1996, when they tried to carjack his vehicle as he was waiting for his ex-wife to have a haircut. Since the state couldn’t prove decisively which one of them was responsible, they were both held accountable under the “felony murder” system (any participant in a felony is held criminally liable for any deaths that occur during or in furtherance of that felony). On 23 April the following year, Manard was sentenced to life imprisonment, to be followed by a ten-year term, and told that he would not be eligible for
parole until 2019 at the earliest. (Manard later claimed that he didn’t think he would get a chance at parole until 2028.)

  At his trial Manard claimed through his attorney that he had simply signed up for a robbery and hadn’t intended anyone to get hurt, describing himself as “a seventeen-year-old kid who was simply scared to death”. After sentencing, he apologised to England’s widow and sons for what he had done. Perhaps understandably, he also felt aggrieved that even though he hadn’t fired the fatal shot (and the prosecutor in the case believed this was probably the case), he was still given the same punishment as the man who had.

  Sent to Lansing initially as a maximum-security prisoner, Manard kept his head down, and earned his way into the medium-security section. That was where he first came in contact with “the dog lady” as Toby Young was described by the prisoners. The former business professional who worked for the Sprint Corporation until 2001, and was married to her high-school sweetheart had recently survived a brush with thyroid cancer.

  Working at a veterinary clinic, Young realized how many stray dogs there were around Kansas City, and, on the suggestion of a colleague, looked into the possibility of setting up a program at the local prison for prisoners to help retrain the dogs so they could be given to new owners. A TV series had featured these so-called “cell dogs” around the country earlier in 2004, and after discussions with the warden at Lansing, the first canines were brought into the prison on 13 August that year.

  Over the next couple of years, Young became a regular visitor to the prison, bringing supplies for the dogs, exchanging the animals, and working with the prisoners. She received all the training that the state deemed necessary for being among the inmates of the prison, so was granted pretty much clear access to whatever she wanted when she needed it. The Lansing authorities were delighted with the positive publicity that the program was bringing the prison, and Young became a trusted part of the prison’s extended workforce.

  Young was also pleased with the way that the program was working, not just for the dogs who were no longer bound to be euthanized and would find better lives, but also for the prisoners with whom they were spending their time. Cell-dog programs across the world report that such activities give prisoners a release from the humdrum, often brutal world of the jailhouse, and can contribute to their eventual return to society. Manard was one of the first to become a trainer, joining the program in October 2004.

  Quite when Manard decided to cultivate Young’s friendship and turn it into something that he could manipulate to escape from Lansing is not clear. For a long time after their recapture, Manard maintained that he was desperately in love with her, sending twenty-seven-page letters to the Wall Street Journal. From his cell soon after their recapture, he wrote to the local TV station: “We have a fairy tale love the size of infinity that’s been lived by 2 real people. She means more to me than my own life.”

  Two years later he wrote to the Wall Street Journal: “I miss her so much, I’d have to wipe out an entire rainforest to put it on paper.” He sent messages to her via a reporter who was compiling a story on their love affair and escape claiming, “I still love her with all that I am . . . I miss her more than my own freedom, and I’ve never doubted her loyalty and love.” But how much of that was genuine is impossible to tell, particularly as much of what Manard would claim about the events of February 2006 were demonstrably false. No matter what Manard might try to state, Toby Young knew exactly what she was doing.

  Manard also knew exactly what she was doing: Young was able to drive in and out of the prison, and was trusted so much that there was a very high degree of probability that her van, with its cargo of slavering mutts, wouldn’t be searched properly, if at all. Over the months, the twenty-seven-year-old Manard flattered the forty-eight-year-old prison volunteer’s ego, complimenting her choice of clothing, and being a shoulder to cry on for her when she described the problems that she had with her fire captain husband.

  Not all the handlers were as impressed with Young as Manard. When one of them confronted her in the prison yard in October 2005, Manard came to her rescue, and from then onwards became her “escort” and unofficial bodyguard around Lansing. This brought the two of them into constant contact. In December that year his feelings for her were apparently so strong that he asked her if she would run away with him if he was able to escape from prison. When she replied that she would, Manard told her his plan.

  Young claimed that Manard originally intended to mail himself from the prison, but she dissuaded him from that. He then explained how she could help: he would squeeze himself into one of the pens used to transport the dogs to and from the prison. Other inmates would then place him in her van, and she would drive through the gates. Heartbeat detectors wouldn’t work, since they would register the dogs who would all be scrabbling and barking furiously. They could drop the dogs at Young’s house, switch vehicles, and head off to a new life at a resort in the mountains, far away from Kansas.

  Manard starved himself, losing around thirty pounds in weight so he could get his 6 foot 2 inch body into the dog carrier. Young smuggled in a cell phone for Manard to use (a key point used by those who maintained from the onset that Young was not the innocent victim she initially appeared to be), and they kept in constant contact – on one occasion, Young’s husband read a text on her phone, which she quickly claimed must be a wrong number. (Her husband has never granted an interview regarding his side of the story.) She also drew out around $42,000 from her retirement plan, and bought a 1997 Chevrolet vehicle for their getaway – rather unfortunately, providing a real address to the dealer from whom she bought it: the address of their hideaway in the Tennessee mountains to which they were heading!

  On Sunday 12 February, Manard was helped into the dog carrier by other inmates after the Safe Harbor dog session came to its end, and was taken to Young’s van. At 10.40 a.m. Young approached the gate, where guard Earl Green was on duty. Green knew Young and although he later claimed that surveillance footage proved that he did search the van, he admitted that he didn’t give it the thorough inspection that he should have done. Every box large enough to carry an occupant should have been shaken down. They weren’t. (Green was initially fired, then, after he made a fuss claiming he was being made a scapegoat, was allowed to resign: prison officials showed that there were at least five occasions on which he failed to search Young’s van properly.) Ten minutes later, Manard was out of Lansing. The dogs were dropped off and they picked up the new van, along with two handguns, hair dye and an electric razor. The lovers were on their way to Tennessee.

  Four hours after their departure from Lansing, a headcount showed that Manard was missing. The manhunt initially worked off the principle that Young wasn’t involved, and that, for some as yet unknown reason, Manard had decided to take her along, since she hadn’t been found with an abandoned vehicle. Local people were convinced that she could not possibly be involved: on the Crime Scene KC blog, which by chance had spoken with Manard at the end of 2005 when interviewing a random inmate about Christmas as a prisoner, one woman, “Christine” wrote:

  Do you seriously think she would ever do that? Ridiculous. The media can put any spin on any story they want and make it into entertainment for the masses who chose to believe and not ever really look for the truth. She did not aide him, she did not hide him. They DID NOT search her van when she left. And now the warden needs someone to blame that a prisoner is missing and someones (sic) life is at risk. End of story. She would never turn her back on her husband and children, on the dogs, nor on the other inmates so incredibly impacted by what she did and will do when she returns.

  But the evidence was clearly showing otherwise. “Toby Young was involved in planning this escape,” Department of Corrections press officer Bill Miskell said bluntly at a press conference on 13 February. “She withdrew a substantial amount of cash. She took two handguns from her home.” Young was “well known and well liked by everyone,” Miskell added. “It appears that her
familiarity with the staff may have played a part.”

  By this point, according to the account she gave in 2011, Toby Young was beginning to suspect that she might have been used by Manard. (This doesn’t tally with what she said at the time.) Rather than indulging in the loving conversation of their time inside Lansing, he was far more interested in eating junk food – after all, he had been in prison for the last decade! Once their fifteen-hour journey was complete, Manard was talking about his desire for freedom to do whatever he wanted to do: this was his first time in the outside world as a legal adult.

  Over the next few days, Manard and Young lived in their cabin, occasionally popping out to see a movie – ironically including Walk the Line, the biopic of singer Johnny Cash, which is partly set inside Folsom State Prison – or going shopping. Their purchases included two fine guitars and a parakeet! On 24 February, they went to the local shops in Chattanooga, but when they returned to their Chevy to head back to the cabin, they discovered the law was on their tail. Young maintained that she didn’t expect police to be looking for them, although she admitted that they had not looked at a paper or the TV, nor listened to the radio, probably because Manard wanted to stop her from worrying. (Manard also kept the only key to the cabin; Young couldn’t have left if she wanted to.)

  The manhunt had taken some time to get going. Young’s family and friends were questioned, all of whom were horrified and mystified by her actions. Her father read a statement saying that family members “simply don’t have any ideas why or how this happened”. To them she was the archetypal do-gooder, who would no sooner run off with a convicted first-degree murderer as fly to the moon. “Our training emphasizes to volunteers what they should and should not do for the inmates,” spokesman Bill Miskell had pointed out. “There is no doubt that she knew the boundaries.”