The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks

by Paul Simpson

  Knoch was a psychopathically clever murderer, and it seems probable that O’Hara simply did what he was told. The plan was to get away from the evening work detail and head to a part of the grounds least watched by the guard towers, cut through the fence, crawl beneath the razor wire, and then cut through the perimeter fence. From there, they would have to take their chances in the open countryside evading the patrols.

  O’Hara and Knoch got themselves as fit as they could, and on 28 February 2001, they dropped out of a line heading to the prison chapel, and raced across the grounds to the pre-designated point in the fence. It took them nearly an hour to cut through the toughened steel fence and then they needed a further hour to negotiate the razor wire, cutting themselves considerably in the process. By the time they reached the perimeter fence, alarms were being tripped, and the guards headed to round them out.

  They expected to find the escapee long gone, and indeed Lee John Knoch had made a quick getaway. Aaron O’Hara, on the other hand, was still very near the prison, and was picked up by one of the guards patrolling nearby, who had been alerted to the escape. He wouldn’t answer any questions, and it wasn’t until a headcount was carried out that the prison authorities realized that there hadn’t just been one escapee – two men had broken out, and they had only recaptured one of them. Oregon State Police and Malheur County sheriff’s deputies began the manhunt for Knoch.

  Although he was injured from the razor wire, Knoch was able to evade his pursuers, who found it difficult to track him through the open countryside littered with grain stubble and many ditches, all of which needed to be checked. He made it six miles across to the yard of Warrington Irrigation, where he was able to steal a truck that had been left overnight ready to go out, and headed east on the I-84 towards Idaho.

  Knoch had managed to travel around 300 miles when the fuel began to run low in the truck, and he had to stop. He had reached the Fort Hall Indian Reservation, home of the Shoshone-Bannock Native American tribe – and Demonte Johnson and his family.

  Johnson was taking his boys to visit the state basketball tournament in Boise, Idaho, but when he realized that he had forgotten the adaptor for the video recorder which they had in their van, he turned round and headed home. To his surprise, a van with Oregon plates was sitting in the driveway. Entering the house on his own, Johnson discovered Knoch rifling through his possessions, looking for food and clothing to steal. The fugitive tried to leave, but Johnson wanted him to wait for the police, the last thing Knoch intended doing.

  As Knoch headed for his stolen van, Johnson grabbed a shovel, and whacked the murderer on the leg. “Took a good baseball swing and knocked him down,” Johnson told reporters later. “He tried to get up again, and I nailed him again on the knee . . . I told him, ‘If you get up again, I’ll hit you again.’” Johnson detained him until the police arrived. They only realized who they had caught once they took responsibility for Knoch from Johnson, and according to Fort Hall Tribal Police Department Captain Gene Fenton, the fugitive was treated for minor injuries and then jailed. Johnson admitted that it was only when he learned who he had been assaulting that he was scared!

  Knoch was sent to the maximum-security jail at Salem, Oregon, and in a touching coda to the story, the superintendent of Snake River Correctional Facility ordered the inmates in the sign shop to make a gift for Johnson. “We are putting together a token of our appreciation,” Superintendent Bob Lambert told the Eugene Register-Guard newspaper. “We did want to recognize his particular heroism and actions.”

  Fact vs. Fiction

  The Real Prison Breaks account includes interesting interviews with some of the law enforcement personnel, as well as Demonte Johnson, but some of its factual material is suspect (Holliday was kidnapped and tortured in 1995, not 1997 – that was when he was murdered.)

  Sources:

  ABC News, 1 March 2001: “Rapist, Murderer Escape Ore. Prison”

  Snake River Correctional Facility website: http://cms.oregon.gov/doc/ops/prison/Pages/srci.aspx

  Oregon Business, April 2008: “Prisons don’t bring prosperity to rural towns”

  Details of Robert Holliday’s murder: http://www.crimevictimsunited.org/cases/robertholliday.htm

  Real Prison Breaks: Cineflix Productions, 2011: Dick Warrington interview

  Eugene Register-Guard, 18 March 2001: “Inmates craft gift for civilian hero.”

  The Spokesman-Review, 3 March 2001: “Escaped murderer caught in Idaho”

  Slipping the Supermax

  Supermax prisons, or the sections within prisons that are designated as Supermax, are meant to be escape-proof. According to the American National Institute of Corrections, a Supermax prison is “a stand-alone unit or part of another facility and is designated for violent or disruptive inmates. It typically involves up to 23-hours-per-day, single-cell confinement for an indefinite period of time. Inmates in Supermax housing have minimal contact with staff and other inmates.” They are for the worst of the worst, those people who are seen as flight risks, and an absolute danger to those around them.

  The H Unit at McAlester State Penitentiary in Oklahoma was constructed in 1991, as part of the on-going upgrade of the prison, following the riots that took place there in July 1973 that caused between $20-40 million worth of damage. It’s a vault within the already-secure facility, which is designed to ensure that no one can tunnel out, or otherwise make a bid for freedom. Two fences as well as twenty feet of razor wire provide a deterrent. According to the official Department of Corrections website, it provides new quarters for disciplinary segregation inmates, death row, and the lethal injection death chamber. H Unit also houses Administrative Segregation and Level III general population inmates. Nearly 300 inmates from across the state are kept there. But while McAlester officials might prefer to be best known for being the home of the world’s biggest “behind the walls” rodeo in 1940, the prison achieved notoriety when three desperate inmates got out from its Supermax H Unit in January 2001, the first prisoners to escape from McAlester since 1992, and the first ever to manage to get round the tight security in H Unit.

  In 1997, James Robert Thomas was sentenced to life without parole for first-degree murder and 400 years for rape for an attack on his eighty-one-year-old neighbour, Jessie M. Roberts in March 1993, when he was just seventeen years old. At his trial, the prosecution maintained that she was strangled with a telephone cord, and then raped while unconscious. Before his conviction, Thomas had briefly escaped from the Oklahoma County Jail. His colleague in the escape was twenty-one-year old Willie Lee Hoffman, who was in the middle of a twenty-year sentence for kidnapping and other charges. He too had escaped from less secure jails previously, breaking out of Payne County Prison in 1998, and from the Cimarron private prison in Cushing, Oklahoma. Nathan Washington, convicted for robbery with force and fear was also part of the breakout, but he didn’t get very far.

  The cells in H Unit each had their own toilet, secured with steel bolts to the back wall of the cell. Thomas and his confederates deduced that the plumbing from these had to be housed somewhere, and worked out that if they could somehow remove the toilets from the walls, they could get through to the duct where the plumbing was running, and from there to the roof. This left them the problem of removing the steel bolts – but these were men with nothing but time on their hands, the downside of the Supermax regime. For anything up to twenty-three hours a day, they could work on the bolts, using whatever came to hand. In this case, it was dental floss, made more abrasive by the application of a cleaning powder, such as Ajax. Although the prison spokeswoman Lee Mann would later tell reporters that she believed that dental floss was no longer being sold in the canteen because of its use so often in escapes, it seems probable that this is what Thomas, Hoffman and Washington used. Whatever the method, they successfully managed to clear the toilets from the wall, and, some point before 5 o’clock on the morning of Monday 15 January 2001, they crawled into the maintenance space.

  From there
, the three men were able to use an air duct to reach the roof. They dropped to the ground, and then used ropes created from their sheets to get over the inside fence. That left them the razor wire to negotiate. Thomas and Hoffman had no problems; Washington, regarded by some as the most dangerous of the three escapers, became caught up in the razor wire. The others left him behind, and scaled the perimeter fence.

  As soon as Washington was found, a headcount revealed the disappearance of Thomas and Hoffman, and the manhunt was begun. Tracker dogs were brought in, and, according to Jerry Massie, the spokesman for the Department of Corrections who briefed reporters during the investigation, “they were able to get some type of track”. Roadblocks were set up, and both a helicopter and a plane from the Oklahoma Highway Patrol searched from overhead.

  Around 6.15 a.m., they were spotted running through a yard belonging to John Brewer, who was feeding his horses at the time, and shortly afterwards they tried to steal a truck. That failed to start, so they abandoned it and carried on running. Realizing that they needed to hole up somewhere until they could get hold of a reliable vehicle, Thomas and Hoffman headed to the Boys and Girls Gymnastic Club on Hereford Lane in McAlester, about two miles east from the prison, and hid beneath a trampoline.

  When Betty Curtis and Judy Adams arrived for their aerobic workout, the two fugitives pounced on them. Threatening the women with a knife, they demanded money and keys for a car; Adams gave them the keys to her distinctive white 1995 Oldsmobile, which had a maroon stripe down the side. After a discussion about taking the women hostage and deciding against it, Thomas and Hoffman took the $65 the two ladies had in their purses, and headed off in the car.

  The manhunt continued throughout Monday, but the Pittsburgh County Sheriff’s Office reluctantly had to admit that they didn’t know which way the fugitives were heading. The operations were scaled back overnight, but on Tuesday morning, all the teams were once again on the ground searching for the men. Throughout that day, there was no sign of either the escapees or the car, then on Wednesday 17, the car was found abandoned in a hospital car park in Coalgate, around forty-five miles southwest of McAlester. Hoffman and Thomas were spotted by hospital staff who were able to give sufficient information to the police that they were able to track them to a house in Lehigh, five miles south of Coalgate. After arresting two accomplices who had allowed the fugitives to stay with them, police recaptured Thomas and Hoffman and returned them to H Unit.

  Hoffman received an additional eight years for his part in the escape, Nathan Washington an extra five. As a result of the breakout, metal plates were installed behind the toilets in the three damaged cells, and shortly afterwards throughout the unit. “We are always certainly more vigilant when something like this occurs,” spokeswoman Lee Mann said once Hoffman and Thomas were back in custody. “It brings it all to us the reality that such things occur. And all security measures that are in place are being looked at.”

  Sources:

  Daniel P. Mears, Evaluating the Effectiveness of Supermax Prisons (Urban Institute: Justice Policy Center, March 2006)

  McAlester history: http://www.doc.state.ok.us/facilities/institutions/osp.htm

  Amarillo Globe News, 16 January 2001: “Two escape in Oklahoma”

  ABC News, 16 January 2001: “Two Okla. Inmates Still on Loose”

  Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, 15 January 2001: “Two escape from Oklahoma maximum-security prison”

  Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, 17 January 2001: “Two escapees from maximum security prison caught”

  Real Prison Breaks: Discovery Channel, 2008: Judy Adams interview

  A Rubbish Escape

  Some escapers work out well in advance what they’re going to do once they get to the other side of the bars which are preventing them from experiencing freedom. They make sure that they have a change of clothing to put their pursuers off the scent, or a vehicle waiting to whisk them far away from the prison. Usually, of course, they are imprisoned in their own country, so there isn’t a language barrier. For former Green Beret and nurse Ted Maher, getting out of Monaco’s luxury prison was simply the start of his problems, since, by his own admission, he hardly spoke a word of French – not exactly the best way in which to blend into his environs.

  Maher’s case raised a lot of questions, as the evidence that convicted him of the arson deaths of his employer and a nurse was far from clear-cut – not helped by a claim that the court in the principality had already made up its mind to convict him before a single word of evidence was heard. According to Maher’s version of events, he had been hired to work for Edmond Safra, the founder and principal stock owner of the Republic National Bank of New York, who suffered from Parkinson’s disease and needed round-the-clock care. Maher’s background, both within the army and as a nurse, made him an attractive prospect to the Safras, and they offered him a wellpaid job, on condition he immediately moved to Monaco, where the Safras were based. Needing the money, Maher moved to the principality.

  Three months after Maher arrived, Safra and one of Maher’s fellow nurses, Vivian Torrente, were dead. On the morning of 3 December 1999, a fire alarm went off in the building; ten minutes later, at 5 a.m., Torrente called the head nurse from inside Safra’s secure dressing room to ask her to call the police, and told her that Maher had been injured. Maher was taken to the Princess Grace hospital twenty minutes later, and five minutes after that a blaze was noticed by many residents in the building. By the time that fire fighters made their way to Safra’s dressing room, he and Torrente had succumbed to the smoke.

  Maher claimed that he had been attacked by two intruders in the apartment who were intent on assassinating Safra. He had nobly fought them off, receiving stab wounds to the stomach in the process. He had given his cell phone to Torrente and told her to take Safra into his dressing room, and to call for help from there. Meanwhile he had set fire to some toilet paper in a waste bin to set the fire alarms off. He had then gone down to the lobby of the building to get help, where he was found and taken to hospital.

  There is no doubt that Maher set the blaze that indirectly caused the deaths of Safra and Torrente; he has never denied it. The motives behind it, though, continue to be debated. Was it, as was claimed at his trial, a mad attempt to curry favour with his boss by being seen as the hero of the hour? Did the intruders ever exist, or were they simply part of his cover story? Had he just stabbed himself in the thigh and the stomach for it all to look more realistic? Was his confession, that he subsequently repudiated, forced out of him? Given his lack of knowledge of French, did he even understand everything that was going on? Did the police really threaten Maher’s third wife, Heidi, when she rushed over to Monaco after his arrest?

  The debate, and subsequent trial – which took over two years to come to court – were a sensation in Monaco and around the world. But at the end of the proceedings, at which Maher’s own lawyer, Michael Griffith (the same man who had represented Midnight Express writer Billy Hayes on occasion), was not allowed to address the court, Maher was found guilty, and in December 2002, he was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment.

  Many prisoners found guilty of a crime in Monaco are sent to French prisons under an agreement signed in 1963; however the principality maintains the right to keep certain criminals within its jurisdiction. Its prison, the fifty-cell House of Arrest, high on a promontory overlooking the sea, wouldn’t ever be included in a list of Top Ten Hellholes. Compared with most, it is more like a holiday destination than a penitentiary, but there are still bars on the windows, and locks on the outside of the doors. “The place is like a luxury hotel,” Michael Griffith commented shortly after Maher’s abortive escape. “They were eating avocado and vinaigrette for lunch. He had a TV in his cell and an en suite bathroom.” The prison was believed to be totally secure – it had been fifty years since the last escape. Faced with up to a decade in total within its walls (he had already spent over two years in the prison before coming to trial), and after learning that his wife would no
t be allowed to visit him with their children, Maher decided to escape, even though there was a fighting chance that if he kept his record clean, he might be released on parole within a couple of years.

  He was imprisoned with Luigi Ciardelli, whom he would later try to claim was the instigator of the escape bid. The forty-five-year-old Italian had already served three sentences in a French prison, and was being held in Monaco following an armed robbery at a pharmacy in 1994. Initially Maher had been in his own cell, but the plan he had in mind needed two people, so between them they persuaded the prison director that Maher was a suicide risk, and Ciardelli would be able to keep an eye on him if they were in the same cell.

  The view of the sea provided an ever-present reminder of the freedom both men craved. The plan was as simple as removing the bars from the windows, climbing through and letting themselves down to ground level. Maher wrote to his sister in America explaining his situation, and she sent four small hacksaw blades to him inside a copy of the Bible which was brought in by a priest who visited Maher regularly: the House of Correction had no prison workshop that the men could use to create any form of tool, and because of recent heart surgery, the priest wasn’t allowed to go through a metal detector.

  Maher didn’t underestimate the work ahead of the two men: they had to get through six steel bars, and two wire meshes that lay between them and the outside. It was a painstaking task, since they had to work as quietly as possible; this meant they had to use small strokes of the blade against the initial steel mesh to avoid making too much noise. Two blades were quickly rendered smooth by the cutting. Each night they would glue the pieces back together, and paint them over, using materials that Ciardelli was able to obtain from his work in the prison library, then hide the blades inside the refrigerator so they wouldn’t register on metal detectors.