He always does. No matter how tight the control, how rigid the security, how frequent the inspections or “impregnable” the prison, the man who desires freedom above all other things always does think of something else.
Take John Carroll, perhaps the only man ever to break both out of and into prison. In the twenties, Carroll and his wife, Mabel, were known throughout the Midwest as the Millionaire Bandits. Eventually captured and convicted, John Carroll was sentenced to Leavenworth while Mabel was imprisoned at the women’s reformatory at Leeds.
At that time, in 1927, Leavenworth was still thought of as being nearly escape-proof, and the constant shakedowns and absolutely rigid daily schedule had Carroll stymied for a while. But not forever.
Carroll had been put to work in the machine shop, and he spent months studying the guards, realizing that he would be much more likely to escape if he could get one of them to collaborate with him.
He finally picked the shop foreman himself, a truculent, middle-aged, dissatisfied guard obviously unhappy in his work. Carroll waited in the machine shop one afternoon until everyone else had left and he was alone with the foreman. The foreman wanted to know what he was still doing here. Carroll, making the big leap all at once, said, “How would you like to make thirty-four thousand dollars?”
The foreman showed neither interest nor shock. Instead, he demanded, as though it were a challenge, “How do I do that?”
“I have sixty-eight thousand hidden on the outside,” Carroll told him. “Help me get out of here, and half of it is yours.”
The foreman shook his head and told Carroll to go on with the others. But the next day, when work was finished, he signaled to Carroll to stay behind again. This time, he wanted to know what Carroll’s plans were.
Carroll told him. A part of the work in this shop was devoted to building the packing cases in which the convict-made goods were shipped outside. Carroll and the foreman would construct a special case and when Carroll felt the time was right, the foreman would help him ship himself out of prison and to the foreman’s apartment.
The foreman agreed, and they went to work. Carroll was a cautious man, and they worked slowly, nor did Carroll make his escape immediately after the special packing case was completed. Instead, he waited for just the right moment.
A note from his wife, delivered through the prison grapevine, forced Carroll to rush his plans. The note, which he received on February 28th, 1927, read: “Your moll has t.b. bad. I’ll die if you don’t get me out. I’m in Dormitory D at Leeds.”
Carroll knew that his wife’s greatest terror was of dying in prison, of not dying a free woman. He left Leavenworth that same night, in the packing case. But the case was inadvertently put in the truck upside down, and Carroll spent over an hour in that position, and had fallen unconscious by the time the case was delivered to the foreman’s apartment.
Coming to, Carroll broke out of the case and discovered the apartment empty and the new clothes he had asked for waiting for him on a chair. He changed and left before the foreman got home, and the foreman never saw a penny of the thirty-four thousand dollars.
Carroll went straight to Leeds. Posing as an engineer, he became friendly with one of the matrons from the prison, and eventually learned not only the location of Dormitory D within the wall, but even the exact whereabouts of his wife’s cell.
It took him five months to get his plan completely worked out. Finally, shortly after dark the night of July 27th, he drove up to the high outer wall of the prison in a second-hand car he’d recently bought. In the car were a ladder, a hacksaw, a length of rope, a bar of naphtha soap and a can of cayenne pepper.
Setting the ladder in place, Carroll climbed atop the wall and lay flat, so as not to offer any watchers a clear silhouette. He then shifted the ladder to the other side of the wall, climbed down into the prison yard, and moved quickly across to Dormitory D. He stood against the dormitory wall and whistled, a shrill, high note, a signal he knew his wife would recognize. When she answered, from her barred third-story window, he tossed the rope to her. She caught it on the third try, tied one end inside the cell, and Carroll climbed up to the window.
Mabel then spoke the only words either of them said before the escape was complete. “I knew you’d come.”
Carroll handed the tools through to his wife, then, one-handed, tied the rope around his waist, so he’d have both hands free to work. Meanwhile, Mabel had rubbed the hacksaw with soap, to cut down the noise of sawing. They each held an end of the saw and cut through the bars one by one, with frequent rest stops for Carroll to ease the pressure of the rope around his waist.
It was nearly dawn before they had removed the last bar. Carroll helped his wife clamber through the window, and they slid down to the ground, where Carroll covered their trail to the outer wall with cayenne powder, to keep bloodhounds from catching their scent They went up the ladder and over the wall, and drove away.
Carroll was recaptured over a year later, and returned willingly enough to jail. His wife was dead, had been for five months. But she hadn’t died in prison.
Most escapees don’t remain on the outside for anywhere near as long as a year. The majority seem to use up all their ingenuity in the process of getting out, and none at all in the job of staying out. Such men have fantastic courage and daring in the planning and execution of one swiftly completed job, be it a murder or a bank robbery or a prison break, but seem totally incapable of giving the same thought and interest to the day-to-day job of living successfully within society.
Another escape from Leavenworth is a case in point. This escape involved five men, led by a felon named Murdock. Murdock, employed in the prison woodworking shop, was a skilled wood-carver and an observant and imaginative man. On smoke breaks in the prison yard, Murdock had noticed the routine of the main gate. There were two gates, and theoretically they were never both open at the same time. When someone was leaving the prison, the inner gate was opened, and the outer gate wasn’t supposed to be opened until that inner gate was closed again. But the guards operating the gates had been employed in that job too long, with never a hint of an attempted escape. As a result, Murdock noticed that the button opening the outer gate was often pushed before the inner gate was completely closed, and that once the button was pushed, the gate had to open completely before it could be closed again.
This one fact, plus his wood-carving abilities, was the nucleus of Murdock’s escape plan. He discussed his plans with four other convicts, convinced them that it was workable, and they decided to go ahead with it. Murdock, working slowly and cautiously, managed to hide five small pieces of wood in the shop where he worked. Taking months over the job, he carved these pieces of wood into exact replicas of .38-caliber pistols, down to the safety catch and the trigger guard, then distributed them among his confederates.
The day and the time finally came. A delivery truck was leaving the prison while Murdock and the other four were with a group of prisoners on a smoke break in the yard. Murdock saw the outer gate opening before the inner gate was completely closed. He shouted out the prearranged word signal and ran for the gate, the other four with him. They squeezed through just before the inner gate closed all the way and Murdock, brandishing his dummy pistol, warned the guards not to reopen it The five dashed through the open outer gate and scattered.
This much planning and imagination they had given to the job of getting out. How much planning and imagination did they give to the job of staying out? Murdock himself, the ringleader, was the first one captured, less than twenty-four hours later. He was found, shivering and miserable, standing waist-deep in water in a culvert. A second was found the following morning, cowering in a barn, and numbers three and four were rounded up before the week was out.