“The last straw,” Sammy continued with seething contempt, “was when Tucker blamed the county commissioners for his escape, saying if they’d properly funded the prison, it never woulda happened. Well, of course they didn’t have any money to keep up the place! Because Tucker stole it to pay for his mistress’s hotel rooms and dinners and clothes and jewelry. Even an abortion.” Sammy’s nostrils flared scornfully. He wore a long gold chain tucked into his collar, and maybe it was my imagination, but I was certain I could make out the pious shape of a cross beneath his white cotton undershirt.
The Defendant was extradited to Aspen in early 1977, and by June, he’d pulled off his first escape. Just before dawn on the sixth day of the statewide manhunt, two sheriff’s deputies came upon a stolen 1966 Cadillac and found The Defendant slumped behind the wheel, severely dehydrated and fatigued, frostbite on three of his toes. He was less than a mile outside Aspen county lines and taken into custody under the jurisdiction of Glenwood Springs, where he was questioned without a lawyer for several hours before the sheriff back in Aspen got wind of it. A pissing match ensued—with Aspen demanding The Defendant’s return and Glenwood Springs refusing. The Defendant was captured on their turf. Aspen had their shot with him, and they’d blown it. A judge ruled in favor of Glenwood Springs: a reckless ruling, not another word for it.
“Glenwood’s supposedly the more secure facility,” Sammy said. “We’re smaller, better equipped to keep an eye on him. But from the start, we were out of our depth.”
Sammy eyed both of us to see if we understood what that meant. I glanced at Tina; she shook her head.
“With prisoners who have a history of escape, Marshals Service is supposed to get involved, come and inspect the facility. But that never happened. There wasn’t even a mention of a previous escape on his intake screening form.”
“You’re sure of that,” I said, feeling winded.
“I read the form myself. Every guard in my unit did. That form’s supposed to list what the prisoner’s in for. He was down for theft.”
“Theft,” Tina repeated incredulously.
Sammy jabbed his thumbs into his eyes and clenched his jaw angrily. “None of us had any idea of who we were dealing with. Enough time passed between when he was caught and when the judge sent him back to Glenwood that we didn’t even know he was the same guy from the manhunt. Plus, he seemed normal. Easy to talk to. The guy they caught looked feral in the pictures in the paper, but by the time we got him, he’d cleaned himself up again. Then”—Sammy turned his eyes up to the ceiling—“he started going up there.”
Tina and I looked up at the ceiling in a coordinated motion.
“There was a loose tile in his cell,” Sammy said. “The sheriff knew he’d been up there once or twice. But he just said not to worry. Don’t go nowhere anyway. I told him he was getting real thin. I’d collect his dinner plate, and he’d hardly have touched anything on it. Sheriff just laughed and said he wouldn’t touch that shit with a ten-foot pole neither.”
By December 1977, four weeks before I saw him at our front door holding a bloody log from our own cord of firewood, The Defendant had dropped twenty pounds from his already lean frame, enough to shimmy through the narrowest part of the ducting, exit into the empty apartment of a prison worker, change his clothes, and escape Colorado for good. It took them six hours to realize he was gone—he’d pulled the covers over his law textbooks and various documents and piles of letters, arranged to pass for a sleeping body.
“People say he’s living off the land in the mountains,” Sammy said. “There are sightings all the time. Like Bigfoot.”
“Well, he’s not,” Tina said. “He’s gone to Florida State University.”
Sammy looked at her square in the face with an alarming urgency.
“What is it?” I asked, my heart pounding.
Sammy folded his hands and bowed his head, lines deepening in his brow, thinking hard.
“What?”
“Give me a second!” Sammy clenched his eyes shut. “I’m trying to remember.”
Tina and I sat there, not breathing, not wanting to do or say anything that may ruin his concentration.
“There was a university brochure,” Sammy said. His eyes were still closed, but his lids were moving rapidly, as though he was scanning the scene in his memory. “In with the other items that he’d put under the covers. One of them”—Sammy opened his eyes—“it had palm trees. And I remember thinking he must have gone to California. But you all got palm trees down there too, right?”