The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison (50 page)

Ashmore had grown up in St. Louis, married when
she was sixteen, and later divorced. She was raising Heather, then five years old, and living on welfare checks. Bucklew wanted to meet the child, so the three of them got together at a public park. “My daughter was hyperactive and most guys couldn’t stand being around her, but he loved all her energy. He wore her out running around the park with her,” Ashmore recalled.

At one point, Bucklew put his arm around Ashmore and she reciprocated by reaching her arm around his waist, but she jerked her hand away when she felt the grip of a gun sticking out of his belt under his bulky sweatshirt. She didn’t ask why he was carrying it, but Bucklew volunteered an explanation. “I’m afraid someone might hurt me,” he told her with a smirk.

Bucklew sent her flowers, bought her clothes, and spent hours playing with Heather. Ashmore was happy, but she knew there was something odd about her new boyfriend. One afternoon she introduced him to a girlfriend, and after he left, the woman asked her if Bucklew had been in prison.

“I don’t know,” Ashmore replied. “Why?”

“Because my brother was in prison and they walk the same way. You know, like animals looking to pounce on someone or have someone pounce on them. Haven’t you noticed?”

Ashmore began watching Bucklew more closely. He did walk funny, she noticed. He also ate with his arm resting on the table beside his plate, as if he were guarding it. Whenever he saw a police car, he always made some profane comment about it.

Despite all this, Ashmore moved into an apartment with him three weeks after they met. “Months later, after Norman was arrested, people asked me how I could live with a bank robber,” Ashmore recalled. “It made me mad. Hey, this bank robber took care of my daughter. He fed her and clothed her and loved her and that was more than her father had ever done for her. Everyone thought my first husband was great because he came
from a religious family, but he was a drunk and he used to beat me up. His mother would come over to our house, and he’d smack me around, and she’d just sit there and say it was my duty to take it. He gave me two black eyes once and this woman blamed me for not being a good enough wife. She said the Bible said I should obey him.”

In Ashmore’s eyes, Bucklew treated her like a princess. “I know what broads are for, okay?” Bucklew explained later. “They are for taking care of and being used. I know there are a lot of little girls out there who want to run the world and I just stay away from them. I want a woman who is worried about whether I am going to like what she is wearing, is worried about fixing her fingernails and hair because I like the fingernails and hair fixed. I like to take them shopping and I like to watch them trying on clothes, and I particularly like how they feel after you are done buying them.

“Now, this broad is a fucking dingbat. She is real good in giving pussy. I’d give her four and a half stars on that. She’s real good at cooking and cleaning house and is the best mother ever to live, but give her a job, even something simple like sitting down and taking tickets at a movie theater, and she is going to be sick on the second or third day. That’s okay with me, though, ’cause I don’t want no broad of mine working. I’ll take care of all that. All she has to do is keep me happy.”

Ashmore was not allowed to speak to any other men unless it was okay with Bucklew. When the two of them went into a restaurant, he walked ahead, she followed. He also ordered for her, told her what to wear, how to fix her hair.

Ashmore loved it.

“When I was little, I was sick a lot, and my daddy took care of me because Mama worked nights. I was always Daddy’s little girl and I liked having someone take care of me,” she said. “I felt secure. I knew he wouldn’t let anyone harm me.”

One night, Ashmore and Bucklew were out with some friends when Ashmore said something that one of the men didn’t like. “Mind your own business,” he snapped.

Ashmore began to cry.

Bucklew had been out of the room when this exchange took place, but when he found Ashmore in tears, he grabbed the man by the throat.

“You apologize to my old lady or I’ll rip out your windpipe!” he yelled. The man quickly complied. Bucklew told Ashmore later that he was going to kill the man but she talked him out of it.

A similar incident happened months later after Bucklew was recaptured and put in Marion. “I was waiting to visit with him,” Ashmore said, “and an inmate walked past me and said, ‘Hey, lady, nice ass.’ I never told Norman, but another convict mentioned it to him, and the next week when I visited him, Norman said, ‘Hey, I heard some guy said you had a nice ass last week,’ and I said, ‘Yeah,’ and he said, ‘I hear that guy got hurt this week. Someone beat him up real bad.’ I said, ‘Is he dead?’ And he said, ‘Naw, but he probably wishes he was.’ I said, ‘Did you do that?’ and he laughed. He was proud of the fact that he had beaten this guy up for offending me. And you know, so was I. I’d never had anyone care enough about me to do something like that. I was proud.”

But Ashmore hadn’t been so thrilled when Bucklew became violent with her when they lived together. “We were driving down the street once and he suddenly backhanded me,” Ashmore remembered. “I asked him why he hit me and he said because I had been looking at some guy, but the truth was, I was just daydreaming.” Bucklew recalled that same incident later. “I cracked her a good one,” he explained, “because she had it coming. Now, I don’t believe in beating up women, but if my old lady is talking to some man, she’s gonna get knocked to the floor every time because I know old ladies are good
for three things: giving pussy, cooking, and taking care of kids, and if I see her talking to another man, I know she ain’t cooking, I know she ain’t taking care of his kids, so she and him must be talking about pussy.”

The entire time that he and Ashmore were living together, Bucklew was robbing banks. He would spend most days driving around different sections of town noting how close the police stations were to banks. He kept two police scanners in his car, and maps marked with potential getaway routes. He always used the same method for each robbery. He would drive to a bowling alley the night before the robbery. “A guy gets out of his car wearing a yellow shirt on his back that says ‘Mac’s Pizza’ and you know he is going to be inside for at least two hours bowling in some league,” Bucklew explained. “That gives you time to steal his car and get it out of the neighborhood.”

Bucklew always stole an older car, preferably a station wagon, which he parked in the lot of an apartment complex or hospital about two miles from the bank that he intended to rob. “No one pays attention if an old station wagon shows up parked in their lot, but if a Lamborghini is there, everyone notices.” The following day, Bucklew would drive right up to the bank’s front door. “I wanted everyone inside the bank to notice that car, to focus on it, because two minutes after the robbery, I was going to dump it and be in a different one.” Bucklew would run into the bank wearing a mask and waving a shotgun. “Open your drawers!” he’d yell as he leaped over the counter. He would grab the cash in the tellers’ drawers and run out of the bank. “I had it timed so I could be in and out of a bank within one minute,” he bragged. He would drive the stolen car back to the apartment complex and switch cars.

“Robbing banks is easy,” said Bucklew. “What other business tells its employees to hand over the money if someone comes in and asks for it?”

Robbing the Boatmen’s Bank of Concord Village in
St. Louis, on May 27, 1977, proved to be the exception. An off-duty policeman, Ray McDonough, happened to be one of the bank’s customers when Bucklew came charging in with his shotgun and jumped up on the counter. McDonough pulled out his .38 caliber revolver and shot Bucklew in the chest. “I heard the bang and then I see this fucking gun bounce out in the middle of the floor and a pair of legs scrambling under a desk,” Bucklew recalled. “But I didn’t know I’d been shot.” The bullet had hit him in the abdomen, but missed his vital organs.

The feet that Bucklew spotted under the desk belonged to McDonough, who had ducked for cover after his bullet failed to kill Bucklew. He thought Bucklew was wearing a bulletproof vest. “I could have ground-swept him with the shotgun,” Bucklew recalled, “but there is a broad standing on one side and another broad on the other, and if I pulled that trigger, I would have killed him and definitely one of the broads, and I didn’t know I had been hit so I didn’t fire. I just grabbed the money and ran.” Bucklew escaped with $48,146 and it wasn’t until he was driving away from the bank that he realized he was bleeding.

When he got home, he stuck a Tampax into the wound and scribbled a telephone number on a pad for Ashmore.

“If something happens and I die tonight, call this number,” Bucklew told her. “Have the guy who answers take me out in the woods and dump me somewhere. Take what money we got and start over.”

Ashmore, who was seven months pregnant at the time, was terrified. “I’m madly in love with him,” she recalled. “Heather is in the next room asking what is wrong with Daddy, blood is coming out of his side, and he wants me to dump him in the woods somewhere. It was crazy.”

The next morning, Bucklew flew to Las Vegas on a commercial flight, rented a car, and drove to Bullhead,
Arizona, where he told a doctor that the bullet wound was caused by a ricochet during target practice.

Back in St. Louis, the shooting and robbery had caught the attention of the media, who dubbed the robber “the Bionic Bandit,” because he seemed invincible to gunfire. The police claimed the Bionic Bandit had stolen $117,500 from seven banks. All this attention worried Bucklew. He wanted to leave St. Louis, but Ashmore wanted to wait until after she had their baby.

On June 26, Sarah was born. Bucklew was stopped during a routine traffic check three weeks later and arrested when police spotted several weapons in his car. A fingerprint check showed that he had escaped from Trenton State Prison.

Bucklew was taken to a cell in the St. Clair County Jail in Belleville, Missouri, but when the jailer started to open the cell door, Bucklew stopped him.

“Hey, you put me in a cell with these four niggers, and you’re gonna find cold bodies tomorrow,” Bucklew said. “I don’t cell with niggers.”

The jailer didn’t know what to do, and neither did the black inmates inside the cell.

“I’m telling you, someone’s gonna be killed if I go in there, and it ain’t gonna be me,” Bucklew repeated.

He was taken to a different cell.

“Most whites fuck up right away when they come into prison, because they try to be friendly,” Bucklew said later. “Let’s say a white dude is put in a cell with maybe fifteen niggers. If he says hello or even nods to them, then he’s already doomed. You see, half of them will think he is just being polite and treating them with respect, but the other half will know he is weak and afraid, because they know that a white man isn’t even going to acknowledge them if he’s been in prison before, because whites don’t speak to niggers in prison. These niggers are going to move on that guy as soon as the hack disappears.”

The St. Louis police were able to link Bucklew to
five bank robberies. He received the maximum sentence of 125 years. Ashmore was not charged with any crimes. Bucklew was turned over to the bureau and taken to the control unit in Marion because of his history of escape attempts, including several tries while he was awaiting trial. Ashmore followed him to Marion, and one year later, she and Bucklew were married in the prison’s visiting room. “I wanted Sarah to know her father,” Ashmore explained, “and I still loved this man.”

But the marriage didn’t last. Bucklew sent all his prison earnings to Ashmore, but it was barely enough to pay the rent and she couldn’t keep a job. She divorced him and married a longtime friend. “It wasn’t love. I still loved Norman, but I needed someone to support me and the girls,” she said. Bucklew stopped talking to Ashmore, although he continued writing and telephoning his daughters.

Bucklew tried to escape from Marion twice. On January 13, 1982, he was caught as he was cutting his way through the prison’s wire fence. On September 17, 1984, he was convicted of conspiring with another inmate to hire a group of Puerto Rican terrorists to launch an armed assault on Marion.

Bucklew had mellowed since then, enough so that the bureau had sent him to Leavenworth. Now, as he sat in his cell thinking about his upcoming visit with Heather and Sarah, Bucklew wrote at the top of a notepad:

1. Hacks
.

“I got to warn Heather about the hacks around here,” he explained. “She might go into a bar, you know, and she’s got to understand that these hacks and the police are my sworn enemy. They aren’t fooling and neither am I. Someday a hack or cop is going to kill me, and if one of my daughters married one of these bastards, it would be all over. It would be the one thing I couldn’t ever forgive.”

Next on the pad, Bucklew wrote:

2. The killing
.

Sarah, he explained, had asked him on the telephone one day if he had ever killed anyone. He had said yes and promised to tell her about it. “I’m not a bullshitter,” Bucklew said. “I’m gonna tell her tomorrow when we visit exactly what I did and let both of them know that, yeah, I am an evil bastard, but I am also their father and I love them.”

While Bucklew was making his notes, across town in a Leavenworth motel Heather and Sarah were eating pizza and talking about their father.

“I remember once I was all dressed up in a blue outfit, like my very best dress, and I went to get a drink of milk from the jug and it spilled all over my dress and I had to, like, change and I cried because I wanted my dad to see the dress and see how pretty I looked,” remembered Sarah. She had brought a special dress for this visit too. Her mother had helped her pack it, and even though she was only nine and too young to wear nylon hose, she was going to wear the dress with flats and no socks because she wanted to look “sophisticated.”

Sarah was a skinny, freckle-faced girl with brown hair cut in a Buster Brown. She had a pixie’s grin, made friends quickly, and was always moving about. In contrast, Heather was reserved and naive. She had given birth to a son only a few months earlier, but had decided not to marry the father because she felt he was irresponsible. Even though she was a mother, she seemed like a child herself.