The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (16 page)

From what the sheriff described as “intelligence” gathered by jail officials, the sheriff’s department listened in on the conversation and learned that Fougere was intending to pass Miller a key under cover of a kiss and a hug when he made his next appearance at the Norfolk Courthouse on 11 January. “This goes beyond just the stage of planning. This was close to execution,” the sheriff told the
Boston Herald.
“Anytime you have these types of escape events, it undermines public safety.” Fougere was questioned and a set of handcuff keys was found in her possession. She was therefore charged with attempting to aid a felon to escape, conspiracy, and attempting to commit a crime. Miller ended up facing charges of attempted escape as well as drugs possession. The Quincy Department certainly weren’t going to get fooled again.

Sources:

History of Dedham Jail:
http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WM61F6_Dedham_Jail_Dedham_MA

http://norfolksheriff.com/history/

The Boston Globe,
27 July 1989: “Joseph Stroy, 64; Correction Officer Shot In ’75 Dedham Prison Escape”

The Day,
27 January 1975: “Four flee Mass jail”

Bangor Daily News,
27 January 1975: “Prison guard shot”

The Day,
12 November 1976: “‘Phantom’ gets four years”

Associated Press,
26 January 1996: “Girlfriend’s kiss helps man escape”

Real Prison Breaks,
Cineflix Productions, 2011

The Patriot Ledger,
6 November 2007: “Prisoner escapes sheriff’s deputies at Quincy court, remains at large”

GateHouse News Service,
14 May 2010: “Hingham Police: Hull man faces larceny, drug charges”

The Patriot Ledger,
23 November 2007: “Escaped prisoner captured in North Quincy”

Boston Herald,
1 January 2008: “Jailers make sure magic kiss doesn’t free con”

The best escape and evasion plans can fall victim to any number of unforeseen circumstances. As Prussian Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke the Elder pointed out, no battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy. And as prison escaper Daniel Mitchem discovered to his cost in the spring of 1995, that enemy might even be someone within your own family.

Mitchem and fellow escaper Sebastian Eccleston were inmates at Bernalillo Detention Center, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Known as the Downtown jail and situated in the heart of Albuquerque, the facility was replaced by the modern Bernalillo Metropolitan Detention Center in 2004; it now houses the Regional Correction Center. Both men were being held for murder – Eccleston was accused of murdering a former Manzano High School football star Ricky Comingo on 13 December 1994, in what was either a drive-by shooting or a confrontation following a near collision in traffic (Eccleston and his co-defendants gave different versions of events). Mitchem had been convicted of killing a forty-four-year-old man in 1993 who refused to get out of his vehicle when Mitchem tried to carjack it; he had begun a thirty-six-year sentence earlier in March 1995.

At the time of his offence, Eccleston was officially already on the run. In October 1994, he escaped from a juvenile jail by going over the top of a ten-feet-high fence that was topped with double-edged barbed wire. Eight days after the shooting of Comingo, Eccleston was recaptured after he led police on a 115 mph chase, during which he wrecked a van he had stolen which was filled with guns. He then made a dash for the mountains, but a helicopter stopped him from getting away from the SWAT team that took him down.

Although some sources suggest that Eccleston and Mitchem used their membership of a “God pod” religious studies group at the prison as a cover for exploring escape routes, it seems as if that program wasn’t officially set up until 2003. More likely, during their work time, they noticed that there was an air shaft to which they could gain access in the utility room on the same floor as their cells. The two men braided their sheets together to form a rope, and, on the evening of 27 March 1995, the cellmates filled their beds with makeshift dummies, made from clothes and socks stuffed with paper, before heading for the utility room. There they abseiled down the sixty-five feet to the first floor, and then headed for a maintenance area. Breaking into one of the employee lockers, they found a propane torch, wire-cutters, a hacksaw and a wrench. These they used to break out of the prison.

Guards went round the cells as usual during the night but didn’t notice that anything was wrong. The next morning, one of the maintenance workers discovered the home-made rope and raised the alarm. A headcount revealed that the two had disappeared – and they were long gone.

Mitchem didn’t survive on the outside for long. He headed for the home of his former girlfriend, twenty-two-year-old Ernestina Rodriguez, the mother of his two-year-old daughter, some thirty-five miles from the prison. Suspecting that she might be involved, the police came round to question her for a third time on the morning of 29 March. Rodriguez was still not willing to cooperate, but the same couldn’t be said of her little girl. The child, who had obviously been primed by her parents not to say anything, couldn’t control herself and had to tell the policemen her great secret. Pointing at the refrigerator, she said, “Daddy’s in there!” And he was: somehow Mitchem had been able to curl his six-foot frame inside the fridge. Wearing only his gym shorts, Mitchem surrendered to police. He returned to prison to serve out his sentence; Rodriguez was charged with harbouring and aiding a felon. The story even made the supermarket tabloid favourite,
The Weekly World News,
for their Halloween edition later that year.

Eccleston was rather harder to find. He dropped off the map until July 1995 (the
Real Prison Breaks
episode suggests he went to South America, although no evidence of this is provided), when his story was featured on the TV programme
America’s Most Wanted.
The team searching for him received a call from the mother of Amy Custer, a girl who had got to know Eccleston some five years earlier. In mid-July, Eccleston had turned up at Custer’s home in Sherburne, New York, demanding her help, and when she realized who he was, threatened to kill her if she turned him in. Custer’s mother recognized Eccleston from the broadcast, and alerted the authorities.

When they reached the apartment on 27 July, the team from the Chenango County Sheriff’s Department realized they had a struggle on their hands: Eccleston wasn’t going to go easily, and once they were able to confine him in the bathroom, put up a tremendous struggle. As Sheriff Thomas Loughren noted to the
Norwich Evening Sun
reporter, it took three of them to subdue the eighteen year old.

Eccleston was found guilty of the shooting and, after a revised hearing, is serving a combined sentence of forty-six years, and will become eligible for parole somewhere around 2037.

As noted above, the “God Pod” regime at Bernalillo began in 2003, according to its own records; the physical descriptions given of Mitchem by
Real Prison Breaks’
“expert”, local lawyer Patrick V. Apocada, aren’t accurate either. They also make suppositions about Eccleston’s movements after the escape that aren’t backed up by any shown documentary evidence.

Sources:

Associated Press
report, 29 March 1995: “Escape Artist: Inmate had broken out before”

Albuquerque Journal,
4 February 2011: “Counties May Change Jail Agreement”

New Mexico Supreme Court, 13 November 1997: “STATE OF NEW MEXICO, PLAINTIFF-APPELLEE, v. MARIO ARTHUR BACA, DEFENDANT-APPELLANT”

KRQE, 25 January 2011: “Plea cuts sentence for athlete’s killer”

Weekly World News,
31 October 1995: “Man breaks out of jail – and his daughter, 2, turns him in!”

Gadsen Times,
27 July 1995: “New Mexico fugitive caught in New York”

Buffalo News,
28 July 1995: “Fugitive Teen captured in Upstate N.Y.”

Real Prison Breaks,
Cineflix Productions, 2011

Actions have consequences, often ones that simply cannot be foreseen at the time. Jay Junior Sigler’s escape from a prison in Florida’s Everglades in April 1998, masterminded by his friend Christopher Michelson, may be best known for the use of a truck to break through the fences to allow them to get free, but during their time on the run they were pursued by police and were responsible for the death of an innocent civilian who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. They may not have thought for one moment that such an outcome was likely – or even possible – when they made their plans, but as the judge at their trial made abundantly clear, no matter what reasons they felt they had for escaping, it was irrelevant to the death that they caused – one which they apparently callously indicated they didn’t care about when they were arrested.

Their escape took place from the Everglades Correctional Institution, twenty miles west of Miami, which had not long been in use as a prison; it was built in 1995 and was originally designed to be used as a mental health facility. However, it became part of Florida’s drive to build more prisons, and was described shortly before completion as a “south-west Dade County version of Devil’s Island”. At the outset, there was no air-conditioning, nor electrical sockets for prisoners to plug televisions or radios into. Weight-lifting equipment was banned in case it was used for prisoners to build up their strength to commit later crimes. There was even a charge of $3 levied for any non-emergency trip to the prison’s health centre. In response to a major break out at Glades Correctional Institution in Palm Beach County in January 1995 security was tightened: the butterfly-shaped cell blocks were mounted on concrete slabs to prevent prisoners from tunnelling out. Motion sensors were buried around the perimeter, and there were two chain-link fences, between which were seven rows of razor wire.

Childhood friends Jay Junior Sigler and Christopher Michelson had both served sentences at Everglades for the same offence of robbing a pair of Austrian tourists in 1990. Michelson was released after eight years, but Sigler was a habitual violent offender prior to this particular robbery, and was given a twenty-year sentence, something both men felt was unjust, leaving him still trapped within the Everglades after Michelson’s release. It was another Austrian who gave Michelson the inspiration for the escape plan: bodybuilder and future California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. In the movie
The Terminator,
released in 1984, Schwarzenegger’s character, an indestructible cyborg Terminator, uses a vehicle as a battering ram to break into a police station. Similar scenes occurred in the movie’s sequel, and it was while watching these films on television that Michelson thought of using a truck as an offensive weapon. If he could get up enough speed, he could ram through the outer fence, crush through the razor wire, and demolish the inner fence, allowing Sigler to run through.

Michelson knew he couldn’t carry out this sort of plan on his own, so once he was on the outside he recruited help from Sigler’s mother Sandra, his sister Kelly Mitchell, and her new partner John Beaston. Michelson had in fact gone to live with Sandra Sigler after his release from prison, staying in her single-storey house in North Miami and making his plans. At fifty-eight, a lifelong smoker with a hacking cough, Sandra Sigler was a far cry from the “Ma Barker” figure that the papers at the time tried to present: she worked at a nearby mail-processing centre, working the night shift handling parcels. One of the police officers investigating summed her involvement up neatly: “Sandra Sigler acted out of mother’s love,” Florida Department of Law Enforcement Special Agent Lew Wilson told reporters a few days later. “Mom was a willing and active participant, but I don’t believe she was the brains behind this.” As far as Sandra Sigler was concerned, her son didn’t belong in the Everglades, and she would do whatever was necessary to bring him home.

A tractor-trailer rig was stolen and driven by John Beaston, who had served time for drugs offences and trafficking in stolen property. On the morning of Saturday 11 April 1998, a mere eleven days after Michelson had been released from Everglades, the escape began. With Michelson in the cabin beside him, Beaston piloted the rig down an access road to the Everglades, and floored the accelerator. The heavy vehicle made short work of the prison’s outer fence, and ploughed its way through the razor wire and two other fences to the inner fence, behind which Sigler was waiting. Beaston jumped out and fired a shotgun several times. Other prisoners, who thought this might be the cue for a mass breakout, were quickly discouraged from approaching the rig, and a couple of prison officers were slightly injured as they took cover. Sigler dashed across the yard to join his friends.

There was no way that the rig was moving again, but Michelson had thought of that. Sandra Sigler had followed the truck down the access road in a yellow Cutlass Supreme, and was waiting for the three men. (Michelson’s brother was meant to be driving the getaway car, but, according to Sandra, he was too stoned to drive!) The fugitives piled into the car, and Sigler sped away, heading for the next rendezvous, where Kelly Mitchell was waiting with other cars.

The police response was immediate and rapid: within twenty minutes of the escape they had captured Sandra Sigler, Kelly Mitchell and John Beaston at a gas station nearby as they tried to swap cars. However, Jay Sigler and Christopher Michelson were able to elude the police, and escaped in Sigler’s mother’s car.

An alert was immediately put out for the black Chrysler, but it seemed as if the two men had vanished – they spent the night in Lake Worth. The first sighting of the vehicle came the next morning, Easter Sunday, in Pompano Beach, Florida, around forty miles from the prison. While they waited for backup, the patrol officers tried to tail the fugitives discreetly. They hoped to set up a perimeter around the fugitives and box them in, but Michelson, who was driving, realized that the law was on their tail. He turned into an alleyway, accelerated up it (to a speed of 90 mph, according to witnesses) and pulled out into the road, ignoring the stop sign and not looking where he was going. In the way was a stationary car, in which fifty-five-year-old father of three Dennis Howard Palmer was seated. Michelson and Sigler hit it at great speed. The two fugitives survived the crash, with some injuries. Both were too shocked to run from the police, who found a sawn-off 12-gauge shotgun and shells inside the car. When they were asked about the death of Palmer, they seemed not to care one way or another.