The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (38 page)

Sunday Journal,
23 October 2005: “Herrema’s kidnapper explains motive”

An Phoblacht,
26 August 2004: “30 years on: The Great Portlaoise Escape”

An Phoblacht,
10 September 2009: “Remembering the Past: IRA Chief of Staff Séamus Twomey”

An Phoblacht,
27 August 2009: “Remembering the Past: 19 prisoners escape from Portlaoise”

An Phoblacht,
1 November 2001: “Remembering the Past: Chopper Escape from Mountjoy”

Hayes, Paddy:
Break Out! Famous Prison Escapes
(O’Brien Press, 2001)

Real Prison Breaks,
Discovery Channel, 2008: Archive news interview with Captain Thomas Boyes

Since the vast majority of prison breaks end with the inmates’ recapture, a wide variety of different items have been cited as the benefits of being on the outside. Sometimes it’s something as simple as being able to have a drink in a bar; other times, it’s a little more poetic. Dale Otto Remling, a conman who was the first American to be freed from a prison on domestic soil by helicopter, was good-humoured when he was captured in a bar not that long after his flight: he told reporters that he was glad he’d had a chance to be on the outside, since he could hear “some birds sing, water trickle, and a fox bark”. It was the sort of charming statement that had bamboozled some of his victims and led him to Jackson Prison in the first place.

In 1951, aged twenty-five, Remling had a stroke of luck, on which he based much of his career: he found a wallet belonging to James J. Mangan, then a bellhop at a hotel in Wichita, Kansas. Rather than return it, Remling decided to adopt Mangan’s identity, and over the next twenty-two years built up a whole new life for Mangan in parallel with the real man’s career working for the US Forestry Service. The ersatz Mangan was considerably less scrupulous: he would issue bad cheques to buy merchandise, and then sell it on to raise cash. He was arrested in California in 1955 and sent to Soledad Prison; he escaped from there but was recaptured after three days. After serving his time, he continued his larcenous career, adding arrests for cattle theft, and then grand larceny in connection with the theft of an airplane in 1971. This landed him back in Soledad.

Remling made a fresh bid for freedom, this time from a prison farm at Sonora, California – and on this occasion he was successful. He headed east and found himself in Crystal, Michigan in 1972. Over the following year, he established his identity as a major cattle baron, with a range in Colorado, and wooed and wed Kay Petersen, the daughter of Crystal’s wealthiest man, after presenting a sob story suggesting that his first wife had passed away after suffering for months in an iron lung. Remling’s new bride and her father-in-law covered some of his bad debts, but time was running out for the conman. An attempt to steal 383 hogs at gunpoint from a family in Nebraska foundered when Remling and his accomplice forgot to obtain the health records for the livestock; without them, the pigs were unsellable, and worthless.

Remling eventually wrote over $50,000 worth of bad cheques, and was arrested and charged with fraud. He was sentenced in August 1973 to a maximum term of six years and eight months to ten years for attempting to purchase a $2,440 car with a bad cheque. His marriage was annulled, and the real James J. Mangan was horrified to learn what had been done in his name (including a dishonourable discharge from the US Navy!).

From the moment he arrived in Jackson Prison, Remling intended to escape. “I think cages are for something other than people,” he pointed out. “You talk about problems with people: the prison system breeds it into you.” However, this time he wasn’t going to go over the wall. “I didn’t have enough nerve to try the wall,” he admitted after being returned to jail following his escape. “I’m getting a little old for that.”

At that stage officially known as the State Prison of Southern Michigan, Jackson prison sat three miles north of the town of Jackson. Thirty-four-feet high walls surrounded the nearly sixty acres of prison grounds with twelve watchtowers looking after around 6,000 cells, making it the largest walled prison in the world. In 1975, there were 3,245 prisoners housed at Jackson. “The place is so damned big something could happen at one end, and you wouldn’t know about it until you read about it in the newspaper,” admitted one prison officer in the aftermath of Remling’s escape.

Jackson’s imposing edifice didn’t immediately offer any obvious signs of an escape route, but Remling wasn’t discouraged. Although there was a lot of publicity at the time of his eventual escape bid connecting it to the release of
Breakout,
the Charles Bronson film which was itself inspired by the escape of Joel David Kaplan from a Mexican prison (see
chapter 35
), Remling was adamant that he had come up with the idea of using a helicopter long before publicity for the film began. Certainly the most that he might have been able to see in the run-up to the movie’s release was the brief television trailers (which did include the scene where the chopper lands in the yard), but
Breakout
wasn’t screened for prisoners, nor did Remling have any access to seeing it outside. It’s more likely that Remling may have read some of the publicity that surrounded Kaplan’s escape at the time, and the idea stuck at the back of his mind.

On the morning of 6 June 1975, he put his plan into motion. At 11.05 a.m., a helicopter landed on a spot in the yard of Jackson prison which had previously been marked with a red handkerchief. The pilot, Richard Jackson, a Vietnam combat veteran, had been hired at the Mettetal Airport in Plymouth to take a businessman by the name of Donald Hill to a meeting at Capitol Airport in Lansing, Michigan. However, ten minutes into the flight, Hill had pulled a knife on him and ordered him to fly to the prison. Jackson tried to make a Mayday call, but Hill pulled the microphone jacks from their sockets. Seeing that the other man was nervous, the pilot therefore decided to comply with his kidnapper’s demands, and brought the chopper in to land at the prison on the second attempt (he overshot the landing point the first time). Dale Remling, who had been waiting beside the licence-plate manufacturing building, promptly ran across and jumped inside. Since the area was supposed to be under electronic surveillance, the guard towers were unmanned. That meant there weren’t any guards within easy reach of the helicopter, and Jackson was able to take off unimpeded. He had been on the ground for no more than twenty seconds.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Hill told Jackson and instructed him to fly in a north-easterly direction, following state highway 106. As they approached a junction, Jackson was ordered to land the helicopter, but as soon as they were on terra firma, Hill sprayed mace in his eyes. He couldn’t tell which of the various cars that had been at the drop point the escapees had disappeared in.

As soon as his eyes cleared from the stinging liquid, Jackson radioed the airport, and went in pursuit of the fugitives. Noticing another car nearby, he passed on its information to the police, who stopped and then questioned its occupant. Jolyne Lou Conn was one of four women who had been hired as a decoy to attract attention away from Remling and Hill. They were all meant to be meeting up at a motel in East Lansing, but when the others heard that Conn had been arrested, they went their separate ways.

Donald Hill was arrested later that day – and police realized that he had nothing to do with the case. The hijacker, Morris Eugene Colosky, had taken a leaf out of Remling’s book, and implicated a completely innocent man. Colosky was eventually arrested in Garden City, Kansas, along with another conspirator, mother of eight Gertrude Woodbury, and charged with kidnapping and aircraft piracy. In all, seven accomplices were arrested over the escape.

However, in the confusion at the rendezvous, Remling had missed his ride! The man whom all the fuss was about was left to run for cover. He spent the night hiding in a barn, before heading for the town of Leslie as police officers carried out a house-to-house hunt for him around northern Jackson County. Local residents spotted the stranger in their midst, and called the police (although one report suggests that Remling was turned in by a former cellmate who refused to help him).

Remling entered Huffie’s Bar but before he could even order a drink he was faced with a state trooper bearing a gun. The conman grinned, then surrendered without a fight. “There was no use for me to shed tears,” Remling said later. “He had the cannon on me, I didn’t have it on him.” He had been out of the prison for a mere thirty hours. At a press conference held by the state police, he said that he probably wouldn’t try to escape again. The FBI agent in charge of the investigation, Neil Welch, was scathing about Remling’s planning: “Remling spent a couple of years getting this ready,” he said the day after the conman was recaptured. “And his total plan apparently ended with his getting over the wall. The whole thing just fritzed.” State Corrections Chief Perry Johnson gave Remling a little more credit: “In terms of adventurousness and bizarreness, I’d say it was one of the strangest,” he told reporters.

Hardly surprisingly, the prison authorities looked at ways of preventing other people from using a helicopter. Chief Johnson said that he didn’t “want to have an unsightly scarecrow arrangement on one hand or act precipitously and cost taxpayers several million dollars in the next decade”. A system of poles and cables that could shear off helicopter propellers was seriously considered.

Remling kept to his word; he was released from prison in 1993 after serving twenty years, and died six years later.

Sources:

Waterloo Courier,
8 June 1975: “Helicopter escapee is captured”

NBC Evening News,
8 June 1975

Palm Beach Post,
16 June 1975: “Take a Bow, Dale Remling”

Big Spring Herald,
8 June 1975: “Hunt Copter Hijacker, Con He Plucked From Prison Captured”

Provo Daily Herald,
8 June 1975: “Copter-Escape Prisoner Nabbed”

Florence Times,
7 June 1975: “Two Charged in Daring ’Copter Prison Escape”

Argus-Press,
9 June 1975: “Chopper Hopper Comes A Cropper”

The Morning Record,
19 June 1975: “Pair arrested for roles in ’copter caper”

Lawrence Journal-World,
18 June 1975: “Copter escape duo arrested”

Tuscaloosa News,
18 June 1975: “Helicopter caper gang rounded up”

Garrett Brock Trapnell may not have been consciously trying to get his name into the history books, but his criminal career saw him become one of the first American citizens to hijack an aircraft – and very nearly one of the first Americans to escape from a domestic American prison by helicopter. “If I had made it in that helicopter,” Trapnell said later, “the American public would have loved it. Escaping from prison is as American as apple pie.” His slightly flippant comment hides the truth of the events of 24 May 1978: it cost the life of a woman who loved him, and ruined the life of her seventeen-year-old daughter who hijacked an aircraft in an attempt to get the authorities to release him.

On one occasion, authorities described Trapnell as “a bizarre character who often carried an attaché case, affected a James Bond role, trained two German shepherds to be vicious, and boasted that he could beat any criminal charge on an insanity plea”. The cover of the book about his career, written by Eliot Asinof, co-author of the book about the very first helicopter escape (see
chapter 35
), boasts that Trapnell was a “Skyjacker! Supercon! Superlover! The true story of the man who used the system to beat the system and almost won . . .”.

By the time that Barbara Ann Oswald tried to free him, Trapnell had been in Marion prison for around five years, and Asinof’s book, first published in 1976, had given him some notoriety. He had spent time studying the law on insanity and managed to find ways around jail terms – he’d be sent to a hospital of some description, from which it was comparatively easy to escape. Charges against him for robberies in the Bahamas and in Canada had been dismissed on the grounds that he was not mentally competent. “A lawyer came to me and said, ‘Trap, you are going to prison for 20 years, or you can go to the state hospital,’” he recalled in an unpublished 1971 interview that was quoted at his trial as evidence that he was playing the system. “So I went to the state hospital and I dug the whole action. I read more damned books on psychiatry and psychology than probably any psychology student will in any school in the world.”

Trapnell’s criminal career came to an end when he hijacked a TransWorld Airways flight from Los Angeles to New York in January 1972. Although he spent part of the time during the hijack talking to Dr David G. Hubbard, a Dallas-based psychiatrist who had written a book about what motivates hijackers, demanded the release of black activist Angela Davis from prison, and requested a personal talk with President Nixon, his real motivation seemed to be getting a fellow prisoner, George Anthony Padilla, out of jail, and receiving $306,800. When he was shot by an FBI agent, he was arrested, and promptly claimed that he could not be held liable for the hijacking. He claimed that he had a Jekyll/Hyde personality, and the crime was committed by his wicked alter ego, Greg Ross. “I have committed all these crimes and have never gotten a number for any of them,” he had said a year earlier. “If Gregg Ross commits a crime, then Gary Trapnell is not responsible. It’s the fallacy of your legal system.” Although one jury member was swayed by this at his first trial, Padilla turned on Trapnell at his second trial, and related how he had been taught how to feign madness. Trapnell was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.

In 1974, there was a bizarre attempt to secure Trapnell’s release. Twenty-two-year-old Maria Theresa Alonzo, a former member of the Manson family, was arrested for conspiring with Trapnell and her boyfriend, prisoner Robert Bernard Hedberg, to kidnap a consul general. Intriguingly, the FBI weren’t sure which country he would come from: the options ranged from Paraguay to Canada, even though the Paraguayan consulate in Los Angeles had recently closed. Alonzo would then hold him to ransom for $250,000, asylum in Sweden, and the release of Hedberg and Trapnell, who at the time was being held in Los Angeles while he stood trial for a robbery in LA in 1971. The plot seems to have fallen apart because Alonzo developed a boil and had to go for treatment rather than kidnapping the consul general! The FBI arrested her the next day and simultaneously charged Trapnell and Hedberg.