Authors: Thomas H. Cook
“I knew the other escapees pretty well,” Ingram said years later, “and there was no way they could have come up with such a highly detailed and intelligent plan. The minute I saw those welding marks on Cell 10, I knew the whole thing had been thought out by Carl Isaacs. None of the others had anywhere near the brains for it.”
Convinced that Isaacs held the key to the escape, Ingram drove to the Jackson Diagnostic and Classification Center as soon as possible to interview him. At first, Isaacs claimed to know nothing of the escape plan, but over a period of two years and twenty interviews, as Ingram patiently and meticulously stroked Isaacs' ego, telling him that only a prisoner of his intelligence and cunning could have devised such a brilliant plan, Isaacs began to reveal the details of the plan he had developed over a period of six years, and which the four escapees had executed on the morning of November 28. In the end, Isaacs even went so far as to produce a forty-six-page narrative whose opening words could hardly have served better to demonstrate his frame of mind: “Herein lies the truthful story of one of the greatest escapes that has ever been recorded in the annuls [sic] of crime,” Isaacs wrote, “perhaps it could even be the greatest.”
That it was an amazing plot could not be doubted. Whether Isaacs' detailed rendering of it was truthful, however, would remain in doubt forever. His contentions would implicate a great many people, some of whom would be charged with aiding in his escape plan. Among those charged was an
Albany Herald
reporter named Charles Postell and his wife. The charges were later dropped after it became known that Isaacs had offered $15,000 to Postell in exchange for which Isaacs would change his testimony implicating Postell. The extent of Postell's actual involvement, if any, remains uncertain. Still, Isaacs' account would remain the central document of the GBI's investigation, and although its veracity would always be questioned as a work of self-aggrandizement, it was pure Carl Junior. Never had he spoken with greater determination to carve out a monument to his own criminal genius.
According to Carl, his first notions of escape had been in May 1974. During the first part of that month, he'd received a short note from an
Albany Herald
reporter named Charles Postell. In the letter, Postell had expressed a desire to interview Isaacs with the idea of writing a book about his life.
Isaacs agreed to the interview, and Postell arrived at the prison on May 10. After the first interview, there were many others, during which Postell sat listening as Carl, delighted to have such an attentive audience, held forth about his life and crimes.
During the latter part of 1974, Carl even went so far as to tell Postell that he planned to escape. According to Isaacs, Postell replied by bringing up such absurd notions as him flying a helicopter to the prison's fourth floor and snatching Isaacs from the roof, or perhaps sending him a Christmas cake with a gun inside. Despite the idiocy of such notions, Isaacs said that a tacit understanding began to develop between the two that should Isaacs ever attempt an escape, Postell would help in any way he could.
In January 1975, Carl was moved to the fifth floor, then later to Cell Number B-4, once again on the fourth floor. It was at this point, Isaacs said, that he began to work seriously on an escape plan. At that moment, Carl, as he later wrote, “being a realist,” determined that he would need assistance in carrying out any escape from Reidsville.
At about that time, Carl began to receive letters from Tami Postell, Charles Postell's daughter, and as relations continued to warm between Isaacs and the entire Postell family, they began to send him the items he occasionally requested, all harmless, things such as pajamas and towels, along with others which, although he saw no immediate need for them, he deemed potentially useful at some later point: glue, tape, and Magic Markers.
During September and October of 1975, according to Isaacs, his relationship with Postell “took on a new perspective.” He and Postell were able to speak more freely, while the family circle broadened to include Postell's wife Judy, called Bunki, and a second Postell daughter, Robin.
It was at this time, January 1976, that Postell began to smuggle in miniature bottles of liquor. They talked more openly, Carl about his family, and Postell about his, with “every scrap of information secretly filed away” in Isaacs' mind, as he put it, “for future use.”
But by then Postell and his family were not the only outsiders with whom Isaacs was developing a relationship. In March 1976, he began a correspondence with Judy Powell. Powell had glimpsed Carl's picture in a local newspaper, she said, and had fallen in love with him. Carl found this hard to believe, as he wrote, “but my mind was turning over the various avenues of recruiting her to help me.”
Judy Powell was placed on Isaacs' approved visiting list, and arrived for her first visit, the “day of reckoning” as Carl called it, during the latter part of May.
During the meeting, Carl made a few nominal requests of Powell to “test her loyalty,” and, to his amazement and delight, she obeyed. “The lock had been set,” Isaacs later wrote. “It was time to begin.”
But not quite.
According to Carl, Postell reacted with outrage at his new friend. He was convinced that she had some ulterior motive for her romantic interest in Carl, he said, and asked for his permission to check her out. Carl agreed to allow Postell to conduct a “cursory probe” of her background, and promised to delay any further contact with Powell until Postell's investigation was completed.
This was a lie, however, and immediately after Postell's visit, Carl penned a long, detailed letter to Powell detailing Postell's suspicions and intentions. Now Powell was outraged, just as Carl had hoped, and he was able to calm her anxiety by assuring her that he would let her know whatever Postell discovered, and that in any event, it would not come between them.
For the next four weeks, Carl deftly played the two competing parties against each other until finally, with Powell at her wits' end, paranoid, convinced that she was being followed, so frightened that she had become too scared even to visit Isaacs at Reidsville, Carl finally insisted that Postell halt his investigation.
Postell relented, even to the point of declaring that Powell was “on the level and that it would be wise” if Isaacs “latched on to her.”
With the matter settled, but in a manner so sudden that Isaacs continued to suspect some kind of ruse on Postell's part, he began to raise the issue of escape with Powell. By late summer she was fully engaged in the plan, and in August she mailed five silver eight-inch hacksaw blades in a box of envelopes from a small town in Alabama.
With Powell indictably committed to his escape, Carl began to work on Postell, telling him of the aid Vinson had already given, and eliciting from him an equal commitment. According to Isaacs, Postell unhesitatingly agreed to be of any assistance he could in Isaacs' impending escape.
With outside assistance now in place, Carl began to work on assistance from within, approaching fellow Death Row inmate Troy Gregg in the fall of 1976.
By then, Carl had devised the basic formula for his escape. His plan was to cut out of his cell through the catwalk bars, then go out a window at the end of the catwalk and on to the roof of the prison. Once on the roof, he intended to lie low until early the following morning, which would have to be a Saturday, leap from the room, and dash to the parking lot where Powell would be waiting in a car. “I realized that it was a grave risk,” Carl wrote, “and that my chances of pulling it off were almost nil, but I was very determined to escape.”
But if reason would not have been sufficient to deter Isaacs from this plan, a sudden shakedown of A-block was. It was no ordinary, routine shakedown. The officers carried rubber hammers to check the bars for cuts, and as he watched the shakedown progress, Isaacs felt relieved that he had made none in his own bars as yet.
Unnerved by such a sudden, thorough shakedown, and suspicious that the authorities had been alerted by none other than his old friend, Charles Postell, Carl began to formulate a different, and far more elaborate scheme.
But while his plans inside the prison progressed, his outside structure began to collapse. Without explanation, Judy Powell was abruptly excluded from his visitor's list. Bereft of this dedicated lifeline, Carl decided that his next attempt would have to be far more complicated and foolproof than his first one. Accordingly, as he later wrote, it was shortly after that “that the idea in my subconscious mind finally evolved into the greatest plan ever, later to be termed the greatest and most daring escape ever recorded in history.”
Two and a half years later, by September 1979, Carl had “worked all the kinks out of the master plan.” Now all he needed was to find the men who would be able to pull it off. He had five in mind, only two of whom, Troy Gregg and Johnny Johnson, were actually located on his cell block. The other three, West McCorquodale, David Jarrell, and Tom Fitzgerald were housed elsewhere.
The first task was to get the remaining three men into Isaacs' cell block. Within five days, by having McCorquodale claim that he was having trouble in his relationships with the inmates of his home cell block, Carl had succeeded in having him transferred to Cell Block A.
A month later, David Jarrell was also transferred to A, and not long after that, the third member, Tom Fitzgerald, was also transferred, this time in the middle of the night, to Cell Block A.
Once the escape team was in place, Carl began assembling the tools he deemed necessary to put his plan into operation.
He needed pajamas, black shoes, and belts for each escapee.
With these items, Isaacs, an accomplished tailor, planned to duplicate in the most minute details the uniforms worn by the Reidsville correctional officers.
To accomplish this, however, he needed to get swatches of the actual uniforms in order to duplicate their color. To do this, Carl relied on corruption.
By June 1980, a young correctional officer, Bill Maddox, had for some time been selling small amounts of marijuana to prison inmates. Carl determined that if he could arrange a large marijuana sale, then Maddox would be his, a prison official disastrously compromised, perhaps even faced with imprisonment, a very perilous situation.
But to pull off a large buy, Carl needed money, and, as always, he was broke. To get money, he drew none other than George Dungee, now in failing health and increasingly dim-witted, into a poker game and quickly won over a thousand dollars in IOUs, none of which Dungee could pay. To satisfy the debt, Carl said that he would take Dungee's watch, and Dungee happily agreed.
The watch was now in hand, and valued at over a hundred and fifty dollars. Carl, to avoid compromising himself, had Troy Gregg offer it to Maddox as collateral for thirty dollars' worth of marijuana. Maddox agreed, and the deal was consummated a few days later.
Now fatally compromised, Maddox, over the next few days, supplied Isaacs with a belt loop from his uniform pants along with a piece of his uniform shirt which Carl cut, using a knife handed to him by Maddox.
Bill Maddox was now deeply involved in an escape plan from Death Row. But he was not the only one. A prison trustee now working as a barber, Willie Flynn, had also become involved. A member of the motorcycle gang to which Timothy McCorquodale had belonged, he began supplying Isaacs with an assortment of necessary items.
While the details involved in acquiring dyes to match the uniform swatches supplied by Maddox went forward, so did the least technically complicated element of the escape, the slow, tedious sawing through of the bars along the cell block's catwalk. It was a long, painfully slow process, requiring nearly four hours per bar, top and bottom. As the days passed, two bars each were sawed through in the respective cells of Isaacs, Gregg, and Fitzgerald. Jarrell required three bars, however, while McCorquodale, biggest of them all, demanded no less than four.
While the bars were still being sawed, two pairs of pajamas arrived for McCorquodale. Since only Carl and Jarrell could sew, the other men continued with the bars, while Isaacs and Jarrell concentrated on making exact copies of correctional officer shirts. At various times during this period, Carl would stop work to draw Maddox into long, lingering conversations at his cell, while Jarrell stood nearby, his eyes fixed on the American flag insignia, Bureau of Corrections patch, nameplate, and badge that adorned his uniform, all of which had to be duplicated as part of Isaacs' escape plan.
Once the two men had gotten a clear enough fix on the uniform accessories, they started to work on reproducing them. Isaacs hand-sewed several American flag insignia, secretly cutting squares from the white institutional towels used throughout the prison, then carefully painting in the flag using Magic Markers and ballpoint pens. The borders of the towels served well as the borders of the patches, and were also colored appropriately.
It took five days to make two patches, but when they were done, along with the pajamas Carl now had a grand total of three complete shirts and two patches, all of which he stuffed inside various pillows in the cell block. Only a few days later, Flynn obviated the need to make any further patches when he supplied six authentic flag and correctional officer patches to Isaacs and his men, all of them cleverly concealed beneath the powder in a talcum powder box. Utterly delighted, Isaacs and the other men, as Isaacs later wrote, “gave Willie a big hug and voiced out deep appreciation.”
By early June, correctional officer badges had been made from cardboard, pieces of a soda can, blue paper, white oil paint, and a blue Magic Marker. The only difficulty had been in making it look shiny, as the actual badges did, a problem Carl corrected by wrapping them very tightly in cellophane, which, as he told Ingram, “was easily obtained from a cigarette pack.”
But other aspects of the break were going far too slowly for Carl's own internal pace. The bars were still being sawed each night before the 11:00
P.M.
count, a time during which the sound of a nearby television served to conceal the noise. For Isaacs, the whole tedious process was excruciatingly slow.