The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (20 page)

Young was also pleased with the way that the program was working, not just for the dogs who were no longer bound to be euthanized and would find better lives, but also for the prisoners with whom they were spending their time. Cell-dog programs across the world report that such activities give prisoners a release from the humdrum, often brutal world of the jailhouse, and can contribute to their eventual return to society. Manard was one of the first to become a trainer, joining the program in October 2004.

Quite when Manard decided to cultivate Young’s friendship and turn it into something that he could manipulate to escape from Lansing is not clear. For a long time after their recapture, Manard maintained that he was desperately in love with her, sending twenty-seven-page letters to the
Wall Street Journal.
From his cell soon after their recapture, he wrote to the local TV station: “We have a fairy tale love the size of infinity that’s been lived by 2 real people. She means more to me than my own life.”

Two years later he wrote to the
Wall Street Journal:
“I miss her so much, I’d have to wipe out an entire rainforest to put it on paper.” He sent messages to her via a reporter who was compiling a story on their love affair and escape claiming, “I still love her with all that I am . . . I miss her more than my own freedom, and I’ve never doubted her loyalty and love.” But how much of that was genuine is impossible to tell, particularly as much of what Manard would claim about the events of February 2006 were demonstrably false. No matter what Manard might try to state, Toby Young knew exactly what she was doing.

Manard also knew exactly what she was doing: Young was able to drive in and out of the prison, and was trusted so much that there was a very high degree of probability that her van, with its cargo of slavering mutts, wouldn’t be searched properly, if at all. Over the months, the twenty-seven-year-old Manard flattered the forty-eight-year-old prison volunteer’s ego, complimenting her choice of clothing, and being a shoulder to cry on for her when she described the problems that she had with her fire captain husband.

Not all the handlers were as impressed with Young as Manard. When one of them confronted her in the prison yard in October 2005, Manard came to her rescue, and from then onwards became her “escort” and unofficial bodyguard around Lansing. This brought the two of them into constant contact. In December that year his feelings for her were apparently so strong that he asked her if she would run away with him if he was able to escape from prison. When she replied that she would, Manard told her his plan.

Young claimed that Manard originally intended to mail himself from the prison, but she dissuaded him from that. He then explained how she could help: he would squeeze himself into one of the pens used to transport the dogs to and from the prison. Other inmates would then place him in her van, and she would drive through the gates. Heartbeat detectors wouldn’t work, since they would register the dogs who would all be scrabbling and barking furiously. They could drop the dogs at Young’s house, switch vehicles, and head off to a new life at a resort in the mountains, far away from Kansas.

Manard starved himself, losing around thirty pounds in weight so he could get his 6 foot 2 inch body into the dog carrier. Young smuggled in a cell phone for Manard to use (a key point used by those who maintained from the onset that Young was not the innocent victim she initially appeared to be), and they kept in constant contact – on one occasion, Young’s husband read a text on her phone, which she quickly claimed must be a wrong number. (Her husband has never granted an interview regarding his side of the story.) She also drew out around $42,000 from her retirement plan, and bought a 1997 Chevrolet vehicle for their getaway – rather unfortunately, providing a real address to the dealer from whom she bought it: the address of their hideaway in the Tennessee mountains to which they were heading!

On Sunday 12 February, Manard was helped into the dog carrier by other inmates after the Safe Harbor dog session came to its end, and was taken to Young’s van. At 10.40 a.m. Young approached the gate, where guard Earl Green was on duty. Green knew Young and although he later claimed that surveillance footage proved that he did search the van, he admitted that he didn’t give it the thorough inspection that he should have done. Every box large enough to carry an occupant should have been shaken down. They weren’t. (Green was initially fired, then, after he made a fuss claiming he was being made a scapegoat, was allowed to resign: prison officials showed that there were at least five occasions on which he failed to search Young’s van properly.) Ten minutes later, Manard was out of Lansing. The dogs were dropped off and they picked up the new van, along with two handguns, hair dye and an electric razor. The lovers were on their way to Tennessee.

Four hours after their departure from Lansing, a headcount showed that Manard was missing. The manhunt initially worked off the principle that Young wasn’t involved, and that, for some as yet unknown reason, Manard had decided to take her along, since she hadn’t been found with an abandoned vehicle. Local people were convinced that she could not possibly be involved: on the Crime Scene KC blog, which by chance had spoken with Manard at the end of 2005 when interviewing a random inmate about Christmas as a prisoner, one woman, “Christine” wrote:

Do you seriously think she would ever do that? Ridiculous. The media can put any spin on any story they want and make it into entertainment for the masses who chose to believe and not ever really look for the truth. She did not aide him, she did not hide him. They DID NOT search her van when she left. And now the warden needs someone to blame that a prisoner is missing and someones (sic) life is at risk. End of story. She would never turn her back on her husband and children, on the dogs, nor on the other inmates so incredibly impacted by what she did and will do when she returns.

But the evidence was clearly showing otherwise. “Toby Young was involved in planning this escape,” Department of Corrections press officer Bill Miskell said bluntly at a press conference on 13 February. “She withdrew a substantial amount of cash. She took two handguns from her home.” Young was “well known and well liked by everyone,” Miskell added. “It appears that her familiarity with the staff may have played a part.”

By this point, according to the account she gave in 2011, Toby Young was beginning to suspect that she might have been used by Manard. (This doesn’t tally with what she said at the time.) Rather than indulging in the loving conversation of their time inside Lansing, he was far more interested in eating junk food – after all, he had been in prison for the last decade! Once their fifteen-hour journey was complete, Manard was talking about his desire for freedom to do whatever he wanted to do: this was his first time in the outside world as a legal adult.

Over the next few days, Manard and Young lived in their cabin, occasionally popping out to see a movie – ironically including
Walk the Line,
the biopic of singer Johnny Cash, which is partly set inside Folsom State Prison – or going shopping. Their purchases included two fine guitars and a parakeet! On 24 February, they went to the local shops in Chattanooga, but when they returned to their Chevy to head back to the cabin, they discovered the law was on their tail. Young maintained that she didn’t expect police to be looking for them, although she admitted that they had not looked at a paper or the TV, nor listened to the radio, probably because Manard wanted to stop her from worrying. (Manard also kept the only key to the cabin; Young couldn’t have left if she wanted to.)

The manhunt had taken some time to get going. Young’s family and friends were questioned, all of whom were horrified and mystified by her actions. Her father read a statement saying that family members “simply don’t have any ideas why or how this happened”. To them she was the archetypal do-gooder, who would no sooner run off with a convicted first-degree murderer as fly to the moon. “Our training emphasizes to volunteers what they should and should not do for the inmates,” spokesman Bill Miskell had pointed out. “There is no doubt that she knew the boundaries.”

However, when the dealer who had sold Young the truck recognized her photograph, he dug out the file – which gave the cabin in Alpine, Tennessee as the address to which to send the title paperwork. The US Marshals headed for the cabin while Tennessee police issued a BOLO (be on the look-out for) on the truck. Young and Manard were out when the Marshals arrived, but by coincidence, the parking lot in Chattanooga in which they were grouping was the one that serviced the mall where the fugitives were shopping.

When Young and Manard came out of a Barnes and Noble bookstore and got in the truck, an alert marshal spotted it. Tennessee Highway Patrol and US Marshals chased the truck, with Manard determined not to be stopped. A 100 mph car chase ensued, with Manard escaping from blocking manoeuvres tried by the law officers, pulling a U-turn and trying to flee down the other carriageway. The police became increasingly concerned that an innocent was going to be hurt in the chase, and shortly after 9 p.m. they blocked the Interstate. Manard moved onto the hard shoulder and drove around them. But as he swerved back onto the highway, he lost control of the truck, shooting straight across the tarmac, missing a police car by inches. Seconds later there was a violent crash as the truck impacted with a thicket of trees.

Although Manard put up a brief struggle, he seemed more concerned that Young wasn’t injured and tried to claim that she wasn’t involved. They were taken straight into custody.

“The Warden and the Secretary of the Lansing Correctional Facility is obviously quite pleased that John Manard and Toby Young have been apprehended,” the Department of Corrections spokesman said. “The apprehension that occurred last night is the best possible outcome. There were no serious injuries and John Manard and Toby Young are back in custody.”

Young’s concerns were more for her dogs. “I want to figure out how the prison dog program can go on. You know, there are some people I can figure that can run it, because it’s a good program.”

Manard had an extra ten years added to his sentence for Aggravated Escape from Custody; Toby Young received twenty-seven months for Aiding and Abetting an Escape, and Aiding a Felon. Young obviously genuinely believed that Manard loved her: originally in interviews, she quoted the French philosopher Pascal: “The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.”

An account of the escape is available:
Mark West & Molly Rose
(named after the pseudonyms Manard and Young adopted) is an interesting take on events. The
Real Prison Breaks
episode, while fascinating for its use of the footage from the recapture of the fugitives, paints a picture of Manard as a ruthless killer that is at odds with the contemporary testimony, and even from its own interviews.

Sources:

http://www.safeharborprisondogs.com
: the Young-free history of the dog training programme

http://www.doc.ks.gov/facilities/lcf/history
: History of KSP

Associated Press,
10 March 2006: “Inmate says love of woman prompted Lansing escape”

Wall Street Journal,
9 February 2008: “The Heart Has Its Reasons”

Crime Scene KC,
13 February 2006: “John Manard: The pre-escape interview” (which links to a transcript of the full phone conversation)

Kansas City Star,
24 April 1997: “Teens get the maximum”

USA Today,
16 February 2006: “Dog trainer helped inmate escape in crate, authorities say”

Associated Press,
22 April 2006: “Fired Lansing guard says he was a scapegoat”

Associated Press,
2 May 2006: “Lansing prison guard allowed to resign”

Real Prison Breaks,
Cineflix Productions, 2011

Some fugitives are on the run for days or weeks and concentrate on keeping themselves away from the forces of the Law; others only manage to stay on the run for part of a day, yet still can cause a great deal of distress and harm in that short time. Billy Jack Fitzmorris’ one-day crime spree in April 2007 was a classic example of the latter: between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. he took multiple hostages, robbed two banks, was involved in a high-speed chase, ended up besieged by a SWAT team – and ordered a ham and pepperoni pizza.

Fitzmorris was being held at the Northeast Ohio Correctional Center (NOCC), in Youngstown, Ohio by the US Marshals service, awaiting sentence in a drug case. NOCC is a private prison housing around two thousand inmates; at the time Fitzmorris was a resident, roughly two-thirds were housed there via a contract with the federal Bureau of Prisons, the other third were being held for the US Marshals. Run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) (“America’s Leader in Partnership Corrections” according to its website), NOCC is now described as a low-security prison, although originally it housed more dangerous prisoners.

In April 2005, Fitzmorris was already on parole from a state sentence for burglary when he was caught in possession of marijuana, cocaine and a stolen gun, and more drugs and another weapon were found at his home. On January 29 2007, he made a plea bargain, agreeing to plead guilty to one count of drug trafficking, and another of firearm possession. Three weeks later, he signed the following statement: “I accept full responsibility for the conduct underlying my pleas of guilty before Judge Frost. I regret becoming involved in narcotics trafficking and blame only myself. I am truly remorseful and accept complete responsibility for my actions.”

Aware that he was facing anything up to forty-five years in prison – effectively a life sentence for a man of thirty-four – Fitzmorris was determined to escape, feeling that he had nothing to lose. He didn’t try to get away from the NOCC though: he was rather smarter than that. Learning that prisoners who required medical treatment weren’t dealt with on the premises but were taken to St Elizabeth’s Hospital, he decided to create an injury, self-harming to produce a head wound that would need to be handled at the nearby medical facility.