The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (36 page)

All 136 guards at the prison were arrested and interrogated about the escape; no action was taken – some claimed that the alarm system had failed to work, or that the machine gun in the main watchtower had jammed. Others said they had been told the helicopter had landed because of mechanical problems. At one point the Mexicans tried to claim that the helicopter escape never happened at all. Kaplan’s other cellmate, Jose Guadalupe Olvera Rico, told interrogators, “Tomorrow, a submarine is to arrive for me.” According to the press, “the most spectacular search in all Mexican criminal history” got under way. One paper suggested that Kaplan and Castro had been treated by a plastic surgeon when they arrived in Mexico City; another “assumed that the helicopter pilot was able to hypnotise the guards at Santa Marta”.

Stadter developed a reputation for helping others in trouble south of the border, occasionally tapping Kaplan for cash to fund his projects. Kaplan himself died in Miami in 1988, fifteen years after cooperating in an account of his escapade. The Attorney General resigned the following day – but although many accounts link this to the escape, it seems more likely that it was a result of the investigations into a massacre on 10 June, and a breakdown in the relationship between Vargas and Mexican President Echevarria.

The Charles Bronson film
Breakout
plays fast and loose with the facts of the Kaplan case. It doesn’t pretend to be a biopic: its tagline was “Sentenced to 28 years in prison for a crime he never committed. Only two things can get him out – a lot of money and Charles Bronson!” Bronson plays a character who both plans and carries out the raid on the prison; he’s hired by the prisoner’s wife, rather than his sister, and considerably more difficulties are thrown in their way (including the prisoner’s cellmate being the real killer, rather than an accountant!). With a disturbing marital rape scene, it’s not particularly pleasant viewing – and they don’t even get the make of helicopter right.

Sources:

Time
magazine, 30 August 1971: “MEXICO: Whirlaway”

United States Court of Appeals Second Circuit, 30 December 1963: “UNITED STATES of America ex rel. Evsey S. PETRUSHANSKY, a/k/a Peter Green, a fugitive from Justice of the United Mexican States, Relator-Appellant, v. Anthony R. Marasco, United States Marshal for the Southern District of NewYork, Respondent-Appellee.”

New York Times,
31 December 2007: “In Prison, Toddlers Serve Time With Mom”

US Department of State Telegram, 20 August 1971: “Resignation of Attorney General Sanchez Vargas”

Houston Chronicle,
8 September 1991: “A Smuggler’s Tale”

Asinof, Eliot, Warren Hinckle and William Turner:
The 10-Second Jailbreak
(Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1973)

Watch interviews with members of the US Marshals office after they’ve caught a fugitive, and you can be pretty sure that at some point they will trot out a line warning any other escapees who are watching that the Marshals service never gives up looking for them, and that they will be caught eventually. Even if it takes decades. Linda Darby is living proof that this isn’t a trite cliché: they mean every word of it. She escaped from the Indiana Women’s Prison in 1972, and she was recaptured thirty-five years later, after making a completely new life for herself. And now, following the dismissal of her attempt to appeal against her sentence in April 2012, she could well be in prison for the rest of her life, serving a sentence that would otherwise have left her eligible for parole some years ago – under the Indiana code, because her offence took place before 1977, she has to serve ten years of her sentence before clemency can be considered.

Linda Darby was convicted of the murder of her second husband in 1970. She has steadfastly maintained her innocence, but the jury in Lake County, Indiana, didn’t believe her. Her husband Charles, from whom she was estranged at the time, was hit with a shotgun blast, and then their Hammond home was set on fire. At the trial, her nine-year-old daughter, from her first marriage, said that her mother had left the motel room in Valparaiso on the night of the murder. A similar gun to the murder weapon was found at the motel; a gas station attendant said he sold her fuel that night. There were no witnesses to the killing. The defence tried the risky strategy of not presenting any witnesses on her behalf at the trial, but simply attacked the state’s case. It was a gamble that didn’t pay off.

The mother of five (four from her first marriage; a son from her second) lost her children and her liberty in one fell swoop. She was sentenced to life imprisonment on 1 October 1970, and immediately tried to appeal on technical grounds. This was turned down in August 1971. She applied to the court for a “pauper” attorney to be brought in to help with an appeal; counsel was appointed on 14 March 1972. However no appeal was ever filed during the twentieth century, because the day before the court gave Linda Darby the chance to rectify what she saw as the wrong done to her, she escaped from prison.

In 1972, the Indiana Women’s Prison was a year away from celebrating its centenary. It was the first prison specifically for women in the country, and the first maximum-security female correctional facility. It didn’t just house murderers and other maximum-security prisoners – within its walls were many convicted of lesser offences, such as drunkenness and prostitution. Darby, who by all accounts was an obedient and docile prisoner, was not regarded as a particularly high escape risk, and was allowed to move around the prison confines on her own.

On 13 March, she decided to leave. Whether she wasn’t aware that the wheels of justice were slowly turning, and believed that all her avenues of appeal were now closed, or she simply had had enough of life without her children, is open to question. After her eventual recapture, she maintained that she had fled the prison because she didn’t want to serve time for another person’s crime – and certainly since then, she has tried her hardest to prove her innocence.

Around 7.30 in the evening of 13 March 1972, Linda Darby didn’t follow the guard’s instructions to go to recreational time; instead, she ran to the fence, climbed over it and took off into Indianapolis. Not knowing the area, and fully aware that she had taken an irretrievable step by escaping, she first thought of trying to locate her children. However, she quickly realized that the police would immediately check there, so, instead, she turned for help to a stranger.

Knocking on the door of a local house, she told the woman who answered that she was on the run from her boyfriend, who had knocked her about – explaining the cuts and bruises she had sustained during her escape. It was there that she met Willie McElroy, with whom she fell in love. Although they never officially married, she took his last name, becoming known as Linda Joe McElroy, and moved with him back to his home town of Pulaski, Tennessee, around seventy-five miles south of Nashville.

They had two children, and eight grandchildren, and she became a respected member of the local community, running an antiques shop with her husband, and later working as a cleaning lady. No one there could quite believe it when the marshals knocked on her door: this was someone they had known their whole lives; she had babysat for their children. She could not possibly be a murderer. As former FBI agent Brad Garrett, consulting for ABC News on the case, pointed out, “It’s actually quite easy [for fugitives] to be absorbed if they cut all ties from their previous life, which appears the case in this situation.”

Darby hadn’t quite cut all her ties. She didn’t go “off the grid” as some escapees do, not using credit cards, or anything else that might identify them. She was registered in various databases, but with her date of birth and social security number slightly altered – sufficiently changed that a quick check wouldn’t correlate with her original information, but similar enough that if she slipped and gave the original by mistake, it could be excused as a silly slip. And that was her downfall.

In 2007, the Indiana State Police started up the Indiana Intelligence Fusion Center, a new taskforce whose mission is to “collect, integrate, evaluate, analyze and disseminate information and intelligence to support local, state and federal agencies in detecting, preventing, and responding to criminal and terrorist activity.” Working with the Indiana Department of Corrections, its Fugitive Apprehension Unit’s aim was to recapture long-term fugitives. Using a new computer system set up by the Department of Homeland Security, which used fuzzy logic (i.e. a computer’s equivalent of a best guess rather than absolute strict yes/no answers) as well as correlating data from every American’s contacts with the police over the years, they were able to match Darby with McElroy. Photos and fingerprints from her time in the Indiana correctional system were sent to Pulaski police; they confirmed that the two were one and the same. On 12 October, police cars were sent to Darby’s home in Pulaski, and she was brought out in handcuffs.

Asked by a reporter for the local
Eyewitness News
if she felt as if she had been living a lie, Darby replied, “Uh huh. But when do you stop? Where do you go back to?” The answer was simple: you stop when you’re caught. And you go back to jail.

Sources:

Valparaiso
Vidette-Messenger,
6 March 1970

Valparaiso
Vidette-Messenger,
7 March 1970

Court of Appeals of Indiana, 19 April 2012: “Opinion – for Publication: APPEAL FROM THE LAKE SUPERIOR COURT The Honorable Salvador Vasquez, Judge Cause No. 45G01-7003-MR-41743”

WHTR.com
, 24 October 2007: “Female fugitive back in Indiana after 35 years”

The Indy Channel, 17 October, 2007: “Woman Caught 35 Years After Escape Speaks Out”

USA Today,
20 October 2007: “Fugitive has support of longtime friends”

Daily Independent
(Ashland), 24 October 2007: “Woman’s arrest brings relief to victim’s family”

New York Times,
22 October 2007: “Neighbor’s Hidden Criminal Past Stuns a Tennessee City”

Indiana Intelligence Fusion Center website:
http://www.in.gov/iifc/

IIRC annual report 2007:
http://www.in.gov/dhs/files/07_Annual_Report.pdf

WHTR.com
, 24 October 2007: “New technology was key to arrest of fugitive for 35 years”

It may not have been the first time that a helicopter was used to assist prison inmates with an escape, but the incident at Mountjoy Prison in Dublin, Ireland, at Halloween 1973 was certainly the first one to inspire a song. Popular Irish rebel band, The Wolfe Tones, whose songs regularly include references to the struggle for freedom by the Irish against their oppressors, wrote and released “The Helicopter Song” (“Up like a bird and high over the city / ‘Three men are missing’ I heard the warder cry”) straight afterwards, and despite being banned (or perhaps because it had been) by the Irish government, it went straight to number one in the Irish charts and remained there for four weeks.

It wasn’t the only song inspired by the events. According to
Time
magazine’s article from less than two weeks later, within hours “a new little ditty” was being sung in Catholic pubs all over Northern Ireland: “The length and breadth of Ireland / No finer sight to see, / The day the Provie birdie / Released the Mountjoy three.” It was an unmitigated disaster for the Irish government, and a stunning propaganda coup for the Irish Republican Army (IRA) – particularly since it may not even have actually cost them a penny to carry out.

The situation in Ireland had deteriorated over the preceding five years. Although the IRA had abandoned its campaign to unite Northern Ireland and the Republic into one country in 1962, violence had flared once more in 1969, and the arrival of the British Army in Northern Ireland marked the start of a troubled period for the island which would last for most of the rest of the twentieth century. The Provisional wing of the IRA had begun an armed campaign, and as a result, a policy of internment without trial was introduced in the North, while the Republic’s coalition government, led by Fine Gael’s Liam Cosgrave, tried to keep a check on IRA activity. Membership was illegal under the Offences against the State Act, with a one-year-minimum mandatory sentence imposed on those found guilty at sessions of the Special Criminal Court (SCC).

The IRA’s Chief of Staff Seamus Twomey was one of those brought before the SCC in 1973. He had helped to reorganize the IRA in Belfast after the creation of the Provisional IRA in December 1969, and had been part of the group negotiating with British Secretary of State Willie Whitelaw in 1972 during a brief truce. He became Chief of Staff in late 1972 after the arrest of Joe Cahill, and held the post until his arrest in September the following year. Refusing to recognize the authority of “this British-oriented quisling court”, Twomey was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. Senior IRA member gunrunner J.B. O’Hagan had been arrested in May 1973 and sent to Mountjoy for a year; he had been imprisoned on previous occasions, and had tried to escape twice from internment at the Curragh camp (see
chapter 29
). Kevin Mallon, another top man in the IRA, had been cleared of the murder of RUC Sergeant Arthur Ovens in 1957 but given fourteen years for arms and conspiracy charges. Now one of the commanders of the IRA units stationed on the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, he too had been sent to Mountjoy.

Based on the design of Pentonville prison in London, Mountjoy opened its doors to inmates in 1850, and had the distinction of having its in-cell sanitation removed in 1939 when a civil servant decided that prisoners were using too much water! By the time that Twomey was sent there, the IRA had ensured that they had a great deal of control within the prison – when the authorities had tried to impose prison uniforms and to abolish segregation of the Official and Provisional IRA members, O’Hagan and seven other prisoners had gone on hunger strike. After three weeks, the governor backed down, allowing the IRA escape committee to carry on plotting without fear that they would be overheard or betrayed by non-political, ordinary criminals housed within the prison.