The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (45 page)

Lee John Knoch didn’t care about the local community. In February 2001, he simply wanted his freedom, something that the state of Oregon was determined to deny him. Knoch had been found guilty in 1998 of aggravated murder, assault, kidnapping, theft by extortion and harassment. At the time of the offence in 1996, Knoch was out on bail on charges of kidnap and torture: he had allegedly snatched Robert Lee Holliday, a thirty-four-year-old mentally challenged Oregon resident, and over a two-week period, he had broken eleven of his ribs and poured carburettor fluid into his eyes, leaving him with heat and chemical burns as well as internal bleeding. Knoch was indicted in January 1996 of these charges, but freed on bail. He didn’t report as ordered, was caught speeding or driving recklessly on four occasions, and was stopped in the area of town where Holliday lived, contrary to a direct instruction from the judge granting bail.

Finally, on 28 March 1997, shortly before his trial was due to begin, Knoch kidnapped Holliday again. This time he and his accomplice Amanda Walker clubbed Holliday, slit his wrists and throat, and then buried him alive on Trask Mountain, one of the highest peaks in northern Oregon. Knoch was sentenced to prison without possibility of parole. (As a result of Knoch’s actions while out on bail, the voters of Oregon passed Measure 40, later amended to Measure 71, which required that judges hold people accused of serious violent crimes without bail if the judge found by clear and convincing evidence that the accused was a danger to the victim or to the public.)

In 2001, Knoch was cellmates with twenty-three-year-old Aaron O’Hara, who was serving a six-year term for sodomy, sex abuse and rape. Both were set on escape, but they were aware that no one had managed to get out of Snake River in the decade it had been operational. Somehow, though, they were able to get hold of a pair of wire-cutters: although it has never been officially confirmed, prison officials believe that they may have been inadvertently left by construction workers (although given that a lot of the work on the prison was carried out by prisoners themselves, chances are that it may have been a deliberate act to enable one of their fellow inmates to get out at a later date).

Knoch was a psychopathically clever murderer, and it seems probable that O’Hara simply did what he was told. The plan was to get away from the evening work detail and head to a part of the grounds least watched by the guard towers, cut through the fence, crawl beneath the razor wire, and then cut through the perimeter fence. From there, they would have to take their chances in the open countryside evading the patrols.

O’Hara and Knoch got themselves as fit as they could, and on 28 February 2001, they dropped out of a line heading to the prison chapel, and raced across the grounds to the pre-designated point in the fence. It took them nearly an hour to cut through the toughened steel fence and then they needed a further hour to negotiate the razor wire, cutting themselves considerably in the process. By the time they reached the perimeter fence, alarms were being tripped, and the guards headed to round them out.

They expected to find the escapee long gone, and indeed Lee John Knoch had made a quick getaway. Aaron O’Hara, on the other hand, was still very near the prison, and was picked up by one of the guards patrolling nearby, who had been alerted to the escape. He wouldn’t answer any questions, and it wasn’t until a headcount was carried out that the prison authorities realized that there hadn’t just been one escapee – two men had broken out, and they had only recaptured one of them. Oregon State Police and Malheur County sheriff’s deputies began the manhunt for Knoch.

Although he was injured from the razor wire, Knoch was able to evade his pursuers, who found it difficult to track him through the open countryside littered with grain stubble and many ditches, all of which needed to be checked. He made it six miles across to the yard of Warrington Irrigation, where he was able to steal a truck that had been left overnight ready to go out, and headed east on the I-84 towards Idaho.

Knoch had managed to travel around 300 miles when the fuel began to run low in the truck, and he had to stop. He had reached the Fort Hall Indian Reservation, home of the Shoshone-Bannock Native American tribe – and Demonte Johnson and his family.

Johnson was taking his boys to visit the state basketball tournament in Boise, Idaho, but when he realized that he had forgotten the adaptor for the video recorder which they had in their van, he turned round and headed home. To his surprise, a van with Oregon plates was sitting in the driveway. Entering the house on his own, Johnson discovered Knoch rifling through his possessions, looking for food and clothing to steal. The fugitive tried to leave, but Johnson wanted him to wait for the police, the last thing Knoch intended doing.

As Knoch headed for his stolen van, Johnson grabbed a shovel, and whacked the murderer on the leg. “Took a good baseball swing and knocked him down,” Johnson told reporters later. “He tried to get up again, and I nailed him again on the knee . . . I told him, ‘If you get up again, I’ll hit you again.’” Johnson detained him until the police arrived. They only realized who they had caught once they took responsibility for Knoch from Johnson, and according to Fort Hall Tribal Police Department Captain Gene Fenton, the fugitive was treated for minor injuries and then jailed. Johnson admitted that it was only when he learned who he had been assaulting that he was scared!

Knoch was sent to the maximum-security jail at Salem, Oregon, and in a touching coda to the story, the superintendent of Snake River Correctional Facility ordered the inmates in the sign shop to make a gift for Johnson. “We are putting together a token of our appreciation,” Superintendent Bob Lambert told the
Eugene Register-Guard
newspaper. “We did want to recognize his particular heroism and actions.”

The
Real Prison Breaks
account includes interesting interviews with some of the law enforcement personnel, as well as Demonte Johnson, but some of its factual material is suspect (Holliday was kidnapped and tortured in 1995, not 1997 – that was when he was murdered.)

Sources:

ABC News,
1 March 2001: “Rapist, Murderer Escape Ore. Prison”

Snake River Correctional Facility website:
http://cms.oregon.gov/doc/ops/prison/Pages/srci.aspx

Oregon Business,
April 2008: “Prisons don’t bring prosperity to rural towns”

Details of Robert Holliday’s murder:
http://www.crimevictimsunited.org/cases/robertholliday.htm

Real Prison Breaks:
Cineflix Productions, 2011: Dick Warrington interview

Eugene Register-Guard,
18 March 2001: “Inmates craft gift for civilian hero.”

The Spokesman-Review,
3 March 2001: “Escaped murderer caught in Idaho”

Supermax prisons, or the sections within prisons that are designated as Supermax, are meant to be escape-proof. According to the American National Institute of Corrections, a Supermax prison is “a stand-alone unit or part of another facility and is designated for violent or disruptive inmates. It typically involves up to 23-hours-per-day, single-cell confinement for an indefinite period of time. Inmates in Supermax housing have minimal contact with staff and other inmates.” They are for the worst of the worst, those people who are seen as flight risks, and an absolute danger to those around them.

The H Unit at McAlester State Penitentiary in Oklahoma was constructed in 1991, as part of the on-going upgrade of the prison, following the riots that took place there in July 1973 that caused between $20-40 million worth of damage. It’s a vault within the already-secure facility, which is designed to ensure that no one can tunnel out, or otherwise make a bid for freedom. Two fences as well as twenty feet of razor wire provide a deterrent. According to the official Department of Corrections website, it provides new quarters for disciplinary segregation inmates, death row, and the lethal injection death chamber. H Unit also houses Administrative Segregation and Level III general population inmates. Nearly 300 inmates from across the state are kept there. But while McAlester officials might prefer to be best known for being the home of the world’s biggest “behind the walls” rodeo in 1940, the prison achieved notoriety when three desperate inmates got out from its Supermax H Unit in January 2001, the first prisoners to escape from McAlester since 1992, and the first ever to manage to get round the tight security in H Unit.

In 1997, James Robert Thomas was sentenced to life without parole for first-degree murder and 400 years for rape for an attack on his eighty-one-year-old neighbour, Jessie M. Roberts in March 1993, when he was just seventeen years old. At his trial, the prosecution maintained that she was strangled with a telephone cord, and then raped while unconscious. Before his conviction, Thomas had briefly escaped from the Oklahoma County Jail. His colleague in the escape was twenty-one-year old Willie Lee Hoffman, who was in the middle of a twenty-year sentence for kidnapping and other charges. He too had escaped from less secure jails previously, breaking out of Payne County Prison in 1998, and from the Cimarron private prison in Cushing, Oklahoma. Nathan Washington, convicted for robbery with force and fear was also part of the breakout, but he didn’t get very far.

The cells in H Unit each had their own toilet, secured with steel bolts to the back wall of the cell. Thomas and his confederates deduced that the plumbing from these had to be housed somewhere, and worked out that if they could somehow remove the toilets from the walls, they could get through to the duct where the plumbing was running, and from there to the roof. This left them the problem of removing the steel bolts – but these were men with nothing but time on their hands, the downside of the Supermax regime. For anything up to twenty-three hours a day, they could work on the bolts, using whatever came to hand. In this case, it was dental floss, made more abrasive by the application of a cleaning powder, such as Ajax. Although the prison spokeswoman Lee Mann would later tell reporters that she believed that dental floss was no longer being sold in the canteen because of its use so often in escapes, it seems probable that this is what Thomas, Hoffman and Washington used. Whatever the method, they successfully managed to clear the toilets from the wall, and, some point before 5 o’clock on the morning of Monday 15 January 2001, they crawled into the maintenance space.

From there, the three men were able to use an air duct to reach the roof. They dropped to the ground, and then used ropes created from their sheets to get over the inside fence. That left them the razor wire to negotiate. Thomas and Hoffman had no problems; Washington, regarded by some as the most dangerous of the three escapers, became caught up in the razor wire. The others left him behind, and scaled the perimeter fence.

As soon as Washington was found, a headcount revealed the disappearance of Thomas and Hoffman, and the manhunt was begun. Tracker dogs were brought in, and, according to Jerry Massie, the spokesman for the Department of Corrections who briefed reporters during the investigation, “they were able to get some type of track”. Roadblocks were set up, and both a helicopter and a plane from the Oklahoma Highway Patrol searched from overhead.

Around 6.15 a.m., they were spotted running through a yard belonging to John Brewer, who was feeding his horses at the time, and shortly afterwards they tried to steal a truck. That failed to start, so they abandoned it and carried on running. Realizing that they needed to hole up somewhere until they could get hold of a reliable vehicle, Thomas and Hoffman headed to the Boys and Girls Gymnastic Club on Hereford Lane in McAlester, about two miles east from the prison, and hid beneath a trampoline.

When Betty Curtis and Judy Adams arrived for their aerobic workout, the two fugitives pounced on them. Threatening the women with a knife, they demanded money and keys for a car; Adams gave them the keys to her distinctive white 1995 Oldsmobile, which had a maroon stripe down the side. After a discussion about taking the women hostage and deciding against it, Thomas and Hoffman took the $65 the two ladies had in their purses, and headed off in the car.

The manhunt continued throughout Monday, but the Pittsburgh County Sheriff’s Office reluctantly had to admit that they didn’t know which way the fugitives were heading. The operations were scaled back overnight, but on Tuesday morning, all the teams were once again on the ground searching for the men. Throughout that day, there was no sign of either the escapees or the car, then on Wednesday 17, the car was found abandoned in a hospital car park in Coalgate, around forty-five miles southwest of McAlester. Hoffman and Thomas were spotted by hospital staff who were able to give sufficient information to the police that they were able to track them to a house in Lehigh, five miles south of Coalgate. After arresting two accomplices who had allowed the fugitives to stay with them, police recaptured Thomas and Hoffman and returned them to H Unit.

Hoffman received an additional eight years for his part in the escape, Nathan Washington an extra five. As a result of the breakout, metal plates were installed behind the toilets in the three damaged cells, and shortly afterwards throughout the unit. “We are always certainly more vigilant when something like this occurs,” spokeswoman Lee Mann said once Hoffman and Thomas were back in custody. “It brings it all to us the reality that such things occur. And all security measures that are in place are being looked at.”

Sources:

Daniel P. Mears,
Evaluating the Effectiveness of Supermax Prisons
(Urban Institute: Justice Policy Center, March 2006)

McAlester history:
http://www.doc.state.ok.us/facilities/institutions/osp.htm

Amarillo Globe News,
16 January 2001: “Two escape in Oklahoma”

ABC News, 16 January 2001: “Two Okla. Inmates Still on Loose”

Lubbock Avalanche-Journal,
15 January 2001: “Two escape from Oklahoma maximum-security prison”