In March 1976, The Defendant was in Utah, serving a fifteen-year sentence for the kidnapping of Anne Biers from a shopping mall. Prosecutors there were working to tie him to the murder of another Utah woman, a girl, really—seventeen-year-old Barbara Kent, who disappeared after leaving a high school play to pick up her younger brother, mere hours after Anne Biers had escaped her abductor. Investigators had discovered a key in the school parking lot where Kent was last seen that fit the handcuffs used on Biers. The case was strong, but the Colorado DA couldn’t be bothered with anything approaching justice. His name was Frank Tucker, but Sammy told us that everyone around here had taken to calling him Tucker the Fucker after what happened.
Sammy pushed his cleaned plate to the side so that he could periodically jab the table with his pointer finger to punctuate the more outrageous parts of his story. “So the guy escapes again, and everyone is in an uproar, wanting to know how we could have let this happen. The sheriff points the finger at Tucker, saying it’s his fault, that Colorado wasn’t ready for him. And we weren’t.”
“What would you have done differently?” Tina asked.
“There is a protocol you follow around high-profile prisoners,” Sammy said. “So I wouldn’t have acted like I was above the goddamn law. I woulda followed it.”
“Why not just follow it?” I asked, confused.
He flung his hand, miming the act of throwing something carelessly out the window. “Because Tucker had a special election coming up that he knew he was gonna lose.” Sammy smirked. Ready for this?
According to Sammy, Tucker the Fucker had billed two counties to finance the abortion of his eighteen-year-old mistress—grossly hypocritical behavior coming from the elected official whose job it was to prosecute criminal violations of the law, the kind of shit you can’t make up, and I haven’t. In a few years Tucker would be prosecuted on two charges of embezzlement of public funds, but in March 1976 he was in the throes of a heated reelection campaign. So he did what all politicians do when they need to rehabilitate their image—he found a straw man. For Tucker, The Defendant was a godsend.
It happened to be true that Colorado investigators had strong evidence to connect The Defendant to the murder of Caryn Campbell—a strand of her hair was discovered in his car, and the use of his gasoline credit card put him near the scene at the time she disappeared from her Aspen hotel. But it was no stronger than the evidence Utah had for the murder of seventeen-year-old Barbara Kent. Colorado should have waited its turn to prosecute, but Frank Tucker didn’t have time to do things by the book. He wanted to be able to say at his campaign rallies that he was the hero for catching Caryn Campbell’s killer. He needed that, if he had any hope of remaining in office and dodging his own criminal charges.
“The last straw,” Sammy continued with seething contempt, “was when Tucker blamed the county commissioners for his escape, saying if they’d properly funded the prison, it never woulda happened. Well, of course they didn’t have any money to keep up the place! Because Tucker stole it to pay for his mistress’s hotel rooms and dinners and clothes and jewelry. Even an abortion.” Sammy’s nostrils flared scornfully. He wore a long gold chain tucked into his collar, and maybe it was my imagination, but I was certain I could make out the pious shape of a cross beneath his white cotton undershirt.
The Defendant was extradited to Aspen in early 1977, and by June, he’d pulled off his first escape. Just before dawn on the sixth day of the statewide manhunt, two sheriff’s deputies came upon a stolen 1966 Cadillac and found The Defendant slumped behind the wheel, severely dehydrated and fatigued, frostbite on three of his toes. He was less than a mile outside Aspen county lines and taken into custody under the jurisdiction of Glenwood Springs, where he was questioned without a lawyer for several hours before the sheriff back in Aspen got wind of it. A pissing match ensued—with Aspen demanding The Defendant’s return and Glenwood Springs refusing. The Defendant was captured on their turf. Aspen had their shot with him, and they’d blown it. A judge ruled in favor of Glenwood Springs: a reckless ruling, not another word for it.
“Glenwood’s supposedly the more secure facility,” Sammy said. “We’re smaller, better equipped to keep an eye on him. But from the start, we were out of our depth.”
Sammy eyed both of us to see if we understood what that meant. I glanced at Tina; she shook her head.
“With prisoners who have a history of escape, Marshals Service is supposed to get involved, come and inspect the facility. But that never happened. There wasn’t even a mention of a previous escape on his intake screening form.”
“You’re sure of that,” I said, feeling winded.
“I read the form myself. Every guard in my unit did. That form’s supposed to list what the prisoner’s in for. He was down for theft.”
“Theft,” Tina repeated incredulously.
Sammy jabbed his thumbs into his eyes and clenched his jaw angrily. “None of us had any idea of who we were dealing with. Enough time passed between when he was caught and when the judge sent him back to Glenwood that we didn’t even know he was the same guy from the manhunt. Plus, he seemed normal. Easy to talk to. The guy they caught looked feral in the pictures in the paper, but by the time we got him, he’d cleaned himself up again. Then”—Sammy turned his eyes up to the ceiling—“he started going up there.”
Tina and I looked up at the ceiling in a coordinated motion.
“There was a loose tile in his cell,” Sammy said. “The sheriff knew he’d been up there once or twice. But he just said not to worry. Don’t go nowhere anyway. I told him he was getting real thin. I’d collect his dinner plate, and he’d hardly have touched anything on it. Sheriff just laughed and said he wouldn’t touch that shit with a ten-foot pole neither.”
By December 1977, four weeks before I saw him at our front door holding a bloody log from our own cord of firewood, The Defendant had dropped twenty pounds from his already lean frame, enough to shimmy through the narrowest part of the ducting, exit into the empty apartment of a prison worker, change his clothes, and escape Colorado for good. It took them six hours to realize he was gone—he’d pulled the covers over his law textbooks and various documents and piles of letters, arranged to pass for a sleeping body.
“People say he’s living off the land in the mountains,” Sammy said. “There are sightings all the time. Like Bigfoot.”
“Well, he’s not,” Tina said. “He’s gone to Florida State University.”
Sammy looked at her square in the face with an alarming urgency.
“What is it?” I asked, my heart pounding.
Sammy folded his hands and bowed his head, lines deepening in his brow, thinking hard.
“What?”
“Give me a second!” Sammy clenched his eyes shut. “I’m trying to remember.”
Tina and I sat there, not breathing, not wanting to do or say anything that may ruin his concentration.
“There was a university brochure,” Sammy said. His eyes were still closed, but his lids were moving rapidly, as though he was scanning the scene in his memory. “In with the other items that he’d put under the covers. One of them”—Sammy opened his eyes—“it had palm trees. And I remember thinking he must have gone to California. But you all got palm trees down there too, right?”
I could see the Florida State University brochure that came in the mail my sophomore year of high school, the fat ancient oaks and the leggy palms, up and down like waves on a heart monitor.
“What happened to all that stuff?” I asked, thinking if we could produce a Florida State brochure, then we’d have our smoking gun.
“It all went to Seattle,” Sammy said.
“You’re sure of that,” Tina said, a tremor of hope in her voice.
“Positive. When he got caught that first time, he refused to talk unless it was to one of the Seattle PDs. Guy who’d been working those missing girl cases for years. I remember Sheriff Wright was real pissed to have to bring them in. And then when he escaped, they came back, and they left with boxes.”
I swore I could hear Tina’s heart pounding with recognition at the mention of the missing girls in Seattle.
Sammy signaled for the check. “That’s all I know. What did he do down in Florida?”