The Escape
DECEMBER 1987
UNITED STATES DISCIPLINARY BARRACKS
FORT LEAVENWORTH, KANSAS
Snow was falling outside when the guard gave Captain Paul Starr his yellow checklist to complete before his parole. Starr’s model behavior in prison had paid off; he was being released after serving nine months of his eighteen-month term. Though the parole board at Fort Leavenworth, headed by a tough Marine colonel, had ruled against parole, Starr had appealed to the Secretary of the Air Force, noting that his imprisonment had already served whatever deterrent value it might have. From Washington, his parole was approved.
Paul had found work in Sacramento, but as a federal prison parolee he was required to report to a local parole officer. Starr arrived before his formal paperwork did, so he had to explain to his parole officer that he had been imprisoned for consensual sexual activity with another adult in the privacy of his home. The parole officer did not believe him. When the papers arrived and the officer saw that there were indeed no children and no force involved in Paul’s crimes, he assigned Starr to the lightest supervision possible, one visit every three months for the nine months of his parole. Starr had served nine months in federal prison and would forever bear the label of convicted felon and ex-con, but as far as the parole officer was concerned, Starr could not be considered a criminal and he would not be treated as one.
JANUARY 11, 1988
MARINE CORPS RECRUIT TRAINING DEPOT
PARRIS ISLAND, SOUTH CAROLINA
Petty Officer Third Class Terry Knox was working at her first aid station for female recruits at Parris Island when she was summoned into the office of the Naval Investigative Service. Although the NIS would later decline to comment about what happened next, numerous court documents corroborated Knox’s recollection of the interrogation, which was led by Special Agent Renea King.
Knox knew King, who she believed was having an affair with Knox’s estranged husband. For weeks before the couple’s recent separation, King had repeatedly called Knox’s home to talk to her husband, who maintained to Terry that it concerned his application to join the NIS. Shortly before their final bitter fight, Knox’s husband admitted the calls from King had to do with an investigation the NIS was launching of lesbian Marines at Parris Island. The investigation, he added, included a drill instructor, Sergeant Mary Kile, who was Terry’s close friend.
Terry brushed aside King’s suggestion that the sergeant was gay. She had met Kile a year earlier. Like Terry, she was involved in a crumbling marriage. Terry understood that her own marital problems had to do with her sexual identity; she had thought she was heterosexual, but she was attracted to Mary Kile and the pair had become inseparable friends. To complicate matters, Terry was pregnant, and determined to keep her baby.
Terry’s husband had offered to interrogate Kile for the NIS and told Terry so one night, which led to an altercation. Fearful he would hurt her as he had before—Knox’s attorney later recalled that the husband had broken one of Terry’s fingers in a fight—Knox called Mary Kile, who came and drove her away. Shortly afterward, Terry moved into housing on base, and was living there when she gave birth to her daughter.
In the weeks that followed, Terry noticed that she was being followed by her husband and others. Sergeant Kile noticed that she was being tailed as well.
Between that and the rumors of an imminent crackdown, Knox was not surprised when she was called into the NIS office from her job at the Parris Island clinic at 6:30 A.M. She was disconcerted, however, when she saw her husband’s car parked outside the office.
Upon entering an interrogation room, Renea King threw a pile of videotapes on a table and announced that the tapes included proof that Knox had committed adulterous homosexual acts. The NIS had it on tape and they had recordings of phone conversations between Terry and Sergeant Kile. Terry responded that she was full of shit. King pressed on: If Knox talked about her relationship with Kile, they could offer her immunity. Knox refused.
“Do you want your daughter growing up knowing her mother is a jailbird and went to jail for being a lesbian?” King finally asked. She then laid out the ultimate threat: If Terry did not cooperate, the NIS would move to have her daughter taken away from her. “In South Carolina, homosexuals cannot have children,” she said.
Terry asked for a lawyer. King ignored that and badgered her further. When Terry asked to go to the bathroom, King followed her right into the stall. As the hours wore on, King became more specific. They had photographs of Terry and the sergeant sitting in front of the A&P supermarket in their car, kissing and embracing each other. Terry and Kile had embraced once in front of the A&P, Knox remembered, one day when her husband was following them, but they had certainly not engaged in sex in a supermarket parking lot.
After lunch, Terry was locked in a small room with her estranged husband. “They’re going to throw you in jail,” he told Terry, and they were going to take away her daughter. He would go to court to ensure that Terry did not have custody. Then King turned up the intensity of the interrogation. Knox’s daughter would go to a foster home after Terry was sent to jail, she said. It might be a long time before Knox saw her. Terry asked for a lawyer again; King ignored her.
King would later be unavailable for comment, but Knox subsequently testified that occasionally King shoved Knox or threw a pen at her. Then Terry would hear a rustling in the next room behind the large one-way mirror, and another agent would come in and take King out. While King had been harsh and confrontational, this agent was warm and understanding, trying to coax a statement from Knox. When that did not work, King returned to threaten and accuse Knox. Several times more Knox asked for a lawyer and was ignored. Several times she asserted her suspicions that King was having an affair with her husband. Then King would glance at the one-way mirror and try to change the subject.
Finally, the Staff Judge Advocate, Colonel Kenneth Taylor, came in to offer Knox immunity. He called her “little lady,” and assured her that the immunity would protect her. The visit was intimidating. Taylor was in effect the base commanding general’s own lawyer.
After more than ten hours of interrogation, Knox finally broke down and admitted she had embraced Mary Kile in front of the A&P. She agreed to sign a statement to that effect. NIS agents typed up the brief statement, only a few lines long, and Knox signed it and was released. The next time she saw the statement, she barely recognized it. Someone had typed in additional paragraphs of entirely fabricated information above Knox’s signature in what had been the blank portion of the page, accusing others of being gay, and having sex.
At the same time Terry Knox was being interrogated, Sergeant Kile was also taken to a small room and told that she too would go to prison if she did not cooperate. The NIS asked her repeatedly if she had sent flowers to a Marine Corps captain named Judy Gretch. The line of questioning seemed almost comical to Kile. Later, she would realize the agents were not joking. The Parris Island witch-hunt had begun.
Marine Corps Corporal Barbara Baum was packing for her pending transfer to Hawaii. Over the past two months she had been in training for track with Captain Laura Hinckley, on whom she had developed a massive crush. Hinckley, an Annapolis graduate from the same class as Ruth Voor, said she was not gay, but Barbara thought otherwise. The pair became friends. By January, however, the friendship seemed as if it would fade—Barb’s uniforms had already been shipped to Hawaii and she was about to take a thirty-day leave at home in Indiana before her transfer. On what was to be her last day at Parris Island, Barbara went to the Military Police headquarters to say good-bye to the people with whom she had worked for the past two years. Arriving there, she was told that agents from the Naval Investigative Service wanted to see her—right away.
An NIS agent explained that although Barbara was a good Marine, the NIS knew she was gay. They knew because they had almost caught her redhanded in bed at the Buccaneer Motel with Lance Corporal Diane Maldonado. Barbara could make it easy on herself if she would just answer some questions. As an MP, Barbara knew her rights: She asked for a lawyer and the interview was ended.
The word spread through Parris Island as more women were called into the NIS. One female drill instructor was taken off the drill field in handcuffs and brought into the NIS office, where she encountered a gay male Marine friend. “They’ve got us—they’ve got us,” he said when she arrived. “You better talk to them.” So she did, though it turned out that the friend who had urged her to make a statement was an NIS informant who had himself given a statement against her two months earlier. His presence at the NIS office was part of the setup.
No one knew who had talked and who had not. Suspicions flared. Friends stopped speaking to each other. Quietly, meanwhile, the NIS used jealousy among the women to nail down evidence. When Sergeant Cheryl Jameson, a drill instructor, began seeing a particular recruit, she enraged another whom she had once dated; a fourth female Marine became even more jealous when she realized that it was her girlfriend with whom Jameson was having an affair. All three of the women ended up giving statements and cooperating with the NIS in its investigation of Jameson. One of them, Staff Sergeant Bonnie Ferguson, named forty-five female Marines as lesbians in her statement, including a woman Marine Corps general, a colonel, three lieutenant colonels, a major, five captains, and three lieutenants.
Strange things began to happen that did not make sense at the time, but which carried great significance later. In February, for example, Staff Sergeant Ferguson made numerous phone calls to a civilian named Paula Berry who had once been a roommate, and who she knew to be a close friend of Captain Judy Meade. When Berry mentioned that Meade was stopping by her home, Ferguson showed up that very night in the company of Private First Class Jill Harris, another of the women involved in the jealous ménage that proved so fruitful for the NIS.
Meade’s father had just died and she was on her way back to Camp LeJeune after the funeral. She was distraught and wanted to talk to Berry alone. The pair went back into Berry’s bedroom, but Ferguson and Harris followed them there. According to Berry’s recollection of the evening, Harris brought up the subject of who was lesbian among the Parris Island women. Meade warned her to stop spreading rumors; she could get in a lot of trouble.
From what Parris Island defendants later pieced together, Harris had been dispatched from Okinawa to help set up women at Parris Island. Meade’s warning about not gossiping about other women became the basis of charges against her a year later. According to the Marine Corps, her statement had represented a threat. In the gathering darkness of the Parris Island purge, any remark could contain criminal implications; it could even send a person to prison.
Later, when Paula Berry tried to understand why her old friend Bonnie Ferguson would betray not only their friendship but the dozens of other women she had named, she recalled that Bonnie had mentioned her child. The NIS agents had told her if she did not cooperate, she could lose custody of the little girl.
A week after her first interrogation, Petty Officer Terry Knox was called back into the NIS, where she was presented with a written promise of immunity if she would provide a statement against Sergeant Kile. The immunity papers were signed by the top of Terry’s chain of command, Rear Admiral W. N. Johnson, commander of the Naval base in Charleston. Again, Special Agent Renea King was in charge of Terry’s interrogation. During this four-hour interrogation, Terry would say only that she had given Kile a kiss of a nonsexual nature in front of the A&P. King was infuriated, according to Knox, and held out the paper that represented Terry’s guarantee of immunity. “Terry, we’re going to take away this immunity if you don’t come clean now,” she said. When Terry remained silent, she ripped the document into pieces and threw it at her.
Knox demanded an attorney, and the interrogation ended. As she was leaving the room, Knox says, King was still fuming. “I’m going to get you if it’s the last thing I do,” she said. “I don’t care about the other dykes in the Marine Corps—if it’s the last thing I do, I’ll get you.”
By now, the NIS had focused their efforts on three women: Sergeant Mary Kile, Sergeant Jacqueline Hickey, and Captain Judy Gretch. As an officer, Gretch was the big fish, and NIS files on the Parris Island purge were labeled the “Gretch case.” By late January, all three women were informed that they were being charged with homosexuality and would face administrative hearings.
Kile was accused of the A&P kiss, and also accused of having a relationship with Captain Gretch. According to one story, Kile had sent Gretch flowers as a sign of devotion. The flowers had been delivered anonymously and Kile’s role in it was mere gossip, but the gossip became the basis of charges against them both.
It seemed that every Marine who ever had a grudge against a lesbian stepped forward to offer the NIS a statement about this or that woman who might be gay. These statements led to new interrogations.
Barbara Baum was at home in Indiana when she received word that her orders to Hawaii had been revoked and she was to return to Parris Island. Back in South Carolina, Barbara went to the NIS. “It’s not you we’re after,” an NIS agent explained. The NIS was hoping she could lead them to other people—the female Marines that the NIS really wanted. Barbara suspected they meant Captain Laura Hinckley, with whom she had once spent so much time. Barb had heard that the NIS had a statement that placed Baum’s car at the captain’s home.
Barb agreed to be interviewed by the NIS if she could tape-record their discussion. Major David Beck, a Marine Corps prosecutor, accused Barbara of “playing games.” As an MP, he said, she should know better. Besides, she might play the tape for others, which would warn them of what to expect in an interrogation. The NIS agent said she absolutely could not allow a tape recording of the interview. Barbara requested a lawyer and the interview ended.
The idea that people were watching other people’s apartments and reporting the license numbers of visitors gave Barbara a chill, but she still felt safe from the purge. She had had only one relationship, with Maldonado the year before, and did not have dozens of former girlfriends who might give statements against her. Although Baum and Maldonado were no longer dating, Barbara had called her several times to make sure they had their stories straight if they did have to talk to the NIS. According to the story they had agreed on, they had spent the night at the Buccaneer Motel in 1986 to get away from Steve Davis, Diane’s violently jealous ex-boyfriend. They were not involved sexually; they were not gay; they did not know any gays.
JANUARY 18, 1988
AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS
Air Force Sergeant Jack Green had been AWOL for a week when Senator Marie Louise Tiesinga Autsema met with Colonel Rick Parsons of Soesterberg Air Base and his legal adviser, Captain Johan Muller of the Staff Judge Advocate’s office. Tiesinga Autsema was a leader of the Democrats’ 66, a liberal party in opposition to the government. Because she had good relations with U.S. officials in Holland, however, she was appointed to be the government spokeswoman and negotiator in the Jack Green matter. The Dutch senator explained that Green was under psychiatric care and that she hoped to work out an agreement with the Americans so that he could be quietly and honorably discharged without having to suffer prosecution from the Air Force for his homosexuality.
Parsons maintained that this was not a subject that could be discussed. Green was expected to return to the base immediately. “Why can he not return?” he asked repeatedly.
Parsons was not available for comment on this matter. Later, Tiesinga Autsema, after a number of exchanges like this, finally blew up. “Quit acting like a robot,” she said. “Talk like a human.”
Parsons’s attitude seemed to soften. The military was beginning to cut troops, he said. Perhaps they could work out an administrative discharge. However, Green would have to be examined by an Air Force psychiatrist.
The meeting was agreed upon, and Green and his Dutch psychologist and psychiatrist met with a Soesterberg psychiatrist, Colonel Ralph Johns, in Amsterdam. The Dutch explained that Green suffered from “acute reactive depression” and that they could not in good conscience suggest he return to Soesterberg or put himself under Air Force authorities again.
Colonel Johns, however, ordered Green to return to the Soesterberg base immediately. Green said that he understood the order, but that he would not go back. The colonel advised him that he could now be found guilty of disobeying a lawful order and of desertion. He could go to jail. At this, Green’s Dutch psychiatrist told the colonel to shut up. “Don’t threaten my patient,” he said.
Senator Tiesinga Autsema made some headway at her next meeting with Colonel Parsons. The issue had by now become the subject of communications between the Dutch secretary of state’s office, which included the defense ministry, and the American State and Defense departments. In a tense meeting with American officials, the Dutch achieved the concessions they sought. Green would be medically discharged from the Air Force with no punishment except for a general discharge. He could then return to Holland.
But in order to clear the medical discharge, the Air Force insisted that military doctors at the Air Force’s 7100th Combat Support Wing Medical Center in Wiesbaden, West Germany, must examine Green. By now, Jack had been in hiding for nearly a month and was eager to resolve his conflicts with the Air Force. Still, he worried what might happen once he left the Netherlands. With much trepidation, Jack finally agreed to the plan. After all, the American government had given its word to the Dutch government.
On February 9, Green turned himself in to the American embassy in The Hague, expecting that within three days, as provided by the agreement between the Dutch and American authorities, he would be out of the Air Force, a free man. According to Air Force documents, Donald Brown, the embassy’s military and political affairs officer, reassured Green while the sergeant was en route to Wiesbaden that the Air Force would not punish him.
From his first hours at Wiesbaden, everyone who interviewed Green focused on one issue: Was he gay? It was one of the first questions the admitting officer asked him before he was placed in a ten-bed psychiatric ward. Though Jack had been promised that he would be released within two to three days, it soon became clear that the Air Force was not in any hurry. It took two days for a doctor to make his way to Green’s bedside, and the physician knew nothing of any agreement between the Dutch and American government concerning Jack’s discharge. As far as he knew, Jack was at Wiesbaden for “observation and testing.” Another doctor told Jack that he was going to be put up on charges of homosexuality; he might be going to jail.
Jack panicked. He asked to contact Dutch officials, but he was not allowed to make any calls. Then he heard that officers from Soesterberg would be arriving within a few days, with papers formally charging him with homosexuality.
Shortly afterward, Green did manage to contact a friend in Holland, and they laid their plans. His friend arrived at the hospital at noon on February 14, a Sunday, the most popular day for visitors at the hospital, claiming she was a doctor who had come to examine Sergeant Green. Since Jack would be in the company of a doctor, he was allowed to leave his second-floor room to walk in the courtyard. Once outside, the pair hurried to a nearby car driven by Jack’s lover, Albert Taminiau. Albert drove a few blocks, where they switched vehicles in case anyone had seen them make their getaway.
Jack was wearing his Air Force green fatigues, but Albert had brought him civilian clothes. Jack changed in the car as the three drove toward the Dutch border. Since Jack did not have his passport, it would be impossible for him to cross from Germany to Holland, so shortly before they came to the border, they pulled alongside the road. Jack’s rescuers pointed toward a windmill in the far distance. That windmill was in the Dutch village of Rhiemen, Albert said. They would wait for him there.
It was bitter cold as Jack made his way through the forest on the frontier between Germany and Holland. He knew that if he was captured by German border guards, he would be returned to American military authorities where he would most certainly face jail time. It was an eerie feeling, walking through the ash and linden trees, worrying that someone might see the vapor from his breath, worrying about border guards, knowing his liberty depended on being able to avoid U.S. officials. After a two-hour walk, fearful of every snap and rustle in the forest, Green made it to the windmill and his friends, and freedom.