An escape by air has to be organised by those on the outside. Of course, the history of such escapes does not go back too far. The use of a hot air balloon may well feature in cinematic adventures, but the reality would hardly offer a speedy departure. It is surprising, though, that helicopter escapes do not feature more heavily, for there is far less traffic in the sky than on the ground. The only disadvantage is that those below can clearly see and hear the whirling machine, and thus follow the trajectory of the escape, running the risk that faster helicopters, or even planes, can take off from nearby airports or other bases to intercept them. But the helicopter is a good means for hoisting inmates from prisons, provided it comes back to ground within a reasonable time, transferring the escapees to more conventional transport before they vanish.
There has only been one escape by helicopter on mainland Britain, and it was a long time in coming. Not only had it been predicted as far back as 1966, when prisoners protesting on the roof at Leicester Prison were buzzed by a press helicopter, but, just a couple of years later, the governor of Parkhurst had made a low-level run over his own prison and noted how easy it would be to escape that way. Even after worldwide press attention had been given to Michel Vaujour’s 1986 Paris escape (noted below), there were still no precautionary measures using netting or wire in the UK.
Thus it should have been no surprise when, on 10 December 1987, Andrew Russell (using the name Andrew Downes) hired a Bell 206 Longranger helicopter from Stansted Airport. On the pretext of flying towards Market Harborough, he stuck a gun to the head of the pilot at the last moment and told him to go to Gartree Prison, in nearby Leicestershire, to touch down on the football field and collect two prisoners.
Russell and his accomplice had made a dummy run eight days earlier. That time they had landed on a golf course in the area, his pretence being that he worked for a security company and was checking out possible hijack points. From there the pair had accepted a lift from a golf club member, who saved them the trouble of calling for a taxi and took them into the town, where they visited the library to consult local Ordnance Survey maps. They asked to photocopy them, but declined to do so when asked to become members of the library. (Why hadn’t they visited Stanford’s, or a similar travel bookshop in London, and bought the appropriate map?) It had also been noted that they were carrying a radio frequency scanner used to monitor police signals.
On the day of the escape itself, as they came into land on the prison football pitch, two robbers on afternoon break from the workshops, John Kendall and Sydney Draper, started running towards the centre circle, waving towels as identification. Guards who tried to follow were hindered by other inmates. At 3:17pm, only twenty-one seconds after it had landed, the helicopter commandeered by Russell was lifting away from the prison with its two escapees.
The plan had been to come down on the golf course, where a getaway car was waiting with a driver. But there was a swirling mist across the course, and it couldn’t be seen from the air. That plan was aborted and the helicopter touched down on an industrial estate, where the pilot was left handcuffed to his plane and the three occupants set about hijacking a delivery van. The receipt for the hire of the helicopter, still in its envelope and bearing Russell’s prints, was left behind in the cockpit.
The prison had feared this might happen one day. For such an eventuality, they had instigated a plan called Operation Rogue Elephant with RAF Wittering, whereby Harrier jump-jets would scramble and intercept any helicopter. But on this December day, when an emergency call was made to the air-control centre at RAF West Drayton, the only response was an operator with no idea of the plan, or even of the existence of a place called HMP Gartree. He suggested they call the local police who, even if they had responded quickly, would still have been hard-pressed to locate the helicopter, as it was soon back on the ground.
Kendall went with Russell when they hijacked a Fiat, leaving its female driver with the delivery van. From there they went to Corby and kidnapped an old man driving a Mini Metro in a multi-storey car park, taking him along, tied up in the back, as they sped northbound up the M1. They abandoned him in Sheffield, where he was found that evening, bound and gagged, with £40 stuffed in his pocket for the trouble they had caused him.
On the last day of January, Kendall was located in a one-room flat along Chelsea’s King’s Road. A forty-strong team of police with searchlights and weapons led a full assault on the building at 3am, smashing their way into the place and terrifying the neighbourhood. Kendall was asleep in bed. Unluckily for Russell, he was also there.
Sydney Draper went another way after the helicopter had come to ground. It was fourteen months before he was recaptured, in February 1989, at a house in his old stomping ground of Enfield.
Reggie Kray, who was at Gartree at the time, noted the commotion and its aftermath, particularly the witty notices on the board: “Helicopter trips/To and fro/Leicester to London. All enquiries to: Chief Security Officer.” “Please check your luggage before helicopter flight.” “Helicopter trips all full for the season. Check for vacancies at a later date.”
One of the government’s proposed methods for prevention was rocket defence, but that had to be scrapped as it was almost certain that, in any helicopter escape, the pilot would be an unwitting outsider. Barrage balloons, nets and wire barriers across exercise yards and open areas within the walls were other cited possibilities. Kray wrote that at Gartree, “they brought in anti-escape devices, including orange-coloured balls stretched across the field. From a distance they looked quite pretty, especially when the arc-lights were flickering on them.”
Kendall and Draper made their way into the annals of crime history. It could just as easily have happened earlier, as Ronnie Biggs and others had been entertaining the idea of a helicopter escape from Wandsworth in the spring of 1965. However, “the police might take pot-shots at us, which didn’t thrill me,” confided Biggs.
Others have undoubtedly explored that same avenue. In Northern Ireland, when the possibility had come up at Long Kesh, it was discarded because the prison was too close to a British army base, and they would have alerted helicopters which were much swifter than the civilian variety.
But it was in Ireland that the first non-mainland helicopter escape happened. At Halloween 1973, an Alouette 2 hired ostensibly for aerial photography purposes by someone impersonating an American was hijacked in a field near Stradbelly by a hooded man. The next time it landed was in the exercise yard of Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison at 3:40pm.
It was behind schedule. The game of football in progress as a distraction had lost its edge, and the spectators had dwindled. Kevin Mallon semaphored the helicopter down using pieces of white cloth, and other inmates were ready to restrain any officers. Mallon and two other important IRA prisoners, J. B. O’Hagan and Seamus Twomey (who the year before, as Chief of Staff of the Provisionals, had been in London negotiating with the British government), were lifted away. Though the officers were restrained with difficulty, they could hardly do anything as the blades were creating a dust storm. The narrowness of the yard left little room between the rotating blades and the perimeter wall, making it difficult to counteract the turbulence as the pilot struggled to take off.
The flight was short, barely six minutes to Baldoyle racecourse, where a car was to collect them. The people designated to steal the getaway car couldn’t find one, and had hired a taxi instead, which they proceeded to hijack brandishing a hefty Colt .45. When the escapees climbed out of the helicopter, the getaway car was not waiting. Believing they were under surveillance, the hijackers had taken the taxi for a quick tour around the area to kill time, delaying their arrival. Once collected, the three IRA men were driven to three different safe houses and the taxi abandoned. (The taxi driver, like the helicopter pilot, was paid a full fare.)
After the escape a prison officer apparently apologised to the governor, saying he “thought it was the new Minister for Defence [Paddy Donegan] arriving” – only for a republican prisoner to retort, “it was our Minister of Defence leaving.” The escape entered republican folklore, immortalised further by the Wolfe Tones in ‘The Helicopter Song’.
Over the English Channel there have been a number of notable cases (each with their own twist) that have made headlines. None more so than that of Michel Vaujour, rescued by his wife at the time, Nadine, who took lessons to learn to fly a helicopter. Little did her instructors know that this single mother, raising her two children, was seeking to free her husband from La Santé Prison in Paris.
Vaujour had escaped three times before, but this fourth escape was to seal his notoriety. On 26 May 1986, Vaujour, serving twenty-eight years for robbery and attempted murder, made his way onto the roof of the prison, armed with a fake gun and nectarines painted to look like grenades, where he was snatched away by his wife in a hired helicopter. They landed nearby on a football pitch, where a car was waiting for them.
Vaujour was captured later in the year, when he was shot in a failed bank robbery. (Nadine had earlier been arrested at a villa in Southwest France.) The bullet hit him in the head and put him into a long coma, with profound effects upon his behaviour. In prison he had to be helped to learn to speak again.
The case had its place in history cemented by the film La Fille de l’Air, starring Beatrice Dalle as Nadine. As the film shows, flying over Paris – or indeed, over any major city where the airspace needs to be vigorously controlled – soon draws the authorities onto your tail.
Pascal Payet seems to have determined that his notoriety was best served by a series of helicopter escapes. Payet was serving thirty years for a murder committed during a 1997 robbery, in which he shot a security guard fourteen times with a Russian AK47 automatic assault rifle – acquiring the nickname ‘Kalashnikov Pat’. In 2001, Payet escaped from Luynes prison in the South of France with a hijacked helicopter; then two years later, while still on the run, he organised an escape for some of his comrades (Franck Perletto, Eric Alboreo and Michel Valero) from the same Luynes prison, using a hijacked helicopter. Though he was later captured, as were the other three men, he escaped once more in July 2007 – this time from Grasse prison, once again by a helicopter, which had been hijacked at Cannes-Mandelieu airport.
The last escape had a special touch because it took place on Bastille Day, the French national holiday that commemorates the storming of the Bastille Prison in 1789. The four men who had hijacked the Squirrel helicopter in Cannes ordered the pilot north to Grasse, where they landed on the roof of the prison at the start of the night shift. Three of them broke open the doors, threatening the guards with machine pistols and sawn-off shotguns. They knew exactly where they were going, forcing their way through a number of doors into the isolation section until they reached Payet in his cell. Within five minutes they were back on the roof and away. As with Charlie Wilson, Payet’s rescuers came in to collect him – remarkably enough, for in this case everyone must have heard and watched the escape.
They touched down at a heliport next to a hospital in Brignoles, twenty-five miles inland from Toulon, not far from Marseilles, Payet’s hometown. It was unusual for a helicopter to be so long in the air. But the escapee’s freedom was short-lived. In September he was recaptured in Spain, not far from Barcelona. Even though he had undergone plastic surgery, he was still recognised by the Spanish police.
In July 2005, Payet was in prison at Villefrance-sur-Saone in Southern France when another attempt at rescue by helicopter failed, though this time he was not the intended escapee. Earlier, in May 2001 at Fresnes Prison, south of Paris, a helicopter had dropped a pistol and a Kalashnikov into the exercise yard. Though two prisoners took three guards hostage, they failed to escape and were forced to surrender after twenty-four hours. Another failed attempt occurred near Lyons in 2000, when a hijacked helicopter lowered a net over the prison for three inmates on the roof to grab. Guards opened fire from a watchtower and killed one, while the other two escaped and hijacked cars once they were set down. They were later captured after a gun battle with police.
Though cables or nets were strung across some prison yards after Michel Vaujour’s escape, not all took such basic preventive action. Draugignan Prison had done little to hinder escape when, in March 2001, a helicopter hijacked at an airfield near St Tropez was forced to land in the courtyard. Three robbers, Emile Forma-Sari, Jean-Philippe Lecase and Abdelhamid Carnous, leapt aboard (“the whole thing was over in a flash,” a guard commented). The machine was in the air for some while, travelling the extraordinary distance of sixty kilometres to the village of Auribeau-sur-Siagne, before coming down to rendezvous with the waiting getaway car.
Another success story occurred in December 2005, when two men hijacked a helicopter in Albertville as it was in the process of taking off to collect skiers in the Alps. The pilot was forced to fly to Aiton Prison and bring it down in the exercise yard. With no security mesh, three men – one serving time for drugs, one for armed robbery and the third for leading a robbery – were lifted and taken to open country near Grenoble. All in all, almost a dozen helicopter escapes have been noted in France since 1981.
Belgium saw two such escapes in 2007, including the high-profile fifth breakout of Nordin Benallal, the self-styled ‘escape king’, though it did not go according to plan. Unforeseen by him, when the prototype helicopter – hijacked from an engineering company and piloted by one of its employees – arrived in the prison yard just before sunset on 28 October, Benallal was not the only one to leap aboard. So many inmates tried to clamber in or hang onto the skids that the plane could not lift off. When the engine failed, it came back to earth and crashed.
Benallal and his heavily armed accomplice leapt from the machine, grabbed two guards as hostages and forced doors to be opened so that they could grab a Volkswagen Golf prison car equipped with a flashing police light and escape Ittre Prison, thirty kilometres south of Brussels, one of the most secure modern facilities in the country. Initially jailed in 1998 for five years on armed robbery charges, Benallal first escaped in June 2000 and was quickly recaptured. In October he was off again for another three months, using a fake leg injury to obtain a crutch with which he beat guards during a transfer between jails. His third escape was affected in January 2001, with the help of his brother, when he swapped clothes and places with him during a prison visit. He was caught three weeks later in a billiard hall.
His fourth escape, in 2004, saw him cut through two wire fences before scaling a twenty-five-foot wall with a rope ladder thrown over by an accomplice waiting with a car. It was after this escape that he shot two policemen who tried to apprehend him, critically injuring them and adding substantially to the accumulating years of his jail sentence. Benallal, who is not yet thirty, now faces over fifty years for ninety-five convictions. One has to expect that escape will remain his central preoccupation for the foreseeable future.
Of course, his fifth escape was short-lived. The car was abandoned three miles away in a forest, probably the original rendezvous point for the helicopter bid. Within a day he was recaptured in neighbouring Holland, cornered in a motorcycle showroom. One Belgian commentator likened his escape, the first ever from ‘Belgium’s Alcatraz’, to an episode of Prison Break. But people in Belgium want his prison to be made secure, as it also holds Marc Dutroux, the paedophile jailed for murdering four girls.
Benallal’s was the second successful helicopter escape of 2007. The first took place on 15 April on the other side of the country, at Lantin Prison in Sint-Truiden, near Liège, where two men posing as tourists from Marseilles hijacked a helicopter and flew into the yard to pick up Frenchman Erik Ferdinand, on pre-trial detention awaiting extradition to Spain where he was wanted for fraud and theft. The pilot initially refused to land in the yard as it was too small, but at gunpoint he couldn’t argue. One rescuer threw teargas canisters into the crowd of exercising prisoners, while Ferdinand clambered aboard. The helicopter flew only a few hundred metres before setting down, and the three men escaped in a waiting car.
In Holland, during September 1997, a helicopter escape attempt from De Geerhorst Prison failed when the plane crashed into the ground and killed the pilot.
The potentially lethal chaos of other prisoners clambering onboard was avoided when Vassilis Paleokostas, serving twenty-five years for kidnapping and robbery, was sprung from Greece’s maximum-security Korydallos Prison, near Athens, on the late afternoon of 6 June 2006. Flares and teargas were thrown around the helicopter to deter stowaways. Joining Paleokostas on the escape was Alket Rizai, an Albanian serving life for homicide. The escape was engineered by Vassilis’ brother, Nikos, who had been on the run himself for some years. They flew to a nearby graveyard in Schisto, where motorcycles were waiting to take them to the port of Piraeus.
The first such Australian escape occurred in March 1999, when librarian Lucy Dudko rescheduled her tourist flight to view Sydney’s Olympic site from the sky by hijacking the copter. Coaxing the pilot with a gun to make for maximum-security Silverwater Prison, she found her lover, John Killick, serving twenty-eight years for armed robbery, waiting outside in the sports area for his lift. He was whisked away to the sound of cheering inmates and a hail of bullets from the prison guards.
The helicopter landed in a park several kilometres away at North Ryde, where the pilot was tied up and the couple hijacked a car and its driver. They eluded the police for six weeks, eventually being captured at a caravan in the Bass Hill Tourist Park.
Dudko received ten years for organising the escape, and was released on parole after seven. She is allowed to write to Killick, but not to phone or visit him. His release will be in 2013 at the earliest, when he will be seventy-one and she will be fifty-five. The escape captured the public imagination, much to the annoyance of police and politicians, for being the most dramatic on record. The media gave them the ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ tag, or made references to the Beatles’ ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’. The public seemed to appreciate the romance of their exploit, and even to hope they would retain their freedom and live on the stash of accumulated earnings from earlier robberies.
Dudko had planned the escape, enquiring about hiring a helicopter earlier at Bankstown Airport, making a dummy flight a fortnight before, and buying the guns – as well as renting out three very apt films from the video shop: The Getaway, Captive and Breakout, in the latter of which Hollywood’s Charles Bronson is hired to free an innocent man from a Mexican prison. These were all found in her flat.
In Puerto Rico, the situation of five prisoners who escaped by helicopter seemed, by our standards, worse than hopeless. Orlando Valdes Cartagena and Jose A. Perez Rodriguez were serving two hundred and fifty-four years and three hundred and nineteen years respectively for murder; Victor Gonzalez Diaz was serving one hundred and thirteen years, Hector Marrero Diaz one hundred and nine years and Jose M. Rojas Tapia one hundred years. It’s hardly surprising that, at the very end of December 2002, two men who rented a helicopter in the capital, San Juan, ostensibly to inspect construction sites in the southern city of Ponce, forced the pilot at gunpoint to bring the helicopter down on the roof of Las Cucharas Prison where the five were waiting, having cut a hole in the chain-link fence.
One man was forced to hang onto the skids of the helicopter, as there was no room left inside, whilst they were flown into the central mountain region. All were later recaptured, except Gonzalez Diaz – whom the others claimed they killed soon after the escape, though no body was ever found. The authorities wondered if the prison’s guards had played any part in the escape, for, in 1991, when the only other helicopter escape occurred, a law was brought in giving guards the authority to shoot down any helicopter during an escape attempt.
Things are pretty rough in Brazil too, where escapes happen more or less on a daily basis, and where prisons are controlled more by the inmates than the authorities. Nevertheless, a helicopter escape is a rarity. In January 2002, when a hijacked copter snatched two inmates from the central yard at the Jose Parada Neto Penitentiary in Guarulhos, a suburb of the capital Sao Paulo, guards opened fire. The machine was later found fifty kilometres away, riddled with bullet-holes. “It was fast, Miami Vice-style,” said a military police spokesman, referring to the 1980s TV cop series.
In California, when Ronald J. McIntosh walked from a minimum-security prison on 28 October 1986, his purpose was to free his lover from her jail. McIntosh, who was already an experienced helicopter pilot, took a practice flight under the name Lyle Thompson with an instructor from Navajo Aviation on the 31st. On 4 November, using another alias, Fred Holbrick, he arranged to hire a machine for the next day from Aris Helicopter in San Jose.
McIntosh set off with the hire company’s pilot, and forced him at gunpoint to set down at Bollinger Canyon, near Danville. He then instructed the pilot to climb out and took over the controls himself. Thirty minutes later, at 11:15am, McIntosh landed the helicopter on the prison athletic field at the Federal Correctional Institution at Pleasanton, east of San Francisco, where he collected Samantha Lopez who was serving a sentence for a 1981 robbery. She was waiting for him.
They were apprehended on 15 November in a Sacramento shopping mall, when they went to collect wedding rings they had ordered. The police were waiting, having monitored the bank account on which the cheque was drawn. McIntosh was subsequently given twenty-five-years for “air piracy, and using a gun in the commission of air piracy”, and Lopez received a further five to add to her fifty for the bank robbery in Georgia. They appealed the conviction, claiming a ‘necessity defence’, which can excuse an otherwise criminal act – in this case, they claimed, Lopez had to escape because her life was in danger, as she was being threatened by prison officials, a fact they claimed the jury was not made aware of.
Lopez explained that she held a position on the Inmate Council, a group that liaised between prisoners and administration, and worked in the business office handling the prison’s financial records. In her position she had pointed out various prisoners’ problems to the warden, whom she claimed expressed no interest. She then made the implicit threat that people outside might be interested in “misappropriation and mismanagement of funds that she had uncovered while working in the business office”, according to her attorneys. Lopez claimed that not only did the warden threaten her life, remarking that “accidents happen in prisons every day”, but that from then on an increasing catalogue of other threats and actions against her were made, until she felt her only alternative to suicide was to escape. McIntosh added that he felt compelled to help her. The defence failed.
There is always the difficulty in staging a helicopter rescue of whether the machine fits into the landing space, or can lift off vertically without clipping the enclosure. It seems that the pilot who tried to aid the escape of Benjamin Kramer from prison in Miami misjudged his manoeuvrability and caught the blades on the wire fence, bringing the helicopter back to earth. On 18 April 1989, it swooped into the exercise yard of the Metropolitan Correctional Centre in South Dade at 10am and snatched up the waiting Kramer, a boat builder and speedboat racer serving life without much chance of parole for heading a drugs ring.
When Kramer climbed aboard he unbalanced the craft, and the pilot, probably too eager to pull away, apparently did not lift off as cleanly as he should have done. He set the helicopter in a spin, its tail hitting the concertina wire, catapulting it over the fence and causing it to crash nose-first into the prison grounds outside the exercise yard. Kramer broke his ankle, while his pilot accomplice – Charles C. Stevens, who had learnt to fly over a period of six months specifically for the escape – broke his neck. Their intention had been to transfer to a twin-engine plane that would take Kramer to Colombia.
The Metropolitan Correctional Centre is unlucky for helicopter escapees. Three years earlier, another inmate found that the contact who had arranged for him to be lifted out was in fact a federal agent. No sooner had he climbed into the cockpit than he was arrested by other agents aboard the machine.
The Chilean government were none too pleased when, at the end of December 1996, four leftwing guerrillas belonging to the Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front, who had fought General Pinochet’s military junta, escaped from prison in a spectacular helicopter swoop. Knowing that speed was of the essence and that they would probably be engaged in a gun battle, the prisoners were to climb aboard a fisherman’s basket suspended beneath the helicopter, its sides reinforced with bullet-proof vests as armour.
In the event, after the helicopter descended on the maximumsecurity Frente Prison in the capital, Santiago, lift-off did not go smoothly. Patricio Ortiz and Mauricio Hernandez were left clinging onto the basket. When it brought them down in a park where cars were waiting for them, Hernandez had to drop the last three metres whilst Ortiz was crushed beneath the basket and seriously injured. The third member, Ricardo Palma Salamanca, jumped awkwardly and found himself rolling on his head. Only the fourth, Pablo Munoz Hoffman, was unscathed, climbing out through the cables that had supported the basket. Ortiz later surfaced in Switzerland, seeking political asylum, and Salamanca published a book chronicling the group and its escape.
Most helicopter escapes are over in the blink of an eye, the machine coming to ground before anyone can set up chase. However, in July 1988 an aerial chase did occur after three inmates were lifted from the Penitentiary of New Mexico, near Santa Fe. The Aerospatiale Gazelle helicopter then flew eighty miles south to Mid-Valley Airport in Los Lunas, south of Albuquerque, where the police were waiting. A gun battle ensued, wounding one of the convicts, whilst another escaped on foot. The copter took off again, but this time was pursued by others, which started a battle in the skies. As one might expect to see in the movies, one of the state police helicopters was almost forced to collide with a crane, while there was an attempt to ram another pursuing craft. Eventually, low on fuel, the machine was forced down and its occupants arrested, including a woman in the cockpit.
Escape teams have also used what appear to be official helicopters. In July 1986, when a machine with state police markings attempted to lift Stephen Vento Sr, a known Mob figure, from the yard of the Federal Penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, those making the bid were armed with a grenade launcher and machineguns, an indication of the lengths to which they were prepared to go. Still they failed.
The proportion of women involved in helicopter escape bids is surprisingly high, as we have already seen. Joyce L. Bailey chartered a helicopter in December 1985, and subsequently drew a gun from her cowboy boots, forcing the pilot to land in the yard of the highsecurity Perry Correctional Institution, near Pelzer, South Carolina, to pick up Jesse Glenn Smith, William Ballew and James Rodney Leonard. The silver sedan they subsequently escaped in was left four miles from the prison. Another switch was made seven miles further, this car being abandoned in Mobile, Alabama, after it broke down. According to an investigator, Bailey had developed “a romantic attachment” to Smith, who was serving forty years for armed robbery, and had visited him in prison a number of times.
In August 1989, two women hired a helicopter in Denver on the pretence that they wanted to photograph some real estate. But, once they were nearing the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility in Colorado, Rebecca Brown pulled a gun and directed the pilot to land in the prison yard to collect their partners, Ralph Brown, doing time for sexual assault, theft and criminal impersonation, and Freddie Gonzales, serving four years for robbery. The guards held fire because they feared the pilot was a hostage. They were flown to a waiting Ryder truck that Rebecca had kitted out with clothes, Albertson’s fried chicken, Double Stuf Oreo cookies, and condoms.
They were later recaptured after a chase and shoot-out in Holdrege, Nebraska. Both Brown and Patricia Gonzales received twenty years for their venture. Today they are free, unlike their men. Rebecca has divorced and started afresh under another name. She puts her mistake down to emulating her mother’s dutiful devotion to a military husband. Rebecca too thought she was obliged to stick by her man, no matter what, and so set about organising the escape that her husband had suggested.
When Rebecca herself was an inmate she was known as ‘Chopper’, which afforded her protection. “I would hide behind that,” she admitted. “It kept me from getting beat up. I was a very weak person, but because of what I did, I had total, automatic respect.” Her crime has gone down in Colorado folklore, still spoken of with awe by inmates. But she feels she has been lucky to survive both her marriage and her time in prison. “I was a doormat. I’m not that person anymore.”