Inmate J.L. Bird, #12345-678, had always enjoyed living in California. The scenery was absolutely to die for, and the Mexican cuisine was, without a doubt, the best in the country. Somehow, though, the view didn’t quite seem the same when seeing it through windows covered in heavy metal mesh.

The Marshal had been driving about two hours when Bird reached into his paper sack and pulled out one of the boiled eggs. He gave it a couple of gentle whacks against the aluminum seat back in front of him and then began the tedious process of picking away the shell one small fleck at a time. After a quick inspection to be certain he’d removed all traces of the outer covering, he devoured the egg in two bites. The second one, though, he decided to savor, nibbling at it and letting his tongue enjoy the creamy texture of the yolk. Besides, who knew when the next meal would come.

The inmate seated next to him on his left, a man whose exposed flesh was mostly covered in jailhouse tats, slept soundly. His shaved head lolled from shoulder to shoulder depending on the direction of curves and varying depths of potholes. A bluish-black cobra adorned the back of his head, and the words “You Die” were inked across his forehead in large block letters.

The man directly in front of him wore his hair in long dreadlocks that he’d gathered into ponytail by using a series of bright pink rubber bands. Next to him sat the fattest man Bird had ever seen in prison khaki. His breathing was loud and wheezy and each exhale produced a faint whistle. His nerdish-cut greasy hair was the perfect compliment to the three-day growth of deep black whiskers covering his cheeks and upper neck.

Bird passed the time by thinking about how wonderful it would be to stand outside in the midst of the almond orchard they’d just passed. Or to feel the sunshine on his arms and face while tending to the dairy cows at the massive farm he’d seen back near Barstow.

After traveling through a very long stretch of nothingness followed by desert as far as the eye could see, the driver finally slowed and turned left into what appeared to be an abandoned airport. She pulled over next to a dilapidated tin shed and asked if any of the prisoners needed to use the restroom.

Bird waited his turn as the Marshals let them out two at a time to expel their water right there on the asphalt. The female marshal was nice enough to look the other way while her male partner stood watch over the tinklers.

Twelve men later, and a nice-sized S-shaped river that disappeared beneath the van, the side door was closed and padlocked, and the driver headed straight for a cracked runway with tall, dry weeds sprouting through the jagged openings. She hooked a left after passing a series of rundown metal buildings of varying sizes. And that’s when Bird first saw the menagerie of sheriff’s vans and buses, prison vehicles, and an array of heavily-armed officers from various agencies. A couple of snipers stood on roof of an old hanger, and several sunglass-wearing BOP (Federal Bureau of Prisons) officers stood on the asphalt pavement. They each held a long gun of some sort—pump shotgun or military-style rifle. Those guys were not there to play games. No sir.

“Where are we?” Bird asked the female Marshal.

“My guess would be an airport,” she said, and looked to her partner who politely chuckled at her weak attempt at humor.

“How about this, then,” Bird said. “Where are we going?”

“You know we can’t tell you that, Bird,” said the male Marshal. “Obviously, you’re going to take a little trip. So just sit there and be quiet. You’ll find out where you’re going when you get there.”

Bird leaned back in his seat. Fat Guy was fidgeting in his seat and sweating profusely, and his breathing whistles had grown louder and higher-pitched, almost to the point of “only dogs can hear.” He toyed with the black box mounted between his cuffs. Bird wondered what he’d done to warrant the added security.

Movement on the runway caught Bird’s eye. The officers outside began to assemble into a somewhat orderly formation. They were also watching the sky. Something was about to happen…and it did. A dot appeared above the horizon and, within a matter of seconds, it grew into a large passenger jet.

The plane made its approach and touched down smoothly, stirring up clouds of dust and sending a half-dozen tumbleweeds rolling off into the desert. The massive unmarked jet came to a stop in front of the officers. The roar from its engines was uncomfortably loud.

A rear stairway lowered to the ground and a handful of jump-boot-wearing marshals filed out. They spoke with the group of ground transport Marshals, deputies, and other officers, and then motioned to the driver in control of Bird’s van, who eased the vehicle forward until it was within a few yards of the plane. She and her partner opened the side door to the van and told the prisoners to step outside and line up, single file. A second door on the jet opened. This one was on the side, and a set of stairs lowered until it, too, touched the pavement.

As the buses and vans unloaded their human cargo, a steady stream of t-shirt and khaki-wearing prisoners made their way down the jet’s side stairs. As soon as their blue-shoed feet hit the pavement they were whisked away by the officers who were there to take them to their new home for the next 5-10 years, or longer. Some, like Bird, were on their way to court where they’d testify against co-defendants or to listen as their court-appointed attorneys pleaded for sentence reductions or new trials, or for whatever legal business warranted a flight on the Marshals’ mass transit system.

After comparing papers and photo ID’s, Bird’s group was loaded into the jet via the rear stairway, where Marshals guided them into seats that had seen their better days many years ago.

The interior of the plane was hot and the little moveable air nozzles either didn’t work or were missing. The seat trays had been removed and the carpeting was stained and sticky. Many years of accumulated artificial fruit juice, piss, and vomit, Bird surmised. The aroma of pine cleaner did nothing to hide the stench. He wondered how the Marshals stood being cooped up inside the funky-smelling jet day in and day out.

Within a few minutes they were taxiing down the runway, headed for who knew where. As soon as they reached their cruising altitude the pilot made a brief announcement. “You must remain in your seats at all times. You may not stand for any reason. You may not use the restroom during the flight. The air marshals on board are not flight attendants. They are here to insure my safety and yours. You will follow their instructions at all times. If you have any questions, please hold them until we land. Until then, thank you for flying Con Air. Enjoy your flight.” Only the Marshals laughed at the pilot’s attempt at comedy.

Bird closed his eyes, hoping to sleep the day away. But the nose-whistling fat guy wasn’t about to let that happen. He stood and began screaming some sort of gibberish about being terrified of flying and that he was going to kill the pilot. Well, it took all of four minutes and five air Marshals, a Taser, and a few well-placed blows to the head, shoulders, and lower back to silence that nonsense.

Bird closed his eyes again, hoping the steady hum of the jet engines would help him sleep and send him to freedom, if only for a few hours. Soon he was dreaming of life on the outside. Ah, to be at the coast once again…

 

Next up…Oklahoma City, good food, and the nightly all-nude girlie shows—for prisoners’ eyes only.

I got my start in law enforcement as a corrections officer working in a prison designed to house the inmates that had been deemed as “the worst of the worst.” Other institutions couldn’t or didn’t want to deal them, so they sent those little darlings to us. In other words, they were the system’s problem children. Fortunately for the citizens who lived nearby, our place was like Colonel Klink’s Stalag 13 … we’d never had a successful escape. Some had tried, but never succeeded.

Not far away, within sight, actually, was another prison. It, too, housed some pretty tough customers, but it also had a substantial population of medium to lower custody inmates. Unfortunately, their escape record was marred by a few blemishes and this was a concern to the locals. After all, a couple of the prisoners there had once beaten a corrections officer to death. Another had violently raped a female officer. Not to mention the inmates who’d killed or maimed other inmates. So yeah, escapes were always on the minds of everyone, including the inmates who had freedom on their minds.

As officers, escapes meant something entirely different to us. Sure, the safety of our neighbors and fellow staff were a concern, but it was the other stuff that went along with total chaos that followed the discovery of a missing inmate that really bugged us.

For example:

The Day the Alarm Sounded … ESCAPE!!

1. Count time and the final tally came up one man short. So they counted again and again and again and again and again, until someone “upstairs” was finally able to comprehend and embarrassingly admit that a prisoner was not where he was supposed to be. This process could and did last up to 30-40 minutes, or so.

2. When a count comes up short, inmates, if not already there, are sent to their cells and locked inside. Those at work were generally ordered to assemble in one secure spot and remain there until further instructions were provided, which usually meant an escorted trip back to their assigned cells. A top-to-bottom search of the buildings and grounds was then initiated.

The place was a madhouse, with employees turning every stone, bush, and mattress. Inmates shouted and cheered for their missing compadre, even if they’d never seen the guy before in their entire lives. They banged and shook their cell doors, tossed things out into the corridors and dayroom areas. Some flooded their cells to add to the confusion, hopefully to provide enough distraction to aid in the escape attempt.

3. An hour of internal searching went by without a trace of the missing man, so the brass swallowed hard before making THE call to the regional office.

4. The order is given to sound the siren—a shrill, even more piercing than a fire siren noise that reached for miles—alerting everyone, including neighbors and other nearby prisons that an inmate has indeed escaped. And this is where the real pucker-factor for lower level officers sets in because …

5. Officers are at their assigned posts, guarding the remaining prisoners (watching them play cards and dominoes while yelling and cheering for their new hero) when they see a handful of White-shirts approaching (superior officers are called White-shirts because they wear—wait for it—white shirts). The bosses point at various officers as they pass by. First one then another, like selecting the top canines in a dog show.

6. The pointed-at officers are now part of the search team. These selections are based on absolutely nothing more than an eenie-meenie-miney-mo type system. Time on the job, marksmanship, alertness…they mean nothing. Warm bodies are what’s needed at that time.

7. So off you go to the armory where the “hand-picked” officers are issued a sidearm and sometimes a shotgun, depending upon how many are on hand and how many are in decent working condition.

8. Recently-armed officers are loaded into smelly vans and buses, packed in like the inmates who’d ridden in those very vehicles just hours before. Meanwhile, back at the prison, all time off and other leave is cancelled for all officers. And, no one is allowed to leave their posts until further notice. No one goes home. In fact, more officers are called in to work.

9. The vans and buses head out to the roads surrounding the prison and the wooded areas between. The vehicles stop at regular intervals to drop off an officer who is to stand there until someone comes back to retrieve him/her. This could be hours, or…

10. Night falls and mosquitoes begin to feed on the guard’s exposed flesh.

11. The officer really wishes he’d been issued a flashlight, and something to eat and drink.

12. Midnight approaches, as does something from inside the darkness of the wooded area. It’s a deer.

13. A prison van drives up at 1 a.m.. The passenger, a White-shirt, rolls down his window and asks if the officer has seen anything? He’s holding a bottle of Diet Coke and promises someone will be by soon to relieve him. Doesn’t offer even a swallow of the beverage.

14. An hour later another van pulls up and the driver tells the officer to get in. The officer is told the search area has been expanded and they’re moving him to an area 20 miles away. Still no food or drink.

15. 24 hours later the officer is standing in in front of a house in a residential neighborhood that’s 26 miles from the prison. It’s raining very hard. No rain gear. Thankfully, the homeowner brings hot soup, a ham and cheese sandwich, and cold drinks.

16. 30 hours since the escape siren sounded. A prison van rolls to a stop in front of the exhausted officer and the driver tells him to get inside.

17. The prisoner was located 250 miles away, traveling in a vehicle owned by a prison kitchen employee. She was driving the car at the time it was stopped by state police.

18. The officer, wet, tired, and still hungry, learned that officials suspected the kitchen worker and had alerted police to locate her.

19. The officer also learned that his bosses had stationed him and his co-workers throughout the countryside as merely a precaution in case the other “thing” didn’t pan out.

20. And that, not so much the idea of a dangerous escapee, is why we hated escapes from our facilities.

*Remember, it was a long, long time ago when I worked as a corrections officer. I’m sure times and things have changed a bit since then. However, I’ll still bet money that forced overtime and poor treatment by administration still occurs and is something that’s despised by many of today’s officers.

Mecklenburg Correctional Center, a twenty-million dollar institution built in 1977, was once touted as an escape-proof prison. But double fencing topped with miles of looping razor wire, heightened security measures, highly trained staff, and all the electronic bells and whistles, didn’t stop two of the most dangerous killers in America, James and Linwood Briley, from finding a way to beat the system.

How’d they do it? Did they use James Bond-like electronic gadgets to override the security systems? Did they have a cache of high-tech weapons smuggled inside through a network of hidden tunnels? Or, did they have a team of conspirators posing as high-ranking prison officials? Well, believe it or not, all it took for six condemned killers to break free of their death row cell block was a little bit of planning, a few officer’s uniforms, a portable TV, and a fire extinguisher.

The Briley Brothers, along with four other death row inmates, Lem Tuggle, Earl Clanton, Derick Peterson, and Willie Lloyd Turner, began their plan by watching the habits of the guards who worked in the death row section of the prison. A seventh prisoner, Dennis Stockton, was to have joined the escapees, but backed out at the last minute fearing a bloodbath during the jailbreak. However, Stockton helped plan the escape.

During the planning stage, the prisoners quickly learned what size clothing each officer wore, and they managed to learn the secret codes used by officers that locked and unlocked security doors.

After months of studying the guard’s movements, the prisoners decided to make their move. On the night of May, 31, 1984, the inmates overpowered a few guards, took their uniforms, and then set their bizarre plan in motion. They each put on a guard’s uniform and then used the door codes to begin a journey that started from deep inside the prison and ended with the freedom that awaited them outside the gate .

They took a stretcher, placed a portable TV on it, and then covered it with a blanket. Pretending to be corrections officers, they called the officer working the main gate and said they’d found a bomb. They told the gate officer that the situation was dire and they needed to exit the prison immediately to dispose of the device.

The Brileys and their partners in crime knew the prison had never dealt with a bomb before and figured there was no set procedure for dealing with one. Their assumptions were correct.

The six inmates made their way to the front gate, carrying the faux bomb. One of the prisoners occasionally sprayed the “bomb” with the fire extinguisher, hoping to make the situation seem more realistic. The men placed the device into a prison van and climbed inside. The officer working the controls opened the gate and allowed six death row inmates to drive off into the dark Virginia night. It would be a little over an hour before prison officials realized they’d been hoodwinked.

I remember receiving the call about the Brileys’ escape. It was an odd feeling to learn that some of Virginia’s most notorious murderers were on the run. I also remember wondering how they managed to pull off such a daring move. My first thought was that they’d most certainly killed several people in order to successfully reach the outside. It’s mind-boggling, to those of us in the business, when we hear of any prison escape. But an escape from a death row? Impossible, or so I thought. To understand why I say impossible, you must know a little about a maximum security facility.

Large prisons, such as Mecklenburg Correctional Center, are like small fortresses that contain several smaller fortresses inside the sprawling compounds To reach either of these smaller sections of the prison, you must first pass through several locked gates, doors, checkpoints, housing units, medical facilities, security stations, electronically controlled doors and gates, and you’ll most certainly pass dozens of employees before reaching the exit gate.

The exit is not a simple gate like you’d find in a nstandard chain-link fence. A prison exit is actually two separate gates with a large space between the two called a sally port. The person exiting the prison must approach the gate and press a call button. A guard in a tower is responsible for the electronic gate controls (the purpose of the tower is so that no one can get to the officer and force him to open the gates). Still, there are guards on the ground who visually check to see who is coming and going.

When the ground and tower officers are certain the person at the gate is someone who’s allowed to leave (they should confirm by ID card and facial recognition), the tower officer opens the first gate. The person exiting the prison steps, or drives (there are separate, smaller sally ports for pedestrians), inside the sally port and waits for the gate to lock behind him. Then the officer opens the second gate, which is the final barrier to the outside. There are numerous checks and balances in place to prevent escapes. On the night of the Briley escape, every single check and balance failed. The cause—human error.

The events of May 31, 1984, are best described by Richmond Times Dispatch reporter Bill McKelway. Mr. McKelway writes:

* The following is an excerpt from a Richmond Times Dispatch article written by Bill McKelway

May 31, 1984, was a Thursday, a beautiful spring day.

Richmond Times Dispatch image

Nearly a dozen of the 24 death-row inmates knew of an escape plan. All but six backed out. The plan depended on a domino effect of good fortune.

Guards didn’t notice that an unusual number of death-row inmates suddenly appeared clean-shaven with their hair neatly kept that day. If they had, perhaps the change would have signaled to them that it was “E-Day” — escape day. How could the rough-looking inmates pass for guards if they looked like slobs?

At 6 p.m. in the recreation yard, inmate Lem D. Tuggle Jr. walked over to Stockton with a question.

“We’re gonna leave tonight and I need to know how to get away from here. Can you tell me which roads run into North Carolina and where they are?”

The words were recorded by Stockton in his diary.

Stockton, a moonshine-running country boy, had backed out of the escape; Tuggle figured he would have to drive the getaway vehicle himself.

“I wish you were going,” Tuggle is said to have told Stockton, the only other white man among the group of likely escapees. “I’ll stick out like a bad penny.”

About 8 p.m., the bulk of the prisoners left the yard and waited in a bunch to enter death row’s C pod.

Lagging behind, inmate Earl Clanton Jr. darted into the bathroom adjoining the control booth. The door was unlocked, and no one saw him.

The others quickly dispersed into the pod; guards failed to count them or notice that Clanton was missing.

A nurse arrived to administer medicines, only to find a locked bathroom, where she would usually draw water for the pills. James Briley concocted an explanation off the top of his head, according to Stockton. Earlier in the day, someone had said the bathroom was out of order, Briley told the guards. They believed him, and the nurse went elsewhere.

About 9 p.m., James Briley asked the guard in the control booth for a book from the adjoining day room.

The guard opened the door to the booth, Briley yelled to Clanton, and Clanton burst from the bathroom into the booth, subdued the guard and used the control panel to open all the cells.

Within three minutes, the inmates took control of the pod. Unarmed guards were stripped of their clothes, their mouths were taped shut, their hands tied behind their backs.

Uniforms were piled on the floor, and the inmates searched through them for pants and shirts that fit.

Guards arrived one after another, wondering why there seemed to be delays or that they hadn’t heard back from co-workers. Each was seized by uniform-wearing prisoners. The hostages were kept in cells. Some inmates protected guards and nurses from attack.

When a white-shirted lieutenant was captured, he complied with orders that he summon a van.

“We have a situation here,” he barked, a knife at his throat.

Informed that the inmates had a bomb, a guard brought up a van, making sure to use an older vehicle so an explosion wouldn’t damage a new vehicle.

“So you had this man willing to spare a new van but not seeing anything wrong with six men he  thought were officers possibly getting blown up,” said Lettner, author of the state police report.

The inmates found a closetful of riot gear. They donned helmets and armed themselves with shields. Gas masks dangled around their necks.

They were in absolute control of C pod, even as walled-off inmates and guards in the rest of the building remained oblivious to what was transpiring.

The escape route from Building 1 was still blocked by a guard in the main control room at the front door. She was lured away with a fake report that she had an outside call.

The lieutenant, still threatened, told her over the phone that a replacement would be showing up so she could leave her post to handle the call.

The guard opened the door to the entryway control booth as she saw her replacement approaching, a man she didn’t recognize.

It was inmate Derick L. Peterson. He subdued the guard and called upstairs to James Briley, who yelled out to the other inmates: “He’s in!”

Peterson could hear cheers over the phone.

The van arrived at the sally port inside the prison’s main vehicular entrance. The sally port is a double-doored, cagelike structure designed to isolate vehicles within the two gates so that a vehicle’s contents can be checked and the identity of any personnel entering or leaving the prison can be confirmed.

A vehicle enters through one of the gates; the gate closes; the vehicle is then confined and checked. The second gate opens and the vehicle leaves.

What came next was one of the most bizarre sights to ever emerge inside the walls of a prison.

Six death-row inmates, each one a heartless killer dressed in riot gear, burst through the door of Building 1 with a wheeled stretcher. They yelled they had a bomb; two of the men were hosing it off with a fire extinguisher, supposedly to cool the explosive.

The bomb, under a blanket, was the television set from death row.

The inmates, their identities obscured in the darkness and beneath helmets, hustled toward the van across the prison yard. They loaded the bomb into the van and told a guard to open both gate doors at once.

She briefly objected, saying it was a blatant violation of policy.

But she relented, opened both gates, and the van passed into the pitch black countryside.

The two Briley brothers, Clanton, Peterson, Tuggle and Richmonder Willie Leroy Jones were free.

There had been no bloodshed, no gunfire. A prison van loaded with a TV set and six murderers rolled toward North Carolina. They had $758 in cash taken from guards, plenty of clothes and hundreds of marijuana cigarettes.

It was 10:47 p.m.

Harold Catron, the prison security chief, still remembers the late-night phone call that awakened him.

“They told me death-row inmates had escaped,” Catron recalled.

He responded with an expletive.

Catron’s world suddenly turned upside down.

“My God, I’m going to lose my job,” he thought.

Then his mind tried to absorb the mayhem that might follow.

“I thought of the murders that would happen, the rapes that could follow, as they tried to get away.”

Snook, the lawyer, turned to his wife in bed. The radio was blaring news of the escape.

“I tried to tell them,” he said. “What happened?”

~

The news spread slowly.

Investigations of the escape revealed that precious chunks of time elapsed before area law-enforcement agencies, as well as the state police, were notified of what happened.

Even the on-site prison command didn’t learn until 11:15 p.m., Lettner said.

State police were told at 11:31 p.m. — not by the prison but by the Mecklenburg County sheriff’s office.

In the nearby town of South Hill, the acting police chief said descriptions of the escapees didn’t reach him until Friday afternoon, 16 hours after the breakout. Initial reports from the prison said there were five escapees, not six. Prison officials did not offer a formal explanation.

At the Executive Mansion, Gov. Charles S. Robb had just dozed off to sleep when the phone rang.

“It was 1:30 or 2 a.m. in the morning and I can remember being pretty upset that all this time had apparently gone by before the word went up the chain of command or whatever and got to me,” Robb said last week.

“I particularly remember feeling concern for the inmates who had helped keep harm from coming to the guards.”

As the enormity of the escape began to sink in, memories awakened about the Brileys’ victims, the viciousness of the crimes and the random nature of what had befallen the Richmond area in 1979.

Suddenly, Richmond seemed a city about to come under siege by some terrible, too-familiar force: the Briley brothers.

“I think what concerned me the most was that I had seen firsthand what they were capable of doing. I knew their determination to seek revenge. You never forget the smell of death and the smell of blood from what they did,” former Richmond detective Woody, now city sheriff, said this month.

So Woody made sure he was armed at all times. He drove different routes to and from work and around town, and he moved his family to a safe location.

Judges, witnesses, prosecutors and victims’ relatives were given protection. Even the family of Meekins, whose testimony sent the brothers to prison, was warned to take precautions.

Gallows humor surfaced as well. A set of playing cards with cartoonlike images of the escape and capture would later appear in Richmond.

Neighbors of Warren Von Schuch, who had helped prosecute the Brileys and is now Chesterfield County special prosecutor, fashioned a posterboard-sized sign for the Brileys, pointing them to Von Schuch’s house across the street.

“Actually, I’d moved out of the neighborhood by then,” said Von Schuch, who had started packing heat.

Two of the escapees, Peterson and Clanton, were captured that Friday morning just across the North Carolina border, sipping wine from a bottle inside a coin laundry. Their prison-issue shoes gave them away.

The arrests and discovery of the escape van in the area fueled the notion that the Brileys and others remained near Warrenton, N.C. More than 200 law-enforcement agents in Virginia and North Carolina, along with scores of media representatives, converged on the community, now transformed from a sleepy town to a place where residents waved guns instead of hello.

Warrenton was sealed off by police.

Some residents patrolled their property with weapons at the ready.

“I’m going to blow the man’s head off and then ask questions,” Frank Talley, a shotgun on his lap, told a reporter.

Alleged sightings popped up across Virginia and North Carolina, from Portsmouth in the east to Rowan County, N.C., 120 miles to the west.

Missing underwear on a clothesline near Warrenton sparked fears of a Briley in the area, attracting dozens of officers.

Key investigators interviewed recently, however, revealed that Virginia State Police had reliable information that the four remaining escapees — the Brileys, Tuggle and Jones — had traveled north and passed Richmond before dawn Friday, June 1.

The startling information was kept highly classified. V. Stuart Cook, then head of Richmond’s major-crimes unit, doesn’t recall being told.

But the information focused a key, clandestine element of the investigation northward even as swarms of police and the media chased reports of sightings to the south for more than two weeks.

A blue pickup truck stolen near Warrenton overnight May 31 was the key.

In interviewing the owner, former state police criminal investigator Larry Mitchell said, state police determined the likely range of the vehicle before it would need refueling.

Agents focused on one of the few all-night gas stations along the Interstate 95 corridor north of Richmond.

“It turned out that there was a sighting at a station in Thornburg” about 50 minutes north of Richmond, Mitchell said. The description of the vehicle matched and so did the arrangement of its four occupants: three black men and a white man.

“The white guy was in the bed of the truck facing backwards,” Mitchell said.

Years later, Tuggle would tell reporters he had trouble tracking the escape route because “they made me sit in the back; all I could see was the back of the highway signs.”

Tuggle, minutes after robbing a store clerk at knifepoint, would be arrested June 8 in Vermont’s southwest corner trying to outrace a local constable.

Tuggle was driving the truck stolen in Warrenton.

“He popped like a grape,” said a state trooper when asked the day of the arrest if Tuggle was cooperative.

Tuggle said the Brileys exited the truck in Philadelphia, Mitchell and Lettner recalled.

Tuggle watched the Briley brothers ditch part of their correctional uniforms and a badge in the hollow of a tree in a park in Philadelphia, Mitchell said.

That same day, June 8, police arrested Jones in northern Vermont a few miles from the Canadian border, leaving only the Brileys unaccounted for.

Jones, whose mother persuaded him to surrender, had been driven north by Tuggle.

Back in Philadelphia, state police agents working with the FBI found the uniforms hidden in the tree. The hunt for the Brileys in the City of Brotherly Love heated up.

A key focus was an uncle, Johnnie Lee Council, who lived there.

But Mitchell said agents found it very difficult to track the man’s movement because of the teeming North Philadelphia neighborhoods he frequented and the traffic congestion.

A big break came with a call to a person in New York whose telephone was being monitored. Lettner and Mitchell declined to discuss specifics of the call.

But immediately after the escape, efforts were put in place to monitor Briley relatives, former associates and people they had been in contact with throughout their prison years.

It took two days to locate the origin of the call to New York: a garage in North Philadelphia. The FBI sent an informant to see who was there, Mitchell said.

Descriptions came back fitting the Brileys.

Within a matter of hours that day, June 19, teams of federal agents swarmed the building, catching the Brileys barbecuing chicken over a charcoal fire in an alley.

They had been sleeping in the garage, doing odd jobs and befriending neighbors.

People called them Lucky and Slim. Linwood was Lucky; James was Slim.

Fairmont in North Philadelphia, where the capture went down shortly after 9 p.m., was a no-questions-asked neighborhood notorious for crime and secrecy.

“It’s where people live to prey on other people,” taxi driver Richard Batchlor told a reporter at the time. “You live here, you get preyed on.”

“All I could see was barrels of shotguns,” said Dan Latham, who owned the garage, when police stormed the place. He had no idea, he said, who Slim and Lucky really were, even as the three of them listened to news reports of the escape.

Charges of aiding and abetting against Council, the uncle who helped settle the Brileys in Philadelphia, were dropped.

Within minutes of the capture, Jay Cochran, head of the state police’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation, called the trooper on duty at the Executive Mansion.

When Robb got on the line, Cochran uttered the words that ended 19 days of torment: The Brileys were in custody. No one had been harmed.

~

The Briley brothers returned to Richmond on June 21, arriving at the now-demolished State Penitentiary — located near the NewMarket Corp. (formerly Ethyl Corp.) complex off Belvidere Street — about 9:15 p.m.

Driven from Philadelphia by a cortege of law-enforcement vehicles, the two brothers received a loud reception from the 900 inmates who quickly became aware of their presence.

“I don’t know if it was cheers or jeers,” a supervisor with the U.S. Marshals Service said at the time.

Death by electrocution would soon follow, the end game in a years-long legal process rather than retribution for escaping.

Linwood, 30, went first. His case had been heard by about 40 judges since his arrest in October 1979. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected his final appeal Oct. 11, 1984; he died the next night at 11:05 for the murder of disc jockey John “Johnny G” Gallaher.

Prison officials at the State Penitentiary rejected Briley’s request that his last meal be the same as that of other inmates. He received steak instead of fried chicken.

He was able to hold his mother in his arms earlier in the day, but the same opportunity was not extended to him regarding his son, then 10, a child who went on to become a career criminal.

Hundreds of protesters chanted or wept on either side of Belvidere Street as the death hour approached: one side spelling out “F-R-Y,” the other holding candles.

Cook, of Richmond’s major-crimes unit, witnessed the electrocution, calling it “quick and uneventful.”

Death-row inmates at Mecklenburg signed a petition, saying they would protest the execution by not eating. Eleven of the 19 signers ate anyway.

Linwood Briley’s execution was the second in Virginia after the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. The total is now 102.

James Briley was executed April 18, 1985, also in the electric chair at the state prison in Richmond.

In a last interview, he professed his innocence and his love for his brother, whose death steeled his courage.

James said he had vowed to be nearby at his brother’s execution, something prison officials didn’t want. James said he took two hits from a stun gun and was dragged away.

“I told them I wouldn’t leave my brother. I wouldn’t walk out.”

The morning of James’ execution, fellow inmates rioted in hopes of stalling the electrocution. They injured nine guards in brutal attacks that used homemade knives. In the minutes before he died, James twice looked to witnesses and asked, “Are you happy?”

Tuggle, the last of the escapees executed, chose lethal injection. He died Dec. 12, 1996. A tattoo on his arm spoke to a bitter truth: “Born to Die.”

Tuggle was almost buoyant in his last words to witnesses. He entered the death chamber and shouted, “Merry Christmas.”

 

In 1993, Marcus Wellons was convicted of raping and killing a 15-year-old girl back in 1989. His punishment…the death penalty.

A witness told officials they’d seen Wellons carrying a large object wrapped in a sheet into a wooded area near his home. Police located the girl’s nude body in that same wooded area. Evidence of the murder was also found in Wellons’ girlfriend’s apartment.

Marcus Wellons entered death row at the age of 34, where he waited to die. In the months and years since he first walked through the prison gates, Wellons’ probably passed time by watching TV, reading, exercising, and eating the meals that were delivered to him. His cell was cool in the summer and warm in the winter.

Wellons’ and his attorneys kept the courts busy by filing various appeals, hoping to find someone who could somehow spare the life of the man who brutally raped and murdered a young girl. Even at the end, those same attorneys made a last minute plea to Justice Clarence Thomas, who, by the way, is from Georgia. Justice Thomas passed on the appeal to the full Court, who rejected it.

Last night, twenty-five long years after the crime was committed, Georgia prison officials finally carried out the execution of Marcus Wellons, by lethal injection. He was 59-years-old.

Early this morning, in Missouri, officials there executed John Winfield. Winfield was convicted of shooting three women in the head in 1996, killing two of them. Another execution is scheduled later today, in Florida.

Each time an execution is carried out, my mind takes me back to a night in 1994 when I served as witness to an execution by electrocution/electric chair.

Since it was my job to arrest murderers for their crimes, I figured I should see what could be the end result of my investigations.

And it was that thinking that brought me to this…

Have you ever sat looking into the eyes of a serial killer, watching for some sign of remorse for his crimes, wondering if he would take back what he’d done, if he could? Have you ever smelled the burning flesh of a condemned killer as 1,800 volts of electricity ripped through his body? No? Well, I have.

Timothy Wilson Spencer began his deadly crime spree in 1984, when he raped and killed a woman named Carol Hamm in Arlington, Virginia. Spencer also killed Dr. Susan Hellams, Debby Davis, and Diane Cho, all of Richmond, Virginia. A month later, Spencer returned to Arlington to rape and murder Susan Tucker.

Timothy W. Spencer

The Southside Strangler

Other women in the area were killed by someone who committed those murders in a very similar manner. Was there a copycat killer who was never caught? Or, did Spencer kill those women too? We’ll probably never learn the truth.

Spencer was, however, later tried, convicted, and sentenced to die for the aforementioned murders. I requested to serve as a witness to his execution. I figured if I had the power to arrest and charge someone with capital murder, then I needed to see a death penalty case through to the end.

On the evening of Spencer’s execution, corrections officials met me at the state police area headquarters. I left my unmarked Chevrolet Caprice there and they drove me to the prison. We passed through the sally port and then through a couple of interior gates, stopping outside the building where death row inmates await their turn to die.

Once inside, I was led to a room where other witnesses waited for a briefing about what to expect. Then we, in single file, were led to where we’d soon watch a condemned person be put to death.

The room where I and other witnesses sat waiting was inside the death house at Virginia’s Greensville Correctional Center. At the time, the execution chamber was pretty much a bare room, with the exception of Old Sparky, the state’s electric chair, an instrument of death that, ironically, was built by prison inmates.

Old Sparky, Virginia’s electric chair, was built by inmates.

State executions in Virginia are carried out at Greensville Correctional Center.

Timothy Spencer was put to death on April 27, 1994 at 11:13 pm.

The atmosphere that night was nothing short of surreal. No one spoke. No one coughed. Nothing. Not a sound as we waited for the door at the rear of “the chamber” to open. After an eternity passed, it did. A couple of prison officials entered first, and then Spencer walked into the chamber surrounded by members of the prison’s death squad (specially trained corrections officers).

I later learned that Spencer had walked the eight short steps to the chamber from a death watch cell, and he’d done so on his own, without assistance from members of the squad. Sometimes the squad is forced to physically deliver the condemned prisoner to the execution chamber. I cannot fathom what sort mindset it takes to make that short and very final walk. Spencer seemed prepared for what was to come, and he’d made his peace with it.

Spencer was shorter and a bit more wiry than most people picture when thinking of a brutal serial killer. His head was shaved and one pant leg of his prison blues was cut short for easy access for attaching one of the connections (the negative post, I surmised). His skin was smooth and was the color of milk chocolate. Dots of perspiration were scattered across his forehead and bare scalp.

Spencer scanned the brightly lit room, looking from side to side, taking in the faces of the witnesses. I wondered if the blonde woman beside me reminded him of either of his victims. Perhaps, the lady in the back row who sat glaring at the condemned killer was the mother of one of the women Spencer had so brutally raped and murdered.

After glancing around the brightly lit surroundings, Spencer took a seat in the oak chair and calmly allowed the death squad to carry out their business of fastening straps, belts, and electrodes. His arms and legs were securely fixed to the oak chair. He looked on, seemingly uninterested in what they were doing, as if he’d just settled in to watch TV, or a movie.

I was seated directly in front of the cold-blooded killer, mere feet away, separated by a partial wall of glass. His gaze met mine and that’s where his focus remained for the next minute or so. His face was expressionless. No sign of sadness, regret, or fear.

The squad’s final task was to place a metal, colander-like hat on Spencer’s head. The cap was lined with a brine-soaked sponge that serves as an excellent conductor of electricity.

 

I wondered if Spencer felt the presence of the former killers who’d died in the chair before him—Morris Mason, Michael Smith, Ricky Boggs, Alton Wayne, Albert Clozza, Derrick Peterson, Willie Jones, Wilbert Evans, Charles Stamper, and Roger Coleman, to name a few.

Morris Mason had raped his 71-year-old neighbor. Then he’d hit her in the head with an ax, nailed her to a chair, set her house on fire, and then left her to die.

Alton Wayne stabbed an elderly woman with a butcher knife, bit her repeatedly, and then dragged her nude body to a bathtub and doused it with bleach.

A prison chaplain once described Wilbert Evans’ execution as brutal. “Blood was pouring down onto his shirt and his body was making the sound of a pressure cooker ready to blow.” The preacher had also said, “I detest what goes on here.”

Yes, I wondered if Spencer felt any of those vibes coming from the chair. And I wondered if he’d heard that his muscles would contract, causing his body to lunge forward. That the heat would literally make his blood boil. That the electrode contact points were going to burn his skin. Did he know that his joints were going to fuse, leaving him in a sitting position? Had anyone told him that later someone would have to use sandbags to straighten out his body? Had he wondered why they’d replaced the metal buttons buttons on his clothes with Velcro? Did they tell him that the buttons would have melted?

For the previous twenty-four hours, Spencer had seen the flurry of activity inside the death house. He’d heard the death squad practicing and testing the chair. He’d seen them rehearsing their take-down techniques in case he decided to resist while they escorted him to the chamber. He watched them swing their batons at a make-believe prisoner. He saw their glances and he heard their mutterings.

Was he thinking about what he’d done?

I wanted to ask him if he was sorry for what he’d done. I wanted to know why he’d killed those women. What drove him to take human lives so callously?

The warden asked Spencer if he cared to say any final words—a time when many condemned murderers ask for forgiveness and offer an apology to family members of the people they’d murdered. Spencer opened his mouth to say something, but stopped, offering no apology and showing no remorse. Whatever he’d been about to say, well, he took it with him to his grave.

He made eye contact with me again. And believe me, this time it was a chilling experience to look into the eyes of a serial killer just mere seconds before he himself was killed. All the way to the end, he kept his gaze on me.

Suddenly all eyes were on the red telephone hanging on the wall at the rear of the chamber—the direct line to the governor. Spencer’s last hope to live beyond the next few seconds. It did not ring.

The warden nodded to the executioner, who, by the way, remained behind a wall inside the chamber, out of our view. Spencer must have sensed what was coming and, while looking directly into my eyes, turned both thumbs upward. A last second display of his arrogance. A death squad member placed a leather mask over Spencer’s face, then he and the rest of the team left the room. The remaining officials stepped back, away from the chair.

Seconds later, the lethal dose of electricity was introduced, causing the murderer’s body to swell and lurch forward against the restraints that held him tightly to the chair.

Suddenly, his body slumped into the chair. The burst of electricity was over. However, after a brief pause, the executioner sent a second burst to the killer’s body. Again, his body swelled, but this time smoke began to rise from Spencer’s head and leg. A sound similar to bacon frying could be heard over the hum of the electricity. Fluids rushed from behind the leather mask. The unmistakable pungent odor of burning flesh filled the room.

The electricity was again switched off and Spencer’s body relaxed.

It was over and an eerie calm filled the chamber. The woman beside me cried softly. I realized that I’d been holding my breath and exhaled, slowly. No one moved for five long minutes (I later learned that this wait-time was to allow the body to cool down. The hot flesh would have burned anyone who touched it).

The prison doctor slowly walked to the chair, placed a stethoscope against Spencer’s chest, and listened for a heartbeat. A few seconds passed before the doctor looked up and said, “Warden, this man has expired.”

That was it. Timothy Spencer, one of the worse serial killers in America was dead, finally.

Strange, but true facts about Spencer’s case:

– Spencer raped and killed all five of his victims while living at a Richmond, Virginia halfway house after his release from a three-year prison sentence for burglary. He committed the murders on the weekends during times when he had signed out of the facility.

– Spencer was the first person in the U.S. executed for a conviction based on DNA evidence.

– David Vasquez, a mentally handicapped man, falsely confessed to murdering one of the victims in the Spencer case after intense interrogation by police detectives. He was later convicted of the crime and served five years in prison before DNA testing proved his innocence. It was learned that Vasquez didn’t understand the questions he’d been asked and merely told the officers what he thought they wanted to hear.

– Spencer used neck ligatures to strangle each of the victims to death, fashioning them in such a way that the more the victims struggled, the more they choked.

– Patricia Cornwell’s first book, Post Mortem, was based on the Spencer murders.