The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison (49 page)

“The man you’re referring to happens to be warden of the best penitentiary in this fucking system,” a Hot House guard replied coldly, “and around here, we call him Warden Matthews or Mr. Matthews.”

Thinking the statement was a joke, the two outsiders
began to laugh, but when they realized the others were serious they stopped, and for several seconds there was a strained silence at the table. The subject was dropped. What made the exchange noteworthy was that the guard who defended Matthews had only a few weeks earlier used the same racist terminology to describe the warden. Later, when he was reminded of this in private, the guard said, without the slightest touch of embarrassment or shame, “Hey, Matthews may be a nigger, but he’s our nigger now, and I’m gonna back him. He’s earned my respect.”

Shortly after Dallas Scott was taken from Marion to the Hole in Leavenworth, he felt sharp pains in his stomach. When he tried to get out of his bunk, his legs went out from under him and he had to crawl to the toilet. There was blood in his vomit. At first he figured he had food poisoning, but when no one else in the Hole became ill, he knew that it was his chronic hepatitis flaring up.

Scott had been sick like this before. Two years earlier, his legs, ankles, and feet had swollen to nearly double their normal size and he had become so ill that doctors sent him to the bureau’s medical center in Springfield, where he was bedridden for three months. As Scott lay shivering in his bunk in the Hole, he decided that he was about to die. Years of drug and alcohol abuse were finally about to kill him. Yet, even though he continued to vomit and shake, he refused to let the guards take him to the hospital. The only professionals that Scott trusted less than lawyers were doctors, especially those who worked for the bureau. He sipped water to prevent dehydration, and stubbornly remained in his cell.

One afternoon, a guard brought him a certified letter
from the U.S. magistrate in Sacramento who had agreed to review Scott’s motion for a new trial on his 1976 bank robbery conviction. Inside was a ten-page ruling, but Scott only got through the first paragraph before he was swearing.

His appeal had been rejected. His claim that he had been denied a fair trial because prosecutors had never told him about the mysterious fingerprints on the robbery weapon and because part of his trial transcript had not been recorded were “unfortunate” mistakes, the magistrate wrote. But they were also “harmless.”

The unidentified fingerprints found on the pistol could have belonged to Scott’s wife, since Scott had testified earlier that the gun belonged to her. The fingerprints at the bank thought to be the robber’s could have belonged to customers. “Although this court does not condone the prosecution’s failure to disclose the fingerprint information … it is unlikely that the fingerprint evidence would have made any difference in Scott’s ultimate conviction,” said the ruling. There was other evidence that pointed to Scott. Several witnesses had testified that the robber talked in a “funny way,” and Scott had a unique Texas accent. The most common denomination of money stolen from the bank was one-dollar bills, and two hours after the robbery, Scott had redeemed a citizen’s-band radio from a pawn shop by paying $45 in one-dollar bills. The magistrate acknowledged that such evidence was circumstantial, but when it was added together it “pointed towards Scott as the robber.” There was no comment about why none of the witnesses had mentioned Scott’s prison tattoos when they described the robber. Apparently, the magistrate had thought this unimportant.

The fact that part of the court transcript was missing also wasn’t sufficient grounds for a new trial, the ruling stated, because the material wasn’t that relevant to the trial.

“I had been stretched out flat on my back for four
days, about half-expecting ‘Old Scratch’ to come knocking at the door,” Scott recalled, “but when they hit me with the deal from California, I shot straight up off the bunk, cussed, stomped around the cell for a while, then hit the shower and spent sixteen hours digging through my trial transcripts, briefs, case law, notes, et cetera. Suddenly, I felt pretty good. You see, I knew this asshole was wrong. I had them beat at their own game and I wasn’t going to die before I proved them wrong.”

Scott went to work on an appeal of the magistrate’s ruling. He also sent an angry letter to the attorney whom the magistrate had forced him to hire. Scott had borrowed $5,000 from friends outside the prison in order to comply with the order that he be represented at the court hearing. The attorney had filed all the proper court documents and had represented Scott before the magistrate, but Scott was unsatisfied with his performance and he wanted him to know it. “You are a spineless coward and lying piece of shit,” Scott wrote, in a letter firing the lawyer. These were some of the nicer terms he used.

By the time Scott had finished mailing the proper forms to appeal the magistrate’s ruling, it was time for him to be tried in Topeka on the drug-smuggling charges. He wanted to act as his own attorney in the case, but this judge wouldn’t allow it either, and Mark Works, a twenty-seven-year-old lawyer fresh out of a Topeka law school, was assigned to the case. Works, who had never before represented an inmate and had little experience in criminal cases, didn’t have much to work with, especially after federal prosecutors played the tape recording of Scott’s telephone call threatening Bill Hutchinson’s girlfriend.

Scott had always denied that it was his voice on the tape, but there was no mistaking his accent when prosecutors played the tape for the jurors. By the second day of the trial, he realized he was losing and he asked that Works be fired as his attorney. The judge denied his
request. Scott then announced that he wanted to call several inmates from Marion to testify on his behalf, as well as some from Leavenworth. Federal prosecutors immediately claimed that Scott was simply trying to give his buddies a chance to get away from Marion so they could attempt an escape. When the judge denied the request, Scott threw down his pencil and shouted, “This is bullshit! This motherfucker is denying all my witnesses.” Two U.S. marshals scrambled to the defense table. The next day, the judge permitted Scott to call several inmates, but only from Leavenworth.

The jury found Scott guilty and the judge sentenced him to 210 months (17.5 years) and a fine of $750 for attempting to smuggle $500 worth of heroin into the prison. Under the new drug-sentencing laws, Scott had to serve at least fifteen years of the sentence, and it wouldn’t start until he had completed the six years that were still hanging over his head from his conviction for his 1976 bank robbery.

Back in the Hole at the Hot House, Scott was incredulous. The trial was “a railroad job,” he complained, not because he was innocent (evidence at the trial proved otherwise), but because he didn’t feel the judge and prosecutors had played fair. “If I’d have been able to defend myself or could’ve afforded an expensive lawyer, I’d have gotten off,” Scott complained. “This is what sucks about this bullshit system of ours. I should get to play by the same rules as everyone else, but because I don’t have the money and am tagged as a prison gang member, I don’t. When you’re in a supermarket with a ham in your arms and there are six people in front of you each with a ham, and the clerk says, ‘That will be five dollars,’ to each of them and then she comes to you and says, That will be fifteen dollars,’ that is not fair. You should have to pay the same price as everyone else. But everyone always wants me to pay more.”

A few days after his conviction, guards told Scott that he had a visitor. He assumed it was Mark Works
coming to say good-bye. Despite the fact that Scott had wanted the young attorney fired, he liked Works. But waiting in the visiting room were Scott’s daughter, Star, and his two granddaughters, ages two and three. It was the first time that Scott had seen his grandchildren and he spent the entire day bouncing the two girls on his knees, playing games with them, and fetching them treats from the candy machine. “I looked like I had been through a war by the time I got back to the cell,” he said later, proudly.

The visit had caused a flood of memories. “When I was in prison in Lompoc, my wife came to see me with my son, who was then fourteen,” Scott recalled. “I remember looking at that kid, and he looked just like me and I could hear my voice in his voice and he was a pretty hep kid, a sharp kid, and we were bullshitting, and all of a sudden, I looked at him and thought, ‘Damn, I was fourteen the first time I went into the Dallas County Jail.’ I’m looking at my kid and I think, he has got to be similar to what I looked like and he looks like a baby to me. It set me back, ’cause I wondered, ‘How in the hell did I survive back then? How did I make it all those years?’

“It also made me sad because I realized that I’ve spent my entire fucking life behind bars. I’ve been convicted of two lousy bank robberies, yet I’ve never really gotten out of prison. I really have missed everything a normal person gets to do, like raise kids and just walk the streets.”

There was a sadness to his voice. “This gets so old. You get tired of all the silly-ass games—the young bucks who come in here thinking they’ve discovered something new by being tough, the fucking guards, the bureau always fucking with you.

“But after all these years, what else do I got? If I were to get out tomorrow, do you actually think I could change? You think the government is going to give me Social Security? You think I’m going to be happy working
at some fast-food joint flipping burgers with teenage kids? Fuck, no. I went down a path a long time ago and all them doors have been closed, but I never thought it’d end up this way. I never thought I’d spend my life in prison.”

Scott knew that he was going to be sent back to Marion. He also knew that even if he did somehow prevail and get his 1976 bank robbery conviction overturned, he still faced another 17.5 years in jail, and that was equivalent to a death sentence. His recent bout with hepatitis had reminded him of his own frailty. He recalled the doctors’ estimate of his life expectancy back in 1983 when they had first diagnosed his liver problem. Ten more years at most. He was going to die in prison, probably Marion.

“I’m going to keep fighting them,” he said. “I ain’t dying on someone else’s schedule. I know I may not ever get out of here. It don’t look like it now. The rest of my life, I am probably going to spend in a cell locked up twenty-three hours each day by myself. But with all my failures by society’s standards, I’m not a failure to me—in my own eyes—and that’s what really counts. Have I robbed banks? Yeah, fuck yes. Am I an outlaw? Yeah, fuck yes. But so what? You think I invented stealing?

“When I’m laying down sucking that last breath of air, I’ll be doing it alone, and I’m the only one that I got to answer to, and when that time comes and I’m thinking about my life, the robberies and this and that, I’ll be able to say, ‘Hey, I can live with that.’ I never harmed anyone, never stole from anyone poorer than me, never went out of my way to fuck with anybody, and I never let the man beat me. I never ratted on anybody, never kissed a guard’s ass. I stuck with my principles. They sure as hell aren’t society’s principles, but I stuck with them, and that means I can die with a clear conscience.”

A few days later, Scott was transferred to Marion.

Few inmates enjoyed Robert Litchfield’s escape more than Norman Bucklew. The fact that Litchfield had made a fool out of the Hot House guards tickled him. The only thing better, he said, would have been if he had been the one who escaped. “I know I would have stayed out longer than he did,” Bucklew remarked.

Bucklew had lived two separate lives. He had grown up in New Jersey, married his neighborhood sweetheart, fathered a son, used drugs, killed an armored-car guard during a bungled robbery, and been sent to Trenton State Prison. But as soon as Bucklew crawled over the prison wall during Hurricane Belle in August 1976, he had started a new life. He assumed the police would expect him to go home to his wife and son—then five years old—or to contact his parents. Instead, he took on a new identity, headed west, and never looked back.

Bucklew was twenty-seven and, if he had decided to go straight, he might have succeeded in disappearing. But as soon as he reached St. Louis, Missouri, he began robbing banks. He also fell in love, got married, adopted one daughter, fathered another, and eventually got caught.

In the spring of 1988, Bucklew learned that his two
daughters from St. Louis were coming to visit him in Leavenworth. He had not seen Heather and Sarah, now ages eighteen and nine respectively, for three years, and on the night before the visit he was as excited as a child on Christmas Eve.

Most Friday nights Bucklew got drunk, but not tonight. He sat at the metal desk in his cell and made notes about what he wanted to say to his daughters. “Most kids get to know their parents by being with them every day,” he explained. “I don’t got that luxury. I want to give them some understanding about who I am and what I believe.”

He especially wanted to explain himself to Sarah, who had only been three weeks old when he was recaptured. Heather was eight, so she could remember a few things about the year that he spent with her and her mother, Laura Ashmore, before he was sent back to prison.

As he sat in his cell, Bucklew recalled how he had met Ashmore only one week after he escaped from Trenton. He was in a bar when he saw her, then a twenty-three-year-old bleached-blonde beauty, sitting at a table with her girlfriend. Strutting over to the two women, Bucklew asked, “Which one of you girls wants to pick me up?”

Ashmore had laughed and invited him to sit down. “We were both intimidated by Norman’s size,” she recalled. “He was so big and strong.” She and Bucklew spent the next few hours talking. It got so late they decided to have breakfast together at a diner and then Ashmore agreed to go with him to the trailer he had rented.

“I don’t know you and I’m not going to have sex with you,” she said. “I just want to get some rest.” Bucklew rubbed her back while she fell asleep. “He didn’t pressure me or come on strong and we didn’t have sex,” she said later. “He just wanted me next to him.”