The Threepersons Hunt

“Niner Zero. Niner Zero. I have a Code Ten-thirteen.”

“Dispatch to Niner Zero. Go ahead on Ten-Thirteen.”

In an embarrassed mutter he explained where he was and the girl on the radio desk had to ask him to repeat it. Finally he got it across to her and asked her to make contact with Trooper Buck Stevens and ask Stevens to bring him a few items. When the awkward dialogue concluded he sprocketed the microphone and reached for his coffee thermos.

He left the door open in the heat; he settled back on the seat, caked with mud, and pulled his hat brim down over his eyes. It would take a while.

Sitting in a half-doze he reviewed the events that had sentenced him to this.

CHAPTER TWO

THE WALLED Arizona State Prison was surrounded by several acres of cropland contained within an eight-foot-high Anchor fence topped with nine parallel strands of barbwire strung in a configuration which in cross section resembled an arrowhead. There were no watchtowers on the fence.

From the corner where the north road intersected U.S. 80-89, the fence ran south along the shrubbed shoulder and travelers on the highway could glance out of their car windows and see small groups of prisoners working the farm fields, guarded by correctional officers who worked in pairs on horseback, armed with riot shotguns and hunting rifles.

The prison had been built just after the turn of the century to replace the infamous and medievally rancid Territorial Penitentiary at Yuma. The present facility stood midway between Phoenix and Tuscon on the arid outskirts of Florence. It was antiquated and inevitably overcrowded. Its administration was as enlightened as could be expected—the state’s penal budget was insanely low—and conditions inside were “average” by national comparisons. It was the state’s Maximum Security Prison but at frequent intervals it had provided assurances that it was not escape-proof.

Only three highways led out of Florence and these were susceptible to rapid interdiction by cars of the Pinal County Sheriff and the Arizona Highway Patrol. Once a man broke out of Florence prison he had little choice but to strike out on foot into barren country where summer heat clung to the ground like melted tar and the pursuit was an amalgam of helicopters, Jeeps, packs of hounds, horsemen and Indian trackers. Yet prisoners kept breaking out and usually one or two fugitives got shot to death by overzealous manhunters but that was regarded as being part of the game because it was a country in which Westerns were very popular and it was no disgrace to die with your boots on.

Most of those who attempted to escape were chronic losers, the ones serving terms of twenty-to-life whose chances at early parole had been destroyed by circumstance, luck or their own behavior.

Fully half the population of the cells spoke no English or next to none. Some were Chicanos: Mexican-Americans who spoke Spanish. Others were Indians who spoke minimal Spanish, no English, and bits and pieces of native American dialects understood by no one outside their own villages. Unable to communicate with their lawyers they had been convicted and sentenced.

Language did not end the problem. The regulations of Anglo law made little sense to Indians whose own laws were based on logic instead of statute, reason instead of prejudice, and compensation of victims instead of punishment of criminals. An Indian who caused another Indian an injury that laid him up was required by tribal law to take upon himself the victim’s job and support of his family until the victim was ready to do his own work again. An Indian did not understand laws that sent him to prison while his victim’s family starved because there was no one to harvest the crops or care for the animals.

The Indian in Florence prison came to understand that he could not expect sanity or reasonable justice in an Anglo judicial-penal system. It was therefore sensible to get out of the place and run into the desert where a man could make his own justice with the earth.

Five prisoners were involved in the July 5 escape. Three were Chicanos and two were Indians: one Papago and one White Mountain Apache.

The break had taken place late in the afternoon. It was the day after the holiday and by their own later admission the two guards were hung over. Evidently the prisoners had taken this into account in pla

The five were not close friends or comrades-in-crime; it was just that they happened to be the five individuals who had been assigned to that particular work detail on that particular afternoon.

The Weather Bureau’s recorded high-temperature for the day, reached just after two in the afternoon, was 104 degrees Fahrenheit. By half-past-four the temperature had not dropped more than two or three degrees and the two horseback guards had posted themselves under the spindly trees that threw a bit of shade alongside the employees’ houses, just within the high fence.

The five prisoners were weeding. The rows were planted in sweet corn but the stalks were not yet two feet high; there was no problem of visibility and the horseback guards were reputed to be expert marksmen.

The five prisoners worked five adjacent parallel rows so that the guards could watch them without distraction. Each prisoner dragged a large burlap sack into which the pulled weeds were stuffed. Ordinarily the guards walked their horses around close to the prisoners but it had been a very hot week and these were not especially troublesome prisoners. By the late afternoon when the prisoners were down at the far end of their rows, the guards were separated from them by the full width of the field and the prisoners were separated from U.S. 80-89 by only a twenty-foot strip of ground and the Anchor Fence.

At first it was not clear whether the beige 1968 Chevrolet came along as part of an outside plan or whether the prisoners simply waited until they saw a car approaching from the south, then went over the fence and commandeered the car by standing in the road in front of it and forcing it to stop or run them down.

They went over the fence by tossing their burlaps across the barbwire and vaulting the nine-foot barrier by boosting one another and by monkeying up the woven-wire Anchor steel with fingers and boot-toes. It was no great athletic feat; the burlap protected them from the barbwire and the only real risk came from the rifles of the two guards under the trees. But the guards had the sun in their eyes and the prisoners were in constant motion once they set their plan in operation. The guards reacted slowly and when they did their shooting was poor; all five of the prisoners got away.

The beige Chevrolet stopped, the convicts squeezed into it, doors slammed, the car moved away to the north.

It was several minutes before the facts were sorted out and several more before alarms were issued. By then the escape car had had time to get ten miles from the prison. The warden alerted enforcement agencies and roadblocks were set up on the Pinal Pioneer Parkway to the south, on the highway below Florence Junction to the north, and on State Highway 287 between Valley Farms and the Casa Grande ruins to the west.

Units of the County Sheriff’s office and the Highway Patrol met for a briefing at the prison at seven o’clock and the hunt went into operation by seven-fifteen. Local police within the town were already searching all streets and driveways and garages for the missing car; three beige Chevrolets were investigated but all of them were owned locally and quickly cleared of suspicion of involvement. Two ranchers arrived at the prison in horse-vans with packs of hunting hounds, and a helicopter like a bloated mosquito hovered near the prison yard, the setting sun throwing a sharp reflection off its Plexiglas bubble.