pictures. Averting his eyes, Ray tried to kick him in the head, screaming, '
Morris led Ray down the hall toward his cell, which was really a fortified cell
It was all Ray's tailor-made hoosegow, the entire third floor of what had become a citadel within the county courts complex. He would be the most heavily guarded, and most vigilantly watched, man in the United States.
Morris handed the prisoner over to the guards, who escorted him into his cell and removed his bulletproof vest, his handcuffs, and his leather harness. Then he was given corrections department garb to put on. Though it was impossible to tell through the steel skin that covered the windows, the sun was just beginning to rise over Memphis when James Earl Ray's cell door clanked shut.
EPILOGUE
#65477
AN HOUR BEFORE dusk, as Tammy Wynette's 'Stand By Your Man' crackled over the prison radio, two hundred inmates742 streamed into the recreation yard. They took in the mountain air for a while and then fell into their usual games--horseshoes, basketball, volleyball. The prison walls were thirteen feet tall and strung along the top with high-tension razor ribbon wires humming with twenty-three hundred volts of electricity. Armed guards watched from the seven towers that were set at regular intervals along the wall. An eighth tower, near the yard's northeast corner, was unmanned.
It was a cool spring night, a Friday, the start of another weekend at Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary. 'Brushy,' as the inmates called their home, was one of Tennessee's tightest maximum-security prisons, a turreted fortress carved from a hillside deep in the Cumberland coal country, in the wrinkled eastern part of the state. It was a small prison, filled with criminals as hard as the surrounding terrain--murderers, rapists, armed robbers, and other violent offenders. The facility's multiple layers of security, combined with the rattlesnakey wilderness in which it was set, long ago prompted corrections experts to confidently declare Brushy Mountain 'escape-proof.'
As the surrounding thickets of oak and hickory darkened in the approaching twilight, the games played on across the nine-acre yard. The hillsides reverberated with lazy volleyball thwacks and gleeful shouts and the occasional metallic clang of a ringer. If the night's atmosphere seemed languorous, maybe even a bit lax, it was because everyone knew that the prison's no-nonsense warden, Stonney Lane, was on holiday down in Texas--his first vacation in five years. It seemed as though
Then, down on the basketball court, an argument erupted. Some of the inmates got into a fistfight. More joined in. A prisoner clutched his ankle and screamed that he'd broken it. Guards stormed into the yard and tried to break up the melee.
It was almost certainly not a real fight but a well-planned ruse. For at this exact moment, near the yard's northeast corner, in the shadow of the unmanned tower, a smaller group of men took advantage of the chaos. Seven prisoners stooped over an assortment of half-inch water pipes that they'd smuggled out to the yard under their clothes. Working frantically with wrenches, they screwed the pipes together. In a few minutes, they constructed a strange, stalky-looking contraption, about nine feet long, that had little rungs and was curved at one end with something that looked like a grappling arm.
Then, just like that, they hooked their jerry-built ladder over the thick stone wall--and started climbing. Within a few seconds, the first man reached the top. He was a forty-nine-year-old man with a slight paunch, wearing a navy blue sweatshirt, dungarees, and black track shoes. He crawled under the high-voltage wire and jumped into a ravine. Then another prisoner went up and over, and another.
In all, six men bolted over the wall before a guard in one of the towers finally turned from the fake fight and spied the ladder. Someone tripped the alarm, and a shrill steam whistle sang down the hollow, all the way to the town of Petros. Corrections officers found that, inexplicably, the power had flickered out through much of the prison and the phone lines were down.
Now marksmen in the various towers replied with shotgun blasts and a fusillade of rifle fire. Inmates scattered from the base of the ladder. The seventh and last man clambering up the wall, a bank robber named Jerry Ward, was struck in the arm and face with buckshot. He jumped over the edge, smarting and bleeding, but not badly hurt.
The Brushy Mountain guards had no idea how many prisoners might have disappeared over the wall--nor did they know the identities of the escapees. Within a few minutes, lawmen easily caught Ward in the brambles just outside the prison. When they hauled him off to the infirmary to treat his wounds, the prisoner had a curious reaction to the failed escapade: he seemed almost beside himself with joy.
'Ray got out!' Ward cried in delicious disbelief. 'Jimmy Ray got away!'
A LINEUP OUT in the yard quickly confirmed it: Brushy Mountain's most famous prisoner was indeed one of the six men who'd bolted over the wall. In fact, he'd masterminded the plot. James Earl Ray, #65477, had been planning his breakout for months. He'd been saving pipe, figuring sight lines, measuring distances, patiently waiting through the early spring for the greening forests to sprout sufficient camouflage. He'd conditioned his body by playing volleyball and lifting weights. He apparently designed the queer-looking pipe ladder himself, and he was the first one over the wall. Ray had even dropped hints to the media that an escape was imminent. 'They wouldn't have me in a maximum security prison if I wasn't interested in getting out,' he told a Nashville reporter only two weeks earlier.
Yet the Brushy Mountain guards didn't see it coming, even though everyone knew Ray had a penchant for disappearing from prisons. The deputy warden Herman Davis said it was 'the most daring escape I ever heard of.' Scrambling under that high-voltage wire, he said, was all but suicidal. 'If you get yourself grounded, you're a cinder.'
