prison for the rest of his miserable life. They say Hicks’s bandage was slipping down over his eyes and he was screaming for somebody to help him. It took the doc and Freddie both to pull Bob Baker offa him. That’s the story we heard Another thing we heard was that a couple of days later Heck Runyon was seen at side door of the county jail one evening and Freddie Baker let him in and they say Heck didnt come out of there again until late at night.
Hicks got fired sure enough. He told the newspaper he was being made a whipping boy. Said it was unfair to be blamed for being attacked from behind. He never really recovered from that whack on the head with a crowbar. It left him part-crippled and strange in the head for all his days after. He couldnt walk in a straight line but had to bear at a slight angle to the direction he really wanted to go, and one eye was always half-closing on him. He got to talking to himself, even when he was walking down the streets and there was people all around. He’d sit on a park bench sometimes and get into mean whispering arguments with himself. He took bad to drink. A coupla years after the jailbreak he killed a fella in a drunken fight or some such and got sent to prison for life. That’s a true fact.
As for Mobley and Matthews, some said Old Joe sent them both out of Florida to lay low for a while. Others say it was only Mobley he sent away—sent him off to wherever John Ashley had hid out a dozen years before when there was a warrant on him for killing the Indian. Wherever it was Hanford Mobley went, he came back about a year later—which was the worst mistake of his life.
Most stories about Roy Matthews said he went off on his own, out to California or up to Tennessee or over to Mexico, depending on which story you wanted to believe. But nobody never saw hide nor hair of him again, not in South Florida. A Palm Beach County deputy who was visiting kin in Cleveland a few months after the jailbreak said he saw him working as a cook in a restaurant on Lake Erie. Said he got up from the table and headed for the kitchen to ask him a few questions but the fella saw him coming and ran out the back way and flat disappeared. Deputy
Clarence Middleton went to trial with his jaw still wired shut. When the judge read the charge against him and asked how he pled, guilty, or not guilty, he said something through his clamped teeth and the judge said “What?” and his lawyer said “That means guilty your honor.” Middleton’s lawyer was a Miami sharpie named Ira Goldman. The story was, Goldman made a deal with the state for Clarence to plead guilty in exchange for a fifteen- year sentence instead of the thirty years the state said it was gonna call for and the judge said he was gonna give him if they was put to the trouble of a trial. The whole thing didn’t take twenty minutes. Two days later Clarence Middleton was on his way to Raiford. That was in October of nineteen and twenty-three.
There’s a lot nobody’s ever been able to figure out for sure about what exactly happened in the next few weeks after that, but there’s no disputing the basic facts. It’s a fact that when Clarence Middleton got to Raiford he was back together with John Ashley. And it’s a fact that Ben Tracey—a convict friend of John’s—finished his sentence and was set loose about a week or so after Clarence got there. Three days later Tracey was seen driving a brand new blue Chevrolet sedan on the streets of Tallahassee, about sixty miles southeast of Marianna, which is right near where the road camp was that Clarence Middleton got sent to after just a couple of weeks at Raiford. Ray Lynn, another prison pal of John Ashley’s, got sent there with Clarence—thats a fact too. Finally, it’s a fact that sometime in the first week of November and barely three weeks after he went to prison, Clarence Middleton and Ray Lynn escaped from the Marianna road gang. They did this just one day after John Ashley someway or other broke out of the penitentiary a Raiford.
All thats a fact. The rest is just stories. A lot of guessing and supposing and probly. What probly happened is Old Joe spread some money around to the right people at Raiford. That’s what
As time went by, the most popular story we heard about how Clarence Middleton and Ray Lynn escaped was they somehow picked the lock to their legchains just before the gang was lined up at the end of the workday to get put in the truck back to camp and next thing anybody knew, the two of them was gone into the pineywoods. The main highway wasnt but a few miles off and there wasnt no time to go get the dogs from back at the camp, so a couple of the guards with rifles took off after them. Said they damn near caught up to them. Said they saw them getting into a blue Chevy sedan and heading off down the road in the twilight and could hear them laughing. Said they fired at them but if they even hit the car they didnt do enough damage to stop it. That was the story we heard. Most times, whoever was telling it would wink when he said Clarence and Ray “picked” the lock to their chain, a wink meaning that like as not the “pick” used on the lock was a guard’s key. There was lots of winks went with that story. Besides using their key, the guards might of been paid to run slow when they went after them, or to be sure to miss when they shot at them. In them days money could buy you a whole lot of cooperation from prison guards, who the state never did pay any bettern coolies. Everbody knew that. Old Joe had found out it was true the first time John went to prison.
It was money that got John Ashley out of Raiford too—leastways the way we heard it. One afternoon he told a rockpile guard he was feeling sick and so the guard took him over to the infirmary. The guard was spose to stay with his prisoner ever minute, even while the doc looked him over. But so happened the doctor wasnt in his office when they got there and the clerk didnt know where he was at. The guard told John Ashley to sit tight in the doctor’s office where there wasnt even a window, and he told the clerk in the outer office to give a holler if the prisoner so much as stuck his head out the door. Then he went off to look for the doc. When they got back fifteen minutes later the clerk wasnt there and neither was John Ashley. The clerk told the investigators he’d forgot John Ashley was in the office and so he’d gone over to the guards’ mess for a cup of coffee. The warden ordered an immediate lockdown and every foot of the prison got searched but they couldnt find him nowhere. They figured the only way he coulda got out of the walls was on one of the rockpile trucks that delivered boulders that afternoon. When the cops went out to the quarry company to talk to the drivers they couldnt round up but five of the six. They never found the other one, not then nor ever after, and so they were sure he’d been the one to help John Ashley to escape. It’s as good an explanation as any, but that dont mean it’s the true one. The only true thing anybody can say about that escape is that it was awful damn easy. The kind of easy you get only by paying for it.
Of course nobody could
You’d of thought that when he heard about three of the Ashley Gang breaking out from prison within a day of each other and just six weeks or so after Hanford Mobley and Roy Matthews escaped from the Broward jail, Bob Baker would of let a holler you could hear to Pensacola. But he didn’t. They say when he got the news about John getting away from Raiford for the second time in his life he was sitting at his office desk and trimming a cigar. It was Slim Jackson who told him the news and he said later that Bob Baker just looked at him with no expression at all and then went right on trimming the cigar. Slim sat down and waited to hear what Bob might have to say about it but he never said a word. Just trimmed at the cigar till the leaf came apart in his hands and he dropped the mess on the floor and brushed his hands and took his pipe out of his shirt pocket and started cleaning that. Slim sat there about ten minutes and then got up and left. They say Bobby just sat there and fiddled with his pipe and smoked it some and didnt say a word till some reporters came to ask what he thought of the escapes. He said he expected all three fugitives to be recaptured before long and he hoped the next time they were locked up in stronger jails and looked after by more honest guards. They say the reporters laughed but Bob Baker didnt smile when he said it.
Lots of folk was feeling sympathy for him. They saw him as a good man and a good sheriff and had come to respect him plenty. His cousin Freddie was probly the only lawman in all Palm Beach County who was more popular. The Ashley had always had friends and admirers who appreciated their independent spirit but, little by little, more
