Inside the Buick, Pickard left behind a paperback describing how to vanish from public view and establish a new identity. Police also found two pamphlets titled “Escape From Controlled Custody” and “How to Survive Federal Prison Camp.” In the trunk were several more instructional brochures: how to obtain an international drivers’ license; how to file for a concealed-weapons permit in Florida; strategies for surviving a police interrogation; and how to hide contraband in public places. Were there any further doubt that they had the right suspect, the cops also located a Department of Justice handbook on controlled substances in the back seat and a catalogue of surveillance equipment in the glove compartment.
Fortified half an hour later by a small army of DEA agents, the Kansas Highway Patrol joined Wamego police and a squadron of Pottawatomie County Sheriff ’s deputies in a full-on flashlight dragnet, crisscrossing the cornfields. Helicopters with infrared scanners and packs of bloodhounds aided in the search. When that failed, a house-to-house canvas of the rural hinterlands surrounding Wamego lasted through the night.
The following morning, a farmer named Billy Taylor rang the sheriff ’s office. A stranger claiming car trouble was holed up in Taylor’s barn out on Military Road, four miles west of Wamego.
Taylor had found the man snoozing in the cab of his old pickup at daybreak. If it weren’t for his dirty sneakers and grubby clothes, Taylor might have bought his story. The fellow seemed more like a professor than a hobo. He was cool as a cucumber when he asked Taylor to drive him to nearby Manhattan. Taylor gave him a nod, but added that he needed to put oil in his rig first. Then he called the sheriff.
With neither lights nor sirens blazing this time, a squad car eased onto Taylor’s property. Taylor had engaged the stranger in small talk until he caught sight of the deputies. Pickard saw them at the same time.
Once again, Pickard ran off through the fields, but this time, the deputies stayed in their squad car and kept pace right behind, bumping over irrigation ditches and shorn stumps of cornstalk. After a thousand yards, Pickard collapsed, breathless.
“You’ve got me,” he told them.
Tucson Federal Penitentiary—July 8, 2018
Inside the antiseptic glare of a fluorescent-flooded visiting room the size of an NBA arena, contact is limited to a hug or handshake upon greeting and departure. Khaki-clad inmates sit in one set of chairs and visitors in street clothes on another. They face each other. No touching. The place looks benign, if sterile, but make no mistake: there is violence here.
William Leonard Pickard leans across a four-foot gap that separates him from his visitor.
“While the guards were distracted, inmates circled ’round,” Pickard confides. He keeps his voice low, his pale blue eyes tilted down. “One inmate steps in, stabs him eighty times.” His eyelids flutter. His normally low timbre hitches a notch at “eighty.”
“Eighty times?” asks his incredulous visitor.
“Eight,” says Pickard, pantomiming the jackhammer action of a shiv against his own narrow torso. He blinks twice then glances away, leaving the visitor in doubt as to whether he’s heard correctly.
“Eight?” the visitor repeats.
Pickard leaves the question hanging, neither confirming nor denying.
“It was David Mitchell!” he hisses. “The guy who kidnapped Elizabeth Smart?” Pickard sits back in horrific triumph. “Blood everywhere.”
Pickard looks askance at two correctional officers kibitzing nearby. Bored at having to spend another Sunday afternoon chaperoning, the guards will clock out once visiting hours end and prisoners return to their Spartan quarters.
Pickard has been in residence almost a dozen years. He has lost count of the attacks he has witnessed. David Mitchell is just the most recent. Several were far more grisly. His point: don’t let the benign trappings of visiting day fool you. Federal prison is a damned dangerous place.
Tucson isn’t the nation’s worst. The penitentiary at Florence, Colorado, 800 miles north of here is a Level 5 and houses such criminal elites as Unabomber Ted Kaczynski,1 World Trade Center mastermind Zacarias Moussaoui, and Silk Road internet wunder-kind Ross Ulbricht. Florence is far safer than Tucson. The difference is that everyone is locked down all the time—the equivalent of solitary confinement, 24/7. Not much room for either violence or intimacy.
Pickard’s home base is also locked down frequently. It has had its own set of notables: celebrity felons as varied as ex-Black Panther
H. Rap Brown, Utah polygamist Warren Jeffs, Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger Jr. and, of course, Brian David Mitchell, the sixty-four-year-old street-preaching pedophile who kidnapped fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Smart in 2002 and kept her indentured as a sex slave for nearly a year.
According to Pickard, Mitchell is the latest of Tucson’s 1,500 high-risk inmates to fall victim to gang violence and guard indifference.2
So was wheelchair-bound Bulger, though the scuttlebutt around the yard was that Whitey had been caught colluding with a prison employee who sold his autograph on eBay. Bulger was summarily shipped out as punishment.
“He was disinclined to walk the yard, but had been seen in the library,” recalled Pickard. “An inmate approached me one day with a note from Whitey, saying he was aware of my case and wanted to talk about his experience with LSD in 1957 at the Atlanta Penitentiary.”
In those days, the federal government occasionally sought drug research volunteers among soldiers and prison inmates, noted Pickard. Whitey claimed to be among them.
“Generally, inmates volunteering for drug researchers were not told of the substance’s identity,” said Pickard. It didn’t necessarily have to be LSD. Could have been mescaline or psilocybin or any of a dozen other psychedelics. “I told him to visit me in the library, but he never made it.”
Instead, in 2018, Bulger was transferred to Hazleton Penitentiary in West Virginia where he was bludgeoned to death with a sock load of padlocks. He was eighty-nine.
“So, death can occur at any time, for any reason, even over some personal illusion or another,” said Pickard. “Other than knives, ‘locks and socks’ are the preferred method.
