Body Leaping Backward by Maureen Stanton

Author:Maureen Stanton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

Walpole Prison was called “escape-proof,” but shortly after it opened an inmate named John Martin escaped by tucking himself between the body and frame of a milk truck, Cape Fear–style. Unfortunately for Martin, cops spotted him two hours later walking down Main Street in the bordering town of Norfolk. In Martin’s second attempt, he wore a guard uniform he’d stolen, dyed his skin with tea bags, drew a crayon mustache on his face, and then brazenly strolled toward the exit, nearly making it before a tower guard grew suspicious.

That same year Frank Drozdowski, an ex-Marine serving life for murder, walked away from a coal silo outside the prison where he worked as a trusty. He tramped through the woods and cedar swamp surrounding the prison for five hours, then stumbled onto the road near Pondville Hospital just three hundred feet away, where he was caught. Another inmate, Michael Thompson, wedged himself between some furniture on a delivery truck and passed through Walpole Prison’s gate, but the truck was traveling only a mile down the road to Norfolk Prison. When Thompson stepped out of his hiding place, he was still behind prison walls.

After the prison opened in 1956, the town of Walpole’s selectmen asked the commissioner of corrections to sound an alarm when a prisoner escaped, and so occasionally we heard sirens, deep resonant blasts like tornado warnings in the Midwest. When the alarm sounded, how were we supposed to react? Lock ourselves inside? Form a vigilante posse? Sue was afraid that escaped prisoners would hide in the woods behind our house, but my mother assured her that escapees would want to get out of Walpole as fast as they could. Still, they’d have to pass through Walpole.

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