Empty Promises (31 page)

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Carl Cletus Bowles went to a federal prison first, serving nine years at the McNeill Island facility on Puget Sound. Surrounded by water as cold and rough as it is beautiful, the prison is an island unto itself both figuratively and literally. No one escapes from McNeill, although a few hapless convicts have tried. But
the churning current pulled them under, trapping them in a watery prison forever.
Seven years later, when he was thirty-one years old, Bowles was transferred to the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem to begin serving concurrent state and federal sentences. According to Judge Edwin Allen's sentencing warning, Bowles was never to be considered a candidate for parole. His file at McNeill Island showed he had received seven disciplinary transfers in seven years of incarceration before he came to the Oregon State pen. A parole coordinator had written: "Bowles is extremely dangerous. He has committed crimes of extreme violence on more than one occasion, culminating in the brutal slaying of a police officer."
But when he came to the state penitentiary in Salem, Carl Cletus Bowles seemed to have turned over a new leaf. Psychologists there noted that Bowles now said he felt his crimes, including the murder of Carlton Smith, had not been justified and that he felt remorse. However, the interviewer suspected Bowles was only trying to earn an early release by saying what he thought parole board members wanted to hear.
As the first year passed, however, Oregon prison officials were surprised to find that Bowles was handling imprisonment "exceptionally well." Like most sociopaths, he was an ideal prisoner, charming and apparently eager to get an education and change his behavior. He was a very handsome man, something that all too often blinds observers to what is really going on behind a wonderful facade and clear, friendly eyes. All of us tend, unconsciously perhaps, to view beautiful people as positive and good, and homely people as negative and suspicious. And because Bowles was small in
stature, he seemed somehow less threatening than a six-footer would have.
Hoyt Cupp, the superintendent of the Oregon prison, took a personal interest in Carl Bowles and became a leading advocate for his rehabilitation. In Cupp's defense, this was in an era when inhumane prison conditions were being blasted by critics, and Cupp had done much to renovate the sections of the Oregon prison that were run-down and shut off from the light. Most states had outlawed the death penalty, and rehabilitation was the philosophy of the day. Cupp saw something in Carl Bowles that he thought merited an attempt to save him, and the warden believed the crimes of his wild youth didn't necessarily mark Bowles forever a criminal. No one knew for sure which of the two parolees had shot Deputy Carlton Smith, and all of the hostages they had taken as they sped toward California had been released unharmed. Ted Wilson was shot, yes, but his wound could have come from friendly fire when the police shot at the stolen police unit. Hoyt Cupp was certainly no novice when it came to dealing with prisoners. He had an unblemished three-decade record in prison administration. And on May 17, 1974, Cupp was in Arkansas presiding over the Western Wardens Association meeting. His innovative techniques and his concern for the rights of both victims and prisoners made him the natural choice to oversee the organization.
One new concept being implemented in the Oregon prison system was that of conjugal visits, the theory behind it being that if men were cut off from the women they loved for endless months and years, they would never be able to fit into their families or society again. Conjugal visits between prisoners and their wives had been tried first in a prison in Parchman, Mississippi, in
the late sixties, and the results had been good. Half a dozen years later, a number of prisons were providing trailers and cabins on the penitentiary grounds where prisoners with good records could be alone with their spouses. The Oregon State Penitentiary did not yet have this kind of facility, so the prisoners who qualified for the program were allowed, in rare instances, to visit their loved ones at the women's homes, but always under the watchful surveillance of corrections or probation officers.
Carl Bowles didn't have a wife, but he did have a fiancée. Jill Fina* was in her early twenties, a slim woman with huge dark eyes and full lips. She had begun to write to Bowles, although no one knew for sure where she had heard of him; she would have been only thirteen or fourteen when he and Norbert Waitts made their marathon run through Oregon, California, and Nevada.
Nevertheless, Jill Fina visited Bowles at least a dozen times between August 1973, and May 17, 1974. At the prison, she was known as his fiancée. Superintendent Cupp and Ted Winters, the assistant ombudsman for the governor's office, visited with Jill several times and found her to be a "responsible, concerned type of individual," someone who would be a good influence on Bowles. And he certainly needed it. He wasn't in prison for life— not yet— and having someone like Jill to bond with might make all the difference in the world for him.
Jill Fina really was concerned about Bowles, and she had shown responsibility in her life, but she also had a wild side, and unbeknownst to Cupp and Winters, she was not who she said she was.
She was born Jill Onofrio in Lubbock, Texas, and had run away from home at thirteen. From that time on,
she lived with foster parents in Oklahoma. Although she was alienated from her parents, Jill had an uncle who became a kind of hero to her, and she felt more related to him than she did to her immediate family.
Jill was smart. She graduated from high school in Felt, Oklahoma, in 1969, and for the next three years she worked as an accountant at banks in Oklahoma City. She married a man named Fina and they moved to Monrovia, California, where they bought a house. Her husband was a skilled carpet layer for a Los Angeles firm, and Jill worked as an assistant bookkeeper for an acoustics company in Pasadena. Her boss would remember her as a very good employee who was capable of doing the work of three people. "She was a little wild in her attitudes," her employer said, "but then, she was only twenty-three."
Somewhere along the line, Jill became estranged from her husband and began to focus all of her attention on Carl Bowles. Her letters and monthly visits seemed to give him new optimism, and the pair made plans for a future together when he was paroled. Bowles confided to Warden Cupp that he and Jill were engaged, and he put in a request for a conjugal visit.
There was a long wait, but eventually Carl and Jill were granted those visits. Jill's residence of record was a Motel 6, not a house in Salem, not even one in the section closest to the prison known as Felony Flats because so many parolees and prisoners' families lived there.
Bowles was given a "social pass" —the euphemism for a conjugal visit— on February 17, and he returned to the prison after several hours, right on time. On May 17 he asked for a thirty-six-hour pass, which was refused. He settled for another four-hour pass, which was granted.
At 8:15 on that Friday evening in May, Carl Bowles
left the prison in the company of a young corrections counselor, more of an escort than a guard. He wasn't in handcuffs or leg irons, and his escort wouldn't go into the motel and sit outside the door of Jill's room— he would wait in the parking lot to drive Carl back to prison shortly before midnight.
They drove to the sprawling pink-and-green Motel 6 on the outskirts of Salem. There, Bowles was taken to the room of his twenty-three-year-old fiancée to begin several hours of a social visit. The concept was kind of romantic when you thought about it, with roses and lilacs blooming all over Salem and a lonely prisoner united for only a few hours with his true love.
While Carl and Jill were inside her room making love, his counselor waited discreetly in the motel parking lot, but in a spot where he had a good view of the exit. At 11:00 P.M. he tapped quietly on the door of Jill's room. He waited. There was no answer. He tapped louder. Finally he got the motel manager to open the door with a passkey.
The room was deserted. The escort knew it even as he poked futilely in the closet and slid back the shower curtain. Both his prisoner and Bowles's fiancée were gone— and probably long gone, from the looks of the room. The bed had not been used, the soap in the bathroom was still wrapped, and the paper band across the toilet seat had never been broken. That meant that the pair had at least a three-hour head start. The prison escort told the manager he didn't understand how they had escaped without his seeing them; he'd been watching the exit constantly.
"That's the front way in," the man said. "You didn't know there was a back door?" The chagrined officer
shook his head. "I knew, but I thought it had an alarm on it."
"Not until after midnight."
When the press got word that Carl Cletus Bowles— cop-killer, kidnapper, repeat felon— had been allowed a conjugal visit in the Motel 6 and had managed to easily dupe his guard and escape, there was hell to pay. Governor Tom McCall called Hoyt Cupp home from the wardens' conference and demanded an explanation. Cupp explained that he had indeed authorized short leaves for Bowles so that he might have some hope and some ties with the outside community. Cupp said he believed Bowles would not resume his criminal career when he was released.
McCall was a no-nonsense governor and a decisively fair man. He withheld judgment until an initial investigation was conducted. Then he docked Cupp's pay by $1,000, and gave him a fourteen-day suspension, saying he hoped he wouldn't have to give him more than this "mild" reprimand because of Cupp's long and distinguished career. But he hinted that Cupp's job could be in jeopardy if anyone was injured because of Bowles's escape.
The question arose immediately: Who was Jill Fina? A check into her background brought some startling news. Jill Fina, née Onofrio, had been only fourteen years old when Bowles and Waitts ripped a path through Oregon, California, and Nevada. But she remembered it well. She was not, it seemed, a stranger who had begun to write to Bowles, nor was she his fiancée. She was Carl Cletus Bowles's niece, the daughter of his sister! She was the wild little girl who saw her uncle as a hero.
Ironically, an urgent message had been teletyped to
authorities at the Oregon State Penitentiary in September of 1973 by Amarillo Detective Jimmy Stevens. It read: "Bowles and his girlfriend, Jill Onofrio, are planning to break him out in some way."
However, Warden Hoyt Cupp never saw that message, and it was never entered into Bowles's file. One explanation for this gross oversight was that, at the time of Stevens's warning, there was an uproar in the prison because one convict was holding another hostage with a knife at his throat and was demanding his own release.
Detective Stevens said that his source had reported that Jill was "scared to death of Bowles," but that made no sense. If she was frightened of him, why had she visited him so often? Why had she left her home, her husband, and a good job to journey a thousand miles once a month to visit him, to talk with his warden and his counselors, even to pretend so convincingly to be his fiancée? All they could deduce was that Bowles had some kind of Svengali-like influence over Jill or that there might be an incestuous relationship between the young woman and her uncle. Or perhaps they had both inherited the "danger gene"; like her uncle, Jill Onofrio Fina yearned for excitement and danger and a walk on the wild side. Now she had it. She was somewhere out there with an escaped felon.
In Eugene, the widow of Deputy Carlton Smith, now remarried to another officer in the Lane County sheriff's office, was shocked to hear that Bowles had been given a conjugal pass. "I never would have thought a pass would have been issued to someone of Carl Bowles's nature," she said. "It's especially difficult to explain to my four children, who range in age from nine to seventeen, how their father's killer managed to escape. It's pretty hard to explain what a conju
gal pass means. If he had been issued a supervised pass to visit a sick mother or to go to a funeral, that wouldn't be so hard to take. But how do you tell a child that they gave him a pass to visit a girlfriend in a motel?"
Bowles's escape sat hard with other prison inmates, too. They worked hard to earn privileges, and the notoriety of this escape brought a clampdown on all prisoners, even those who really did want to go straight. In 1973 some 30,000 social leaves and work releases were granted, and only .023% of the prisoners failed to return on schedule. There were 24,941 passes for work release for one to twelve hours, 1,800 work-release passes for more than twelve hours, and 3,839 unescorted passes for social reasons— for visiting families or for job interviews.
But never before had a pass been issued to a man with a record like Bowles's. Governor McCall pleaded with Bowles to return for the sake of the warden who had trusted him. But wherever he was, Bowles didn't give a hoot about Warden Cupp.
Six days after the couple disappeared from the motel, Jill Fina's Thunderbird was found on the Reed College campus in Portland, 47 miles north of Salem. Three other vehicles had also been stolen in the immediate area, and their descriptions were put on Teletype wires as possible getaway cars for the fugitive duo.
No one knew where the couple had gone. They had not shown up in Texas to visit Carl Cletus's mother. They had seemingly gone to earth, just as a wily fox hides from mounted hunters. Investigators didn't know if they were still together, or if Jill was even still alive; she might merely have been an expedient way out for Bowles, an adoring niece who had now become expendable.
There probably had never been a manhunt in Oregon that was as important to the officers who now looked
for Carl Cletus Bowles for the second time. None of them had forgotten the fallen deputy in Eugene. They knew that any cop who approached Bowles faced the same danger.
It was almost a month after Bowles's escape when he finally made headlines again. On Thursday, June 13, a pretty young woman entered a mom-and-pop grocery store in South Eugene and carried half a rack of beer to the checkout counter. She was asked for proof of age and presented a driver's license bearing the name Jill Fina— in Eugene, of all places, where the names of Carl Bowles and Jill Fina were familiar to almost every man on the street! The son of the store owner sold her the beer and then attempted to follow her when she left the store. When he lost sight of her, he ran back to call the police. They had been waiting for this call, and already had a contingency plan. Stealthily, a cordon of local officers and FBI agents positioned themselves around a fourteen-block area. The search moved into high gear when the sun rose the next morning. At 8:00 A.M., two federal agents in a stakeout car spotted a man who looked remarkably like Carl Bowles at the corner of South 34th and Willamette Street. They approached him to ask for his I.D.