36 Men in Flight

Lunch hour was over. The convicts--134 of them--sprawled in two long rows stretching from the prison chuck wagon. Four hard-eyed mounted riflemen watched them. Six other armed guards waited near by. The stockade--Cummins Prison Farm in southeast Arkansas--was three miles away. Here were pea fields where the convicts had been working all morning. They were a tough crew, murderers, robbers, rapists, kidnappers--men like Frank Conley, who at 34 had a 21-year sentence for robbery and kidnapping; like Percy Loftin, who at 25 faced life plus 52 additional years for murder, robbery and kidnapping. Their guards were tough, some of them trusties--Arkansas law permits trusties to be armed as guards. There was a new one --Claude Martin, who murdered his wife last year--sitting down, holding his shotgun. He had been made a prison guard only the week before.

Guard Troy Wade dozed in the shade of a tree, his shotgun beside him. Near by, Convict Frank Conley waited, watched, his hand on a knife hidden in his clothes. Far down at the end of the line he saw two convict guards saunter up to the driver of the prison water wagon--an Indian, in for rape--and train their guns on him. At the opposite end of the line two convict guards armed with shotguns quietly moved up on the regular prison guards. It was just 11:50.

It was Frank Conley's moment. The tough, triangular-faced hillbilly with a term in the Federal penitentiary behind him was more resourceful and ruthless than the mass of sullen, stupefied convicts. He jumped Guard Wade, slashed with his knife, wounded him. The new guard, Claude Martin, still sitting down, raised his gun. He never got up. Before he could fire, Conley had grabbed Wade's shotgun, blazed away at Martin with both barrels. Martin fell forward. Conley's partner, Loftin, who had already disarmed the guards at his end of the line, fired another slug into the prone body. Martin rolled over, dead. Conley looked around, saw another guard drawing a bead on him. He raised his shotgun, snapped both empty barrels, just as the guard was overpowered and disarmed by the convicts.

One minute had passed. A handful of men were now in control of the mob, but not the same handful who had been in control a moment before. They had horses, guns, ammunition.

They lined up the convicts and the disarmed guards, two abreast, drove them at a run four miles into the woods, the leaders riding horseback. In a thicket they stopped, conferred on the direction of flight, took the convicts' tobacco, turned them loose. Conley with five others headed south. Loftin moved west. Through the afternoon 104 convicts and guards straggled back to the prison.

Hostages. A middle-aged Farm Security Administrator of Little Rock, Frank Horsfall, was quietly driving home when armed men began to burst from the bushes beside the road. Five climbed into the back seat of the car, and one took the wheel. A philosophical New Dealer and onetime college president, Mr. Horsfall did not turn a hair at the appearance of armed men on the Arkansas landscape. He quizzed his captors about prison conditions, learned that they believed they were abused, since they said the trusties used bull whips on them. They admitted that they had killed a guard. Mr. Horsfall remarked: "They treated us like relatives."

Frank Conley had other things to think about. He pushed the Horsfall car south at 80 miles an hour. A tire blew out. Mr. Horsfall showed the convicts how to change it. On the convicts' order he told passers-by that no help was needed, bought them cigarets, tried to fix the motor when it stalled. "We got along fine," he said. Near Rayville, La., a sudden blinding rainfall forced them to park on the shoulder. A passing car promptly skidded into the Horsfall automobile, smashed a fender against a wheel. The convicts stopped a farmer driving by. He was not so helpful. They held him prisoner. Then something happened that gave Mr. Horsfall a shock and caused his wife to cry out.

In For It. Gladys Diamond, 16, a North Louisiana schoolgirl, was driving by with her girl friend, Voncille Williams, and Jerry Harrigill, 17. Gladys was driving; Voncille and Jerry were in the back seat. Gladys saw the wrecked Horsfall car, stopped to see if help was needed. Armed men surrounded them. "Oh, oh," said Gladys, "now we're in for it." Six convicts piled into the car with them, drove it into gravel side roads. "This is a fine thing to be happening to me," Gladys thought, "what with Daddy being city marshal of Rayville." The farmer raced to town to give the alarm. A thousand men swarmed out of nearby towns to surround a swamp near the Ouachita River. A tire blew out on the convicts' car. They turned out the lights, waited. A long line of car lights approached. Bullets began to whiz in the darkness. An automobile dealer in the posse fell dead. The convicts slipped into the swamp, taking Voncille, Gladys and Jerry with them, the girls screaming.

Frank Conley, nicked, slipped away. Bruce Fowler and another convict decided to go it alone. The three remaining fugitives and their hostages pushed on all night through the thicket. The girls were unharmed, except for the scratches of the brush. The convicts were thirsty, famished, exhausted. The hostages were becoming a handicap. The convicts offered to turn them loose if they would promise to remain in the swamp until morning. They promised; Jerry swore on his Boy Scout honor. Then the convicts changed their minds.

Next day and next night they lay in the swamp. An airplane droned overhead. Most of the other fugitives were caught. Bruce Fowler commandeered the automobile of a cotton-gin operator, abandoned it when a tire blew out, grabbed another containing two sisters and their nephew, forced them to drive to Vicksburg, where police, lying in ambush, shot him in the head.

Murderer Percy Loftin tangled with the toughest hostages of them all. He tried to flag down a 6-ft. oil driller named Will Modisette, who just kept on going, dodging shots. Next Loftin stopped a schoolteacher and friends, forced her to turn her car around--with Modisette turning around too, in hot pursuit. Schoolteacher Pauline Shurtleff raced to a filling station, deliberately swerved the car and wrecked it. When Loftin raised his gun to shoot Modisette, who was running toward the wreck, she knocked the gun upward, and the oil driller pulled the fugitive out of the car, clipped him on the jaw, knocked him out.

But in the swamp, the convicts still held out. On the morning of the second day, the convicts in the swamp sent Voncille out to bargain with the posse. They would not harm Gladys and Jerry if a car would be sent in for them, the doors open, to show that no police were hiding in it. The police refused. Shaky, but still keeping her nerve, Voncille led them to the fugitives' hideout--but after three of the convicts surrendered, and Gladys and Jerry were released, she collapsed with Gladys (see cut p. 15).

Frank Conley did not surrender. Twenty-four hours after his leap on Troy Wade he was found in a pit on the Ouachita River levee, still holding his shotgun, 50 yards from the spot where the posseman had been killed. A bullet through the throat had ended his flight.

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