hounded
Another piece of participatory journalism; the runner, of
course, was me. Duke Blackburn was very enthusiastic about doing this piece, and
since then I've done half a dozen more on him and his people. He's a fascinating
man. We're alike, I think, in one respect -- we're having happy childhoods.
Incidentally, the line in the penultimate paragraph about the big wet kiss was
was edited out of the story for PC considerations. I put it back in for the Web
site.
Jackson Ga. - The runner slips
into the forest while the distant trees still shield him from the guard in the
white tower a quarter-mile away.
It's a gray, windless day and the ground is wet from a
nighttime shower; more rain will fall any time now. A bad day to run, but you
take your chance when it comes. The runner figures he's got half an hour, no
more, before they realize he's gone, and then they'll come after him with a dog.
So he trots slowly through a fairly open part of the forest. Running full-tilt
will wear him out too soon; he'll start tripping and falling and making
mistakes.
Day like this, it's a dog's day. The damp will keep his scent
on the ground, and there's no wind to blow it away.
These woods are full of game, but they run alongside a busy
highway and they're noisy; you could run an elephant through and no one would
hear it. In the kennels, you can hear bloodhounds barking and baying a long way
off. But they're quiet when they're working, not like the beagles they use over
in Alabama. He won't be able to hear the dog. The dog doesn't need to hear him.
Wayne Garner's two-year reign as corrections commissioner has
been filled with controversy, but one aspect of it is incontrovertible ---the
state's prisons have quit leaking inmates. Twenty-four men have broken out of
prison in that time, half as many as in the previous two years ---and all of
them have been caught.
This success is the envy of other Southern states and the
pride of Duke Blackburn, the tough, wiry man whom Garner appointed as his
director of special operations. At the outset of his appointment, Blackburn was
responsible for all prison-related investigations, keeping order within the
prisons and retaking those who fled.
Under his command, tactical squads were trained and put in
place at each prison to quell disturbances. He has a dozen fugitive trackers,
most of them assigned to GBI-run fugitive squads, and an elite eight-man hostage
rescue team. Blackburn spends much of his time in the field working alongside
his men during an escape. He recently relinquished control of the tactical
squads to avoid any appearance of a conflict with his investigative duties,
which include internal matters
The prison system has more than 70 dogs ---drug and bomb
sniffers used to help local law enforcement agencies, as well as trackers
---housed at nine major prisons around the state. They are divided into 20
teams, each with two or three full-time trainers and handlers.
The scent the trackers pick up comes from dead skin cells,
which are constantly flaking off everyone. Anyone running through forest or
underbrush leaves an even better trail, since more cells are rubbed away by
branches and bushes. "The more they run, the better the trail," says
Capt. Gordon Burgamy, coordinator of the prison system's dog teams.
"This weather is just about perfect" says Burgamy,
a big man with a sleepy smile. "Hot weather's bad. The dogs get exhausted
real quick, and then we have to bring up another one." German shepherds are
good dogs on a hot trail, Burgamy says, but bloodhounds are the world's best on
a cold trail. Basically gentle dogs, they are trained only to track; they are
unlikely to harm their quarry unless he should attack them.
A fugitive is tracked by one dog at a time, held on the leash
by his handler, with another handler bringing up the rear as security, helping
the active handler keep the dog on the right track. Dogs can be distracted by
the scent of deer or other game and by the scent of humans whose trail the
fugitive happened to cut across. Tales of dogs picking up day-old trails are
fiction.
"Anything older than two or three hours is real cold,
real difficult," Burgamy says.
The runner has
no plan. If he can fool the dogs, maybe he's got a chance. After a quarter of an
hour or so, he comes to a narrow stream with banks 3 or 4 feet deep. There
doesn't seem to be much water in it. It runs parallel to the runner's path. He
stumbles down the bank and into the cold water, and starts slogging back the way
he came. The fugitives in the books he's read always used water to throw off the
dogs.
He doubles back for five minutes, sinking at times up to his
knees in unseen holes in the stream, before he finds a place with some rocks and
a sturdy sapling and hauls himself out. His breath is short now as he turns and
begins trotting in his original direction, toward the dense part of the forest.
All the handlers have their favorite stories and memorable
hunts, but none is so remarkable as the pursuit of Kenny Putnam.
Blackburn calls him Kenny, because he admires a man who is
good at what he does, and what Kenny was good at was escaping. He didn't amount
to much as a criminal, evidently, since he had to escape from custody five times
---but only once, Blackburn is quick to point out, from state custody.
"We had him in prison, and he convinced the FBI he knew
something about some bank robberies in North Georgia," Blackburn says,
"so they took him up to the Gilmer County Jail, and of course he was long
gone.
"Kenny made a game out of it. We chased him for three
days. He's a woodsman, and he could run through those laurel patches like a buck
deer. He doubled back once and he told us later he laid up and watched the dog
and the handler go right past him. We finally found him in Decatur, Texas,
working for a carnival."
Burgamy recalled a five-day chase after a convict who escaped
from Rivers State Prison near Milledgeville.
"He got to the Oconee River right after he got out, and
before he jumped in he took off his shoes and left them there," Burgamy
said. "He swam the river and went running barefoot for five days. We'd lose
his trail, and then he'd break into someone's house and steal some food and
clothing, somebody would spot him, and we'd be after him again. He took clothes
from several places, but evidently he decided he could run better barefoot. When
we finally got him, his feet were red as a barn and about as big."
In the thick woods, the
runner's pace slows to a walk. The long "wait-a-minute" vines snatch
and grab at him, their thorns slicing flesh even through the jacket and his
denim trousers. They cannot be broken; if one catches him he has to stop,
disentangle himself and then go around it.
It's slow going, but it will be just as slow for the pursuit
and it gives him a chance to get his breath back. He works his way toward
another creekbed, close to the edge of the forest. The hunters must be on his
trail now, but he has no idea how close they are.
He reaches another stream with only a few inches of water in
it and he isn't sure whether it's enough to cover his footprints. But it's worth
a try. When he gets into the water, he sees a tree that has fallen across the
creek and flattened out until it's almost a hammock. He wades downstream to the
natural bridge, grabs a branch, tests it for strength and begins hauling himself
up. He's got both feet on the tree when the branch breaks, dropping him on his
back into the creek.
Blackburn's men, from the dog handlers to the fugitive squad
hunters, display an intense loyalty toward him and Garner. Sgt. Stan Wicks, in
charge of the dog teams at Jackson, leans against his shiny new pickup truck and
says, "You should have seen the stuff we used to have to drive. We had
trucks that wouldn't run half an hour without breaking down. Now we've got more
equipment, more people, and we're a lot more organized."
Blackburn and his men are implacable, but they deal squarely
and honestly with their prey. When convicted murderers Ian Dwight Harris and
Corey Grier escaped in September, Jeff May, who heads the corrections contingent
on the Metro Fugitive Squad, promised Grier's wife that if Grier turned himself
in he would not be harmed. About 48 hours later, Grier surrendered to May.
May drove him back to prison. "I told them they didn't
have to love him, but I gave my word he wouldn't be hurt and I meant to keep
it," May said later. Grier's wife hugged the agent in appreciation and a
few days later, when a Journal-Constitution reporter received permission to
interview Grier, the prisoner agreed to do it only if May was on hand.
The Corrections Department differentiates between
"absconders," inmates who have disappeared from lightly supervised
situations or simply not returned to transitional centers from their jobs, and
"escapees," high-risk inmates who have broken out from behind walls
and razor-wire fences. Of the 24 of those men who have run to freedom since
Garner took over, the last to be recaptured was Harris, a killer who left a
bloody trail over the razor wire at Macon State Prison and vanished.
With Harris' arrest in Texas this month, Blackburn and his
men have cleared every case of escape since 1984.
"I used to like to hunt deer and birds and all
that," Blackburn says with a small grin. "Don't do it any more.
Doesn't seem like much compared to hunting men."
The
creek bed is soft and the fall only knocks the wind out of the runner. He pulls
himself up onto the bridge and lies there, looking around, trying to think of a
plan. After 10 minutes, he crosses the creek and begins working his way back the
way he came.
He hears a vehicle coming, not the engine but the sound of
the chassis bouncing on the dirt track, and takes cover. It's the dog truck,
headed back toward the kennels, and from the cage in the back comes a low,
frustrated moan. Worn-out dog. They'll be back with a fresh one.
Almost within sight of the place where he first entered the
forest, he crawls into a thicket, leans back against a water oak and waits. He's
still loose, but he hasn't gotten anywhere.
There's a small movement to his left, something gray moving, a little at a time,
low to the ground. Then, framed against a tree trunk, a head moves upward on a
long neck, scans briefly like a periscope, and ducks out of sight. Hen turkey.
He's been on the run two hours when men in black baseball
caps appear across the creek, racing hard back toward the point where the runner
entered the forest. He can't see the dog at first, the brush is too thick. When
it comes into view, it isn't tracking; it's testing the air. It's got his scent
on the little breeze, and it's coming across the creek right for him, the
handlers barely able to stay with it. "Find him, girl, find him," the
handler urges.
It's Belle, the best of the Jackson bloodhounds, and when she
gets to the runner she begins lapping at his his face, happy to see him. Just
like a woman -- give you a big wet kiss and then hand you over to The Man.
Blackburn has a detailed list of all the dogs, rating them
for their talent in their speciality. There's Booger, a lab who's a good drug
sniffer, and Dixie, an outstanding German shepherd bomb dog who is,
unfortunately, too old to breed. Not all, evidently, are as content in their
work as Belle; consider Sadie, a 4-year-old red bloodhound, good tracker and
good breeding stock, who escaped from Reidsville in August and hasn't been seen
since. -- Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January
18, 1998
crime & punishment
critical incidents
hounded metro fugitive squad on the lam
rusty's funeral southern gothic
the village eccentric on trial