Photography by Susan Adcock
Just about every state prison has what’s called a “hole”—a veritable dungeon within a dungeon, where the warden punishes the worst of his bad lot by removing them from their friends, routines and sometimes even sunlight. But at the old Brushy Mountain State Prison, the hole was aptly named, as it was located in the basement of the laundry room, with a tiny window that allowed, on a bright day, only a few rays of sunshine to penetrate. The inmates stayed in solitary blocks behind iron-gated cells, with a thin slit to capture whatever slivers of light made their way through. Inside each cell was a bucket, the hole’s version of a toilet.
Hard stone, quarried from the rugged East Tennessee mountains that surround the facility, encased the hole like an ancient tomb. The concrete floor was as unyielding as the prison sentences each man faced. To keep track of time, prisoners in the hole drew patterns of four vertical lines on their walls with a fifth slashing through them to mark the days served. Some inmates etched other markings, including their names, their loved ones and in one case, “Jesus Saves.” According to prison legend, wardens would sometimes forget about the inmates they banished to the hole, leaving them there to languish for much longer than their prescribed punishment.
Today, Brushy Mountain, located in the East Tennessee town of Petros, 150 miles from Nashville, still has what is called D Block, where inmates are isolated from the general population. But they’re allowed to exercise, breathe copious amounts of air and go to the bathroom. They’re carefully monitored. D Block is no Hilton, but it’s really nothing like the oppressive confines of the old hole that today is used mainly for storage and showcased as a relic of more primitive prison life. In fact, Brushy itself, a maximum-security prison built in a lonely hollow surrounded by the snake-friendly Walden Ridge Mountains, will soon be a relic. Last month, Gov. Phil Bredesen announced plans to close the Morgan County facility to make way for a modern, more cost-effective prison to be built nearby with nearly three times as many beds.
But the story of Brushy Mountain will be remembered long after its gates are closed. The one-time home to James Earl Ray, Brushy in an odd way is a handy historical marker, neatly tracing Tennessee’s evolution from a rough-and-tumble state with a cowboy’s approach to justice to a more democratic, humane place that nonetheless isn’t about to coddle its worst-behaving citizens. Brushy has also captured the imagination of novelists who have referenced the quirky, colorful and foreboding prison in such best sellers as Silence of the Lambs and The Firm. And it will leave behind a library of legends, some of them dark and twisted, others comical, even uplifting.
James Slagle, a 67-year-old bespectacled inmate who has spent nearly half his life at Brushy, doesn’t just know many of those tales. He’s lived them. He himself spent time in D Block, shortly after the old hole became a part of prison folklore. But Slagle didn’t exactly enjoy his stay, even though his predecessors would have envied his relatively lavish accommodations.
Shortly after Christmas in 1970, Slagle was sent to the new hole for escaping Brushy in a box. A guard fed him one full meal every three days. On the other days, he woke up to a rock hard biscuit and glass of milk, which he couldn’t so much as sip because of a serious dietary condition. The prison would treat him to the same combo for dinner. For lunch, Slagle feasted on a bowl of a substance that inmates unaffectionately called the “green monster,” not to be confused with the left field wall by the same name in Boston’s Fenway Park. The prison kitchen concocted the green monster, valued only for its nutrients, by steaming okra and turnip greens until they became a hot lump of green slime. The dish was then placed in a refrigerator and served cold, without a trace of seasoning. Once, a rather collegial inmate who worked in the kitchen was caught adding a little of salt to the dish. As punishment, he was exiled to the hole for 30 days, where he had to endure seemingly endless feedings of the green monster. It’s a good bet that his was left unseasoned.
In the hole, Slagle remembers that his amenities included a roll of toilet paper, a pair of shorts and a mattress. No sheets, blanket or pillow. He likely had two steel buckets in his cell, one for water, the other for a toilet. (The bathrooms came later.)
Slagle found himself at this dreary outpost for pulling off a daring and nearly successful stab at freedom. Shortly into his 318-year sentence for kidnapping and drunkenly murdering a Tennessee man who tried to help him fix his car, Slagle began plotting his escape. He picked up on a prison regulation that no box large enough to hold a human being was allowed to leave the facility. “Wouldn’t it be great,” he thought, “If I could cut myself in two.”
Slagle decided on the next best thing: He’d learn yoga. For nearly a year, the wiry convict studied the ancient art, learning to contort himself in the oddest and most efficient shapes. Soon he was able to fit himself into a pair of boxes, each of which, Slagle estimates, were 18 inches high and 14 inches wide and long. During that time, Slagle also built up his shoulders to make them strong enough to bust open the box once it was outside the prison limits. He did this often by ramming his shoulder against concrete walls. The guards thought he was a loon.
Shortly before his planned escape, Slagle remembers the warden asking him mockingly how his 318-year-sentence was going. “Warden,” he said, “This is just really getting to me. I guess the only way I’m getting out of here is in a box.” It sounds like something Clint Eastwood would say.
Slagle worked as the chief clerk in the dining room. Sometimes Brushy Mountain would ship food the inmates didn’t finish to a nearby facility. With the help of five or so inmates who also worked in the kitchen, Slagle managed to fit himself into a pair of boxes labeled “153 pounds of roast beef” by slicing off the bottom of the top box and the top of the bottom. To avoid suspicion, the boxes weren’t stacked directly on top of each other, but were instead offset slightly. Placed on a 5-ton flatbed truck, Slagle’s boxes were surrounded by containers of real food, including a bag of potatoes and boxes of bread. As the truck prepared to leave the facility, the guard performed only a cursory inspection of the truck, a habit Slagle had planned to exploit after watching the guard walk through his duties for months.
The truck left the facility, and Slagle was a free man, albeit one cramped inside two boxes on a flatbed. Just like he had practiced, the convict used his shoulders to open the box. He jumped off the bed directly behind the truck to avoid being seen in the driver’s rearview mirror. When the truck drove down the lonely stretch of country road, he slipped into the woods and thought, for a fleeting moment, that he had found freedom.
But at the same time that Slagle had busted out of the box, an off-duty prison guard was hunting rabbits. He saw Slagle, made his way to a phone and called the warden. “Did you issue a walking pass to Slagle?” he asked. “Of course not!” the warden replied. “Well, he’s out here walking in the woods,” the guard told him.
Slagle knew they’d soon be on his trail. For a while at least he masked his scent by running along a stream, darting to a tree in the distance and then reversing course and jumping across the same stream. The search dogs were left befuddled, but a prison officer figured out his trick and tracked him down across the stream.
Were it not for the off-duty guard, Slagle might be a free man today. But fate intervened, and Slagle instead found himself in the hole, eating bowls of the green monster.
“It was amazing, just amazing, that he could escape so easily,” says Charles Jones, who is now a lieutenant at the prison and has worked at the facility for more than 30 years. In fact, he remembers another inmate escaping in a similar fashion at around the same time. “It wasn’t just that they did it, but how they did it.” (These days, state prison exits are equipped with heart rate monitors so that such inmate-in-a-box escapes wouldn’t be possible. Even a mouse in a food carton would set the things off.)
Slagle loves regaling guests with stories about prison life. An intelligent man with thick glasses and a passing resemblance to his onetime friend James Earl Ray, the Indiana native often sounds more like an entertaining regular at the neighborhood bar than a convicted murderer. The officers love him. Some of them quietly speculate that Slagle is taking the rap for his accomplice, who they think actually shot the victim Slagle was convicted of killing. But Slagle never proclaims his innocence. Neither does he minimize the impact of his crime.
“If you’ve never killed someone, you don’t know what it’s like to live every day of your life wondering about what that person was like and what that person could have become,” he says. “He was a nice man. He tried to help me. And I killed him.”
Brushy Mountain State Prison was built in 1896. Its wood buildings were arranged in the shape of a cross, an odd nod to Christianity for an institution housing killers, rapists and thieves. During a tour of the facility, one prison official explains that the shape of the prison was meant to satisfy religious-minded people who believed that the only way inmates could be rehabilitated was for them to embrace Jesus. In the 1930s and ’40s, nearly all of the prison was rebuilt; the shape still formed a cross, although up close Brushy Mountain looks more like the medieval fortress of a feudal overlord than any kind of sanctuary.
Brushy first operated as a convict-lease prison. According to Building Time at Brushy, a fascinating history written by former warden Stonney Lane, the state rented out its tough, grizzled convicts to private coal mining operations in Morgan and Anderson counties, just northeast of Knoxville along the Kentucky border. The citizen miners soon revolted, and the state stopped using inmates to staff this kind of temp agency.
Instead, Tennessee decided to get into the mining business full-time. The state enlisted Brushy’s inmates to operate several mines around state property in the mountains surrounding the prison. Inmates had quotas of coal they had to mine and, if they failed to meet their quota, they were stripped naked and lashed with a stiff, leather whip. Some inmates died from black lung. Others were raped or murdered. Near the prison lies a cemetery full of inmates who died at the mines.
In 1967, two miners were killed in a rock fall. Shortly after, Lake Russell, a reform-minded warden and former college football coach at Carson-Newman College in Jefferson City, Tenn., decided to cease the coal mining at Brushy Mountain, a practice that endured for more than 70 years. “That accident really bothered him, and he could never get over it,” says Lane, the former warden and author, whom Russell hired as a teacher. “He told me he was going to close the mines, and they would never run as long as he was around.”
Lane himself began his stint at Brushy believing that inmates could and should be rehabilitated, even those who faced life sentences. As an instructor, he felt inspired when he taught inmates how to read, noting gleefully in his book the pride the prisoners felt when they were finally able to sign their names. But when he became warden in 1976, he turned from “a liberal in correctional reform to a very conservative administrator of a maximum-security institution,” he writes—maybe because in the four years that he ran the place, there were seven homicides and three suicides. In one grisly case, two inmates stabbed another man to death in the kitchen. One took a knife and nearly sliced off the victim’s arm, which dangled from his body ready to fall off at any moment. The accomplice neatly severed the victim’s spine with a meat clever.
“When you’re in maximum security, you’re not worried about rehabilitation,” Lane says of his ideological about-face when he became warden. “The inmates have been through everything the system can give them. Telling anybody we were in rehabilitative services is the biggest lie. Our main concern was perimeter security.”
Now in its final years, Brushy looks like a very clinical place. The 8-by-10 cells are cramped and old, but clean. The inmates are orderly. The guards are stern, but professional and intelligent. Some are surprisingly compassionate. There is a well-kept basketball court in the center of the yard. The prison is accredited. But for any new inmate walking below the gun towers, through the tall gates laced with razor wire and into the yellowish fortress encircled by mountains, Brushy Mountain will make him rue the day he became a criminal.
“It’s the toughest prison in Tennessee,” says Alma Jones. She should know. Currently the mayor of Morgan County, Jones worked at Brushy for nearly 20 years. “The guards are terrific, but they don’t put up with anything. If there’s a prisoner no one else can handle, they send him to Brushy. The guards don’t abuse them, but they are tough and make them walk the line—exactly like they’re supposed to.”
Prisoners at Brushy endure sentences ranging from a few years to centuries (because of the judicial system’s lack of “truth in sentencing”). “I would be eating lunch with some of the guys, and someone would have a prison sentence of 200 years and the other might have one of 250,” says Keith Adkisson, a Brushy prison officer for nearly 27 years. “I worked here for five years before I ever saw anyone released.”
Through the years, there have been a number of infamous killers who have made their home at Brushy. Currently, Byron “Low Tax” Looper, the Tennessee politician who shot and killed State Sen. Tommy Burks in 1998, resides at Brushy in a tiny cell littered with legal papers. In his first day at the prison, the staff assigned him to work in the kitchen, scrubbing pots and pans. That’s one of the more unpopular jobs at Brushy. According to Alma Jones, the well-educated and famously arrogant Looper refused. So the kitchen manager told him that he’d be there until midnight if he didn’t begin his chores immediately. He complied, but because of his initial recalcitrance, he was given an extra 30 days of kitchen duty.
Convicted serial killer Paul Dennis Reid also lives at Brushy. He was on death row at Nashville’s Riverbend, but couldn’t get along with the other doomed souls on the block. So he was banished to Morgan County, where he will be held until an execution date is scheduled. Surprisingly, Reid is relatively well-behaved at Brushy, at least according to one of the prison officers. But in general, the prisoners who know they’ll never live a day outside their cell cause the most problems.
“The inmates who are there for a longer period of time are harder to deal with,” Jones says. “They just don’t care. They’ll even throw feces at you. They just have nothing to look forward to in life.”
No wonder James Earl Ray climbed the wall. Easily the most infamous inmate to make his home at Brushy, the convicted assassin of civil rights leader Martin Luther King requested to be sent to the Morgan County facility nearly eight years after his arrest for the 1968 slaying. On Aug. 13, 1976 at 1:30 a.m., Ray left Nashville for Petros, followed by two escort vehicles, each carrying three heavily armed guards. After a tense trip, Warden Stonney Lane personally escorted Ray through the front door of the prison.
At first, Ray was a model inmate. But in June 1977, Ray, who had escaped from a Missouri prison before assassinating King, drew worldwide attention to Brushy and Morgan County when he and six other inmates hopped the back wall of the facility while one guard dozed and the others were distracted. One inmate doing a 20-to-40-year sentence for armed robbery was shot shortly after he climbed the wall. He was caught and sent to the hospital. The others, including the most notorious inmate in America, were on the loose.
Details about their escape emerged days later. According to Lane’s book, Ray and two other cunning inmates, both doing time for murder, concocted the escape together. They assembled a makeshift pipe ladder built from scrap that was probably left over from a renovation project. On the evening of the escape, they arranged to have a few inmates start a fight during a ballgame to divert the attention of the guard tower officers. Meanwhile, Ray and his two partners in crime headed to the northeast corner of the wall, where there was a gap in the electrical wire. They hooked the ladder up to the wall and climbed their way to freedom.
The last inmate up the ladder forgot to kick it off the wall. As a result, four other inmates who had nothing to do with the escape plan made a split-second decision to climb to freedom. One of those inmates, David Lee Powell, was black. In his book, the warden recounts asking the inmate why he tried to escape. “Why not, it looked like everyone else was making it,” he replied. Powell also told the warden that he had no idea who the ringleader was. “If I’d’a known James Earl Ray was in the bunch, I’d’a waited for another time.”
When Ray broke free, the rural, placid confines of Morgan County turned into a media circus. Reporters from Time and Newsweek flocked to East Tennessee. They mocked the well-educated Lane, calling him the “hillybilly warden” because of his East Tennessee-Kentucky accent. The population of Morgan County seemed to double overnight. For the prison guards who worked at Brushy—some of whom had never ventured outside East Tennessee—it had to be quite the sight.
“It was pretty wild,” says Keith Adkisson, who had just started working at Brushy at the time. “It seemed like every reporter in the country was here.”
Up to 60 FBI agents descended on Morgan County to “assist” in the search, but they quickly clashed with the Brushy officers who were supposed to be leading the manhunt. It’s the classic movie plot in which the feds and locals distrust each other the moment they meet. In the Ray hunt, the FBI agents suspected that the Brushy officers were in on the escape. The officers felt like the agents were arrogant and secretive because they adamantly refused to cooperate with the locals. According to Lane’s account, the branches of law enforcement didn’t work with each other, but rather became rivals, each trying to be the first to apprehend the King assassin.
Today, some Brushy officers say that the FBI didn’t actually want to capture Ray, that they wanted to kill him instead. “Would you use a high-powered rifle to bring someone in?” one officer asks rhetorically. Lane believes that the agents did want to apprehend Ray peacefully, but “they wanted the publicity of capturing him.”
Well, that didn’t happen. The FBI agents might have thought they were smarter and better trained, but the prison officers were the ones who knew the hills where Ray and his accomplices fled. They hunted and fished in those mountains, and knew how to make their way through heavy underbrush and create their own paths. They had seen the rattlers and copperheads that make their homes in the hills. They knew how to handle search dogs.
Soon, nearly all the other inmates but Ray were apprehended. Meanwhile, the FBI and the press speculated that Ray had long since fled to South America. But the officers knew that Ray could not have come down off the mountain. Acting on a tip from a local, they finally tracked him down just a few miles from the prison, hiding awkwardly under a pile of leaves. He had been loose for 54 hours, his clothes torn and covered in mud. In his pockets, he had a map of Petros and $300. He seemed relieved that the FBI wasn’t anywhere in sight. To this day, Brushy officers say they would have caught Ray immediately had the FBI not interfered.
“We could have had him in one day if they would have left us alone,” says Jones, who had been working at the facility for nearly five years at the time of Ray’s escape. “We grew up in the mountains; we knew how to get around.”
In his book, Lane echoes her remarks. “Brushy officers have been doing this job for years. Their ancestors had chased convicts through these mountains for 80 years. It was a proud tradition.”
Some believe that if Ray wanted to escape, he simply could have hitched a ride with any number of Morgan County farmers, who would have been happy to lend a hand to the King assassin. In fact, one apocryphal tale has it that even before Ray escaped, farmers would leave their pickup trucks in the woods with the keys inside and rifles in the beds—just in case he managed to break free. Lane doubts that story, pointing out that his men caught Ray because of a tip from a local. Still, as Lane’s book recounts, Morgan County in the 1970s was hardly a haven for racial harmony. A few locals even fired gunshots over the head of a black officer from Nashville who was helping in the search. Lane explains, however, that if the locals really wanted to hit him, they would have.
To this day, nearly all of the prison officials who knew Ray seem to think that he was set up or took the rap for a conspiracy that was much larger than him. “I don’t think he acted alone,” says Jones, adding that Ray was very respectful. Adds Lane, “It bothers me that they didn’t investigate further to see if he really acted alone.”
Meanwhile, Slagle, who was friends with Ray, says that Ray was “very secretive” and would never discuss his past. Still, he was actually well-liked by everybody, even the black inmates. A few black inmates stabbed Ray in the kitchen a few years after his escape, but he was barely harmed. Slagle speculates, somewhat incredulously, that the inmates were only trying to injure him so that he could be transferred to a local hospital from which Ray could again try to run away.
Like Ray, Geronimo tried to flee, but he too was quickly nabbed after a massive search. Actually, Geronimo was a deer that an officer brought to the prison when he was just a fawn. The inmates took to Geronimo and adopted him as one of their own. In fact, the deer began to think that he was a prisoner too. Like a street-tough convict, Geronimo chewed on unlit cigarettes and devoured orange slices. He drank from the water fountain. When the inmates wouldn’t feed him from the bag of food they had bought at the commissary, he simply knocked the bag over. Slagle says that Geronimo even ate in the dining room and once, after wandering around the prison, wound up in a cell and took a nap.
Some of the inmates actually called him a snitch because when they were huddled in the yard playing craps, Geronimo would always peer over their shoulders, drawing the attention of the guards. When they thought he was depressed, they medicated him. Sometimes, when Geronimo wanted peace and quiet, he’d rest beside the guards, where he knew he wouldn’t be disturbed.
“We loved him,” Slagle remembers. “We would have rioted if they took him away. And they knew that.”
Meanwhile, Slagle says that he had a chance to escape during his brief stay at the Tennessee State Prison in Nashville, when Brushy was temporarily closed in the early 1970s. After he tutored the warden’s son in math, he was given a gate pass so that he could attend classes at the University of Tennessee at Nashville. He says that he never wanted to obtain a college degree. A voracious reader to this day, Slagle says that he just wanted to take as many classes as he could. The warden trusted him not to flee, even though Slagle says that he was under no supervision while he was furthering his education.
(Interestingly, while we couldn’t find anybody in a position to corroborate this story, a number of officials say that the scenario Slagle describes is certainly plausible, given how lax things were at the time. In addition, Brushy guards who have known Slagle for decades enthusiastically vouch for his credibility.)
Slagle was moved back to Brushy after the facility reopened, and he resumed his attempts to escape. At one point, he studied whether he could construct a hot air balloon. He also considered pole vaulting over the wall.
So why didn’t Slagle, who will probably die behind bars, escape the Nashville prison when he had the chance? Adhering to a quirky code of honor, the 67-year-old inmate says that he didn’t want to break the warden’s trust, even though he was certainly tempted.
“This man trusted me, and I couldn’t betray someone who took a chance on me,” Slagle says. “But there were many nights I was at the bus stop wondering to myself 'What the hell are you doing? Why are you going back?’ ”
It’s not, after all, a place anyone would want to call home. Then again, even those who’ve tried to escape have made their way back, albeit not always on purpose. Legend has it that one escapee wandered around in the mountains, hiking for five full days before finally reaching what he thought was a factory. As he made his way toward it, he realized it wasn’t a factory at all. He’d come full circle. He was back at Brushy.
Just what Tennessee officials will do with the storied prison once the new one is built is anyone’s guess. They simply don’t know yet. It could become a museum, a movie set, even overflow prison space. In the meantime, Byron Looper, Paul Dennis Reid and the 500 other prisoners there can count themselves lucky the hole has been retired.
