Empty Promises

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