Empty Promises

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