Empty Promises

conducted. Then he docked Cupp’s pay by $1,000, and gave him a fourteen-day suspension, saying he hoped he wouldn’t have to give him more than this “mild” reprimand because of Cupp’s long and distinguished career. But he hinted that Cupp’s job could be in jeopardy if anyone was injured because of Bowles’s escape.
    The question arose immediately: Who was Jill Fina? A check into her background brought some startling news. Jill Fina, née Onofrio, had been only fourteen years old when Bowles and Waitts ripped a path through Oregon, California, and Nevada. But she remembered it well. She was not, it seemed, a stranger who had begun to write to Bowles, nor was she his fiancée. She was Carl Cletus Bowles’s niece, the daughter of his sister! She was the wild little girl who saw her uncle as a hero.
    Ironically, an urgent message had been teletyped to authorities at the Oregon State Penitentiary in September of 1973 by Amarillo Detective Jimmy Stevens. It read: “Bowles and his girlfriend, Jill Onofrio, are planning to break him out in some way.”
    However, Warden Hoyt Cupp never saw that message, and it was never entered into Bowles’s file. One explanation for this gross oversight was that, at the time of Stevens’s warning, there was an uproar in the prison because one convict was holding another hostage with a knife at his throat and was demanding his own release.
    Detective Stevens said that his source had reported that Jill was “scared to death of Bowles,” but that made no sense. If she was frightened of him, why had she visited him so often? Why had she left her home, her husband, and a good job to journey a thousand miles once a month to visit him, to talk with his warden and his counselors, even to pretend so convincingly to be his fiancée? All they could deduce was that Bowles had some kind of Svengali-like influence over Jill or that there might be an incestuous relationship between the young woman and her uncle. Or perhaps they had both inherited the “danger gene”; like her uncle, Jill Onofrio Fina yearned for excitement and danger and a walk on the wild side. Now she had it. She was somewhere out there with an escaped felon.
    In Eugene, the widow of Deputy Carlton Smith, now remarried to another officer in the Lane County sheriff’s office, was shocked to hear that Bowles had been given a conjugal pass. “I never would have thought a pass would have been issued to someone of Carl Bowles’s nature,” she said. “It’s especially difficult to explain to my four children, who range in age from nine to seventeen, how their father’s killer managed to escape. It’s pretty hard to explain what a conjugal pass means. If he had been issued a supervised pass to visit a sick mother or to go to a funeral, that wouldn’t be so hard to take. But how do you tell a child that they gave him a pass to visit a girlfriend in a motel?”
    Bowles’s escape sat hard with other prison inmates, too. They worked hard to earn privileges, and the notoriety of this escape brought a clampdown on all prisoners, even those who really did want to go straight. In 1973 some 30,000 social leaves and work releases were granted, and only .023% of the prisoners failed to return on schedule. There were 24,941 passes for work release for one to twelve hours, 1,800 work-release passes for more than twelve hours, and 3,839 unescorted passes for social reasons—for visiting families or for job interviews.
    But never before had a pass been issued to a man with a record like Bowles’s. Governor McCall pleaded with Bowles to return for the sake of the warden who had trusted him. But wherever he was, Bowles didn’t give a hoot about Warden Cupp.
    Six days after the couple disappeared from the motel, Jill Fina’s Thunderbird was found on the Reed College campus in Portland, 47 miles north of Salem. Three other vehicles had also been stolen in the immediate area, and their descriptions were put on Teletype wires as possible getaway cars for the fugitive duo.
    No one knew where the couple had gone. They had not shown up in Texas to visit Carl Cletus’s mother. They had seemingly gone to earth, just as a wily fox hides from mounted hunters. Investigators didn’t know if they were still together, or if Jill was even still alive; she might merely have been an expedient way out for Bowles, an adoring niece who had now become expendable.
    There probably had never been a manhunt in Oregon that was as important to the