Last Dance, Last Chance

area in Louisiana, living in grinding poverty.
    Elledge was one of six children in a family that could barely afford to raise one child. He was closer to a sister than he was to his parents, who had no time for him. But she died when he was 6. In his family, the answer to despair was alcohol. “I started so durned young in drinking,” he once said. “Hell, I’m talking about a little kid—7, 8 years old. I think that’s what destroyed me.”
    Elledge’s father was committed to a mental institution when Jim was 10, and a few months later Jim was arrested for breaking and entering. His long rap sheet began.
    After his father went insane, his mother began to drink, too. She couldn’t cope with supporting five children emotionally or financially.
    Jim’s father died when he was 13, and two of his half-siblings committed suicide, allegedly because they were grief-stricken over the loss of their father. His mother would always blame Jim’s trouble with the law on the loss of his father.
    Jim went to reform school in his early teens. He was badly burned while working in the kitchen there, and spent months in the hospital. Even so, he preferred reform school to his home. He once asked his parole officer to put him back in prison because he was literally “starving” at home. He was told that they couldn’t do that; his sentence was up.
    He left home when he was 15, seeking some life that might be better than what he had known. He was 21 when he was arrested for his first serious crime: he kidnapped a Western Union Clerk during an armed robbery in New Mexico in 1964.
    In 1966, while Elledge was serving time for that robbery, he managed to slither through an air vent and escape from the New Mexico Penitentiary. Recaptured, he made yet another attempt at freedom: He jumped from a second-story window at the city jail, but he was free for only 11 hours.
    His records showed that he had tested as “very intelligent,” but psychological tests indicated that he suffered from antisocial personality disorder, meaning, essentially, that he had no conscience.
    When Kim Lane met Jim Elledge on the bus, she saw a rather attractive man—a man who told lies with a great deal of conviction. But she sensed the danger there.
    Jim wasn’t a complete sociopath. He was a survivor, but he seemed to have episodes of feeling empathy for others. Had his childhood not been so cruel, he might have grown up to be an entirely different man.
    Three years after he went to the Washington State Penitentiary, he tipped prison officials to an escape plot planned by several high-profile offenders. They were well on their way to tunneling out of the prison. “Snitches” don’t last long in prison, and his life was threatened.
    He was moved to a prison in Atlanta for protection. Ten years later, during the Cuban prison riots in the Georgia prison, he risked his life again—this time to save a prison guard. The Cubans were about to take a prison lieutenant hostage and gain control of his ring of security keys—keys that would open a series of doors that led to the outside. Jim barred a door between the rioters and the guard and said he “would fight for as long as he could hold out.”
    He earned his GED high school equivalency diploma in prison, and he went to classes in anger management and support groups for substance abusers. His sentence was reduced from premeditated first-degree murder to second-degree murder.
    Still, every time Jim was paroled, he managed to do something that violated the trust placed in him, usually after he had been drinking. He was released on parole after 14 years, but in 1989 he got drunk and tried to rob a tavern in Louisiana. And back he went to prison. It may well have been that he actually craved the security of being inside, away from the world. He never seemed upset about going back.
    On one occasion when he broke the rules of his parole, a corrections officer wrote in 1990: “No use. Might as well go get him and attempt to save another life.”
    Jim was now back in Washington State. “It is obvious that Mr. Elledge cannot adjust to life outside of prison,” a community corrections supervisor wrote in 1994, warning a parole review board. “Be extremely careful in deciding if you ever want to let him out of prison. I believe he is at high risk to kill again.” The supervisor said he had little hope for Jim Elledge’s “redemption.”
    But Jim was placed in a work-release program that year, the first