- A brilliant mind...
- He's detail-oriented.
He's a very smart guy.
[suspenseful music]
- Trapped in a supermax prison...
- Stabbings occurred almost every night.
- The worst of the worst.
- He just can't take it anymore.
- He discovers its one weakness...
- The only way out is gonna be this window.
- But can he outsmart everything
the prison throws at him...
- The tower guard has the authority to shoot to kill.
- Survive the sweltering Mississippi Delta...
[mosquitoes buzzing]
- The mosquitoes would eat you up in a day.
- And outrun a dangerous cross-country manhunt
that could turn deadly at any moment?
♪
- I said, "If you move again, I will shoot you.
Do you understand me?"
♪
[dramatic music]
♪
- Some of the greatest stories ever told
start behind bars.
[inmates shouting]
Locked up in the most notorious prisons
in the world,
spied on by guards and fellow prisoners,
it takes a devious mind to find a way out.
It could lead you to freedom,
or it could cost you your life.
- [groaning]
- But wouldn't you try
when you have nothing left to lose?
♪
[door clangs]
[twangy music]
♪
The Mississippi Delta, north to south,
runs 200 miles
and is 87 miles at its widest.
Some call the Delta
the most Southern place on Earth.
It's also the site
of the infamous Mississippi State Penitentiary,
Parchman.
♪
MSP is the oldest prison in the state.
In 1901, the state bought the former plantation
known as Parchman Farm,
the informal name for the prison today.
Prisoners helped build the prison,
nearly all of them Black men
in an exploitative work program.
Parchman quickly became a horrifying place,
housing one of the first gas chambers in the country.
♪
Today it's notorious for prisoner murders,
suicides, and wretched living conditions--
rusted pipes, sewage leaks, rodents, and insects.
There's more than one reason to want to escape,
but the prison's unique layout makes that a fool's errand.
♪
Parchman is spread out over a jaw-dropping 18,000 acres
of former farmland.
It's known as the prison without walls
because there's no fencing around the widest perimeter,
only around the secure prisoner units.
You would think that this would make it easier
for some of the 2,500 inmates to escape,
but the Delta is its own deterrent.
The prison sits on a marshy floodplain
with unbearable heat,
mud so thick it'll stop you in your tracks,
and mosquitoes so big
they could practically carry you away.
- It's a very difficult thing to escape from there
because the land is very flat.
It's very easy to get caught.
- Most never get the chance to run.
The prisoner units are secured
by layers by razor-wire fencing
and armed guard towers
wielding deadly automatic firepower
24 hours a day.
The most infamous is Supermax Unit 32.
[tense music]
If you're one of the unfortunate souls
sent to 32, your life is nothing less
than a relentless assault on decency--
an unhygienic, violent,
and diseased hellhole that Dante couldn't make up.
[indistinct chatter]
- Unit 32 is the worst of the worst.
- Rapes occur. Stabbings occur.
- [groaning]
- Almost every night, someone would get stabbed
or shanked.
- There are people who have psychological problems.
That creates an almost intolerable situation.
- Unit 32 houses murderers,
psychopaths, and high-threat escape risks,
all side by side.
They're the reason supermax exists.
Unit 32 is surrounded by a double-fenced area
known as the kill zone.
Guard towers surround it with shoot-to-kill orders,
and an armed patrol circles the fence day and night.
The walls of the cell blocks are made of precast concrete
and half a million pounds of reinforced steel.
This means Unit 32 is a place you don't dare try to escape,
but Roy Harper likes a dare.
♪
If any prisoner at Parchman has what it takes
to break out, it's Harper.
His story reads like a Southern Gothic novel,
which is fitting, since he manages to write
and publish two books while behind bars.
Good writing requires a detailed, keen mind,
a person who can communicate and persuade.
Roy Harper possesses all these traits.
But above all, Roy Harper is a thinker.
- He's a genius.
He's detail-oriented, and he's a very smart guy.
- In 1981, Roy Harper breaks out of an Arizona prison.
When he's arrested for armed robbery in 1982,
Harper gets the equivalent of a death sentence,
88 years without parole.
He spends eight years in regular maximum security,
but when supermax opens in 1990,
he's one of the first thrown in
because of his high level of escape risk.
[phone dialing]
In a telephone interview,
Harper describes his impressions of Unit 32.
[somber music]
♪
- Escape is at the top of Roy Harper's mind
from the moment he enters Unit 32.
In 1993, he tries cutting his way out
with a hacksaw blade, but he's caught.
He can't get through the window covering.
To prevent Harper from escaping,
the system moves him around the unit often.
Frustrated, he petitions the court to stop it.
- Knowing he would not be moved,
Harper can begin planning a more effective escape.
[twangy music]
♪
To have a real chance at freedom,
Roy knows he has to not only break out of prison,
but also get out of the Delta and out of Mississippi.
First things first.
If this supermax window stops him again,
nothing else matters.
Now, a thinker like Roy learns from his mistakes,
so he comes up with a clever way
to get through the window and not get caught.
- He just can't take it anymore,
and so he decides to escape.
The only way out is gonna be this window.
- This is no ordinary window.
The walls around it are run through with steel bars.
A bolted-on, cut-proof grate covers the entire window.
Behind that, a steel frame secures six panels
of tempered glass, each reinforced
by galvanized metal wire.
Harper's got his work cut out for him.
With constant observation by the guards,
Harper knows he's going to need money
to get things moving.
In a place like Parchman,
it doesn't take much to smuggle in cash
through the mail or the guards.
In fact, the corrupt guards
are something Parchman is famous for.
- Corruption was a constant problem at Parchman.
You could just about get anything inside Parchman
you wanted to get.
- Guards aren't really paid much,
so they're really more susceptible
to the offer of money.
♪
He pays a guard 40 bucks apiece for these hacksaw blades.
[upbeat music]
♪
- Harper's got hacksaw blades and thinks he should be able
to cut through the window frame.
But before he can start,
he needs to get the window cover off
that stopped him before.
To remove the screw-headed bolts,
he smuggles in a screw bit from the guards.
The bit fits, but it needs a handle
or some way to get leverage and torque
to turn the bolt head,
while at the same time making sure the guard,
who's 20 feet away watching his every move,
doesn't see him.
[suspenseful music]
Even Harper can't smuggle enough money in
to make the guards turn away from a full-blown escape,
so he has to improvise.
- With cover from the guards,
he can really get to work.
He looks at the light fixture above.
A light bulb goes off in his head.
♪
He breaks two pieces of angled iron
from the light fixture, which is made of soft steel.
He bends them into the shape of an elongated handle.
- He's able to use pencil sharpener blades
that he found to cut this soft metal
so he could create a handle,
whereby he can unscrew, essentially,
the window covering.
- Harper's in business.
He's makeshift bolt remover works.
♪
He's finally figured out how to get the window cover off
and can now proceed to the next step:
cutting through the frame.
[indistinct chatter, shouting]
But suddenly, a wrench is thrown into the works.
♪
Roy has a new neighbor,
a convicted murderer and escape artist,
John "JW" Woolard.
[door clangs]
♪
This newcomer to Unit 32
is the kind of problem that can't easily be solved
by MacGyvering a screwdriver
or hiding behind a sheet.
[somber music]
With Woolard taking up residence next door,
all of Harper's plans
and his contraband tools might be thrown--
well, out the window.
The disciplined, exacting man with a plan
is just dealt a wild card.
Will he fold,
or will the thinker figure out a way
to keep his escape plan on track?
♪
[tense music]
♪
- Roy Harper is all set to break out of Unit 32.
He's got his hacksaw blades
and a way to get the window cover off.
He's developed a cunning system to shield himself
from the guard so he can work on the window infrastructure.
But there's an unexpected wrinkle in his plans.
Convicted murder John Woolard, who's serving a life sentence,
is his new neighbor.
- John Woolard arrived in Unit 32,
literally in the cell next to Roy Harper.
- Woolard had his own reputation
as a person who had escaped custody in the past.
He was serving a life sentence without parole
for murder and kidnapping.
- Harper knows Woolard's reputation.
He's dangerous and unpredictable
and has an even worse escape habit than Harper.
In a twist of fate, Woolard recently tried
to break out of Parchman, but they caught him.
If Woolard tries to escape again before Harper
and the guards get wise to it,
they'll shake down the whole tier,
including Harper's cell.
- Roy Harper was already plotting an escape,
but now, all of a sudden,
this is gonna interfere with all that.
The last thing he wanted was a shakedown,
because he already had these items
that were contraband.
- Harper,
the persuasive thinker that he is,
decides to do something shrewd:
recruit Woolard.
♪
He can talk more freely with Woolard
when the prisoners are allowed one hour of yard time a day.
- In the case of inmates in 32,
they were outside of their cells only one hour a day,
and that was for an exercise yard
or for a shower.
It is possible to converse during yard time.
- Even though a two-man team
increases the chance of getting caught,
it's better than a unit shakedown.
And if they do make it outside,
an accomplice might come in handy.
The thinker has a collaborator.
♪
[tense music]
They meet in the yard every day
and lay out their plan.
Stage 1 is getting through the window.
Stage 2 is getting across the prison yard
and through the outer fence.
Stage 3 will be to make it off the Delta
and out of Mississippi.
Each of these stages
will require preparation and luck,
especially making it across the yard.
Once they get through their windows,
which, by luck, are on the first floor,
the plan is to crawl along a narrow strip
of shadow that runs along C-block.
Next they face 50 feet of wide-open yard
monitored by guard towers and floodlights.
If they're lucky enough to not be spotted,
they are running to the kill zone,
a double razor-wire fence they'll have to cut through
with hacksaws.
If they make it through the fences,
they have to just pray
one of the perimeter patrol vehicles doesn't drive by.
♪
- Roy Harper, who had masterminded
and broken out of prisons before,
took a lot of time to find a weakness
where he could breach and get out of his facility.
It took some planning, and it took some time.
- Harper knows what he and Woolard are attempting
is incredibly risky, but he's not stupid.
He knows to have any chance,
they're going to need supplies.
They smuggle in two red death-row jumpsuits,
much darker than the white-striped
Unit 32 uniform.
- There's a color-coding system
used by Mississippi to identify the custody level.
Solid red death-row inmate pants
cut down on the white reflection
that their red and white uniforms may have made.
♪
- To cover their faces, Harper makes a dark cream
by burning paper and mixing the ash with Vaseline.
Both will increase the chance
of slipping through the yard undetected.
Harper's also smart enough
to realize once they get past the fences,
they face the inhospitable Delta,
where pesticides leach into the water,
making it undrinkable.
They throw bottles of clean water
into makeshift backpacks made out of prison jackets.
♪
With their supplies gathered,
Harper and Woolard turn their attention
back to the window.
Woolard has his own hacksaw blades,
but Harper lets him borrow his makeshift wrench.
Harper is trying to cut his window
when suddenly he hears a disturbance
outside his cell followed by a booming voice
that echoes through Unit 32,
a voice he isn't quite keen on.
♪
It's the warden making his rounds.
With the window cover sitting against the wall
and Harper holding a hacksaw,
he's about to be caught red-handed.
♪
[tense music]
♪
- Roy Harper and John Woolard are several weeks
into planning their escape from Parchman's notorious Unit 32.
Their only way out is through a window in their cells.
While Harper is trying to saw through the window frame,
the voice of the warden stops him in his tracks.
♪
- He's working on the window,
and he already has the window covering down
when the warden comes by.
[suspenseful music]
♪
- This is one of those times
when good fortune really comes in handy.
♪
He gets up in the warden's face.
He smiles brightly.
- And he's hoping and praying
that the warden will keep his focus on him
rather than spot the window covering is missing already.
- Sometimes fortune favors the bold,
because the warden becomes distracted
by other raucous inmates...
[indistinct shouting]
And simply moves on.
♪
[twangy music]
♪
The next day, Harper and Woolard are back at it,
but they run into an unexpected problem.
Harper realizes not only the window frame,
but the mechanism holding the window louvers in place,
are made of reinforced cut-proof steel.
The hacksaws aren't making a dent.
After overcoming numerous challenges,
this new obstacle knocks the wind out of him.
How could the great thinker have overlooked this?
But Harper and men like him have a ruthless determination.
It's built into their psyches.
Harper looks for another detail he can exploit,
another way through.
He notices that the seam of the window box
in the wall looks different.
- This window has reinforced steel,
and so they begin to experiment.
He hacksawed into this metal box
below the window.
- Harper tries the hacksaw
and is able to saw the seam of the window box
made of softer metal.
Lifting the top of the box,
he's able to access a control box
that releases the window louvers,
then puts the top back down.
With the mechanism released,
Roy can remove the louvers from the window
without having to get through the cut-proof frame.
They're back in business.
Stage 1 is complete.
They've conquered the supermax window,
but they can't just crawl out in the middle of the day.
To hide the cut marks until they can make their break,
the thinker comes up with his own brand of spackle.
[tense music]
♪
- It's a hot summer night in May.
Harper and Woolard are ready,
but they need to be out of their cells
at exactly the same time for their plan to work.
- They plotted out for the appropriate time
when they're gonna escape,
which was in the middle of the night, obviously.
- They wait until the last cell checks at midnight.
To synchronize their progress,
they signal to each other once it's time to move
to the next step.
Step one, they hang sheets over their cells,
then uncover the window.
Step two, they change into their death-row jumpsuits
and prepare a dummy in their beds.
They figure they'll have till sunup,
but stuffing old clothes with newspaper and magazines
would buy them more time
and keep the guards from noticing.
Finally, step three, they throw their supplies
and strings attached to their sheets
out the window.
♪
With all steps complete and the pair in sync,
it's go time.
♪
On the outside, the first thing they do
is try to cover up their tracks.
- They darken their faces
with the concoction that Harper cooked up.
Things are going according to plan,
but the greatest test is on the prison grounds,
where cameras, patrols, and a gun tower
could, in one quick moment, seal their fate.
♪
They begin crawling along the narrow bit of shadow
that hugs cell block C and into the yard,
hoping the tower guards don't notice.
♪
- Between the interior fence and the outer fence
is a "kill zone," as it's called.
If they're discovered in that area,
that tower guard has the authority
to shoot to kill.
- If you get beyond the first fence,
they're gonna shoot first and ask questions later.
♪
- Harper and Woolard start to saw the chain-link.
The guard tower does not spot them.
- Harper and Woolard move through fence one
into the kill zone.
[suspenseful music]
♪
They start cutting the second fence
when suddenly a bright light shines
through the circular razor wire,
blinding them.
♪
They're literally caught in the headlights.
Unit 32's perimeter patrol
could spell "doom" for Harper and Woolard.
♪
[tense music]
♪
- Is the perimeter patrol about to end
the carefully detailed escape plans
of Roy Harper and John "JW" Woolard?
♪
They cross the kill zone unscathed,
cut through the second fence,
only to be met by an armed patrol vehicle.
♪
- They start hacksawing through the second fence,
and a patrol happened to come by
at that exact same moment.
[suspenseful music]
♪
[engine revving]
- Amazingly, they get another stroke of luck,
and the vehicle passes them by.
- This is it, but somehow the patrol goes by.
[upbeat country music]
♪
- Harper and Woolard have cleared Unit 32,
but their escape is not yet complete.
They enter stage 3 of their plan:
get out of the Delta and get as far away from Mississippi
as they can.
They know they'll have until a few hours after sunup
to disappear, so they run off into the night.
♪
At daybreak, Harper and Woolard have been on foot
traversing the hot, humid Mississippi Delta for hours.
They're an easy target,
since much of the Delta is flat land.
Sure that a search party will be soon on their tail,
they've got to get to cover.
If they can make it to nightfall,
they stand a better chance of not getting caught
in the Delta.
- The sun comes out, and you're gonna be seen
if you're moving around, so they hide in a thicket.
♪
[tense music]
♪
- It turns out, they had more time
than they thought.
The dummies do their job,
and the guards don't notice they're gone
until hours after sunrise,
giving Harper and Woolard a 12-hour head start.
- So hours later, they noticed that Harper didn't eat his meal
and thought, "Well, that's odd."
- There was a inmate delivering food
that actually informed the staff
that something was wrong.
The sergeant called for a takedown team.
♪
- A group of riot guards burst into Harper's cell,
where they meet the dummy Harper
and his breakout window.
- Once that discovery is made,
the prison itself goes on lockdown.
[alarm blaring]
- Harper and Woolard have gotten a head start,
making it much harder for law enforcement
to apprehend them.
- The first 24 hours in a prison escape
is absolutely critical
because it is when the vast majority
of people who've escaped from prison get caught.
- You are trying to contain an inmate
within certain boundaries,
so learning as much as you can as quickly as you can
helps facilitate their capture.
- At the FBI office, we were notified
two individuals had escaped from Parchman.
We sent out what's called an "EC,"
or an electronic communication,
to all FBI offices all throughout the United States.
[siren wailing]
- Even with a head start,
Harper and Woolard are not in the clear.
Sleep-deprived, they're bogged down
in a humid, muddy Delta, waiting for night.
- It was 100 degrees, mosquitoes everywhere.
They're huge, and they will smother you.
- They tried to stay as still as possible.
Over the din of the mosquitoes,
they hear voices.
[indistinct shouting]
A search party is in the vicinity.
- [whistling]
[indistinct shouting]
- Come on!
- Eventually, the sounds fade.
They've avoided capture.
[tense music]
For a week, they hide
and make their way across the Delta,
surviving on the meager amount of clean water and food
they've carried in the backpacks.
♪
- They'd gone to a little town called Webb, Mississippi,
found a house, hunkered down outside,
watching this house.
Again, very methodical.
Sunday, church time,
and this old couple apparently walked outside
to get into their car.
♪
- Harper and Woolard decide they need that car
if they're gonna make it out of Mississippi
and complete the final stage of their escape.
While they wait for the couple to return from church,
they help themselves to the house.
♪
- Dying from hunger,
they storm the fridge, cupboards,
and stuff themselves to their hearts' content.
They change into stolen clothes.
Then they notice something incredible.
[upbeat music]
[cocks gun] An arsenal of firepower
in the pantry.
Pistols, shotguns, ammo.
For Harper and Woolard,
it's Christmas morning in June.
♪
[tense music]
When they hear the car of the elderly couple
pull into the driveway,
they stake out positions in the house.
The elderly couple walks towards the kitchen door.
Let's hope they said their morning prayers.
♪
[door clicks]
♪
[twangy music]
♪
- Woolard and Harper have eluded the authorities
for nearly a week.
Now they've broken into the home
of an elderly couple,
where they've found food and weapons.
The elderly couple is just returning home from church.
Woolard and Harper, shotguns at the ready,
await their arrival.
[clicks tongue]
They're in for the surprise of their lives.
[tense music]
♪
- Harper conveys instructions.
He won't hurt them. He just wants their car.
They comply and hand over the keys.
They tie the couple up and part ways.
Harper and Woolard now have their getaway vehicle.
♪
- They have a car.
They have clothing.
They're hitting the road, and they're free.
They've done what the vast majority
of people who escape from prison
aren't able to do, which is essentially
made it beyond that first day.
- They hightail it out of Mississippi.
Harper and Woolard have done it.
They made it out of Unit 32, out of the Delta,
and Mississippi is in their rearview mirror.
They just have to disappear.
Unfortunately for them,
an interstate manhunt is just heating up,
a hunt that's just changed from on foot to in vehicle.
What could possibly go wrong?
[siren wailing] For starters,
when police rescue the elderly couple
a few hours later,
they learn exactly what car they should be looking for.
- The question becomes "Okay, what direction?
Where did they go with this car?"
Again, we put out another
BOLO, or "Be On the Lookout,"
for this vehicle and this tag.
- The fugitives make their way north through Arkansas
and head towards West Virginia.
With law enforcement in multiple states
now tracking a Chevy Caprice,
Harper soon realizes they've got to change vehicles.
In a motel parking lot, they attack and steal a van
from an unsuspecting patron.
♪
- [groaning] [blows landing]
♪
[keys jingling]
♪
- Thinking one step ahead,
Harper and Woolard paint the brown van blue
and put different plates on it
to make it look like a whole other vehicle.
They head west into Indiana,
but this is where Woolard's brashness
starts to become a liability.
They get caught speeding.
♪
- You know, we just wait for people
to make stupid mistakes once they're out,
and that certainly occurred here with John Woolard
speeding down the road, and he gets stopped.
[siren wailing]
- Officer Raymond Coleman approaches the van cautiously.
[suspenseful music]
[gunshot]
- Woolard fires at the officer,
but the shot misses,
and the discharge blows him backward.
[tires squealing]
[gunshots]
- A high-speed chase begins.
Harper begins to fire from the van.
- It's the worst of the worst.
They're convicted violent felons
and have engaged law enforcement
in a gun battle.
- Officer Jim Poling joins the pursuit
as the outlaws head into Crown Point, Indiana,
recording the chase on his dash cam.
- So I immediately jumped in my squad car.
It's the major leagues,
and you gotta step up to the plate.
The stress--it--it's a mess.
I probably had my squad car well over 100,
just trying to catch up to 'em.
- With the help of a spike-filled
tire-deflation device,
officers pop the van's tires...
[tires screeching] Causing sparks,
forcing the van off the interstate
into a truck stop.
Harper and Woolard are cornered.
- I'm figuring that this is gonna end
somewhere in the truck stop,
but we're not gonna let 'em escape.
♪
[groaning]
♪
- Rapid fire exchanges
between Harper and Woolard and the officers,
but their shots aren't having much effect.
The thinker once again thinks ahead.
- We managed to discover they had put
some clothing and luggage
on the side of that van inside of it,
and it was like a fortress.
Our pistol rounds were basically doing nothing.
- Harper and Woolard make a break for it.
Amidst the chaos of sirens and gunfire,
they miraculously get away.
They're on the run again and back on foot
into the Indiana night.
[somber music]
- With nearby towns on high alert,
Harper and Woolard hide
and sneak around rural Indiana for two days.
Badly in need of water and food,
they head out of the woods.
- But that's exactly when they run into the law again.
♪
- I drove around
and saw the two individuals come out of the woods,
and then they were walking right toward me.
That's when I confirmed
that this was the two individuals
that we were looking for.
- Officer Turturillo had never fired a weapon
in all of his years on the St. John police force,
and now he's face to face
with two of the most dangerous,
cunning criminals he will ever meet.
♪
- I stayed in the cover of my car.
I was standing with the door open,
and when they got about five feet
from the front of my car,
that's when I took my gun out
and I drew down on them.
♪
- Woolard put his hands on the front of the car.
Harper put his hands
on the left front fender of the car.
And I'm getting ready to get them on the ground
so we can wait for backup
so we can get them handcuffed,
and Woolard looked right in Harper's eyes,
and he said...
[dramatic music]
- As soon as he started running,
Harper's right hand came off
the left front fender of the car.
And as soon as I saw him move his hand,
I kept my sights on him, and I said,
"If you move again, I will take it
"as an act of aggression, and I will shoot you.
Do you understand me?"
And he said, "Yes, sir."
♪
[somber music]
♪
- Two hours later,
Woolard crashes a van on the interstate--
another van he stole at gunpoint
from a nearby car wash.
He's cuffed and arrested moments later.
♪
Harper's story doesn't end
after he's sent back to Parchman.
Appalled by the conditions,
he becomes part of a prison reform movement
that finally succeeds in closing Unit 32
due to the violations of basic human rights.
That was in 2010.
Six years later,
his first novel is published.
In it, he writes,
"A man should have a personal code of conduct,
"a code of laws to live by
"which you feel in your heart are right.
"Then never deviate from them,
even when it hurts."
♪
"Live life by your own rules"
is a philosophy Harper still believes in.
But today, and for many years to come,
he's in Colorado,
serving a life sentence in a supermax
and living by someone else's rules.