Anthony Graves Press Conference 
Capital Punishment 
The Getaway
The first inmate to break out of death row in 64 years was a cold-blooded killer who exposed dangerous lapses in prison security. Yet there was something romantic about Martin Gurule’s escape—and disappointing about his inglorious death.
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At the Texas Prison Museum, a musty gallery of jailhouse memorabilia on the town square, sit the crude tools that inmates have fashioned to aid their flight: handmade keys, lock-picking kits made out of melted-down silverware, shanks, Chinese throwing stars, monkey knots, shoe soles that conceal blades, and zip guns made out of metal pipes and screws—reminders that even in the most closed of systems, there is room for at least the imagination to roam. In an adjoining case are the tools that guards have used to thwart escapes for 150 years: Thick metal leg yokes, shackles, belly chains, horse hobbles, balls and chains, slap jacks, and a three-foot-long leather switch are all proudly displayed on a piece of red velveteen. On one wall hangs a framed photo of Black Betty, the bus that transported shackled inmates to and from Huntsville for decades, and her driver, Bud Russell, from whom only one man successfully fled. Behind a nearby glass window sits Old Sparky, the retired electric chair, its polished oak slabs laced with the thick leather straps from which there was no escape.
At the center of town is the Walls, Huntsville’s oldest prison, whose brick ramparts measure forty feet high and are fringed with razor wire, above which guard towers and floodlights brighten the night sky. It is Huntsville’s best-known landmark and a symbol for all that Huntsville believes itself to be: a place from which escape is practically impossible. But even the Walls, where the execution chamber is housed, inspires images of flight; for years Bustin’ Loose Menswear was located one block from the prison, and the recently closed Desperado Club still sits down the street. For inmates who have dreamt of life on the outside but have never run, the Walls is where they get their first taste of freedom; all TDCJ inmates who are scheduled to be released are first bused into Huntsville from prisons across the state, then given $50 and a one-way Greyhound ticket home. Dozens of men in prison-issue work clothes are released from the Walls every weekday, starting just before noon, some walking solemnly with their eyes fixed on the sidewalk, others high-fiving each other, letting out boisterous whoops and hollers. A few occasionally run along Twelfth Street, sprinting all the way up the hill that takes them away from the prison as if they must move as fast as humanly possible to prevent the redbrick walls from pulling them back inside.
Huntsville has seen its fair share of escapes over the years—some no more complicated than a trusty throwing down his hoe in the field and trying to outrun the dogs—and the community is sufficiently nervous that housepainters are thought to have the unluckiest job in town: Their white cotton jumpsuits have been mistaken more than once for prison-issue uniforms, the painters themselves for men on the run. In the early part of this century, prisoners who tried to escape were whipped mercilessly upon their recapture. Even so, there was no shortage of men willing to try. They stole keys from night watchmen, they hid in slop wagons headed for the hog farm, and on one occasion, they crawled out through a hole under the grandstand of the prison rodeo, kidnapping two Huntsville high school football stars and their dates in exchange for the boys’ shirts and a ride to Beaumont. In 1934 Bonnie and Clyde sidekick Raymond Hamilton and two other condemned men staged an escape from death row (then housed at the Walls), climbing up a fire ladder, dodging gunfire, and catapulting over the side to two waiting getaway cars. Hamilton, the last of the trio to remain at large, was recaptured nine months later. In the summer of 1974 came the bloody standoff with Fred Gomez Carrasco, the San Antonio drug lord who took sixteen people hostage in the prison library after a trusty smuggled pistols and a bandolier to him inside a can of peaches and a hollowed-out ham. Eleven days later, after negotiations failed, Carrasco and two inmates exchanged fire with lawmen in a shootout that claimed the lives of Carrasco, another inmate, and two women hostages.
It was an awful lesson for Huntsville—one that illustrated that despite all the appearances of security, there are no guarantees—but one that occurred 25 years ago, a time that many prison guards here are too young to remember. Night after night, year after year, guards had stared out into the darkness from their towers and scanned the corridors of their cellblocks, looking for an escape that never came, and if their vigilance had flagged, Martin Gurule had certainly made the most of it. For the TDCJ, his flight was deeply humiliating, and in the days that followed the breakout, prison officials stared helplessly into the woods, as if held captive themselves. “We have a perfect record with escapes, and we plan to keep it that way,” announced Texas Board of Criminal Justice chairman Allan Polunsky five days into the manhunt, standing grim-faced before a group of reporters while hounds bayed in the distance. “We will bring back this fugitive, dead or alive. It doesn’t make any difference, in my opinion, which that will be.”
THE MAN WHO WOULD BREAK OUT OF DEATH ROW and lead prison officials on one of the largest manhunts in Texas history was not, as one might have imagined him to be, someone whose only hope was a life of crime. A polite, even-tempered boy, Martin Gurule had at first seemed full of promise, taking several honors classes in junior high. He grew up in a modest frame house on Corpus Christi’s Hispanic west side, having been raised by his grandmother since he was an infant. His mother died of an aneurysm when he was one year old, and his father was stationed elsewhere in the Army. But by the time Gurule entered W. B. Ray High School, he had grown restless with the limitations that an ordinary life presented, and after committing a few petty crimes with mixed results, he robbed a neighborhood bank at the age of sixteen. Walking into the bank at lunchtime, he presented a teller with a handwritten note. “I have a gun,” it read. “Give me all the money.” He had no gun, but he did have a gift for seeming sincere, and the teller stuffed $2,500 worth of bills from her cash drawer into a manila envelope while Gurule smiled pleasantly and made small talk about the weather. Soon afterward, he robbed the same bank again but received only probation after a friend turned him in.
Gurule had an easy way about him and dark-eyed good looks, and during his junior year in high school, he set his sights on Malisa Smith, a soft-spoken girl with hazel eyes and long honey-colored hair, introducing himself to her one chilly afternoon after school by wrapping his jacket around her shoulders. Over the course of their romance, Gurule would acquire a few belongings that seemed beyond his means—among them a black Chevy pickup, a black leather jacket, snakeskin boots, and a 10mm Colt Delta Elite handgun—but initially neither Malisa, nor his friends and co-workers at the Corpus Christi State School, where he held a part-time job, suspected that the meticulously dressed, well-mannered Gurule led a life of crime. “If he had a double life, he didn’t want those two lives to cross,” Smith explained from the Sycamore Unit in Gatesville, where she is now serving 25 years for being an accessory to the crime that sent Gurule to death row. “He didn’t tell me his business, and I didn’t ask questions.”
Gurule was sentenced to death in 1993 for robbing the U & I Restaurant, a family-owned Greek diner where Malisa had briefly worked before being fired for cash-register irregularities. On October 12, 1992, while Malisa waited in her car outside, Gurule went to the diner shortly after midnight, cutting the phone lines and forcing co-owner Mike Piperis and custodian Tony Staton at gunpoint into the back room, where he stole $9,000 from the safe and shot both men execution-style, each with one bullet to the head. The police would arrest Gurule less than a week later after tracing the bullets back to the handful of Corpus Christi residents who owned Colt Delta Elite handguns and piecing together the relationship between Gurule and Malisa Smith. “Both the physical and circumstantial evidence against him were overwhelming,” concedes even his defense attorney, Edward Garza. “They literally found the smoking gun.” But Gurule insisted on testifying on his own behalf, spinning a wild story about how Piperis had called him down to the diner that night to dissuade him from reporting the business to the IRS for tax fraud and how, after a struggle, his gun had accidentally gone off.
“He had always been able to talk his way out of anything,” recalled prosecutor Mark Skurka, “and he thought he was going to be able to talk his way out of this one, but the jury thought they were being flimflammed. He was happy, casual, throughout the whole trial, but when they handed down their sentence, that was the first time the smile was wiped off his face.” Gurule, whose greatest phobia was needles, learned that he was to be put to death by lethal injection.
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