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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His first escape attempt took place when he tried to flee the Corpus Christi courthouse during a lunch break at his trial. Locked inside a holding cell, he waited for bailiff Lilia Ann Gutierrez to walk down the hall to the court reporter’s office for lunch, then leaned his back against the cement wall for support and kicked the door of his cell until the deadbolt broke. Gutierrez found him red faced and panting, his efforts foiled by another locked door that was beyond his holding cell. “I felt like I couldn’t breathe anymore,” he told her. He would express similar sentiments to Malisa Smith. “He felt like he was in a cage, waiting to die,” she explained. “He said, ‘I’m not going to let them kill me.’”
But if Gurule had escape on his mind when he arrived at death row, it would prove to be a more difficult task. A rectangular redbrick building ten miles north of Huntsville, Ellis is surrounded by long stretches of bare, well-lit grounds, as well as six guard towers and two 12-foot-tall fences, spaced eight feet apart and topped with razor wire. Motion detectors are installed along the prison’s outer fence, and heartbeat detectors are used to scan vehicles leaving the prison. There are few opportunities to hatch a complex escape plan; all mail and phone calls are monitored, all inmates may be patted down or strip-searched at any time, and all five-by-nine-foot cells—where inmates can keep only a few approved belongings—are open for observation and are always subject to a shakedown.
When he first arrived at Ellis, five and a half years ago, Gurule had little freedom of movement; locked inside his cell for 23 hours each day, he was allowed out only to shower and exercise and was always escorted in handcuffs and leg shackles by guards. As he grew accustomed to Ellis, he made do with what few materials he was given—he tailored his prison clothes and lifted makeshift weights to keep in shape—and with his good disciplinary record, he was given a job in the prison’s garment factory in 1996. Classified as “work capable,” Gurule could walk unfettered around Cellblock H-17, coming and going between his cell, the dayroom, and the fenced-in recreation yard as he pleased.
For a man who wanted to escape, it was a windfall. Gurule presumably learned from Ponchai Wilkerson, a 27-year-old thief and convicted murderer who occupied a neighboring cell, about Wilkerson’s use of a hacksaw blade to cut through a prison recreation-yard fence in a thwarted escape attempt several years earlier. He was also in a position to ask other inmates about the prison’s layout, learn guards’ schedules, and trade contraband. In December 1997 Gurule’s motion for an appeal was denied, and what lay before him began to take on a sense of inevitability. “Nobody gets strapped down and lives to tell,” he wrote in a letter to a fellow inmate. “As far as one gets is the death house. I’ve not yet received a date . . . but I have been affirmed and I can tell you of one emotion that comes strongly to mind. Desperation.”
Shortly after Thanksgiving dinner on the evening of November 26, Gurule, Wilkerson, and five other death row inmates in Cellblock H-17 stuffed their beds with makeshift dummies and strolled into the recreation yard, which is covered on top and on all sides by chain-link fencing. Climbing to the top of the fencing, the escapees cut the metal—with a hacksaw, according to published reports—then peeled one corner back, squeezed through the hole, and clambered onto the prison roof, which was flat and partially obscured by a low retaining wall that ran along its perimeter. Gurule and the other six inmates had darkened their prison-issue long underwear with black markers and went undetected as they crawled roughly one thousand yards from the north end of the roof to the southern end, where the chapel is located. The men would hide there for several hours while fog crept in; meanwhile, a guard who walked his rounds through Cellblock H-17 and saw the sleeping figures of the dummies reported the men present and accounted for. At a quarter past midnight, the inmates descended the chapel’s sloped roof to the ground and bolted 75 yards to the perimeter fences, with Gurule leading the pack. He easily scaled the first perimeter fence, then the second. When shots rang out from the guard towers, the other six men dropped to the ground in surrender. Ahead of them, Gurule kept on running.
A WEEK AFTER MARTIN GURULE WAS found floating in Harmon Creek, having drowned less than a mile from death row, he had been all but forgotten. The biggest news in Huntsville was the opening of a tractor store, an event that graced the front page of the Huntsville Item. Christmas decorations hung from the antique shops along the town square, and at the Cafe Texan, where ranchers and county courthouse employees gathered for their morning coffee, conversation centered around the cold front that was moving in. The reporters who had descended upon Huntsville from around the country for the manhunt’s denouement—“Gurule is no more,” announced public information officer Larry Fitzgerald to the assembled television cameras, ripping the fugitive’s wanted poster to pieces and tossing them to the ground—were long gone, as were the Canadian reporters who had stood outside the Walls to cover the scheduled execution of a fellow citizen. Huntsville had resumed a certain sense of normalcy, settling into the quietness of Christmas.
At the Ellis Unit, which had been classified as a crime scene and was off-limits to the media, there were plenty of unanswered questions, which TDCJ officials declined to address until the internal affairs division completed its investigation in late January. It was clear, however, that significant changes would need to be made; Gurule’s escape was made possible not by an isolated instance of human error but by multiple mistakes throughout the prison, and while speculation had initially centered on whether he was assisted by someone on the inside, a more likely scenario is that prison guards at Ellis had simply grown complacent. “For months now there has been a steady evaporation of security on the 2nd shift,” one death row inmate wrote to me in a recent letter. “It had gotten so bad that inmates complained about it, partly for our own safety, and partly because we knew we’d lose a lot (which we all did) because of someone else’s failed scheme.”
Security at the Ellis Unit indeed had grown remarkably lax: Gurule and his fellow escapees apparently were able to obtain a hacksaw blade and to enter a recreation yard unattended, and their failure to return to their cells went unnoticed. Moreover, guards gave their beds such cursory glances that they failed to notice that men did not lie under the covers. And six guards in watchtowers surrounding the prison did not see the inmates scale the rec-yard wall, traverse the length of the prison’s roof, and remain there for nearly four hours. For those who assumed that death row was escape-proof, Gurule’s breakout provided ample evidence to the contrary; even the motion detectors along the perimeter fences reportedly were not tripped when he made his escape.
No one followed Martin Gurule’s escape more intensely than other inmates, who clustered around television sets in prison dayrooms and listened in their cells to hourly news updates on their radios. During the week that followed the discovery of his body, few of them believed the reports that Gurule had drowned. “Hell, everybody knows there’s more to it than that,” a man in a release work shirt said as he stood by the register at the Surplus Store, a drab clothing outlet next to the Huntsville bus station, the first stop for men just released from the Walls. “They probably beat him or shot him and dumped him out there in the river for someone to find.” A thin man in his twenties with a crooked grin nodded in agreement. “Kind of strange that two prison guards found him, don’t you think?” Behind them, several men rifled through piles of blue jeans and faded T-shirts and, upon finding a few things to their liking, tore off their prison-issue clothes as quickly as they could, stepping into pants that hung loosely about their waists and studying themselves in the mirror. Savoring the pleasures of the free world, one man surveyed the store with a broad smile, then fished in his pocket for a quarter and helped himself to a gumball. “This is lovely. This is lovely,” a lanky black man said softly, running his hands along the glass counter and eyeing the rows of cigarettes, sucking in his breath when he saw the prices. “Three dollars and thirty cents?” he whistled. “I’ve been gone too long.”
Outside, where men wearing their new ill-fitting jeans leaned in the shade, sipping beer from paper bags and waiting for the next bus to Fort Worth, I asked a short black man in his twenties if he had ever contemplated escaping. He had spent the past six years at the Beto Unit for cocaine possession. “Two years ago, we were working the fields, and I saw a drainage ditch that looked like it led to the other side,” he recalled. “The grate was loose, and I thought about it for a minute or two, but I didn’t do it. They put you back in the joint for twenty-five years if they catch you, you know.” Squinting in the bright sunlight, he cupped his hand over his eyes and watched the bus to Fort Worth roll up, a sprinting greyhound painted along its side. “Six years I waited for this moment,” he said quietly, “and now it’s here.” Condemned murderer Martin Gurule couldn’t wait for freedom to come to him; his only hope, however scant, was to run.
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