Bang! Bang! A loud knock at the basement door sent my brother and I scrambling toward my dad. He made it with ease. I was stuck, with my foot wedged between the stairs and a stove, and I frantically shouted, “Dad! Dad!”
At that moment, you heard the telltale click of a shotgun being cocked, followed by my father yelling at the door, “Back away from the #$*@ing door or I’ll blow your mother#$#*ing head off!”
“Ernie, it’s me!” A high-pitched voice said on the other side of the door. It was our neighbor, an elderly woman who lived a few hundred yards down the hill from our house in Anderson, Missouri. Dad slowly opened the door and spoke to her for a few minutes. She was frightened, as everybody except seemingly my father was, and walked home after the encounter.
That happened when I was 5 years old in September 1981 and had just started kindergarten. One of my few memories of my first year of school was sitting in my father’s lap the day before classes started. I didn’t want to go, but he told me that they’d put him in jail if I didn’t. I went, of course, and loved it.
But that September wasn’t much fun for folks in McDonald County. On Sept. 7, seven inmates escaped from a prison in Kansas. Three of those men – Terry McClain, Marvin Thornton and Larry Miller – were arrested not long after breaking out of the facility. A fourth, James Murray, was arrested a few days later in Aurora, Missouri, about an hour from Anderson.
The remaining three – John Kitchell, Robert Bentley and Everett Cameron – broke into a house not far from the facility, robbing a retired farmer and his wife, before driving to Springfield, Missouri. They stole a car there and drove to Noel, Missouri, about 10 miles from Anderson, and were pulled over by a police officer. The trio raced from the car and ran into the woods.
For several days, people reported seeing the three men walking through the deep timber and open fields sprawling across the region. According to a wonderful piece by fellow blogger Stan Fine, a longtime McDonald County resident, people in the area were on high alert, caring guns wherever they went.
That was a big story in our small, rural neck of the woods. People were terrified, as Kitchell was a convicted murderer, Bentley a convicted murderer and rapist and Cameron a convicted rapist. For a week, we were at my father’s side when we weren’t at school. I don’t think the old man slept at all during those seven days.
As it turned out, the trio had come within a few miles of our house. They ended up spending a miserable week in the woods, barely surviving without food and very little water for seven days. Upon their arrest, they were covered in tics and chiggers.
Amazingly, they didn’t harm a soul during their week on the run. All seven went back to prison to serve out long sentences. Cameron died in 1998 (at 49 years old) after being paroled in 1994. McClain died in prison earlier this year at age 71. Thornton went on parole in 2000, but violated it and was incarcerated again. He died in 2019 at age 77. Miller escaped a second time in 1986. He died at 66 in 2014.
Three of the men – Bentley, Kitchell and Murray – are still alive and in their 60s. Bentley has been free for 17 years and Murray nearly 30 now. Kitchell got out in 1992, but went back for several years.
As scary as that was, their short-lived reign of fear in McDonald County died quickly and later was humorously memorialized on “We Survived the Prison Escape of 1981” T-shirts. If anybody out there still has one, I’d love to hear from you.
TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS 2021 SERIES
PART VI: An excerpt from the book I’m writing about Brenda Keller
PART V: Dad, my best friend and jars of baby sh$t
PART IV: Dad, “Big Swede” and hitting a guy in the head with a ladle
PART III: Dad, pinball and arcades