When a quiet holiday turned into chaos
Thanksgiving escape by condemned man changed death row
Warden Jim Willett was expecting a calm weekend.
It was Thanksgiving 1998, and he was full of turkey and ready to relax. With his family around him, he’d settled in for a quiet evening at the Walls Unit warden’s house in Huntsville.
But in the wee hours of the night, the phone rang: There’d been an escape. From death row.
Using a hacksaw and dummies in prison garb, seven condemned men — including three from the Houston area — made an epic bid for freedom, cutting through the roof and running through a hail of gunfire like something straight out of a Hollywood film.
Only one made it over the outer fence, kicking off a weeklong manhunt harkening back to the days of the Bonnie and Clyde gang — the last time a Texas death row inmate successfully made it outside the prison walls.
And while the doomed escape may not have changed the fates of most of the inmates involved — five of the seven are now dead — it has forever changed life on Texas death row. In the aftermath, officials transferred all of death row to a more secure facility, eliminated work programs and took away group recreation.
“It was the talk of all around the prison system,” said Willett, who now heads up the Texas Prison Museum. “We were all wondering how this all happened.”
Nearly 20 years later, there are still unanswered questions.
In 1998, death row was still at Huntsville’s Ellis Unit, about 30 miles northwest of its current location in Livingston. Just a few miles down the road was the Walls Unit death chamber, the busiest in the country and one that the seven inmates were particularly desperate to avoid.
The planning for the escape started through the work program, officials said later. Martin Gurule, a 29-year-old killer from Corpus Christi, teamed up with a crew of desperate men ready to run.
From Harris County, there was Eric Cathey, convicted of blindfolding and shooting 20-year-old Christina Castillo in a botched 1996 robbery. Ponchai Wilkerson, the son of a retired deputy sheriff, had been sentenced to death for the slaying of Chung Myong Yi in a 1990 Houston jewelry store robbery. And Howard Guidry, one of the few still alive from the break-out, who was sentenced to death in a murder-for-hire scheme targeting the wife of a Missouri City police officer.
Three other convicted killers — including one involved in a notorious hate crime in Tyler — joined in the plot.
On Nov. 27, they made their move.
The men packed their beds with paper dummies, stuffed into prison uniforms. They hoped guards wouldn’t notice them missing that night, even though they’d hidden themselves away in a rec area.
Two decades later, it’s still not clear how they got the hacksaw used to cut through a fence and sneak up onto the roof, according to Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Jason Clark.
Wearing a second set of uniforms, blackened with carbon paper and coffee so as not to stand out in their prison whites, Clark said, they bided their time on top of the building, waiting until the moment was just right.
Then at 12:20 a.m., they slipped down onto the chapel roof, jumped off and rushed the fence.
As they went to scale the first layer of razor wire ringing the facility, officers spotted them and opened fire.
It was the first death-row escape since 1934, when Bonnieand-Clyde gang member Raymond Hamilton broke out.
Gruesome discovery
Six of the fleeing men under fire stopped running, but Gurule kept at it. Before the guards could stop him, he scaled the outer fence, protected from the sharp barbs by head-to-toe cardboard armor.
It helped make him a free man, but that flimsy armor would be his undoing. As soon as he stepped in the water of a nearby creek, it bogged him down, Willett said.
Bleeding from a bullet to the shoulder and covered in inky clothes and waterlogged cardboard, Gurule drowned, probably not long after his escape.
But prison officials didn’t know that, and they rounded up forces for an intense manhunt through woods and pastures around Huntsville.
“They knew the chances of him getting far were not good,” Willett said.
Officials vowed to track him down “dead or alive.” More than 500 searchers used helicopters, horses, cars and dogs to hunt for the escapee.
Willett remembers sleeping in his car between patrols around the perimeter of the search area.
When they finally found the missing prisoner, it was almost accidental. Two off-duty prison officers baiting a trout line spotted Gurule’s body in a creek about a mile from the prison.
Authorities didn’t make their gruesome find until Dec. 3, but by the start of the new year plans were already underway to move to the more secure Terrell Unit, later renamed Polunsky Unit.
Loss of privileges
The security changes were swift and lasting.
“We just expected things to get back to how they were,” said death row inmate Robert Fratta, who was there at the time. “But nope, we were wrong.”
Even today, there’s no more work in the garment factory for death row inmates, and group recreational options were cut off.
Instead, prisoners are let out of their cells to individual caged recreation areas alone for about an hour a day some days of the week.
There’s no more group church services, and piddling — when inmates make craft items for sale — isn’t allowed on death row.
They don’t have bunkmates, and their cells are solid doors instead of old-fashioned bars. And there’s no TV. “They’re upset about that,” former prison spokesman Larry Fitzgerald said at the time.
Aside from the sweeping shifts, some of the security changes were smaller and specific: Death row inmates can only have one uniform at a time, and they aren’t allowed carbon paper, Clark said.
They are still not permitted to have hacksaws.