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Escaping Ike: Timing everything for prisoner
Published September 9, 2009
He had climbed through razor wire, avoided bullets from a .357-caliber gun and charmed prison dogs with tuna from his pocket, but a couple of farmhouse pooches almost were Marlow Wayne Reynolds’ undoing.
It had been a few hours since Reynolds, a convicted murderer serving a 40-year sentence, had scaled a fence next to the recreation yard at the Stringfellow prison unit in Rosharon. He had crept into a barn, and was crouched down to hide from his hunters.
“The dogs at the little old farmhouse were raising nine kinds of hell and the farmer called the law down there,” said Reynolds, a Sweeny native. “They shined a light right over the top of my head.”
A year ago today, Reynolds made his escape, the start of 19 days on the lam.
Within hours, 15 TDCJ investigators tracked him while the rest of us tracked Ike, churning in the Gulf of Mexico, off Cuba’s western tip. Officials used airplanes, helicopters, untold numbers of police, hounds and horses to prowl the Brazos River bottoms. Reynolds was on “America’s Most Wanted” twice.
One year later, Reynolds told his story through a wire and glass window in his highly fortified home at the Ellis Unit near Huntsville.
But on that first day, Sept. 9, 2008, Reynolds darted through pastures, woods and farmland in West Brazoria County, a place where he grew up.
“That first day, I’d like to get caught so many damn times,” Reynolds said. “I was on the verge of getting caught every second.”
As he got to the Brazos River, one of the hounds approached.
“Hell, I petted that one dog,” he said. “I fed him half of my tuna fish.”
The escaped inmate said he then tossed his prison shirt, bloodied from his cuts crawling through razor wire, into a nearby tree to throw off the rest of the dogs and started running again into the night.
In the time he was out, Reynolds would survive a hurricane, celebrate his birthday, make a few visits to a West Columbia convenience store to buy cheap wine and con his way past a Brazoria police officer.
He was not an easy man to catch, officials said. Before he was arrested on a murder charge, the escapee was an ardent survivalist.
“Honestly, I didn’t think they would ever catch him again,” said Kenny Dagle, an investigator with the Liberty County Sheriff’s Office, who helped put Reynolds behind bars the first time.
THE PLAN
Reynolds talked bluntly, his voice animated, as he shared his tale. His arms and face showed scars from razor wire on the Stringfellow fence.
The letters “Ad. Seg.” were scrawled in marker all over his white prison garb, meaning he was in administrative segregation, with time outside a cell limited mostly to showering and limited recreation.
Before he went to prison, Reynolds had been an instrumentation fitter for Brown and Root. A divorced father of one son, Reynolds is the eldest of five children, said Martha Reynolds, Marlow’s mother, who still lives outside Brazoria with her husband.
Reynolds moved to a 14-acre tract near Dayton in Liberty County several years ago. He lived in a cabin he built there with his hands until he was convicted of murder in the 2003 shooting death of his friend, Leslie Ledford.
Reynolds said he planned on escaping for almost as long as he had been in prison. When he heard on prison television and radios that Hurricane Ike was due to hit the Texas Gulf Coast, he saw an opportunity.
He had been at the Stringfellow Unit for three years. He had asked for a transfer from a West Texas prison to a Brazoria County unit to make it easier for his parents to visit — and to bolster his chances of an escape, he said.
Reynolds figured prison officials might evacuate prisoners if Ike shifted course to Brazoria County, as they had during Hurricane Rita in 2005.
“If we evacuated, that was going to screw up my little old plan,” Reynolds said. “If I could get on out, that hurricane would play right into my hand.
“There’s going to be mass confusion,” he said. “Everybody’s going to be evacuating and locking stuff down, and the power’s going to be going out and all kinds of good stuff. They’re not going to have time to worry about one little old escaped convict.”
So three days before the storm hit Brazoria County, Reynolds bundled a sewing kit, two months’ worth of heart medication and a packet of tuna.
He skipped chow that night, waited until about 7 p.m., and while he was out on the Stringfellow Unit’s recreation yard, darted to the fence. He climbed up the top, through the cutting razor wire, and jumped down on the other side.
A prison guard fired three times as Reynolds ran for the employee parking lot, according to a TDCJ review of the escape.
Prison officials rushed to vans and drove the perimeter, spotting Reynolds 150 yards away, across a creek near the unit. After losing Reynolds near the creek, the guards headed back to the unit for search dogs, the report states.
It turned out TDCJ did evacuate about 2,600 prisoners from the Terrell and Clemens units in Brazoria County, but Stringfellow prisoners waited out Hurricane Ike.
Reynolds said he didn’t have a solid plan to get out of Brazoria County but felt with the confusion from the storm, he could get to Freeport.
“I’d had a rough idea I’d go down south,” he said. “Maybe get on a shrimp boat.”
'I WAS JUST WORRIED'
The night Reynolds escaped Stringfellow, TDCJ’s victim services called his murder victim’s mother, Lavern Keenan, at her Liberty County home.
“I was just worried,” Keenan said. “… Everybody was evacuating down there. We didn’t know where he might end up.”
She had heard of Reynolds’ threats against people who helped put him in prison, and she thought he might head toward Liberty County.
“We made sure our doors were secure and everything,” she said.
Prosecutors who put him in prison worried, too.
“We had received information from an inmate,” said Liberty County District Attorney Mike Little. “He said he was going to get a judge or a prosecutor.”
Reynolds’ mother, Martha Reynolds, was terrified for her son’s life.
“I just knew he would be caught,” she said.
Martha Reynolds wanted her son safe during the storm, but she had mixed feelings about him being captured.
“I wished that he could have kept on going,” she said.
Martha Reynolds thought her son would try to contact her while he was out, but he didn’t. He did try to call a sister, but she was not able to answer the phone, Martha Reynolds said.
“We knew we were under constant surveillance,” she said.
The fact her son lasted three weeks in the wild by himself is not a surprise, she said. Growing up, he always talked about how much he loved living off the land. He did taxidermy and crafted hunting knives. He often went into the woods to gather wild grapes and pick pecans, she said.
“I remember one time he told me, ‘Momma, you need to take a walk in the woods. It’s so green and beautiful,’” she said.
ESCAPE ARTIST
There were four escape attempts from Texas prisons in 2008 and five in 2007, Lyons said.
“The majority of them are very, very short,” Texas Department of Criminal Justice Inspector General John Moriarty said.
Several months before Marlow Reynolds’ escape, another convicted murderer, David Luke Davis, tried to scale the same fence at the Stringfellow Unit.
Davis, who was serving a life sentence for aggravated robbery and 30 years on a murder charge, fell about 10 feet to the ground after a guard fired a gun in his direction. He suffered broken ribs and a concussion from the fall, but the bullet didn’t get him.
Most inmates who escape custody are caught within three days, Moriarty said.
If escapees visit relatives, use credit cards or meet up with friends, investigators usually can track them, Moriarty said.
“Resources are important,” Moriarty said. “Those resources have to come from somewhere, and a lot of them are traceable.”
But Marlow Reynolds posed a challenge to those methods, Moriarty said. He didn’t make any connections. He made his resources, Moriarty said.
“He had no outside person helping him,” he said. “He wasn’t reliant on anyone but himself.”
Hurricane Ike didn’t hurt Marlow Reynolds’ efforts either, Moriarty said. Once the storm shifted toward Brazoria County, there were fewer feet beating the ground looking for him. That gave him time to put distance between him and the searchers, Brazoria County Sheriff Charles Wagner said.
Ike started rolling ashore the evening of Sept. 12.
COMING THURSDAY
On the outside, Marlow Reynolds had no television or radios for weather reports. He wasn’t certain Ike was heading toward him, but he knew something was happening as he watched helicopters moving north to south.
Reynolds squatted in a small travel trailer in a pasture south of Damon he found not long after escaping. He found a couple cans of beans to eat, T-shirts and a pair of jeans. He also found a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and poured it into a deep cut on his leg.
“That old boy had left about four or five beers in there, and I drank them for him,” he said. “There was a bottled water, and I was proud to get that.”
Having once worked offshore, Reynolds said he knew the helicopters were bringing workers in from offshore oil rigs ahead of the storm.
“By the time the dark come, the winds were coming up,” he said.
John Tompkins is senior reporter for The Facts. Contact him at 979-849-8581.
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