Tracking a Mass. murder mystery

Local filmmaker shares the journey

In 2005, a 20-year quest to track down one of Massachusetts's longest-wanted criminals, Norman Porter Jr., came to an end. As ends often do, it opened a new chapter - the "now what?" phase - that gets a careful investigation in Rowley director-producer Susan Gray's new film, "Killer Poet."

Porter had been convicted of two murders that took place in Lynn and East Cambridge in 1960 and 1961 and had spent 25 years in jail when he escaped from a pre-release center in 1985. He then joined the 2 percent of escapees who aren't apprehended; from the perspective of law-enforcement officials, he vanished.

He hadn't, of course. He'd taken a bus to Chicago, picked a new name for himself - JJ Jameson - and built a new life. It was his first life outside of prison as an adult, and over the course of nearly 20 years he made friends, started a day-care center, did political organizing, wrote and published poetry.

In 2005, Porter was apprehended after fingerprints from a 1993 arrest for theft matched his prints under his real name. He's now back in Massachusetts in a maximum-security prison.

Those are the basic outlines of Gray's movie, but at its core is an exploration of redemption. Do you buy Porter's contention, voiced toward the end of the film, that "you stand or fall on who you are at that moment"? Or do you believe, as one of Porter's Chicago friends puts it, that "when Norman Porter's life caught up with JJ Jameson's, Norman Porter's had to win"?

The movie hears from people on both sides. There's Claire Wilcox, who had been engaged to Jackie Pigott when he was shot during a store robbery in 1960. There's Peter Robinson, nephew of David Robinson Sr., the jail master at the East Cambridge jail who was shot in 1961 during a (short-lived) breakout by Porter and another prisoner. There are law-enforcement officials who devoted large chunks of their careers to tracking down Porter.

There's also the Rev. Donald Wheat, minister emeritus of the Third Unitarian Church in Chicago, where Porter-as-Jameson started a day-care center and was serving as chairman of the trustees at the time of his capture. There are Porter's friends in the Chicago art scene, where Porter established himself as a colorful, useful, and beloved - if sometimes volatile - spirit.

Most critically, the movie hears from Porter himself. After years of persistent requests to prison officials, Gray was finally able to arrange an on-tape interview with Porter last November.

"I'd had one visit with him, and then one year later a second interview, and then we were at the end of making the movie but had never heard from the main character," says Gray. A change in rules governing maximum-security facilities allowed recording devices on a case-by-case basis. She got one hour.

"At the second visit, I think he felt a little betrayed when he heard that I had talked to the victims' families and the cops," Gray says, but Porter's lawyers convinced him that it would be in his interest to talk to her even if the movie wouldn't be just his story.

And it's not. The film has extensive footage of Porter's capture in Chicago, and of his court appearance in Dedham in September 2005, where friends and families of the victims got to make their cases about his future.

The Dedham hearing is where Gray began her filming.

"That hearing became a judgment on his life," says Gray. "Both sides were weighing in and the judge was in the role of playing God, deciding whether [Porter] would be let out or would die in prison."

Gray was drawn to the project, she says, partly because it was so high profile in the Boston area for so long, but mostly it touches on so many big issues: the prison system, the way politics weighs in on decisions, how reform works or doesn't work in this country.

"People ask me, 'Why Norman Porter? Why look at an escaped convict? Why not look at someone who was falsely convicted?' " says Gray. The first reason she cites is that Porter seemed more representative of people who are in jail for murder - "he was a punk kid from Woburn who was stealing cars and robbing."

The second reason, she says, is that after 25 years in jail, "he was out for 20 years and you could see the evidence: It appears he didn't commit any violent crimes, it seems he was rehabilitated, it seems he did a lot of good. And it raises the question: Should he still be in prison?"

"Killer Poet" was produced by Northern Light Productions, an Allston company with two other films in theaters. "The Singing Revolution" is about the Estonian resistance movement, which used song to protest Soviet occupation in the late 1980s, and is playing at the Kendall Square Cinema through Thursday. "The Dhamma Brothers," about death-row prisoners who get introduced to Buddhism and meditation, was at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in May and the West Newton Cinema last week.

The company is also at work on a movie about the record "Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison."

Porter now lives in a maximum-security facility, where he spends 23 hours a day in his cell. "I asked him about what life is like there but he wouldn't talk about [it]," Gray says. "He's very proud. He talks about the books he reads."

Gray will be at the Saturday debut of the film, 4:45 p.m. at the AMC Loews Boston Common, as part of the Boston International Film Festival (story opposite). A trailer is online at killerpoetfilm.com.