Finishing His Sentence
For 20 years, he was this state's most wanted fugitive, a convicted double murderer who walked away from a minimum-security prison. Norman Porter Jr. moved to Chicago and changed his name, then, instead of skulking in the shadows, published a book of poetry, became a radio regular, and gave lectures at his church. Still, no matter how hard he tried, the poet could not hide from the murderer.
HE HAD BEEN IMAGINING FOR TWO DECADES WHAT IT WOULD BE like to be captured and cuffed but had no reason to think it would come this day. He and his friend were in the car. They turned into a spot in front of the Third Unitarian Church on a tree-lined Chicago street as they had so many times before. Only today, his poet friend told him she didn't want to visit the kids in the church day-care center. "No," she said, "I'll wait in the car." So he went in alone.
They had come to deliver a set of tires to a church worker, but he always liked to drop in on the neighborhood children. He knew each by name. But before he could get to them, it was over. Illinois state troopers in the church office were on top of him. They threw him across a desk, cuffed him, and took him out as he screamed at the surprised woman in the car to go on without him.
What's remarkable about the story of Norman Porter Jr. is not that the cops finally caught up to him. It's that they didn't catch up to him sooner. His phones were listed under pseudonyms like Alexander Hamilton and Ralph Waldo Emerson. He told people he had two daughters, one in California, another in England, but they never came to visit. And, no, he didn't have any pictures of them, either. He said he was from Maine, but he spoke with a thick Boston accent. Porter was a convicted double murderer, Massachusetts' most wanted fugitive, but he didn't skulk in the shadows during his 20 years living in Chicago. He welcomed the spotlight, publishing a poetry book as Jacob "J.J." Jameson and performing his verses regularly in smoke-filled taverns on the city's North Side. He was a frequent guest on the radio, talking about politics and literature; he took a post on his church board; and he gave annual lectures on Thomas Paine.
He laughs about it all now, as he sits in a gray concrete schoolroom at the MCI-Cedar Junction state prison in Walpole.
"It's all theatah," he says, his false teeth clicking, a little askew, as he grins. "It's all theatah."
He's 65, serving out the remainder of a sentence he skipped out on by walking away from a minimum-security prison back in 1985, five years shy of parole eligibility.
Many have wondered what it would be like to start over, to wipe away the past and try again, in a different place, with a different name, and a different story. Plenty have done it. Kathleen Soliah, wanted on charges that she conspired to commit murder as a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, went into hiding for 23 years before she was discovered in Minnesota, living as "Sara Jane Olson," a doctor's wife and mother of three.
When Porter was picked up in March, he was poet of the month on Chicagopoetry.com. He was working on his second book. He was an eccentric bachelor, a chain-smoking womanizer with a staunch contempt for authority and a problem with alcohol. But he was admired for his intellect. Next to his bed in an apartment in a seedy area of Chicago's Far West Side sat hefty volumes on the US Supreme Court and American history. He quoted liberally from Shakespeare and Walt Whitman in everyday conversation. One former girlfriend says they regularly made love to the drone of The Charlie Rose Show and that he reveled in the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzles.
He rarely had 2 cents to rub together, often mooching off friends for meals and scouting trash bins in alleys for useful pieces of furniture and knickknacks. Yet he was a snappy dresser, wearing colorful bow ties, suspenders, and hats he picked up at thrift stores. He worked as a handyman, but by some accounts, he wasn't always very good at it. Porter fixed 80-year-old Katherine Jeans's plumbing, but she still has hot water flowing through her toilet. "The only way to get cold water from the tap is to flush the toilet - it uses up all the hot water so you can get the cold," she says. Still, she and other church members continued to hire him. He was fun to watch, they say, and cheaper than a licensed contractor.
Occasionally, Porter would go on drinking binges and disappear for days in the middle of a job. He may have escaped prison, but the dread of capture and the frustration of leading a double life haunted him like a tragic poem. "I would look around and think, 'I don't belong here,'" he says. Sometimes he would take his dog, Saucepan, and head to the rolling dunes of Indiana to drink. Other times, he would just lie in bed. And sometimes he would think about the victims.
FIRST TO DIE WAS 22-YEAR-OLD JOHN "JACKIE" PIGOTT, A PART-TIME clerk at the Robert Hall clothing store on Route 1 in Saugus. He took a sawed-off shotgun blast to the back of the head on September 29, 1960, while Porter and an accomplice were robbing the store. Until that point, Porter says, he had committed only nonviolent crimes, stealing cars and ripping off sporting goods stores, hotels, and supermarkets. Second to die was Middlesex County jailer David Robinson, 53. He was shot dead on Mother's Day, 1961, when Porter - who was awaiting trial on Pigott's murder - and another inmate broke out of a Cambridge jail. The other inmate, Edgar Cook, committed suicide three days later. Authorities caught up with Porter one week later in Keene, New Hampshire, where he was burglarizing a market in the middle of the night. He had loaded up a stolen station wagon with canned goods and cigarettes and was headed back inside when a cop driving by spotted his car. "If I hadn't gone back for more beer, I'd be on my way," he said in Globe reports at the time.
In court, at least two witnesses testified that Porter had been the triggerman in the Saugus robbery; Porter denies it. In the Cambridge jailbreak, guards reportedly saw Porter refuse when Cook told him to shoot the jailer. It was Cook who shot him, they said. Porter pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in both cases and was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences.
It was in prison that he says his transformation into the writer later known as "Jacob Jameson" began. He had been a high school dropout in Woburn, one of three children of a furniture mover and a devoutly religious stay-at-home mother. He began stealing cars at 13 and spent his teenage years in and out of detention centers. At MCI in Walpole, he took correspondence courses and earned a high school equivalency certificate. He took college courses offered by Boston University and, according to his 1971 inmate bio, headed a weekly discussion group on Time magazine from 1967 to 1970 at MCI-Norfolk. He read voraciously in prison, became president of the Norfolk Debating Society, and started a newspaper called The Lifers. He was regarded by some as a model prisoner and determined activist who spoke out for inmate rights on local radio. By 1975, he had been transferred to a minimum-security facility in Medfield, and Governor Michael Dukakis commuted one of his life sentences. For the next 10 years, Porter would battle for commutation of the other sentence, a struggle he described in his poetry.
When I first came here
two hundred years ago
they took off the ball & chain
and sent me into a barbed-wire brick courtyard.
I asked:
"What do I have to do to get out of here?"
They said:
"Just go through the Green door."
My eighth-grade eyes
counted to twenty-one Green doors
before education wearied me.
I paused to rest . . .
They went . . .
And painted the Green door Brown.
Yet another petition for freedom was denied in early 1985, and in December of that year, Porter just got fed up. He watched a bus drive by the Norfolk Pre-Release Center, where he worked as a groundskeeper, and he remembers thinking, "I should be on that friggin' bus." So he went outside and dug up the $3,100 he had buried in a baggie under a tree, money he said he'd saved from prison jobs and speaking engagements. He walked away, as if to mow the lawn, and never came back.
Porter first headed to Baltimore, where he went to the harbor and decided it looked too much like Boston, so he thought back to a book he'd read by Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make, in a prison literature class. He says he was drawn to the metropolis where, as Algren wrote, "All our villains have hearts of gold and all our heroes are slightly tainted." He arrived a few days after Christmas 1985 and took up residence in a flophouse for $35 a week. He picked his name from a phone book - Jacob Jameson, J.J. for short - and took a birth date five years after his own from another flophouse guest. He spent days touring the city by bus and on foot, visiting many of the sites in Algren's book. When money ran low, he would hawk newspapers at an expressway exit. Porter spent hours swigging vodka and debating life's mysteries with a homeless man on Lower Wacker Drive. He eventually finagled work as a laborer rehabbing an acquaintance's three-flat on Winchester Street in Chicago's Ukrainian Village neighborhood. The deal came with a bed, an arrangement Porter would replicate time and again. He made use of his people skills as a campaign worker for Mayor Harold Washington and visited the Third Unitarian Church for the first time while rustling up votes for the mayor. And all along, he kept on writing poetry. A poem titled "Alleys" was found in Porter's Chicago apartment:
I felt homesick last week
so I took a walk in an alley -
It seems I have lived my life there -
my house is decorated from there
my dogs are from there
I once met a woman there -
Alleys are the lifeblood
of this city -
cobble-stoned or otherwise
under viaducts
or overgrown with weeds
IT WAS AROUND the time Harold Washington won a second term as mayor of Chicago, in early 1987, that Porter's file landed on the desk of Joseph Pepe, a Massachusetts Department of Correction investigator. Immediately after Porter's escape, police had issued an all-points bulletin. Investigators visited his friends and relatives, circulated his mug shot to reporters, and scoured the Boston area. "We were probably doing 200 escapes a year," says Pepe, who was assigned the case in part because he had been working at the Norfolk Pre-Release Center when Porter escaped. "Most of them, you'd find them the next day or next week, because they went back to their girlfriend's or mother's house."
At 18 years, Porter would be Pepe's longest chase. The trail would get hot, then cold. The file would rise to the top of the pile, only to get pushed back down. "You have to kind of weigh each case on what information you have," says State Police Lieutenant Kevin Horton, who worked with Pepe on the case. "There was only so many of us, and there were thousands of warrants."
It was 1989 when Porter showed up one day on the doorstep of the Third Unitarian Church, looking as though he hadn't slept in weeks, rags wrapped around his feet. "I was not in good shape," he says now. "I went up to four pints a day." The pastor secured him a place to stay and a handyman job with a church associate. Porter soon became a member of the congregation and an exuberant speaker from the pulpit, discoursing on Thomas Paine. Every Sunday, a discussion group and debate preceded services, and they often centered on politics or history. Porter says he felt right at home. "He was kind of like this eccentric," church member Joe Kransdorf says. "He never contributed anything to the plate. He was just coming and talking and smoking cigarettes outside. He fit into the personality of the church."
Porter also hooked up with Chicago's Nelson Algren Committee, a group that conducts walking tours and regular readings of work by Algren, who died in 1981. Porter made friends easily, helped by his knowledge of literature and his propensity for debate. In 1991, he visited Puddin'head Books near the corner of Milwaukee and Nelson Algren avenues and made fast friends with the owner. It was smack in the middle of the Wicker Park neighborhood, a mecca for Chicago's poetry scene in the early 1990s. Puddin'head owner David Gecic says there were more than a dozen readings there each week, at venues with names like the Bop Shop, Kill the Poets, Czar Bar, and Lit X.
"It was seven or eight hours of poetry readings within two blocks of one another on one night," Gecic recalls. "Poets would go from one reading to the next."
Porter joined in. He picked up friends and fans. Oh, and women. Always, there were the women. His blond, blue-eyed, boyish looks had faded. But his intellect and obstinance were equally successful turn-ons. He may not have been a great poet, but his performances were memorable. He often told audience members to shut up and listen as he recited cantankerous verses about penises and politics. He wrote one about a spy-plane pilot captured by the Soviets in 1960, "Francis Gary Powers." Gecic capitalized on Porter's popular performances and published Porter's first collection, Lady Rutherfurd's Cauliflower, in 1999.
Having a network of friends made life more stable for Porter, and he drank less. But it also required a more complex ruse. Along with his new name and birth date, he concocted a history, with a few facts sprinkled in to help him keep his own story straight. Porter estimates that 90 percent of what he told people was true, but much was false. He claimed to have grown up in Maine. He said he split with his family during his tumultuous teenage years and struck out on his own, never to return. He said he had two daughters with a woman he never married, whom he called Jan. She supposedly lived in Australia. One of his daughters was a successful real estate broker in California and couldn't visit because she was so busy, he said. The other was studying for a PhD in England and had adopted a little girl who wasn't an American citizen and therefore couldn't come to the States to see him. When someone asked why his phone was listed under Alexander Hamilton, the name of a Revolutionary War hero and Founding Father, Porter said he had a cousin with that name, an expert on Ukrainian icons, who had left town and let Porter stay in his apartment.
"From the very beginning, things he said didn't click with me," says Debbie DeChinistso, a church member who frequently hired Porter to do odd jobs in apartments she owns.
But many brushed aside the inconsistencies as "just J.J.," quirks of a man given to tall tales but with a good heart. After all, few believed him when he bragged about dating an alderwoman from Chicago's North Side or when he said he had been bedding a worker in Mayor Richard J. Daley's office. Porter once organized a reading of Ernest Hemingway's works, passing off a friend as Hemingway's illegitimate grandson. "He tried to make big productions out of everything - his next soiree, his next performance," Gecic says.
He was arrested at least twice during his time in Chicago, once in 1993 after bouncing a check. "Up until the time they took the fingerprints, I thought I was all right," Porter says now. But as a Chicago police officer pressed his fingers into an ink pad, Porter says, he knew it was only a matter of time until his identity was found out. Never did he think it would take another 12 years.
Finally, in February of this year, a notice from the FBI arrived at the Massachusetts Fugitive Apprehension Unit, saying fingerprints from the 1993 arrest matched those of Porter. FBI officials say fingerprint records weren't computerized until 1999 and were not cross-checked until January of this year. For Pepe and Horton, it was the break they had been waiting for. A quick Google search on Porter's alias, Jacob Jameson, from the arrest record, turned up a picture of their fugitive reading poetry in Chicago.
On March 20, Pepe and Horton caught a flight to Chicago and enlisted the help of Illinois state troopers. Two days later, Porter volunteered to help one of his poet friends drop off a set of tires at the church, and the troopers were there, waiting. He had picked up 35-year-old Shelley Nation at 9:30 a.m., and they had planned to have breakfast afterward, maybe work on a poem or two and go to a reading that night at a North Side bar. Instead, she spent the day crying and would later write a poem:
I sat in the car waiting.
I always walked into that church with J.J. by my
side
and this time I said, "No, go alone."
Minutes passed and my thoughts strayed to other
things
and I heard his voice, "Shelley, go on!"
I looked out the car window,
halfway rolled down,
saw two lives, passing through one face,
saw J.J. meeting Norman,
saw poet meeting convict,
saw freedom meeting incarceration
The lawyers who have represented Porter for 30 years are working for his release again, hoping for commutation or at least a plea deal on the escape charge. If they get their way, he would be eligible for parole in five years or even sooner. If they don't, he won't be eligible until he turns 80. Relatives of his victims say they hope Porter will never see the light of day. "He's had freedom that was not earned," says David Robinson III, the grandson of the Cambridge jailer slain in 1961.
Porter jokes that his incarceration again at 65 is like retirement. He gets three squares a day and a place to sleep every night, and there are still signs of a swagger as he walks down the cellblock in his dark-green prison uniform, quick to offer a wink and a smile. He says he receives four or five letters a day from friends in Chicago and writes as many as 25 a week. He's working on an autobiography, and he's become something of a celebrity among the inmates at Cedar Junction: "They say, 'I have this girlfriend; I need you to write a poem.'"
Donovan Slack is a Globe staff writer. She can be reached at dslack@globe.com. 