Word: laddered
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That was time enough. While the diversions went on, seven prisoners were making a dash for another section of the wall at the northern corner of the yard (see diagram). As usual during routine operations, the tower nearest to it was unmanned. The men erected a makeshift ladder crudely fashioned out of iron water pipes stolen from the prison's plumbing. Frantically, the men scrambled up the ladder and wiggled under the 2,300-volt electrified barbed wire that ran 18 in. above the top. At about that moment, all of the phones inexplicably went dead in the prison...
...ladder had already been concealed on the western side of the yard. When the diversions began, Ray and the six others started moving toward the wall, and it was all over about as quickly as it began. At week's end prison officials were still not sure what had caused the phones to go dead at the critical moment...
...mysteries of the break was that the other five apparently were little more than casual acquaintances of Ray's. They were all criminals with records of violence, and Ray normally kept apart from such convicts. Although Ray was thought to have been the first man up the ladder, prison officials believed that the leader of the group might have been Larry Hacker, 32, a man with a spider tatooed on his arm who was serving a sentence of 28 years for robbery with a deadly weapon...
...only black in the group. He offered no resistance. It turned out that he was the only convict from another cell block?he came from B?and guards theorized that he had had nothing to do with planning the break, that he saw men going up a ladder and simply joined the crowd. After the break, the others told Powell to find his own way. Shortly after 2 on Sunday morning, searchers grabbed Hacker near a Baptist church, four miles east of the prison...
...Attempted flight over the wall of the Missouri State Penitentiary at Jefferson City, on Nov. 19, 1961. Serving a 20-year sentence for armed robbery, Ray tried to scale the wall with a jerry-built ladder, but it collapsed...