Word: mountain
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ended last week the escape of the admitted killer of Martin Luther King Jr., 54½ hours after he went over the 14ft. wall of Brushy Mountain state prison with six other convicts. All were run down and seized, the last 31 hours after Ray. And Ray's capture-out in the rugged hills, on his own, just as local officials had predicted from the start-deflated speculation that the assassin had escaped from Brushy Mountain, a maximum-security fortress set down in the wilderness, with outside help...
Initially, Brushy Mountain Warden Stonney Lane suspected that some of the prison's employees had helped Ray break out. But by last week he too had changed his mind. He felt that none of his men had aided Ray and the others, although he believed some of the prison personnel might have been careless. Last Thursday Guard Floyd Hooks, 38, was dismissed for "negligence on duty"; he had been in the manned watchtower nearest the point of the escape. Said Lane, "This was a traditional break, and they ran just like other prisoners...
...always, when the steam whistle at Brushy Mountain wailed the message that prisoners had gone over the wall, the chase was led by the men who knew the territory best, mountain men who have roamed the area since childhood. They have caught everyone who has escaped from prisons on the site since 1896 -hundreds of convicts, including those who darted away from work details outside the walls. No one could get away from the trackers, not in those mountains, where the terrain funnels newcomers down into a few paths-the only passageways to the outside world and freedom...
Suddenly, high up on Usher Top Mountain, hundreds of feet above the river, everything in the darkened forest turned silent. Chapman pulled his Smith & Wesson .38-cal. Chiefs Special from his shoulder holster. At 2:10 a.m. Sandy led him to a pile of wet leaves and began wagging her tail. Beneath the foliage, Ray was lying on his back with his arms straight out, as though he had been crucified...
Finally it becomes instinct. There are probably less than five people here who can read a compass, but they know every tree in these woods. So drawled Guard Bill Garrison, 45, last week as he described to TIME Correspondent George Taber how the Tennessee mountain men at Brushy Mountain prison flushed out and captured James Earl Ray in less than 2½% days...