Outside Counsel

This Dannemora prison break story has me thinking about it all the time. They've been out two weeks, so the odds are they are long gone, but I keep turning over pieces of it. Are they still together? I think probably yes. Together they may be more conspicuous, but if they split up they double the chances that they might be caught-- and either probably knows enough about the other to make completing the set more likely. At first I thought that they'd hole up in an empty cabin in the woods, but we are past Memorial Day, so people are opening up their camps, and the locals would surely notice if there were strangers about. there are cabins out there that people mostly don't know about, but Big Dick and his sidekick would have had to have either stumbled on something like that, or known about it before hand for that particular holing up in the woods plan to work, and that wouldn't be a good plan for more than a few days anyway. There were 800 cops scouring the woods in the Adirondacks -- the best idea would be to get out of there toot sweet.

Of course they might have made their way to the St Lawrence and found an island camp, but that presents a lot of the same issues. You'd have to hope that the camp you broke into was pretty well stocked with delicious Spam and Grandma Brown's baked beans, and you'd need a boat.

Transportation is the big issue. You can cover maybe 20 miles a day if you are bushwacking, and you'd probably want to be doing that, since you'd stand out like a fly on a plate on the roads. So that means a car. The woman they have in custody is said to have decided she couldn't go through with the original plan, which was along the lines of picking them up near the break-out point and driving them to a place seven hours away. Seven hours from Dannemora covers a lot of ground. One of the fellas is from Tonawanda, and the other (I can never keep straight which one has the huge penis) is from Deposit, and both of those are inside that seven hour circle. Of course, both of those would be poor choices, since people would be likely to recognize them. Slipping over into Canada presents its own problems. Neither of these guys impress me as being the outdoorsy type-- they are more the stone-cold sociopath type. One tortured and killed a guy, the other shot a cop and then ran him over to finish the job. They'd be good people to avoid, but, by the same token they are certainly trying to avoid other people. Other than homicide the crimes they are good at are chiefly petty theft, which will come in handy since it doesn't seem likely that they'd have a great deal of ready cash. I'm thinking that the accomplice probably came through with a car and some cash, and they've been swapping plates that they steal along the way. Plates are easier to steal, and less likely to be noticed quickly and reported.

If I were looking to swap cars I'd look for small independent used car dealers. I might even go in and ask to see a car, just figure out where the keys are kept and what the security looks like. The bigger the operation the more intense the security-- I'd be looking for a small town operation in a place like Medina. Ideally there wouldn't be a fence, and what I'd try to do would be to swap out the car I had with another that looked kind of similar-- white car for white car, Chevy for Chevy. Since I'm on the move what I am really trying to do is keep from being spotted, so if I get a day or three out of a car before the dealer figures out that the blue 04 Malibu over in the corner is now a 99 Nova, well, I'm long out of Astabula, Ohio anyway, and the Buckeye cops aren't too very likely to be spending a ton of time looking for a ten year old Malibu when there is an international manhunt searching for two killers on at the same time. Probably kids, you know?

Big Dick (I think) lived in Mexico for a while, and really liked it. I think probably that's where they are headed (who, after all, sits in prison dream of Saskatoon?) If it were me, I'd keep going, to Central America, maybe Nicaragua. But I'm not sure what the plan would be from there. Having just made it across North America, living on shoplifted Slim Jims and energy drinks what comes next? I'm betting  that neither of these guys has a 401(k). They've lived their whole lives on the theory that something will turn up, and when it has it has almost always taken the form of the police, usually after they've committed an atrocity. The planning that went into their present project-- and the sense of deferred gratification-- seems out of character for both of these guys, and right now it seems like they are probably improvising. That can't end well.