Prison Escapes Alabama

Six convicts, including three murderers, escaped from a maximum-security prison in St. Clair Springs by using a broom handle to slip under an electric fence. Officers set up roadblocks and went house to house with tracking dogs in a search for the men. Three of them were serving life sentences without parole, and a fourth had broken out of the prison before. The men escaped from the St. Clair Correctional Facility after dark.

Six escaped convicts from Alabama were captured in Tennessee on Thursday, two days after they broke out of a maximum-security prison by using a broom handle to lift an electrified fence. Authorities stumbled onto the group along a country road about 50 miles west of Nashville and 165 miles from the prison. They scattered and were caught without violence over an eight-hour span.

Six escaped convicts from Alabama were captured in Tennessee on Thursday, two days after they broke out of a maximum-security prison by using a broom handle to lift an electrified fence. Authorities stumbled onto the group along a country road about 50 miles west of Nashville and 165 miles from the prison. They scattered and were caught without violence over an eight-hour span.

Six convicts, including three murderers, escaped from a maximum-security prison in St. Clair Springs by using a broom handle to slip under an electric fence. Officers set up roadblocks and went house to house with tracking dogs in a search for the men. Three of them were serving life sentences without parole, and a fourth had broken out of the prison before. The men escaped from the St. Clair Correctional Facility after dark.

Warren Lawson forgot about it. Police in Birmingham, Ala., forgot about it. Almost everyone, in fact, forgot how Lawson shot and wounded a policeman in 1972 and then escaped from Alabama State Prison four years later. But an FBI computer in Washington remembered. And when Lawson, 41, was picked up by Los Angeles police four months ago for beating up his girlfriend, a routine check of his fingerprints caused the machine to dredge up a 13-year-old warrant for his arrest.

An inmate at a state prison cattle ranch is accused of killing the director, the director's wife and two inmates Sunday and burning the bodies in a house, prison officials said. Kelvin O'Neal Washington, 27, was arrested in the slayings hours later on prison property, said John Hale, a spokesman for the state Department of Corrections. Washington is serving a 20-year sentence for a 1984 theft and assault conviction. A motive in the slayings was not immediately known.

An inmate at a state prison cattle ranch is accused of killing the director, the director's wife and two inmates Sunday and burning the bodies in a house, prison officials said. Kelvin O'Neal Washington, 27, was arrested in the slayings hours later on prison property, said John Hale, a spokesman for the state Department of Corrections. Washington is serving a 20-year sentence for a 1984 theft and assault conviction. A motive in the slayings was not immediately known.

Warren Lawson forgot about it. Police in Birmingham, Ala., forgot about it. Almost everyone, in fact, forgot how Lawson shot and wounded a policeman in 1972 and then escaped from Alabama State Prison four years later. But an FBI computer in Washington remembered. And when Lawson, 41, was picked up by Los Angeles police four months ago for beating up his girlfriend, a routine check of his fingerprints caused the machine to dredge up a 13-year-old warrant for his arrest.