Under & Out

Convict Joseph Holmes liked music. Every day from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m., the loudspeakers in Maryland's State Penitentiary blared out radio programs for the prisoners' entertainment, and Holmes scraped away at his tunnel. The radio drowned out the noise.

Holmes, a slender, 39-year-old Negro, had loosened a piece of slate on the floor under the bunk in his cell. Then he chipped patiently through ten inches of concrete, burrowed diagonally downward for ten feet and leveled off under the massive stone wall. He kept digging, tunneled on under a dry moat, then turned upward again. He had 26 feet to go to reach the surface.

He dug with bits of scrap iron stolen from the prison workshop. Crawling painfully along the cramped tube, he carried the dirt out in his clothes and flushed it down the cell toilet. Midway, fresh-water seepage formed a narrow chamber high enough for a man to stand in. He matted it with old clothes and rags to prevent a cave-in.

One night last week, 70 ft. from his cell and ten years from completing his 20-year stretch for burglary, Convict Holmes broke through in a grassy plot outside the prison walls, hopped over a 7-ft. picket fence, and disappeared into the surrounding city of Baltimore. Nobody missed him until next morning, when a guard checked a motionless lump on Holmes' bunk. It was a wadded blanket and a pillow.

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