Hiding Between the Lines

Over the course of 20 raucous years, J. J. Jameson became a fixture on the city's lively poetry circuit—a loud, drunken declaimer out of central casting. So his many friends were more than a little shocked when Massachusetts police came to town this spring and arrested him. He had been active in his church, loyal to a fault, unusually talented—and his writing revealed such intimate details of his life that people on the scene thought they knew him. But they didn't know he had been doing time for murder, and had escaped. They didn't even know his real name.

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Courtesy The Puddin'Head Press

Porter taking a break in Lincoln Square during the 2004 Chicago Poetry Festival.

His clothes never fit right. That's the one thing you hear from people who have known J. J. Jameson over the years, and it is true of Norman Porter as he sits across from me in an interview room at MCI–Cedar Junction, a state prison in South Walpole, on a sweltering June day. He looks underfed and frail in his baggy blue-green jump suit. Porter is garrulous, charming, and slightly goofy. He has a certain stubborn dignity that comes across as almost comical in undignified situations, whether it's the physical and sexual depredations he wrote about in his poems or sitting across the table from me in his thin V-neck prison blouse. One friend describes him as Chaplinesque. Don Knotts could play him in the movie.

And let there be no doubt that Porter would like there to be a movie. (In fact, a Boston-based documentary crew has already interviewed Porter in prison.) He has already started his memoirs, he says, and it is immediately apparent to anyone who meets him that Porter is taken with what he believes to be the sweeping, romantic narrative arc of his life: the man who entered prison a thug and left it a thinker; the neglected weed that grew up from the concrete and turned out to be a flower.

Norman Arthur Porter Jr. was born on January 28, 1940, in Woburn, one of four children. "On a dirt road with an icebox, not a refrigerator," he says. His father owned a business drilling water wells and, later, moving homes to make way for new highways.

"My father was strict," Porter says. "New England strict. There's a breed of Puritanism my father shared." He put his children to work early, and Porter points a proud finger in the air between us to emphasize that he worked hard for his father's business from the age of eight. But by the time he was 13, he says, he had started getting into trouble. He stole a car when he was 15-as with most of Porter's crimes, he brings up muddying and mitigating circumstances for this juvenile arrest, saying he'd been wrongly accused-and was sent to the Lyman Reform School for boys. His parents, hoping to teach him a lesson, did not object to the sentence. "I was not right for the next seven or eight years," he says. "It was a brutal place. They beat the shit out of you."

For Porter, past was prologue. He cut his teeth on jailbreaks by busting out of Lyman "about 18 times," he says. He'd steal cars and hit the road until he was caught, which he always was. He once got as far as Richmond, Virginia, where, he says, he went to visit Civil War battlefields-an early emergence of what would later become a recurring theme in his life, that of the intellectually curious outlaw. Eventually, he met Teddy Mavor and John Deveau.

"Three guys went to rob a place and it went haywire" is how Porter describes the events of September 29, 1960. According to court documents and contemporaneous press accounts, Porter, Mavor, and Deveau were relatively accomplished holdup men in the midst of a crime spree when Porter and Mavor walked into the Robert Hall clothing store in Saugus, a working-class suburb north of Boston, around 8:30 that evening. Porter was out on bail awaiting trial for three felonies in Boston, and later police would link the trio to a grocery store holdup from two weeks before and an attempted bank robbery that very morning.

Porter and Mavor, wearing blue-and-white-checked bandannas over their faces and felt pork-pie hats pulled low over their eyes, walked into the Robert Hall store and announced a holdup. Mavor, who had worked at the store a few months earlier and so knew the layout, was carrying a pistol; Porter carried a sawed-off shotgun and had a pistol in his belt. Deveau waited in the getaway car. They were expecting the store to be closing down, but it had stayed open late to accommodate the back-to-school rush, and there were 20 to 30 shoppers inside. Mavor and Porter herded everyone to a back room. While Mavor took the store manager into the office and demanded that he unlock the safe, Porter shook down the customers. He pulled a checkered raincoat from the rack and handed it to Jackie Pigott, who worked nights as a clerk at the store, saying, "Put your wallet in this." Pigott didn't carry a wallet. "Well, put your money in it, then." Pigott produced two ten-dollar bills, but he was nervous and had trouble getting the bills into the raincoat pocket. The woman standing next to him tried to help by holding the coat steady. For some reason, Pigott turned away from Porter. And for some reason, Porter raised his shotgun and shot Pigott in the back of the neck, killing him.

Then he reached down and picked up the two ten-dollar bills in Pigott's left hand, and said, "Now you know I mean business." The raincoat was passed to the next customer.

One of the employees picked up a stepladder and hit Mavor over the head with it, knocking him into the store's manager, Ralph Fabiano. Mavor and Fabiano began wrestling over Mavor's pistol, and it went off, hitting Fabiano in the left side (he survived). Mavor and Porter gave up on the robbery and fled. They had made $411. Deveau, perhaps having heard the gunshots while waiting in the car, had lost his nerve and was gone when they got out.

Claire Wilcox, Pigott's girlfriend at the time, was 19 years old. When I asked her in June at her Hudson apartment to tell me about Pigott, Wilcox, a forceful and plainspoken 64-year-old grandmother of four with an easy laugh, said simply, "There's not a whole lot of life to tell you about." Pigott was 22 when he was murdered. His father was the vice president of a local bank, but Jackie had a job digging ditches for the local gas company. He was the kind of guy, Wilcox said, who would show up for work in the morning with coffee and doughnuts for everyone. He had a quick smile, she said, and "the happiest eyes." Though they weren't engaged, they were planning to marry, and he had taken the job at Robert Hall to save up for the wedding.

Wilcox was at her parents' house, waiting for Jackie to come by after work. It was getting late, after ten, and the phone started to ring. Her parents answered, and began to look worried, but they wouldn't tell her what was wrong. From across the room, Wilcox could hear that someone was screaming hysterically on the other end of the phone. "And then my father walked in, and he handed me my first-my very first-Manhattan. And he said, ‘You'd better drink this.' And then it was just chaos."

Local police caught Mavor and Deveau within hours, and Porter was caught two days later in upstate New York on a traffic stop. Mavor told police that Porter was the one with the shotgun. Porter confessed in New York that he had been carrying the shotgun and shot Pigott.

Porter now says that he wasn't the one with the shotgun, but was in fact the one who carried the pistol and shot Fabiano. Mavor was murdered in prison in 1972. Since both men wore masks, neither was positively identified. But the available record strongly points to Porter: aside from Porter's own confession and Mavor's account, contemporaneous witness statements are unanimous in saying that the shorter of the two men-Porter-carried the shotgun and killed Pigott. Gordon Walker, Porter's longtime attorney, says those statements were coached by the police, who were intent on making Porter the triggerman because Mavor was willing to testify to that.

Walker says that Porter's confession in New York was coerced-Porter claims that he was kept awake for 30 hours straight. Walker raises some other potentially compelling points-among other things, Porter's confession states that he was attacked with a stepladder, and the employee wielding it said he attacked the man with the pistol, not the shotgun. The dispute will never be definitively resolved, but Massachusetts state courts have found that Porter carried the shotgun, and he eventually pleaded guilty to possession of a sawed-off shotgun. At Porter's sentencing, his own attorney, Paul Smith, clearly acknowledged that Porter was the one with the shotgun by arguing that Mavor was the heist's ringleader because he had been the one to go to the safe with Fabiano.

In May 1961, Porter was in a Cambridge jail awaiting trial for the Pigott murder when he pulled a pistol on the guard escorting him back to his cell from a visit with a psychiatrist. "A guy gave it to me," he tells me when I ask him how he had smuggled a pistol into jail. "Back then, at the East Cambridge jail, you could reach out your hand and touch people walking by on the sidewalk."

Porter walked with the guard down a hall to a room where a fellow inmate, Edgar Cook, who was awaiting trial for the murder of a Boston police officer, was meeting with his lawyer. He waved Cook out of the room, and the two headed for the door. Before they could escape, they encountered David Robinson, the jailmaster, who stood his ground and demanded that Porter hand over the gun. Cook told Porter to shoot him. Porter hesitated. Robinson made a move for Porter. Cook grabbed the gun. He shot Robinson behind the ear. It was Mother's Day, and Robinson, a 30-year veteran law enforcement officer with a wife and two kids, wasn't supposed to be there; he had traded shifts so a few of his men could be with their mothers.

Cook was found three days later at a friend's apartment by the Boston police. His death was ruled a suicide, but everybody I talked to who was familiar with the case suspected that it was a police murder. One crime scene photo shows Cook's pistol, hat, burning cigarette, and a pool of blood lined up in a tidy row on the floor. Porter was caught in New Hampshire one week later while robbing a food store. A photo taken in court the next day shows Porter, smiling, arms folded confidently across his chest, amiably chatting up the two New Hampshire State Police patrolmen who had arrested him.

Porter pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in both cases. He was sentenced to life in prison for Robinson's murder and life in prison for Pigott's murder, with the sentences to be served consecutively. In other words, as his lawyer puts it: "You serve life for Robinson's murder, then you die, and then you start serving life for Pigott's murder."