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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"From 1965 to 1975, it was prison reform at its best," Porter tells me. And he became its poster boy. Porter went to high school in prison. He hit the books. He participated in a program started by Elizabeth "Ma" Barker, a Boston University professor and lifelong prisoners' rights advocate, who held college poetry classes in the prison. He graduated from high school and earned nearly enough credits at Boston University-including a seminar in criminology-to graduate, though he never received a degree. He started Radio Free Norfolk, a weekly half-hour show broadcast from within the Massachusetts Correctional Institute at Norfolk on WBUR, a Boston public radio station. The show won a 1973 Citation for Excellence in Public Service from United Press International. He also launched a prison newspaper.

His efforts at rehabilitation earned him a celebrity status among the Boston intelligentsia that is almost unthinkable today: he eventually earned the right to 14 days of furlough a year and says he attended seminars at Harvard University, where he met John Cheever-rather dubiously, Porter claims to have assisted Cheever with his novel of prison life, Falconer. (Blake Bailey, the author of a forthcoming biography of Cheever, says that it is highly unlikely the two ever met: Cheever based Falconer on his experiences teaching at Sing-Sing prison in upstate New York, and met more than enough inmates there to provide him with details. Bailey found no mention of Porter in Cheever's detailed and voluminous journals.)

Porter claims to have hobnobbed with the poets George Starbuck and X. J. Kennedy and with the writer James Carroll. (Starbuck is dead and Kennedy recalls meeting Porter briefly; Carroll did not return several phone calls to his home and to The Boston Globe, where he writes a column. But Christopher Lydon, a Boston radio host who was a member of Ma Barker's circle, says he remembers Carroll as being involved with Porter's case.) While on furlough, Porter would give lectures on poetry and prison reform at churches and colleges, earning $50 per engagement (he also worked days as the prison's carpenter, building and repairing furniture).

He became a prison trusty and was moved to minimum security facilities. In 1975, then–governor Michael Dukakis commuted the sentence for Robinson's murder and Porter began serving the sentence for Pigott's murder. The Robinson family wasn't even notified. When Porter applied three years later to have Pigott's murder commuted, Jackie Pigott's cousin Dottie Johnson caught wind of the request. Dukakis recommended the second commutation, but Johnson showed up at a meeting of the Governor's Council, which normally functions as a rubber stamp for the governor's recommendations, with 5,000 signatures from Massachusetts law enforcement officers opposing the commutation. The effort was scuttled.

"The late sixties and early seventies was a period of great reform," says Dukakis, today a professor at Northeastern University in Boston. "I was very committed to education and job training. In the Porter case, [the state Advisory Board of Pardons] recommended commutation, and it was based on what appeared to be a very impressive record as a prisoner. He was a very responsible inmate within the system-you need these kinds of people or otherwise the place will blow up. And something snapped in him or something, and he said, ‘I'm out of here.' I wasn't happy."

In fact, something snapped twice. Porter walked off the grounds of a minimum security prison in 1980, only to turn himself in two days later. He was never charged; Porter insists that he was lost in a fog of depression over the thwarted commutation and "wandered" away. By Porter's count, it was his 20th escape.

It turns out to have been a dry run for number 21. Porter continued to push for commutation, but by 1984 it was clear that Dukakis had presidential ambitions and could no longer afford to be generous to murderers. (Indeed, it was publicity surrounding the furloughing of one of Porter's fellow inmates, Willie Horton, that may have cost Dukakis the White House four years later.) So on the day before Christmas Eve in 1985, Porter walked out of the Norfolk Pre-Release Center, where inmates were permitted to sign themselves out for strolls. He was seen making a call on the prison pay phone minutes before he disappeared. Porter claims he had buried around $3,000 in Ziploc bags in the woods that bordered the prison. He tells me he earned the money from prison work and speaking engagements; when I express doubt, he points an accusatory finger and says, "I worked very hard, young man." In any case, he says he dug it up and caught a bus to Rhode Island. Massachusetts authorities laugh at that story.

"We think he had help," says detective lieutenant Kevin Horton of the Massachusetts State Police Violent Fugitive Apprehension Section, who started at the unit a month before Porter escaped and spent the next 20 years involved in the search. "He might have taken a bus, but he was driven to a bus station somewhere in Providence or New York; we don't know where. There were a lot of people that were promoting him. They were all liberal academia people looking for a poster child. They found one."

One of them was Robert Castagnola, a Boston College professor of social work who had counseled Porter in prison and whom Porter credits with saving his life. "I went to see Castagnola in 1965 and told him I didn't want to be a thief anymore," Porter says, and Castagnola started him on the path to rehabilitation. Shortly after the escape, Castagnola wrote a letter to The Boston Globe accusing Dukakis of betraying Porter and saying, "I fully support Porter's escape. . . . I will be pleased if there is anything I can do to keep Porter out of the clutches of ‘justice' and to at last be free." Porter told me he kept in touch with Castagnola, who has since died, during his 20 years on the run, but never told him where he was.

Porter got to Chicago shortly before New Year's Day. He had spent a few days traveling by bus up and down the eastern seaboard before heading west to Chicago, drawn by Nelson Algren's sketches of the down-and-out life on the margins in City on the Make. "I said, Chicago-what the hell? With all them pimps and whores, it can't be too bad." He holed up at the Olympia Hotel, a flophouse at Wells and Ontario, and, picking the name out of a phone book, Norman Porter became Jacob A. Jameson.

The chronology of Jameson's first years in Chicago is unclear. He says that he spent some time living on Lower Wacker Drive, drinking his days away. On weekday mornings, he would sell copies of the Chicago Tribune and the Sun-Times at an on ramp to the Eisenhower Expressway, earning around $50 by 8:30 a.m. "Then I'd get on the train and I'd go down to Zimmerman's Liquors on Hubbard and Wells, and I'd start drinking and I'd visit every museum and place of interest in Chicago."

David Beaton was one of the first friends Jameson made in Chicago. Beaton can't recall exactly how they met, but he thinks it must have been 1986 when he hired Jameson to help him rehab the three-flat building Beaton owned in West Town. Jameson needed a place to live, so Beaton let him move in while he worked on the job, and they became friendly.

"He was always asking, ‘Where are you going, what are you doing; can I come along?'" Beaton says. "He was kind of like a kid brother. To be honest with you, once we became friends, I didn't get much work out of him. I don't think I even finished the apartment-I just sold it."

A laid-back political progressive, Beaton wasn't the kind to ask too many questions. It was clear to him that Jameson was struggling with alcoholism, but he found him to be lively company. "I never got the sense that he was hiding something," Beaton says. "I got the sense that he was a creative genius who was definitely living off the grid. He told me he was from Maine, close to the Canadian border. But to me, I don't really care about what your past is as long as you're OK today."

In the spring of 1987, as Harold Washington's re-election campaign heated up, Beaton became Washington's area coordinator for part of the 32nd Ward, which at the time included the Ukrainian Village neighborhood. As he made the rounds canvassing and leafleting the ward, Jameson tagged along. Eventually, Jameson insinuated his way deep into the campaign effort, a role of which he is still enormously proud. "They told me they'd be happy if they got 40 percent in my precinct," Porter says. "And I got them 50 percent."

"Those were wild times," says Beaton, whose recollections of that era are shot through with nostalgia for the political upheaval, with Washington in the mayor's office and African American and Latino political groups threatening the city's white power structure. "My office got firebombed," he says. "There's a lot of shit that went down in those years. J. J. was there and the action was happening every day."

Jameson met Washington himself several times during the campaign, and a signed photograph of the mayor hung on Jameson's wall until the day he was caught. Today, Porter claims that during that time he dated Helen Shiller, then a Washington campaign worker and now a North Side alderman, and that he served as the press secretary for the aldermanic campaign of the West Side activist Emma Lozano. Through a spokeswoman, Shiller says she has no recollection of Jameson and that she was married at the time. Lozano says she didn't have a press secretary and that, although she did enlist the help of some of Washington's campaign workers, she can't remember Jameson.

During those days, Beaton and Jameson would socialize as well as work the campaign. "He was an entertainer-always center stage," recalls Beaton. "We used to have lavish dinner parties, and he'd invite people from all walks of life."

But Jameson's drinking made him unpredictable and unreliable, Beaton says, echoing a complaint raised by later friends of the poet. Beaton moved to Florida in 1991, and he and Jameson drifted apart. Jameson went to visit him once, arriving with little warning. Beaton says he couldn't get time off work the next day, so he left Jameson alone at the house. When Beaton returned, most of the liquor was gone, along with some money, and so was Jameson.

Around 1988 Jameson came to the Third Unitarian Church in Austin, an aggressively eccentric collection of professionals, activists, and intellectuals who seek the community of a church without the attendant religiosity. The Rev. Don Wheat, the minister during those years, remembers Jameson showing up at the door with "rags around his feet." Wheat arranged for David Schweig, a church member who owned some buildings in the area, to employ Jameson as a handyman and found him a place to stay, an arrangement they would repeat at least a dozen times over the next two decades.

In several regards, the church was a perfect fit for Jameson. Not only was the pulpit named for Tom Paine, whose writings Porter had come to admire in prison, but the Unitarian political philosophy was based on notions of redemption and, to put it bluntly, not asking too many questions. "It's a place that accepts people who are unacceptable," Wheat says. "It's a place where everyone's a misfit. If J. J. had said, ‘I did time for murder,' I don't think anybody would have drawn back at coffee hour." Porter was raised an Episcopalian, but Jameson eagerly took Unitarianism as a central part of his identity. He looked in on the church's elderly parishioners. He launched a daycare program that brought 40 local kids into the church each day. When Marcet Tinsley was sick with cancer, he painted her house and carried her downstairs so she could see the work. The stories are legion.

Jameson told his friends little about his background. He would often tell boyhood stories from "Maine"-about his schoolteachers, about his parents. It was clear to most that he was an educated man-he enjoyed showing off his knowledge of literature and history-but he never spoke of having gone to college. He boasted to friends that he had participated in protests against the Vietnam War and against a nuclear reactor in Maine, neither of which could possibly be true. He told people that he had two children, one who lived on the West Coast with whom he wasn't close, and another who lived in England and was a "hellraiser." He now claims that these children were fictional. Both of Jameson's parents are now dead; he told me he kept in touch with them by phone while he was in hiding. And he was in contact with his lawyer, Gordon Walker-Walker's phone number was found in Jameson's cell phone when he was caught. He is matter-of-fact about the life he invented. "I would tell nine truths for every one lie," he says.

This article appears in the October 2005 issue of Chicago Magazine.

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