THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, August 1, 1994 TAG: 9408010043
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: RALEIGH LENGTH: Medium: 88 lines
Security lapses may have allowed a murderer and a rapist to escape from Central Prison in a trash container, prison officials say.
But workers searched a landfill Sunday to see whether the men were crushed by bulldozers after the container was dumped.
``We're investigating the possibility that there may have been a breakdown in procedures,'' said Patty McQuillan, spokeswoman for the state Correction Department.
The two escapees, Thomas Lee Bonney, 51, and James Stromer, 48, had not been found by late Sunday afternoon.
Bonney, a former Chesapeake auto salvage dealer, was convicted in 1988 of shooting his daughter 27 times. Stromer, a former lecturer at East Carolina University, was serving a life sentence for rape.
North Carolina officials were en route to Waynesboro, Va., Sunday evening to check on a possible lead on the missing inmates.
Waynesboro police Sgt. Randy Miller said a 1987 Oldsmobile was found in a remote part of the city Sunday afternoon. Miller said the vehicle was reported stolen from an area of Raleigh near the Central Prison. Also found near the car was a license plate reported stolen in Virginia Beach.
``Our SWAT team is out searching the wooded areas around where the vehicle was found,'' Miller said.
He said North Carolina officials were scheduled to arrive in Waynesboro around 11 p.m. Waynesboro is about 20 miles west of Charlottesville and is near both the Shenandoah National Park and the George Washington National Forest.
The men apparently entered a room to which they should not have had access, slid down a trash chute that should have been locked and hid in a trash container attached to a compactor, McQuillan said. It is not known whether the men got out of the container - which was supposed to be locked - before it was dumped in a city landfill.
``If they survived the compactor and were dumped in the landfill, they would have had to survive the blades of the bulldozers,'' she said.
An early theory of prison officials was that the escapees would have died when the trash compactor crushed its contents.
Although the 25-foot container has a compactor blade, it does not exert pressure on the contents until the container is mostly full. The load Friday morning weighed less than 2 tons, landfill records said.
Most loads weigh about 8 tons.
Most of the load was composedof Styrofoam dinner trays, McQuillan said.
``That load is always light because the maximum-custody prisoners are served on those trays,'' she said. A second load from the prison, weighing about 3 tons, was dumped about noon, landfill records showed.
Prison officials tested the theory about how the men escaped by having a correction guard slide down the chute Friday night, McQuillan said. ``He said it was real easy to go down and maneuver the trash in the container'' to hide, she said.
Stromer, who was trained in construction management, probably knew how trash compactors worked, McQuillan said. She thought he probably recognized the opportunity that the partially filled container presented.
Stromer and Bonney were not known to have associated with each other in the month since Bonney arrived at the prison, she said. Bonney temporarily worked in the prison's trash room while the inmate who usually does the job was being disciplined, McQuillan said. Bonney had left the job last week.
Stromer was convicted of rape in 1990 in Pitt County, McQuillan said.
Bonney, who suffers from a multiple-personality disorder, according to a psychiatrist who testified at his trial, was convicted of murder in Camden County in 1988 and sentenced to death. The sentence was appealed and a new sentencing hearing began, but Bonney's mental condition prevented that hearing from being completed. He was being held until declared competent for a new hearing.
Prison officials briefly searched the landfill Friday night and returned with the truck driver Saturday morning to find where he had dumped the load. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Thomas Lee Bonney
ASSOCIATED PRESS photo
A bulldozer unearths a mound of garbage Sunday morning as North
Carolina corrections officials search for Thomas Lee Bonney and
James Stromer, who escaped from Central Prison in Raleigh.
Officials believe they were hiding in a trash container and may have
been crushed by bulldozers in the landfill.
KEYWORDS: PRISON ESCAPE PRISONER by CNB