Eleven Days in Hell: The 1974 Carrasco Prison Siege at Huntsville, Texas

Eleven—“We have more time.”

115 That meal must have totally satiated Fred Carrasco and induced some sort of temporary amnesia. Amazingly and inexplicably, there was neither further conversation nor demands for weapons nor threats of killing hostages for the rest of Thursday night. Carrasco did not call Estelle nor did he call Montemayor. And there was no way those in the Think Tank wanted to renew the day’s previous discussion. Though glad to still be alive, the hostages were, to say the least, confused. The TDC director could not explain it to the media. He would only say, “We have more time.” Prison spokesman Ron Taylor said there would be no more moves at all until 10:00 a.m. the next day, Friday. “We asked the inmates if they were agreeable to break off negotiations. They were, so we did,” Taylor said. He called the suspension of negotiations “a good sign” and added it had allowed prison officials to “buy time.”1 And time was the commodity Estelle and the Texas Department of Corrections was most in the market for. Chapter Eleven “We have more time.” —TDC Director, Jim Estelle, Jr. 116 CHAPTER ELEVEN None of the media was privy to Carrasco’s conversations with Governor Briscoe which was the way the authorities wanted it. On Thursday evening’s national network television newscasts, CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite and reporter-on-the-scene, Ed Rabel, talked about the siege to about one-third of the nation’s TV viewers. Their report featured a film clip from the shootout in the San Antonio motel in 1973 when Carrasco was captured. The newscasters described the situation in Huntsville as “tense.” With Harry Reasoner anchoring the ABC-TV telecast, it came up with the “good news” that “so far, Carrasco has extended deadlines to kill the hostages.” John Chancellor anchoring NBC-TV’s telecast gave almost two full minutes to the Huntsville story, which he opened erroneously by saying “seven convicts” were holding the hostages. George Lewis, on scene from NBC’s Houston office, focused on Novella Pollard’s daughter Kathy’s belief that “Carrasco will carry out threats if necessary.”2 Many people both inside the Texas Department of Corrections system, members of the media, and local folks walking the streets of Huntsville, were wondering why Carrasco was housed inside the Walls in the first place. One citizen asked no one in particular, “I wonder why Carrasco was placed here? He should have been in a maximum security facility such as the nearby Ellis Unit.” What the questioners did not realize was the Walls Unit was, in fact, operated under maximum security policies, even though classified as medium security, simply because high-risk inmates were often in and out of the unit for such things as medical attention in its prison hospital. It is also an old prison axiom that the first goal in classification is the protection of the public. You do not knowingly put an escape risk in a situation that he can take advantage of.And secondly, “if he’s got trouble in his heart,” as Estelle described it, “if he’s got a violent background, a flash point of low elevation, you’re not going to put him in a situation where he’s going to be exposed to weapons material or ready-made weapons.” Prison officials long ago discovered that some of the worst citizens make the best convicts, and some of the best citizens are the worst convicts. It was a lesson brought home when Estelle was growing 117 “WE HAVE MORE TIME.” up in California. Although he was born in Indiana in 1931, the family moved to California where they suffered economically due to the Great Depression. Estelle went to work in the prison system because he needed a job when he found out it “took money to pay the light bills.” There were other jobs available in the late 1940s but he gravitated to the prison system and found out he enjoyed doing what he was doing. “I’ve always said,” he reflected, “that if I find myself hating to go to work for three days in a row, I’d better find another job.” His father, Ward James, Sr., was a prison administrator in the California Corrections Department. When he was selecting inmates as “houseboys” or “yard boys” he would always seek out those serving time as murderers because “most of them are just...