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

Fifteen—“You don’t treat women that way.”

157 In the early morning hours of Saturday,Aline House— awake because of a painful back ache from sleeping on the library floor—saw some strange goings on in the room. Even at that hour, it was not dark in the complex because the overhead lights glared twentyfour hours a day. The first thing she noticed was Rudy Dominguez and Ignacio Cuevas, using electrical cord wrapped around the door handles, had locked shut the two staff restrooms in the library. They were afraid prison guards could enter their fortress through those rooms so they closed them off, leaving only the inmates’ restroom to serve the needs of all seventeen people. Then she saw the four extremely busy but quiet hostage inmates moving a study carrel (an enclosed, partitioned table often used for individual study in libraries) to the middle of the floor. They were building an interior barricade to further protect themselves from their expected TDC attack. “One of the inmate captives,” she recalled, “had a load of something. And I said to myself, ‘My God, they’ve got hand grenades.’ He put one down and it went Chapter Fifteen July 27, 1974 • Day Four “You don’t treat women that way.” — TDC Director, Jim Estelle, Jr. 158 CHAPTER FIFTEEN clank. I couldn’t tell exactly how many.” Squinting through one eye while pretending to be asleep, she saw what looked like sections of pipe several inches long which she thought were pipe bombs. From their fortified study carrel, the men could effectively lob those bombs, just like hand grenades, in any direction—at hostages or at the assault team when and if it entered the premises.1 The unusual activity continued throughout the morning. When Von Beseda and Judy Standley, handcuffed together, got up to use the inmate restroom, clinking noises coming from within alarmed Cuevas and Dominguez. They thought the women were trying to unlock their handcuffs. Actually, Von had slipped her one hand out of the cuffs and was washing her hands at the sink while Judy used the stall. What the convicts heard was merely the sound of Von’s handcuff clinking against the washbowl. Cuevas opened the outer door to the restroom to see what was going on. When the quick-thinking Beseda heard him coming, she dashed over to Standley’s stall door and thrust her cuffed arm in towards Judy, making it look like the two were still linked. When the women later stormed out of the restroom in indignation and confronted Cuevas for his invasion of their privacy, he merely said a handcuff key was missing and he accused Von of having it. She told him she had no such thing. The embarrassed Cuevas got together with Dominguez and they started muttering in Spanish about how they would like to kill the women. After Carrasco awoke from his late-morning sleep, Novella Pollard told him about the handcuff key incident. The ringleader confessed that he put the key under one of the telephones. Ann Fleming thought “they might be testing us to see if we would try to escape. Fred later told us he told his clumsy cohorts, ‘You all would go hungry if you have to depend on security for a living.’ We even joked with Fred about it, asking him, ‘Don’t you want us to keep the keys?’”2 According to Pollard, Carrasco “didn’t like to get up before noon. And always,” she recalled, “the crises started early in the morning. Sometimes Father O’Brien would be sitting there saying, ‘I wish Fred’d wake up because he could handle things. He could keep them calm.’”3 Of Carrasco, House said, “Even though he was a mad dog, he still had some intelligence. The other two didn’t have any.”4 FBI agent Bob Wiatt 159 “YOU DON’T TREAT WOMEN THAT WAY.” believed that Carrasco’s close surveillance of Dominguez was particularly necessary. “I think,” Wiatt mused, “his concern over Dominguez was him doing something indecent towards the women. He counseled Dominguez on several occasions. ‘You don’t talk this way’ or ‘You don’t do this in front of the women.’”5 The hostages’ apprehension was never-ending. What they discovered next when they awoke from whatever fitful sleep they managed was that Cuevas and Dominguez had scotch-taped cardboard to an interior office. Eye-holes were cut in the cardboard at various intervals...