Cible says he, too, has sequestered prison data on the Internet as an “ace in the hole” with the authorities. Ironically, many convicts are firmly convinced that high prison officials are a gang of thieves, and they are constantly seeking evidence.
Officials had missed the significance of a first glimpse of the computer breach. In September, prison investigator Karen Anderson wrote a memo, obtained through a Freedom of Access request, to Deputy Warden James O’Farrell, chief of security, notifying him that some prisoners had accessed the Internet in the law library. The “hole” had been closed, she said, “and the prisoners would no longer be able to get on the Internet.”
But on November 2, Deputy Warden O’Farrell wrote Warden Merrill about some prisoners: “There is no doubt that they have information that was acquired from [the] Maine Department of Corrections computer server. Mainly the Maine State Prison [name blanked out] file, which contains information on prison security systems and the physical plant, and they have information on other prisoner investigations which could prove to be very useful in the execution of planning an escape.”
The plot foiled
Both prison authorities and Cible agree that Watland’s escape plans at first relied on the computer manipulation. Cible says Watland worked for a long time writing a computer program that would open most of the prison’s doors at once while he was in the visitors’ room with his wife. In the chaos, he would escape. Cible says Watland ran into trouble trying to write commands to have the double sliding doors to the large visitors’ room open at the same time; they had been designed for one to open only when the other is closed. According to Cible, Watland wanted him to open these doors one at a time from a law library computer while Watland was in the visitors’ room. Cible says he refused and tried to talk Watland out of the plan.
So Watland turned to the gun scheme. On previous visits, the guards in the lobby had not made his wife take off her belt buckle when it had set off the metal-detector alarm, Cible said in a letter to me detailing the plot — with copies to Governor Baldacci and corrections officials. (Watland had ordered the .40-caliber Beretta for her on the Internet, Cible said in our interview.) By getting security staff used to letting her into the visitors’ room without a search, “Mrs. Watland had cleverly programmed them into giving her a free pass to carry a loaded gun” into the prison, Cible added.
He continued in the letter: “Watland told me that as soon as his wife put the gun in his hand that he was going to immediately execute the visit-room guard who sits at a podium ... as well as shooting any visitors that tried to interfere. He said he was going to herd all of the visitors into the alcove by the exit doors and demand that the doors be opened. Each time the demands were refused or delayed, he said he would execute a visitor. ... If they still refused to let him out, he told me that he and his wife had made a ‘suicide pact.’”
