The Christmas Shopping Fugitive

Most prison escapes involve tunneled concrete or the desperate scaling of razor wire. Lester Eubanks managed his through a department store door. In December 1973, Eubanks—convicted of the brutal murder of a fourteen-year-old girl—was granted a furlough from the Ohio State Penitentiary to do his holiday shopping. Turned loose among the crowds at the Great Southern Shopping Center in Columbus, he was told to meet his ride at a set hour. He did not show. He slipped into the stream of shoppers and vanished into the American interior, where he has stayed for over half a century.

The escape was a byproduct of a brief, optimistic era in American penology. The early-1970s "Honor Inmate" program bet on rehabilitation through reintegration: behave with docility inside the walls and you might be eased back into society through small, supervised tastes of liberty. On paper Eubanks was the ideal candidate—a seemingly reformed portrait painter who had won his jailers' trust. His holiday leave was not a loophole but a privilege of the system, a gesture of civic faith that a life sentence could be softened by an afternoon buying gifts.

The faith did not survive contact with Eubanks's exit. His disappearance launched a manhunt and, in Ohio, ended the furlough as a routine tool of criminal justice. In the decades since he has become a name on the U.S. Marshals' 15 Most Wanted list and a digital composite of an aging man, believed to have lived under various aliases while drifting through California and the Pacific Northwest—blending into the very communities the furlough program had hoped he would rejoin. He is now the oldest fugitive on the federal list, a man who beat a life sentence by declining to come back from a Saturday at the mall.