[10:29] I know about that book sales. That’s a good sign there. That’s a good deal. Yeah, it was a good deal. He’s not still alive, is he? No. He passed away from cancer. Bill Lamone, Rocco’s brother, Billy Valero, Rocco himself. There was a window of about three years where they all passed away in their late 70s. It was kind of sad.

[10:48] I made some good friends, and I lost them all at the same time. All right. That’s a great start for our show today, guys. As you all know, we’re going to talk about Daniel’s most recent book, Chasson’s Run. And so the prison break that captivated America and the love story that fueled it. Now, we know about the one up at Dannemore. It seems like this thing where a woman helps a guy break out of the penitentiary and goes on the run with him is an oft-told tale. This is another one of them. So tell us about this. How’d you get onto this? As I see, Escape from Walpole, was this something that happened when you were working around there? Yeah, as a matter of fact, so, you know, people ask me with Rocco’s book, I mean, Shots in the Dark, the first book, my connection. Obviously, my connection with the two victims in the shootings were my aunt and my cousin. So I get the same question on the second book and not quite as strong a connection, but there was one. As I mentioned, I worked as an EMT for the private ambulance service that handled prison transports of these inmates. And come Labor Day weekend, 1982, I was scheduled to work that weekend shift.

[11:52] And I had a girlfriend of a couple of years and she and I talked about running off for the weekend, the long weekend visit. We wanted to visit Montreal was our destination. So I reached out to one of my coworkers at the ambulance company and I asked him, I said, would you mind doing a swap? Can you work for me? And he agreed. It was a holiday weekend. Labor Day weekend is the last weekend of the summer season. Everybody tries to go away before the colder weather sets in up here in New England. He agreed. So off to Montreal, I go and come back to work Tuesday morning. And this gentleman’s name is Bobby. I walk in the office, ready to go to work again. And Bobby comes over to me and he puts a hand on my neck as if he’s strangling me. And he says, Zimmerman, I am never working for you again. And I said, Bobby, what happened? What is it? What happened? He says, because of you and me working for you, I had a gun held on me. I should be dead right now.

[12:46] He was one of the two EMTs that transported Leroy to the hospital. The other one was a gentleman named Paul, Paul Kilroy. He’s in the book. So the two of them were the EMS team that handled Leroy’s transport from Walpole prison to the Norwood hospital, which is where a lot of strange things took place. It should have actually been me. And years later, about seven years later, 1989, America’s Most Wanted, that TV show that everybody’s aware of, did a feature on Chasen. He had been gone so long and the FBI was kind of losing track of him and not having any evidence or leads coming in to be able to find him. America’s Most Wanted did a feature on him in 1988. The first year didn’t turn up any good leads. A lot of people watch the show, obviously, but no leads. But the next year they rebroadcast it. The funny story behind that is the America’s Most Wanted producers came to the office where I worked. And when they wanted to do the recreation of the escape, they wanted to hire an ambulance and two EMTs to act as the actors. And go through the whole process, start to finish, and film it all. And when they came to the office, the office manager looked at me, and, you know, I’m in uniform. I’m ready to go do calls. He says, hey, Zimmerman, why don’t you be one of the EMTs? You missed it the first time. You might as well do it the second time.

[14:10] So, you know, it’s funny. I said to him, you know, to be honest, I really don’t want to associate myself with a criminal like Leroy Jason. Give it to somebody else. and he said all right suit yourself turns out the two emts that were hired ended up getting substantial royalty checks now killer and i was left out in the cold oh man yeah yeah one of them one of them knew i had turned down the job and came over to me with this check kind of held it up in front of my face so that really was my connection to what took place working for the company, being aware of the people who were involved directly. And in later years, when I decided to write the book and I started to do the research and do interviews, I took them both out for a quick meal and we sat down. And even though I knew the mechanics and I knew the locations very well, because I’d been there so many times myself, I wanted that firsthand view. So I sat down with both the EMTs. And they were very good about sharing the experience with me. Even years later, in the escape of that degree, you don’t forget. Even four decades or five decades later, you don’t forget. That’s what we call a peak experience in your life. And when it’s a peak experience, you usually remember a lot of details. I’ve had a lot of peak experiences.

[15:32] Those death-defying moments. Tell us about Leroy Chase. This is a bad, bad, bad. And you went all the way back into his early history. I mean, I’m looking at this stuff, you know, he starts off in reformatory and, you know, going to the different facilities that young men go to as they start in that criminal world. So tell us a little bit about Leroy Chasen. Well, I mean, his rap sheet, he started as an eight-year-old, nine-year-old breaking into houses. He grew up in a town up in western Maine, the town of Rumford, which is known for rivers and mountains and woodmills. Really not much else. But his father, because of the size of the family, there were so many children. There were actually two sets of twins. Leroy was on the lower end. He was one of the younger kids. In fact, when he was born, one of his brothers was already 20 years old. The father decided to move to Massachusetts to find more and better work to feed his family. Lee, Leroy came along with him and the rest of the clan that was still living at home. And he started breaking into houses. He started setting fires. He had a knack for lighting cars and garages on fire and things like that. He wasn’t very good at getting away with things either. The police were always knocking on his door, putting handcuffs on him in some form or another. He ended up in the Massachusetts Reform School system.

[16:58] Seven buildings scattered throughout the state, all catering to young children up to the age of 17. And they were just terrible places. My first book, Rocco had spent some time in one, and he shared some of the experiences of the inner workings of the Massachusetts reform school system. And it wasn’t very pleasant for the kids. A lot of violence, a lot of mistreatment. Well, you know, what typically happened, and I’m not saying that’s the reason behind it, but these schools were run by husband and wife couples.

[17:28] So the husband would be hired by the state, he’d be a live-in caretaker, and the wife would go along because they had housing for them. And the wife would contribute to the punishment of the children and so forth. So, you know, Leroy would, because of the treatment and because of how difficult it was in these places, he would escape. It’s where he learned his early years on how to get out of these places. And he was always escaping, but then he was always being brought back. The police in the areas, one of the most notorious one was in a town called Westboro, and the police would actually pick up these kids and not want to bring them back because they knew what was going on in these places and just felt so bad for these kids. They didn’t want to bring them back, but they really had no choice. They couldn’t bring them home. There was nowhere else for them to go. There was one story about one of the reform schools. A police officer was returning a runaway, heard screaming from inside the building. And hesitated bringing back the kid that he had with him. He just said it was just horrible. They decided that in the 70s, the new administrations, the new people came in, decided to shut down the system. And they did. They succeeded by the late 70s in shutting down the reform schools. But by then, Leroy had graduated. He graduated to the grown-up facilities. Yeah.

[18:46] And the reason that the crime that he committed that basically put him behind real bars and a real prison, this was MCI Concord, was he fired a gun at some kids that were hanging out in front of his apartment. He had an apartment in the town of Somerville, and he shot a gun out the window and actually hit a girl in the face. She was wounded, scarred for life, and Leroy went off to prison at MCI Concord. Did his time, short time, because he was still young and the system was forgiving. They worked hard to get out and they let them out. And he, from that point, went on to his first armed robbery.

[19:26] He robbed a pharmacy in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and they captured him there. It was armed robbery. He had a gun with him. He actually took a police officer hostage for a while. In the basement, he had tried to escape through the basement. The police officer went down into the basement and Leroy grabbed him, held the gun to his head, and actually to the back of his neck,

[19:44] the cop negotiated his release saying, if you let me go, you’ll live. If you don’t, you’ll die. My friends upstairs will not let you leave here alive. Leroy wasn’t suicidal by any means that he did what he had to do to get out of that situation and back to prison. He went this time to the big house, to Walpole. Walpole. So yeah, Walpole was one of the most difficult prisons to be in, to be incarcerated in, and obviously to escape from. 18-foot walls topped with electric barbed wire. Just a lot of corrections officers, a lot of turrets and guard shacks along the wall. In fact, on the cover of the book, there’s a picture of one of them that I happened to take for the cover. And you just weren’t getting out of this place, not in the conventional means.

[20:34] And it was just a terrible prison. They had a block in Walpole. It was called Ten Block. It was pretty famous. Obviously, all the inmates knew it, but people on the outside had been made aware of it through newspaper articles and hearsay and other stories. And Ten Block was reserved for the worst of the worst. These criminals that were held in those cells were so violent that they couldn’t even mix with each other. To get them there 23 hours a day in the cell, one hour to the outside, they actually had individual cages that would feed at the back of their cell with an extra door. And they would open those doors. The inmate would come out into this cage of wire top to bottom. And that’s where they’d get their fresh air and exercise time. You know, in certain days when we were going in with the inmate to pick up an inmate, you had to drive from the front gate. They called it the trap. You drove from that point to the back of the prison where the infirmary was, and you drove by the 10-block cages, and sometimes they were out. And the stuff they would say to you, they would yell things at you. They had pretend shotguns that would shoot at you.

[21:41] Just nasty people. Needless to say, Mr. Chasen spent some substantial time in the worst block in the prison. I was reading through your book. I know he was not a model prisoner either. He did some things, a lot of assaults, a lot of them on corrections offices. There was one time where he was acting out of sorts during a family visit, and after the family visit, one of the protocol is that they do a strip search to make sure that family members haven’t transferred any contraband to the prisoner. And he refused to disrobe so they could do their strip search. And he basically took down four corrections officers who tried to force him. He hurt two of them. That was just his way. That’s how he resolved things. He tried to bribe corrections officers. He threw things in their faces when they would deliver things to his cell just not a very nice guy but then he would turn around you know i guess you could say if he had a heart i noticed in his record i counted, dozens of blood donations he gave yeah and i’m like why is this guy giving so much blood and then i come find out they earn points towards parole so that’s why every chance he could donate blood they would add to his it would speed up his parole and eventually he did get paroled after the Yanmaraburi. He was sent away for 7 or 15 years. He didn’t do nearly that bunch. And was eventually released in 1977.

[23:05] Early that summer, he was out. In Massachusetts, there’s kind of the well-known story of Dukakis and letting Willie Horton out on a furlough. Yes. He would be the kind of guy that would be like Willie Horton out on a furlough. In my first book, Rocco was out of that furlough program. Yes, he was. He applied for the furlough. It was a new program for him at his stage. And they awarded it to him. And so he was actually going out on the weekends, leaving the prison. And going into the city, into Boston, to spend time with his family members. And he would go back, and he stuck to it. He returned every time. The program was under threat. A lot of people were pushing to have it ended. They just didn’t want some of these inmates being released, even for a minute, never mind a whole weekend or more. So as a result, Rocco Bolero got upset about that, and he escaped.

[24:02] He left. Yeah, he was on a work detail, working one of the farms at a prison. And he had it arranged so that one of his friends would pick him up. And he ended up in San Francisco and he was there for about three months before they tracked him down and brought him back. Chasen did apply for furloughs, but he just never really got to the point where

[24:20] they felt comfortable letting him out even for a few minutes. That furlough program, there’s a lot of politicians from the 70s in Massachusetts that say that cost Mike Dukakis the presidential. Remember it. President Bush actually put up billboards advertising Dukakis’ softness on crime because he let out Willie Horton. Willie Horton was a vicious murderer. He ended up in prison for killing a 17-year-old gas station attendant, stabbed him over 17 times, stuffed him in a trash can, and off to prison, Mr. Horton goes. Well, Dukakis’ program, he gets out. He runs off into Maryland and rapes a woman and beats her husband pretty badly.

[25:04] And so he gets arrested in Maryland for that crime. And the Massachusetts authorities said, well, we want our guy back. We want Horton back in our prison system. And the people in Maryland said, no way. You let him out once. We’re not going to send him back so you can let him out again. To this day, he’s still incarcerated. and they never let him come back to Massachusetts. That’s interesting. I didn’t know we were going there when I asked that question about that. That’s an interesting story. And George Bush, the first George Bush. I remember those ads. They really crucified him on that Willie Orton story. Yes, they did. The other reason I remember it. Yep, and it was a good reason too because that furlough program was ridiculous. They should never have done something like that. Not with some of these guys. It was designed for the lesser criminals. They never wanted murderers to be let out for a weekend. But the politicians in the state tend to bleeding hearts, and they decided to, they went to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court said, yeah, you got to make it fair. All inmates are eligible. And so the murderers started getting out, too, and that caused problems.

[26:06] Obvious problems. Interesting. Getting back to Leroy. Now, he gets out later on in midlife before he goes back in this final time. Well, what crime put him back in this final time? I have to assume he just continued to do robberies, little robberies and stuff all along. He never was a master criminal. Yeah, he wasn’t really a master criminal. He did things enough to survive and feed his drug habit. He murdered a kid in Quincy, if you’re familiar with Quincy, Massachusetts. The story behind the murder was he had a friend in prison at MCI Concord.

[26:40] His name was Mark Bray, B-R-A-Y. And Chasen were good friends. Chasen was getting out on parole, legitimate release that summer of 77. And Bray had escaped. And he was on the run. He wanted some money that was owed to him on a drug deal. They met. And he says, there’s a guy in Quincy that owes me some cash. He didn’t give me the drugs he prompts me in jail and i want my money and chasing agreed to go get it for him so he gets a ride down to quincy and he goes to a park pageant field is the name of the park and there’s a group of kids there they basically meet there every night they have a few beers and they chit chat they talk to each other and nothing crazy on their 20s, and he approaches the gentleman that owes the money to his friend and demands the money or drugs. And the other guy, his name is Kevin, he had basically stopped doing drugs, stopped distributing drugs. He wasn’t involved anymore. And he really wasn’t going to respond the way Mr. Chasen wanted him to. So Leroy knocked him to the ground, punched him really hard in the face, knocked him down.

[27:51] Kevin Rousset’s friends saw this happen and they all come running to his aid. And a couple of them jumped on Leroy Chasen, who produced a knife and stabbed two of them and then threatened the rest of them before he was taken out of the park by the friend that brought him there. One of the people that he stabbed, Paul Melody, was 20. He perished. And the other guy, he was wounded in the kidneys, but they did surgery and he recovered fully. A side note on Mr. Melody, the victim, his dad was a Boston police officer, just retired. So Leroy left, and then he went on the run with Mark Bray and a third gentleman. They made a stop in Somerville where his apartment was to get some clothing because his clothing was covered with blood and a couple of guns that he had stashed in the apartment.

[28:41] He lived there with his girlfriend. Her name was Linnell. After they took off to go on their run, trying to get out of Massachusetts, more or less, the police stormed that apartment. State police, Somerville police, a lot of police. They questioned Linnell, her roommate. And the third wheel that had been with Leroy, who decided not to go with Leroy, he decided to stay and face the music, more or less. He wasn’t involved in the murder in any way. He’d stolen a car and just some minor stuff. So he decided to stay and face the cops while Leroy and Mark Bray basically took off and they were gone. And they kind of lingered around the city a little while, spent the night in Rhode Island while they kind of planned what they were going to do. Jason’s thought was they would go to Montreal, Canada, and hide there. Mark Bray wanted to go to Florida. He felt it was warmer.

[29:32] And he had friends there. They didn’t get to either one of them. And after about a week on the run, they decided to rob a store in Maine, an antique store that they had heard had some very expensive clocks that they could sell. They could fence for cash to feed their escape. And so at that store, they were apprehended by a couple of Maine cops. You know, people always say you can get away with stuff in Maine, but these guys weren’t having it. One was a former New York City police detective and the other was a local cop. It was pretty well seasoned. And they set up a bit of a sting at the antique store and arrested all three of them. The third one was Kathleen McDonald, Leroy’s wife. They had met her in Boston. It was an arranged meeting. She had met Leroy in prison. And they got married in prison chapel.

[30:28] And so she was meeting with him, and she was going to run with him. She went with them on the robbery of the antique store. And she was going to basically go home from there, and they were going to run off to Canada. But she was apprehended with the two suspects, and she became one herself. She had a very interesting story. She was a married woman from Weymouth, Massachusetts, which is very close to Quincy. She and her husband had six children. And she unfortunately turned to drugs, a lot of drinking, and they ended up getting a divorce. He took custody of the kids, and she went off with Mr. Jason. She met him as a pen pal. Leroy was looking for money to conduct an appeal. His lawyer told him he needed $500. So he put an ad in a Boston newspaper that he wanted 500 people to send him $1 each.

[31:25] Kathleen saw the ad. She sent him $1 and a greeting card, and the rest is history. They began writing to each other. She started to visit him at the prison and they fell in love and she orchestrated his escape.

[31:40] All right. Interesting. We won’t roll into the whole escape because you got to leave the guys something that they want. But tell us just kind of an overview of how did she get in? I mean, she was on the outside, I assume. Yeah. You mentioned that she had some EMTs that were held at gunpoint that night. So just kind of a quick little brush over on how this got started. Well, she was a pretty intelligent woman. Between the two of them, they figured that the only way really to escape from Walpole prison, only one other guy had done it previously. He was a very very thin man of maybe 110 pounds and he hid in the wheel weld of the preacher’s car.

[32:20] Of a station wagon there’s an old you know it was in the 70s so you know those cars how big they were and all the side decided the interior body the the plastic off climbed in there pull it back on and off the the priest drove and when he got outside he jumped out of the car and he captured him in about two days they figured out where he was going so the really the only way to get out of walpole prison other than parole is to escape on the outside yeah so instead of the inside there’s no way getting out of that place from the inside i saw enough of it over the years to realize you know because you think of those things as you’re in the prison you know if i were in here how could i get out and just just really absolutely impossible rocco in my first book rocco and i had a discussion about escapes. And Rocco and a group of other men actually tried to dig a tunnel out of there. Yes, they do make license plates at Walpole Prison. They made them in the foundry. Everybody driving in Massachusetts, the license plate on the back of their car back in the 70s and 80s was made at Walpole Prison.

[33:27] That’s not just a myth. They also made other items for sale in the little craft shop in the visiting area. And they made things out of metal and people would buy them. That’s how they fed their canteens so they could buy things in the prison. So yeah, they dug a tunnel and halfway across the yard underneath, they actually ran into a brick wall. And I’m sure you’ve heard that phrase. When they built MCI Walpole and MCI Norfolk, it was a very secretive construction project.

[33:54] People who built it were sworn to secrecy. And what they had done is they built that wall from the surface, the dirt surface, down all the way around the interior of the prison. So that if anybody tried to dig a tunnel towards the actual main wall, there was no way getting past that. So needless to say, the only way to get out of the Walpole prison was to escape from the outside. So Leroy and Kathleen figured out a way to get him out so that they could execute an escape. And the way they did that was Leroy got hold of a ballpoint pen and stabbed himself in the abdomen three times and Kathleen had some nursing experience she at one time had her nurse’s aid license so she had a little bit of knowledge and she knew that if he stabbed himself in the abdomen number one it would bleed a lot and look worse than it really was and number two one of the The protocol at MCI Walpole or all prisons in Massachusetts was if an inmate left the facility, he had to have a belly chain. So it was a chain that would wrap around your belly all the way around the back to the front. And then you would be handcuffed to that in addition to leg irons. So you were pretty secure leaving the leaving the prison.

[35:08] And she figured, and he was correct, that because of where the wounds were, they wouldn’t put a chain on him in that area and handcuff him to the chain. So all he had was the leg irons, and those could be dealt with. He still had mobility. He had his hands free. He had his hands free so he could take hold of a gun that was smuggled in by his wife. That’s a heck of a story, Daniel. This is great. You got to get this book. It really is a fascinating story. They become like Bonnie and Clyde on the run out there also. One of the state police officers who was interviewed at the time of the escape called him the Bonnie and Clyde of Massachusetts.

[35:46] That’s such a common story as a woman helps a man escape from prison, go on the run, and then they hide out somewhere and eventually they get caught. But it’s such a common story. You look at the subtitle on the book and it tells you that these two fell in love and she was willing to risk everything to be with him and to be with him on the outside of prison. And so they executed this escape, and they were gone for seven years until a gentleman named John Walsh on America’s Most Walsh.

[36:16] Yeah, he came along, and he ruined Leroy Chasen’s day.

[36:22] Leroy Chasen, he’s not still alive, is he? No. As a result of that television show, the FBI got enough tips to locate him. He and his wife were living in downtown Denver. The FBI got enough tips to figure out where he was. And I’ll leave the rest to the reader as to what took place. You know, it also begs the question, is a guy like this has spent his entire life in and out of penitentiaries and was out. He was just doing drugs and doing robberies and crimes. Yeah. But he’s able to now spend seven years and not encounter the police. As a matter of fact, he and his wife were working while they were on the run. They made stops in New Hampshire, Chicago, Seattle, Kansas City, Las Vegas, until they finally reached Denver. And along the way, they would have stops in these cities, these locations, living in motels. And he was working at Mom and Pop Cafe as a dishwasher. And she was a nurse’s aide by trade, and she would find jobs in that respect. And so they managed to earn enough money to stay on their feet. There were some crimes committed along the way, but they were described later on after it was all said and done as Teflon criminals because they always got away. The police would often let them go.

[37:46] They had no idea who they had. They had false names. Oh, yeah.

[37:53] When they did, they had an accomplice. Yeah. Oh, did they? When you get somebody in and you check your prints and, you know, their record locally and there’s nothing. Well, unless, you know, unless it’s really something, you may just release them

[38:07] on a recognizance or a city charge in a small bond or they go pay a bond. Yeah. You know, you got a $5,000 bond. You go pay a bond for that $1,000. bucks and and you know and walk i mean they actually had an account on a bar room and one of their hideouts where a gentleman was stabbed and that would trigger a lot more than a slap on the hand yeah but the other gentleman was also a criminal and didn’t want to reveal that to the police so he didn’t press charges yeah and the police let mr chason walk away he spent a couple days behind bars and off he went all right teflon the teflon everything just rolled off then, yep chasen chasen chasen i’ve got how’s it i’ll read all it is it chasen’s run the prison break the captivated america and the love story that fueled it so guys i have links to that book down below i also have link to shots in the dark the saga of rocco bolero you’ll be interested in both these books, guys.

[39:10] Thanks a lot, Daniel. Thanks a lot for coming on the show. Thank you. Oh, I appreciate it. Thank you for this opportunity. Okay. All right. You go ahead and just leave. I’ll be in touch. When I get ready to put this up, when I put it up, I’ll send you links. It’s both the audio and the YouTube video. So I’ll put it up. Okay. I appreciate it. Thanks very much, Gary. I visit Boston every once in a while. I have to look you up one of these times. I live down in Hingham. Okay. Yeah. I’m familiar with that. I’ll be there a couple of times a year, not for very long, but I’ll try to look you up. All right. Thanks a lot. Hangum is right next to Weymouth where some of this, I’m Quincy with it. A lot of this took place. So yeah, look me up. I’ll take you to lunch in the North End. I’ll give you a nice Italian meal. You know, I want to go up there. I did a story on Jello and the FBI investigation of putting that hidden microphone in the social club down there. It’s a hell of a story. I want to go down there, see the North End. I’ve got, I’ll give you a great tour. I’ll show you all the sites. All right, buddy. Thank you. Bye. Thank you. Bye.

[40:10] Don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles. So when you’re out on the streets there and you’re a big F-150, watch out for those little motorcycles when you’re out. If you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, be sure and go to the VA website. They’ll help with your drugs and alcohol problem. If you’ve got that problem or gambling, if not, you can go to Anthony Ruggiano. He’s a counselor down in Florida. He’s got a hotline on his website. If you’ve got a problem with gambling, most states will have, if you have gambling, most states will have a hotline number to call. Just have to search around for it. You know, I’ve always got stuff to sell. I got my books. I got my movies. They’re all on Amazon. Just go. And I got links down below in the show notes and just go to my Amazon sales page and you can figure out what to do. I really appreciate y’all tuning in and we’ll keep coming back and doing this. Thanks, guys.