Crime & Justice

How a convicted rapist escaped the Anchorage jail and roamed the city for 3 hours

If anyone should have been locked up tight, it was Kevin Tuckfield.

At the Cook Inlet Pre-Trial Facility, blocks from downtown Anchorage, the 28-year-old was classified as a "two-man" inmate -- so dangerous that two correctional officers were required to escort him every time he left his cell in the jail's M or "Mike" module, which houses the state's most acutely mentally ill prisoners.

Tuckfield was serving a sentence for a 2008 abduction and rape.

But on the morning of March 13, he managed to scale a concrete wall in a recreation yard attached to his housing unit and pry open a vulnerable patch of fencing, according to the accounts of current and former workers at the jail. He is thought to have slipped through, then used a coat to pass over an external fence topped with razor wire.

With that, a man with a criminal history of sexually terrorizing strangers became the first person in history to successfully escape the Anchorage jail.

For a few hours, Tuckfield was free in Anchorage.

By 11:30, he was trying to force a woman at a car wash in the 5500 block of Lake Otis Parkway into her vehicle, telling her he had a gun.

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She screamed and fought back, attracting the attention of passers-by. He ran away and was followed by a 16-year-old who heard the woman's screams and helped police find him. Tuckfield was arrested soon after that.

What news reports that day didn't mention was that Tuckfield was serving a long sentence for a crime that started in much the same way: In 2008, he threatened a woman unloading groceries from her car in the parking lot of a Government Hill apartment complex. That time he was carrying a handgun. He pushed her into the car, court documents say, and told her he'd shoot her if she didn't do what he wanted.

The woman asked him not to hurt her because she had children. Tuckfield drove to a secluded park and raped her in the backseat of her car.

Attorney Taylor Winston prosecuted the case. Now the head of the state Office of Victims' Rights, she remembers it vividly.

It was an example of a rare but fearful scenario she encountered only a handful of times in her career as a sex crimes prosecutor.

"Over all the sex assaults that occur, very few are what we'll call stranger rapes," she said. "He engaged in a very violent stranger rape."

No comment from DOC

The Department of Corrections would rather not talk about the escape. Or, for that matter, the other problems at the Anchorage jail, which in the past four months has been the site of three inmate deaths as well as an incident in which prisoners put a correctional officer in a chokehold during an escape attempt.

The department made no statement when the escape happened. Two weeks later, officials refuse to answer any questions about the incident, the inmate, the facility or whether any policies will change to prevent a future escape.

Spokeswoman Sherrie Daigle would say only that the DOC is cooperating with an investigation by the Alaska State Troopers. For their part, the Alaska State Troopers' Bureau of Investigation referred questions back to the Department of Corrections.

On the morning of the escape, employees at the Cook Inlet Pre-Trial facility were not notified that a dangerous prisoner had escaped, according to an outraged email that a longtime DOC employee sent to top department and state officials, including Gov. Bill Walker, on March 13.

A copy of the email was obtained by the Alaska Dispatch News.

Tuckfield's escape was entered into an internal information system at 8:20 a.m., the email said. It's not clear how much time had passed from when he was discovered missing. But it wasn't until 8:50 a.m., when a co-worker asked why signs had been taped to the door saying visits had been suspended for the day, that employees within the building learned an inmate had escaped from the "Mike" mod, the email claims.

"How can a dangerous rapist escape from a facility in the middle of a busy business district and the department takes no steps to alert the public?" it said.

DOC employees concerned for the safety of young female workers at three coffee stands close to the jail called the businesses themselves to warn them, the email said.

They might have had reason to worry.

In 2003, Tuckfield was charged with attempting to sexually assault a worker at a state home for delinquent youth where he was living, holding a potato peeler to her throat. Later, he was accused of fondling unsuspecting women in a Wal-Mart. After his conviction for the 2008 sexual assault of the Government Hill woman, he was charged in Juneau with sexual harassment in 2012, presumably while serving his sentence.

About an hour after the escape, the Anchorage Police Department issued a public alert about the escape, which said nothing about Tuckfield's history of violent assaults on women.

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Alone in the yard

The email sent by the DOC employee to top officials alleges that Tuckfield was left alone in the recreation yard before he escaped.

"How can a dangerous offender that requires two officers for every move outside his cell be allowed to be alone in the rec yard?" the email asks.

That question hasn't been officially answered. But jail employees say it's not hard to imagine how it might have happened.

The Anchorage Correctional Complex is actually two distinct buildings -- the newer Anchorage Jail on the east side, and the older Cook Inlet Pre-Trial Facility to the west.

Both are meant to be intake facilities, where inmates in for as little as a shoplifting charge or as serious as a first-degree murder rap bide time until their cases are resolved. It is a complicated revolving door of a jail, housing everyone from minimum-security inmates to notorious maximum-security prisoners like Israel Keyes and Jerry Active.

"Mike" mod, Alaska's only acute psychiatric unit for men, is supposed to provide hospital-level care for seriously mentally ill prisoners from all over the state. By its very purpose, it is supposed to be a unit with the highest level of security.

But because of staffing cuts, correctional officers often find themselves supervising "Mike" mod alone, said John Scott, who retired from the Department of Corrections last year after more than two decades of service. He worked in the module for more than 10 years.

Their attention can be split between watching an inmate getting mandatory recreation time in the yard, separated from inside cells by a glass wall, and dealing with the needs of a host of other inmates, all of whom are suffering from severe mental illness or are suicidal. Fragmented attention can be exploited, Scott said.

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It's not clear why two officers wouldn't have been with Tuckfield as he used the yard.

The Cook Inlet building itself is also older and less modern than the Anchorage Jail side of the complex.

Recreation areas on the east side have solid concrete walls at least 20 feet high. "It would be virtually impossible" to climb one, Scott said.

But on the Cook Inlet side, recreation yards do not have fully solid walls.

Instead, the walls are concrete 6 or 7 feet high but are topped with what amounts to tight chain-link fencing, with a halo of barbed wire thatching the open-air top.

Scott said he was told by former colleagues that on March 13, despite daily checks, "somehow chain link was loose" where the cement wall connects to the chain link, allowing Tuckfield to pry it open.

When he heard of the escape, Scott said, he was flabbergasted.

The event is a sign that staff at the Anchorage jail is stretched to its limit, he said.

As for Tuckfield, he's facing additional charges from his three-hour escape.

Right now, he's back inside the Anchorage jail.

Michelle Theriault Boots

Michelle Theriault Boots is a longtime reporter for the Anchorage Daily News. She focuses on in-depth stories about the intersection of public policy and Alaskans' lives. Before joining the ADN in 2012, she worked at daily newspapers up and down the West Coast and earned a master's degree from the University of Oregon.

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