David Winfrey

What would make a prison escapee turn himself in?

By David Winfrey

Russellville, KY—Twenty-six years ago, Leonard Adamson cut through one fence and climbed over another to escape from Kentucky State Reformatory in LaGrange.

Today he regularly returns through the front gate to tell inmates about the love of God he eventually found on a Minneapolis sidewalk.

As an ordained minister, prison chaplain and volunteer missionary, Adamson visits up to six state prisons each month.

“I don’t like prisons and I don’t even care to be there,” said Adamson, 53, a member of Crossroads Church in Russellville. “But I love people, and since God’s come into my heart, those people have been part of my life.”

But in 1978 he was so eager to leave that he endured being shot 12 times in a successful escape that freed him from the LaGrange facility for 10 months.

About two or three times each year, he visits a church to share his testimony, which includes wrong choices, demonic voices and running from the law and God.

A native of Ottumwa, Iowa, Adamson moved to Kentucky when his father, a bivocational minister, became pastor of a church in Winchester.

An army veteran, Adamson said he dabbled in drugs and alcohol, straining his marriage to the breaking point. A charge of assaulting his wife gave him his first taste of jail. There, he made some friends who “had a bright idea” to break into a clothing store and rob the safe. “We ended up getting busted, and I got probation.”

His marriage ended and another burglary got him his first prison sentence. “It was just a revolving door from that time.”

In 1976, Adamson was convicted of armed robbery at two Louisville grocery stores, illegal trafficking of pharmaceutical drugs and auto theft. For using a firearm to commit a felony and having a previous criminal record, Adamson received two life sentences.

A daring escape

After about two years, Adamson began looking for a way to get out.

Just before entering prison, his girlfriend had a baby, and Adamson convinced himself that if he could break out he could find a way to make a new life and bring along his new family.

By enrolling in rehabilitation training for radio and TV repair, Adamson secured a pair of heavy-duty cutters he planned to use on the prison’s two perimeter fences.

Adamson had observed that the tower guards, spaced 100 yards apart, had shotguns, which are less powerful and less accurate than rifles over longer distances. Furthermore, a tower on the back side of the grounds wasn’t occupied on Saturday mornings, meaning the guards would have to shoot 100 yards to reach him.

“I’d hunted and I knew weapons,” he recalled. “I knew they maybe could hit me but they couldn’t kill me.”

So at 9 a.m. on Sept. 3, 1978, dressed in multiple layers of clothing, Adamson crawled to the first fence and quickly cut his way through the soft chain links.

Five other men had committed to escape with Adamson, but when they didn’t follow him through the fence, he found himself the sole target for the tower guard who was now shooting.

With buckshot stinging his body, Adamson quickly discovered that the second fence was too hard to cut through and would have to be climbed. As he scaled the top and jumped over, the barbed wire grabbed his jacket, leaving him suspended “like a yo-yo” as the guards fired more shots.

Adamson said he was shot 12 times before he slipped out of his jacket, ran down an embankment and into a wooded area, where he stayed three days before walking to Louisville.

A life on the run

He secured a fake identification card and began running to avoid the law. He quickly realized his plan to reunite with his daughter was just another dream he could not fulfill.

“A man on the run, he can’t be with family and he can’t be with friends,” he said. “He has to keep moving and he always has to be putting on that false face, being somebody other than who he really is.”

Under the name Bill Hogue, Adamson traveled to Colorado. As much as he was trying to avoid the law, he said, he also was running from God, what he describes as demonic voices taunting him, and the influence of his mother and father.

“It’s one thing when you’ve been a minister’s son and you’ve heard the Word time after time,” he said, crediting the prayers of his mom and dad as spiritual influences.

“I’d tried to ignore a lot of things I’d been taught. … Well, I had ignored them,” he said matter-of-factly.

Certain the police were close to catching him, Adamson left Colorado and headed east.

“As I left that area I went up along the Canadian border. And the voices were still there. I went to Milwaukee, Wis., and the voices were still there. I went back down to Ottumwa, Iowa, where I was born. … I knew that I was about to die and go to hell and that those voices that I heard was going to be for eternity tormenting me.

“I knew the importance of being a new creature, but yet I still didn’t want to give in to God. I still wanted to run.”

A welcoming open door

The running ended July 7, 1979, he said, in Minneapolis where he had started visiting an all-night Christian mission and coffeehouse.

“It’s one thing when you’re an outcast to find an open door,” he explained. “At times when I was really discouraged and stuff, I’d just go in there and sit.”

On a sidewalk near the mission, Adamson decided to commit his life to Christ, but he said the demonic voices continued taunting him, daring him to give up the items he kept for security, including a razor, his fake ID and money.

“They said, ‘Leonard, if you’re going all the way with God,’ they said, ‘you don’t need that razor,’” he recalled. “I said ‘I didn’t need anything but God.’”

He said he felt like a fog was lifted when he dropped the last of his personal belongings, but when he looked up he saw a policeman between himself and the mission.

“That spirit inside of me said, ‘Run.’ And I said, ‘No I’m not. I’ve made a quality decision and I’m going all the way.’”

As he approached the officer, he blurted out: “My name’s Leonard Adamson. I’m on escape from LaGrange, Ky., where I’m serving a life sentence. If you want me, I’ll be in this mission.”

Inside the coffeehouse, he walked up to a table and told a group, “I want to be saved.”

“It was just like shelling corn and throwing it to the chickens, because they were on me,” he recalled. “One little black lady, she’s trying to give me her Bible, and somebody ran and they got the preacher.”

Having prayed to receive Christ into his life, he said, “I felt freedom.”

But his spiritual freedom would come at a cost to his physical freedom. As he walked outside, “the police were there, in fact they had multiplied.”

“They took me to the jail and placed me in the insane cell,” he said. “I’d finally made one of the wisest choices in life, and the whole world thought I was crazy.”

He was returned to Kentucky prisons, where he began “studying God’s Word, renewing my mind.”

Gone, he said, were the old cravings for drugs, alcohol, “or anything else that was abusive to the will and the purpose of God.”

To his surprise, he was paroled in October 1985, and he moved to Russellville. Two years later he was allowed to return to Kentucky prisons to minister to inmates.

“A lot of people knew me and they knew there was such a change in my heart,” he said.

“I share the Word and what God can do with any man,” he added. That difference impacts both inmates and officers, he said. “It gives them hope.”

Prison “invasions”

Adamson’s authenticity is one of the first things people notice when they meet him, according to Eric Allen, director of Mission Service Corps missionaries with the Kentucky Baptist Convention.

“The joy of the Lord just flows out of him,” Allen said. “He gives his life back to the prisons.”

Working with Agape Service Foundation in Russellville, Adamson coordinates monthly “invasions” at Kentucky prisons. Musicians and as many as 100 volunteers visit the prisons, working alongside chaplains to befriend inmates, sharing a word of encouragement and hope.

Today, he gets to visit his 27-year-old daughter in Bardstown as well as an “adopted” son and five grandbabies.

“I’ve been blessed,” he said. “I’ve got my health and I’ve sure got a lot of the Word of God living in me.”

Drawing from his own story, his message remains consistent to those he meets.

“God turned me around,” he said. “Without God, any man is a walking dead man. But with Christ he has all hope, he has life.”

(Western Recorder issue date: May 18, 2004)

(Epilogue: Leonard Adamson, 59, died March  31, 2009, after serving 15 years as director of prison chaplaincy for Agape Service Foundation (agapesvf.com).