Thursday, Aug. 26, 1999 | 11:20 a.m.
Timothy Blackburn's ability to evade authorities since breaking out of jail Aug. 11 makes the alleged bank robber one of the most elusive quarries sought by local FBI officials in recent memory.
FBI Special Agent Kevin Caudle places Blackburn in notorious company, comparing him with the likes of suspected armored truck robbers Heather Tallchief and Roberto Zelaya-Solis, and convicted thief Anthony Frisco.
Blackburn, 25, and Robert Bates, 26, are suspected of stealing $1 million from a Bank of America ATM repository at 4215 E. Charleston in December. Two weeks ago Blackburn, allegedly with the help of his wife, Puthea Lee, escaped from the North Las Vegas Corrections Center. The whereabouts of the couple and their two young daughters remain unknown.
Six years ago Tallchief, then 21 and a driver for Loomis Armored Inc., drove away from Circus Circus in an armored van loaded with $3.1 million while two coworkers were inside the casino filling ATM machines. She rendezvoused with Zelaya-Solis, then 48, her boyfriend and the alleged mastermind of the crime. Hours later the couple boarded a chartered jet to Denver, and authorities haven't spotted them since.
Less than a year later, on Aug. 9, 1994, Frisco and his girlfriend Misty Leann Smith pulled off a similar caper. Smith, then 23 and a Brinks Inc. employee, sped off in an armored truck carrying $1.8 million from the Belz Factory Outlet World mall while a coworker was inside the building.
From there Smith met up with Frisco, and the two fled the country. Three weeks after the heist authorities finally tracked down Frisco, then 29, and most of the cash in Costa Rica. Smith was found dead in a Mexico hotel room two weeks later, the apparent victim of severe dehydration. Frisco pleaded guilty to the robbery in 1996.
Blackburn has avoided law enforcement's clutches for 15 days and counting, and Caudle speculated that the fugitive may have left the country. What qualifies Blackburn's case as unusual is that authorities suspect he has fled with his family.
"We can't find the wife and kids. That's a little hard, to hide four people," Caudle said.
North Las Vegas jail officials said Blackburn is the first inmate to break out of the facility and remain at large for longer than a half-day. Sgt. Dan Lake said the jail, which houses 650 inmates, has seen only two other escape attempts that were marginally successful.
The first incident involved an inmate who made it outside the jail before getting stuck trying to climb the perimeter fence. In the other, two inmates escaped, but authorities caught one just outside the facility, and recaptured the second man 12 hours later.
No one has ever successfully escaped from the 1,488-bed Clark County Detention Center, although inmates have gained premature release through inadvertent paperwork snafus, according to Capt. Henry Hoogland, the facility's custody bureau director.
Still, he cautioned, "When you start saying it can't happen, something does. We've been fortunate not to have a forced escape like that."
The lone escape from a Nevada state prison so far this year occurred Jan. 22. Roy Burney Bell, 39, allegedly broke out of the Desert Correctional Center in Indian Springs by crawling underneath a produce truck delivering supplies to the medium-security prison and wedging himself between the fuel tank and body frame. Authorities recaptured the convicted robber 10 days later.
The state prison system, comprised of 20 facilities that hold a total of 9,115 inmates, has greater difficulty containing inmates in residential-confinement and work-release programs. This year 27 inmates -- out of a population of 1,871 -- have walked away from such programs and eight remain at large, according to Glen Whorton, chief of classification and planning for the Nevada Department of Prisons.
Inmates who flee municipal, county and state facilities typically land back in custody within a few hours. Raphael Basurto, Nevada's longest missing prisoner, represents the exception. Convicted in the early 1970s for what Wharton could only recall as "infamous crimes against nature," Basurto broke out of a state prison in Carson City in 1975 and has never been found.
But the Basurtos of the penal world are a rare breed. Most escapees display far less craftiness in eluding law enforcement, done in by what can be charitably described as a breathtaking lack of brains.
"So many of these guys get stopped when they're in a car," Whorton said. "They get pulled over for having their headlights out or registration expired. I mean, it's like, 'Didn't you check? Didn't you see that stop sign?' "
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