In the spring of 1916, a bootlegger in Idaho escaped from jail by hiding a saw in his shoe and using it to cut his way out of his cell. A few months later, the man murdered his common law wife by “beating her brains out with an ax,” according to a local newspaper. At her funeral, one of his children told a reporter, “Papa never stayed in jail very long and he’ll soon be out.” A couple of weeks later, he did it again, escaping from yet another jail with the old saw-in-the-boot trick. This week, more than a century later, officials in Clark County, Idaho, announced that Joseph Henry Loveless, the bootlegging escape artist, had been found. Since 1979, the authorities in Idaho had been trying to identify a torso that had been stuffed in a burlap sack in a cave.

Source: New York Times January 03, 2020 09:56 UTC