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Never Free

For more than three decades, Charles Free built a warm, loving world for his family; now the fugitive from justice is behind bars. Should he be?

Joshua Longobardy

Sergeant Dave Stansbury stepped out of his unmarked car, and with two partners from his special unit he made his way up the driveway to the identified house. It was modest, one-story, stucco, and stood without distinction in an air of sterility that derived at once from the front yard’s desert landscaping. The neighborhood was quiet and peaceful. It was embedded in a tract community near the U.S. 95 Lake Mead exit, just off of north Rainbow Boulevard. The three law-enforcement officials wore plain clothes.

They followed the walkway to the front door, past the statue of two love-stricken children sitting abreast and the bench reserved for easygoing lovebirds. They had received word the day before. January 29. A Tuesday. Stansbury opened the screen door, its stiff and creaking hinges a betrayal to any element of surprise—if there ever was one—and knocked on the front door.

Kathy Free was provoked from her midday nap by her husband’s voice, engaged in conversation with the visitors.

“Charles,” she said, searching out the man who had never failed to provide her comfort in nearly 28 years of marriage. “What’s going on?”

Charles Free said he needed to talk to these men, and he did. Their conversation carried with it the polite and courteous tone of professionals meeting one another for the first time. There was no trace of either startle or commotion. As if it were a long time coming. And so, Kathy figured the visitors to be men related to her husband’s work—the construction business—and walked off to a side room to watch television, without any ill premonitions.

Then Stansbury and his fellow members of the Criminal Apprehension Team—C.A.T.—entered the house. A couch. A small dog. A television angled like a personality quirk. Oil paintings, mounted and signed at the bottom by their master composer, CFree. A recliner. A fish aquarium. A white wood archway constructed by Charles himself, a plentiful kitchen and bedrooms beyond. All suffused in a dim light, cozy, practical, a bit cluttered. It is not difficult to see that it was a house cultivated by, and for, family life.

In short, it was a home.

It had been the family manor for Charles and Kathy and their two daughters for the past 18 years. Charles had picked and purchased it because of its distance from the center of town. He wanted to raise his family outside the centripetal force of the Strip, on the outskirts, where back then the region had possessed enough open area to remedy his family’s acute nostalgia for small-town life.

The C.A.T. unit comprises detectives from Metro, Henderson P.D. and the FBI. They had come for Charles. “We gave him the opportunity to explain everything to his wife,” says Stansbury. But he opted not to. Nor did he offer the detectives any protest or resistance. It was like he had harbored inside of him a secret from a distant time and place, which he was hoping would dissolve in the running water of time but instead fossilized like some calculus he could not purge, not even at this moment, discovered by the law.

The detectives sat Kathy down. They showed her mug shots of a man who, in her judgment, had nothing to do with her husband. She told them she did not recognize the man in the photos. Dismayed and utterly confused, she asked the detectives what was going on. They said they could not tell her. They said that was her husband’s wish. They said, however, that she could have a moment with him.

Charles worried for his wife’s welfare, because she had not worked since delivering her second child, and he had always been her sole provider. He instructed her to call their daughters and arrange for them to stay “for a while.”

They hugged. And kissed. And Kathy loathed to let go.

Stansbury’s guys allowed Charles Free to walk out of his home with the dignity afforded to disgraced politicians, on his own and without handcuffs. In this way he emerged from his front door just as he is—a peaceable and nondescript Las Vegas local, 61 years old—and entered the unmarked car that would take him off to jail.

Jack Hazen sat on a plane heading for the United States, carrying both his psychological evaluation and discharge papers from the Marines, and thinking about death. For, he, a decorated lieutenant in the corps, had seen so many dead and decomposed bodies that the horror of the other side continued to haunt him with vivid, inexorable, disturbing memories. Medical advances since the Vietnam War would indicate that it had been a classic case of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Hazen had just been in Vietnam, a participant in the 1968 Tet Offensive. He was in the South Vietnamese city Hue when his unit unearthed mass graves of murdered civilians. It was fucked up from the start. An endless and unpopular war—like today’s—Vietnam swallowed some 1.1 million military personnel and 5 million people in total. The Tet Offensive, deemed by most historians a tactical success for America but a psychological victory for the North Vietnamese communists, was the bloody turning point in domestic support for the conflict. According to the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Survey, almost one-third of Vietnam veterans suffered from PTSD, and Hazen was but one of them. The military sent him home.

He was not yet 22. A California man, Hazen returned home from the war with far more grief than glory, and in reality there did not appear to be any cure for his maniacal angst, because not even the good doctors of that age knew how to treat that which they could not diagnose. When he tiptoed the precipice to which he felt his life was coming, and looked out onto the horizon, there was nothing in view but a blood-red and dying sun. Hazen fell off the deep end.

As soon as C.A.T. took her husband, Kathy Free called her two daughters, Christina Greer and Windy Ross. In the ambiguity of her frantic crying she told them Charles was gone.

The girls anticipated the worst. Their father had lived a restless life and now only the years of his death remained. For he had, in the past 24 months, come under a barrage of critical ailments. Diabetes. Multiple sclerosis. Hearing loss. Cataracts. Heart problems.

In all truthfulness, it was not a good day to receive upending news. Only the day before his arrest, Charles had told them that he’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, on top of everything else.

“It didn’t come as a surprise,” says Greer, 32. “We’d started to figure it out.”

In 2006 he had begun to experience memory loss concerning the most mundane things, such as how to swipe his credit card at the gas pump, and the doctors searched his mind and body for the source of his lapses until they found it indeed in his brain: It was a tumor. Charles went in for surgery. Although the doctors felt they extracted the cancerous tissue, they feared it could come back, if carcinogens had burrowed themselves into the brain’s many crevices. And so they assigned regular checkups for Charles. It was during the course of the latest checkup that he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

Kathy would take care of him. Doubtless. He had been coadjutant to her ever since she had become disabled, 18 years earlier; and now that he was sick, she would do the same for him, with honor. Thus strengthening their bond in a way only lifelong lovers can fathom. Kathy and Charles had, in fact, renewed their wedding vows eight years ago, on their 20th anniversary, and at the same chapel where they first pledged them.

Kathy and her daughters came together in the house they all considered home, and wondered in tears and with great perplexity why law enforcement had taken Charles away. What could he have possibly done? They had always been a close family, and they had always known Charles to be a just man.

In any case, they agreed that no matter what he did, they would stand behind him.

For Charles had spent the past 28 years—the family’s lifespan—devoted to the welfare and happiness of each one of them. It was as if nothing else mattered. As if, moreover, Charles had molded himself out of the dust and clay of this earth for that sole purpose.

He had moved the clan to Las Vegas in 1989 after reconnoitering the northwest area for several months, to ensure that it was safe, and suitable, for his wife and daughters. This city can be hard on people; above all, young folks. “He’s just a very protective dad,” says Ross, 26. A supervisor with Pulte homes, Charles was the house’s sole breadwinner, with his wife disabled but receiving no government check.

Within that home he built for himself a solid American family: decent, blue-collar, law-abiding. He did it the hard way, with his hands, working from sunup to sundown through Las Vegas’ real-estate boom in the ’90s and early 2000s, building homes all across the Valley for the families like his own who compose this dusty town of ours.

“It was like every major new community we drove by, Dad had been involved in it,” says Greer. “That was pretty cool.”

It was on account of such work that Charles had picked up his family and left Fountain Hills, Arizona, a rustic town on the lower east slopes of the McDowell Mountains. Where they lived in a house that Charles built. There he had inundated his wife and daughters with trust and support, Greer and Ross say. So that, like a master teacher, he never had to raise his hand in anger but needed only to change the tone of his voice to obtain compliance from his family. For they dreaded the thought of disappointing the man who had shown them so much loyalty, and through him they learned both law and order and right from wrong without violence.

Greer, floating in her fond memories, says: “It was a good life, and there was nothing wrong with it.”

That’s because Charles Free never allowed his family reason to worry, no matter how barren the circumstances. In the early ’80s, when Charles was living in Phoenix with his nascent family, the construction business had come to a standstill, and the company for which Charles and Kathy worked closed down. Without looking back, he took Kathy and 5-year-old Christina to the high mountains of northern Arizona. Into an unvanquished place enveloped in ponderosa pines called Munds Park. On his own accord he raised an eight-frame cabin which barely kept out the snow in the winter, and he cut firewood and hunted game to keep his family from starving. Kathy tells how they ate chicken out of the same pot for a week. It was all right. “Dad made it fun,” says Greer. It’s a testament to her dad’s character, she says, that she didn’t know just how hard those times were until she grew up. “Everything he did was to protect me and my mom.” As well as her sister. In 1981, on a day of inclement Southwest weather in which the family had to wait outside a Flagstaff hospital for Kathy to begin labor to be admitted, the outlaw gales brought with them a name for the forthcoming child, the couple’s first together: Windy. Charles’ family was now complete.

His family, they say, witnessed a change in spirit within Charles during that period. Something like baptism in the Arizona wild. As if, they say, he had finally come to believe he deserved what life gave him. A wife and children.

“My memories of those days are made up of feelings and senses,” says Greer, who is now married with three children whom she keeps close to her parents’ home. “And I just remember always feeling love and warmth, and this sense of total security.”

The prevailing thought was that even if the ship was sinking, everything was going to be okay, so long as Charles was there, Greer says. Because they believed he wouldn’t allow them the slightest harm. “He was our superman,” she says, a knot of tears in her throat.

And so, on the day Charles Free was apprehended by Southern Nevada law-enforcement officials, his wife and daughters huddled together and were overcome with panic. It was as if their ship was sinking. And, for the first time, Charles was not there.

The end was in fact near for Jack Hazen. He had given himself to drink, and soon he was foundering. It left him poor and without any ground beneath his feet, and so he embarked upon a path of deviance that included a robbery for which he received imprisonment but no rehabilition. It also led to a destination on the opposite end of the country: Florida.

There Hazen lived an impecunious life along the southeast coast. This was 1975. A young veteran of a gruesome war with an untreated psychological affliction and a drinking problem, he was unruly, and too despondent to care. Moreover, he was hungry. And so one day in April he walked into a convenience store with a knife on his person and took from the shelves food and cigarettes. He pulled the knife on a woman who tried to stop him. He fled without hurting her or himself and was apprehended by a police officer fewer than 100 yards away.

Hazen was convicted of armed robbery in Broward County and then sent upstate to the Florida Reception and Medical Center, where he was provisioned to receive help for both his psychological and drinking problems. It was one of Florida’s smaller correctional facilities, located in the city of Lake Butler, just south of the Okefenokee swamp and its ancient peat and legendary alligators. The facility had been established in 1968 to process newly committed male inmates into the state’s system, and it included various levels of offenders. Prisoners in the work-release program were permitted to carry money on them. Jack Allen Hazen was sentenced to seven and a half years for his felony. He would serve less than one.

“My mom is a wreck,” says Ross. “This has been hard on her. She’s lost her best friend, her lover, her soul mate of the past 30 years.”

The love affair between Kathy and Charles had ignited in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1980, when Kathy Ann Sigourney was cleaning newly built homes for a construction company. She was a single mom of a 4-year-old daughter, a status that carried with it a stigma at the time, yet she was not looking for a father to her child when a man with hair down to his butt asked her for a date. But she did become infatuated with a man whose handsome features commanded her attention at work two weeks later, and her attraction to him became so unbearable one day that she sought alleviation by writing him a note, asking if he was single. He said he was.

They went out. They had a great time. During the course of the date, the man asked her, point blank: “Do you know who I am?”

“Of course I do,” she said: “We work together.”

“I asked you out two weeks ago,” he said.

“I don’t remember that.”

“I got a haircut since then.”

She carried that sense of bewilderment to the Hitching Post wedding chapel on the Las Vegas Strip on April 12, 1980. After obtaining the consent of her daughter Christina, who felt safe with Charles, she exchanged vows with Charles Free, and adopted his last name.

He was an inveterate romantic, and always would be. But more than that, Kathy loved Charles for his masculinity: He was strong, able, good with his hands, never given to the idle waters that expedite aging, and above all a provider. He gave Kathy a notion of utter security, so that she enjoyed the rare privilege of not having to worry about the future. Nor did she need to concern herself with the past. For it was well enough to be in his arms in the present.

Good thing, because Charles had long ago broken the habit of speaking about the past. He told his family that his people were spread out around the country, and they did not ask many questions, because they figured he would tell them if he wanted to. Instead, he embraced his in-laws. Sometimes, during war movies, he would tell his children that he was once in the military and that war was indeed a very horrific thing. But he never delved into his own macabre experiences.

“I think he withheld things like that to protect us,” says Greer. “They were the past.”

All they knew was that he had come from Florida on a bus. In the end it was more romantic that way. A man who showed up in Arizona one day and swept a poor single mother off her feet, married her and remained steadfast by her side as they raised their family in Las Vegas. That was the reason Charles, though suffering heart problems, a brain tumor and now Alzheimer’s, continued to work full-time. His marital vow was to provide for his wife. And he did. Up until this past January 30, the day the police took him away.

According to the Florida Department of Corrections, Jack Hazen was assigned to the carpentry shop at the Reception and Medical Center. “He was last seen leaving the warehouse parking area, walking toward the dog yard area, carrying a five-gallon bucket,” says Rita Hall, a coordinator with the Florida Department of Corrections Cold Case Fugitive Unit.

He had gotten into a beef with some prison-mates, over a pair of shoes, and word spread throughout the camp that a hit had been put on his life. And so one day in February of 1976, he walked off his work crew, as simple as that. Florida’s work-release centers had no prison walls.

The prison staff conducted a search. Ten armed officers and six institutional vehicles were then dispatched to the surrounding area. Bloodhounds were also unleashed, and they tracked his scent to Highway 121, which runs a mile north of the prison center.

Hazen was nowhere to be found. He had crossed the haunted alluvium and spongy bogs of the great Okefenokee swamp—which is like traversing death—and as he passed by a forlorn hotel he noticed a student ID card on the ground. Letter by letter, he read the name of his rebirth: Charles Danny Free.

With it, and with the money he had carried on his person at the Reception and Medical Center, he bought a bus ticket out west, to Arizona, where he at once, in body and soul, became Free.

 

The Cold Case Fugitive Unit at the Florida Department of Corrections was formed last year, and already it has proven to be a competent agency. Investigators tracked down 93 fugitives in their first 10 months. Without delay, they reviewed Hazen’s file for information related to his life before and after incarceration, such as his talents in construction, and then picked up the scent where the bloodhounds had left off 31 years earlier.

After usurping his new name from a student ID, Charles Free sent in for a new Social Security card. It was not a difficult thing to do in the ’70s. Because not everyone had been issued one at birth, all anyone needed to do to obtain one was to make a phone call. He found honest work in Arizona, and up in the mountains with his inchoate family he would find inner peace, exorcising the demons of alcoholism and PTSD.

“The big thing is, he stayed clean,” says Stansbury. “I think he had like one traffic ticket, and that’s all. He just lived a typical life and was so far under the radar.

“But you’d stay low-key too if you ran away from prison.”

Searching the Internet, and governmental and law-enforcement databases, investigators from the Cold Case Fugitive Unit developed leads and contacts, and then they took on the painstaking task of comparing, state by state, law-enforcement numbers against state and local files. Finally—though agents from Florida won’t say precisely how, because “to do so might jeopardize future investigations of other such cold-case fugitives,” says Hall—they obtained the key intelligence regarding Hazen’s whereabouts, and tipped off Las Vegas law enforcement.

Established in 1992, and now dedicated strictly to violent offenders, C.A.T. arrests about 400 fugitives per year, says Stansbury. With 50 to 60 of those coming from out of state. The Valley’s transient and anonymous nature attracts criminals on the run, says FBI agent David Staretz, and past cases indicate that some just like to come for one final hurrah.

“But this one’s certainly out of the norm,” says Stansbury, speaking about Charles Free. “This one’s an eye-opener.”

Though the sergeant might not know the extent to which that is true. Free’s case is extraordinary for reasons outside the duration of time between his escape and his capture.

Ross relates the crux of this sad and incredible tale with perfect simplicity:

“I don’t have any idea who this Jack Hazen is; I only know my dad, Charles Free.”

It’s a valid statement. It is as though Hazen died, all traces of his character vanished from the face of this earth, before Ross was even born, to Charles Free, for whose innocence of character she can vouch. Which is to say: This is not a story of two identities rooted in the same person, but rather, of two distinct persons with identical roots.

Charles now sits in the Clark County Detention Center, awaiting his March 10 extradition hearing. The state of Florida, by way of warrant, wants him back, to serve out his uncompleted sentence plus additional time for his escape. Charles is sustained by regular calls and visits from his wife and daughters, as well as letters of support from his numerous friends and co-workers. None seems to hold resentment.

“I think he kept that secret inside to protect us,” says Greer.

His attorney, Conrad Claus, managed to have his case stayed last February 7, while Claus works on setting his client free. In essence, Claus says, they have two chances:

Either the governor of Florida, Charlie Crist, can grant Charles a pardon by vetoing his warrant; or, if Charles is transferred back to Florida, the Department of Corrections can put him before the parole board, which has the power to commute his sentence. It’s known as a compassionate release.

“The right is on our side,” says Claus, a former prosecutor for the Clark County District Attorney’s office. “We will prevail—so long as the Florida authorities see common sense.”

It might be that simple, but without a doubt it is not that easy. For not only is the justice system difficult waters to navigate, there are also several moral and legal dilemmas to resolve.

Jack Hazen committed a crime, for which he was tried and convicted, and if criminals were allowed to evade their sentences, it would make a mockery of the justice system. For this precise reason, the Department of Corrections has never forgotten about Hazen, and has actively pursued his recapture. Even Ross understands this sense of law and order, having been taught right from wrong, stating: “If he did something major, then sure, they need to look at it.”

It was indeed a felony. Yet, no one was harmed, and the only loss—some food and cigarettes—was incurred by the convenience store.

“From what I hear, it was petty,” says Greer. “And it was so long ago that now it seems more like paperwork than anything else.”

That’s true. There are no victims calling for Charles to be brought to justice; his crime endures only on cold, sterile documents.

But it was still a crime, even if only against nameless, faceless society. “Escapees will not go unpunished,” says former Department of Corrections Secretary James McDonough, who stepped down from his seat last month. “We will bring them back to justice. They all have a legal debt to pay to society.”

Claus says the real burden will fall on the taxpayers of Florida if Charles is sent back to prison. Due to his numerous conditions, and the prescriptions and doctors they demand, it will cost more than a half a million dollars to house him for the next six and a half years, Claus estimates.

“It would be better for everyone if he was in our hands,” says Greer. “Let us take care of him.”

Most of all, the family says, they do not want their sick father to die lonely in Florida. On account of his declining state of health, it appears that death will truncate the remainder of his sentence if the Florida authorities do not.

The justice system is a pillar of society: founded on anything less than solid rock, it will wash away with the first windstorm.

“Yes,” says Claus, “but justice must be tempered with the recognition of the purpose of the justice system.”

There are three essential reasons for prison, he says: to punish, to protect society and to rehabilitate criminals.

The first, Claus says, is obsolete, because that philosophy of incarceration is now widely believed to be outdated. Moreover, he says, Charles’ nightmares, cold sweats and chronic paranoia have been castigation enough these past 32 years. The second, he says, should not apply to his client, who hasn’t posed a threat to even a fly in the past three decades. And his track record during that time span, says Claus, is proof that the ultimate objective of imprisonment—to rehabilitate deviants into law-abiding citizens—has been accomplished.

The evidence is not only in the exemplary life he’s maintained, say his family and friends, but also in the occupation to which he’s dedicated himself, and in the daughters he’s raised.

“They’re the nicest people you ever met,” says Don Kahn, a man who just moved into his son’s house next door to the Frees. It’s a superlative repeated throughout the neighborhood. Both Greer and Ross have grown into fine adults and respectable citizens with husbands and kids, and they often speak in axioms learned from their father.

A supervisor with Pulte Homes, Charles not only trains new employees, he is also in charge of assisting those struggling with personal and professional issues. “He lives for that,” says Ross, who also works for Pulte. “The construction industry is full of boys trying to become men.” Ross’ husband, who is now a manager at Pulte, started under her father’s wing.

“In my job I don’t always get to represent people as deserving as Charles Free,” says Claus. “You don’t have to ask if he’s learned his lesson.”

That, however, is not to say that he is repentant. Claus explains:

“He met Kathy and her daughter during that seven-year sentence. He wouldn’t change that for the world. He’ll look you right in the eye and say he’d do it all over again, because of the love he has for Kathy.”

Joshua Longobardy is a Weekly staff writer.

Illustration by Aaron Thomas Roth

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