By Stan Finger
The Wichita Eagle, Kan.
EL DORADO, Kan. — A sobbing Amber Goff told her mother during a jailhouse telephone call that El Dorado inmate Jesse Bell “threatened” her, her mother said Saturday.
“I don’t believe she is lying to me,” Laurie Nutter said.
She said a law enforcement officer with Goff during the phone call Friday night acknowledged that authorities are aware of the contention, and he added that “Amber has been cooperating.”
Nutter said she told her daughter, “We got a whole different ballgame here. You sit tight. We’re going to get you home.”
Goff, 23, is charged in Kansas with aiding an escape and aiding a felon. She’s accused of helping Bell, 33, and Steven Ford, 26, escape from the El Dorado Correctional Facility on Oct. 28.
Bell and Ford have both been charged in Kansas with aggravated escape from custody.
All three were arrested early Wednesday in Grants, N.M.
Nutter said that during Friday’s call, Goff was on a speaker phone with three law enforcement officers, whom Nutter identified as two Grants, N.M., police officers and an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Goff was full of questions — about whether she should get a lawyer or her family would provide one, about how her two boys are faring.
“She was very concerned about them,” Nutter said of the boys, who are 5 and 7 and staying with family.
“Are there people out there?” Nutter asked her daughter at one point. “Should we be worried?”
Nutter said Goff “just completely broke down.”
“She said, ‘Mom, Jesse (Bell) threatened me.’ Honestly, my knees about buckled,” Nutter said. “I was so relieved to hear those words.”
As Goff wept, one of the officers acknowledged that authorities are aware of her contention, adding that she had already asked for an attorney, and that the government can provide one if necessary.
The call lasted about 10 minutes, Nutter said.
A police sergeant at the Cibola County, N.M., detention center referred all questions to the warden, who he said would not be available for comment until Monday.
Kansas Department of Corrections spokesman Bill Miskell said Saturday evening that he had no reason to challenge Goff’s contention that she was threatened.
But prison staff are threatened by inmates on a regular basis —“That’s the environment in which our staff work,” he said — and it’s why the department has “very definitive and prescribed procedures” for reporting and responding to any kind of threats.
“Helping two inmates escape” from a maximum-security prison “is not the way to respond to a threat from an inmate,” Miskell said.
Nutter said she did not know when Goff was threatened, “whether it was right at the beginning, or somewhere in the middle of this mess.”
Law enforcement officials have said they think Goff had developed a relationship with one of the inmates.
Nutter said she had heard her daughter mention Ford many times over the 13 months she worked at the prison, “but she mentioned a lot of names.”
Nutter said that a friend who lived down the street told her after the escape that he had seen Goff’s white Taurus parked a few houses down from the Nutter house at about 9 p.m. Oct. 28 as he stood outside smoking a cigarette. He recognized Goff’s car, but not the male voices shouting and swearing for several minutes.
Suddenly, the car raced away.
Authorities say Goff used her white Taurus to pick up Bell and Ford after they had snipped wires and crawled through gaps in fences on the north side of the prison around 8:30 p.m. Oct. 28.
An extradition hearing is anticipated early this week in New Mexico, 13th Judicial District Attorney Lemuel Martinez has said.
Nutter said she has urged Goff to waive extradition so she can return to Kansas as soon as possible.
Copyright 2007 The Cichita Eagle