THE OLD BALL & CHAIN

"`If I blindfolded you and asked you to pick a particular one out of the pile,'" Eaklor recalls telling the woman, "`the chances of getting it right are how much chance you have.' And she said to me, `You don't like John.' And I said, `I like him very much. But you asked me what I thought your chances were.'"

Over the past dozen years, numerous women have come to Eaklor seeking advice--and, just as often, consolation--about their relationships with prisoners. Some of the women are guards or teachers who worked within the prison system and became smitten with a con. Others have worked behind the walls as volunteers. Some, like the young woman from a few years ago, want to tie the knot with their special felon. To that question, Eaklor says her advice will always be the same: Don't do it.

Eaklor, now 73 and a great-grandmother, has become a sounding board for the prison system's lovelorn because of her firsthand experience: For the last seven years, she has been married to Robert Dean Kautz, whom she met while he was serving a life term for the murder of a Wheat Ridge man. (Kautz's accomplice was convicted of killing the man's pregnant wife.) Eaklor married Kautz knowing not only that he was a murderer but that he had previously been convicted of trying to kill his first wife. And though she divorced Kautz after he was paroled and she realized she was afraid of him, Eaklor later agreed to marry him a second time.

Today Eaklor remains wedded to Kautz, who is back behind bars after committing yet another violent crime--the stabbing of a Sterling woman. "I'm still taking that chance," she says. But she harbors no illusions about prison romances. "Of all the cases I know about," she says, "none of them have been successful." Eaklor can easily summon up stories about countless failed romances and the sometimes cruel marriages that resulted from such unions. Once, when trying to comfort another prison secretary whose relationship with an ex-con had soured, Eaklor offered to pray with her. "I said to her, `Pray that you don't care about him so he can't hurt you anymore,'" remembers Eaklor.

Studies show that Eaklor is right when she says that the majority of such relationships are doomed. But in Colorado they continue to occur with such frequency that the marriage of Eaklor, a prison staffer, to Kautz, a convicted murderer, is far from unique. According to Colorado prison officials, an informal study of inmate marriages during the 1980s discovered 63 pairings between felons and people who'd worked in the corrections system. About half that number involved men and women who'd done volunteer work in the prisons. The other half consisted of state Department of Corrections employees who'd held positions ranging from teachers and secretaries to prison guards and psychologists. Officials also learned from the study that staffers most often become involved not with con artists or white-collar criminals but with the worst of the worst--violent offenders, primarily rapists and murderers.

Fraternization is of great concern to prison officials across the country because the practice can jeopardize the safety of inmates and staff alike. Displays of partiality to certain prisoners have caused fights and assaults. Staffers who've become involved with inmates have been known to bring drugs into the system and have even aided in escapes. And prison authorities have long suspected that what staffers may view as romantic encounters are actually guileful seductions.

"The majority of relationships are based solely on the fact that the inmate needed something," says Judy Finch, a DOC employee who tracked Colorado's 63 odd couples for a study ending in 1990. "They wanted someone to help them get out or to have someone to write to or to do things for them. The inmate is getting involved with a staff member for a reason that has very little to do with love. But you can't tell staff that."

The vast majority of the staffers Finch studied were either fired or chose to abandon their careers when their relationships were discovered. Some were ostracized by co-workers and their families. Of the 63 marriages, says Finch, now the DOC's assistant director of training, only one is still intact.

Despite that dismal track record--and the fact that fraternization is a firing offense--staffers show no sign of slowing down.

Between January 1994 and December 1, 1995, DOC investigators have probed 44 cases of alleged fraternization between staffers and inmates. Of those numbers, says DOC Inspector General Bob Cantwell, 13 employees have resigned and 8 were terminated as a direct result of the investigations. Four others have been disciplined. Nine cases remain open. Only ten cases were either proven to be unfounded or could not be substantiated.

Within the past two months alone, a prison psychologist under contract to the DOC was forced to resign after allegations arose that she had had sex with an inmate. Another staffer, a corrections officer with fifteen years of experience, is appealing his recent firing, which occurred after his inmate lover ratted on him.

The DOC has taken an increasingly aggressive approach to heading off prison romances in the last five to ten years. Pre-employment screening has been implemented and job-training programs beefed up as the number of inmates and staff has increased. That hasn't stopped the trend, either. Finch recalls the case of a female corrections officer who was incredulous during training when told that staffers sometimes get emotionally involved with inmates. "Three or four months later," Finch says, "officers found nude pictures of her in an inmate's cell."

Cantwell says the DOC plans to launch a more systematic study into inmate/staff relationships beginning this month. The object, he says, is to learn which staffers are more likely to get involved with inmates and which inmates are more likely to get involved with staffers.

Up to now, say Finch and other DOC officials, there has been virtually no way to predict which prison employees are most vulnerable. It's suspected that low self-esteem on the staffer's part is a piece of the puzzle, but that hasn't always been the case. Neither rank nor length of employment is an indicator, says Finch, and men and women are equally prone to involvement with inmates.

Prison officials say they hope a new study will help them bring an end to--or at least dramatically slow--the fraternization that goes on behind prison walls. Finch, however, is pessimistic.

"You'll never be able stop it," she says, "because people are human beings. They fall in love."

Mary Jane Eaklor was no spring chicken--nor was she naive about relationships--when, in the 1970s, she met Robert Dean Kautz, an inmate eighteen years her junior. In her late fifties at the time, she'd been married more than thirty years and had raised two daughters. Eaklor had worked in corrections for seventeen years, primarily performing clerical duties for the wardens and housing managers who came and went at the medium-security prison now known as Fremont Correctional Facility.

"Bob worked as a clerk because he's a good typist, a very intelligent person," Eaklor recalls. Kautz and another inmate, she says, "used to make excuses to come to my office because they said they were so tired of not having anyone to talk to that had more than a sixth-grade education." Kautz was "tall and slim and good-looking," she says, "a very attractive person, physically. And he got to visiting a lot. I was physically and mentally attracted to him."

Eaklor was still married at the time, but she wasn't happy. "My husband lost himself in a bottle of wine," she says of Carl Eaklor. "He was deliberately making me feel old and ugly and unattractive. Bob made me feel the opposite: young, attractive, interesting and even desirable." In the later years of her marriage to Carl, she says, her husband would turn surly and accusatory when drinking. The unpleasantness--and the fact that she had met Kautz--led her to get a divorce.

Despite all the trouble she had with Carl, though, Mary Jane never actually made the break from her first husband; after their divorce, she continued to live with him until his death. It was a conflicted pattern she would later repeat with Kautz--surprising, perhaps, for the outspoken Eaklor, who has an independent streak a mile wide. She is a firm believer in anti-establishment, constitutionalist politics and has made something of a name for herself locally through her frequent and caustic letters to the editor of the Canon City newspaper.

"I don't have any respect for the prison system," Eaklor says. "For the sake of accuracy, I call it the `prison lack of system.' And I have practically no respect for the FBI, the CIA and all the rest of those alphabetical agencies." (Eaklor knows firsthand about the FBI. After the Oklahoma City bombing, her right-wing tendencies and letters to a member of the Michigan militia and an imprisoned Branch Davidian earned her two visits from federal agents.)

Although after her divorce Eaklor was technically free to marry Kautz, she knew that such an action would mean the loss of her job. And with only three years to go till retirement, she didn't care to take that gamble. "I told Bob that we could keep it under wraps that long," she says, and the two strove to keep their attachment to one another a secret. But despite their caution (broken only by a few clandestine hugs and furtive kisses), some of Eaklor's supervisors grew suspicious. On at least one occasion, Eaklor says, she caught "an inside snooper" following her, apparently in the hopes that he'd find her sneaking a visit with Kautz.

The couple never got caught, though, and they wed in 1983, when Eaklor was 61, newly retired and no longer worried about endangering her pension. Because Kautz was still behind bars, it was a marriage by proxy, with one of her daughters standing in for Kautz. A religious woman and lifelong member of the Seventh-Day Adventists, Eaklor had wanted to have the ceremony performed in a church. But because Kautz wasn't a Seventh-Day Adventist, it wasn't permitted. The fact that he was a convicted murderer had nothing to do with it.

In January 1984, after serving just eleven years of his life sentence, Kautz was paroled and went to live with Eaklor in the town of Penrose, just east of Canon City. Eaklor was happy, but she harbored enough doubts about the future of the relationship that she kept her financial dealings separate from those of her husband. "I did not put his name on my checking account or on the deed of my house," she says. She also drew up a prenuptial agreement to prevent Kautz from claiming any of her property in the event of her death.

"I felt like if he cared about me, he would want to be independent," she says. "If not, I would not let him make a fool of me."

Eaklor's son-in-law, a superintendent for a construction company, got Kautz a job as a troubleshooter. "And he was doing pretty good until alcohol got in the way," Eaklor says. "While he was here, I found out he was an alcoholic and a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. When he started drinking, he would get a strange expression and look like a different person. Some people, when they drink, you get a clown. He got a demon. I don't think he'd even remember the things he'd say or do."

Once, she says, Kautz "got kind of abusive and he kind of hit me and threatened my son-in-law." Kautz grabbed a kitchen knife in the midst of the argument, says Eaklor, but he didn't attack anyone with it. Nonetheless, Eaklor turned her husband over to the authorities, and Kautz was arrested for investigation of third-degree assault and menacing with a knife. He was briefly jailed but didn't go back to prison.

After that incident, Kautz went to Sterling, where his family lived. "I was willing to move up there," Eaklor says, "but he still was drinking. I told him I didn't want him to stay around, because I was afraid of him. So we got a divorce." The marriage had lasted only a year or two. But the relationship wasn't over.

Earlier in her career, when Judy Finch was assigned to interview prisoners scheduled to meet the parole board and make recommendations about their release, she became aware of relationships that had sprung up between inmates and prison volunteers. Numerous volunteers, she learned, had agreed to take inmates into their homes and to help find them jobs upon their release. "I wanted to understand why they became involved," says Finch. "I thought if I could understand why it happened to those people, I would be able to understand why it happened to our staffers."

Finch was particularly concerned about the number of female staff members who'd become involved with male inmates. She worried that women would suffer a loss of credibility because of their actions. Women had worked long and hard to get into the guard ranks, and Finch says she didn't want anything to torpedo their chances.

"I wanted to know, for example, what types of females might get involved with inmates," says Finch. What she learned when she conducted her study of the 63 couples who had gotten married was discouraging: "I found that there's absolutely nothing I could put my finger on."

There had been a basic assumption by DOC officials that staffers who became involved with inmates were emotionally needy. But Finch did not find that to be true in many cases. "There were women who were extremely intelligent, they had college degrees, they were attractive," she says. "I never got a handle on what caused them to get involved in a relationship with a convicted felon when they had everything going for them."

One woman, a prison nurse, quit her job so she could marry her inmate lover, Finch recalls. "He was in for burglary because they couldn't prove rape, but it was a plea bargain. Soon after she married him, he went out and committed another rape."

Another staffer, a psychologist, married an inmate whom she'd met in prison. "When he left DOC," Finch says, "he physically abused her. Seriously abused her."

Finch says she was careful when assessing the failed marriages not to assume that they collapsed simply because one partner was an ex-con. "After all," she says, "a lot of relationships end."

But Finch came to believe that the inmates she studied had married for no other reason than to get out of prison. The inmates' partners would spend a lot of time and energy finding them a job, she says. The felons would walk out of prison to find a home and a car waiting. But they wouldn't leave their old lifestyles behind. "About 85 percent of them reverted back to that behavior, and that generally ended the relationship," Finch says.

Even after the marriages had failed, Finch found that the betrayed partners couldn't face the fact that they had been used. "They said things like, `Well, he just could not come out and live in society. Society was too tough on him,'" she notes. "They still were making those excuses, that what happened wasn't that person's fault."

One woman whom Finch interviewed, and who touched her heart, "was very, very intelligent, very well-liked, an upstanding citizen." The woman had been a prison volunteer; she met and married a convicted rapist. "When I first talked to her," Finch says, "[her husband] was ready to meet the parole board. I asked her how she felt about being married to a rapist and how that was going to affect her in the community. And I asked her why she felt he had changed. She went through the same thing a majority of the females do. Number one, she said that he did not do it. Number two, she said he had found religion. And she said she believed that she had made a difference in his life, that he was changing because of her.

"And I knew by that point that when a female believes that, there's going to be trouble down the road," Finch adds. "I told her that when a person is in prison for a violent offense, especially rape, it's very, very difficult for the parole board to release that person, because they could commit the same type of offense. And she said, `No, that's not going to happen.' She said, `He's changed. You can't imagine how much he's changed. And he's so caring and so good.' I firmly believe she thought this man was the greatest thing that ever was and that his life had turned around."

The parole board released the inmate based on the woman's standing in the community and her promise to provide a home for him, Finch says. "She'd probably been married to him about three years when he was discharged from parole. The day he got his discharge papers, he left her. She was devastated."

Of the 63 couples she studied, says Finch, the woman whose marriage survived had wed a man who was incarcerated for first-degree murder. "I told her that the chance of him being released in the near future was practically nil," Finch recalls. "And she said that she did not need to have him released. She said, `I like him right where he is.' To her, he was filling her needs. She had someplace to go on weekends, and she was married. What she told her friends, I don't know. But she was very satisfied with that relationship."

Finch shared her findings about the futility of prison romances with inmates and staffers she learned had either married or were planning nuptials. "And what I found to be real interesting," she says, "is that even with knowing all of that, and whether or not they worked in the DOC, there was nothing you could say to them to change their minds. That wasn't going to happen to them. Every one of them except for one believed that their partner was innocent, that they were railroaded."

end of part 1