Through the night, inmate Robert L. Emery broke windows, drilled out a door lock, broke into metal tool cages, bashed a hole in the laundry wall, lugged bags of tools, dug under one fence and climbed over another at the Oregon state prison near Ontario.

No one noticed.

Emery, exhausted and bleeding, gave up his effort that June night in 2010, huddling under a blanket in the prison yard until he was found.

Just one day earlier, the entire prison had gone on alert during another escape attempt.

Both inmates employed a well-worn, almost cliche, trick: creating dummies that they left behind in their bunks. In fact, Emery apparently fooled two different corrections officers into thinking he was fast asleep in Cell 301 of Complex 1 at Snake River Correctional Institution.

State auditors subsequently blamed the two attempts on "complacency" among prison staff.

Yet Oregon Corrections Department officials never provided the public details about the attempts. The Oregonian, recently tipped off by a corrections worker to the incidents, obtained the documents and the state's audit under the Oregon Public Records Law.

Turns out, 2010 was a bad year for state prisons.

Corrections Department records show 10 inmates were found guilty that year of attempting to escape. In all, 18 inmates were caught during the past five years with escape plans elaborate enough to justify prison sanctions.

And that doesn't count the discovery at Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem of a handmade rope. Records describe a 39-foot-long rope found buried behind some bleachers in full view of one of the guard towers.

Corrections Department photographs demonstrate that the rope was long enough to scale the prison's exterior wall. The rope, treated with a preservative that officials wouldn't disclose, had climbing knots. They never learned who made the rope or established how long it had been hidden near the bleachers.

The documents -- internal memos, police reports and photographs -- reveal the inventiveness of inmates, who obviously have plenty of time to concoct escape plans. Despite the round-the-clock vigilance of corrections officers, inmates smuggle contraband and steal state property to enable their escape plans.

Mark Nooth

Mark Nooth, Snake River superintendent, said the 3,007 inmates far outnumber his staff at the medium security prison.

"We have inmates at Snake River that are quite a challenge," Nooth said. He said his management team constantly battles the complacency identified by auditors.

"We have 900 employees. We have training all the time," Nooth said. "With that size of work force, we're going to have instances where employees maybe are not doing exactly what we'd like them to do."

Escape route torturous

Emery, 50, was convicted in Bend in 2000 of robbery, kidnapping, assault and attempted rape. He will be 96 when his sentence ends in 2060.

Robert L. Emery

He told an Oregon State Police detective he planned the escape after he was turned down for a transfer from his prison job as an orderly. He said prison was "driving him insane" and that he had to escape or "start killing people, plain and simple," according to an OSP report.

Emery told the detective he identified what he thought was a vulnerable spot at the prison. For security, The Oregonian isn't disclosing all the details.

He launched his escape bid on June 13, 2010 -- a Sunday evening. He used clothing and towels to craft his dummy "fashioned in a manner to appear to look like a person sleeping under a blanket," according to an internal prison report.

Emery jumped into a laundry cart in his cell block, burrowing beneath the dirty inmate clothes. He rode undetected as another inmate pushed the cart to the prison laundry, where it was locked with dozens of others for the night.

Left alone, Emery went to work. He broke a hole in the wall to get into prison maintenance shops. Once there, he busted open a vending machine and pried open cages holding hand tools.

Guided by a checklist he wrote earlier, Emery loaded two bags with tools: a sledgehammer, a pry bar, a battery-powered drill, a power saw and other items. He also had maps of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming, but the reports don't explain how he got them.

Emery drilled out the door lock to get into a utility room and then shed his pants and applied lotion to slither through a vent to get outdoors. He dug under one fence, and then climbed over a second. The razor wire on top shredded his arms as he went over, and Emery quit his bid. Prison officials won't say how close he came to escaping.

He was treated at a local hospital for his injuries and then punished with six months in segregation. He was subsequently transferred to Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem.

Prison officials wouldn't explain how Emery could go undetected for so long while being so destructive.

"Disclosing that type of information would definitely create a safety risk to the public as other inmates could use that information," said Cathleen Shroyer, Snake River public information officer.

Tried and true illusion

Hardly 24 hours before Emery made his move, inmate Michael J. Norwood executed his own elaborate escape attempt.

Norwood, 41, arrived at Snake River, the state's largest prison, in late 2009, convicted of burglary out of Eugene. An intake counselor didn't properly document Norwood's escape from a Colorado halfway house in 2000, according to prison records.

Michael J. Norwood

On the evening of June 12, 2010, Norwood arranged inmate clothing into a dummy, placing it in a relaxed pose on his top bunk in cell 36B of Snake River's Complex 3. He topped the illusion with a homemade head, adorned with headphones. He wanted any passing corrections officer to see just another inmate listening to music.

He made his way to the prison recreation yard for evening yard time. But within 15 minutes, another inmate tipped a corrections officer to the dummy.

Officers barked at inmates milling in the yard, three times ordering Norwood to make himself known. They finally found him among inmates streaming off the recreation yard for an emergency lock down. Among items in his pockets: 35 rolls of dental floss, two razor blades, a piece of plastic rope, photos of his wife, and candy bars.

According to an Oregon State Police report, searchers later that evening found an improvised ladder in a garbage can on the recreation yard. The ladder was manufactured from toilet paper tubes and dental floss.

He was punished with six months in segregation at Snake River.

Out of compliance

Dummies have long been part of prison lore.

The most infamous version involved a prison break in 1962 at Alcatraz, the island federal prison in San Francisco. Three convicted bank robbers disappeared after leaving dummies in their bunks, the papier mache heads adorned with human hair.

In Oregon, an inmate successfully used a dummy to escape in 1992.

Convicted killer Jeffrey S. Wagner crafted a papier mache dummy while incarcerated at Oregon State Penitentiary. The dummy was so convincing he was gone without notice for two days, carried out of the prison in the back of a truck. Prison officials didn't know he had escaped until Salem police called to report they had arrested Wagner.

At Snake River, a special team assessed the 2010 escape attempts. Their report, heavily redacted for release to The Oregonian, found that Snake River was "out of compliance with its own procedure and DOC security standards."

The review discovered the prison staff wasn't properly counting inmates each day, and specifically spotlighted Emery's escape.

"Staff failed to account for only living breathing inmates for three official counts," the review said. "He was missed by two different count officers" and "his absence was not observed for the entire shift," the review said.

The review team found problems in the prison laundry.

"Inmates did not line up nor did they show any identification," the review said. "The inmates just called off their name and cell number and the officer checked off their information without looking up."

Recommendations -- all redacted by prison officials -- laced every page of the seven-page report.

Nooth said "most" recommendations were in place.

He said the escape attempts were "unacceptable." Nooth said his responsibility is to ensure policies are followed and training is adequate.

"We're never satisfied," Nooth said.

-- Les Zaitz