Right is Right: Nearly 65 years ago, an escapee from the ADC captured the imagination of the country
- Dennis McCaslin
- Dec 29, 2023
- 5 min read
In the foothills of the Ozarks,
Back in northwest Arkansas.
A convict came from prison,
To see his ailin' Pa.
But the mountains they were callin',
To come an' play the game.
He answered the lonely call,
An' won notorious fame.
One of my favorite movies of all time is a cult classic called The "Legend of Billie Jean".
The 1985 action/drama film starring Helen Slater was about a young girl who is falsely accused of a crime in her hometown that went on the run with her brother and a few other people. The public at large took up her cause and she ended up inspiring a nationwide fury about injustices to the common people.
Our part of Arkansas had a similar story that happened back in 1960. The major difference was the protagonist of that story, who became a folk hero, was a young male, shade tree mechanic who wasn't a model citizen and absconded with the young niece of his then-wife and led authorities on a goose chase that drew nationwide attention.
If you're not familiar with the name Joe Lyttle Hilderbrand, he was a Pope County resident who received very little education beyond grade school. Att the age of 19 he married Ola Standridge, a 40-year-old neighbor of his family.
Young Joe had a bit of a wild streak, and in 1958 he was convicted of robbing a tourist couple of $1.02. Joe was charged with leaving the Iowa newlyweds tied to a tree after taking their money.
Sentenced to jail for three years he became a model prisoner and a trustee and did a lot of the work and repairs on the equipment in the prison. It's said that Joe even repaired the state electric chair at one time.
In January of 1960 Joe was almost eligible fpor parole and he returned home to Pope County on a three-day furlough because his father was ill and thought to be near death.
Joe decided he didn't like being in prison so he never returned voluntarily from the furlough.
After a few weeks authorities went to pick him up at his rural Pope County home, but Joe scooted out the backdoor and into the hills and hollers that he knew so well from his childhood.
Even though Joe was still married to Ola, before he made his play for freedom he had become romantically involved with Francis Standridge, the young niece of his wife. He was man enough to tell Ola face-to-face that he had decided he wanted to spend the rest of his life with Francis and after he ran away from authorities rather than go back to prison, she snuck away and joined him in the backwoods of Pope County.
The authorities chased, tracked, and set the dogs on Joe and Francis to no avail. After a few weeks of looking, and deciding that family and hill folks all around the area were helping to aid and abet the young couple in their flight, law enforcement started putting pressure on all the individuals they thought were part of the escape network.
Ola and Joe's father were both arrested for charges stemming from obstructing justice and harboring a criminal but two of their Ozark neighbors put up $1,000 bill and got Ola and the old man out of jail.
A bonus in the protracted manhunt for law enforcement was the discovery of a number of moonshine stills as they scoured the countryside looking for Joe and Francis. When law enforcement officials would get a lull in their search activities, they would return to these moonshine operations with axes, bust up the stills, and confiscate "rivers of first-class moonshine".
Those actions, at least in the surrounding neighborhood of Joe's parents, kind of leveraged their opinions and willingness to help the couple to some degree.
The posse kept looking, and as the manhunt grew more intense Joe stold eight cars, wrecking some, and jumping from one to another. The couple slept in the woods that was full of copperheads and rattlesnakes. Francis later told life magazine "Them snakes didn't bother usuns none".
Joe's father drove a rattle trap old truck all over the region and every time he encountered law enforcement officials he would beg them not to shoot his son. The couple was eventually spotted by an airplane observer who figured out where he thought they would be at nightfall and directed a group of officers to their location. They were arrested near the community of Treat in northern Pope County and rushed to Little Rock where they were both locked up.
In all, the couple had been on the lam for nine months. The story was featured in numerous magazines and newspapers and Joe and Francis received some degree of notoriety from the media attention.
Francis was given a one-year prison sentence for larceny. That was pretty much the end of her romantic interest in Joe.
Once they got Joe back to the state prison he claimed a mental illness and was sent to the Arkansas State Hospital for evaluation. After six months doctors judged him sane and readied him for his return to prison. The night before he was supposed to return to the Arkansas Department of Corrections he went on the lam again.
In what has since become a cliched move for escaping, Joe knotted bed sheets together, made a rope, and threw it out the window of his hospital room. He used the Arkansas River as a rudimentary GPS and was back in Polk County within six days of his escape. He remained at-large for the next fourteen months but was finally captured again in October of 1962 and returned to prison.
Joel was paroled in 1964 but that wasn't the end of his legal problems.
In 1972 he was charged with raped and jailed once again. He escaped again, this time from the Pope County jail, but he left the sheriff a note saying that he would return for the hearing.
He was a man of his word and showed up in court on the day of his hearing and the charges were later dismissed and dropped against him.
After his last round of trouble with the law, Joe returned to his home near Dover where he lived out the remainder of his life. He was a respected mechanic whose ability to fix just about anything was highly sought after in the community.
In 1964 Joe married Mabel McCullough and the couple had four children, three girls and a boy. Records indicate they were married until Joe's death in 1998 at the age of 62.
Joe was buried in the Bradley cemetery a short distance for Big Piney Creek not far from Bullfrog Valley.
During his entire life, Joe always maintained that it was not him that robbed the couple from Iowa and tied them to a tree.
In 2003 a retired Arkansas State Police investigator while talking about his 26-year career with the agency made a shocking statement. According to the former ASP detective, Joe's brother, who looked a lot like Joe and was "prone to drink", was the actual culprit.
So Joe Hildebrand became a cult hero for escaping from prison and law enforcement for a crime he probably never committed in the first place.
Kind of makes me want to rewatch that movie from 1985.
One cold October night,
They knew a broken heart.
They were captured by two lawmen,
Awaiting in th dark.
To say goodbye in handcuffs,
Had not been in their plan.
Ending the chase for pretty Francis.
And the convict Hildebrand.
