Cool, Brains, Daring Marked Jail Escapee

On a wall in his island home on Puget Sound, Michael Taylor hung a picture of himself posing in front of posters of the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted fugitives.

Police who searched the place saw it as an expression of an ambition.

“It seemed like it would make his life to be on that 10 Most Wanted list,” said John Desmond, a Newport Beach police detective.

Today, Taylor may be a candidate for just such a distinction. He is the target of an intense nationwide manhunt that began last November when he and four other inmates escaped from the Orange County Jail by rappelling from the roof of the four-story building with a rope of braided bed sheets.

Almost immediately, authorities concluded that Taylor was the mastermind of the daring jailbreak. Today, he is the only one of the escapees who is still at large.

Taylor has a reputation as a self-confident thrill-seeker who has been an extraordinarily successful outlaw because he is intelligent and a perfectionist. The jail breakout, like other brazen escapes in his past, fits the profile.

Police say Taylor, 35, has made a career out of armed robberies for jewelry, and he goes about it like a corporate employee bucking for a promotion. He is usually well-dressed--sometimes in a three-piece suit--and he uses rented, full-sized American cars for getaways.

Last week, police say, Taylor committed yet another bold robbery, holding up a jewelry store near Chicago in which he and an accomplice made off with about $450,000 in gems.

The fact that his picture is being passed around at police roll calls all over the country--including his native Chicago--has not seemed to deter him. In fact, the element of high risk is almost a part of Taylor’s signature.

Since 1987, police believe, Taylor has stolen about $2 million in jewels from almost two dozen Southern California stores, including seven in Orange County.

Police say Taylor barked assignments to his partners, kept track of the clock and quickly gathered the loot.

“He is not an emotional robber,” said Jack Price, the owner of Designer Jewelers Inc. in Huntington Beach who was the victim last year of a $450,000 holdup allegedly committed by Taylor. “It’s a business for him. I was in the Army Rangers in Vietnam, and we were taught to do everything click, click, click; he was that kind of a methodical guy. He knew what he was doing . . . and he was good at it.”

What police fear most is Taylor’s cool temperament and cold-blooded character. He has never been charged with shooting anyone, although police say he has been armed in all of the robberies he has pulled--and two of the Orange County heists erupted into shoot-outs.

“You’ve got a potentially dangerous person--there’s no doubt about it,” said Tom Gilligan, Huntington Beach police detective.

Taylor doesn’t drink and he doesn’t use drugs, according to people on both sides of the law who know him. He has lived a middle-class life style with a live-in girlfriend and two children. After the string of robberies in Southern California, the family moved into a waterfront house on Vashon Island in Washington state with a hot tub on the rear deck and a private dock.

In addition to the photograph on the wall, police who searched the house found an aquarium in which the gravel was sprinkled with stolen rubies.

Taylor is glib, friendly and a master at assuming fake identities.

He has used numerous fake identification cards, including one that said he is an employee of a bogus company called the Criminal Research Assn. in Chicago. Another pictures him as the owner of the California Home Improvement Co. in Long Beach.

Tracked for Months

Desmond, the Newport Beach police detective, tracked Taylor for months and traveled to Washington for the search of his home.

“I think he’s not driven like a lot of guys are because they’re addicted to drugs,” Desmond said. “He’s doing the best way he knows to make money; he’s just going about his business.”

When they heard Taylor was involved in the escape last Nov. 20, Gilligan and Desmond had no doubt that he was the mastermind. Desmond said Taylor had boasted that he was going to break out.

Authorities had told Taylor he was facing more than 40 years in prison for the seven Orange County robberies, and Los Angeles prosecutors were planning to charge him with an additional 10 armed robberies.

The five inmates involved in the escape made off from a rooftop recreation area after cutting through a chain-link fence. Contrary to policy, they were not searched for weapons or tools before being taken to the recreation area that night.

And, as the Orange County Grand Jury found later, the deputies on duty at the jail that night miscounted the 68 inmates as they left the roof, so the escape was not discovered for several hours. A neighborhood caller told police he had seen men running down the street in jail clothing.

The two deputies assigned to the rooftop area that night are still on administrative leave pending the outcome of a Sheriff’s Department internal investigation.

One of the escapees, Ly Hung, broke his leg when he fell from the roof because the makeshift rope ripped on barbed, razor-wire. He was captured outside the jail that night. Another escapee, Eleazar Gonzales, who was in jail facing a murder charge, turned himself in on Thanksgiving Day.

After their escape, Taylor and the two others, Richard Fluharty and Steven Wilson, stripped to their shorts and convinced the driver of a car that they needed a ride to a hospital. Once inside the car, police said, the escapees displayed a jail-made knife and threw the driver out of the car.

Two weeks later, Fluharty and Wilson were arrested in Denver.

Escape Predicted

For Taylor, it may have been his most daring escape, but it only added to a longtime reputation. After Taylor’s arrest in Huntington Beach, police there considered him so slippery they warned the Sheriff’s Department, which runs the county jail, in writing: “Given a chance, he will escape.”

Last June, Taylor had eluded Seattle police who saw him on a ferry. During a chase, police say, Taylor escaped by jumping from his car while turning the wheel over to his girlfriend.

A few weeks later, police say, he slipped away from the Border Patrol in New Mexico when he was stopped at a checkpoint while driving a stolen pickup truck. He took off running across the desert and covered more than 10 miles before police search dogs found him buried in the dirt trying to hide from helicopters.

Taylor also escaped from California’s Chino state prison in 1975 while he was serving a sentence for an armed robbery committed when he was 21.

His history of escapes has caused some to question whether he should have been treated as a greater security risk at the Orange County Jail.

Sheriff’s Lt. Richard Olson said that overcrowding at the jail prevents the department from isolating many prisoners for tighter scrutiny. But he would not say whether the overcrowding was a factor in classifying Taylor.

“The security is something that we generally don’t talk about,” Olson said.