"Nose" Heathman, 30-year prison inmate, made history when he scaled the penitentiary wall 26 years ago and vowed to escape again. He's 63 now, had cancer and has emphysema.
Noel Heathman already had done an eight-year stretch behind bars in Iowa when he was sentenced in Omaha to life in prison for kidnapping and rape 30 years ago.
Four years later, almost to the day, the man who goes by the nickname "Nose" became the first inmate to go over the Nebraska State Penitentiary wall since 1951. No one has done it since.
"This was my intention from the day the judge gave me ... life. I said, ‘I'll never do it,' and he said, ‘Yeah, you'll do it in Lincoln,' and I laughed."
Today, Heathman is one one day from 64. His long hair and Fu Manchu are gray. A yellow bandanna covers a neck ravaged by cancer and an infection that started in his trachea.
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But the memories of his great escape and travels during the three months he was out are fresh.
On Sept. 9, 1984, Heathman and inmate Roger Weikle used knotted bedsheets and a homemade grappling hook to scale the 30-foot wall that runs along U.S. 77 just south of Nebraska 2 -- in broad daylight.
Weikle's leg snapped when he hit the ground on the other side, and he soon was back behind bars.
Heathman hurt his foot when he made the jump to freedom, but he hid out near the prison until 2 in the morning, brushed some of the mud and leaves off his clothing -- "I looked like the wrath of God," he said during a 1985 interview -- and strolled into a hotel across the street to buy a pack of smokes and a soda.
Then he set off on a three-month adventure that, he says, took him to Kansas City, Arizona, California and Wisconsin before he was caught near Santa Cruz, Calif.
A little more than two years later, Heathman went to Oregon as part of a prisoner exchange.
"There was a bunch of us in the hole making big trouble ... and they needed us out of there, so I went from the hole to general population in Oregon.
"I was 39, healthy, antisocial and nuts. Oregon, I loved it. That was old-school. They had actual bars on the cells. This was a joint with 2,500 people inside the walls.
"Dig this: We had 501 Levis and denim shirts."
Still, he didn't plan to stay.
"That was my goal, to escape out of Oregon," he said during an interview last week. "I figured out a way of doing it, too. ... I was thinking on it and discussing it with a few brothers and then - I got sick."
* * *
Throat cancer led to a permanent tracheotomy in Oregon. Heathman was sent back to Lincoln, where he lived until soon after the state opened a new prison in Tecumseh in late 2001.
He almost died there.
He's been cancer-free since 1988, but in the past year got a drug-resistant staph infection that started in the trach and spread down his back.
"I went from 195 to 117 lbs in 8 months/couldn't walk to chow hall to eat 'cause of unbelievable pain ... and really death had to be better," he writes in a letter.
Eventually, he says, prison administrators sent him to Omaha, where he had extensive back surgery to repair damage done by the infection. Doctors also essentially removed his left breast and grafted it onto his upper chest and throat so they had healthy skin from which to craft a new trach.
"All in all, I'm alive, weight is 180 lbs., and I walk with a slight limp," he writes. "I have a nipple under my trach now, but that is cool cause I pierced it and have a small ring in it."
He started to get better in July, he says, with a lot of help from fellow inmates and the caseworkers in his housing unit.
"These are good guys," he says, gesturing at one of them during an interview in the visiting room at the Tecumseh State Correctional Institution. "They went over and above what they needed to do. It really overwhelmed me."
Wait a minute. This guy with a twinkle in his eye and a zest for life is serving life for kidnapping and rape. Before that, he was a drug dealer.
"I'm like this," he says during a serious moment. "I can be your very, very best friend, or your worst enemy."
A 19-year-old woman found that out when Heathman and two other men abducted her from a convenience store in Omaha early on a winter morning in 1980.
They muscled her into a car at gunpoint and raped her, driving around for 2 1/2 hours until cops stopped them in Council Bluffs.
Larry Schneckloth, 56, and John Koger, 64, are serving their life sentences at the Omaha Correctional Center.
"I snapped," Heathman says now. "I was loaded on good meth ... booze -- beer and hard liquor.
"I feel bad about it. I wish it had never happened."
* * *
Heathman grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, the son of a father who worked for the government and a mother who was a secretary. Good, down-to-earth people, he says. They're both dead now, and neither his sister nor his daughter talks to him.
"The only type of relationship we had was strictly in prison," he says of his daughter. "She was 3 1/2 when this came down.
"She's got three kids. I've got three grandkids. Neat!"
He has emphysema and talks in a raspy voice, the air whooshing in and out of the hole in his neck.
But he smiles -- a lot -- and jokes with his captors and fellow inmates.
"I'm a year older, girl," he says. "I didn't think I was gonna make 21, and then I took a shot for 30, and it's just been a fun ride, a real roller coaster."
He's dead serious about one subject, though. He believes the state should offer serious rehabilitation to inmates who have a shot at living outside someday.
"These guys, the youngsters, are coming out with no formal skills and they're not taught anything. They need rehabilitation, welding, meat cutting, industry. I truly believe if we can teach a man a skill, he's got something to fall back on."
* * *
As for himself, Heathman knows he's not going anywhere, no matter how sick he has been or may be.
"No, Nebraska never forgets or forgives," he says. "I got 30 calendars in. I'm never getting out, so I make the most of it.
"This is my home. This is where I'm gonna die."
And then he grins.
Reach Catharine Huddle at 402-473-7222 or chuddle@journalstar.com.
