It took five minutes to reach the guards’ locker room. As soon as they were inside, they took off their guard uniforms and put on the civilian clothes that were hanging in the lockers. They took the dead guards’ wallets, keys, phones, and other belongings.

They left the uniforms in the lockers, but took with them the firearms and ammunition they had stolen from the arsenal. Each man had an M4 rifle capable of firing on the settings for semiautomatic and fully automatic, two Glock 17 pistols, and as many loaded magazines as he could carry in his pockets, jacket, and belt.

They made their way to the out-processing area on the ground floor, where prisoners were held while being prepared for release. They shot the two guards on duty there and used the watch commander’s key card to open the building doors and the outer gate. Then they streamed out through the gate and left it open for the inmates they knew would follow.

They trotted out to the staff parking lot outside the prison walls, and quickly figured out which sets of keys went with which cars and trucks. Most of the car key fobs had brand logos on them, and all of them could unlock a door and light the dome lights with the press of a button.

Within minutes each of the twelve had a car, and by then most of them had found the addresses of the guards, either from a driver’s license or a car registration. Each of these addresses was a place where a man about to start a new life might find things that would help him on his way.

The guards’ houses would contain more clothes and maybe a suitcase or two to carry them. The houses would also contain some cash, some food and water, and some valuable items that could be sold or traded later. There could be many additional attractions at any one of those houses, and the seven-to-seven shift was not even close to over. It was only 1:12 a.m.

None of the escapees had ever been outside the walls of the prison before, and the U.S. marshal’s vehicles that had delivered them at the start of their sentences had carried them directly from the interstate highway to the prison without passing through the residential neighborhoods of Weldonville. Some of the twelve escapees used the guards’ cell phone apps to get directions to the dead guards’ addresses.

Beth Tiedemann was upstairs asleep when the car crept up the street. The evening of July 19 had been such a hot, still time that she had the bedroom windows open and the ceiling fan running. The doors and windows downstairs were all locked and bolted. Those were the only ones that mattered, because the upstairs windows were too high to reach without an extension ladder, and there were no big trees close enough to the house to use as a way to climb up to a bedroom.