part 2 of 2
Like so many women who have fallen for prisoners, Flo Orona insists that her man and her marriage are different.

Orona met the man of her dreams in 1987. She'd prayed to God for a man who would meet her ideals. That's why her two marriages had failed, she thought--because she never chose someone who could meet her needs. Her man had to be godly, she says, and well-respected. He had to be as strong and as intelligent as she was and be able to encourage her to be all that she could be and not be threatened by her.

But when she found that man and realized she was falling in love, she initially believed it was God's idea of a joke. Because Flo--who sprang from a long line of law enforcement officers and who'd been a prison guard for fifteen years (ten in Colorado and five in Missouri)--was taken with a man serving twenty years to life for killing his wife.

She was working at the Territorial Correctional Facility in Canon City when she met Larry Orona. She'd heard about him before--a fellow employee said he was a guy who didn't belong in prison--but she hadn't been prepared for the ambivalent feelings he stirred up in her.

"We got to talking," Flo says. "And I thought, `He is a godly man, and he is respected. But I am a professional corrections officer, and whether he belongs here or not, being with an inmate would never work.'"

Two years later Flo left the prison system--without, she says, ever acting on her feelings. She'd become disillusioned with the system and disgusted by what she perceived as corruption. When she was hospitalized to have an operation on her leg, she decided she would never go back to work for the DOC.

Flo opened an investigative agency in Boulder and began working for attorneys. And one of the first cases she accepted was Larry Orona's; she helped his attorney gather evidence for a hearing in which he planned to ask for a new trial for his client.

Larry Orona shot his wife in April 1983 following an argument in a motel parking lot. He has always claimed that his estranged wife had the gun and that the weapon discharged when he tried to take it away from her. After speaking with people who knew him--witnesses, friends and family--Flo decided he was not guilty of first-degree murder.

Larry's attorney didn't succeed in obtaining a new trial. But the relationship between Flo and Larry blossomed. They were married in the chapel at the state prison in Limon in April 1992.

Unlike the vast majority of inmates, Larry Orona is able to help his wife financially. He had earned an early retirement before he was arrested, and he has always worked in prison. He pays his wife's monthly car payment and keeps up her burial insurance. "He wants to take care of me," Flo says. "He's never asked me for any money. The only time I send him some is at Christmas, and he uses it to call his family, because he doesn't like to call collect."

Larry Orona is active in prison counseling groups and lacks just nine hours of academic credit for an associate of arts degree in behavioral counseling, his wife says proudly. She expects that when he is released, he will go to work in some kind of ministry.

Flo, now 57, has retained her independence--she manages an assisted-care facility in Caon City--but says she's preparing to share a life with Larry by seeking his input on all major decisions. The couple has vowed to hold a second marriage ceremony when Larry is released from prison, but that could be a long way off. His parole eligibility date is 2002, at which time he'll be 65 and his wife 63.

Flo says she knows relationships likes hers can be iffy propositions. However, she doesn't believe her marriage will fail. Since marrying Larry, she says, "my life has been nothing but beautiful and good."

When DOC officials screen job applicants, says Wallis Parmenter, superintendent of the San Carlos Correctional Facility for the chronically medically ill in Pueblo, "one of the things we try to look for is whether or not [that person] is looking for something other than a paycheck. Are they here to meet their own personal needs? Do they have their own personal problems? Are they divorced or maybe ten years and twenty pounds past their prime? Because what happens is that there are times in peoples' lives that they're vulnerable. Maybe they've had a catastrophic illness in the family and they're in bad financial shape and they decide to bring in some dope [to a prisoner]. Or they're lonely and they get involved with some sex issues."  

The DOC attempts to guard against human frailties through intensive training and repeated warnings about the dangers of getting involved with inmates. Finch, for instance, tells new employees that inmates are "geniuses at figuring things out" and that prisoners are "good"--good at complimenting people, good at making someone feel confident or important, good at picking up on problems that staffers may be having at work or at home.












Last summer, Lee English, a captain at the DOC's Diagnostic Center, was arrested for allegedly engaging in sex with a 31-year-old female inmate. The woman reportedly told the police that English had reneged on promises to her. According to one DOC staffer, the inmate claims that English told her he'd help her get parole.

Several months earlier, another diagnostic-center staffer, 49-year-old Valgene Armstead, was accused of having sex with a female inmate in a utility closet. He, too, was charged criminally.

Other cases remain in limbo. DOC captain Stanley Powell, a fifteen-year veteran, was fired last year after claims surfaced that he'd propositioned a former inmate. Those allegations arose as part of an investigation into whether Powell had used his position to obtain sexual favors from six or seven other female inmates at the Colorado Women's Correctional Facility. The Fremont County District Attorney's office has not yet determined whether to file criminal charges against Powell.

In most fraternization cases that are uncovered, the person blowing the whistle is the inmate. That's what happened to a fifteen-year DOC veteran who recently was terminated after officials discovered his relationship with a female inmate. "The female he got involved with [figuratively] cut his throat," prison superintendent Parmenter says. "We had suspected they were involved, and when we questioned her [earlier], she denied it. But the minute she got in trouble and faced losing fifteen days of good time, she told the truth and she gave us the evidence. She was so madly in love with him that she preferred that he lose his fifteen-year career to her losing fifteen days of good time."

Bob Roybal, a representative of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, has represented at least four officers who became involved with inmates. "Most of them," says Roybal, a former corrections officer himself, "had tremendous futures and halfway-decent marriages" when they became involved with an inmate. "Then everything kind of goes to hell in a hand basket. It's an error in judgment, but that type of error basically throws their career down the tubes, and everything goes with it."

Even if staffers wait for an inmate to be released from prison, DOC rules prevent them from starting up a relationship until the felon has been out for a minimum of two years. "Even when an inmate leaves," Cantwell says, "they have a lot of ties back to the facility. A lot of their friends are still in. I just got a call today from an inmate who's getting out soon. He's being pressured by other inmates to do things for them, and they told him a staff member to contact. If they know someone who has a direct link to a staffer, they'll prey on them."

That corrections officials have the right to get involved in employees' personal relationships--even those that may take place outside the workplace--has been affirmed by courts throughout the country. It was tested in Denver in 1983, after the firing of David Alan Goodwin, a Denver sheriff's deputy.

Goodwin had worked for the city for more than six years when he was fired for violating numerous departmental regulations, all of which had to do with his relationship with a former jail inmate named Kay Meyers. Goodwin, it was charged, had left his wife and moved into an East Colfax motel with Meyers. Although he was warned by his supervisor to discontinue the relationship and claimed that he had, within six days Goodwin was again living with Meyers.

Goodwin appealed his termination on the grounds that it violated his right to association, guaranteed to him by the Colorado constitution. His case eventually went to the Colorado Court of Appeals, which affirmed his termination and the decision of the lower courts.

The law's intrusion into people's private lives has always rankled Mary Jane Eaklor, particularly so in the case of relationships between staffers and inmates. "It was always a matter of double standards," she says. "It seemed all the hanky-panky that went on between the employees, married or unmarried, was all right, but if an unmarried woman employee found an unmarried prisoner attractive, that was a no-no."  

When Eaklor divorced Robert Kautz in 1985, he was already living on the edge. He was drinking too much, for one thing. And on March 7, 1986, after being out of prison just over two years, Kautz was back in jail, this time charged with investigation of attempted second-degree murder, first-degree assault, committing a crime of violence and felony menacing. Sterling police officers said Kautz had attacked his girlfriend with a knife, then broke into her house to continue the attack when she fled.

Later that year, when Kautz was being transported to Fort Morgan for a hearing, he was charged with attempting to kill a police officer during what prosecutors described as an escape attempt. Kautz went back to prison to begin serving a 32-year sentence.

Soon after Kautz's return to Canon City, Eaklor again began visiting him. They married for the second time on December 7, 1988.

There were several reasons why she chose to remarry, Eaklor says. For one thing, Kautz had become a Seventh-Day Adventist, "and I think he's convinced that what the church teaches is the truth." She also believes that he will never again touch alcohol.

When Eaklor speaks of her second marriage to Kautz, she doesn't talk of love, though it is clear she retains feelings for her husband. "I'm not always sure it was the smart thing to do," she says of the remarriage, "but we have a very good relationship, because we do think alike, and we have a lot to visit about and talk about."

She doesn't see her husband often, visiting him in the Buena Vista prison less than once a month. But they speak on the phone at least twice a week, and she mails him articles and orders books for him, which they both read and discuss.

Unlike Flo Orona, Eaklor and her husband haven't made plans for a future together. "I'm not sure he'd be happy living here," Eaklor says of her Penrose home. "The daily grind brings out things that would not exist otherwise. You can feel that everything is perfectly good, and then, once you're in close proximity..." Eaklor's words drop off as she considers the possibilities. "In real life," she continues, "there's probably a lot of things I do that he doesn't like, and there's probably a lot of things that he does that I don't like."

end of part 2

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