Maybe inmate No. 089956 really runs long-distance races on a dirt track in the prison yard. Maybe he's exaggerating. Either way, he'll reach the finish line in 2019. [Times photo illustration: Patty Yablonski]

By LANE DeGREGORY
© St. Petersburg Times
published September 22, 2002

CHIPLEY, Fla. -- The letters started coming in February 2001: white envelopes with blue Statue of Liberty stamps on the front and red writing across the back: MAILED FROM A CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION.

Inside, in perfect printing, Prisoner No. 089956 was pleading for help.

"I am a fairly decent 65-year-old long-distance runner and commercial printing salesman from Indiana presently 'retired' here in Florida," said the first letter, addressed to one of my newsroom colleagues. "I used to run 50 training miles a week here on the prison recreation field. I am writing to you in hopes you will expose the injustice and abuse of authority that I'm presently incurring from my keepers."

He said he runs races -- 92 in the last two years -- 5Ks and 10-milers and marathons, circling the dirt track inside the chain-link fence at Washington Correctional Institution.

When he's in solitary confinement, he runs in his 6- by 9-foot cell, he said. Three paces forward, three back. Two hours at a time.

He said he was trying to raise $1-million for the American Cancer Society. He said he had been featured on the CBS Evening News and in Runner's World magazine.

Now, he said, the warden was confiscating the pin-on numbers race directors were sending him. "Shortly after I started this project, the Florida DOC ordered me to stop it simply because I was attracting publicity," he wrote. "They wanted Jim Deupree to be #089956 and nothing more."

It wasn't fair. He wanted something done about it.

He sent the same handwritten letter to 50 reporters across the country. No one responded.

In April 2001, the letters landed on my desk.

RUNNING THE GAMUT

I didn't know what to think when I wrote back to Jim Deupree. Maybe this was going to be another article about some convict trying to convince everyone he had changed. Or another expose of injustice in the justice system. Or maybe a waste of time.

I wasn't sure an inmate could run a marathon in such confining spaces, even if the guards would let him; or that he really was trying to raise money for charity; or that he had been on TV.

It took 17 months, 18 letters, a computer researcher, a long drive and a new pair of underwear to get to the bottom of things.

Then, in an anteroom of a Panhandle prison, I saw it.

I had been looking at this story all wrong.

BLACK JACK AND PURPLE PAINT

By the time we started corresponding, Deupree had been in and out of jail for half his life -- all for alcohol-induced, nonviolent crimes.

He had lost a printing business, two wives and three children because of his drinking. He hadn't met any of his seven grandchildren. All his friends, even his lawyer, had given up on him.

His Florida criminal record goes back to Jan. 10, 1974. Daytona Beach. Insufficient Check Funds. Ditto seven months later in Pinellas County. He got a three-year sentence, suspended. He moved back to Indiana. Within five years, he was behind bars in his home state.

He said he started running in prison there, in 1979, to lose weight. He was 43 years old. He weighed 250 pounds. At first, he said, he could barely make a quarter-mile. But he kept running round and round, and resting between jogs.

After all, he had plenty of time.

"I'm doing life," he said, "on the installment plan."

Between prison terms he was on the streets, getting nowhere as a career criminal. It's hard to get away with anything after downing four shots of Jack Daniel's and chasing them with draft Buds.

During his last, worst drunk, at the end of a two-week binge, Deupree ran out of money. He panicked. He had to buy more booze. About 10 a.m. on Jan. 11, 1990, he drove to Florida National Bank on Gulf-to-Bay Boulevard in Clearwater and parked out front. He dug a scrap of paper out of his glove box. With a shaky hand, he scribbled a note: "Give me $2,000 or I'll hurt you." He had a .22-caliber rifle in his trunk to prove his point.

[Times photo: Jim Damaske 1990] Jim Deupree was arrested as a suspect in a Clearwater bank robbery in 1990. He was charged and is serving 30 years in prison.

But he was so drunk he forgot to get the gun.

He stumbled into the bank, up to the counter and shoved the note in front of a startled teller.

"Where's your bag, sir?" she asked politely.

He'd forgotten that, too. So he held out both hands. "Just stack it here."

By the time he got to the sidewalk, the dye packs exploded. Purple ink spewed across his arms, clothes and car. The teller had wound the tell-tale packets into the bills.

A half-hour later, sheriffs' deputies caught Deupree in his paint-splattered Dodge Omni. The judge gave him 30 years. Deupree is scheduled to be released in November 2019.

He will be 83.

A newspaper photo of Deupree's arrest shows officers folding him into the backseat of a squad car. He is wearing dark sunglasses, a polo shirt and jeans, a light windbreaker.

And running shoes.

HEART AND HUSTLE

In his letters, Deupree often asked me to do things for him. He wanted me to photocopy papers, call lawyers and register him for races he would never run. When he asked me to send $200 so he could keep writing to race directors -- "a Times sponsorship," he called it -- I stopped writing.

His letters kept coming. The stack grew to an inch high.

All the letters sounded pretty much the same: He's going to run these upcoming races and raise so much money for charity. He's running out of funds for stamps and envelopes. The warden isn't letting him wear his race numbers.

The race numbers seemed to be a big sticking point. Wearing them was against prison policy, the warden said. Deupree saw that as abuse. What's the big deal about those pin-on numbers? I kept wondering. Why couldn't he just run the races without them?

He kept writing and writing. But he never addressed that issue.

"I am not new to fundraising from inside prison," he wrote June 1, 2001. "In 1979, at the Indiana State Prison, I raised over a million dollars for the American Heart Association." That's when the TV reporters and magazine writers started knocking at his cell door, he wrote. Then he got out of prison, ran 269 miles home and got even more media attention.

I called the American Heart Association, three offices. No one had heard of Jim Deupree. No record of any contribution in his name, much less a million-dollar bequest. Then a St. Petersburg Times researcher checked with CBS. Nope. No evening news broadcast about a prison runner, nothing about a national fundraiser. No archive footage about a long run home. Nothing about anyone by that name.

I had more luck with Runner's World. When I asked former senior writer Hal Hogdon about Jim Deupree, he laughed. "Is that old guy still causing trouble?" he asked.

"I told him to stop using me as a reference."

Deupree started writing Hogdon from behind bars in the late '70s. "I lived near the prison, so I went and met him one weekend," Hogdon said. "I ran with him. He's wasn't that bad of a runner.

"He used to try to hustle free shoes from me."

Hogdon confirmed that he wrote about Deupree's run home from prison. "But by the time the story was printed, that guy was already drinking again," Hogdon said. "Within three months, he was back in prison for something else stupid. I felt sorry for him and was trying to be nice. But he outruns people's capacity to care for him."

ALMOST FAMOUS

Deupree started proxy running races in 1994, he said, a few years after the Clearwater bank catastrophe. He wanted to raise money for the American Cancer Society "in memory of my friend Dr. George Sheehan, former editor for Runner's World magazine, who died from prostate cancer in November 1993. George would send new running shoes to me here in prison while I was in need . . . I miss this guy."

Over the years, across the country, newspapers kept picking up that paragraph. An Internet search turned up more than a dozen references to Jim Deupree and his long, lonely laps to end cancer. All that time Deupree was doing time in Florida, he was getting publicity in newspapers across the country.

"Prisoner Participates by Proxy in Barber to Boise Run," The Idaho Statesman printed in 1995. "Inside job lets prison inmate run against cancer," The Digital Collegian of Penn State wrote six years later. The New Hampshire Sunday News, the Buffalo News, the Tennessean, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, the South Bend Tribune in Indiana. All the articles said Deupree was raising $1-million for the cancer foundation or $10,000 against drunken driving or some other astronomical sum for some other charity. All the stories said he had been on the CBS news and in Runner's World and in lots of newspapers. All of them quoted Deupree's letters. All the articles were written before the races.

Apparently, no one ever checked whether Deupree really ran in any races or raised any money.

From inside the state pen, Deupree was able to make a name for himself.

Race directors sent him numbers and put him in their programs because they wanted publicity. Then Deupree put that program in his next letter, so the next race director would think he had run that race, too.

I called two national offices of the American Cancer Society, and no one had heard of Jim Deupree, or any prison running project. Spokesmen in New York and Atlanta directed me to Indianapolis, to a man named Brad Burk.

"I have received correspondence from Jim Deupree. But there are no records indicating any donation from or on behalf of Mr. Deupree. The same holds true for George Sheehan, whom Mr. Deupree has attempted to honor by running," Burk wrote in an e-mail.

About a week later, I got another letter from Deupree. "The American Cancer Society has asked me to stop using their logo on my letterheads," the familiar handwriting read. "They don't want their good name attached to a convict, no matter how good my intentions may be on their behalf."

CHECKS AND BALANCES

Just before Memorial Day last year, I got another letter. Deupree wanted to know why I hadn't been writing. He wanted me to visit him. He was still insisting the guards were being unfair to him. I was curious enough to make another call.

Prison officials said Deupree was not allowed to talk to anyone -- even over the telephone -- until he was out of solitary. Department of Corrections spokeswoman Debbie Buchanan said she had no idea how long he might be in there.

"He had eight reports written on him in the last year, mostly for disobeying orders," she said. "And you know, he's been telling this story about running races and raising money for at least eight years now. At one point, he was actually telling people he was running marathons. And he wasn't."

How do you know? I asked her. Does anyone watch him, to see whether he's running in place?

"No," she said. "But we could."

All through Memorial Day weekend 2001, when Deupree was supposed to be proxy running a marathon, guards looked in on him during every shift. At my request, they agreed to mark times they saw him exercising.

I called Buchanan after the weekend. "One correctional officer said he thought he saw the prisoner stretching," Buchanan said. "But no one saw him running, not even in place."

So what was Deupree doing? And why?

A year later, I got to see for myself.

NOTHING UP MY SLEEVE

When Deupree got out of solitary confinement a year later, he wrote to me again. Now I could come talk to him, he said.

[Times photo: Lane DeGregory] Jim Deupree, 65, has spent about half his life getting in and out of prison. His latest stretch is scheduled to end in November 2019.

He had been moved to a two-man cell, inside a dormlike wing of the prison.

"He has an outdoor exercise period every day now," said Yolanda Murphy, the public relations director for the Florida Department of Corrections. "And on the weekends, he can use the yard for up to two hours at a time. We have no way to verify, though, if he really runs, or even walks, out there. And you can't talk to the warden. He doesn't want to get involved."

But I could visit Deupree, she said -- if I really wanted to. "We'll have to go over a few ground rules before you can come inside a prison," she said.

The first one: You have to wear undergarments.

On a drizzly Tuesday in early September, I drove west across the Panhandle with a stack of dog-eared letters in my backpack and three pages of questions for my pen pal. Outside a rural inland community called Chipley, I turned into Washington Correctional Institution. A corrections officer told me to take off my shoes, my belt, my bracelets and barrette. I'd bought new underwear, but she didn't check. She showed me through a metal detector and through four thick, bolted doors, down a dark corridor to a darker room. She told me to wait.

She went to get Deupree. After a year and a half, I was about to meet the marathon man.

GETTING THE PICTURE

The photo of Deupree on the prison Web site shows a scowling man with a small eyes, a square chin and almost no lips.

In person, prisoner No. 089956 is thinner, older and less mean looking. His sparse hair has gone gray. Square glasses hide his green eyes. His cheeks have sunk beneath two days of stubble. His thin lips are turned down, not quite grimacing.

He walks into the room slowly, wearing a white T-shirt under light blue scrubs, white socks and gray slip-on shoes.

"You don't know how long I've been waiting for this," he says softly, almost to himself. Then he looks up, just slightly. He's not used to making eye contact. He seems embarrassed.

I hadn't realized this meant so much to him. Hadn't he talked to dozens of reporters before me?

"On the phone, yes," he answers, focusing on his folded hands. "In person, no. You're the first."

Then I think of a question I hadn't considered.

When was the last time you had a visitor?

"Never," he answers. "There's no one."

Twelve years, and not one person had visited him. Not even a lawyer. Not once.

"My oldest son, D.J., he's a Coast Guard officer, last I heard. He wrote me off years ago. And I don't keep up with my daughter Shannon. Dan, my youngest boy, he was helping me e-mail my letters to the race directors for a while. Then he and his wife got involved in that Amway thing. Now, he doesn't have time."

SELF-PRESERVATION AND POLITICS

Deupree wore out his last pair of running shoes six months ago. He doesn't have $70 to buy a new pair at the canteen. So he wears prison-issue combat boots when he runs, black leather Brogans that lace up over his ankles.

He rolls down his socks to prove he's been running. Both bony ankles are raw, red and scabby from the boots' rubbing. Then he slips off his shoes. His toenails are black or missing.

"Boot bump," he says. "It's well worth it."

What else does he have?

Here is a 65-year-old former salesman, a onetime family man turned barfly, who craves company and conversation but keeps getting sent to solitary. He is surrounded by convicts half his age and guards who think all criminals are the same. He hasn't had a drink since 1990. He has never surfed the Internet or seen his grandchildren.

So whenever he's able, whenever the guards let him, he runs around that unpaved dirt ring, staring at the same lack of scenery, 23/4 laps to a mile, 72 makes a marathon, hour after day after week after month after year. He never gets anywhere, of course. But at least he's not standing still.

He wears race numbers strangers send him whenever he's allowed. He pins them over the number stenciled on his prison-issue shirt. These race numbers represent him much better than that six-digit number the DOC substitutes for his name.

They are the only things that change inside these walls. They set him apart.

They help him hold on.

"Without those numbers, I probably wouldn't be running," Deupree says. "Wearing those numbers, having everyone see them, well, I guess it sort of gives me a sense of self-worth, or something."

The guard comes back, taps on the window. Time's up.

Deupree glares at the guard. Then turns to me. He starts to smile.

"I guess everyone likes a little attention," he says.

I promise to mail him a copy of my story. Then I shake his hand and turn to leave.

As the guard slides that first thick door open, Deupree calls out one last request.

"Would you send a copy to Gov. Bush?" he asks. "I want him to read about me."

I should have known.

-- Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this story.

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