Tip ends decades of freedom
A prison escapee is caught in Tampa after 28 years.
By JUSTIN GEORGE, Times Staff Writer
Published October 26, 2007
TAMPA -- State investigators called Tampa police Thursday morning with a tip.
They had learned the alias for Michael Hess, a man who escaped from prison in 1979, and might be living in Tampa.
The case landed back in the hands of the agency that first put him away.
Florida Department of Law Enforcement records show that Hess, an Illinois native, was arrested in Tampa for the first time in 1971 for military desertion and was discharged from the service.
In 1972, he was arrested on five counts of armed robbery, one count of marijuana possession and grand larceny.
Those charges led to a conviction. After eight years in prison, he managed to escape in 1979, according to police.
State records show he received at least 35 years in prison, though Tampa police said it was actually 65 years. He served just eight before he disappeared.
The FDLE gave Tampa police Detective Rick Cochran just one address to go on near Temple Terrace and the alias Charles Swiger, a Tampa man who died in 1973.
They also told Cochran that Hess had an extremely high IQ. By afternoon, detectives found a long-ago ex-girlfriend who remembered that the man worked at the Press Box sports bar on S Dale Mabry Highway.
There, in the dark, windowless confines of Tampa's popular sports bar, Cochran found him in the kitchen.
He arrested the cook that his colleagues knew as Charles Swiger.
"Yes, what's this about?" the suspect asked the detective. "What's this about?"
Cochran responded with one word, "Michael."
With that, the detective said, Hess knew it was over.
* * *
Thursday evening, police escorted the thin, bespectacled 57-year-old man with a gray ponytail and mustache into a police car headed to jail. He still wore a baseball cap, green apron and towel from work. His hands were cuffed.
"I just tried to do all right when I was out," he told reporters outside the Police Department before he was booked into the Orient Road Jail without bail. "I realize I did wrong in leaving, but for the past 29 years, I didn't do wrong."
He said he had been working at a prison car wash in 1979 and "just left." He said he knew it was wrong to escape. But he said he had paid income taxes and tried to be a "so-called citizen" while on the lam.
Cochran cast some doubt, saying Hess appears to have been in a traffic accident and was pulled over several years ago under Swiger's name, using suspended licenses both times.
He now faces a charge of escape from confinement and possession of less than 20 grams of marijuana.
Cochran said Hess was found with 0.42 ounces on him Thursday.
* * *
How Hess lived over the past several years remains guarded. Press Box managers declined to comment and public information officials for the FDLE and Tampa police knew little about the case.
But Cochran says Hess told him the origin of his alias. Sometime in the 1970s, he told Swiger's widow his tale of escape.
At the time, she was a neighbor, living on the same street in unincorporated Hillsborough County. She sympathized, and offered him the use of her late husband's identity, Cochran said.
The real Swiger died in 1973, at the age of 52. He was last known to have lived on Manhattan Drive in Tampa, records show.
The widow has since died, Cochran said, but people who remain on that same block validated the story.
Over the years, the IRS took out Hess' income taxes under Swiger's name, Cochran said. Tax authorities sent him letters questioning Swiger's resurrection, but Hess never answered them.
He never filed tax returns, Cochran said.
"Hopefully, they'll look past these 29 years and see that I did all right," Hess said.
That leniency may be hard to come by, Cochran noted. At 57, Hess still had the equivalent of his lifetime thus far -- 57 years -- left to serve.
"He's got a life sentence no matter what he does," Cochran said.
Times researcher Angie Drobnic Holan contributed to this report. Justin George can be reached at jgeorge@sptimes.com or (813) 226-3368.