Chicago Prison Escape: Second of Two Bank Robbers Arrested
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Kevin Horan/Stone(CHICAGO) — A convicted bank robber who escaped jail before Christmas is back in custody.
Kenneth Conley, 38, one of two inmates who escaped from the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown Chicago on Dec. 18, was taken into custody at an apartment complex in the suburb of Palos Hills Friday evening. The other man, Joseph “Jose” Banks, 37, was captured just two days after the escape.
Banks and Conley were last seen Dec. 17 at 10 p.m. during a prison head count at the correctional center in downtown Chicago’s Loop district. The two borrowed a move from the film Escape From Alcatraz by stuffing their beds with clothes in the shape of bodies.
The men then broke the window of their cell at the federal prison, shimmying out a hole only inches wide, and scaled 17 stories down the side of the building, all the while holding onto a rope of sheets and towels taken from the prison. The rope was strong enough to support the two, one weighing 165 pounds the other 185 pounds.
At 7 a.m. the next morning, as employees arrived at work, they noticed the sheets left dangling from the building and discovered that Conley and Banks were missing.
Investigators said surveillance cameras captured Banks and Conley getting into a taxi minutes after their brazen escape. They entered the taxi at the intersection of Michigan Avenue and Congress Street, just blocks away from the jail.
The men then showed up at the home of Sandy Conley, Kenneth Conley’s mother, in the Chicago suburb of Tinley Park, Ill., on Tuesday morning, only five hours after they escaped.
“He was in the house for two minutes,” Sandy Conley told ABC News on Thursday. “I can’t tell you if he was armed. I made him get out.”
It is unclear what connection, if any, Conley might have to the Palos Hills apartment complex where he was apprehended.
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