Escapees happen all the time, sadly. Part of the MYTH “he’s going away to prison for a long time.” No they aren’t.
Timothy Leary made a prison escape (as detailed in the fascinating book The Most Dangerous Man in America: Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon and the Hunt for the Fugitive King of LSD by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis).
As part of a plan by the old SDS antiwar group now morphed into the violent bomb making Weathermen, Leary worked for weeks to pump up his muscular strength and nutrition and as planned he got out of the prison upstairs, pulling himself across the yard by grasping the taut phone wire overhead. Part way through as he looked down at the big drop he risked, he thought “I shouldn’t have tried this. I could fall and get killed.” Then he gathered his courage and stamina and kept going hand over hand to the other side. Once over the prison wall he lowered himself and was picked up by a waiting pickup truck and smuggled away where he was out of prison for a long time, baffling the authorities.
Writer Hunter S. Thompson hated Leary and was convinced by people who supposedly had knowledge of it that Leary was a CIA informant after his escape.
Ted Bundy escaped.