His bedspread had a bright and garish pattern of multi-colored lines exploding in every direction. It was the only thing Richard Jones had brought with him to Quiet Manor, a medium-security hospital for the criminally insane in rural Orange County, eighty miles north of New York City. The intensity of its colors and design came up for discussion at a staff meeting soon after Jones’s arrival: “Not appropriate for a man in his condition,” one of the senior therapists said. “It’ll agitate his mind and trigger another episode.” But in the end they let him keep it. “Something familiar often helps in the adjustment process,” was the psychiatric consensus.

When he was first brought in, Jones was disheveled, disoriented, and delusional. So they pumped him full of Thorazine and he slept for two full days and nights. When he awoke he was no longer agitated but he spoke to no one¾not to Henry Hutchinson, the pompous old faux-Freudian psychiatrist with his ludicrous Viennese mustache who met with Jones every two weeks to check on his medication, not to Thelma the social worker, a thin mousy woman who tried in vain to administer psychological tests to Jones, and not to the orderlies, the nurses, nor the other patients.

What he did do was to lie face down on his narrow bed for hours, scribbling furiously in his loose-leaf notebooks, frequently missing meals and staying up late into the night, writing by the dim light of the shadeless lamp on his nightstand. A stack of those notebooks soon began to grow at his bedside. He showed what he wrote to no one.

His room was empty, its whitewashed walls bare except for two identical landscape prints on opposite sides of the room. No curtains were permitted¾to minimize hangings. A small plywood-topped bureau with matching nightstand, a single metal chair, and a bed were the only furnishings.

Because of his strange habits, they didn’t discover that Jones had escaped until the following day…