Chapter 3

I spent twelve years working my way into Marion State Prison.

As a boy, I lived in a small town in the oil fields of central California, which was like being in the desert or the outback, many miles from anything.

When I was ten and a half years old, I was called from class to the principal's office.  My aunt and uncle were there and they told me my Dad had been in an accident and my mother was at the hospital.  I was going home with them.

My Dad had been working on an oil derrick as a "roustabout".  Most of my family on his side worked in the oil business.  He’d been up high on the derrick when a large pulley, weighing about two tons, broke loose, swung over and hit him. The safety belt he had on, stopped him falling to the ground. They lowered him down and rushed him to the hospital by ambulance.  The doctors tried to save him but after a while they decided he was dead and gave up. However, a young intern who had just graduated from medical school and was doing his residency, tried a new technique and this saved my Dad.  He was a physical wreck though and in a coma for a year.  He'd had one side of his body and face totally smashed.  He lost an eye and his face looked grotesque; plastic surgery wasn't too advanced in the mid 1950's. The accident also left him brain damaged.

My aunt told me that with my Dad in hospital, I was now the man of the family.  That sounded good to me.  I'd never been close to my Dad; if he wasn't working, he was playing poker somewhere so he wasn't around much.  My mother was a beautiful redhead who was sad and scared a lot.  Her parents had been killed in an auto crash when she was young and she'd been raised by her older sisters.  She was the twelfth of thirteen children.

I thought being the " man of the family" meant I could quit school, get a job, and be in control of when I went to bed.  It didn't work that way.  I had to stay in school and go to bed at ten o'clock.  But I now felt responsible for my mother and my brothers and I was trying to take care of them.

Dad came home after eighteen months in the hospital. I was resentful of his being back and we started struggling with each other for the "man of the family" position. The brain damage he had sustained in the accident caused him to go into a rage once in a while, and these were directed at me.

One day, when I was twelve years old we got into a fight and he tried to strangle me.  I decided to leave.  The town we lived in, Taft, California, was out in the middle of nowhere, forty miles from the highway that ran to Los Angeles.  I went downtown and stole a car.  It was a 1949 Chevrolet and it had the keys in it.  Next to it was a new 1955 Chevrolet which also had keys, but I took the older one because I didn't know how to drive and knew there was a possibility that the car would wind up smashed. I'd gotten a friend, Keith, to go with me.  He said he knew how to drive but he'd lied.  He didn't know any more about it than I did.  We drove around town for an hour or so, trying to get the hang of driving.  I was behind the wheel and took off from a stop sign and was trying to shift from first to second while still accelerating.  I lost control of the car and crashed.  We ran away from the scene of the accident and went home.  My Dad had cooled off by then so he left me alone. I was scared and shaken from the accident but I couldn’t tell anyone what I had done.

A couple of weeks later, I was in the bowling alley where I worked setting pins and keeping score for the bowling league. I was sitting at the counter drinking a coke on my break, when a policeman walked in and came up to me. "Are you Kenneth Windes," he asked.
"Yes," I answered.
"I want to talk to you about the car you stole. Come with me."
He took me to the police station and I saw they had Keith there too.  They took me into a room and began questioning me about the car.
"Why did you steal the car?" one of the cops asked.
"I didn't steal a car," I responded.
I was wondering how they had found out and I was feeling scared and intimidated.
"We know you stole the car and wrecked it.  Don't you know how to drive?" the cop said.
I continued to insist that I didn't know what they were talking about.
"Keith has already told us all about it", another cop said to me.  "If you tell us what happened, you'll probably get probation.  We know you're a good kid and you haven't been in trouble before.  But if you keep lying to us, you'll wind up in reform school."

I was in a classic trap.  It's called 'Prisoner's Dilemma'.  I had four options; 1. If Keith had already confessed and I now confessed, we'd both get probation. 2. If Keith had confessed and I didn't, I'd go to reform school. 3. If Keith hadn't confessed and I did, I'd get probation but he'd go to reform school. 4. If we both stood our ground, we might walk away or we might go to reform school.

One of the cops opened the door to the room where Keith was being held and I could see him sitting on a chair, crying.  Then my mother showed up and she was crying and begging me to tell the truth.  So I confessed.  It turned out to be the right decision.  Keith had already confessed. They took us to the county seat, Bakersfield, and booked us into Juvenile Hall.  The charge was Grand Theft Auto. I was arrested, spent two weeks in a juvenile detention center, then placed on probation and returned home, to my Dad.

For a few months life at home was calm but then he blew up again and came at my throat. I stole another car and drove off. I had taken a few driving lessons since the last time, so I got as far as Los Angeles where I was arrested. I spent another two weeks in the detention center, reinstated on probation and sent home again where nothing had changed.

After this occurred a couple more times, I was formally declared a juvenile delinquent and sentenced to the California Youth Authority until the age of eighteen. I spent most of my teenage years in California’s reform schools. These schools were not “schools of crime” though I did learn many criminal skills there. They primarily taught me how to be a Convict. I learned how to walk the walk and talk the talk of a Convict. The friends I was making were all kids locked up in reform school. I would get paroled from a reform school every once in awhile and sent home. My mother and Dad had divorced so he wasn’t in the picture anymore. But I didn’t have any friends outside of reform school and my walk and talk only fitted a criminal culture. So after a few weeks, I would get into trouble, my parole would be revoked and I would be sent back.

When I was seventeen, after trying to escape from a reform school, I graduated into the California Adult Prison System. For the next seven years, I was in and out (but mostly in) of the state prisons at SoleDad and San Quentin.

At twenty four years of age, I was paroled from the State Prison at SoleDad, California. I realised that I had spent eleven years of my life locked behind bars and I could not see a future that didn’t include more of the same.  So I did something I’d never done before. I bought a gun. I’d never used or even fired a gun in my life. I put the gun in my pocket and told myself that, when they came to lock me up again, we would settle the whole matter right there. I’d either shoot my way out of the situation or they would kill me. And I didn’t care which way it turned out.

Copyright 1994-2009 Liana Di Stefano & Ken Windes

Chapter 2

Ken Windes
United States Penitentiary
Marion, Illinois

August 1968

It was a hot afternoon.  I was in the back seat of a late model Pontiac GTO, handcuffed to a body chain with leg irons around my ankles.  We were approaching Marion prison which looked like something out of a science fiction movie.  The first thing you see when approaching a prison is the water tower.  This one looked like a space ship poised for takeoff.

Marion had the highest security rating in the U.S. Prison system.  It had been opened four years earlier to replace Alcatraz as the ultimate prison.  Alcatraz, sitting on an island in San Francisco bay, had been falling apart and getting very expensive to operate.  It cost a fortune just to ship water out to it and four convicts had escaped, somehow getting through the treacherous waters of the bay.  First time in the history of Alcatraz that anyone had escaped.  The official position of the Bureau of Prisons was that none of them had made it, all having drowned even though the bodies weren't recovered.  But the convicts knew better because one of them had received a postcard from South America signalling that the escape had been successful.

The car was driven by a young United States Marshal, accompanied by his brother who was riding shotgun as a guard.  He carried his gun in a holster on the right hip.  That put it about two feet from me, sitting as I was in the middle of the back seat.  I'd been watching it for four days as we travelled from the Federal Prison at El Reno, Oklahoma on the journey to Marion.  I couldn't just reach forward and grab it because each of my hands were handcuffed to the prisoner on either side of me. They were both short-termers who were going to the minimum security ranch at Marion and I knew they wouldn't cooperate with my grabbing the gun because they had no interest in escaping.  I had twenty-six years to serve and a lot of interest in escaping.

We pulled up to the entrance at the guard tower and the Marshals turned their guns over to a guard.  Nobody is allowed to carry weapons into a prison.  They have to be checked before entry.  This is to prevent the convicts from overpowering someone and arming themselves.

We drove in through the entrance and parked the car. I was escorted into the reception area and unchained.  After a week in the back of the car, I was ready for a cell with a bed and a hot meal.  The prison had a feeling of newness to it and the smell of disinfectant that is common to all institutions.  It was laid out with four spokes radiating from a central hub that contained the control room.  We went through five electronically controlled gates, each one closing behind us before the next one would open.  Our progress was monitored by remote television cameras spaced along the corridor.  My first impression was that they were very serious about security.

We reached the Captain's office and I was turned over to a prison guard who told me I was being placed in the Isolation Unit until I could be classified.  So I was taken to H-Block and placed in an isolation cell.  It was a surprise.  The cell was big, with a metal bed bolted to the wall that had springs rather than being the usual slab of metal.  The mattress was about three inches thick and there were clean sheets and blankets on the bed.  A metal toilet and sink was bolted to the back wall, with hot and cold running water.  As cells go, this was a five star hotel.  If this was isolation, I figured the mainline cells must really be something.  I later learned they were exactly the same.  The whole prison was one big isolation unit.  That was its purpose.  To isolate the most dangerous convicts in the federal prison system.

I was left in Isolation for three days, reading magazines and a few old novels. The food was good, and served hot. I did light exercise every day in my cell and they’d let me out once to shower. The water was hot and I had all the time I wanted in the shower, by myself.  I’d served six months in the Los Angeles County Jail on a narcotics charge when I was nineteen. There, a whole tank of about one hundred prisoners would be herded into a shower room with about fifteen shower-heads. We were given ten minutes to shower, then herded back out. There wasn’t time enough to get raped but you usually didn’t get clean either. It was hard to even get wet. So the Isolation unit at Marion was feeling luxurious.

On the morning of the fourth day, a guy dressed in a suit appeared in front of my cell. I was laying on the bed, reading. I got up to greet him.  “My name is Dr George Camp,” he said by way of introduction. “I’m the Associate Warden here.” He was tall and slender, good looking with sharp features, light hair and glasses. I later learned that the ‘Dr’ came from a Ph.D in Criminal Justice.

“Do you know why you’re in Isolation?” he asked in a conversational tone of voice.

“No,” I replied in an ‘I don’t care’ tone.

“I wanted you to know where you’re going to spend all your time if you try to escape from Marion,” he said, still being light and friendly.  “I’m releasing you into the General Population today. Stay out of trouble. And forget escaping, Windes. You can’t escape from Marion.”  He walked away.

I sat down on the bed and thought about what he had said. The information I had about this prison was that there was no way to escape, but I wasn’t buying it.

Copyright  1994-2009 Liana Di Stefano & Ken Windes

Chapter 1

Against the odds, Ken Windes and I fell in love. In December 1992, I attended one of his seminars and at the end, as everyone said goodbye, Ken and I kissed. We were both surprised by what we felt. “Not her!” he groaned to himself as he moved away. We had come from two very different worlds. I thought he was charismatic yet very arrogant, and he thought I was the ‘Ice Queen’. I was 30 and he was 50. If there was a movie that best described our lives, mine would probably have been ‘Gidget’,  the story of a pretty happy, carefree childhood and teenage years going to the beach on weekends and holidays. Mine  however, was an Italian version which included lots of family, food and the traditional bottling of tomato sauce each year. Ken’s movie was “America Me”, a story of growing up in prison with Mexican gangs. We did not seem a likely match.


We were both staying at the home of  mutual friends, and that evening, while everyone slept, Ken and I talked through most of the night. I kept my coat on: it was my way of keeping a barrier between us, and Ken kept trying to take it off. There was too much at stake for both of us. I was married, had a beautiful two year old daughter, Allegra, and was the head of a large personal development network that was meant to model certain principles of how to live, which did not include falling in love with an ex-con. Ken was also in a good, solid marriage and had been with Jane for 14 years. But fall in love we did.


Ken left Jane immediately. He felt that even if we did not get together, it was time for him to leave regardless. Even though he loved and cared for her deeply, he felt that for the first time in his life he knew what it felt like to be in love.


For a year I tried to resist it. It was a year of hell for me and at times I thought I would go mad with the split I felt between staying in my marriage and following my heart. In the end I left my marriage.


Ken was American and left everything behind, including his business, to be with me in Australia. He was happy  to start over again. He said all he wanted to do was lie on the beach, trade Futures, make love to me and play with Allegra.


By February 1995, we had been together one year. It had been a hard year. Money was tight and my family was very angry at us; they didn’t speak to Ken for five years. I also felt very guilty for breaking up my daughter’s family and hurting her father.  But we were committed to being together, we were in love.


Ken had just come back from teaching a workshop in New Zealand and had a tooth ache. He didn’t have much of an appetite so ate a plum and took an aspirin. At lunch time he was sick. He thought the aspirin had unsettled his stomach. Ken was 52 years old and had never been sick in his life. At about 8.30pm that night he was sick again. He returned to the couch where we had been sitting watching television.


“That’s strange" he said, "I just vomited again and it was still purple. I couldn’t possibly have any plum left in my system.”


I turned to him and from out of nowhere said “You won’t die on me will you?” Ken looked at me with his pretty pale blue eyes; he had a way of looking at me that soothed.


“No, I promise I won’t leave you”.


I don’t know why I asked that question, as he had never been ill before.  At that moment, I remembered the day we were in the kitchen of his apartment. I couldn’t decide if I was going to be with him. He took hold of the belt around my jeans and pulled me close: “I will love you like no other man has ever loved you”, he said. I didn’t want to lose what I had just found. But I had no reason to think that things wouldn’t be okay.


Until 1.30am, when I woke up to hear Ken running through the house, crashing into doors. I found him sitting on the bathroom floor vomiting blood. I made him get up and sit on the side of the spa bath tub. That was a mistake, as the blood drained from his head, causing him to pass out. He was a solid man and I couldn’t hold on to him. He crashed into the bath. I’d stayed calm up until this point. I thought that hitting his head on the bath the way it did definitely would have killed him. He woke up and asked weakly “What are you screaming about?” He wanted to get up and sit on the toilet but I ordered him to stay in the tub, and went to ring for an ambulance. I got back to find him passing more blood. When the ambulance arrived, I showed them where Ken had been sick and the senior officer reacted with “Oh no, this is not good”. Now I was really shaking. I expected her to be calm, neutral and reassuring, not tell me that this was not good.


They took Ken in the ambulance. I couldn’t leave my little girl alone, even though they were insisting I go with him.  I called James, Allegra’s father, and even though he was still very hurt that our marriage had ended, he put all those feelings aside and came over to look after her.   I then went to the hospital and waited.  After a few hours they were able to stabilise Ken and move him to a ward.  He was sedated, and there was nothing I could do at the hospital. I wanted to get back to Allegra, so I went home.


Ken did not look good the next day, but he was alive.  I was sitting at his bedside when he told me that during the night his blood pressure dropped and his vital signs started crashing.  As the doctors and nurses worked on him, Ken said he left his body and watched them from above. He noticed a bright light over his shoulder, and turned and started walking towards it. It was a very seductive light and it felt good to walk forward  and just let go, but he remembered “I promised Liana I wouldn’t leave her”.  He came back, just in time to feel the full sensation of a respiratory tube being forced down his throat.


Thirty years earlier, Ken had been diagnosed with Hepatitis C. Actually, back then they didn’t know it as Hepatitis C, just non-infectious Hepatitis. Doctors told him that it would sit in his liver for thirty years and then kill him. When Ken was twenty he didn’t think he would live for thirty years, so it didn’t bother him. While many of us in our twenties can’t ever imagine being 50, for Ken it was real. The life he was leading at the time meant that there was an 80% chance that he would never make it.


This is Ken’s story.




Copyright 2009 Liana Di Stefano


Note to Reader:


The ‘personal development network’ in Chapter 1, was the Money & You network in Sydney, Australia. During the years 1987 to 1994, my then husband and business partner, James Caldwell, and I ran Business Plus, a company dedicated to bringing the best in business, learning and personal development training to Sydney. We worked with some of the greats in the industry: DC Cordova, Robert Kiyosaki, Stephanie Burns, Tony Robbins, Tom Crum, Ken Windes and many others.  It was a rich, exciting environment in which I had the good fortune to ‘grow up’ in.


Chapter 1 also referred to "our mutual friends'. They are Jane and Stan Jordan, who still promote the Money & You workshop today in Australia, USA and Asia, and have, fortunately, remained my dear friends.