How This Man Escaped from Prison by Faking His Own Death

At the headquarters of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, officials received a shocking document, a death certificate for inmate Steven Jay Russell. Cause of death? An AIDS-related illness. Case closed, they thought. The famous escape artist who had given them so many gray hairs was finally gone. But within weeks, they would discover that the only thing that was dead was the paperwork.

Hundreds of miles away, a very much alive Steven Russell walked out through the doors of a nursing home smiling at the audacity of his latest trick. He had just convinced the prison system that he was terminally ill and then officially dead, all to win his freedom. It was the culmination of a long string of ingenious escapes by a man so cunning and determined that people would later call him Houdini and King Con.

And at the heart of every one of his escapes was a very simple motive, love. Steven Russell wasn’t always a criminal. At first, he tried to live a conventional life. He even married a woman and played the organ at church, but he wrestled with a part of himself that he kept secret. Seven years later, that same church organist would call an employee in Texas out of the blue posing as Judge Davis and make a $900,000 bond vanish with a single sentence.

In the 1980s, he came out as a gay man and his world fell apart. He lost his job, felt discriminated against, and grew bitter and desperate for money. Already in his early 30s, he started running small scams to survive. In 1992, one of those scams, a false insurance claim, landed him in the Harris County Jail in Houston with a 6-month sentence for fraud.

That sentence might have passed without any drama, except for one thing. Steven had a lover on the outside who was dying. Alone in his cell, Steven learned that his boyfriend, whom he loved deeply, had AIDS and had very little time left. The thought of never seeing him again before he died was unbearable. Steven panicked.

 He wasn’t a violent man, but he understood that the only way to be with his dying partner was to do something drastic. He began watching the jail’s routine closely. He noticed that the guards went out to smoke at roughly the same times, leaving certain exit points unwatched for moments at a time. With cold, calm determination, Steven gathered everything he could to make an escape easier.

He found an old pair of black work pants in a trashcan and got hold of a discarded walkie-talkie, tools that would help him pass as jail staff. Then, on Friday, May 13th, 1993, a date he would later consider his lucky charm, Steven made his move. He timed the exact moment the guard stepped away, put on the black pants and a plain shirt to look like a maintenance worker, and walked confidently toward a restricted door.

He knocked twice on the metal frame with the walkie-talkie, clack clack, an improvised badge of authority. The guard on duty, seeing someone who looked like a worker needing to get out, released the lock. In an instant, Steven walked out of the jail as if it were nothing. He went straight to the hospital where his partner was spending his final days.

For one brief, bittersweet moment, Steven got exactly what he wanted. He was by the side of the man he loved when it mattered most. His boyfriend died soon after with Steven there to say goodbye. In that sense, his wild escape had served its purpose, but now Steven was a fugitive with nowhere to go. Within a few weeks, the authorities caught up with him and returned him to jail.

A simple 6-month sentence had now turned into a few more years for having escaped, but Steven hardly cared. His partner’s death had left him shattered and adrift. Back behind bars in the mid-1990s, Steven found an unexpected ray of light. He met a soft-spoken fellow prisoner named Philip Morris. Philip was serving time for a minor offense and on the surface was nothing like the daring Steven.

But the two men formed a very close bond, sharing laughs and quiet conversations in the prison yard. For Steven, who had always longed for love and acceptance, Philip quickly became a new reason to dream of a life beyond the bars. They fell in love and began planning a future together for when their sentences ended.

In 1995, both were released on parole. At last, Steven and Philip were free at the same time, and they wasted no time starting a life as a couple. They moved in together, and for a short while enjoyed some peace. Philip would have been happy simply building a quiet, honest life. But Steven’s restless mind had other plans.

He was determined to give the two of them a lavish life, perhaps to prove to Philip and to himself that he could be someone important and successful. The problem was that Steven’s skills didn’t lie in honest work. They lay in deception. Using his gift of gab and fake credentials, Steven landed a job as chief financial officer of a medical insurance company in Texas.

It was a position of enormous trust, and he got it entirely by lying about his experience. Amazingly, he thrived in that role, at least on the surface. At the office Christmas party, he raised a glass of champagne and joked, “There’s nothing like other people’s premiums to keep the lights on.” Drawing a few polite laughs.

No one realized the line was literal. Over the course of several months, Steven siphoned off around $800,000 from the company. With that illicit gain, he and Philip suddenly had luxury cars, Rolex watches, and designer clothes. They treated themselves to expensive dinners and even cosmetic procedures. For a brief period, Steven lived the fantasy of wealth he had always wanted.

And he spoiled Philip with every comfort money could buy. Of course, the law caught up with him sooner or later. In 1996, Steven’s employer discovered the massive fraud. The police arrested him immediately, and Philip was detained as well, even though Philip’s involvement in the crimes had been relatively minor.

This time Steven faced serious charges that could send him to prison for decades. The judge, well aware of Steven’s history of escape, set his bond at $900,000. An enormous amount meant to keep him locked up until trial. For most people, that would have been the end of the story. But for Steven, it was just another challenge.

Sitting in jail while awaiting trial, Steven devised one of his boldest scams up to that point. He couldn’t pay the $900,000 bond, so he decided to trick the system into reducing it. Posing as a judge, yes, a real judge, he called the court clerk.  Good morning. This is Judge Davis regarding the Russell case.

 Reduce the bond to $45,000 and file the order today, please.  In a confident tone, he claimed to be the judge handling the Russell case and ordered the bond reduced to $45,000. Then came the paperwork, forged by Steven, naturally, and by some miracle, the change actually went through. Then Steven scraped together a small fraction of that amount to pay a bail bondsman using a bad check that would never clear, and incredibly, walked out of jail before anyone figured out what had happened.

Within a matter of days, he had impersonated a judge and literally talked his way out the front door. It was a short-lived victory. Steven fled Texas and reunited with Philip, who had gotten out on his own bond. The two of them headed to Florida hoping to disappear among the palm trees. But the authorities were already on his trail, tapping phone lines and keeping watch on associates.

Barely a week later, they located Steven and arrested him in Florida. His face was already showing up in the national news as that of the brilliant con man who had pulled off yet another escape. When Texas brought him back to face justice, they made sure that this time there would be no easy way out. In court, he received a 45-year prison sentence for fraud plus additional time for impersonating a judge.

At around 40 years old, Steven was looking at spending most, perhaps all of the rest of his life behind bars. Phillip, for his part, received a lighter sentence and would be out in just a few years. But Steven was sent to a maximum security prison, once again separated from the man he loved. Most people would have given up at that point, but Steven Russell was not like most people.

Inside the Texas Department of Corrections, he immediately began planning his next move. He was now inmate number 00760259 at the Stiles Unit, a high-security prison surrounded by fences and watchtowers. It was supposed to be impossible to escape from there. Steven was determined to prove otherwise. He noticed that the civilian medical staff, doctors and nurses in green uniforms, came and went from the prison on a regular basis.

If he could pass as one of them, maybe he could simply walk out, just as he had done before. For weeks, he quietly gathered materials. From the prison’s art supplies, he extracted green dye from several felt-tip markers. The strong smell of alcohol filled his tiny cell as he squeezed the ink into a plastic cup, stirring it with a toothbrush until the liquid turned a dark emerald green.

He soaked one of his white prison uniforms in that dye until it came out a pale green, roughly the color of surgical scrubs. He managed to steal a blank ID card and carefully forged an identification for a fictional doctor. Little by little, he was putting together what looked like an escape straight out of a Hollywood movie.

On the morning of February 24th, 1997, another Friday, fittingly Steven put on his dyed green scrubs and hung the fake ID around his neck. With nerves of steel, he walked toward the prison’s main gate during a busy shift change, blending in with a small group of real medical staff. A guard glanced at him sideways.

 Steven answered with a curt nod and touched an imaginary pager on his waist. The guard at the entrance, assuming he was just another hospital worker, let the group through, including Steven. Just like that, Steven walked out of a Texas State Prison in broad daylight, disguised as a doctor. By the time the prison realized an inmate was missing, Steven was already far, far away.

He reunited with Philip, and together they left Texas. This time they hid out in Biloxi, Mississippi, renting a small apartment and trying not to draw attention. For a few months, life was quiet. Maybe they thought the worst was behind them. But the authorities Steven had humiliated had no intention of leaving him alone.

Texas law enforcement coordinated efforts with federal agents, and eventually received a tip about Steven’s whereabouts. In early 1998, police units surrounded the apartment in Biloxi. There was no escape route left. Steven and Philip were arrested without incident. For Texas officials, that was the last straw.

Steven had already escaped from custody three times, not counting the phony judge phone scam, and they were determined to make sure it never happened again. Back in Texas, Steven faced new serious charges for the prison break. He was quickly convicted and received another 45 years on top of the sentence he already had.

His total sentence shot up to 144 years. To many observers, a sentence like that was brutally excessive for a non-violent offender. Russell hadn’t physically hurt anyone. His crimes had been scams and escapes, and yet he ended up with a sentence equivalent to life in prison three times over. It seemed the Texas authorities wanted to send a crystal clear message after the humiliation his exploits had caused them.

No one was going to let someone make a mockery of the system and get away with it. The prison system also took extraordinary measures to make sure Steven Russell would never slip through their fingers again. He was transferred to the most secure unit and placed in solitary confinement, locked up 23 hours a day.

For 1 hour a day, he was allowed out to exercise alone in a fenced yard. Then it was back to isolation. Every bit of communication he had was monitored. If there was one inmate in the United States who no longer had any way to escape, it was Steven Russell. And yet, even under those conditions, Steven found one last card to play.

Alone in his cell, he began carrying out an elaborate scam against the prison’s own medical system. Little by little, he started eating less and taking every laxative he could get his hands on, making himself look sicker and sicker. He faked memory loss and seizures. At every medical checkup, he exaggerated his symptoms.

 Then, in secret, he filled out fake medical records using official forms indicating that he had HIV/AIDS. Incredibly, those forged documents ended up in his file and no one bothered to verify them. Seeing his emaciated appearance and the test results, the prison doctors concluded that Steven was in an advanced stage of AIDS. In 1998, with Russell apparently on the brink of death, the state granted him a compassionate special needs parole so he could be cared for at a civilian residence in Dallas.

The guards wheeled Steven, frail-looking and in a wheelchair, into the nursing home and left, [music] convinced he had only a few weeks to live. As the doors closed behind them, a nurse whispered to him, “Rest now, honey.” Steven smiled weakly. If only she had known it was exactly what Steven wanted.

 He had managed to shake off prison once again. Not by picking a lock or fooling a guard, but by taking advantage of the system’s assumptions and its compassion. Now came the final masterstroke. At the nursing home, Steven got access to a phone and immediately put on another disguise, this time over the phone line. He called Texas prison officials posing as Dr.

 X using the name of a well-known AIDS specialist and in a somber tone informed them that Steven Jay Russell had died.  Time of death, 4:17 a.m. We’ll fax you the certificate within the hour. My condolences to the department.  He even arranged for a fake death certificate to be sent to the Bureau of Prisons. The document arrived and looked authentic.

Before long, Texas formally recorded Steven Russell as deceased. For a brief period after his fake death, Steven Russell truly tasted freedom. He was officially a dead man living under the radar. The investigators who had dealt with Russell had mixed feelings about him. One Texas officer admitted that Russell could be insufferable, but that he also had an undeniable charm in his own way, and that helped him get so many people to trust him.

Some of his captors even felt a kind of grudging respect for his ingenuity, even as they tightened the conditions further to keep him locked up. And what happened to Phillip Morris? After serving his short sentence, Phillip was released and eventually moved away to rebuild his life in quiet anonymity. He and Steven gradually lost touch over the years.

The great love that had driven Steven to such incredible extremes ended up becoming just another casualty of his criminal saga. It’s hard to believe that a single man could have done everything he did, but Steven did. Just a few weeks after his supposed death in early 1999, the authorities uncovered the truth.

An investigator who had remained skeptical managed to track him down to Florida where he was living under an alias. A team of US Marshals descended on him and arrested him for what everyone swore would be the last time. After this final capture, Texas came down hard on Steven. The judge tacked on additional years for his multiple escapes and frauds, leaving his total sentence set at 144 years.

Since then, Steven Jay Russell has been a model prisoner. Not that he had many opportunities to misbehave. He spent years in solitary confinement under strict surveillance with all his privileges stripped away. As time went on, compassionate voices began to emerge saying that enough was enough. After all, Steven’s crimes, however costly and scandalous, had not been violent.

Yes, he was a con man and an escape artist, but he hadn’t physically harmed anyone. In 2023, after 25 years behind bars, the state parole board finally agreed to let Steven out on parole. When he walked out of prison through the front door for the last time, this time with permission, he was 65 years old and almost unrecognizable as that cunning, explosive guy who had once made national headlines.

He paused, breathed in the warm Texas air, and murmured,  No more aliases left, just Steven.  He had outlived the wild legend of King Con. The world out there had changed and so had he. But the story of Steven Jay Russell, the man who escaped from prison again and again, remains one of the most extraordinary true crime stories out there.

Proof of how far someone can go for freedom and for love.