For your consideration, today is just another face on a computer screen. A dowdy man in a sweatshirt with a name tag clipped to the front of it. His eyes are cut to the side. Nervous, maybe. Skittish, like a man who has become convinced that others are out to get him.
But otherwise, this is a wholly unremarkable man with a bland, chubby face. He could be a Little League coach or a school teacher caught at a bad time.
It’s a common face and would be easy to miss. For sure, you don’t get the feeling he’s one of the most abhorred characters in all of Twin Cities history. But that’s what he is. The man is John Lane, as pictured in the new prisoner database, brought to you by the Maine Department of Corrections.
For nearly three decades, Lane has been the faceless ogre from a local horror story. When we last saw him, he was wild-eyed and young, a man who went crazy on drugs and put a young girl to die in an oven. If our ugly past had an avatar, it was this man, a fiend who committed an act so reprehensible, it could be regarded as nothing less than pure evil. And yet for those 30 years, there was no face to attach to that evil.
Sent away, moved from one prison to another, John Lane disappeared from public view. Our memories of him were of a wiry man with runaway hair and crazy eyes, a Mansonesque figure being led into and out of court before he was sent away. In our minds, Lane never aged. So now, gazing upon his ordinary face in the prison photograph, it’s difficult to connect this old man with such a horrific thing from so long ago.
Before he was killed by a fellow inmate, I looked upon the face of Lloyd Franklin Millett, who at one time took over as leading bogeyman for our area. This was a giant of a man, a corn-fed farm boy who killed one woman and stashed her in a closet. Snatched another woman from a local bar, wrestled her into a field where he raped and killed her. Frank Millett was the kind of man fathers worry about as they send their daughters off into the world. Frank Millett was a bad dream released into the world.
In 1995, Millett was big and bad, a broad-shouldered man with dark eyes devoid of compassion. But nearly 17 years later, in his prison duds, he looked withered and tired. Not quite frail, but not the savage killer we saw in all of those newspaper photographs when he was brought to justice. To me, Millett looked smaller, a mere mortal who lived in a cage, getting older by the minute. Still a bogeyman, I suppose, but one who probably would have needed dentures soon, and maybe a hearing aid if another prisoner hadn’t relieved him of such worries.
Alfred Saunders, who almost got away with the murder of his wife 30 years ago, is gray and well-groomed. He looks like a fellow who might work on your car or your furnace. You wouldn’t give him a second look if you bumped into him at the grocery store. Though he surpassed middle age behind bars and is closing in on his elderly years, this is a man who doesn’t show the stress and strain of burying a body beneath a house and spends years hoping it will not be found.
Nadim Haque has been transformed. When he stabbed to death his estranged girlfriend in 1996, he was a young man full of a young man’s passions. Now he looks almost sedate, scholarly, with a white beard and calm eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses.
Brandon Thonsavanh has not been imprisoned long enough to show the years. He’s still young and venomous, with a shaved head and a collar of tattoos. It’s only been 10 years since he stabbed a Bates College student in a West Side Storyesque brawl in Lewiston. Close that page and open it again in another 10 years and you may see the years sitting more heavily upon the killer’s face.
The prisoner database marks the time for us in matters of things we’d rather not think about. Killers who were kids when they were sent away have become adults inside prison walls. Some have become old men, mere shadows of the men they were. They’ve lost hair and teeth and shrunk into wobbling scarecrows who might blow away if a strong wind were to rip through their cells.
And here, the prisoner database may serve its ultimate purpose. By seeing these faces again, weathered by time and the weary tick-tock of prison, maybe it will remind those long-ago victims that these are just mortals after all. They are not Hollywood demons, forever young and imbued with inhuman powers. They are just men and women, victimized themselves now by the killer that is prison time.
For some of us free people, it’s easier to sleep at night knowing that it’s so.
Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. You won’t find his face in the prisoner database, but you can email him at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.
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