Your Local Jail May Be A House of Horrors

I. The Parents

As Bill Ames smoked a cigarette in the predawn dark, he heard his dogs barking and looked outside to see two sheriff’s deputies approaching. It was November 2018, and his 36-year-old son Billy was locked up in the St. Francois County Jail. “What’d he do, break out?” Ames asked the men, inviting them in from the cold. The deputies told him Billy had died. They didn’t know any more than that.

With the sun still behind the Missouri Ozarks, Bill and his wife Joyce called Billy’s stepdad, Joe Braun, who woke up Billy’s mom Laurie with “the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to tell anybody in my life.” A few days earlier, Billy’s four parents had actually been relieved to hear of his arrest. They’d spent months worrying about his methamphetamine use, which had begun after a friend was released from prison and crashed at his house (taking advantage, his parents felt, of a brain injury from his early 20s that impaired his cognition.) Billy grew erratic, delusional, running barefoot through the trees on the mountain next to his father’s house, talking about drones and dead bodies. He scared his stepmother Joyce so badly that she took out a restraining order, which led to this arrest—and, his parents had hoped, rehab.

Joe Braun called the St. Francois County jail administrator, Dennis Smith, who told him the post-death investigation would be handled internally. (Smith declined an interview for this story.) Braun was suspicious; he had previously worked as a police officer in Texas, where jail deaths are often investigated by an outside agency. The next day, he started making calls to state government offices to push for an independent inquiry, and St. Francois County Sheriff Daniel Bullock formally requested an investigation by the state highway patrol.

In the meantime, Billy’s father Bill received a call. “Is this the family of the man who died in the St. Francois County Jail?” a woman asked. She’d been in a cell near Billy’s, she said, and believed he’d been strapped into a restraint chair; she’d heard him shouting for hours, begging to be let out. Ames’s autopsy listed meth as the cause of death, and in security footage from his booking, he appeared to conceal something in a pocket. The jailers told the investigator they fastened Ames to the chair after he threatened to attack his cellmate, but they had not been trained to use the device safely. (Experts say these chairs, which have led to , can render it more difficult to tell when someone is having a medical crisis like an overdose, and some prisons have banned their use entirely.) An inmate said she told a jailer, “This guy is dying next to me.”