Martha: I've seen newspaper stories saying they thought you tried to kill Governor Boggs back in Missouri. Is that true?
Porter: "If I'd of shot at him, he'd been dead." Nonetheless, I spent nine months in prison in Independence, on suspicion of that attempted murder. I worked on escaping from that cold prison, and did it twice through the hole running up the ceiling for the stove pipe. I only got caught because I was helping that other feller in the prison to escape, too, and he was too old and weak to make it over that fence, so I hoped back over and was a-helpin' him, which slowed me down. And then here came the sheriff, and back in I went.
The next time I was working on escaping late one night, and it took me awhile to dig out enough space to crawl through. Well, I was so tired when I finally got through, and it was a little warmer up there, so I stopped for a little touch of a nap, and I fell asleep in that upper room. They found me there in the morning, snoring away. So after that they filled in that hole with a lot of gunk, guess they didn't want time to escape through there again. It wasn't until a jury acquitted me later that I was freed.