The Killer Poet

Norman Porter was twenty on September 29, 1960, when he and an accomplice robbed the Robert Hall clothing store in Saugus, Massachusetts. Store clerk John “Jackie” Pigott was killed with a sawed-off shotgun, and the manager was wounded. In 1961, while awaiting trial in the Middlesex County jail in Cambridge, Porter helped plan an escape during which jail master David S. Robinson was shot dead. Porter pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for both deaths and received consecutive life sentences.

He spent the next twenty-five years in prison, where he wrote poetry. On December 21, 1985, he walked away from the Norfolk Pre-Release Center and vanished. He turned up in Chicago as J.J. Jameson, a bearded poet and activist who did handyman work at the Third Unitarian Church. In March 2005 a poetry website named him its Poet of the Month and posted his photo. Investigators matched fingerprints from a 1993 arrest to Porter, and officers took him into custody at the church on March 22, 2005.

Returned to Massachusetts, Porter received three more years for the escape. The parole board turned him down repeatedly, most recently in 2019. At a March 2022 hearing he apologized to both families, and on July 5, 2022, the board approved his release with a curfew and electronic monitoring. In failing health, he died on December 27, 2023, at age 83.