Steven Jay Russell is currently serving a 140-year sentence, but don’t let that fool you. He is a master con artist and has escaped from prison multiple times; events dramatized in the 2009 film I Love You Phillip Morris.
Russell’s most inventive escape also took the greatest amount of planning and panache. He was incarcerated in a high-security Texan prison for fraud and a previous escape. And in 1998, he spent 10 months starving himself and drinking laxatives in order to make it look as if he had AIDS. During this time, he wrote up multiple fake health records, which he mailed to the department responsible for updating his medical file.
Russell was eventually sent to a nursing home where, pretending to be a doctor, he called the prison to give progress reports. Eventually, he told the prison that he had died, when in reality he was, if only temporarily, tasting sweet freedom.
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