Hamstrung

Recaptured after his second escape from Mississippi's prison farm at Parchman, lanky ex-Robber William Frank Moody became a model prisoner. At 22, he busied himself with a correspondence course in radio repair, was soon earning pin money in the pen by fixing radios for fellow prisoners. Because his whole attitude suggested reformation, Bill was allowed to wear the vertical striped trousers of a trusty.

With odds & ends picked up for his radio repair work, Trusty Bill eventually put together three short-wave transmitters. He hid two of them near his bunk and one in a tiny guardhouse which trusties used. Then, while prison guards were not looking, Moody became an amateur radio "ham." For the last four years, using the call letters W5BNK, he has held early-morning gab sessions with amateurs in neighboring states. To his friends on the air, Bill was just another ham; he never admitted that he was a prisoner. For Bill, chatting casually in the complicated lingo of radio hamdom, it was almost like being on the outside again. In fact, he began to think, he might even get help over the radio in a plea for parole.

Last month, a ham in Memphis got suspicious and reported station W5BNK to the Federal Communications Commission. With its long-range direction finders in Washington, FCC tracked down Moody's transmitters to a loo-mile area. In the process, two other unlicensed operators were caught. Finally, after three weeks, busy FCC field crews pinpointed station W5BNK at the Parchman prison farm.

Last week, though still in the vertical stripes of a trusty, Bill Moody faced a possible $10,000 fine and two years in prison for breaking FCC rules. But Bill was not much worried: for long-ago robberies and other matters, he still had some 40 years to serve.

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