Column: Being freed not worth the price of admission for inmate

"The jail turned 70 this year. The only prisoner is always in, not knowing what he's done."

- From Richard Hugo's "Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg"

At 62, Frank LaPena isn't the oldest inmate in the Nevada prison system, but he might be the only one who refused freedom when given the chance to leave.

I think about that all the way out to the Southern Nevada Correctional Center at Jean, where LaPena is serving a life sentence for the 1974 murder of Hilda Krause in what was then the most sensational homicide case in Las Vegas history. I wondered whether I wouldn't have just agreed with my captors even if I knew they were wrong.

Surely anything would be better than spending the rest of my life locked in a small cell or roaming a bleak yard behind barbed wire in a dead brown place so close to home that at night I could see the glow from the city lights.

LaPena didn't kill the 71-year-old Krause, whose throat was slashed. Everyone associated with the case knows it. He was convicted of helping to plan the murder, but the woman linking him to the crime, a Caesars Palace cocktail goddess named Rosalie Maxwell, was acquitted at trial. LaPena was convicted largely on the inconsistent testimony of the man who admitted to the killing, certified perjurer Gerald Weakland. Weakland was released from prison more than a year ago and would have been out years earlier if he had been able to adjust to life on the outside.

None of that is news, nor is it the reason I drove to Jean and recently spent two hours interviewing LaPena, whose deep tan and well-groomed appearance belie that he's spent more than 20 years in the penitentiary. He looks better now than he did in black-and-white photos taken when he was still a young man. I came to ask why, when LaPena was offered freedom in exchange for an admission of guilt in 1989, he didn't just admit his role in the crime - even if, as he claims, he had nothing to do with it.

Honor is old hat. On the justice system's calendar, it's always the Year of the Rat. Defendants are convicted with shaky testimony every day.

So why not play the game and get the hell out?

His few friends and allies in the community would understand. Not even the staunchest defender of the justice system can honestly say it offers a level playing field every time. Everyone knows juries make mistakes.

Isn't that a small price to pay for freedom?

It's a safe bet every other inmate in the system would gladly admit a crime he hadn't committed for a chance to return to society. But not Frank LaPena, who is clearly obsessed.

Not with his freedom, but with clearing his name in a city that barely remembers it.

I came to Jean for another reason. I wanted to ask about Rosalie Maxwell, the bombshell who had played with LaPena while she was dating her Caesars sugar daddy, Marvin Krause. Followers of the recent Ted Binion murder trial and co-defendants Sandy Murphy and Rick Tabish will shudder at the similarity.

In our conversation, LaPena barely mentions Maxwell's name even though it was she who tied him to the Krause murder. Perhaps she was, as the poet Hugo once wrote, his last good kiss.

Today, LaPena believes Marvin Krause was behind his wife's murder and is no longer sure Weakland committed the crime. He is fighting against all hope to win a third trial after losing the first two.

Before the second trial in 1989, LaPena turned down a plea bargain that would have allowed him to go home.

"That was the hardest decision I ever made ..." he said. "But I didn't do this. It would kill me to say I did."

There's the irony: Weakland changed his story to fit the government's theory of the case. LaPena has stuck to his story and paid the price.

These days, he works in the prison library on his case and the appeals of fellow inmates.

"I want to go home," LaPena said. "I've got things I want to do out there."

I don't know that I believe him. He's so obsessed with his case that he doesn't care where he gets his mail.

Frank LaPena's life broke down long ago. He is a ghost who haunts the system.

(John L. Smith's column appears Wednesdays in the Nevada Appeal. Reach him at (702) 383-0295 or Smith@lasvegas.com.)