William Enman’s 2007 walk-away from Ancora Psychiatric Hospital

A supervised walk that went unsupervised

William Enman walked away from Ancora Psychiatric Hospital in Winslow Township, Camden County, on the afternoon of Sunday, September 9, 2007. He had been permitted a scheduled unsupervised walk of about fifty minutes — a privilege that, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported, a Morris County judge had granted, allowing him to walk the hospital campus without an escort. Under the practice described to the Inquirer by Ellen Lovejoy, a spokeswoman for the state human services department, a judge sets such privileges for insanity acquittees after meeting with a patient’s treatment team. Enman had last had his status reviewed the previous August and was due before a judge again that week.

Enman had been confined since the 1970s, when he was found not guilty by reason of insanity in the deaths of his former roommate, Peter LeSeur, and LeSeur’s four-year-old son, Eric, in northern New Jersey; he admitted the killings. A former Marine diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, he had been held in state hospitals continuously since, and at Ancora, according to the Associated Press, since 1992. Both accounts record that he had left psychiatric hospitals without permission before.

Ancora is not a secure facility in the sense a prison is. Both accounts describe a chain-link perimeter fence about eight feet high, and the Associated Press adds that it had several open, unguarded gates. Lovejoy told the Inquirer that although the 709-bed hospital held some patients committed through the criminal courts, the “vast majority” had been committed through civil proceedings.

Two days, and two accounts of how it ended

A search involving the New Jersey State Police, with infrared equipment and a helicopter, and a U.S. Marshals task force ran for roughly forty-eight hours. It briefly reached beyond the state: the Inquirer reported that investigators looked toward Canada because Enman had bought a piece of property in Nova Scotia.

He was back in custody on the afternoon of Tuesday, September 11, on the hospital’s own grounds. The two contemporaneous accounts read this session do not agree on how. The Inquirer reported that a New Jersey State Police detective working with the marshals’ task force found him in a wooded area of the campus and captured him at about 2:30 p.m. The Associated Press reported instead that two hospital employees spotted him in camouflage clothing behind the facility after he had made his way back inside the perimeter fence, and that he surrendered and was arrested without a fight. Both cannot be right, and this entry does not choose between them. The two accounts also differ on the size of the grounds — 80 acres in the Inquirer, 657 in the AP report — and on his age, given as 65 by the Inquirer and 64 by the AP.

A detail that did change between the first reports and the last is worth recording, because the earlier version is the one that circulated. On the first day the Inquirer reported, on the authority of unnamed officials, that Enman had left carrying a backpack full of “camping and survivalist equipment.” By the time he was recaptured, the Associated Press reported that the backpack in fact held clothing, a toothbrush, toothpaste, soap and bandages — “none of the camping or survivalist gear that some authorities believed he was carrying” — and that Lovejoy said he could have gathered those items, and the camouflage clothing, at the hospital, which has no dress code. On the same authority, a state police spokesman said Enman had struck his head scaling a fence the first night and had stayed in the area ever since, which if correct answers the question of where he spent the two days.

Lovejoy said afterwards that Enman would no longer be allowed out of his room unwatched and would be moved to the more secure Anne Klein Forensic Center in Trenton, and that he faced a charge of escape. Whether that charge was brought, and with what result, is not established here.

What is not confirmed here

Two contemporaneous news reports were opened in full for this entry. No court record, commitment order, hospital incident report or state investigative document was examined, and no source published after September 2007 was consulted. Where the two accounts conflict — on Enman’s age, on the acreage of the campus, and on who found him — the conflict is shown above rather than resolved.

An earlier draft of this entry placed the walk-away in a wider narrative about security at Ancora, describing it as the second such incident in three months and recounting the case of another committed patient later that year, along with a federal investigation of the hospital in 2008. None of that was supported by a source that had been opened, the internal chronology did not hold, and it has been removed in full. A New York Times brief cited in that draft is likewise gone: the Times returns an HTTP 403 to this researcher, only a search-result snippet was ever seen, and a snippet is not a source.