A POPULAR peacenik poet in Chicago has been exposed as a fugitive double-murderer who escaped from prison almost two decades ago.

Norman Porter, 65, was arrested on Tuesday after police matched his fingerprints to those taken from a published anti-war poet calling himself Jacob “J. J.” Jameson when he was accused of bouncing a cheque 12 years ago. Porter, picked up at a progressive Unitarian church where he worshipped and worked, told police: “I had a good 20 years.”

The arrest stunned the poet’s friends and fans in Chicago, who had no idea of his brutal past. “I’ve always known him to be a perfect gentleman, quite active in the community,” Charles Paidock, who has been working on a play with him, said. “This is absolutely a complete and total shock.”

Porter has been one of Massachusetts’s 12 “Most Wanted” since he escaped from a minimum security prison in 1985, where he was serving a life sentence for murder. He had already committed a string of robberies when he shot a sales clerk in the back of the head with a sawn-off shotgun in 1960.

While awaiting trial for the murder, Porter and another prisoner, Edgar Cook, escaped from the Middlesex County Jail after Cook killed a warder with a smuggled gun. Porter was arrested two days later. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for both killings and was sentenced to consecutive life terms with no possibility of parole for 30 years. Cook killed himself.

In prison Porter became the darling of local left-wing academics by studying to obtain his high school diploma and a college degree. In 1975 Michael Dukakis, the Massachusetts Governor, commuted one of his life sentences. Porter, considered a model prisoner, was transferred in 1985 to the minimum-security facility in Norfolk, Massachusetts. He walked out three months later while working in the prison grounds.

On the run he reinvented himself as a “saloon poet” called J. J. Jameson. In March 2004 the ChicagoPoetry.com website described him as “one of Chicago’s most beloved anti-war poets”.

Massachusetts state police celebrated the capture, even though it took them almost 20 years. Investigators matched the fingerprints from “J. J.” Jameson’s 1993 arrest for bouncing a cheque in Chicago to Porter only three weeks ago and a squad picked him up.

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