THE STATE VS. THOMAS WINGATE
At some point I haven't determined, Thomas J. Wingate got out of Annandale Reformatory for Boys and hit the streets again. This time, it appears that nobody saved his newspaper clippings when he got back into trouble. Had everybody given up by then? Were they assiduously clipped and then lost?
The paperwork from this phase of my father's life is a bit scattered, and most of it is official correspondence with the prison system, the parole board, and the courts. The basic timeline runs like this:
- After Annandale, he got into trouble again in April and July of 1951, including another attempt at escape.
- In prison, he had a weird history with the parole board and managed to change his state prisoner number in the middle of his term.
- Somewhere along the way, he (or someone very kind to him) figured out that he'd been inappropriately transferred from a youth facility to an adult facility, and got one of his sentences commuted to parole.
- After this parole he served more time, which makes me think he'd committed some crime while locked up.
- On June 7, 1956, he became a free man.
All in all he was in Annandale, Bordentown, Rahway Work Farm, and New Jersey State Prison, in addition to the Passaic, Hunterdon, Burlington, and (probably) Bergen county jails. That's quite the tour.
I want to go back to New Jersey (and back in time) to do a documentary about all the placed he was locked up. But who would remember him? Most of the people involved will either be dead or too old to remember anything. Thousands of people went through those places. Unless Thomas J. Wingate did something specific to them, why would they need to remember him?
Why do I need them to remember him?
While I wouldn't quite call him a career criminal, especially since he seemed to straighten out after he got out in 1956. Though there was one incident in 1959 that makes me wonder if he'd truly straightened out. By then he was a father. By then he should have known better.
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