Sorry this one hit your inbox late — I had a bunch of tech issues that slowed me down. — Dan

Promontory, Utah, is an unincorporated area about an hour’s drive north of Salt Lake City (Here’s a map.) In 1995, it was home to a “pre-release facility” — a prison-like institution where inmates were held pending their presumptive pardon a few months later. It was a minimum security facility, as “trusties” (the inmates were called that, not “prisoners”) had little incentive to do anything that would get themselves in trouble. But on September 3, 1995, officers found something amiss during roll call: two inmates were missing.

As the Deseret News reported, Anthony Scott Bailey -- who had been convicted of burglary a year prior -- and Eric Neil Fischbeck, convicted of burglary and drug possession in 1992, weren't there when they should have been. Rather, the pair had "apparently climbed under a fence" the night before and simply walked to freedom. But their time on the run wasn't very long. Their undoing?

They didn't know how to talk about San Francisco.

Bailey and Fischbeck made their way from Utah to the San Francisco Bay Area, more than ten hours away by car. They ended their journey on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, just across the bay from San Fran itself. And there, they took a nap out in public. That drew the attention of campus police, which came up to the two men and asked them who they were, where they were from, and what they were doing there. The pair could have said virtually anything and, at worst, would have been sent on their way. But they made a fundamental mistake, as the New York Times reported:

Sergeant David Eubanks of the UC-Berkeley police department explained the issue to the San Francisco Chronicle: "It made our officers suspicious. No one from here ever says that." The campus cops ran the two men's identities and found that not only weren't they from "Frisco," but they were supposed to be in Utah, and behind bars.

The pair were returned to the Utah prison, and they were likely removed from the pre-release program. Per the Chronicle, they both then faced an additional charge for escaping the facility, which carried a sentence of up to 15 years.

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Today’s Bonus fact: During the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, U.S. General Omar Bradley was momentarily detained at a checkpoint by American forces, under suspicion that he might have been a spy. It wasn't Bradley’s fault, though. The military police officer who was questioning people at the checkpoint in question asked Bradley (and presumably, others) to name the capital of the state of Illinois. Bradley correctly responded with "Springfield" but the MP thought that Chicago was the state's capital, and refused to let Bradley proceed until the issue could be resolved.

From the Archives: Proof that No One Really Likes Town Meetings: The town named for how boring it is to name a town in the first place.

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And thanks! — Dan