How ‘Houdini of Florida’ Mark DeFriest’s 4-Year Prison Stint Turned Into a Life Sentence

Mark DeFriest was 19 years old when his odyssey with the Florida prison system began in 1980. The automotive savant was arrested when his stepmother called the cops on him for taking tools that his dead father willed to him before probate finalized. Initially, the arrest resulted in a four-year prison sentence. But DeFriest refused to stay put.

“He's sort of a legend of the Florida prison system,” Gabriel London, director of The Dark Mind of Mark DeFriest, tells A&E Crime + Investigation.

Dubbed the “Houdini of Florida,” DeFriest has attempted to escape prison a total of 13 times, seven of which were successful. Each escape attempt added decades to his sentence.

“He seemed to be a guy who couldn't stop himself from digging a deeper hole at every juncture,” London, who spent 14 years making the DeFriest documentary, admits. “He was brilliant at escaping, but he was really ignorant and seemingly unable to learn how to navigate the prison system to truly get out of it.”

At trial, five out of six court-appointed psychiatrists said they found DeFriest was unfit to be tried and mentally ill. However, one psychiatrist testified DeFriest was merely faking his mental illness. The single damning testimony paved the way for the state to prosecute and sentence him. Still, DeFriest had difficulty staying incarcerated.

“He's done every different type of escape you can imagine,” London explains. “He was able to pop his tooth out to take an emergency trip to a dental office, he escaped from three different cells in the same jail by going out through the roof and the air conditioning system. Another time he was able to make ‘zip guns’ from pipes. He was able to escape from his double-doored cell because he was able to make a master key that fit all the locks in Florida State Prison.

“He's just ingenious in the things that he's able to do.”

London says it's obvious that imprisonment is not the appropriate remedy for DeFriest’s deeper, underlying mental health conditions.

“He is somebody who has, because of his mental issues, the need for treatment and not incarceration,” the documentarian explains. “He’s had a lot of problems over the years with officials, tons of disciplinary reports, but overall—not a violent history—just somebody who, because of his mental issues and the way his brain works, he is just not able to make the adjustments that he needs.”

London says DeFriest has never officially received an autism diagnosis due to the “very subpar” and “some would say ‘unconstitutional’” levels of healthcare in the prison system, but that it’s evident his friend is likely on the autism spectrum. He says it’s clear that at the time of his initial arrest, DeFriest was “situationally depressed after the death of his father and seemed to have a psychotic break where he had no clear understanding of reality.”

Instead of receiving treatment for these supposed underlying mental conditions, people like DeFriest are sometimes alternatively punished, according to experts.

Dr. Robert Trestman, Chair of Psychiatry at Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine, says a person’s experience in the criminal justice system while incarcerated can be “profoundly” affected if they suffer from mental illnesses or disabilities, such as autism.

“Pretrial, people with mental illness will frequently end up spending more time in jail than they would have if they were convicted of the crime due to case complexity and lack of resources for psychiatric evaluation. Given inadequate resources, many people are untreated or undertreated and end up being charged with crimes after incarceration due to their underlying illness,” Trestman said in a statement to A&E Crime + Investigation. “The system overall is designed to punish, not rehabilitate. It is focused on security, not treatment.”

In 2019, after 39 years in prison as a nonviolent offender, DeFriest was finally granted parole. As a condition, he agreed to enter a one-year inpatient treatment program in Corvallis, Ore., where he would receive mandatory psychiatric and drug counseling while maintaining proximity to his second wife, Bonnie, who passed away in 2020.

Nevertheless, days after he was admitted, he suffered a manic episode and walked away from the halfway house. When he was taken back into custody, he tested positive for methamphetamine, prompting Florida to rescind DeFriest’s parole and send him back to the Suwannee Correctional Institution in Live Oak, Fla., after only eight days of freedom.

Now 65, DeFriest will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars.

“We have failed to find a solution for him, and now it looks like it's his fate to die in prison,” London says. “Florida issued an arrest warrant that said he had violated his parole, and they locked him up and essentially, at this point, threw away the key. They are trying to make an example out of him.”

The Florida Department of Corrections did not immediately respond to A&E Crime + Investigation’s request for comment.

Had DeFriest’s case originated in today’s social and political climate, London is ambivalent it would be handled any differently.

“I would like to hope that we have advanced as a society to a point where somebody like Mark could be healed, instead of brought to heel through some punitive philosophy that really doesn't do anything except throw away lives,” he explains. “But I don't think there's any guarantee. I don't think you see that the country as a whole has moved in any sort of direction that really shows that we're more merciful or more understanding.”