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The old “Red Top Jail” is one of Llano’s greatest historic treasures, and one of the most dramatic remaining evidences of the boom town that exploded out of the “wild, wild west” in the early 1890s. But to Crime Stoppers Coordinator Janie Prew, the Llano County Jail was also a wedding chapel, a workplace and a home.

Janie married Ken Rhoades, whose sister and brother-in-law (Ben and Betty Graham) were the jailers, in 1970. After a stint in the military, Ken and Janie came back to Llano, where they served as co-jailers for two years in the late ‘70s. Their middle daughter was born while they were there, and their youngest daughter graduated from Head Start in the old jail building in 1999.

“I took a tour a couple of months ago,” Janie told Deidre Henderson’s Family and Community Services class at an LHS Oral history project last Thursday morning. “They’ve redone so much; it looked a lot different than it used to,” she said, adding that the corrugated tin ceiling was about the only thing that looked the same. The spot taken up by the restrooms, in the back of the ground floor, was once a large living room. That is where Ken and Janie were married; they are the only living former jailers from the historic Red Top Jail.

“It was a whole new thing,” Janie says of life in the old jail. “We had a radio in the bedroom, and it was nothing but static all the time. At first I didn’t know how anyone could understand what was being said, but after a while I got used to it.” In response to a question about rumors of ghosts, she answered, “We didn’t hear any ghosts, but there were lots of bats in the chimney, making strange noises.” Sometimes visitors would hit the fireplace just to rile the bats.

“Crime wasn’t rampant like it is now,” Janie recalls. “Everything was pretty mellow in those days, and security was very lax.” Most of the prisoners in the Llano County Jail (most people didn’t call it the Red Top during the ‘70s; Janie remembers Betty Graham occasionally referring to it that way) were folks who went to the lake and drank too much. If someone came to visit a prisoner, they would stand out in the yard and call up to the prisoners at the second-floor windows. The jailer’s wife was responsible for providing meals for the prisoners. “We served inmates whatever we ate,” Janie says. “If we went out to get hamburgers, we brought some hamburgers back for the inmates.”

Janie herself hardly ever went upstairs where the prisoners were housed; a “trusty,” who had free rein in the jail, would usually carry meals up the stairs for the prisoners, or Ken, when he was home from his job at the grocery store, would deliver them. Inmates used the family’s silverware utensils to feed themselves. One night Ken and Janie were awakened by the sound of pounding feet on the floor over their heads. The prisoners were alerting them to the fact that one very slender prisoner had escaped through the bars (they found out later that the other prisoners had waited four hours to give him a head start before sounding the alarm). In the investigation that followed, they discovered one of their forks, with two tines removed and the other two sharpened to make the fork into a dangerous weapon, in one of the cells. They apparently had foiled a plot to attack Ken when he brought the meals up to the cells. The bars were replaced after the escape; the new bars had less space between them, to prevent anyone else from squeezing through.

Prisoners usually slept on mattresses on the cell floor (“It was cooler on the floor,” Janie says). A shower curtain provided a little privacy for the occasional woman inmate. When no one was in jail (most prisoners just spent the weekend back then), Janie would go upstairs to clean the cells. “It was always dirty and nasty up there,” she remembers. As time went on, the jail was deemed unusable, and Sheriff Gale Ligon began transporting prisoners to Brady or Burnet instead of locking them up in the old Red Top Jail. Ken and Janie, who had by that time moved into a home of their own in Llano, were hired as dispatchers for the sheriff’s department. In 1982, the “new” jail was installed on the third floor of the old Llano Hotel.

Janie went on to work for years as a dispatcher and 911 coordinator in the Burnet County Sheriff’s Department. She is now the coordinator for the Hill Country Area Crime Stoppers program, which solicits anonymous tips and offers rewards to help police solve crimes. (If you have information about a crime, you can call 1-866-756-TIPS (8477) or send a tip on-line to www.hcacrimestoppers.com.)

She is pleased to hear of efforts by the Friends of the Red Top Jail to restore the historic building. “We should keep our history alive,” she says. “I didn’t care much about history when I was young, but I appreciate it more and more as I grow older.”

Deidre Henderson’s class is helping to preserve history with its Oral History project; in the near future they will be interviewing several others with first-hand knowledge of the old Red Top Jail, and recording their findings for posterity.