By 2009, McNally decided he'd had enough parole hearings to last a lifetime. No more, he told his case manager. Each previous hearing — about a half-dozen throughout the last three decades — had ended with the parole board restating the obvious: McNally's past crimes made him a risk to the public.
But after a miscommunication with a case manager, McNally was nevertheless roused on the morning of July 18, 2009, and told he was expected at a parole hearing the next day. The inmate grumbled, but an order was an order.
The meeting seemed normal enough. The board quizzed him about his record and his activities in prison. By now
, McNally had collected about 30 years of generally good behavior. Like Trapnell, McNally had been affected by the 1978 caper and its sobering aftermath. He wrote to his mother about changing her will. "Don't leave me anything," he told her. "I'm never going to get out of prison."
Yet McNally left the parole hearing in a state of dumbfounded bliss, and he walked back to his cell, grinning ear to ear. Against all expectations, he'd been given a release date. The board had evaluated his 37 years in prison and deemed him capable of handling parole.
Six months later, on Jan. 27, 2010, McNally walked out of the federal prison in Atwater, California, and hopped on a Greyhound bus. He initially requested to be settled in Tennessee to live with an old prison buddy, but that plan had been denied. McNally had no interest in returning to his estranged family in Michigan.
He still hasn't set foot on a plane..to paranoid, says McNally...
Released from prison Jan. 27, 2010
Released from parole Oct. 4, 2010
I guess they decided it wasn't worth keeping an eye on the old guy
