ALL COUNTIES: When Willie Parker escaped from a Maryland prison in 1965, he probably never dreamed he would spend the next 43 years as a free man. He had served 10 years on charges of robbery with a dangerous weapon. He still owes Maryland 29 years.
After his escape, he traveled around the country using different aliases; he was arrested in several states and finally came to North Carolina to escape his criminal past.
He settled in Clinton and lived peacefully for nearly four decades, the fear of apprehension subsiding more and more each day.
But last February, three federal marshals knocked on the 81-year-old fugitive's door. The ailing Parker, who suffers from liver failure, hepatitis and diabetes, would finally face justice. His extradition to Maryland was announced last week.
Other fugitives who have been apprehended in North Carolina for crimes in other states include Anthony Ray Artrip, who escaped from an armed robbery sentence in Kentucky, and Timothy Sutton, who escaped from a Georgia prison where he was serving time for burglary and breaking and entering.
But the process of tracking these people across state lines, although easier now than in times past, poses unique challenges for correction officers, said Department of Correction spokesman Keith Acree. Just as Parker, Artrip and Sutton fled to North Carolina, the state's own escapees have likely set up new lives with new identities in other states.
There are currently 170 escaped convicts on the run from North Carolina's prisons, according to the Department of Correction. Fourteen of those escapees are convicted murderers. Correction officers have arrested 43 escaped inmates in the last year.
"The crimes deserve some form of retribution," local victim advocate Wayne Uber told NC WANTED. "For every day these individuals are outside of prison, they’re escaping their sentence. They’re cheating justice and they’re endangering North Carolina citizens possibly."
Uber advocates devoting more time and attention to escape cases, especially when the escapees were convicted of violent offenses.
Acree, on the other hand, illustrated that not only can the list of escaped prisoners be somewhat deceiving, but that full-time, exhaustive searches for fugitives are unrealistic.
Many of North Carolina's 170 escaped inmates have actually gone missing without a trace. Others, however, have been located in other states but cannot be apprehended, said Acree.
“I’d imagine that probably 130 or 40 or 50 of those are probably legitimate escape cases. There’s probably 15 or 20 that are these oddball cases where we know where the person is and we’re not going to get them back because they’re incarcerated in another state, doing a life sentence somewhere, and those kind of things," Acree said.
In an unusual case, correction officers tracked an escaped convict to Michigan, where he had been living a crime-free life outside prison walls. Because North Carolina has no extradition agreement with Michigan, requests to bring the convict back to finish his sentence have been denied time and again. The man continues to live freely there.
Acree also pointed out that most of the escapees listed on the Department of Correction Web site escaped decades ago. He maintained that because technology and security have improved over the years, prison escapes are not only less frequent, but the escapee is usually apprehended within 48 hours.
Most escapes occur when an inmate walks away from a work release program outside the confines of the correctional facility. Fugitive officers are brought in immediately to gather intelligence and track the escapee.
If a member of the community reports seeing the fugitive, correction officials will launch an intensive manhunt and bring the escapee back to prison.
But sometimes the trail goes cold.
"Once the trail gets a couple days old or we don’t really have any good solid leads to follow up on, it’s really hard to keep a bunch of guys out there beating the streets, you know, looking when we really don’t know where we’re looking,” said Acree.
These convicts slip through the cracks, maybe changing their identity or fleeing the state, but justice is always close behind -- even if it's moving slowly. In the case of Willie Parker, it may have taken 40 years, but his escape eventually caught up with him.
