Escaped con tells all

2005-04-07 15:51

Chicago - Randolph Dial fled jail more than decade ago, taking his freedom along with his warden's wife.

Dial said he used psychological games and threats to hold her hostage in a one-bed trailer in eastern Texas, until he was captured after a neighbour saw his story on America's Most Wanted, a television show seeking tips from citizens to nab criminals on the run.

Bobbi Parker was reunited with her husband and two children on Tuesday after telling police her side of a story that law enforcement officials in two states are still trying to sort out.

It all began in Granite, Oklahoma on a summer's day in 1994.

The artist-turned-murderer was at the home of the medium-security prison's deputy warden, working on a pottery project. When the warden came home, Dial and his wife were gone.

Parker called home twice in the days after her disappearance, promising she would be home soon. Then she stopped calling.

Now 60, Dial told police that he hid in Parker's van and threatened her with a knife as she was heading to the grocery store.

He made her drive 160km to Wichita Falls, Texas and then made her get on a bus to Houston. Once there, they took a taxi to the port town of Galveston, where Dial was hoping to get on a boat to Mexico.

"When they get back to Houston they find a 15-dollars-a-night hotel and he ties her up with her panty hose and makes her drink whiskey until she throws up to keep her pacified," said Shelby County Chief Deputy Kent Shaffer

Dial eventually got a job working as a security guard at a homeless shelter where he often assisted members of the Houston police when they searched the shelter for criminals.

Over the next few years he and Parker moved from job to job and town to town in rural eastern Texas. They settled on a chicken farm outside Center, Texas about five years ago.

While he said he only went into Center three times, Dial travelled to Oklahoma several times to sell his artwork and to attend the launch of a book that a former homicide detective had written about his escape.

"Dial drives up to Tulsa, buys a book and has the author sign it. He drives home, reads the book, calls the author and tells him he got it right," Shaffer said.

Dial has not yet been charged with kidnapping, though he is back in prison and is likely to stay there for the rest of his life. He had served eight years of his life sentence when he escaped in 1994.

"It is difficult to understand why she (Parker) would not have contacted someone or slipped a note to someone when she went to town," said district attorney John Wampler of Greer County, Oklahoma where the case will be tried.

Parker told the FBI that she was afraid Dial would harm her family if she did not do as she was told.

Wampler said in an interview that it is possible the 42-year-old who posed as Dial's wife was suffering from Stockholm syndrome - a psychological condition in which a hostage sympathises with the captor.

- AFP