Steph Deschamps / May 10, 2022
It is a tragic end for a runaway on the background of a romance which fascinated America: the police arrested Monday May 9 in the state of Indiana an extremely dangerous prisoner, while the prison officer, who had helped him to escape at the end of April and was also on the run, died. Vanderburgh County authorities are investigating the death of Vicky White, a fugitive from Alabama, they confirmed Monday night to AFP. Vicky White died at 7 p.m. and an autopsy is scheduled for Tuesday afternoon, they added in a statement.
Vicky White and Casey White were arrested after a car chase with law enforcement. The couple was chased while in a Ford pickup truck in the Evansville metropolitan area in the heart of the Midwest, said Sheriff Rick Singleton, who is coordinating the hunt for the fugitives. She shot herself and was seriously injured, Vanderburgh County Sheriff Dave Wedding said on CNN. During the pursuit, the pickup truck crashed. Casey White surrendered, Rick Singleton recounted.
Beginning in an Alabama prison, their escape spanned ten days, hundreds of miles, and at least four states. Vicky White, 56, and Casey White, 38, have the same name but are not related. The unlikely duo has attracted a lot of attention because of the contrasts between them: she, a model civil servant with a seemingly well-ordered life; he, a 6-foot-tall, multi-offender behemoth in jail for alleged murder. Today we put a very dangerous man out of action, said Sheriff Singleton. And he will never see the open air again.
His men had a tip about the couple's presence in Indiana and CCTV footage shot at a car wash where the Ford pickup was spotted. It's getting harder every year to pull off these kinds of escapes with the ubiquity of video surveillance and the ability of the media and social networks to make this information public in real time, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe said on CNN.
However, these last days and until this Monday, the two fugitives seemed to keep at least one length ahead of their pursuers. We are back to square one, lamented Sheriff Singleton on Friday, noting that the escape plan had been very well thought out. On April 29, it was with disconcerting ease that Vicky White extracted Casey White from his penitentiary in Florence, where he was serving a 75-year sentence. The woman was supervising prisoner transfers for the Lauderdale County Sheriff.
A video showed the officer escorting the tall, tattooed inmate, whose feet and hands were shackled, into her police car, and taking him outside under the false pretense of a psychological evaluation in court. The model employee according to the sheriff, described by the county prosecutor as the most reliable person in the jail, had then arranged for a substitute vehicle in the parking lot of a nearby shopping center. This car, which the civil servant had bought under an assumed name, was found in an impound lot of Tennessee, without this rebound in the investigations really allowing the investigators to progress.
It was later learned that the prison officer had withdrawn some $90,000 in cash from the recent sale of her house and purchased civilian clothes to replace her partner's prison jumpsuit. The bounty offered by the authorities for information leading to the arrest of the two fugitives had been raised to $25,000.