A Bold Life on the Lam Ends in Quiet Surrender

He headed north to New York and New Jersey and lived with relatives, barely avoiding capture several times by police and FBI agents.

One day in 1967, he was helping to paint his brother's house in Jersey City when two police officers approached. Parker said he took off running but fell and hurt his arm. The officers took him to a hospital, then left to go check his police records. Left alone in an unsecured room, Parker walked out of the hospital. "I was waiting for somebody to come take me to get an X-ray. I looked around and realized I was by myself," he said. "I left the same way the police had."

A short time later, another greedy stranger came to his aid. "There was this woman whose acquaintance I had made, and she thought I had some money," he said. "She gave me $500 to go get the money so that I would give her some. I bought a plane ticket to Chicago."

There, he said, he ran a restaurant and even joined a community police advisory group. After getting into a fight, he decided to move again, this time to Seattle. Parker, using the aliases Robert Lewis and Robert Louis, tried to make a new life. But "bad associations" brought him down again, he said.

He was driving around with a friend one day when the man asked him to stop at a store. A few minutes later, police pulled over Parker's car, looking for the person who had just robbed the store, and found a gun on his friend. "They locked us both up," Parker said, on suspicion of robbery.

Parker was sentenced in August 1969 to a maximum of 20 years for robbery. He served less than two, records show. In court one day, a judge asked whether he was aware that Maryland had a fugitive hold on him. The judge asked officials to contact Maryland, he said.

"The judge came back and told me Maryland had dropped the hold on me," Parker said.

Paper records on Parker's cases in Maryland and Washington state have been destroyed, officials said, leaving no way to verify whether he was indeed released from his obligation to serve the 29 years he owed on the robbery sentence from 1953.

As he walked out of a prison in Walla Walla, he pledged to change his life.

Parker stayed in Washington for three years before heading back to New York. He was living in Queens and driving a cab when he met Margie Harvey. They married in 1982; it was his second marriage. His first, not long after he moved to New York from Baltimore, ended badly after a few months. He never divorced his first wife, Alma. Parker had one child, Willie Jr., who died five years ago, relatives said.

In 1989, Parker and his second wife moved to Clinton. He worked farm and labor jobs and drove a truck before retiring in 1994, when a stroke left him paralyzed on his right side. He walks with a cane and needs help bathing and performing basic tasks. He also has high blood pressure, diabetes and hepatitis C, which doctors can't treat because his heart is too weak, he said.

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