A Bold Life on the Lam Ends in Quiet Surrender
Over 4 Decades, Md. Fugitive Evaded Authorities and Lived in Plain Sight

By Avis Thomas-Lester
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 29, 2008

When the law caught up with Willie Carroll Parker after nearly 43 years, he didn't put up a fight.

It was 1:30 in the afternoon Feb. 20, and he was relaxing in the back bedroom of a house he has shared with a buddy in North Carolina since leaving his wife six months ago.

When deputies from the U.S. Marshals Service surrounded the white clapboard house, Parker had just finished his lunch. He was relaxing in bed in a shirt and skivvies, watching television. A long gun was propped next to the headboard.

"Are you Mr. Willie Carroll Parker?" Deputy Brandon Taylor asked as other deputies flooded the house.

"I am," Parker responded.

Taylor had a warrant for Parker's arrest. "He was very cooperative," Taylor said. "I guess he knew his time was up."

At 81, Parker is considered Maryland's oldest living fugitive -- he has been on the lam since 1965, when he escaped from an Eastern Shore prison where he was serving time for robbery, officials say.

Now, he's in trouble again. His arrest in connection with that escape was part of a Maryland corrections department operation to apprehend fugitives, officials said.

After spending a week in jail in North Carolina, Parker was released on bail yesterday pending a hearing next week to determine whether he will be extradited to Maryland.

Parker, a sickly man who can barely walk, let alone run, admits that he took off four decades ago. He spent years on the run, surviving on odd jobs and the kindness of pretty women. But he stopped all that after a judge told him that Maryland no longer wanted him, he said.

Since then, he said, he has been a changed man, living out in the open. "I ain't been running from nobody."

At the time of his arrest last week, Parker had been a fixture for about 20 years in and around Clinton, N.C., a farming town of fewer than 10,000 people about 60 miles south of Raleigh.

He had bought two homes. He owned a van and had a valid driver's license. He was registered to vote. He was collecting Social Security benefits. He was under the care of physicians who were paid through his Veterans Affairs benefits, public records show.

He had even been to Maryland and back dozens of times, as recently as last month, to see his ailing brother, Perlie, in Randallstown.

"I been right here all the time," Parker said in a telephone interview from the Sampson County jail, where he was held until yesterday. "I been living in the same place, driving the same roads, working under my own name. Now they're trying to say I've been running."

Parker, one of seven children, was born a few rural routes away from Clinton. His father walked out when Parker was 6, and his mother supported the family by picking cotton and doing domestic work.

Parker was 17 when he was drafted into the Navy in 1942. During his downtime as a steward's mate, he taught himself to read and write simple words. He left the military in 1944 and headed to Maryland. He also lived with relatives in New York and New Jersey.

He was working odd jobs in 1952 when he was arrested on suspicion of holding up a cabdriver in downtown Baltimore. "I didn't do it," Parker said. "I was with my uncle, Will Chester, and he went up to this cabbie and pulled a gun on him. I didn't know he was gonna do that. I ran."

Chester was convicted, and in March 1953, Parker was sentenced to 40 years for robbery with a deadly weapon. He was sent to the state penitentiary in downtown Baltimore, which is now the Metropolitan Transition Center. He was assigned to the facility's hospital, where he said he struck up a friendship with George Grammer, one of the last men executed by hanging in Maryland. Parker said he prepared Grammer for the gallows in 1954 and helped prison officials "take care of his body" afterward.

In 1961, Parker was paroled, only to be arrested again a year later when he was caught up in an FBI sting involving a five-acre marijuana farm in Salisbury, records show.

As a result, Parker said, his parole was revoked, and in 1965 he was sent to the Eastern Correctional Camp in Westover. He had 11 years of credit for time served toward the 40-year sentence, so he owed 29.

He was assigned to work for the owner of a nearby farm. One day, as his employer drove him back to prison, the subject of money came up.

"For some reason, people used to always think I had a lot of money," Parker said. "This fellow was asking me if I had any. I told him I did and that it was in Baltimore. He offered to take me there to get it if I would give him some. He drove me there."

Parker said the man let him out of the car, and "I just kept going."

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.

* * *

In the clapboard house in North Carolina last week, Parker fought back tears as he dressed. It had been almost 40 years since the law had drawn down on him, and he had forgotten how it felt to be locked up.

While he got ready for jail, the nurse who stops in daily to care for him packed his meds and other items in a plastic bag.

When it was time to go, the deputies didn't handcuff Parker, Deputy Taylor said. There was no need. Other than Parker's friend and the nurse, there was nobody in the house. The weapon near Parker's headboard was a BB gun.

Authorities would not say how they found Parker, but a law enforcement source said he was traced through his driver's license. Maryland authorities said neither Parker's age nor health will affect the decision to return him to Maryland.

His arrest was part of a crime-fighting program, said Sgt. Arthur Betts of the Maryland State Police, which was tasked by the corrections department to find Parker.

"Getting wanted people off the streets is a way to reduce overall crime in the state," he said.

Officials said Parker is probably not a threat to the public. But, they said, their hands are tied.

"The question is what will happen when he comes back to Maryland," Betts said. "That will be left up to the courts and a judge."

Alice Evans, a niece of Parker's who lives down the street in Clinton, said she learned of her uncle's fate from a reporter. "I just couldn't believe it," she said. "My uncle has been right here. Everybody who knows him loves him."

For many, Parker has become somewhat of a folk hero. Others say that what happened is not so much an injustice as it is a chicken coming home to roost. He did escape from prison and admits to being tangled up in some serious messes.

"I don't have much time left," he said. "I really don't want to spend it in jail. But the most important thing is clearing my name. I thought Maryland had released me, so I went on living my life. I want to tell them that, so they'll know I wasn't running."

Staff researchers Meg Smith, Rena Kirsch and Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this report.