The Fugitive
She was convicted at age eighteen of armed robbery and broke out of a Georgia prison five times before escaping for good in July 1974. She made a new life for herself as a loving wife and a caring nurse in East Texas, where no one—not even her husband—knew her dark secret or the terrifying experiences that had made her run.
gary says: Well the way I see this, They should take the man hours to track those guards down and prosecute them.! On the street it would be Rape so why isn’t it if a guard does it. This lady lived out a good honest life. I Truly hope she out lives all involved in the abuse and wish her a happy life. (March 11th, 2010 at 1:15am)
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She first went to Atlanta, then to Nashville, and then, because she was lonely, she decided to call her mother, who was still in Florida but had separated from Deborah’s father. She told her she had been in prison, had served her time, and was ready for a new start. They went to Texas, moving into an apartment in the Dallas suburb of Irving, where Deborah’s mother had relatives. Amazingly, Deborah didn’t try very hard to live under the radar. She didn’t change her name, and she continued using a Social Security number she had received as a teenager. “I just decided I wasn’t going to get pulled over by the police ever again,” she told me. “I decided to lead the best life I could. I had been running ever since I could remember, and I was tired of it.”
It wasn’t long before Deborah met some men out by the apartment complex’s swimming pool. When she learned they worked construction, doing the brickwork on new homes, she asked about job openings. They introduced her to their boss, Richard Murphey. He was ten years her senior and “gentle as a lamb,” said Deborah, “the kind of man who didn’t raise his voice, not once.” She went to work for him as a laborer, hauling mud and building scaffolding, and soon, he was taking her bowling and out to eat at inexpensive Mexican restaurants. She finally told him about her time in prison, and she did mention that she had once escaped and was later found in New Orleans. But she never said anything about the last escape “because I didn’t want to worry about him going to jail for harboring a fugitive.”
Richard and Deborah moved into an apartment together in 1976. A year later, she gave birth to a boy, Scooter, and in 1979 they had a daughter, Christy. They waited until 1984 to get married, holding their wedding ceremony at a justice of the peace office. She wore jeans; Richard was in his work clothes, brick dust still clinging to his shirt.
The Murpheys relocated to a small piece of property outside Sulphur Springs, in East Texas, and in 1989 they moved to Frankston, Richard’s hometown. Deborah coached her son’s Little League team and took her daughter to Future Farmers of America meetings. “I was always with them,” she said. “I didn’t want them getting into any trouble, facing temptations they didn’t know how to deal with.” When her kids got into high school, she attended all her son’s football games, and she cheered in the stands the day her daughter was named band queen.
During those years, Deborah took one major gamble, writing to the Georgia Department of Education to ask for a copy of her GED, which she had received when she was in prison. To her relief, the request triggered no alarm: The department obviously had no idea a prison escapee was writing. The diploma arrived in the mail, and Deborah used it to enroll in tiny Jacksonville College, not far from Frankston, where she took some math, history, and English courses. Then she enrolled at the University of Texas at Tyler to study nursing. To pay for her tuition and books, she sold her dining room set and worked part-time at a convenience store.
In 1994, when she was forty years old, she walked across the UT—Tyler stage to receive her diploma. Richard was so proud that he later drove her to a mall in Tyler and had a glamour photo taken of her at Hollywood Portraits. She got a job at Tyler’s East Texas Medical Center, where she worked in several departments. Sometimes she’d leave the house as early as three-thirty in the morning to get to the hospital by four so she could do a couple hours of paperwork before her six o’clock shift. A few of the staffers called her Gestapo because she took her job so seriously. But in 2005 her career was derailed when she hurt her back trying to lift an overweight patient. An MRI revealed that she had Paget’s disease, and a CAT scan uncovered a malignant tumor on her right kidney (the kidney was removed). A stress test later showed blockage in her heart, and she underwent surgery to have three stents put in her right coronary artery.
Forced to quit her nursing job, Deborah decided to start a small quilting business. Soon the house was full of quilting books, yards of cloth, appliqués, and sewing machines. Richard removed the furniture from their living room and had a special twelve-foot-long quilting machine brought in, which allowed her to make professional-grade quilts. Although Deborah’s business never got off the ground—she had trouble bending over the sewing machine due to her health problems—she was content. “After I escaped, I had three goals: to meet a good man, to raise my kids, and to go to school and do something with my life,” she told me, tears filling her eyes for the first time since we’d met. “I had done what I had set out to do.”
And then a U.S. marshal knocked on the door.
In 2000 the U.S. Marshals Service began forming task forces around the country to look for fugitives who had escaped from jail or prison, violated probation or parole, or skipped a court appearance. The Southeast Regional Fugitive Task Force, out of Atlanta, has been particularly successful: Since its inception, in 2003, it has picked up people in more than 11,000 felony investigations—an average of six a day. “If a case is assigned to the marshals’ office, it remains open until that person is caught,” said James Ergas, one of the Southeast supervisors. “Right now we have about a thousand cases open in our region.”
Ergas would not confirm exactly how the marshals found Deborah. Her attorney, Scarbrough, and Anderson County sheriff Taylor say they were told that a Homeland Security computer program triggered some sort of notification when Deborah filed a Social Security disability claim. But the Murpheys also wonder if one of their relatives, a woman who was angry with them for not helping her out financially, grew suspicious about Deborah’s past and her reticence to talk about it, did some digging, and then informed authorities.
I asked Deborah if, after all this time, she had still been waiting for the marshals to come for her. “I thought maybe I was forgotten,” she said. “I thought maybe there were too many other bad things happening for anyone to remember me.” When I asked what she had felt when they were at her door, she replied, “It was like I was a seventeen-year-old girl again.” She put her face in her hands, trying not to weep.
When she went back to the bedroom, she said, she picked up the shotgun—Richard had taken it out of a closet a couple days earlier to shoot at a skunk—sat on the edge of the bed, placed the butt on the floor, and aimed the barrel directly at her heart. She had planned to lean forward, directly over the gun, and pull the trigger. “But first I was going to call Richard, tell him the truth about who I was and that it was better for me to die than go back. I was going to tell him I was sorry and that I loved him. And I was going to thank him for being so good to me.”
But when her husband didn’t answer, Deborah decided that “it would not be right to leave him with a message on his phone. He and my two kids needed an explanation.” She let herself be arrested, and when Richard heard what had happened, he raced to the county jail to find her. Afterward, as the first reporters arrived at their home, he stood outside by his pickup truck, holding the photo of Deborah from Hollywood Portraits, telling everyone what a good woman she was. When I asked Richard if he felt the slightest bit betrayed that she hadn’t revealed her entire past to him, he replied, “No, she had to do what she had to do. My wife and I have never had a single argument in all our years together, and we’re not going to start now.”
After Scarbrough won his motion to keep Deborah in Texas temporarily, the case seemed to stall. But a spokesman for the Georgia Department of Corrections told me that the state remained committed to bringing her back. “That is what the law requires,” he said. He added that because Deborah had refused to return to Georgia, the state would be sending an extradition request for her to the office of Governor Rick Perry, which required certified copies of her court records. Perry will then eventually sign a warrant that goes to Anderson County, where Deborah will be kept in jail until officers from Georgia come to get her. (If he wants, Perry can refuse to sign the warrant. But the State of Georgia could, in turn, sue him in federal court, and he would most likely lose; a compact among U.S. states requires that they honor one another’s extradition requests.)
In early November, Perry’s office informed me that it had not yet received any request from the Georgia governor’s office asking that Deborah be extradited. And so she waits. The heart attack she suffered after her release has clearly slowed her down: She has trouble catching her breath, and she can stand for only ten to twenty minutes at a time. She has had to surrender her nurse’s license, which she said “was like another blow to my heart.” But, she told me, she knows that many people are supporting her. A group of hospital employees who used to work with her came by with $500 for a defense fund. And some of the boys she had coached in Little League showed up one day to say they were praying for her.
Nevertheless, during my visit to her home, I noticed something unusual about the blinds covering the window next to her recliner. One slat was bent, curved upward so that Deborah could see the backyard. “I’m always looking outside now, waiting for them to come back,” she said. “And when they do, I know exactly what I’m going to do.” She pointed to a vial of heart medication on the windowsill. “I’ll take all those pills, and I’ll be gone. I’ve made my peace with my husband and my children, and I’ve made peace with myself. I know it will be my time to go.”
“Oh, come on, Deborah,” said Richard. “Come on, now.”
Deborah looked at her husband, and the tears returned. “I’m not going back. I don’t deserve to go back.”
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