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.

by Skip Hollandsworth

December 2008

On a mild November afternoon in 2007, two dark SUVs with tinted windows slipped into Frankston, a small town in East Texas. Inside the vehicles were four U.S. marshals Dressed in civilian clothes with handguns strapped to their belts. One held a photo of a thin teenage girl, her hair dark and straight, her eyes as brown as chestnuts.

The SUVs slowed as they approached a wood-frame home just across the street from the town’s water tower. One marshal got out and walked toward the front porch. One stood by the street. Another hid his gun underneath his shirt, strode around the house, and knocked on the back door.

Inside, a dog barked. A woman in her fifties, wearing thick glasses, jeans, and a faded blouse, sat in a recliner by a window that looked onto the backyard. She was sewing a pattern of red flowers onto a quilt. The television was tuned to a cable news channel. On a small table next to the recliner was a half-eaten cheese sandwich.

The marshal knocked again, and the woman slowly rose, steadying herself with one hand on the recliner. She walked across the room, past her framed nursing degree hanging on a wall. When she opened the door, the marshal stared at her for several seconds. He said he worked for the city and wanted to make sure her water was on. She checked a faucet in the kitchen and informed him that everything was fine.

He thanked her, walked to one of the SUVs, looked again at the photo of the teenage girl, and returned to the house. When the woman opened the door a second time, the marshal’s gun was back on his belt. “You’re Deborah Gavin, aren’t you?” he asked.

“I’m Mrs. Deborah Murphey,” she replied, but her voice faltered.

“Ma’am, we’re here to take you back to Georgia,” the marshal said. “It’s been thirty-three years.”

The woman noticed another marshal in the yard, his hand on his gun. She said she needed to put her dog, Roxy, an aging, overweight blue heeler mix, in the rear bedroom so that she wouldn’t cause a commotion. She went with Roxy into the bedroom, shut the door, grabbed a single-barrel shotgun leaning against a wall, and then picked up the telephone to call her husband, who was working in nearby Tyler. “Richard,” she planned to say, “there’s something I’ve never told you.” But he didn’t answer. She tried him again, and then again.

Minutes passed. “Ma’am?” the marshal called from the entryway. “Ma’am?”

Finally, she opened the bedroom door, the shotgun in her hands, the barrel pointing toward the ceiling with the stock open. “You need to take this before I do something bad to myself,” she said, giving him the gun, and then she nearly collapsed, her hands pressed against her heart. “Do you not know what they did to me there?” she asked the marshals. “Do you not know?”

It was the biggest news ever to hit Frankston, population 1,231. People who knew her simply couldn’t believe what they were reading in the papers. Sweet Deborah Murphey, the 53-year-old nurse who used to work at the hospital over in Tyler, was a fugitive—“the nicest lady in the world turned into an escapee from the law,” marveled Linda Veitch, the owner of the town’s biggest beauty salon, the Hair Depot.

In April 1972, when Deborah was just eighteen, she was sentenced to seven years in prison for an armed robbery of a gas station outside Atlanta. But within four months of arriving at the Georgia Rehabilitation Center for Women, which was then the state’s only prison for female inmates, she escaped. She was apprehended and reincarcerated, but she soon escaped again. In less than two years, she broke out of the facility five times—“some sort of record, no doubt,” a prison official would later say—getting caught each time. But on her sixth attempt, in July 1974, she made a clean getaway, evading the guards and eventually making her way to Texas. There she married, raised two children, and graduated from college with a nursing degree. “As far as I can tell, she became a model citizen,” said Greg Taylor, the sheriff of Anderson County, where Frankston is located. “She lived among us in peace and harmony. I don’t even think she got a traffic ticket.”

Whenever a fugitive escapes from one state to another and is caught by a U.S. marshal, he or she is usually held at a local jail until formal extradition proceedings get under way. But after Deborah’s arrest, Dan Scarbrough, an attorney from the nearby town of Palestine, took her case pro bono and quickly filed a motion with a district court in Anderson County, claiming that the marshals had come for Deborah without a certified copy of an arrest warrant. A sympathetic judge released her on a $250,000 bond. She returned to her home, where she was immediately besieged by everyone from reporters and television producers to many of Frankston’s own wide-eyed citizens, who just wanted to get another look at her: this upright, small-town woman who had once been so utterly defiant of the law and whose past was such a secret that even her husband had been unaware she was a fugitive.

Questions swirled. Why, nearly everyone wanted to know, had she gone to get the shotgun when the marshals arrived? Was it true, as rumor had it, that she had come close to killing herself? If so, was it because she was ashamed that her past life was about to become public, or was the idea of returning to prison just too devastating to contemplate? And what was she going to do if the marshals returned with the proper warrant?

But Deborah refused to give any interviews. She rarely left the house except for trips to the doctor or her attorney’s office or to attend a couple funerals for old friends. During one visit to Tyler, she suffered a heart attack and was rushed to the very hospital where she had once worked. Then, this past September, as word leaked that the Georgia Department of Corrections was finally compiling the proper court records to bring her back, she agreed to let me come see her. When I arrived at her home, she was sitting in her recliner, where she spends much of her time due to poor health. (Besides her bad heart, she also suffers from Paget’s disease of bone, a chronic skeletal disorder.) Richard, a soft-spoken,
silver-haired man, had taken the afternoon off from work and was sitting on a couch in his overalls. Roxy lay nearby.

“It isn’t right what they’re doing to me, and they know it isn’t right,” Deborah said, staring at a blank spot on a wall, her eyes blinking rapidly behind her glasses. “It isn’t right at all.”

She was born in Waco, the oldest of five children. Her father, who served in the Air Force, was regularly transferred from one base to another around the country, and by the time Deborah was a young teenager, the family was living in Orlando, Florida. When I asked her what her childhood was like, she shrugged her shoulders and said, “My daddy drank, and he hit my mom, then he started hitting us kids. I got whipped with a coat hanger. I had my jaw and my nose broken. He’d get mad at me for any kind of reason, like not making good grades in school, and off he’d go.”

She took a breath. “One day he made me pack some clothes in a paper bag, and he took me out and left me beside a road, telling me not to come back because I was worthless. He came back a while later, saying he hoped I had learned my lesson. But I knew right then I needed to leave.”

Deborah said she first ran away in the eighth grade. She ran away so many times that she was sent to a juvenile reform school and later to a psychiatric hospital, but as soon as she returned home, she’d inevitably leave again, because her father would resume his beatings. “Listen, we all wanted to get out,” her sister Dale, who now lives in Oklahoma, later told me. “If Child Protective Services had been around back then, they would have taken us away because of the abuse. As it was, we had to do what we could.”

When she was fifteen or sixteen, Deborah took a bus to Atlanta, telling no one in her family where she was going. She made her way to what was then known as the Strip, a six-block area along Peachtree Street that local newspapers liked to describe as the hippie district. The Strip was populated with head shops, rock and roll nightclubs with names like the Bowery and the Catacombs, and boutiques that sold tie-dyed shirts, bell-bottom jeans, and psychedelic art. Long-haired street vendors hawked an underground newspaper called the Great Speckled Bird, which railed against Vietnam and Nixon. “I lied about my age and got a job as a waitress at a coffee shop,” Deborah said, “and I lived in a rundown apartment with some other waitresses. It wasn’t much of a life, but it was better than what I had.”

She was a lanky girl, just over one hundred pounds, with bony shoulders and a sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her nose. The portrait of youthful petulance, she smoked unfiltered cigarettes and experimented with drugs—“LSD, speed, Boone’s Farm apple wine, cough syrup, whatever anyone offered me,” she told me. Needless to say, guys along the Strip lusted after her. Soon after she arrived, she got pregnant, gave birth to a son, and put him up for adoption. Then, on the evening of February 10, 1972, just before her eighteenth birthday, she got in a car with two men in their early twenties whom she had just met, and together they ended up at a Hi-Lo gas station in Duluth, northeast of Atlanta.

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