Bobbi Parker to face charge of assisting escaped fugitive

[KBCraig]

Originally Posted by PapaBear

You uneducated sons a bitches, I do know her and Randy, I was there, and this is a crock of ****!

Really? You were there on that Texas chicken farm, in the bedroom of that trailer, with the sex toys and condoms? You were there at the table while she wrote love letters to the thug?

Look, you might be 100% right: she might be 100% victim, guilty of nothing but fear for her family, and Stockholm Syndrome. If you want to tell us what you know, then starting off with "Look, I know how it looks, but I know these people, and here's what I think..." would work pretty well.

On the other hand, someone joining a conversation with "You dumb muther ****ers I'm glad you bitches know all about it, when you don't at all. You uneducated sons a bitches..." is probably going to get blasted in return.

[PapaBear]

With any normal conversation you would be right. But this and the other conversation had people calling her everything but a white girl. They don't know her or them but they can call her those things? One even had "protect the innocent" right under his remarks. Pardon me for a natural response to that.

[Crosstimbers Okie]

Formal arraignment moved again for warden's wife

Formal arraignment moved again for warden's wife

Posted: Dec 4, 2008 10:17 AM

Associated Press

MANGUM, Okla. - The wife of a prison warden who's charged with helping a convicted killer escape prison is changing attorneys.

The change by Bobbi Parker will delay today's scheduled arraignment of her in Greer County District Court until February 5.

Attorney Rick Cunningham says Parker is replacing him with attorney Garvin Isaacs.

Cunningham says the change is due to logistics.

Cunningham practices in northwestern Oklahoma while Parker lives in the southeastern corner of the state and the trial will be in the southwest.

He says Parker needs an attorney who is closer to her and to the court.

Parker is accused of helping Randolph Dial escape in August 1994 from Oklahoma State Reformatory in Granite where her husband was the deputy warden.

The two were found in April 2005 living together in a mobile home in Campti, Texas.

Parker reportedly said she was kidnapped by Dial and forced to live with him out of fear he would somehow harm her husband and two daughters.

She was ordered to stand trial by a judge who said evidence indicates Parker wasn't kidnapped and that she "acquiesced" to the escape.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.

All content © Copyright 2001 - 2008 WorldNow and KFOR-TV .

[Crosstimbers Okie]

Alva Review/Courier

Warden's wife hires new attorney

12/06/08
© 2008 The Associated Press

MANGUM, Okla. — A high-profile Oklahoma City lawyer will represent a prison warden's wife who is accused of helping an inmate escape from the Oklahoma State Reformatory. Garvin Isaacs will defend Bobbi Parker instead of Rick Cunningham, Cunningham said Wednesday.

Because of the change, Bobbi Parker's scheduled arraignment for Thursday in Greer County District Court was moved to Feb. 5. The Thursday date was set earlier when attorneys requested a postponement of a Nov. 6 date.

Cunningham said the decision "just came down to logistics." "I practice up here in the northwest, she lives in the southeast, and the trial is in the southwest. We knew we needed someone who was closer to her and the court, and we thought Garvin Isaacs was the perfect choice," said the Alva, Okla., lawyer. "He's a very colorful individual and certainly very qualified in criminal law and high-profile cases."

Prosecutors have accused Parker of aiding in the escape of convicted killer Randolph Dial on Aug. 30, 1994, from the prison in Granite, where her husband was the deputy warden at the time.

No one knew the whereabouts of the pair until April 4, 2005, when authorities found Parker and Dial living together in a mobile home in the East Texas community of Campti.

Parker reportedly said she was kidnapped by Dial and forced to live with him out of fear that he would somehow have her husband and two daughters harmed.

Special Judge Brad Leverett ordered her to stand trial after her preliminary hearing in October, saying at the time that evidence showed Parker wasn't kidnapped and that she "acquiesced" to the escape.

Isaacs may be best known for defending Gene Leroy Hart, who was tried for the 1977 killings of three Girl Scouts near Locust Grove, Okla.

A Mayes County jury acquitted Hart during a highly publicized trial in 1979. Hart died in prison of a heart attack two months later while serving time on unrelated charges.

[coloradosgt79]

He must have been hard up. She got the living crap beat out of her with a ugly stick.

[Crosstimbers Okie]

Fugitive Case Confounds Texas Town - Los Angeles Times

Archive for Thursday, April 07, 2005
Fugitive Case Confounds Texas Town

By Scott Gold and Lianne Hart
April 07, 2005 in print edition A-1

Note This article includes corrections to the original version.

Bobbi Parker was a little shy and always in a bit of hurry, “like she had left a cake in the oven,” one acquaintance said.

But she was an independent woman, or so it seemed to the people she encountered in the Piney Woods of rural Texas. Every few weeks, she stopped to buy supplies for a local chicken farm. She cashed her paychecks at a convenience store and bought beer for the man she called her husband. She was always alone.

If she had wanted to leave, said James Chandler, who works at the farm supply store, “all she had to do was just keep on driving.”

This week, police stormed Parker’s mobile home and arrested Randolph Dial, convicted in the 1981 murder of a karate teacher in Oklahoma. Dial had been in hiding for 11 years, ever since escaping from prison by holding a knife to Parker’s throat while she drove him to freedom. She was the deputy warden’s wife.

Authorities say they believe Parker’s contention that she had been held against her will all along – not physically, but by threat of violence. Some of her acquaintances aren’t so convinced.

And an event that Chandler called the “biggest thing to ever hit” this isolated pocket of East Texas had people pondering questions that seemed preposterous just days ago.

Was Parker, 42, worried that Dial, 60, might harm her real family if she tried to escape?

Did she suffer from Stockholm syndrome, where kidnap victims become sympathetic to their abductors?

Or had the polite mother of two simply fallen for a blue-eyed, smooth-talking, professed hit man?

“In the last two days, I’ve heard so much stuff that I don’t know what to believe anymore,” Chandler said. “But I wonder about it. In 11 years, you would think she could have done something.”

In 1986, a drunken Dial confessed to the unsolved murder of Kelly Hogan. Five years earlier, Dial told investigators, he had knocked on Hogan’s door and shot him in the chest with a .38-caliber pistol.

Dial said that the mob had paid him $5,000, but investigators never figured out who, if anyone, had orchestrated the murder or why Hogan might have been the target.

Dial’s wife at the time told investigators that he had turned her into a “robot,” unable to think for herself, and tricked her into helping him kill Hogan. She was shot and killed four months later; her murder was never solved.

Imprisoned in Granite, Okla., Dial was seen as a braggart and a storyteller, but was a model inmate, officials said. The former art teacher, who made delicate sculptures of women’s figures and painted scenes of sailboats and landscapes, soon gained trusty status; he persuaded officials to let him start an art program to make money for the prison and to help rehabilitate inmates.

Much of the project involved pottery, said Oklahoma Department of Corrections spokesman Jerry Massie. Dial was given regular, unsupervised access to a kiln in Deputy Warden Randy Parker’s garage. Dial became a fixture in the Parker household. He and Bobbi were friendly, and she volunteered to work on his art program.

On the morning of Aug. 30, 1994, Bobbi Parker told her husband she was going shopping. When Randy Parker left for work, Dial was in the garage. By the end of the day, both he and Bobbi Parker were missing. So was the Parkers’ red minivan.

That night, Bobbi Parker called her mother and passed along a message to her daughters, who were 8 and 10. “Tell the kids I’ll see them soon,” she said. She called twice more in the next few days, but was never heard from after that. Randy Parker, Massie said, “never gave up hope that she was alive.”

Together, Dial said during a news conference after his arrest, he and Bobbi Parker moved around Texas – first to Houston, where he worked as a security guard, then south of Dallas. Five years ago, they ended up in Campti, which is little more than a collection of twisting, red-dirt roads and mobile homes on the Texas-Louisiana border.

They lived and worked on a 25-acre broiler farm, where chickens are raised until they are big enough to be taken to a processing plant. In exchange for their work, the pair received $500 a week and lived rent-free, said Shelby County Chief Deputy Kent Shaffer.

Dial told reporters it was an “honest living,” although it appeared to folks here that Parker did most of the work.

“I never hardly saw them,” said Harold Bloodgood, 59, a logger who lives nearby. “They were way back in the woods.”

Dial, who told authorities that he never forgot that he was a fugitive, rarely left the farm. He attended a nearby Pentecostal church periodically with Parker, and once drove to Oklahoma City to attend an event held for the release of a book about his disappearance. Without making any effort to disguise himself, Dial got the author to autograph a copy for him. Undetected, he went back home.

Mostly, Dial left the shopping and driving duties to Parker. He made up a Social Security number and started going by the name Richard Deahl.

At some point, Parker began signing her receipts at the farm supply store “Samantha Deahl” and referred to him as her husband. She fretted to acquaintances about Dial’s heart condition, one of the few pieces of her life she ever discussed.

But Josephine Nichols, 61, who lived across the road, said she thought something was amiss. Parker never talked about herself, Nichols said, just her chickens. And when they spoke, the conversation was brief. Parker was always looking over her shoulder – apparently for Dial, who was rarely seen without his shotgun.

“She told me he was very jealous and that she was not allowed to talk to anybody,” Nichols said. “She never looked very happy. She never smiled. And why should she? She had nothing to look forward to.”

On Monday afternoon, acting on an anonymous tip from someone who saw Dial’s picture on the website for the television series “America’s Most Wanted,” authorities swarmed the farm. Dial had a loaded pistol on the table and his shotgun by the door, but he was taken into custody without a struggle, said FBI Special Agent Gary Johnson.

Dial was cooking lunch and watching a golf tournament when authorities arrived. He chuckled, Shaffer said, with sheriff’s deputies when he was led away from the house: “I was wondering when you were all going to get here.”

Despite the contention from some in the community that Parker had not been held against her will, Dial said that he viewed himself as a kidnapper and that he had been “working on her.” He said he threatened to harm her or her daughters if she fled – although, he said, he never meant it.

Shaffer said that though investigators found her story hard to believe, it did appear Dial had used “reverse psychology” to keep her from running.

“He said he made the good guys look bad and the bad guys look good,” Shaffer said.

Dial has been charged with escaping from a penal institution, said Greer County, Okla., Dist. Atty. John Wampler. Additional charges related to the abduction are likely. Dial is being held at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester.

Wampler said there were no plans to charge Parker with a crime, provided her version of the events holds up.

“There is a question there that a lot of people have problems with, and that is why she didn’t call or contact someone,” he said. “The investigation is still open.”

Randy Parker is now the warden at the minimum-security William S. Key Correction Center in Fort Supply, Okla. He declined to comment through a spokesman.

The Parkers were reunited Tuesday in Nacogdoches, Texas, and they returned to Oklahoma together on Wednesday. The two embraced, wept and seemed no different than any other husband and wife who had been apart for a long time, said the officers who were there.

“The reunion went well,” the FBI’s Johnson said.

Dial was given a chance to say goodbye to Parker.

“Be good to yourself,” he said he told her. “You’ve got it coming.”

Hart reported from Campti and Gold from Houston.

[Crosstimbers Okie]

Mobile Breaking Oklahoma News | NewsOK.com

Bobbi Parker ordered to stand trial
By Ron Jackson
Published: October 28, 2008

MANGUM - Describing her claim she was a kidnap victim as "far-fetched," Special Judge Brad Leverett this morning ordered Bobbi Parker to trial on a charge of helping convicted killer Randolph Franklin Dial escape from the prison where Parker's husband was a deputy warden.


Parker, 46, is to formally enter a plea on the felony charge on Nov. 6 and faces 10 years in prison if convicted in the trial assigned to District Judge Richard Darby.

"All the evidence obtained out of the Campti, Texas residence tells us they were having a romantic relationship and this was not a kidnapping," Leverett said as he ruled at the conclusion of Parker's preliminary hearing in Greer County.

"Mrs. Parker drove her van away from the prison with Mr. Dial crouched next to her on the floorboard. If Webster had a definition of assisting escape of a prisoner, then I believe that picture would be next to the definition."

Parker and Dial were found living on a chicken farm near Campti on April 4, 2005. Parker returned to her family, and Dial died in prison on June 13, 2007.

Two witnesses were called today for a total of five in the preliminary hearing that started Monday morning. Jack Cowley, former warden at the Oklahoma State Reformatory in Granite from which Dial escaped on Aug. 30, 1994 testified, as did Tulsa author Charles Sasser.

Sasser testified that on Nov. 9, 2001, he received a phone call from Dial. He said he spoke for 40 minutes with Dial and a person he believes was Parker. Sasser said his conclusion was "they sounded like an old married couple."

Sasser said he asked the woman if she was alright and she said, "I'm alright, and I'm happy."

[Crosstimbers Okie]

And the "Great" Jack Cowley on who's authority the Lifer Randolph Franklin Dial was allowed to play outside the fence, in the deputy warden's garage... with the deputy warden's wife...

Jack is still savings souls. But don't get any ideas. He's not interested in your soul. To Jack, thug souls are the only souls worthy of redemption.

Listen to Jack! Law & Order Series: Part II - Reducing Recidivism : NPR

Jack Cowley

Cowley & Associates Innovations in Criminal Justice (Remember the innovation, "Doc" Dial!)



Jack Cowley
There are innovations, which when applied to the Criminal Justice system, will provide for greater public safety while assisting the victims of crime to better manage their changed lives and the perpetrators of crime to successfully modify their lifestyle.

Jack retired with 30 years of service from the State of Oklahoma Department of Corrections. The majority of his career with the state was as a prison warden where he served in that capacity at three facilities. He is a firm believer that prisons should be institutions which promote public safety by offering inmates meaningful opportunities to change their behavior rather than simply warehouses where they “do time” and continue to harm the public once released.

Upon retirement in 1996 Jack joined the staff of Prison Fellowship Ministries as a public policy advocate for criminal justice reform and later Director of the InnerChange Freedom Initiative (IFI), an intensive faith based prison re-entry program located near Houston, Texas. He went on to be the National Director of Operations for IFI establishing programs in Iowa, Kansas and Minnesota. Through IFI a model was established which vastly reduces the rate that inmates released from prison re-offend.

For one year prior to joining Alpha USA in 2004 Jack was the Director of Programs for Freedom Ranch, Inc. a non-profit ministry headquartered in Tulsa that provides transitional housing for released offenders and out patient drug and alcohol treatment. Alpha USA equips the local church with materials and instruction in providing a 12-week course in basic Christianity. His primary function is to assist the church in providing ministry opportunities to prisons that include re-entry services.

Mr. Cowley has consulted on prisons and criminal justice issues on a national level and serves on the Advisory Board of the National Institute of Corrections, as well as a staff member at the University of Phoenix. He is a founding board member of the Oklahoma Criminal Justice Association and a member of the Restorative Justice and Victim’s Committee of the American Correctional Association.

Jack earned his Bachelors of Science from Oklahoma State University in Sociology as well as a Masters of Science in Corrections. He has completed his course work toward his Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma in Organizational Leadership. He co-authored, “Lifeline: A Drug/Alcohol Program for Negatively Addicted Inmates” Journal of Reality Therapy- Spring 1990. He appeared on the 1996 HBO Special: “Prison Life: Prisoners of the War on Drugs” and the 2002 PBS Frontline Special: “Burden of Innocence”.

[Crosstimbers Okie]

Law & Order Series: Part II - Reducing Recidivism : NPRCNN.com - Transcripts

LAVANDERA: Well, this guy was convicted in 1986 of murder. He had spent almost nine years in prison. And from what he said, from the moment he landed in prison, he was trying to figure a way out.

Before his prison life, he was an artist, he`s a sculptor. He has a master`s degree in art. He had convinced the prison authorities, from what I understand there, to create an inmate pottery program. And then over the years, he had developed trustee status, which means that he was given privileges other inmates weren`t given.

LAVANDERA: So he gets there. He creates this pottery program. At some point, the kiln for the pottery program was in the deputy warden`s garage. He has access to this garage through...

GRACE: Say what? Wait a minute. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You`ve got a prison. You`ve got a prisoner who pled guilty to murder with a kiln, a pottery kiln, outside the prison grounds at the warden`s garage? Did I hear that?

LAVANDERA: Yes, that`s what we`re being told.

GRACE: OK.

LAVANDERA: And through this program is how he meets Bobbi Parker. And then according to him, and after he was arrested yesterday, or Monday afternoon, he came out and spoke with reporters yesterday. And he says he had worked on her home, talked to her, and made, as he told us, said that he made her think that the "enemy was the friend and the friend was the enemy," was his direct quote.

And according to him, he held her at gun point. And one day in August of `94, he forced her to drive off. And he still maintains that over the last almost 11 years, he has held her against her will.

GRACE: On a chicken farm in a trailer? OK, Ed?

LAVANDERA: Well, for the last five years. Yes?

GRACE: Ed, I have heard an interview with a young woman who works at like a 7-11 down the street. And she said that this couple would come in. The abductee would buy gas, buy groceries, take off in the car. The locals are not buying the kidnapped theory.

GRACE: Really? Now, tell me about Mrs. Parker. Is she looking at criminal prosecution in any way?

LAVANDERA: Well, we`re asking that. She wasn`t arrested. As we mentioned, she was reunited with her family. We understand her whereabouts aren`t exactly clear at this point. We understand she`s with her family, presumably at some point making her way back to Oklahoma.

It`s interesting. I wanted to lay out some of the details that we`ve learned about -- you know, we`ve mentioned she had gone to a gas station that`s about six, seven miles from the home, to pick up groceries, cash checks. She was also seen the day that -- on Monday afternoon when Dial was arrested, she was about a mile away mowing the lawn. She had drive into town, she had her own car.

GRACE: Wait, he had her cutting the grass? She was brainwashed, OK? I`m convinced. Go ahead.

LAVANDERA: But he was making dinner. So she had her own car. We understand that she had just started planting a garden there next to the trailer.

GRACE: Oh, God.

LAVANDERA: There`s two bedrooms in that trailer. I asked one of the authorities, you know, were they living in the same room? And he said, well, one of them was storage. The other room appeared to be used by two people.

GRACE: OK, I get your drift, Ed Lavandera, always the gentleman.

[Crosstimbers Okie]

Prison official's wife accused in escape

Like the John Anderson songs goes: "Jest a'swangin'... jest a'swangin'"

Jack Cowley said it just didn't look right!

Prison Official's Wife Accused in Escape


By SEAN MURPHY

MANGUM, Okla. (AP) _ A decade after a convicted killer escaped from an Oklahoma prison and vanished along with the assistant warden's pretty young wife, the two were found living together on a Texas chicken ranch.

Now, the woman, Bobbi Parker, is back with her husband and fighting in court to prove she was a kidnap victim, not a lovestruck accomplice to escape.

On Tuesday, a judge ruled Parker, now 46, must stand trial on charges she helped Randolph Dial break out of the Oklahoma State Reformatory in Granite in 1994. The ruling came after evidence was presented at a preliminary hearing that Parker and Dial shared a bed for a decade and acted like husband and wife.

During the hearing, Parker's soft-spoken husband, Randy Parker, chatted with his wife and occasionally leaned on the back of her chair. He has said only that the couple's marriage is strong and that they are looking forward to putting the case behind them.

Dial began spending time with Bobbi Parker while she oversaw a pottery program at the prison. With a charming personality and a gift for gab, Dial was granted minimum-security status and allowed to roam the prison grounds with little oversight.

The inmate and the assistant warden's wife worked together in the pottery shop in her garage on the prison grounds. They were also seen sipping coffee on her porch swing.

Their behavior didn't look right, Jack Cowley, the former warden of the prison, testified at the hearing. He said he was considering moving the pottery shop into another building when the pair disappeared.

"You don't sit on the front porch and drink coffee," Cowley said. "Just the appearance would be an impropriety."

Dial, who died in 2007 at age 62, pleaded guilty to escape and maintained until his death that he kidnapped Parker at knifepoint and forced her to drive him from the prison.

"I was a hostage-taker and will probably live to regret it," Dial said in a jailhouse interview shortly after his capture. "But now I don't. Doing a life sentence, at my age, I wouldn't trade it for the past 10½ years."

But prosecutors painted a different picture, claiming Bobbi Parker fell in love with the con man and ran off with him. They said a search of the pair's East Texas trailer, which had only one bed, uncovered photographs, cards they exchanged, a box of condoms, Viagra instructions, a vibrating sex toy and a love letter she wrote to him.

Prosecutors also said it wasn't the first time Parker had inappropriate relationships, including sexual contact, with inmates at prisons where her husband worked.

Parker told investigators she and Dial never were intimate, that she wasn't attracted to Dial and that the sex toy was a gag gift from a friend. She said she stayed with him out of fear he would harm her family.

An author who wrote a book on the escape, Charles Sasser, testified Tuesday that he spoke to the couple while they were on the run and said their relationship was like that of "two old married people." Sasser said he asked Dial over the telephone whether Bobbi Parker was still alive.

"He said, 'Of course she's still alive. She's right here. Do you want to talk to her?'" Sasser recalled.

Bobbi Parker then took the phone and talked briefly to Sasser, who said he encouraged her to call her children, who were 7 and 10 when she disappeared, to let them know she was safe. Sasser said Parker responded that it might be better if her children thought she was dead.

Parker's attorney said she stayed with Dial out of fear.

"From the get-go, Dial was intimidating to her," said attorney Rick Cunningham. "He threatened her and her family, her two daughters ... and that became an oppressive part of that situation. She kind of resigned herself to her fate."

Parker told investigators that she began to feel woozy on the day of the escape, possibly from being drugged, and that she recalls Dial carrying her to the van that the couple escaped in.

The judge who presided over the preliminary hearing didn't buy it. In ordering her to trial on a charge that could bring 10 years in prison, Judge Brad Leverett said: "It's clear from the evidence the court has heard so far that Ms. Parker was not kidnapped in 1994 as she claimed."