Incorrigible at 83, murderer escapes yet again
In the pop-cultural imagination, the jail break is a communal project.
It took three men to escape from Alcatraz in 1962, dozens to make the Great Escape from Stalag Luft III, and in the Tragically Hip’s fictionalized retelling of a Millhaven breakout, it was “twelve pictures lined up across the front page.”
But that’s not the case for Ralph Whitfield Morris, serving a life sentence for second-degree murder. He runs solo, or more likely walks at an urgent pace, given that he is 83 years old.
Last week, he was recaptured after a few daylight hours on the wrong side of the uncontrolled perimeter of the minimum secure facility in Mission, B.C. It was at least his sixth proper prison escape, in addition to dozens more illegal abscondments dating to the 1950s.
As such, Morris has been the subject of more police manhunts than probably anyone else ever in Canada.
Sometimes they catch him, as they did this time at 5:30 p.m., after staff noticed him missing. Sometimes he just comes back of his own accord. This takes a day or two, until the weather turns, or he runs out of food.
Morris is five foot seven and 150 pounds. Mugshots show him with a moustache.
His escapes tend to be in late April or early May, but sometimes in summer. He puts on regular clothes and disappears.
His reasons are simple, according to parole records. He said he gets tired of being told what to do. He said he has a “hobo” history, so he just lives in the community, sometimes helping people, and never committing other offences.
He is not a success story of corrections. Given his age, his repeated jailbreaks might even mean his life sentence ends up lasting his whole life. They have certainly extended his stay, and three times led to additional criminal convictions.
Morris once wrote in a letter to the warden, “I have paid my debt to society many times over.”
But he has entrenched criminal values, attitude and behaviour, and adheres firmly to the “con code,” according to a decision of the Parole Board of Canada. His risk to reoffend violently is judged high enough that his parole was revoked in 2015 and denied twice since then, most recently last November.
He is remorseless about murdering his intimate partner in 1982, and there are concerns about harassment of family members.
A report last summer indicated progress and a sustained “low profile,” but three years ago, a psychologist described him as “essentially a psychopathic individual who is not yet completely burnt out” and “a somewhat garrulous, cantankerous, opinionated, self-focused, narcissistic and irritable older inmate who does not appear to be willing to accept any directions.”
His criminal record goes back to his teens in the 1950s, to his roots in Ontario’s Niagara region.
In 1975, he shot the lock off a cottage door with a rifle, and robbed the owner at gunpoint. He was free on mandatory supervision for that crime seven years later when he walked into a bowling alley in Welland, Ont., and murdered Marian Levinski, 39, his intimate partner who had ended their relationship three weeks earlier.
This kicked off his first manhunt, and it was massive. He went north to Ontario cottage country near Huntsville, and broke into cottages to survive and eventually arm himself. Police called in dogs and helicopters and reinforcements.
The search lasted five frantic days in May, 1982. Cottagers started carrying guns.
He was caught at a cottage near Utterson, a few kilometres southwest of Huntsville. He dropped the two rifles he was carrying when police fired warning shots.
A few years later, in April, 1988, Morris walked away from minimum security at Joyceville, Ont., on a Sunday. He was caught the following day by a farmer who heard strange noises in his barn.
In 1991, he escaped from a minimum-security facility in Kingston, Ont.
In May 2006, when he was 71 and in B.C., he was unlawfully at large from day parole when police made a public request for help finding him. Two years later, at the end of April, 2008, he walked away from a facility near Agassiz in the Fraser Valley.
“He basically returned because of the weather conditions and he realized what he had done was not right,” an RCMP officer said at the time.
In the summer of 2011, Morris went missing for two months from a halfway house. Police said he probably hopped on a freight train headed east. But, as ever, he was nearby.