Recaptured convicts grilled about escape ruse
Pair used forged documents to walk away
PANAMA CITY BEACH, Fla. Back in custody after using forged documents to escape their life sentences, two convicted killers were being grilled Sunday by law enforcement authorities, who said they expect to make more arrests in a case that has given court and corrections officials in Florida a black eye.
Among the questions being posed to Joseph Jenkins and Charles Walker: Who forged the papers? Who helped you run from police? What other prisoners have got away with this? Who was coming from Atlanta to whisk you out of Florida?
“I can tell you, there will be more arrests,” Florida Department of Law Enforcement Commissioner Gerald Bailey told a news conference Sunday, hours after Jenkins and Walker were arrested.
“We will be backtracking to those who helped carry out this fraud and along the way we will be looking closely at anyone who may have helped harbour these fugitives,” Bailey said.
Jenkins and Walker were captured without incident Saturday night at the Coconut Grove Motor Inn in Panama City Beach, a touristy area of putt-putt courses and go-kart tracks.
They were unarmed and didn’t have much money. Hours earlier, their families had held a news conference in Orlandourging them to surrender.
The men, who had fled the Orlando area after word of their ruse became public, didn’t know law enforcement was on the way to Panama City.
They were waiting in the motel for someone to arrive from Atlanta to take them out of state, Bailey said, adding that authorities don’t yet know who that person was or where the convicts planned to go. Bailey’s department is pursuing a tip that someone was offering to forge documents for prisoners for $8,000. He said there are at least two other recent cases where prisoners were thwarted trying to use fake documents to escape.
“The documents themselves looked good, they looked official,” Bailey said, although they contained the signatures of people who normally don’t deal with release documents.
The two prisoners hadn’t been travelling together, but hooked up once word of the forgeries became public and travelled from Orlando to Panama City, said Frank Chiumento, chief of the U.S. Marshals Service for Florida and the Caribbean.
Chiumento said in an interview Sunday that Jenkins and Walker knew their time on the run was limited once their ruse had been uncovered. They were under surveillance for about two and a half days.
Jenkins and Walker were both serving life sentences at the Franklin Correctional Facility before they walked free without anyone realizing the paperwork, complete with case numbers and a judge’s forged signature, was bogus. The documents seemingly reduced their life sentences to 15 years. Jenkins was released Sept. 27 and registered himself as a felon Sept. 30 in an Orlando jail. Walker was released Oct. 8 and also registered himself with authorities three days later.