AUSTIN, April 6 --
Randolph Franklin Dial used to portray himself as the hero of his own
novel, writing friends that he served in Vietnam as a member of Delta
Force or that he was a CIA, Secret Service or FBI agent. He told others
he was a hit man with Mafia connections.
What he was, in actuality, was an accomplished
artist and sculptor, a convicted murderer, a prison escapee and the
presumed kidnapper of the wife of the assistant warden of the prison
from which he escaped in 1994. Today, he is the star of a bizarre
mystery that ended Monday night after almost 11 years when federal,
Oklahoma and Texas authorities found him in a mobile home, three miles
off the nearest paved road in rural East Texas. Dial was sauteing steak
for supper and, according to one official, said: "I had been thinking
of when they were going to catch me. I had been looking for it, but I
never saw this coming."
On Wednesday,
Dial, 60, was back in Oklahoma, held in the maximum-security
penitentiary in McAlester. Bobbi Parker, 42, the woman he reportedly
abducted when he escaped from the Oklahoma State Reformatory in Granite
and who was found on the property outside the mobile home, was reunited
with her husband. Randy Parker is now the warden of the William S. Key
Correctional Center in Fort Supply.
Dial's story is that he held Parker against her will -- under threat of death -- for more than 10 years.
"She was living under the impression that if she
ever tried to get away, I would get away and I would make her regret
it, particularly towards her family," Dial told reporters gathered at
the Shelby County Jail in Texas on Tuesday, several hours after his
arrest.
"I didn't mean it, but she didn't know that. . . .,"
Dial said. "I'm not workin' you. I'm just telling you I know what I'm
capable of. I'm not capable of that, but she didn't know that."
Greer County District Attorney John Wampler, whose
office will prosecute Dial on a prison escape charge, has ordered an
investigation.
"We will be looking at all the facts surrounding this
matter . . . to find out what actually occurred and what happened," the
Oklahoma prosecutor said. "It would appear that kidnapping charges
against Mr. Dial would be appropriate," he said. "Whether there's any
reason to charge Ms. Parker with anything, I won't know until the
investigation is complete."
He said Parker told authorities this week that she
had been kidnapped and held against her will. Neither Parker nor her
husband could be reached today.
The family reportedly got a call from Parker the
night she disappeared, and a friend got a call from her a day later. In
2000, the FBI announced a $25,000 reward for information leading to
Dial or Parker.
At the time of her abduction, Parker was running an
inmate pottery program with Dial at the prison, where her husband then
worked as assistant warden. As a trusty, Dial lived in minimum-security
housing outside the prison walls; the Parkers and their two daughters
lived in housing on the prison grounds.
The author of the true-crime book "At Large," which
was based on Dial's case, does not believe the story that Parker had
been forced to stay with Dial since 1994. Charles W. Sasser, a writer
and a former Tulsa homicide detective, spoke to Dial and Parker by
telephone in 2001, three years after "At Large" was published. Dial
called him, Sasser said, to say he had read the book 12 times and to
note that "you weren't always complimentary to me, but you were always
fair and objective."
Sasser asked about Parker, and Dial said she was fine
and put her on the phone. Sasser said he asked three questions to which
only Parker would have known the answers and was satisfied that he was
talking to the right woman. He said he asked how she was and urged her
to call her family and let them know she was alive. "She said, 'I'm
fine and I'm happy,' and . . . she said she wondered if it was better
to let them [her family] keep thinking she was dead or to call them,"
Sasser said. He said he spoke to Dial for about an hour and called the
FBI afterward. FBI attempts to trace Dial's call were unsuccessful,
Sasser said.
Authorities were led to Dial and Parker this week by
a tip generated by the TV show "America's Most Wanted," which featured
the case. The two had been running a chicken farm in Campti, near the
Louisiana border, for the past 5 1/2 years. They lived in a two-bedroom
trailer in the woods. Dial told authorities he rarely ventured off the
property. Instead, he sent Parker on errands to nearby Center,
including to the town's grocery store, across the street from the
Shelby County Sheriff's Office.
"We're looking across the highway at
the store," Chief Deputy Kent Shaffer said. "She could have driven in
here instead. We sure would have helped her out, I guarantee you."
