Oklahoma warden's wife found guilty of helping inmate escape

Steve Olafson
Reuters
September 21, 2011 ET

OKLAHOMA CITY (Reuters) - An Oklahoma pri­son warden's wife claimed she was kidnapped when she and a convicted murderer van­ished for nearly 11 years, while po­lice were certain she was in love with the man and helped him escape.
Af­ter a trial that lasted through­out the summer, a ju­ry agreed with po­lice and found Bobbi Parker, 49, guilty on Wednesday of help­ing Randolph Franklin Dial escape. They rec­ommended she serve a year in pri­son.
Parker spent nearly 11 years on the run with Dial, a gray-haired, bearded sculptor who befriended the as­sistant warden's wife through a pri­son-based pottery class in Gran­ite, Oklahoma.
Dial, who was serving a life sen­tence for murder when he escaped, was a ma­nip­ulative and ego­tis­tical "ladies man," Dis­trict Attor­ney John Wampler said af­ter the ver­dict.
"He could talk a good talk. I suspect he prob­a­bly charmed her and she became enthralled with that," he said.
Parker's attor­neys maintained she was threat­ened, a defense upheld by Dial's own recorded state­ment. Dial died of lung can­cer in 2007 at age 62, but his state­ment was played dur­ing the trial. Parker did not tes­ti­fy on her

own behalf.
Dis­trict Judge Richard Darby sched­uled formal sen­tenc­ing for October 6. Judges in Oklahoma nearly always fol­low sen­tenc­ing rec­ommendations made by ju­ries, Wampler said.
Parker and Dial were discovered by au­thor­ities in April 2005 when a tipster alerted the TV show "America's Most Wanted" that they were pos­ing as a married couple while living and working on a chicken farm in rural east Texas.
Parker was returned to her husband and Dial was returned to pri­son, where he told au­thor­ities Parker was inno­cent of wrongdo­ing and acted out of fear from the threats he made.
Pros­ecutors in Mangum, Oklahoma, didn't file crim­inal charges until three years af­ter Parker was reunited with her husband Randy and their two daugh­ters, who were 8 and 10 years old when she van­ished.
Her husband, Randy Parker, is still employed by the corrections system but no longer works at the pri­son.
He tes­ti­fied in her defense, telling ju­rors he still loved his wife and had a good relation­ship with her before she and Dial van­ished.
Before he was impris­oned, Dial had worked as an art teach­er and sculptor. One of his works, a desktop
sculp­ture of an oil derrick, was fea­tured on the televi­sion se­ries "Dallas," where it was displayed on the desk of the show's villain, J.R. Ew­ing.
(Ed­ited by Karen Brooks and Cynthia Johnston)