Tired of Hiding: Murder, an escape, then 32 years as a fugitive
by Scott Sexton
727-7481 or at
ssexton@wsjournal.com

http://www.journalnow.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=WSJ%%2FMGArticle%%2FWSJ_BasicArticle&c...=!localnews&s=1037645509099

When William Blake Williams escaped from prison
on June 17, 1973, no sirens sounded. No tobacco
spitting, shotgun-toting deputies lined up to fan through
the nearby woods in Stokes County. No teams of
droopy-eyed bloodhounds were assembled.
Williams, a convicted killer, walked away in broad
daylight, hopped on a bus bound for Roanoke, Va.,
and faded into anonymous oblivion.
For the next 32 years and five months, he lived a
shadowy existence in a series of small towns. At
some point in the mid-1980s, he settled near Pea
Ridge, Ark., near the Missouri border. He assumed
the name James Quisenberry for a while, sporadically
attended Methodist church services and blended in.
He probably could have lived the rest of his life in
Pea Ridge working construction and maintenance j
obs.
But he didn't.
One day last November, Williams got on a bus and
headed to Surry County, the place where he had
stabbed his brother to death on Jan. 5, 1969.
It's anybody's guess why a 64-year-old man would up
and decide to turn himself in after all those years.
Even Williams doesn't know for sure.
After the sixth or eighth or 10th time he hears the
question during a recent interview at the Warren
Correctional Center, Williams sighs and slumps
ever so slightly.
"I just came back, just returned to prison," he says,
shrugging his shoulders.
Just like that?
"Just like that."
The correctional center
The visitation room at Warren Correctional in Manson,
about an hour miles northeast of Raleigh, looks like a
school cafeteria. The sharp odor of a cleaning agent
hangs in the air.
Just outside, inmates are cutting the grass on riding
mowers. You can't help but notice how easy it would
be to slip away, just the way Williams did in 1973.
Two well-dressed, older women select a table in a
corner. One is the mother of an inmate and the other
his aunt.
Everyone waits patiently, if not a little apprehensively,
for a heavy metal door at the end of the visitation room
to open and the prisoners to appear. Two guards sit
on the other side of the room, uninterested in what
Williams (or the other inmate) might have to say.
Williams is dressed in prison-issue gray. He wears
thick, prison-issue glasses. He has no leg irons or
shackles.
He has piercing blue eyes and looks right at you when
he talks. Other than missing most of the top teeth in the
front of his mouth, he appears to be in relative good
health.
Williams is evasive and responds to questions with short, noncommittal answers. He
won't give anything away, not without prompting. Then he is told that people would
want to hear his story.
"I suppose they might," he says. "It is pretty interesting."
Charged, tried, sentenced
The Winston-Salem Journal's file about Williams' crime contains only two stories,
neither of which is more than 11 paragraphs long. The accounts are straightforward,
with little detail.
Williams was taken off a Greyhound bus at the corner of Cherry Street and Northwest
Boulevard in Winston-Salem less than four hours after his older brother, Clarence Lee
Williams of Lowgap, died of stab wounds at Northern Surry Hospital.
Police said that Williams was carrying a .22-caliber rifle, but the bolt was removed
and he didn't resist arrest.
Four months later, in Surry Superior Court, Williams pleaded guilty to second-degree
murder and was sentenced to 30 years in prison. He was 27.
In those days, a parole board could - and often did - shave time off a man's
sentence. Thirty years might actually have meant 15 or even 10.
"The widow and daughter of the deceased were eyewitnesses to the stabbing and
testified for the state yesterday," reads a Journal account from Williams' sentencing
on May 14, 1969. "Williams also took the stand. He told the court that he was under
the influence of drugs and intoxicating liquors at the time of the stabbing and
didn't remember anything about it."
According to accounts of the killing in The Mount Airy News, neighbors said that when
William Williams and his wife got into marital disputes, Clarence Williams often
intervened. Surry Sheriff Jim Taylor said that at the time of the killing, Williams'
wife had left him. Taylor speculated that the brothers might have been arguing about
where she was.
Williams didn't want to talk about the day he stabbed his brother or what sort of
disagreement could escalate to the point where a man would kill his own flesh and
blood.
"I never forgot about that," Williams says now, lowering his eyes and his voice. "I'm
sorry it ever happened. If I could undo it, I would."
Williams says he attended church sporadically during his years on the lam. But can a
man who killed his brother ever make peace with that fact?
"I don't know how to answer that. I don't know," Williams says. "Just leave it at
that."
Prisoner on the move
After he was sentenced, Williams was shipped to Central Prison in Raleigh.
He stayed at Central for nearly three years before he was transferred, first to
Blanche Correctional Center in Caswell County, then to Person Correctional in July
1972.
Less than a year later, he was moved again, this time to Stokes Correctional, a
medium-security prison outside of Danbury.
Then, as now, most counties in the state had prisons, and inmates were considered a
source of cheap labor.
North Carolina was in the throes of a road-building boom and it needed every strong
back it could find. It was not by accident that prisons were built next door to N.C.
Department of Transportation garages and maintenance sheds.
Williams had racked up only one infraction - a petty-theft charge in Central Prison
on Jan. 21, 1970 - and that probably didn't rate more than a short loss of a few
privileges. He was considered safe enough to be allowed outside to work.
He passed his time quietly enough.
But on June 17, 1973, he decided to start walking, as far away and as fast as he
could.
Williams didn't plot an elaborate escape. He says he really didn't give it much
thought at all, just set his tools down and took off.
"I was trustworthy. Honor grade," he says. "The gate was never closed. It was just a
spur-of-the-moment thing. I never plan anything."
Williams was cagey about where he went.
"I'm not going to say. It wouldn't look good," Williams says. "I just don't want them
to know."
Officials with the N.C. Department of Correction tried to find out shortly after
Williams was returned to the department's custody last November.
"He didn't have to tell us anything," said Keith Acree, a department spokesman. "We
can't make him talk if he doesn't want to."
According to notes from his short interviews with the department, Williams made his
way to Dobson in Surry County and caught the bus to Roanoke. That makes sense,
because he was born in Wytheville, Va., and had kin in southwestern Virginia.
He didn't hide out for long in Roanoke, though. The department's notes indicate that
Williams told them he hitched a ride with a long-haul trucker and wound up in North
Dakota.
From there, the timeline gets fuzzy.
Prison officials say that Williams mentioned being in Oklahoma, then Kansas and
Missouri. Even Alaska.
"Yeah, I was in Alaska," Williams says. "I was all over. The Midwest mostly. People
there are nice, real friendly."
Where else has he been?
"It ain't doing anything for me to talk," Williams says. "There's people out there
still on escape. It might backfire on them if I talked about how I did it."
Tennessee and Arkansas
Despite Williams' evasiveness about where he lived, it is clear that he spent time in
Tennessee and Arkansas.
A mention of Tennessee appears deep in his prison records in a section about prior
convictions. In addition to the 1969 murder conviction and the escape, the record
shows that Williams was arrested in Union City, Tenn., for shoplifting in May 1984.
"That was added after he got back in," Acree said.
Court officials in Union City, a town of 10,000 in northwestern Tennessee, didn't
know much about that shoplifting charge, not at first. In the pre-computer age, many
court systems destroyed their records after five years, especially for misdemeanors
and minor offenses such as shoplifting.
When Williams' story was described to her, Gerri Warren, a clerk in the Obion County
General Sessions Court, decided to dig through the remaining paper files. She found
that Williams had been arrested for shoplifting in Union City and taken to the county
jail on May 12, 1984. He was going by the name James Quisenberry.
"Says here that he went to court on July 22, 1984," Warren said. "He was fined $250,
plus court costs and sentenced to time served."
Investigators at the Union City Police Department didn't have any reason to think he
was anybody other than James Quisenberry. There were no national databases for
fingerprints, no Internet and no computers to check a man's identity.
"Quisenberry" never paid the fine. He simply vanished after he was released from
jail.
Williams settled down in Arkansas. He told prison officials that he was living among
the 2,347 residents in Pea Ridge, apparently for some 20 years, when he decided to
return to Surry County to surrender.
People in Pea Ridge came to know and like Williams, who was still using the name
James Quisenberry. Williams settled on the outskirts of town. He didn't live like a
hermit but mixed freely with others.
Williams had friends while he lived in Pea Ridge, Police Chief Tim Ledbetter said.
"Some people were real close with him," he said. "They didn't have any idea who he
was and had no reason to think anything was out of whack."
Ledbetter knows many of the people in his small town, which is not far from
Bentonville, home to Wal-Mart. Ledbetter said he saw Williams from time to time,
mostly on job sites, and never paid him much mind.
"He was just one of those people I didn't know," he said. "Far as I was concerned, he
was a fairly productive citizen."
When Williams is asked about his ability to carry on a life, a working life, he has
plenty to say.
As the ongoing national debate over illegal immigration has shown, there are plenty
of jobs available for those willing to work hard - and get paid less than market
wages - for backbreaking labor.
"Jobs are out there if you want them," Williams says. "You're not going to make a lot
of money and you have to be willing to do dirty, filthy jobs. I worked in hog houses,
chicken houses, you name it. Whatever came up. I cleaned up at construction sites,
picked up trash."
His eyes wander, looking through the reinforced glass in the prison's visitation
room, past the tall fences and the guard tower. For just a moment, the determination
of a man who had successfully hidden from authorities was plain to see.
"I could get a job in two hours if I left here," he says. "It's not hard."
Had a truck and some tools
Williams acknowledges he made friends over the years, but not too many. He was
outgoing, he says, but never talked much about himself. He owned used trucks or cars,
but nothing ostentatious.
He accumulated tools, showed up when he was supposed to and worked hard. Like many
guys, Williams likes football, fishing and hunting.
When the mood struck, Williams says, he would slip into church on Sundays.
"Methodist, mostly."
As days became weeks and weeks gave way to months and years, Williams gave up the
notion of keeping a mental meter running on his freedom. He never calculated how long
he had been gone.
"You just forget about it," he says. "Take things as they come, one day at a time."
Williams had girlfriends and people he trusted - to a degree. He says he was never
once tempted to share his secret.
He changed some of his habits and made an effort to steer clear of places where he
might run into trouble. And, he says, he avoided the lifestyle choices that landed
him in prison in the first place.
"I didn't frequent places - big cities, bars - where I could get into trouble or run
into troublemakers. I quit drinking. I learned to do without it. People can quit
anything if they want."
That self-discipline might have helped Williams engage in the larger act of
self-deception. In Williams' mind, he wasn't just going by the name James
Quisenberry. He was James Quisenberry.
In the process of becoming a new man, Williams had to decide what to do about his
real family.
When first asked, he says he doesn't have any children. An hour or so later, though,
he changes his story and admits that he has a daughter who was 3 when he went to
prison and a granddaughter in Tennessee somewhere. A great-granddaughter, too.
Surely in 32 years, he is asked, he must have tried to contact his daughter. He
swears he didn't.
Surely he carried a photo of her with him.
"I kept it all in here," he says, pointing to his head. "I knew I couldn't do that,
contact her. That's how people get caught. They slide up to their mama's house or
their wife's house and there's the police, waiting for them."
Not a quick decision
Deciding to surrender after 32 years was not a sudden decision.
"God, no. It took years," Williams says.
Chief Ledbetter of the Pea Ridge Police Department said that local authorities
received a tip about a longtime fugitive living in their midst a few weeks before
Williams turned himself in.
Somebody had been stealing mail in the area where Williams was living and
investigators with the Bella Vista division of the Benton County Sheriff's Office got
a description of the suspect's vehicle. They ran all the license-plate numbers from
similar vehicles and then checked criminal histories of their owners.
Williams had registered a vehicle in his real name; the escape warrant was now on a
computer network.
"We were looking for someone else on the mail theft and we stumbled across him," said
Sgt. Mark Kugler of the sheriff's Bella Vista division. He alerted police in nearby
Pea Ridge.
"Somehow he got wind of it," Ledbetter said. "He knew we were looking."
Williams could have moved to another town and started over. He had had the close call
in Union City and decided to slip away.
This time, he didn't. Instead, he took a bus from Pea Ridge to North Carolina. After
a few missteps, he walked into the Surry County Jail and surrendered on Nov. 8.
Deputies were incredulous.
"It liked to floored them," Williams says. "They were real nice to me while they
checked on me."
Other than a few handwritten notes left in his personal daily logbook, Sheriff Connie
Watson doesn't remember many details about Nov. 8. He does say that Williams'
surrender was one of the more remarkable things to happen in his 12 years as sheriff.
Capt. Mickey Estes, the man in charge of the Surry County Jail, remembers some things
about the day Williams surrendered. He had lots of questions for Williams and wasn't
shy about asking them.
"My thought was that he was tired of running and looking over his shoulder," Estes
said. "He was as calm as he could be, a whole lot calmer than I would have been."
Estes said that Williams also hinted that he might have been in declining health.
"He told me he thought he might have cancer," Estes said. "You'd think that if he'd
been gone that many years, he'd stay gone, so there must be more to it. Like cancer."
Only one person knows for sure, and Williams wouldn't answer questions about his
health.
But when presented with a range of possible reasons for turning himself in - fear of
being caught, health concerns, a desire to see his daughter - he did answer.
"It was a little of all that," Williams says. "I knew that one of these days they'd
catch up with me. I want to get this behind me."
The years take a toll
Williams is no longer the young man he was when he walked away from the Stokes
Correctional Center.
His brown hair has gone gray. His shoulders sag, and he walks slowly.
He is aware that he stands a good chance of dying inside prison walls. That doesn't
stop him from making plans and having dreams of what it might be like to live as a
free man under his birth name.
He says he would like to get a legitimate job. He has some skills and a work ethic.
He has vague notions about writing a book about his life on the run, where he has
been and how he managed to live by his wits all those years.
Like just about every other inmate in the penal system, he has ideas about being a
convict. And like a lot of other old men, Williams has a sense of the things that
have changed through the years - not always for the better.
During his first stint behind the fence, the food was better and inmates were
accorded more respect from guards and other inmates, Williams says. A man would get
meat, eggs and fresh vegetables.
"Now it's all synthetic stuff," he says.
Prisoners, for the most part, still keep to themselves. Williams says he has not told
any of the other cons who live in the same pod that he managed an escape and stayed
away for 32 years.
"It's so difficult now," he says. "In the old days, you could trust another convict.
Inmates had a code. We looked out for each other. Not anymore. This place is full of
druggers. You can't trust a drugger. They don't care."
The guards and gatekeepers at the Warren Correctional Center seemed genuinely
surprised when they learned that Williams was a longtime escapee. Williams doesn't
talk to them, either.
Nor has Williams told anybody about his family.
But he longs to be reunited with them, and proudly says that his daughter and
granddaughter have written to him, and sent him photos.
It bothers him some that they haven't come to visit, but Warren County is a long way
from Tennessee. Williams says he has written to prison officials seeking a transfer
to a facility in Western North Carolina.
Williams falls back into his cat-and-mouse answers when asked for his daughter's name
or where she lives. Efforts to find her through public-records searches in North
Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee didn't turn up a trace.
"I don't want that in there. The less people know, the better off I'll be," he says.
"I might want to get a job in Wal-Mart when I get out. I don't want them knowing
about me. Nobody wants to hire an ex-con."
Williams' projected release date is Nov. 2, 2017. He will be 76 then. Because he went
to prison in 1969 - long before structured-sentencing laws went into effect - he is
eligible for parole. His first parole review is scheduled for Aug. 18.
It's unlikely that the N.C. Parole Commission will let him out - he has served less
than five years of his original 30-year sentence. First-review hearings are required
by law and are usually informational in nature.
Still, Williams hopes that the commission sees things his way.
"I'm not going to go out there and screw up. This is my first, last and only time in
here. I hope I live long enough to get out.
"You can't think nothing negative. You can't give up. Life is too short as it is."
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I intend to last long enough to put out of business all COck-suckers
and other beneficiaries of the institutionalized slavery and genocide.

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"The army that will defeat terrorism doesn't wear uniforms, or drive
Humvees, or calls in air-strikes. It doesn't have a high command, or
high security, or a high budget. The army that can defeat terrorism
does battle quietly, clearing minefields and vaccinating children. It
undermines military dictatorships and military lobbyists. It subverts
sweatshops and special interests.Where people feel powerless, it
helps them organize for change, and where people are powerful, it
reminds them of their responsibility." ~~~~ Author Unknown ~~~~
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