Marie Walsh - A Tale of Two Lives

 

 

I was home one day when I received a call from a man who was trimming the trees in the neighbor's yard next door. And he asked me to come out in front to see if there was any damage from a branch that had fallen in my yard. So, I went outside. As I approached him, he pulled out a badge and said, "Are you Susan LaFevre?" And I said, "No, I'm Marie Walsh." I was Alan's wife, Katie, Maureen, and Alan Jr.'s mother. But I hadn't been Susan LaFever in 33 years. But then, he pulled out a mugshot of me when I was 19, and I knew at that point that the two worlds that I had been living had finally collided.

As a teenager growing up in Michigan, I had listened to Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, worn paisley print dresses and fringe suede jackets, all choices that drove my parents crazy. I also went to a community college and folded clothes at a department store. By most accounts, I was a pretty average teenager. 

 

And until one night when I went with a friend to a pizza place, was a guy that I'd only met a couple times, a friend of my ex-boyfriend. And suddenly, we were surrounded by police and arrested. When they interrogated me later, they said that it wasn't me that they wanted. This was the early day of the war on drugs, and they said, "We just want some names." But I didn't have any names to give them. My parents were very angry. I'd been raised in a very strict Catholic home, and had always been told that it was better to die than embarrass your parents, and we're supposed to make them proud, not bring the family down. 

 

My uncle was a prominent attorney in town, and he said that I should take a plea deal that I'd been offered to plead guilty and I would get probation for one year. So, I was very reluctant to do this. I hadn't done anything wrong. But my father also said that. My mother was quite ill and that an embarrassing public trial would make her feel worse, so I finally gave in, I decided to just do what I was told for once. 

 

So, I pled guilty. And then I went back to the court and stood before the judge expecting probation. He looked down at me and said that he wanted to send a message to the public, and he sentenced me to 10 to 20 years in prison. So, I was shocked more than anything, more than sad, that would come later. At the time, I was just stunned. I couldn't figure out what had gone wrong. I'd done what they told me and I thought there must be a mistake. 

 

Nonetheless, the next day, I was sent to a prison in Detroit. And I thought, “I can't survive this.” But then, part of me didn't want to survive it. I didn't want to survive. I didn't want to live. My uncle now said that since I'd pled guilty, I couldn't appeal my sentence. I was devastated, depressed, I guess I was just for months. And eight months later, I received my first visit, and it was my grandfather. And he said, "Your only option is to escape this prison." 

 

When I got up off my chair, this is my grandfather, who was a very respected man from a very prominent family in Detroit for many generations and he'd never broken the law in his life, and here he was telling me to escape from a prison, and he would help me. [audience laughter] So, I was stunned again. And he said, "If you make it over the fence, I'll be there waiting for you." So, I was terrified of the idea of escape, but I'd heard stories about people getting caught on the fence, and caught in the barbed wire or shot while they're trying to get over it. But I was more terrified of staying in this prison, this place, for 10 to 20 years. 

 

So, early one morning, I was on my way to a prison job. It was still dark. Under the cover of darkness, I bolted for the fence. I ran, started climbing up the fence. I threw some clothing the best I could over the barbed wire and jumped to the other side, my feet hitting the frozen ground. My hands were all were bleeding, I noticed, but I knew I just had to keep running. It didn't matter. I just had to start running and keep running. I ran and ran until I felt like my heart was going to burst through my chest, but I just had to keep going. I heard a helicopter overhead after a little while and all I could think of was, "I hope they shoot me, I don't want to go back." 

 

And I kept running. Finally, the day started getting a little brighter, and I could see my grandfather's car at the edge of the woods, just like he'd said. It was a welcome sight. I jumped in the backseat and he took off. My heart was pounding at every intersection, every moment away, getting further from the prison, just felt elated. He drove about 30 miles to his house. 

 

It looked strange. Every other time I'd been to his home was-- Growing up, almost every holiday we'd spent at my grandfather’s, and the big house had been filled with many cousins, my brothers, and sisters. But today, it was eerily quiet. A little while later my parents arrived. I was shocked to see my mother was in a wheelchair now. We hugged, thinking we might never see each other again, and she slipped $200 in my hand. 

 

Two weeks later, I arrived in San Diego in the middle of the night. When I woke up, it was to a glistening pastel-colored world. I decided I was now Marie Day. I'd left Susan behind in a cold, wintry Michigan. I started immediately to build a new life, and I got a job, and roommates, and made new relationships. Sometimes I'd get so comfortable with people that I would reveal my experience and instantly regret it that they when it came out that they now knew this. So, I feel like I knew I had to distance myself from whoever I had told. 

 

So, years later when I met Alan, I knew that I couldn't tell him. I didn't ever want to have to leave him. So, Alan and I got married. We’re married and had three children and started to build a new life together. I had lived a life that I had dreamed of, that my grandfather would have been proud of. I knew the fear never left me, knowing that even the slightest mistake, a minor traffic ticket, and I might be pulled back into this terrible world, terrible place. So, I just was very careful. 

 

But then, one day, a relative called and said that the police were calling around and looking for me, asking if I was still alive and if they had heard from me, if I was alive. And everybody said that I wasn't, because almost no one that I had gotten in touch with knew my address. We'd hoped that this was a formality that the detective would go away and quit looking for me, but he kept on. And month after month, and about a year later, so I got another call, and five police cars were at my brother's house in Arizona. They're banging on the door, yelling for him to answer the door. I knew that I had a decision to make. Do I tell my husband about my past and uproot the family? 

 

My son was 15 and in high school, just started, and I said, “I don't want to do that to him. I said that I felt like I'd be running like a wild animal.” I thought, I can't do this to my family. It was nothing that they had done. And so, I just stayed put and decided to prepare my family the best I could as far as having the kids cook and do their laundry. I even planted succulents, a plant that my husband couldn't kill if I happened to, [audience laughter] the worst case happened. 

 

And then, here I was, finding myself looking at my mugshot in my front yard. Aat that point, I knew that my long run from the law was over. The detective asked me to go in the house to leave my valuables. I took off my wedding ring for the first time in 23 years. My daughter was there, Katie, she was 19, the same age that this all happened to me, when everything started. She ran over and was crying, knowing something was very wrong. I tried to comfort her. Then I had to call my husband. He was at work. The words "prison escape" and "10 to 20 years, fugitive," [audience laughter] took him a moment, but [audience laughter] he's an accountant, of course. [audience laughter] When he recovered a few minutes later, he did go into a protective mode and said, "We'll get through this together." 

 

So, I was transported back to Michigan in a cage in the back of a truck. My hands and ankles were chained tightly to my waist for 24 hours a day for almost two weeks. Yeah. When I got there, there was a media frenzy about my case. Not only my family was embarrassed, but the Michigan legal system was also embarrassed about the details of my case. The guards seemed to be incited. Some of them felt a little incited by the media attention and singled me out, not letting me-- First thing was not letting me use the telephone like other inmates. So, I wasn't able to call home or call an attorney for many weeks. My husband didn't know where I was for more than a month. He had no idea. 

 

I stayed there for a year, waiting for a hearing. It was a year that I didn't able to touch my children, able to hug them. Holidays went by, came, and went. My oldest daughter graduated from college, birthdays. Finally, I did get my hearing. It was made clear that there was no evidence to convict me in the first place, and I was given a release date soon after that. 

 

My husband and friends met me on my release day, met me at the gate. There was a helicopter overhead. This time, it was to shoot news footage, not bullets. So, as I walked out, my husband leaned over and said, "It's over. It's finally over." As a fugitive, I'd always looked forward, always planning my next step. It wasn't until I stopped running and was able to look back that I realized how much my grandfather had risked, what an amazing impact that he'd had on my life. I only wish that he were around at that day to see that it all had turned out all right. Thank you.