CAMPTI, Texas — Bobbi Parker was a little shy and always in a bit of hurry, "like she had left a cake in the oven," one acquaintance said.
But she was an independent woman, or so it seemed to the people she encountered in the Piney Woods of rural Texas. Every few weeks, she stopped to buy supplies for a local chicken farm. She cashed her paychecks at a convenience store and bought beer for the man she called her husband. She was always alone.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday April 13, 2005 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 45 words Type of Material: Correction
Fugitive case -- A photo caption with an article about captured fugitive Randolph Dial in Thursday's Section A said he was sent to an Oklahoma prison in 1981 after he confessed to murdering Kelly Hogan. Dial was imprisoned after confessing to the murder in 1986.
If she had wanted to leave, said James Chandler, who works at the farm supply store, "all she had to do was just keep on driving."
This week, police stormed Parker's mobile home and arrested Randolph Dial, convicted in the 1981 murder of a karate teacher in Oklahoma. Dial had been in hiding for 11 years, ever since escaping from prison by holding a knife to Parker's throat while she drove him to freedom. She was the deputy warden's wife.
Authorities say they believe Parker's contention that she had been held against her will all along -- not physically, but by threat of violence. Some of her acquaintances aren't so convinced.
And an event that Chandler called the "biggest thing to ever hit" this isolated pocket of East Texas had people pondering questions that seemed preposterous just days ago.
Was Parker, 42, worried that Dial, 60, might harm her real family if she tried to escape?
Did she suffer from Stockholm syndrome, where kidnap victims become sympathetic to their abductors?
Or had the polite mother of two simply fallen for a blue-eyed, smooth-talking, professed hit man?
"In the last two days, I've heard so much stuff that I don't know what to believe anymore," Chandler said. "But I wonder about it. In 11 years, you would think she could have done something."
In 1986, a drunken Dial confessed to the unsolved murder of Kelly Hogan. Five years earlier, Dial told investigators, he had knocked on Hogan's door and shot him in the chest with a .38-caliber pistol.
Dial said that the mob had paid him $5,000, but investigators never figured out who, if anyone, had orchestrated the murder or why Hogan might have been the target.
Dial's wife at the time told investigators that he had turned her into a "robot," unable to think for herself, and tricked her into helping him kill Hogan. She was shot and killed four months later; her murder was never solved.
