By William Thornton
al.com
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — A new documentary from Netflix gives more details about the jailhouse romance that led an Alabama corrections officer to assist a capital murder suspect in fleeing for 11 days in 2022.
“Jailbreak: Love on the Run” tells the story of Vicky White, the Lauderdale County jailer, and Casey White, the inmate she sprang from the jail, in April of 2022. Vicky, who was not related to Casey, died by suicide as police closed in on the couple in Indiana.
The film talks to former coworkers of Vicky White, reconstructing the events leading up the escape. New revelations come through recordings of more than 1,000 calls made between the two on Vicky’s burner phone over a two-year period.
The two indulged in phone sex, planned their escape, argued about him using meth while in jail and fantasized about what they would do once the coast was clear.
“It’s about chicken time. Chicken day rolls around real quick, don’t it? ... We’re gonna have fun on our adventure. Never lookin’ back at little Alabama, and then venture around the world on a sailboat,” Casey White tells her in one phone call.
The film charts Vicky White’s 17 years working corrections in Lauderdale County, a nurturing presence who worked long hours, weekends, and was almost always on call due to the demands of her job. One inmate described her as the mother he never had.
She would sometimes sit at her desk, listening to inmate phone calls, watching videos, to expose corrections officers bringing in contraband.
One former coworker, Joyce Brawley, observed: “She wanted everybody to think that she could be a superhero. Vicky just wanted to take care of everybody, but who’s taking care of Vicky?”
Enter Casey White in 2020, who was brought to the Lauderdale County Jail awaiting trial for capital murder. This was after he got a 75 year sentence for a shooting spree.
“We considered him a very dangerous person,” former Sheriff Rick Singleton said.
But somehow, a physical relationship developed between the two that Vicky White managed to keep hidden, despite the close quarters of the jail.
Workers suspected she had a relationship that made her happy, but had no idea who it might be. Even her parents did not suspect what eventually happened.
She would hand envelopes to Casey while delivering mail to inmates, and he would hand back a letter addressed to his mother, but with no address or stamps, one inmate remembered. It was intended for Vicky. He would occasionally ask other inmates for the correct spelling of certain words, which made them suspect he was writing to someone else.
During shopping trips, she began buying camping equipment, firearms, lingerie, fake IDs, an orange Ford Edge, and laying plans for their eventual escape. She quickly sold her house at auction and gave away furniture. Meanwhile, she would give Casey extra from the jail commissary, and took him outside the jail on a “dry run.”
Casey White, facing a possible death sentence, had nothing to lose.
“We go up to Tennessee, in like the backwoods …We ain’t never gone be around people the rest of our lives,” he told Vicky White. “Anyone gets within 300 yards it’s gonna be shots fired.”
Vicky informed coworkers that when she left her job, “I’m going out with a bang.”
On Thursday, April 28, 2022, Vicky White put in for retirement, effective the following day. “I can’t do it no more,” she said, shocking her coworkers. Her behavior in the weeks leading up had seemed erratic.
That Friday, the jail was shorthanded, with five deputies on duty and Singleton in Birmingham for Academy graduation. Vicky still had a retirement party, but remained largely silent and preoccupied while coworkers were cutting the cake.
By 9:30 a.m., Casey White had been removed from his cell and was waiting for her. Within minutes, the two of them were gone from the jail. Hours later, coworkers noticed the two had not returned. By the time Vicky’s patrol car was found at a local parking lot, authorities had realized she must have been involved in Casey’s escape. Video of the two leaving the jail showed Vicky walking in front of Casey, the capital murder suspect - a serious breach of procedure.
The resulting manhunt eventually tracked them to a Ford F-150 in Evansville, Ind. , found abandoned in a car wash, almost 300 miles away from Florence. Security footage showed Casey abandoning the truck and getting into a grey Cadillac, which was later tracked to a motel.
As authorities were getting into position to take arrest them, Vicky and Casey fled the motel. With police closing in, Vicky shot herself in the Cadillac. The angle of the wound was so odd, coworkers said, it seemed accidental.
Police pulled Casey from the car, with him asking, “Is my wife hurtin’? Is my wife alive?”
In a jailhouse interview, Casey told the filmmakers the two planned to take the money, find a trailer, and “stay hunkered down” for a while.
“We thought we’d never really get caught,” he said.
Casey White pleaded guilty in June 2023 to escape charges and was sentenced to life in prison. White entered his plea in exchange for the felony murder charge involving Vicky White being dropped.
Last year, prosecutors dropped capital murder charges against Casey White in the 2015 murder-for-hire of Connie Ridgeway , which White had confessed to in 2020. He was in Lauderdale County Jail awaiting trial on those charges when the escape took place. Prosecutors saw no need to pursue the case as White was already sentenced to life without parole.
The jail nurse, Kylie O’Bryant, perhaps delivered the moral of the story, if one exists.
“Hell, you don’t never know nobody ‘til you live with their ass, and well, that’s the truth,” she said.
—
©2024 Advance Local Media LLC. Visit al.com.
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.