Pal: Warden's Wife Feared Captor

The wife of a deputy prison warden who vanished 11 years ago with an escaped killer feared him and tried to flee from the fugitive on three occasions, according to the chicken farmer who employed the pair.

Debra Grace tells the Nacogdoches Daily Sentinel that Randolph Dial and Bobbi Parker lived on her Texas farm for two years in the late 1990s. Grace says she was the first person Parker called after Dial was arrested.

"I saw him hit her, and I told him that I wasn't going to have that on my farm," she told the Sentinal. "He worked her like a slave, and I always thought she was just a battered wife who was just afraid to leave her husband."

Grace said Parker attempted to escape on three occasions.

"There's a lady here in Nacogdoches with whom she was friends, and she went to her house. But they both got scared of what Dial would do, and Sam [Parker's assumed name] would go back," Grace said.

Grace said that she found Parker sitting inside a chicken houses crying on several occasions, but Parker never explained why.

"She was afraid of him. She just wore hats and kept her head down most of the time," Grace said.

Dial offered a simple explanation for the failure of the prison warden's wife to try to escape or contact her family for more than a decade.

"I had worked on her for about a year trying to get her mind right. I convinced her the friend was the enemy and the enemy was the friend. I think they refer to it as the Stockholm Syndrome," Dial told reporters in a jailhouse interview earlier this week, following his capture.

Dial has had plenty of company in his excursion into pop psychology. The strange case of the convict and his captive has prompted nationwide speculation about what happened and why.

Parker disappeared with Dial in 1994 during his escape from an Oklahoma prison. Randy Parker, her husband, was an assistant warden at the prison.

Dial, 60, was arrested Monday and authorities found Parker, 42, shortly afterward. They were living as a couple on a chicken farm in East Texas, near Grace's farm.

Investigators believe Dial kept Parker from escaping all those years by threatening to hurt her family.

But some locals have been skeptical of Parker's account, saying she often drove alone and had plenty of chances to flee.

Stockholm syndrome is a condition in which kidnap victims become sympathetic toward their captors and begin to identify with them. The most famous example was millionaire heiress Patti Hearst, who was kidnapped by the radical Symbionese Liberation Army and soon began assisting members of the group to carry out armed bank robberies.

Dial told reporters he abducted Parker at knifepoint and brainwashed her into staying with him as they moved from Houston to Crockett to Nacogdoches, and then the chicken farm five years ago.

Frank M. Ochberg, former associate director of the National Institute of Mental Health, is an authority on the Stockholm Syndrome.

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Ochberg did not attempt a long-distance diagnosis of Parker, but he did offer a roadmap for armchair psychologists.

Ochberg said Parker might have been suffering from the syndrome " ... if she went through the stages of shock, terror and regression that are seen in sudden captures, and if she developed the ironic and profound positive feelings [for her captor] spontaneously and without conscious control."

On the other hand, he said: " ... if... she made a calculated choice to stay with her assailant (or to leave with him in the first place), perhaps out of fear of harm to her family, perhaps out of preference for a different life, then the syndrome would not apply."

The FBI located the couple thanks to a tip generated by the TV show "America's Most Wanted." Dial and Parker were living in Campti, a tiny community deep in the Texas Piney Woods, near the Louisiana line.

Parker and her husband were reunited and returned to Oklahoma on Thursday.

The Parkers' two daughters, who were 8 and 10 when Dial escaped with their mother, were at the warden's residence at the William S. Key Correctional Center in Fort Supply in northwestern Oklahoma.

"Warden Parker and Bobbi want to maintain their privacy and security with their family," said corrections department spokesman Jerry Massie.

Dial waived extradition and arrived at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester early Wednesday and was placed in the top-security unit. He is alone in a cell in a portion of the prison containing death row inmates. Inmates there receive meals in their cells and are locked up 23 hours a day.

Dial, a sculptor and painter, was convicted of the 1981 murder of a karate instructor. He had obtained trusty status at the reformatory, and he ran an inmate pottery program with Bobbi Parker and had access to the couple's home during the day in staff housing on prison grounds.

"We're conducting an investigation to look into the kidnapping and the escape," said Jack Dailey, a spokesman for the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation.

He also said there continues to be no indication Bobbi Parker committed any crimes.

"We've not found anything that would refute her status as a captive throughout the whole thing," he said.