US Marshals are searching for an escaped murderer and his jail guard lover in rural Indiana after authorities located a vehicle that was reported stolen in Tennessee.
The vehicle was reported missing just hours after Casey White and Vicky White – who are unrelated but are said to be lovers – abandoned her SUV in Florence, Tennessee, on April 29.
Investigators located it Monday in Evansville, Indiana, a small city along the Ohio River that borders Kentucky, WAAY reported. Police are working to determine if the vehicle is connected to the couple.
Confessed murderer Casey, 38, broke out of Lauderdale County Detention Center in Alabama on April 29, aided by 57-year-old prison guard Vicky White.
The pair are still on the run from authorities 11 days after they were supposed to arrive at an Alabama courthouse for a ‘mental health evaluation’.
Lauderdale County Sheriff Rick Singleton said he ‘really had hoped that we would have had them in a couple of days, three days max.’
Discovery of the stolen vehicle followed a declaration from Casey’s former attorney that Vicky was likely the mastermind behind the inmate’s prison break.
Dale Bryant was the defense attorney for Casey when he was sentenced in 2019 on counts of attempted murder, kidnapping, robbery, burglary and other felonies dating back to 2015.
Bryant claims while the 6ft 9in inmate has a lengthy criminal history and escaped from jail before, his most recent getaway – which took place 11 days ago – was ‘far too thorough and too far-thinking’.
‘That is not Casey’s MO,’ Bryant told Newsweek on Sunday. ‘None of his crimes were planned. They are all short sighted; in the moment crimes.’
He added: ‘Even his prior escape attempt from the same county jail was spontaneous.’
The attorney also noted footage of their escape suggests jail guard Vicky White, who was in a more than two-year relationship with Casey, looks more worrisome than him.
‘If you notice in the video of the two leaving the jail, Casey’s body language does not look like someone that is hiding something,’ Bryant said. ‘Her body language looks more hurried and anxious.’
Lauderdale County Sheriff Rick Singleton, who worked with Vicky for many years, echoed the lawyer’s claim, saying the escape was ‘well-planned and thought out’.
He revealed that in the week leading up to the jailbreak Vicky purchased men’s clothing at a Kohl’s store and visited a sex shop. It is unclear if she bought anything at the adult toy store.
‘We just confirmed that this was well-planned and thought out,’ Singleton told the TODAY Show Monday. ‘Obviously, she bought some clothes for him. The adult store thing? I don’t know what that was about.’
Bryant also believes Casey may attempt ‘suicide by cop’.
He claimed his former client wanted to die when he was arrested back in 2015 and suggested Casey could likely shoot at police officers to elicit a deadly response.
‘Casey wanted to die… He was trying to get the officers to shoot him and that is kind of my fear, how this situation is going to end,’ Bryant told WAFF last week.
‘I’m afraid that Casey may try to shoot them [police officers] to try and get them to shoot him. I want to say in his interview after his arrest and in my conversations with him, he wanted to die that day.’
Bryant went on to declare the escaped suspected murderer is actually a ‘decent person’ when on appropriate medication, but warned he ‘can’t function in the real world’ and is prone to self-medication with dangerous substances.
‘Casey suffers from a mental illness… When he’s on medication and in a supervised environment… he’s a decent person. When he gets out of incarceration, he self medicates by smoking methamphetamine or taking other illegal substances,’ Bryant said.
Bryant’s comments came as a woman living in Tennessee discovered Casey and Vicky’s getaway car had been abandoned outside her home.
‘It’s eerie that they were here,’ College Grove resident Jackie Adams told DailyMail.com Saturday after coming across the suspicious vehicle on the evening of April 29, roughly 100 miles from the jail the pair had fled earlier that day.
Adams, 41 who drives a school-bus in the rural town, said she was coming home from one of her other jobs when she saw the then-unidentified SUV with tinted windows and no tags, which belongs to former corrections officer Vicky.
‘I went ahead and called the sheriff’s office to have it towed. We know all of our neighbors and I immediately knew it wasn’t anybody’s car.’
The car – which contained contained Vicky’s jail radio, handcuffs and keys – was towed later that day, with sheriffs seemingly unaware of the vehicle’s connection to then burgeoning manhunt.
The car sat in a Tennessee tow lot for an entire week, but cops on Friday realized the impounded vehicle belonged to Vicky, spurring a force of US Marshals, Williamson County Sheriff’s Officers and SWAT members to circle back to Adams’ property Friday morning – a week after she had reported the vehicle.
‘It was pretty intense yesterday,’ the school bus driver recalled Saturday to DailyMail.com.
She said officers searched her property, the properties around her home, and nearby woods relentlessly into the night, for any clues as to the location of the pair – whom police believe are romantically involved.
Speaking to DailyMail.com just hours after drones and helicopters descended on the home – where they remained for hours and into the evening, according to Adams – the homeowner said she hopes the duo are long gone.
‘I would hope that the people aren’t here but I hope that they find them soon so that people around here can sleep peacefully,’ Adams said, adding that the car turning up in the usually quiet neighborhood left her and others feeling on edge.
‘We know everybody on our road and we watch out for each other.’
She added: ‘We have children and we like to trust that our kids are safe in their yards but now we can’t trust that.’
Cops say Vicky, a 57-year-old prison guard at Lauderdale County Jail in Alabama with a spotless record, helped confessed murderer Casey White escape custody the morning of April 29, the day she was scheduled to retire.
Vicky, who was an assistant director of corrections at the facility, used a police vehicle to ferry Casey out of the maximum-security jail, under the guise that she was taking the con to a scheduled mental health evaluation.
The pair then switched to Vicky’s orange Ford Edge – the car Adams would discover on her property hours later.
Lauderdale County Sheriff Rick Singleton said at a press briefing Friday that the couple’s escape vehicle was abandoned roughly two hours away from the jail.
‘I think this was a very well thought out plan,’ said Singleton. ‘We’re sort of at a loss.’
Singleton noted that Vicky was divorced but continued living with her ex-husband, who died of Parkinson’s disease earlier this year. He wonders if grief at the loss of her former partner may have triggered her recent actions.
The sheriff of Williamson County, where the SUV was discovered, said in a tweet earlier Friday that ‘there is NO sign the two are still in our area.’
Investigators have also learned that Vicky had sold her home in the weeks before the escape, and had withdrawn about $90,000 in cash from several banks in the area, Singleton said.
He also noted that Vicky had used an alias to purchase the SUV and was likely to try to do that again.
The US Marshals Service, a federal agency specialized in fugitive manhunts, also said in a report Friday that Vicky might have darkened her hair.
The agency released composite images of what she would look like, as well as photos of Casey White’s tattoos – including one associated with a white supremacist prison gang.
Their report also noted the couple’s stark difference in size, with Casey standing a full foot taller than the former corrections officer.
The reward for information leading to the couple’s arrest has been increased to $25,000, Singleton said.