Thirty-seven years after Billy Burchfield escaped from a Georgia prison, somebody called authorities to say he was living under a false name in a small Kentucky town.
Detectives knocked on his door Wednesday evening, and while he claimed he was not that guy, a quick electronic fingerprint check confirmed he was Burchfield. Soon, authorities say, he’ll be heading back to a Georgia prison.
“He obviously made somebody mad, or they held a grudge and thought it’s time to rat him out,” said Gilbert Acciardo, spokesman for the Laurel County Sheriff’s Office in Kentucky.
Burchfield, 67, is the second long-term fugitive from Georgia re-captured in recent weeks. Authorities caught up to Robert Stackowitz in Connecticut last month after he eluded them for 48 years. The similarities in their two stories are striking.
Both men fled Georgia to faraway small towns where they disappeared into new identities, gaining reputations for their kindness and generosity. And both of their re-arrests have spurred intense debate on whether the men, both senior citizens, should be returned to serve out their sentence, or freed because they led clean lives through the intervening years.
Burchfield was six years into a 15-year manslaughter sentence when he escaped from the Jackson County Correctional Institute in 1979. He assumed the identity of his dead cousin, Harold Arnold, in the little Kentucky town of London, population 8,000. It’s right off I-75.
He married there, and the couple opened a mom-and-pop gas station/lunch place popular among law officers. People say he was a generous and congenial fellow.
“He would bring food to shut-ins. He offered Thanksgiving dinners for poor people,” said Wilma Westerfield, 72, who cut his hair for years in the eighties.
Shot woman in the neck
Georgia authorities cast him a darker light, according to court documents obtained Friday by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Burchfield was originally charged with murder after shooting a woman named Vera Sue Burchfield in the neck and killing her in his residence in Whitfield County on July 7, 1973, according to Superior Court records.
Whitfield County is about a 2 1/2-hour drive north of Atlanta. The court documents indicate he eventually pleaded to voluntary manslaughter.
How he exacted his escape from the Jackson County Correctional Institution remains unclear, say officials there.
People say he’s been in London at least since the eighties, fitting in smoothly in a county known as the birthplace of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Fairs there frequently host a Col. Sanders lookalike contest to honor the founder.
When the county sheriff posted news this week of the arrest of the man known as Bill Arnold, the guy who ran Arnold’s Get and Go for years, some 200 people commented, virtually all shocked that this could be such a nice person.
“Liked him before and I like him now. I’ll pray for him,” said one man.
Another woman spoke of his wife, Carol, doing her taxes.
Westerfield said she learned a lot about him as she cut his hair for about five years. He liked to wear his hair in a style similar to Elvis Presley, slicked back with sideburns. He talked a lot, but never about his past, she said. He did have two sisters living in town, she said.
He had started out in London as a long-haul truck driver. He met Carol in the nineties and they operated the popular Arnold’s. He also owned some cigarette shacks around town. Carol died of cancer about a decade ago. He had more or less retired in recent times.
“They seemed to be a very loving couple,” she said. “He took great care of her when she had cancer.”
‘Highly regarded’
Lots of people know about him, including Acciardo, the spokesman for the Laurel County Sheriff’s Office, who issued the news of his arrest. “He was highly regarded,” Acciardo said.
He said someone notified the authorities in Jackson County, Ga., that “there was a man living in London, Ky., who was not who he said he was.” Assisting in locating him was the Georgia Department of Corrections Fugitive Apprehension Unit.
When Laurel County detectives arrived at his home on East Laurel Road, he denied that he was Burchfield. They submitted his fingerprints to the FBI and the Kentucky State Police, which confirmed he was Burchfield while the detectives sat with him that evening.
Burchfield is being held in Kentucky without bond. Georgia corrections officials have already made clear they want him back.
Wilma Westerfield has mixed feeling about that. He’s led a clean life since, and he’s helped a lot of people, she said.
“I’d be hard-pressed to say take him back to serve his sentence,” she said. “But that’s the law.”
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