Vicky White and Casey White
New details have emerged about the relationship between an accused murderer and the onetime corrections officer who helped him escape from prison before killing herself earlier this year.
The nationwide manhunt for Alabama murder suspect Casey White, and his then-girlfriend, who also happened to be a then-jail employed sheriff’s deputy, Vicky White, no relation, captivated the nation for over a week until their brief abscondence went awry in Indiana.
For six months prior to the daring April escape from a detention center in Lauderdale County, the duo spoke nearly 1,000 times – occasionally even having phone sex.
According to AL.com, Lauderdale County Sheriff Rick Singleton recently said the star-crossed lovers spoke together some 949 times total between August 2021 and late February 2022 while Casey White was incarcerated at the William Donaldson Correctional Facility in Jefferson County. At the time, he was serving a 75-year prison sentence for a multi-state crime spree after being convicted in 2016 on charges of attempted murder, burglary, robbery, kidnapping, animal cruelty, and attempting to elude law enforcement.
“We’re in the process of listening to those calls to see if there’s any information there that might help us,’’ the sheriff said. “The only thing I know for a fact was that they had some phone sex.”
Singleton said he thought some of the torrid phone calls between the two likely occurred while the former deputy was on duty.
“That’s a lot of phone calls,” the sheriff said. “I think what it tells us is they were definitely in a relationship.”
None of the calls, at least so far, predate August 2021.
“He was here in 2020 and that’s when he planned an escape the first time,’’ Singleton said. “Apparently, this relationship was established in 2021 when he was here.”
The inmate went back-and-forth between a number of various jails, clinks, and lockups in the northern part of the Yellowhammer State over the past few years in order to attend various court proceedings.
On April 29, 2022, he was incarcerated at the Lauderdale County jail on charges of murdering Connie Ridgeway. Then and there, Vicky White served as the Lauderdale County Sheriff’s Office assistant director of corrections. She told subordinates she was going to take him to a court appearance by herself, by way of a mental health evaluation, and in violation of protocol, and then head home early because she didn’t feel well. Casey White, of course, never made it to the court appearance. Eleven days later, their story came to an end as Vicky White shot and killed herself in lieu of being captured.
On the day she died, investigators unveiled a raft of charges against the sheriff’s deputy over her intricately plotted out efforts to secure freedom, false identities, changes of clothes, and multiple getaway cars in service of the headline-generating vanishing act.
In July of this year, Casey White was indicted for the felony murder of Vicky White on the theory that he was part of the underlying crime that led to his girlfriend’s death and therefore bears criminal liability. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
[images via U.S. Marshals]