Saturday, November 1, 2008

Carol Hart: Life on the Lam

Carol Hart's mugshot from the sixties. (Photo courtesy of the Michigan Department of Corrections via The Flint Journal.)


Shannon Murphy of The Flint Journal covers the recent capture of Carol Hart:

"Nearly 40 years ago, Carol Hart sat in a car outside the former Dort Motel, listening to the gunshots that would ultimately kill one man and paralyze another.

"Hart, who was 22 at the time and living near Millington, drove away before she could hear or see any more. Still, prosecutors charged her in 1969 because she was, after all, driving what was supposed to be the getaway car in the robbery turned murder of motel owner Leonard Smith.

"After pleading guilty, she spent only a year of her 25-35 year prison sentence for assault with intent to rob while armed before escaping the now defunct Detroit House of Corrections, a women's prison in Plymouth Township, by simply walking away.

"After 38 years on the run -- changing her identity and crisscrossing the country from Florida to Nevada to North Carolina and finally back to Michigan -- Hart was captured Wednesday afternoon in northern Michigan."
Hart's certainly not the first person to evade capture for decades. Willie Carroll Parker is just one other fascinating example. Should Hart, now 61 and happily married, go back to prison?



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Thanks for commenting. I moderate comments, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You might enjoy my book about Flint called "Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City," a Michigan Notable Book for 2014 and a finalist for the 33rd Annual Northern California Book Award for Creative NonFiction. Filmmaker Michael Moore described Teardown as "a brilliant chronicle of the Mad Maxization of a once-great American city." More information about Teardown is available at www.teardownbook.com.