Marie Walsh, also known as Susan LeFevre, shares her story after 32 years as a fugitive. SMH
Marie Walsh, Inmate 140217 and Susan LeFevre may all represent the same woman, but the identities represent very different lives.
At 4 p.m. today, the woman now known as Marie Walsh will sit down opposite Oprah Winfrey and talk about her 32 years as a fugitive. On Friday, she’ll appear on NBC’s Today Show as part of the promotion of her new book “A Tale of Two Lives: The Susan LeFevre Fugitive Story,” by Marie S. Walsh, also known as Susan LeFevre.
Walsh, a former Thomas Township resident best known in Saginaw County as Susan LeFevre, was 19 when she was arrested Jan. 8, 1974, with Richard A. Anderson, her boyfriend at the time, for selling heroin to an undercover officer during a sting in Thomas Township.
LeFevre and Anderson both pleaded guilty to drug and conspiracy charges and received prison sentences of 10 to 20 years apiece, though Walsh said she was promised probation for her guilty plea.
“I was put right into the belly of the beast,” Walsh said. “I saw the so-called drug war and how the justice system was really dealing with the drug problem.
Walsh admits to using drugs before her arrest but said prison rehab was reserved for people about to complete their sentences, and most of her one year and 19 days in prison were filled by torment rather than trying to get better.
“They kept telling me they were going to make me scum like everybody else,” Walsh said. “They told me they were going to crush me.”
The 1973 Arthur Hill High School graduate said she decided she had to get out. She said she climbed a barbed-wire fence and her grandfather helped her escape from the Scott Correctional Facility in Wayne County in 1976.
“I didn’t want to be a fugitive,” she said. “On one hand, it felt really good to be free and escaped from such a situation, but on the other hand I was really worried, and I left everything I knew.”
Walsh said the conditions and treatment she experienced in prison led her to write her book.
“I knew how terrible it was to be in the prison system. I could hear rapes down the hallways and would wonder when my number would come up,” Walsh said. “Nobody believes an inmate, and that’s why I’m doing this, because people don’t believe inmates.”
Anderson, Walsh’s codefendant and a Vietnam veteran, served about 2 years before his release. He was killed execution-style four years later. His slaying is unsolved.
A married couple out for a walk along Banner near East in Spaulding Township found Anderson’s body in a water-filled ditch Sept. 29, 1981.
Meanwhile, LeFevre had already made it west to California. She began going by her middle name, Marie, and using the last name Day. She said she made up a social security number similar to her own and obtained a California driver’s license.
“I was as surprised as anybody when I got a license,” she said, adding that her new identity allowed her to work low-paying jobs, such as at a mall juice bar, but not much else. “It didn’t seem to matter, but usually, after a year, I’d have to move on to a different job.”
As the years went on, she married and had three children. She said she always was wary of detection.
“I led a pretty normal life,” Walsh said recently from her home in California. “But I always did have to worry. I didn’t just get off.”
In March 2008, authorities received an anonymous online tip, which Walsh said was merely a website listing absconders, that the woman they were searching for was living in suburban San Diego. Investigators confirmed her identity, and federal marshals in April 2008 pulled Walsh over in the neighborhood of the Del Mar, Calif., home where she lived with her husband, Alan Walsh, and three children.
A month later, she was back in the Michigan prison system, and once again she was Susan LeFevre. In September 2008, she pleaded guilty to escape and was sentenced to five years probation and 18 months of parole. In January 2009, parole board members voted unanimously to free her.
She went back to California, and back to the name Marie.
“They destroyed Susan, they killed her,” Walsh said. “Susan was a really nice young girl who trusted people, who believed them when they said they were going to give her probation. I said goodbye to her on my way to California.”
Thank grandholm for her not serving the prison sentence the judge deem proper for a high level herion dealer . But when you come from a family of lawyers and bowling ally mongrols it all about buying your way out
only evil people support the drugwar
rational humans support Harm Reduction Policies.
Wow, "they promised me probation" for selling herion. Ya right. People are still believing her and will make her rich. Just remember when your 19 year old daughter sells herion and wants to escape from prison- you must help her because it's not her fault. No wonder why the world is the way it is. Poor little drug dealer, done wrong.
Not only they let this criminal heffa free, but now she's trying to get fame and profit out of using her white privilege card when most black men or other ethnic folks will probably get a longer sentence added on and not a second chance.
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