Poisoned Blood by Philip E. Ginsburg

Author:Philip E. Ginsburg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2018-08-19T16:00:00+00:00

Part Four: Robbi Hannon Homan

12 A New Life

Even after she was unmasked in Vermont following three years on the run, the woman who began as Audrey Marie Hilley trailed unsolved mysteries in her wake.

From the start in Alabama, she had been pursued by FBI agents and the Anniston Police Department’s Lieutenant Gary Carroll. At the end, she was captured by New Hampshire state trooper Barry Hunter and three other officers in front of Book Press in Brattleboro. But in between lay a trail of three years’ living, jobs and friends and acquaintances, three years of pretense and deception.

Officially, no one was much interested in those three years. The New Englanders dispatched their captive back to Alabama and returned to more ordinary matters. In Alabama, the FBI did the same, and Lieutenant Carroll joined the Calhoun County district attorney’s office in building a case for the prosecution. They had no need for more than the barest outline of Audrey Marie Hilley’s activities during her years as a fugitive.

But among those who had known her, the arrest of Marie Hilley provoked intense curiosity: How had she escaped the pursuit of the FBI? Where had she gone from Anniston? How had she met and tempted John Homan?

When the detectives questioned her at the Brattleboro police station, Marie Hilley said she and John had met in Fort Lauderdale early in 1980. In a letter written to a Florida friend soon after the arrest, John placed their meeting in the latter part of February, a little more than three months after Audrey Marie Hilley fled Alabama.

These stories seemed consistent. At the time, the investigators accepted them at face value. But among those who had followed the case most intimately, the police and FBI agents and prosecutors who studied the facts as they emerged, bits of evidence gradually assembled themselves into a different version. The FBI had traced the fugitive Audrey Marie Hilley as far as southeastern Georgia, where they, placed her a week or so after she disappeared from Anniston. She had been almost penniless, without transportation, inexperienced at flight. How had she managed to disappear so completely, erasing the trail of her scent like a deer swimming across a stream? In Savannah she had met up with a man. Apparently she had gone off with him. And it was there that the trail ended. There was no further identification of the man, no way of tracking him down.

But what they learned from Carol and Mike Hilley allowed the investigators to approach the mystery of Marie’s escape from another direction. Eighteen months earlier, during the summer of 1978, Marie and her daughter had visited Mike and his wife, Ten, in Pompano Beach, Florida. Marie had given up her job and sold her house in Anniston; she had left with the idea of settling permanently in Florida.

As it turned out, she had stayed in Florida only three months. Mike and Teri had been distressed by her behavior. Around the house she had been sullen and withdrawn. She was absent for long periods.

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