By Sara Jean Green
Seattle Times staff reporter
WASHINGTON — A stolen key to a maintenance shed helped Roy Townsend break out of an Arizona prison last month.
This week, a motel key — and a broken ankle — led to his capture.
The 37-year-old Bremerton man will soon be spending 23 hours a day in solitary confinement at the maximum-security Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla — at least until prosecutors decide if the convicted murderer will return to Arizona to face charges stemming from his Sept. 17 escape from a privately-run, medium-security prison southeast of Phoenix.
A 29-day, multistate manhunt for Townsend ended Tuesday night almost 1,500 miles away, at a little motel outside Spokane, said Tom Lanier, a supervisory deputy with the U.S. Marshals Service in Seattle.
“We thought for sure he was heading to Mexico,” Lanier said, surmising that Townsend was forced to change his plans after breaking his ankle during his prison escape.
Two of Townsend’s relatives — a 40-year-old Tacoma woman and a 21-year-old Bremerton woman — were also arrested on suspicion they lied to police and aided and abetted an escaped prisoner, Lanier said. Both remain in custody in the Spokane County Jail.
Townsend was sentenced to 66 years in prison on murder, arson and theft charges for the 1996 shooting death of 18-year-old Gerald Harkins in Mason County. Due to overcrowding in Washington state prisons, Townsend was sent to a Nevada prison and later moved to the facility in Florence, Ariz.
Townsend and another Washington state convicted murderer, 24-year-old Kollin Folsom, were working on a night cleaning crew last month when they overpowered a prison guard, tied him up, stole his keys to a maintenance shed and used ladders to scale the prison’s 16-foot fences topped with razor wire.
Townsend — who likely spent months planning the escape — apparently fell as he was climbing down a prison fence, breaking his ankle, Lanier said. But Townsend had plenty of help outside the prison’s walls: At least one of Townsend’s relatives is suspected of picking him up nearby and may have driven him the entire way from Florence, Ariz., to Spokane, he said.
Folsom wasn’t so lucky. He was arrested by local police within six hours of the prison break. He is serving a 50-year sentence for killing his girlfriend’s father with a machete in Washougal, Clark County, in 1999
Though investigators were convinced Townsend had planned to go to Mexico, where he has family, officials there determined Townsend never left the U.S., Lanier said. He apparently didn’t receive medical treatment for his ankle, either, he said.
Police agencies across the Northwest were advised to be on the lookout for Townsend and the maroon Ford Taurus with Arizona license plates he was thought to be traveling in, Lanier said.
Three weeks ago, a sheriff’s deputy in Grant County, Ore. phoned Lanier to say he’d seen the Taurus driving on Highway 395 but the deputy was driving in the opposite direction, en route to another call, so couldn’t stop the car.
Then, on Tuesday night, an Airway Heights police officer stopped the Taurus in unincorporated Spokane County, Lanier said. Inside were the two women, who gave police fake names and denied knowing Townsend. But the older woman had a motel key in her possession, which led officers to the Bell Motel across the street, he said.
When agents and detectives entered the room, they noticed a bedroom window screen had been cut out — and a pair of crutches had been left behind. While searching through the scrub pine and juniper bushes behind the motel, a deputy US Marshal “literally stepped on him — on his bad ankle,” Lanier said. Townsend let out a yelp and deputies, not realizing he was injured, pulled him from the bushes by his feet, he said.
Townsend is being held without bail in the Spokane County Jail until he is moved to the state penitentiary in Walla Walla, said state Department of Corrections spokesman Chad Lewis.
Motel manager Karen Crosiar said the two women checked into the 14-room Bell Motel Oct. 11, paying $650 cash for a one-month stay. The older woman said her name was “Janet” and the younger woman went by “Chula,” which were aliases, Crosiar later learned. Crosiar, who lives on-site, never saw Townsend and figures his relatives sneaked him into their room one night after she’d gone to bed.
Copyright 2007 The Seattle Times