By Tim StellohNBC
News
A former Alabama prison officer and an inmate who fled together this year, sparking an 11-day manhunt, spoke hundreds of times on the phone before fleeing, with most of the calls sexually explicit, a law enforcement official said Thursday. .
Lauderdale County Sheriff Rick Singleton said investigators have so far heard just over half of the calls Vicky White and Casey White (who have the same last name but are not related) had between August 2021 and February. ), while he was incarcerated at the William Donaldson Correctional Center.
Investigators have been poring over recorded calls in preparation for Casey White's prosecution, said Singleton, whose comments were first reported by AL.com.
The love story between a convict and a jailer had a tragic end
May 10, 202201:35
When the calls began, Casey White had been in prison for a series of crimes committed in 2015 that included a home invasion, a carjacking and an escape from the police.
While behind bars, he confessed to another crime, the 2015 murder of 58-year-old Connie Ridgeway, and was booked into the Lauderdale County Jail in February to await trial.
Vicky White, the jail's deputy director of corrections, had been employed there for nearly two decades.
On April 29, the day that was supposed to be her last before retirement, she and Casey White disappeared.
"So far we haven't found anything related to the leak," Singleton said.
“
Most of it is basically phone sex,
” he added.
"That averages about four times a day," he added.
The police believe that the prisoner and the ex-officer were ready to unleash an intense firefight when they found them
May 10, 202201:54
An attorney for Casey White did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
When authorities managed to track down the couple and close in on them in a police pursuit down the highway on May 10, Vicky White died by suicide.
The police chase ended when the couple collided with a Cadillac sedan in an Indiana ditch.
Casey White then got out of the car and said that his "wife" had taken her own life and that he "didn't do it."
[“Let's get out and run!”: audio reveals the last words of the former police officer who fled with an inmate in Alabama]
In early July, about two months later, Casey White was charged with felony murder in her death.
He has pleaded not guilty.
Authorities have said the couple had a "special relationship" and had been in contact for a couple of years.
Singleton said Thursday that he believed Casey White had manipulated his former employee, a practice he described as routine in prison.
“
She had been on the job 17 years
,” he said.
“She had seen young officers come in and be manipulated.
It happens to everyone.
We tell them to be ready for it, and she was the one in charge of training them,” she stated.
With Casey White, Singleton alleged, "she herself was conned."