From Deseret News archives:
Fugitive mother of 3 kept secret from husband for 23 years
She raised three children with her husband of 23 years, Alan, who never knew she was using an assumed identity. Authorities wanted her for escaping from a Detroit prison a year into a maximum 20-year sentence on heroin charges.
Now, LeFevre, 53, is in jail awaiting extradition from California to Michigan on an escape warrant.
She was arrested April 24 outside her home in San Diego's posh Carmel Valley area, wearing a sweat suit and driving a black Lexus SUV. Authorities say her cover was blown by an anonymous caller who tipped Michigan authorities to her new name.
"It's been a secret no one knew for so long, and now everyone knows," LeFevre told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday at Las Colinas Detention Facility in Santee, a San Diego suburb. "I hope there's some mercy."
LeFevre, who grew up the second of five children, was just 19 when she was arrested during an undercover drug operation in Thomas Township, outside Saginaw, Mich., in 1974. She said she got into drugs after graduating from her Catholic high school because she was despondent over the death of her teenage sweetheart in the Vietnam War.
Her parents, strict Catholics who took away her John Lennon albums and prohibited their daughter from wearing faded blue jeans, encouraged her to plead guilty to spare the family the embarrassment of a court trial. LeFevre said she agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy and violation of drug laws in hopes of winning leniency from the judge but was given the maximum sentence of 10 to 20 years.
"I kept thinking it had to be a mistake. I was supposed to have probation," LeFevre said.
In jail, LeFevre said, she was threatened by other inmates at the Detroit House of Corrections, now known as Robert Scott Correctional Facility. One night, she decided she had to leave. Her grandfather and another relative agreed to meet her, and in February 1976 LeFevre walked across an open yard, threw her jacket over a barbed wire fence and climbed over, then started running.
"They had helicopters looking for me. ... You don't think about fear, you don't have time. You just run," she said.
When she got to the car, her relative was saying a rosary for her.
A few weeks later, friends let her ride with them to California, where she went by Marie, her middle name.
LeFevre said only a few people knew about her secret past. She said she told a fiance, who broke their engagement. She decided to keep it secret when she married her husband of 23 years, Alan Walsh.
"We're still just getting over this, but it's been a tremendous shock to us," Alan Walsh told the AP in a brief telephone interview.
