From Chesapeake to Georgia - 27 years on the run

MURRAY COUNTY, GA.

Eric Coleman heard a ruckus. He stepped shirtless and barefoot into the cool mountain morning and peered toward the thicket behind his trailer.

Dogs barked. Something stirred amid the trees and brush - perhaps a raccoon or a possum, he thought.

Coleman went back inside, pulled on some boots and headed out again, beyond the rabbit pen and the clothesline strung from the edge of the trailer.

Coleman froze when he noticed one of the trees. It had a shoe. It also had arms and legs and a gun.

In an instant, Coleman was on the ground, his hands cuffed behind his back. Half a dozen men in plain clothes appeared in the yard.

What's your name, one of them asked.

Eric Coleman.

What's your real name, Richard?

He grinned a little. OK, he said. "You got me."

Richard Boucher had avoided this day for 27 years. He lived in the shadows of Appalachia, scraping by with odd jobs and handouts, using an alias and paying cash.

He found freedom on an October morning in 1982 by escaping a Virginia prison. Now he was headed back.

Boucher was a Marine from Connecticut. Debbie Long grew up in Deep Creek.

They met in Hampton Roads and married in a Catholic chapel at Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base on June 1, 1974. The groom was 21, the bride 18. They'd chosen her parents' anniversary for the wedding date.

The Bouchers settled into a trailer at Woodshire Mobile Home Park in Chesapeake. Richard Boucher stayed in the service for another couple of years; his wife had a job at Hardee's.

Then, on May 1, 1981, Boucher and some buddies got pulled over.

Be cool, they told each other when a young Chesapeake police officer approached the station wagon stopped near Canal Drive and Military Highway.

The tailgate was down. They'd probably be ticketed for a traffic violation. But the officer already knew about the Coast Guardsman they'd attacked and robbed that night. He was in the hospital. So were two of the four sailors they'd attacked in Portsmouth.

The officer charged all five with robbery and assault. "Woman officer nabs strong-arm suspects," a newspaper reported later that day. One suspect was not yet 18. At 28, Boucher was the oldest. He was convicted and sentenced to a decade in prison. If he stayed out of trouble, he might be out on parole in half that time.

Boucher went to Tidewater Correctional Unit No. 22, a squat brick prison in Chesapeake's sprawling countryside. During that first year, he met Eddie Bryan.

Bryan was 23, doing eight years for robbery. The men plotted.

Early one Sunday in October 1982, the pair persuaded a guard to unlock the door of their housing unit.

The guard was struck with a clothes iron; Bryan snatched his keys. They ran out through the front door. Boucher's wife, Debbie, waited nearby.

They pointed the car south. Bryan, Boucher and 26-year-old Debbie would go as far as they could and stop only when they had to.

They slipped from Virginia. When the car broke down in North Carolina, they sold it. The money bought them sleeping bags and backpacks. They kept moving, through the woods, and slept amid the trees.

Back in Chesapeake, the authorities had little to go on. Debbie's family - her mother, Shirley Birch, who lived in the same mobile home park, and her younger sister, Pamela, were stunned.

The three women had visited together in Portsmouth the day before Richard's escape. They'd had a fine, ordinary time.

Birch read about the prison break in the newspaper. When she couldn't reach Debbie, she assumed her daughter had joined Boucher.

But where had they gone?

The article said the men had fled the state. That was all Birch knew.

Murray County lies in Georgia's northwestern corner, more than 340 square miles of smooth and sloping land, of valleys and blue mountains anchored by two small towns.

Chatsworth, the county seat, is the largest. Eton (pronounced Ee-tahn) lies just to the north, a place so small it has been overlooked on some state maps.

Bryan and the Bouchers stopped here with their sleeping bags and camping gear. They found work as groundskeepers at the Murray County Saddle Club, which hosts horse shows and barrel races and rodeos in a covered arena. Spectators wear boots and cowboy hats more often than not and eat homemade Georgia peach ice cream and funnel cake still moist from the oil.

Richard and Debbie Boucher became Eric and Diane Coleman. They traded work for cash and a place to live - a trailer with the utilities taken care of.

In February 1983, Bryan, who had become Bobby Brickhouse, was arrested for driving under the influence in the nearby town of Dalton. His escape was over - but he didn't snitch.

By the end of the year, Debbie was pregnant.

Their daughter was born on her grandmother Birch's birthday. They named her Pamela.

Life on the lam made Boucher nervous. He didn't sleep well. Noises made him jump. If he saw a cop, he slipped away.

After more than two years at the Saddle Club, it was time to move on. The trailer was theirs to keep, and the couple who once saw Murray County as a pit stop decided to stay.

It is a quiet place with thick forests and winding trails two hours north and a world away from Atlanta. Trailers and brick houses are spread alongside empty stretches of highway. Big homes peek from the tree-covered mountainside.

Carpet is manufactured here, stored here and sold here. When the housing market suffers so do Murray County and its neighbors.

Boucher found the kind of work available to a man with no driver's license and no car - usually odd jobs that paid cash. Contractors hired him. So did a feed store and a grocery store. He hitched rides, rode a bicycle or walked.

They moved every couple of years, from one trailer lot to the next, to an apartment near a country store where he worked - always in Murray County. An injury left one of his hands nearly useless, but there was no money for proper care.

Boucher kept to himself. If he ever committed another crime, nobody found out about it. Once, a cop came knocking. There was a problem in the neighborhood, and she wanted to see his identification. He said he didn't have any. She insisted. So did he. She left and never came back.

Eric and Diane Coleman's paper trail may have begun with their daughter's birth in 1984, and there it seemed to stop - for a while.

Police say Pamela did not know her parents' secret. She did not know about the grandmother who shared her birthday or the aunt who shared her name. She attended local schools. She grew up and became a mother. She married, moved into a home of her own and bought a trailer for her parents near U.S. 411.

Hooker Road sits off that highway, just past Eton, where the houses and trailers grow farther apart. An old building stands at the corner, its north side painted yellow with big black letters: For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life.

A rug store across the highway is going out of business. Everything must go.

Hooker Road is less solemn. Somebody sells quaint dog houses. There is a poultry farm and a child care center. A gravel drive opens up into a mobile home park where the trailers are narrow, the lots deep and wide.

In the mid-2000s, Eric and Diane Coleman moved to the second one on the left, the tan trailer with rust stains on the roof.

Mae Beason and her husband, Luther, had lived on the other side of the gravel drive for about two years when the Colemans moved in. Neither couple introduced themselves right away, but the Beasons raise dachshunds and they got to talking about that one day.

For the most part, though, the Colemans kept to themselves. Eric Coleman came outside more than his wife. His hair grew to his shoulders and a beard covered his face. He usually went shirtless and barefoot.

"A mountain man," Beason said. "That's what he looks like."

Diane Coleman was in her early 50s but looked older. She visited with her daughter and cared for her two young grandchildren. She used the neighbors' computers.

When a water pipe burst in the trailer park one Thanksgiving, Eric Coleman came out to fix it.

He was always doing stuff like that, said Gene Myers, another neighbor. "Anytime I needed him for anything, he'd be right here to help me."

But the economy began to weaken. Odd jobs grew scarce. Soon, the Colemans were the ones who needed help.

Michelle Prater knew times were tough. A clerk at the Kangaroo Express near Hooker Road, she'd watch Eric Coleman wait outside for a ride to work in the mornings. Sometimes, hours passed. She admired his persistence, and she liked his wife and his daughter. They came in two or three times a day for cigarettes and chips, hot dogs and other groceries, and they always called her ma'am.

Mae Beason knew the couple were just getting by. She gave them bread and canned goods, fresh eggs from her chickens, leftover goodies from her job at Bojangles.

"I just want you to know we appreciate it," Eric Coleman would say.

They'd ask to buy a beer or a stick of butter. The Beasons would hand it over and say not to worry about it.

One neighbor suggested the couple apply for food stamps.

Diane Coleman said she didn't have a Social Security card. No one thought much about it at the time.

Years passed without so much as a tip.

Then in the spring somebody contacted the Whitfield County Sheriff's Office with two names: Eric Coleman and Richard Boucher. He was one and the same, he was living in neighboring Murray County, and he was wanted in Virginia.

Whitfield County's Safe Street Task Force went to work.

Somewhere along the line, Boucher had slipped up.

What he said exactly - and who he said it to - is a mystery to most. The neighbors have their suspicions. The police aren't telling.

Undercover officers posing as evangelists went to their home and spoke to Diane Coleman. She looked like an old photo of Debbie Boucher.

Richard Boucher's grainy, black and white mug shot was on the Virginia Department of Corrections Web site now, under a link that read "Most Wanted."

The Virginia Department of Corrections absconder unit had worked on the Boucher case for years. They'd tracked down aliases that turned into dead ends. Then came news from Georgia.

One early Wednesday morning last month, members of the sheriff's office task force went into the woods behind the Coleman trailer. Two men donned ghillie suits - covered with leaves and branches to look like trees - and waited.

Mae Beason was feeding the chickens when she heard gravel crunching. The dogs made a terrible racket. She looked up and saw a caravan. Unmarked police cars, she thought. Must be a drug bust.

But there were men coming out of the woods, men who looked like well-armed trees. They had the shirtless Eric Coleman on the ground.

The officers knocked on the trailer door. Diane Coleman, alone inside, answered.

They charged her with hindering the apprehension of a criminal and took the couple to jail.

No resistance, Detective Daniel Rann thought curiously. Just a grin.

"You got me."

They spoke for an hour and a half. Boucher told Rann everything: the prison break, the flight south, the Saddle Club, the arrest of Bryan. He detailed one move after another, the hard times, the fear that didn't go away. Rann summed up Boucher: "He went from a prison behind bars to a prison in his head."

A neighbor called Pamela. Police are here. Reporters are here. Your parents have been arrested.

The Beasons were shocked. They'd assumed Diane and Eric - it's still hard to call them anything but those names - had lived here all their lives. They never talked about anyplace else.

So what about the prison break 27 years ago? the neighbors asked themselves. He'd obviously reformed. They ought to let them go.

"I know they screwed up," Prater said from behind the counter at the Kangaroo Express, "but, honey, who hasn't?"

Pamela, Prater declared, "is the sweetest girl I ever met."

She stopped by the store after the arrests. "She was numb."

Pamela asked for Eric Coleman at the jail, but there was no one there by that name.

In Elizabeth City, N.C., the next day, Shirley Birch picked up the newspaper and learned that her daughter was alive.

It was, she said, an answer to a prayer she said every night for 27 years.

It took several tries to get through to Debbie Boucher in Georgia. At last, they spoke.

The young woman who'd disappeared at 26 had become a 53-year-old grandmother.

Birch, now 75, has two great-grandchildren. That's what she and Debbie talk about, mostly, when they phone each other every few days. Debbie is out on bond.

Birch and her younger daughter are planning a road trip next month. She only wishes she could go now.

They will all be together again, like they were that Saturday in October 1982.

Richard Boucher won't be there. The man who would have been out of prison two decades ago is back in.

Kristin Davis, (757) 222-5208, kristin.davis@pilotonline.com