Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, March 12, 1990                   TAG: 9003123039
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A5   EDITION: EVENING 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: STATE FARM                                 LENGTH: Medium

FORMER FUGITIVE WANTS TO SETTLE DEBT WITH VIRGINIA

Raymond Sexton was arrested at his Ola, Ark., home on Feb. 17, 11 days before he turned 60. When he escaped on July 13, 1951, he was serving a sentence for violating his probation after forging a $6 check.

"I just want to do my time," Sexton said in an interview Friday at Powhatan Correctional Facility, about 30 miles west of Richmond. "I want to do whatever it takes to get back to even with Virginia."

Sexton's wife and children bear the last name Mitchum, an alias Sexton said he borrowed 27 years ago from actor Robert Mitchum.

Sexton said his first run-in with authorities came when he was running moonshine whiskey in Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas. He said he forged the $6 check on his uncle's account to buy gas for a whiskey run, but it bounced. He was put on probation, he said.

A probation violation landed him on a prison chain gang, and he had two more years added to his sentence for an unsuccessful escape attempt.

His successful escape, he said, came when he jumped off a bridge into a raging creek, grabbed a log and was whisked downstream. He caught a freight train "but it kept passing by the prison." He finally found a track out of Virginia.

He said he met Robert Mitchum in California and told him about his escape. He said Mitchum, who told him he, too, once had escaped from a chain gang, suggested the name change to Leonard Mitchum.

He was put on probation in California in the 1950s on a morals charge but his true identity wasn't discovered. Then, in the late 1960s, he got involved with "one of the biggest marijuana distributors in LA" and spent from 1971 to 1974 in federal prison in Leavenworth, Kan. Again, his true identity was not discovered.

He never told his wife or three children about his past. But when he learned that correction officials knew his whereabouts, he offered to turn himself in on July 13, the anniversary date of his escape 39 years before.

"I didn't want to pass away with owing my state anything. Virginia's my home. I'm back home," Sexton said.