ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, February 23, 1996 TAG: 9602230069
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURA LaFAY LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
Geoffrey Alan Ward, the confessed double murderer who escaped from Powhatan Correctional Center early Wednesday, was recaptured Thursday afternoon about 15 miles north of the maximum-security prison.
Correctional officers with dogs tracked Ward to a wooded area behind a Louisa County doctor's office about 12:45 p.m., officials said.
Ward, 38, was cut and bruised from scaling the prison's five barbed and razor-wire fences and from somehow crossing the James River, according to Department of Public Safety spokesman Bill Cimino. Officers found him huddled against a tree, wrapped in plastic for protection against the rain. He was accompanied by a stray dog and offered no resistance.
Ward's capture ended an exhaustive search that began Wednesday morning after he turned up missing at Powhatan's 7:30 a.m. inmate count. For almost 30 hours, correctional officers armed with shotguns staked out the rural roads surrounding the prison while state and local police searched the area with dogs and hunting maps.
Area children were kept at school until their parents picked them up Wednesday. On Thursday, police shadowed buses and patrolled near school grounds.
Ward is serving eight life terms plus 140 years for crimes that included two murders in Norfolk in 1984. He abducted, raped and strangled a 14-year-old Norfolk girl and a 38-year-old Norfolk woman in separate incidents.
Ward returned to his native Massachusetts, but came back to Norfolk two years later and confessed to the crimes. He had become a born-again Christian, he told police, and he needed to relieve his conscience. He pleaded guilty to 13 felonies and has never been eligible for parole.
Ward was classified as a high-security inmate because of the nature of his crimes, according to prison employees who asked not to be identified. But he lived in Unit C-5, a kind of honor dorm, because he had never been charged with any institutional infractions. He worked in the prison kitchen, and reported there every day at 3 a.m.
Ward went to the kitchen as usual early Wednesday, employees said, and was present for the prison's regular 3:30 a.m. count. But soon after the count, Secretary of Public Safety Jerry Kilgore confirmed, he apparently slipped out the kitchen door into a compound area and scaled a razor-wire fence behind the facility's visiting room.
The next two fences were made of barbed wire, the two after that of razor wire. A piece of Ward's bloody shirt was found clinging to one of the razor-wire fences Wednesday morning.
Some employees said Thursday that Ward's escape was made easier by the fact that a key prison watch tower is not staffed between midnight and 8 a.m.
Each of the prison's eight towers is staffed during the day by an officer with a rifle and a shotgun. Between midnight and 8 a.m., however, two of them are empty.
``If the state would look at all the expense and manpower it took to find this man and compare it to what it would have cost to pay people to prevent his escape, they'd be way ahead of the game,'' said Lillian Abrams, area director of the Virginia Association of State Employees/American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which counts 2,000 corrections officers in its membership. Kilgore blamed Wednesday morning's thick fog, not insufficient tower staffing, for contributing to Ward's escape.
Ward was locked in M-Building - Powhatan's infamous prison-within-a-prison - Thursday night as corrections officials pondered his fate. He probably will remain there, or else be transferred to the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, Kilgore said.
The state police are investigating the incident.
LENGTH: Medium: 70 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: Map by staff (in New River Valley edition).by CNB