THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, March 20, 1996 TAG: 9603200458
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LAURA LAFAY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 108 lines
Geoffrey Ward escaped from a maximum-security Virginia prison ``with relative ease'' last month by climbing up a ventilator shaft to a roof door that fell off as soon as he touched it, he wrote in a recent letter to his psychotherapist.
At shortly before 4 a.m. on Feb. 21, Ward wrote, he jumped from the Powhatan Correctional Center's kitchen roof into the prison yard. ``Expecting shots to ring out at any moment,'' he ``trotted'' from fence to fence ``in plain view of two towers'' looking for the section of fence that would be easiest to climb.
Finally deciding on a section about 20 feet from a tower that was not staffed from midnight to 8 a.m., he began his painstaking climb. He made it over four fences, gaining each tenuous toehold by spreading apart the razor wire to make a place for his foot.
At the top of the last fence, Ward wrote, he ``held onto the barbed wire and stamped and spread the concertina (wire) to keep from getting entangled.'' Then he ``flung'' his body over.
``Messed up my glasses,'' he wrote.
When he escaped, Ward was serving a term of life without parole for the rapes and murders of a woman and a young girl in Norfolk in 1984, the assault on an off-duty police officer with a hammer and a rape in which the victim was not killed. He was recaptured 30 hours after the escape about 15 miles from the prison.
He had been imprisoned since 1987. That was the year he met Dr. Robert Scott Walton, a licensed mental health counselor hired by his defense team to help him avoid the death penalty.
Walton, who specializes in severe personality disorders, has since moved from Hampton Roads and opened a practice in Jacksonville, Fla. The two men have kept in touch over the years, with Walton serving as a psychotherapist, friend and mentor to Ward, now 38.
Recently, Walton got Ward's permission to provide The Virginian-Pilot a copy of his letter. In the three-page, hand-written letter, Ward describes how, after escaping, he befriended a dog, then had the dog come with him, hoping searchers wouldn't suspect that a man walking a dog was a fugitive. The ruse worked; he said he twice walked past authorities who didn't stop him.
The letter paints a picture of a man who believes he is a different person now, who wanted to ``be someone again.''
``My intentions were never to hurt anyone,'' he wrote.
``In fact, I avoided people and houses so there would be no confrontation. I simply wanted to get to a warmer climate where I could camp out for awhile, get an I.D. established, work & save to move into a truck or small motor home.
``I honestly have no desire to rage and do like I did in '84. That was a different person back then. . . . It's just not in me. All I wanted was a real life, with real people, & to be someone again, you know? I would have been fine, Scott. Really.''
By his own account, Ward savored his 30 hours of freedom ``just strolling through fields and along creeks in Powhatan County.''
``I stopped a number of times to look at a huge flock of geese by the James, poke around fallen logs and see newts, salamanders, etc.'' he wrote.
``In one barn I was resting in, I watched 8 deer walk by grazing. Fantastic. I saw 5 another time hop across an open field. Took in a lot of smells, too, from the foggy woods. Wish I could have some of the mosses and lichen I saw in my cell.''
Early in his journey, as he was crossing the James River on a narrow bridge leading away from the penitentiary, Ward heard a dog bark. He called to the dog, ``sat down with him and scratched his head awhile, and he took to me,'' he wrote.
``Then I thought, hey, if I call him along, people won't see a fugitive, they'll see a guy jogging with his dog! Sure enough! I walked in front of a Goochland Sheriff car, & later, a state police car drove right by me and no one knew. I got a kick out of that.''
Ward often sought sanctuary in the woods as a child growing up in rural Massachusetts, Walton said.
According to Walton, Ward was the son of a tyrannical, abusive mother and a father who was a mill worker and seldom home, Ward was punished while his two sisters - one of whom was mentally disabled - were protected and loved.
Ward's crimes - the bludgeoning with a claw hammer of the sleeping, off-duty police officer, a break-in and rape, the rape and murder of a 38-year-old Thai women and the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl - stemmed from the pathology born of such a childhood, according to Walton.
This is Walton's theory: the police officer bludgeoned by Ward represented the father who failed to protect him. The Thai woman was a proxy for the mother who tormented him. And the young girl may have represented the disabled sister who got all their mother's love.
``It's easier to take your hostility out on strangers,'' noted Walton. ``You can't take it out on the people you're really angry with because those are the people whose love you still crave.''
Like Ward, people who grow up to become serial killers often suffer as children ``under the complete and utter domination of another human being,'' said Walton. But unlike Ward, such people suffer a continuing compulsion to kill.
Ward does not fit the classic mold of a serial killer, Walton said.
After his crime spree, which took place between June 1983 and September 1984, Ward moved back to Massachusetts, where he worked for two years. While there, he became a born-again Christian. Shortly after a meeting with his minister, Ward drove back to Norfolk and turned himself in.
Still, said Walton, because there is no way to predict how Ward would react if faced with another abusive situation, he will always need to be carefully supervised. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Geoffrey Ward
KEYWORDS: MURDER RAPE SEX CRIME ASSAULT
ESCAPED PRISONER by CNB