MANGUM, Okla. ? Seventeen years after the wife of an Oklahoma prison warden disappeared with a convicted killer, jurors on Monday finally began to deliberate whether she was kidnapped or ran away with him to build a new life on an east Texas chicken ranch.
Bobbi Parker's long, winding trial took the entire summer to complete. It included nearly 80 witnesses and more than 800 pieces of evidence in an effort to reconstruct their high-profile disappearance on Aug. 30, 1994.
Jurors face one central question: Did she fall in love with now-dead Randolph Franklin Dial or did Dial drug the woman and take her from the Oklahoma State Reformatory as his hostage?
The jury got the case Monday evening and deliberated for about an hour before quitting until morning. District Judge Richard Darby has set aside motel rooms for the jurors during deliberations and is providing for meals.
Because of Greer County's small population, and the fact that the prison is the community's largest employer, it took weeks to pick a jury prior to the 2 1/2 months needed to present evidence.
"I've not been involved in a trial that has lasted this long," said Assistant District Attorney David Thomas, the lead prosecutor. "There are so many witnesses."
After a tip to a television anti-crime show, police captured Dial April 4, 2005, in Campti, Texas, and found Parker working in a nearby chicken house. Both maintained Dial kidnapped the woman, but Oklahoma authorities filed charges against Parker the day before the statute of limitations ran out on a claim that she helped him leave.
As closing arguments began Monday, assistant prosecutor Eric Yarborough said there was no evidence Parker was intoxicated or drugged as defense attorney Garvin Isaacs had claimed.
"The intoxication in this case was love," Yarborough said. "She chose freedom with Randolph Franklin Dial. Was it a good choice? Probably not. Was it a bad choice? Absolutely."
Reviewing photos of items taken from Dial and Parker's mobile home ? including love letters, condoms and a sex toy ? Yarborough said Dial and Parker lived together as husband and wife. Even before his escape, the prosecutor said, an inmate saw Dial and Parker behaving inappropriately while working "day in, day out" in a prison pottery program she ran from her garage.
Isaacs described Dial as a "sick, sociopathic egomaniac" and questioned why Parker would leave her family, including her two daughters.
"That won't fit. Bobbi Parker isn't' going to do anything that will break up her family," Isaacs said.
Isaacs displayed photos of Parker's family on a projection screen and said she's "a mother who loves her daughters."
Isaacs questioned the testimony of several prosecution witnesses who said they saw Parker and Dial together in inappropriate situations. Those witnesses include former Oklahoma State Reformatory Warden Jack Cowley, who testified he saw Parker and Dial on a front porch swing at the deputy warden's house.
"That didn't happen. She was never on the front porch drinking coffee with Randolph Franklin Dial," Isaacs said.
Parker's husband was present Monday for part of closing arguments, and has watched other portions of the trial.
Isaacs promised the jury during openings that Parker would testify in her own defense, but she never took the stand.
"The farther I got into this, the more concerned I became about the trauma. I couldn't do it," Isaacs explained.
Jury selection took nearly two months, as the judge disallowed anyone who worked at the prison or who knew anyone who worked at the prison. Lawyers also subpoenaed 200 potential witnesses, further reducing the pool in a county that has only 6,000 residents. By comparison, jury selection in the murder trial of Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols in 2004 took only nine days. The entire Casey Anthony murder trial in Florida this summer took eight weeks.
The prosecution's first witness, Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation agent Robert Williams, was on the witness stand for 14 days as he identified dozens of pieces of evidence collected from the cramped mobile home where Parker and Dial lived and defended his unit's investigation against claims that crucial witnesses weren't questioned and vital evidence wasn't tested.
"It's an unusual, complicated deal," said Isaacs. "Witnesses have died. Evidence has been destroyed. Memories have been contaminated. Facts have been forgotten."
A dust devil hit the courthouse one afternoon, knocking out power, and while stifling triple-digit heat didn't delay work it at least made everyone uncomfortable. At one point, the judge chided attorneys that they were just taking too long.
"It's unfortunate that this trial is causing inconveniences for so many people," Darby said. The judge said much of the testimony has been repetitive and repeats or reinforces that of other witnesses.
Parker, now 49, worked with Dial in the pottery program and prosecutors claim she became Dial's mistress while her husband Randy served as deputy warden and the couple lived with their two daughters in a house on the prison grounds.
Dial was serving a life term for first-degree murder for the 1981 death of a karate instructor in Tulsa County. Isaacs has described Dial as a manipulative sociopath and told Parker's jury during his opening statement that Dial drugged and kidnapped Parker and held her hostage by threatening to use his alleged mob connections to harm her family, including her daughters, if she ran away.
Parker has pleaded not guilty to the felony charge of assisting a prisoner to escape and faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted. Legal complications, including the substitution of statements by witnesses who have died and are unavailable to provide direct testimony, have prompted Isaacs to repeatedly ask that the charge against Parker be dismissed. Darby has denied all of the requests.
Dial pleaded guilty to escape before he died in prison in 2007 at the age of 62 and maintained until his death that he kidnapped Parker and held her against her will.
But prosecutors allege that Dial and Parker made a pact that if either was discovered, he would say he kidnaped her and held her hostage. In a letter he wrote from prison after he was recaptured, Dial said: "I'll do anything to see her in the clear of all this." In another, he said: "Who cares how many years I get? With my life sentence, who's counting? Not me."
Dial was never charged with kidnapping.
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