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Escaping Ike: Riding out the storm
Published September 10, 2009
Trees swayed hard in the heavy winds and the buzz of helicopters filled the air.
An escaped prisoner convicted of murder, Marlow Wayne Reynolds had holed up in a small travel trailer in a pasture he figured was south of Damon.
Reynolds thought the helicopters were bringing offshore oil workers in ahead of Hurricane Ike. It was one year ago this week, and he knew Ike was coming before he escaped, but without radio or television reports, he didn’t know where it would land.
Not that it mattered to him.
“I was going to take my chances with that storm than in any one of these damn prison units,” he said. “... I ain’t scared of no storm.”
Reynolds took cover in the camper as winds got stronger and the Category 2 storm landed square on Galveston County the night of Sept. 12, 2008. He had no idea how close Brazoria County came to a direct hit. As it were, Ike turned the trailer into an amusement park ride.
“It rocked and it rolled,” Reynolds said, laughing. “It was fun.”
Law enforcement looked for Reynolds in the two days before Ike, but they also took cover ahead of the storm, said John Moriarty, Texas Department of Criminal Justice inspector general, who was tasked with capturing Reynolds.
Reynolds escaped on Sept. 9, 2008, by scaling a recreation yard fence at the Stringfellow Unit in Rosharon. He swam across the Brazos River and walked through woods, pastures and farmland. He intended to get to Freeport in hopes he might get on a shrimp boat.
Hours after the storm, TDCJ and police returned to hunt Reynolds. They would not find him until about three weeks after he escaped. They wouldn’t even have a confirmed sighting until he popped up in West Columbia on his 55th birthday.
ON THE LAM
When Reynolds walked out of the travel trailer unscathed by Ike, tree limbs, debris, electric poles and power lines covered the roads. Most people didn’t have electricity or running water, and many had evacuated.
Reynolds walked along the Brazos River, slowly working his way south.
“I crossed a shell road, and I looked down and there was a car coming,” he said.
He jumped back into the woods, and from then on, he spent his days resting and nights on the move.
Along the way, he would “confiscate” cans of beans, sausage and beer.
Buildings, barns and a mechanic shop would turn up treasures. He took grapefruit from a tree he found in front of an abandoned trailer home. One building he found had a refrigerator powered by a generator.
“I confiscated a couple links of sausage out of that,” Reynolds said. “He had another refrigerator there with a few beers, and I helped him out on that.”
In one of the buildings near a rice barn, he found a can full of change.
A deep cut to his leg from the razor wire at Stringfellow would re-open several times while he was out. Reynolds also had severe diarrhea from drinking Brazos River water, he fended off the constant swarms of mosquitos and rationed medication he took for a heart condition.
“I came prepared,” he said. “I had needle and thread.”
After sewing up his leg, Reynolds would tear some of the shirts he found into bandages.
He always used the word “confiscate” when he talked about taking things. When asked about his choice of words, he laughed.
“Better than stealing,” he said. “I wasn’t born a thief. It was what I needed.”
LOOKING FOR A MURDERER
He might not have been born a thief, but he was a convicted killer, and his time on the outside was tense for his victim’s family. Fellow prisoners had said he made threats against people who put him in prison.
A Liberty County jury convicted Reynolds of shooting his friend, 36-year-old Leslie Ledford, after a drunken argument outside Reynolds’ cabin in September 2003.
Debbie Hopkins, Ledford’s sister, said she always was wary of Reynolds.
“A lot of friends told us he’d pulled guns on them,” she said. “They said he once pulled a gun out and shot a TV.”
When investigators first saw Reynolds’s cabin outside Dayton, they had a hard time narrowing down evidence of the fatal shot because there were so many bullet holes in the walls, said Sgt. Kenny Dagle, an investigator with the Liberty County Sheriff’s Office.
Ledford’s mother, Lavern Keenan, said she didn’t know Reynolds well but knew her son, who worked in construction, spent a lot of time with him.
“They were real close,” she said. “Leslie used to say about him, ‘Mom, he’s a good guy, you just have to get to know him.’”
On the day Ledford died, the two had been drinking all day, celebrating their birthdays. Reynolds’ is on the 22nd and Ledford’s was on the 11th, Keenan said.
They got into an argument and Ledford grabbed a rifle, Reynolds said. Reynolds said he grabbed a pistol and ran outside. He looked through a window and locked eyes with Ledford, he said.
“When he throwed down on me like that, I just up and, instinct you know, and shot one time,” Reynolds said.
Reynolds said he panicked and placed his friend’s body in a pile of brush and lighted it.
“I didn’t figure they would believe I shot him in self-defense,” he said.
Reynolds told a friend in Clute what happened that night, said Glenn Patton. The distraught friend came to Patton, the Richwood police chief, and within a few days Reynolds was in custody and investigators had found Ledford’s remains.
“We identified him by the tattoos on his feet,” Dagle said.
Keenan said her son’s death devastated her.
“I just went into sobs,” she said. “I just didn’t have any feelings.”
A jury convicted Reynolds of murder, possession of a prohibited weapon and tampering with physical evidence. They gave him 40 years.
Marlow Reynolds said it was a mistake to burn Ledford’s body.
“I’m guilty of the tampering charge,” he said.
MAD DOG AND WATER
Two weeks had passed since the night Marlow Reynolds escaped from Stringfellow, and there had been no positive sightings, Moriarty said.
“We had aircraft up,” he said. “We had dogs on the ground. We had people along the rivers.”
Brazoria County sheriff’s deputies helped in the search, Sheriff Charles Wagner said.
“They’d get a little sleep in their car and go looking again,” Wagner said.
After a few weeks, Marlow Reynolds came to West Columbia and slept for a few days behind a store.
His 55th birthday was coming up, and to celebrate, he took some change he had found, walked into the Columbia Stop off Highway 36, and bought water and a bottle of Green Apple Mad Dog 20/20. Reynolds wore sunglasses, a camouflage ball cap and duct tape around an injured hand.
Marlow Reynolds was polite, and he paid with change, said Ahmad Suleiman, the store’s owner.
“He acted like anybody,” he said. “He looked like he was sleeping in his car, but I did not think anything about it.”
A tip led TDCJ investigators to believe Reynolds was at the store, and when they reviewed surveillance video, they spotted him, Moriarty said.
Reynolds was surprised he was recognized in the store because his hair had grown, he had a slight beard and didn’t look anything like the bald Marlow Reynolds in the prison mug shot.
“I didn’t figure nobody would put two and two together,” he said.
Moriarty wouldn’t elaborate on how they discovered Reynolds in West Columbia, but he said he wasn’t surprised.
“We never expected to find him out of the area,” he said.
COMING FRIDAY
To get out of Brazoria County and to freedom, Marlow Reynolds figured he had to get to Freeport, but after a walk through West Columbia, his luck finding food began to run out.
He knew his mother’s freezer outside Brazoria had meat inside, but to get there, he would need to cross Highway 36.
As he approached Brazoria from Wild Peach, Marlow Reynolds realized it was not a part of town he knew. Tired, hungry and running out of energy, Reynolds took a chance and passed through Brazoria in broad daylight.
“I just got into a hurry,” he said.
John Tompkins is senior reporter for The Facts. Contact him at 979-849-8581.
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