A new Netflix doc tells the true story of a woman who left her colleagues appalled after she helped a violent prisoner escape on the day she was due to retire.
It all began when Vicky White, a Lauderdale County Detention Center worker in Alabama told her co-workers she was ready to retire in 2022.
As the assistant director of operations, she headed everything and was a staple in the office for the last 17 years.
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According to Lauderdale County Detention Center inmate Tyler Purser, who told Netflix: “She treated everybody like they were somebody.
“She was like [the] mother … that everybody in there never had growing up.”
But what would come next shocked everyone who knew her.
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You see, Vicky had developed feelings for a violent criminal who was detained at the detention centre and went as far as to plan his escape so the pair could be together.
Rachel Stockman, the producer of Netflix crime documentary Jailbreak: Love on the Run, told Tudum: “What made Vicky’s story so surprising was how trapped she felt and how little her co-workers knew about her private life.”
Sergeant Dylan Elrod, the detention center’s booking supervisor admitted: “If you had a question about anything, you called Vicky.”
While Vicky had been married once, it ended it divorce and in 2021, she explained to her co-workers that she was dating two men at once, and one of them was a younger man.
At the time, the 55-year-old was dating a 38-year-old, but nobody could imagine who it was.
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However, other inmates began to get suspicious when an inmate called Casey White handed Vicky cards to be mailed out without any addresses written on the envelope.
Stockman said: “In her jailhouse phone calls, she spoke about how her life revolved around work and pleasing others.
“After work, she would drink every day. Casey became her escape.”
Casey, a violent criminal who had been convicted on multiple felony charges before he was transferred to the Lauderdale County Detention Center in August 2020, was serving a 75-year prison sentence.
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He’d even confessed to an unrelated murder and was sent to the Detention Center to await trial.
But that didn’t scare Vicky, who had mentioned to other members of staff that before she retired, she’d go out with a bang.
It was on her very last day on 29 April, 2022, that Vicky told other officers that she was bringing Casey to the Florence courthouse for a mental health evaluation and asked an officer to bring Casey up to booking and shackle him.
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Shackled, she took him elsewhere.
For hours they were missing, and by the time authorities found Vicky’s car, they found a handcuff key as well as Casey’s prison-issued footwear discarded.
Upon reviewing security footage, they saw that Vicky had actually helped him to escape jail and a further investigation found that they had contacted one another over 1,000 times since 2020.
When they caught up to the pair 11 days later and ran them into a ditch, Vicky seemed to have been seriously injured and later died in hospital.
However, it was found that the cause was a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
“We was married in my laws,” Casey told filmmakers following his arrest.
“We weren't married in faith laws... I was her husband and she was my wife.
“We thought we had enough cash money.”
He said they had plans to find a 'rinky dink trailer' and pay a year's rent to give them time to 'hunker down’ together.
Casey explained: “When we got to Kentucky and got out of the shower she had me all new clothes laid out on the bed and that was the best night right here.”
Jailbreak: Love on the Run is on Netflix now.
Topics: Crime, True Crime, Netflix, Documentaries
Britt Jones