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| Escaped murderer on lam for years |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 03/06/2001 |
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Neck-deep and alone in a Florida swamp, Theodore 'Teddy' Menut could hear himself breathing and his heart beating. Dogs barked in the distance and helicopters buzzed the bayou. It was just before 6 p.m. on Nov. 11, 1993, shortly after Menut broke out of Florida's Polk Correctional Institution. Using a makeshift ladder he built in the prison shop, he scaled two 15-foot razor wire fences, then crossed an open field, a road and a drainage ditch and hit the swamp. He was determined not to go back to where he was serving a life sentence for first-degree murder. Menut says he spent three days hiding in the mud amid the alligators and cypress trees, then made a run for freedom that took him to Arkansas and dropped him back into society for seven years. 'I felt I had done enough time after 13 years. All I wanted to do was be free and live a regular life,' Menut said last week at the Faulkner County Detention Center in Conway, where he waited for an armed escort back to a maximum-security Florida prison. 'And I guess all it really takes is determination and the will for freedom.' Menut felt he didn't deserve a life sentence. He was only the driver in 1981 when his passenger opened fire on bouncers standing outside a Broward County, Fla., bar, killing 19-year-old Bryce Waldman. Menut said his wife had been tossed out of the bar earlier that night and he went back in a fit of anger to find out what had happened. 'I never meant for anyone to get killed,' he said. He said he was represented by the same lawyer who defended the shooter, who testified against him in exchange for immunity. After the last of his appeals failed, Menut believed he had nothing to lose by escaping. Cheryle Lewis, a friend of the slain man, has quite a different view, and opened a bottle of champagne when she heard that Menut had been recaptured. 'I cried tears of joy when I heard they caught Teddy,' she told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Menut, now 43, was 23 at the time of the shooting. 'I made some pretty stupid, rash decisions when I was younger,' he said, sobbing uncontrollably in a cell. Just days before he was recaptured on Feb. 16, Menut had made the last payment on some land and thought he was free and clear. Menut had gone to a friend's house in North Little Rock and says he was there for maybe a half-hour when he heard police outside. Authorities had received an anonymous tip, said State Police spokeswoman Kim Fontaine. She said the officers, including FBI agents, could see smoke coming from the chimney and later learned Menut had been burning his false identification records, driver's licenses and Social Security cards. After about another half-hour, Fontaine said, Menut surrendered. Menut would have been eligible for parole in 2004 but now he'll face escape charges, said Debbie Buchanan, a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Corrections. An inmate who escaped with Menut was recaptured about a month later and sentenced to an additional five years. Buchanan said she suspects Menut will face a similar sentence. 'I got nothin' to look forward to. It's pretty depressing. This ain't no kind of life,' Menut said. |
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