Sacramento, California, Aug 24 : A fugitive who spent the last 36 years hiding from the law is today back behind bars, after detectives used his mother’s dying wish to track him down.
After more than three-and-a-half decades on the run, William Walter Asher III was arrested at his home in Salida, about 70 miles south of Sacramento, California, on Friday, reports Daily Mail.
The 66-year-old escaped convict - who had been involved in a robbery that left a man dead - had changed his name and was living with a woman who had no idea about his criminal past.
It was his mother’s wish to speak to her son one last time before she died that led investigators to Asher.
‘Shortly before her death she asked various family members to assist her in using the “secret†number to call “Billyâ€,’ the FBI said in a statement.
Agents, tipped off about the conversation by an informer, scoured the phone records of people suspected of helping carry out the deathbed request.
These led them to the Salida home of a man calling himself Garry Donald Webb, to whom two phonecalls were made two days before the mother died.
A fingerprint on Webb’s driving license matched the one on Asher’s prison record and, after questioning from federal agents, he admitted his true identity.
Asher had escaped from Growlersburg Conservation Camp, a prison camp in El Dorado County, California, in January 1975.
Eight years earlier, he had been sentenced to life in prison aged just 20 for a robbery of a San Francisco bar, in which a bartender was shot and beaten to death.
After his escape, Asher fled to the Northwest Territories of Canada, where he assumed the name David Donald Mcfee and worked as a long-haul truck driver, according to the FBI.
He married, raised a family and eventually separated from his wife.
She was unable to help Canadian authorities or the FBI and the trail went cold.
When he was finally discovered, police found Asher had been living with a woman who had been with him for more than 10 years, but who was unaware that he was on the run.
He is now being held at the Sierra Conservation Center in Jamestown.
He could face new charges related to his escape and could spend the rest of his life in prison.