Lester Eubanks, the man who escaped death row and tricked the...

In 1973, the convicted murderer Lester Eubanks managed to escape from prison. Facing a life sentence with no possibility of parole, he had been arrested in 1966 and held as a model inmate for about seven years.

His good behavior even earned him the right to leave Ohio State Penitentiary for a day and go to a local mall for Christmas shopping.

However, as many might imagine, a mall in the middle of a shopping season is an ideal setting for a possible escape – and that’s what happened. He had agreed to meet at a specific time and place near the mall when he was finished. Instead, it disappeared and has not been seen for almost half a century.

His story is told in Volume 2 of the first season of Unsolved Mysteries, which premiered this week on Netflix.

Lester Eubanks profile

Lester Eubanks he was arrested, first, for attempting to rape a 14-year-old girl before shooting her – and then beating her with a brick until he was completely disfigured. His disappearance has plagued the victim’s authorities and family for decades.

At the time Eubanks murdered Mary Ellen Deener, he had already committed a series of sexual crimes. But the attack on Deener, on November 14, 1965, was what led him to prison. That day, the girl and her little sister, Brenda Sue, 12, was doing laundry. Without change, Deener he went to another laundry to pick up other coins.

Tragically, instead, she found Eubanks. The young woman fought bravely and thwarted her violent sexual assault, but it only infuriated him. So the killer shot the girl twice and then hit her with a brick. Found, the family of Deener she was naturally consumed by unbearable pain.

Eubanks he confessed to the murder the next day, after local authorities put him under arrest. After being charged with first-degree murder while committing rape, he tried to claim insanity – to no avail. On May 25, 1966, a jury found him guilty and sentenced him to death.

Subsequently, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment without parole. This happened in 1972, when a US Supreme Court decision ruled the death penalty unconstitutional. The following year, he escaped.

On the run

During the seven years that Lester Eubanks been in prison, he acted like a model prisoner. The inmate was even profiled in 1972, while still on death row, by The Columbus Dispatch, in an article about incarcerated artists. The publication considered him “the best of death row painters”.

Eubanks he was so polite that he became an honorary intern at the facility, which earned him certain privileges: like a shopping session at the Great Southern Shopping Center on December 7, 1973.

Although the Ohio Department of Corrections immediately listed Eubanks as a fugitive, it would take decades for federal authorities to do the same. It was clear to United States Vice Marshal David Siler, who started working on the case in 2016, that Eubanks had planned his escape from justice all the time.

And then, in the early 1990s, the investigation started to escalate when a young police officer brought the case to the public’s attention.

Possible whereabouts

In the 1990s, investigations were resumed when John Arcudi, a policeman who was in high school when Deener was killed, became head of the Detective Department at the Mansfield Police Department. At the time, he discovered that Eubanks he was not listed as wanted by the National Crime Information Center – which enabled him to commit another minor offense without being identified as a fugitive.

As investigations progressed, the suspicion began that Lester Eubanks could be using the pseudonym of Victor Young. Following clues from an anonymous source, the team of investigators investigated a mattress factory in Gardena, California, where an anonymous source said that Eubanks worked.

The promising Gardena it ended with the news that his suspect had quit his job and disappeared. “I think we were probably very close to Lester at some point, but the tips and technology didn’t allow us to get close enough, ”he said Tim Conner, one of the investigators in the case. “He is very cunning; he is not a dumb guy. He has been avoiding the authorities for more than forty years. ”

Researchers believe that Eubankshe is probably being involuntarily protected by people who don’t even know who he is. At that time, the convicted criminal must have had children and may even be a grandfather.

+ Learn more about crimes through great works available on Amazon:

Serial Killers – Anatomy of Evil: Get into the mind of psychopaths, Harold Schrechte (2019) – https://amzn.to/39YVlGK

Facing the serial killer, from Mark Olshaker e John E. Douglas (2019) – https://amzn.to/2UX47R4

Lady Killers: The most lethal women in history, from Tori Telfer (2019) – https://amzn.to/3c7BoPb

Mindhunter: The First Serial Killers Hunter, by John Douglas e Olshaker Mark (2017) – https://amzn.to/2xccb7L

Ted Bundy: A Stranger by My Side, by Ann Rule (2019) – https://amzn.to/3cauuc9

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