Randolph F. Dial, an artist and confessed hit man who fled a life sentence for murder to spend nearly 11 years on the run with a deputy wardens wife, died Wednesday in the infirmary of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. He was 62.
David McDaniel/The Oklahoman, via Associated Press
Randolph F. Dial, in February.
A prison spokeswoman announced the death. Since his recapture in April 2005, Mr. Dial had been suffering from heart disease and tumors. Medical reports cited in court records said he had at least two masses in his chest that are possibly cancer.
Mr. Dial, a paunchy figure with a penumbra of white hair and beard, remained adamantly coy about his relationship with his traveling companion, who was 18 years his junior. But in a letter to The New York Times in January, he wrote, Ill gladly trade 11 years of then for 7 years of now.
A spinner of tales whom a presentencing report called delusional to a point, Mr. Dial joined the most-wanted lists with his disappearance on Aug. 30, 1994, from the Oklahoma State Reformatory in Granite, where he had been allowed to work on pottery projects in the home garage of the deputy warden, Randy Parker.
Mr. Parkers wife, Bobbi, then 31 and a mother of two, vanished in her car at the same time but called home that night to say she was safe. She and Mr. Dial surfaced enigmatically in 2001 in a telephone call to the author of a true-crime book on Mr. Dial, Charles W. Sasser. Then the trail went cold until April 5, 2005, when F.B.I agents alerted by a tipsters call found them living in a trailer at a chicken ranch in Campti, in East Texas.
Both later said that Ms. Parker had been held against her will, but Mr. Dial was never charged with kidnapping, and the Greer County district attorney, John Wampler, has never ruled out the possibility that Ms. Parker could be charged with aiding the escape. The Parkers have since reunited but have not publicly discussed their marriage.
At his sentencing on Feb. 1 for the escape, Mr. Dial turned away all questions about Ms. Parker, saying that his answers could be self-incriminating. When told by Judge Richard Darby that he had already waived his rights under the Fifth Amendment, Mr. Dial continued to resist, saying, I dont remember.
But his memory, he said, was crystal clear about schemes that he said showed the perfidy of the prison system: a supervisors effort to have him kill a troublesome inmate and a death threat from white supremacists after he was given a black cellmate who, Mr. Dial said, was gay and had AIDS.
In another letter to The Times, Mr. Dial said that while he and Ms. Parker were together, she was briefly kidnapped by a pair of Louisiana swamp rats whom he had to kill to rescue her.
Doc lives in his own world and creates his own scenarios, said Mr. Sasser, a former homicide detective in Tulsa, who wrote the book At Large about Mr. Dial while Mr. Dial and Ms. Parker were still missing.
But Mr. Sasser added, I dont think he thinks hes lying; he believes it.
The presentencing report said that Mr. Dial was born in Tulsa on Sept. 26, 1944, that his parents divorced when he was 3 and that he had a brother who committed suicide in 1988. He was said to have studied painting at the University of Mexico in Mexico City, worked as an art teacher in North Tulsa and earned a living selling his art.
The report said that he had at least six children (he says nine) from at least five marriages and that one wife, Mary Katherine Fields, was mysteriously killed in 1986, while he was in prison for murder.
One survivor who could be reached, a daughter, said that she did not want to be named for fear for her safety, and that her father would be cremated without a funeral.
Mr. Dials record included charges of check-swindling and threats, and the murder conviction, stemming from the 1981 shooting of a karate instructor, Kelly D. Hogan, outside Mr. Hogans home in Broken Arrow, Okla. The killing went unsolved for years until Mr. Dial turned himself in, saying, according to the presentencing report, that he was hired by the Kansas City mob as a hit man to kill Hogan, realizing later, he said, that he had become a target of the same mobsters.
But in court in February, Mr. Dial told a different story. In 1981 I killed a man I thought was dealing drugs to one of my kids, he said. When I found I was mistaken, I turned myself in.
I took everything a man has and everything he was going to have, he said, voicing contrition and asking to be judged warts and all.
In my life I have done some good things as well as bad, he said.
While I have not established the family tree for RE
AVID DIAL....this came up in a search the Tulsa Oklahoma/and the haveing been a painter stood out...to include that FDF stated he painted the Church cieling in Utah ?? While these two dials look very muchn alike as far as eye shape and their choose life-styles had to post this....could be an extended family member......still searching....can read a few pages of this book ...sounds like FDF story.....
At Large: The Life and Crimes of Randolph Franklin Dial - Google Books Result.....Takes place in Broken-arrow...Oklahoma.....could this be why FDF keeps returning to Oklahoma ??????