Extradition set
for ex-fugitive
FORSYTH, Mo. - The attorney for a man accused of escaping from a Florida prison 30 years ago said his client does not plan to fight extradition from Missouri.
Oscar Richardson, 61, was arrested over the weekend at his home in the southwest Missouri town of Ridgedale. He’d been living there for 26 years under an assumed name and working as a handyman.
Richardson had been jailed in Florida for a pair of armed robberies and escaped from a work release center in 1979.
After his arrest in Missouri’s Taney County, he was released on bond and has been scheduled for a Feb. 11 court date.
The Springfield [Mo.] News-Leader reported Wednesday that his attorney, Dee Wampler, said Richardson will return to Florida - and plans to pay for the trip himself.
-THE ASSOCIATED PRESSGPS aids capture of wanted trucker
OWENSBORO, Ky.
- Authorities said a truck driver charged in a 2008 shooting death in western Kentucky has been arrested in Arkansas with the help of a GPS tracking system.
Kentucky State Police trooper Corey King said Adam Adelman, 38, was arrested Tuesday night in Fort Smith.
The Messenger-Inquirer of Owensboro reports that Arkansas authorities were acting on an arrest warrant issued out of McLean County in Kentucky this week after Adelman was indicted on a murder charge in the death of Keith Calhoun of Beech Grove.
In making the arrest, Arkansas authorities worked with the Fort Smith trucking company that employed Adelman. King said authorities tracked the GPS unit in Adelman’s truck and arrested him when he drove to Fort Smith to pick up a load.
The newspaper reported that Adelman is expected to be returned to Kentucky.
-THE ASSOCIATED PRESSDad, 38, son, 19,
held in slaying
LADDONIA, Mo. - The 19-year-old son of an eastern Missouri truck driver, arrested after a body was found in a tractor-trailer, also has been arrested.
Chad Michael Harvey of Eolia is charged with abandonment of a corpse and remains in jail without bond.
His father, Chester Harvey Jr., 38, faces the same charge and one count of kidnapping after a day-long hostage standoff Wednesday involving his wife and several children.
Authorities said in a probable cause statement that Chester Harvey told a tipster he killed a man he had picked up in California and placed him in a rig’strailer while he figured out how to “dispose of the body.”
Officials obtained a search warrant and Tuesday found the body wrapped in a covering in the trailer, which was parked in a lot along U.S. 54 east of Vandalia.
-THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
County to close
underfunded jail
ASHDOWN - Little River County Judge Clayton Castleman said the county has agreed to close its jail to avoid a lawsuit by the state attorney general.
Castleman said the jail will close Jan. 1, and inmates will be moved to jails in Miller, Sevier, Howard, Hempstead and Lafayette counties. He said the county will pay $30 to $35 a day to those counties to house the inmates and $42 a day to house female inmates and those with medical problems at the Bi-State Center in Texarkana.
The decision to close the Little River County jail comes after the 9th West Criminal Detention Facilities Review Committee said in a letter it found the jail inadequate and “a potential lawsuit waiting to happen.”
County voters in October rejected a proposed 3 /8-percent sales tax to build a new jail and also a 1 /8-percent sales tax to operate the jail.
-THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Tulsa man gets
4 life sentences
TULSA - A judge has sentenced a Tulsa man in prison to life in prison after he was convicted of killing two women.
Tony Alton Hall, 54, continued to maintain his innocence Wednesday at a sentencing hearing that followed his conviction Dec. 14 in the October 2007 deaths of 29-year-old Angela Bassett and 36-year-old Angela Hargrove.
“I did not kill nobody,” Hall told District Judge Kurt Glassco.
But Glassco imposed four life sentences to be served consecutively - two of them for slaying the women, and two for unauthorized removal of a body.
The women’s bodies were found alongside a road, bound and covered with a tarp.
The jury that convicted Hall had the option of recommending sentences of life without parole on the murder counts, but chose not to do so.
A co-defendant, Eric Lee Phillips, 43, pleaded guilty in March to the murder and body-removal counts.
He was sentenced to two life terms and two five-year terms, all to be served at the same time.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 13 on 12/25/2009