Former LPDC escapee paroled, arrested again

Note: Due to space constraints, this story printed in two parts in the March 15 and 17 editions. It has been restored to its original one-story form for the website.

Lincoln Parish Sheriff Mike Stone remembers the night in October 1993 when Phillip Wayne DeWoody broke out of the parish detention center by taking a female officer hostage.

“That was a bad deal. It was all hands on deck,” said Stone, who, at the time, was the LPSO’s Drug Abuse Resistance Education officer.

But Stone and just about everybody else in law enforcement responded. Jailbreaks were not common here.

“What I remember about him, he was just out-and-out mean,” Stone said.

Within two months of his escape and subsequent recapture in Texas, DeWoody, from Bossier City, would plead guilty to two counts of aggravated armed robbery one count of aggravated escape and one count of second-degree kidnapping.

He’d be sentenced to 109 years in prison at hard labor, without benefit of probation, parole or suspension of sentence.

Yet on June 10, 2019, the Louisiana Board of Pardon’s Committee on Parole voted unanimously to parole DeWoody, now 53. He went to Opelousas and was living at The Refinery, a men’s homeless shelter there.

According to his Facebook page, he was evidently working as a butcher at a grocery store there.

On Feb. 28 of this year — eight months after he was paroled from Dixon Correction Center near Baton Rouge — DeWoody was arrested in St. Landry Parish, accused of aggravated kidnapping. The 72-year-old female victim’s body was found March 2 in a wooded area off Interstate 49 between Sunset and Opelousas.

The investigation is still open; a Louisiana State Police spokesman said there are additional charges pending, contingent on the findings of the probe.

DeWoody is also being looked at for possible involvement in an unrelated case of alleged kidnapping and sexual assault that also happened since his parole.

He is being held in Hunt Correctional in St. Gabriel.

Though DeWoody’s criminal history didn’t begin in Lincoln Parish, all of the charges upon which he was paroled stem from crimes committed in Lincoln Parish.

Here is his story, based on court documents, archive stories from the Ruston Leader and interviews with local law enforcement officers who remember the man nicknamed “the deer.”

Phil DeWoody was 3 or 4 years old when his father left to go to the Army. In a nine-page handwritten letter found on his bunk at the detention center in September 1993, DeWoody describes a turbulent childhood during which he lived off and on with both his father and his grandparents.

The letter repeatedly states how much DeWoody wanted to be with his dad. The elder DeWoody now lives in Houston, and according to an audio recording of Phil DeWoody’s parole hearing, he attended each of his son’s prior unsuccessful parole attempts.

Juvenile history

Phil DeWoody’s juvenile criminal history dates back to a homicide he committed at age 12 or 13. DeWoody shot his girlfriend in the head. According to his letter, the killing was an accident.

He claims to have been waving the gun as he ran down a hallway towards the front door of his dad’s house, and the gun went off.

“Some people thought I did this on purpose, so they locked me up,” DeWoody wrote.

He said his father was later able to get an attorney and “proved that it was an accident.” Because juvenile records are confidential, further information was unavailable.

But other court documents show DeWoody was adjudicated a juvenile delinquent on June 3, 1981 on five separate juvenile counts and placed on “indefinite suspension.”

In September 1984, at age 17, DeWoody was convicted of armed robbery in Caddo Parish. A sexual battery charge was dropped. He received a 15-year sentence.

In April of 1985, he was convicted of simple battery in Bossier Parish and given a two-and-one-half year sentence to run consecutively with the Caddo robbery sentence.

He served nine years and was released on June 14, 1993.

He went to live with his grandmother. Then one morning he got mad — apparently about his grandmother’s repeated efforts to get him up early for work.

“I got dressed and stepped out of the house at 5:30 and got in my car and said ‘to hell with everything. I’m not going to work, I’m leaving,” he wrote in his letter. “I got on I-20 and just drove.”

It was Aug. 3, 1993.

Next stop: Lincoln Parish

At about 10:43 that morning, near Louisiana Downs in Bossier City, the car in front of DeWoody caught fire.

He stopped to help, as did a Louisiana State Police trooper and medic crew. The family in the car told authorities they’d just arrived back at the Shreveport airport from a vacation in Thailand and were headed home to Ruston.

DeWoody, driving a maroon sedan, offered to follow them home. The couple accepted. But when they waved him off at the La. 33 exit, signaling they were close enough to Suburban Mobile Home Park, where they lived, DeWoody didn’t leave.

Instead, court documents show he flagged them down, asking if he could use their bathroom before he went on his way

“He seemed like a nice young college kid to both my wife and myself, so we told him he could use our restroom,” the female victim wrote in a statement given to Lincoln Parish Sheriff’s Office.

DeWoody went in the bathroom and came out “a few minutes later brandishing a knife.”

He demanded money, jewelry and guns, the narrative says.

In fact, DeWoody appears to admit as much in his letter.

He tied the husband to the refrigerator and started searching the house. For about an hour, the wife tried to talk to DeWoody, until he threatened her, at one point apparently wanting to have sex with her. The couples’ 23-month-old daughter was with them.

Eventually, after a scuffle, DeWoody ran out of the house, with the male victim running after him. DeWoody got in his car and drove off.

Workers at a nearby mobile home wrote down his license plate number.

DeWoody’s vehicle was spotted in Webster Parish, and a chase ensued, reaching speeds of 120 mph before he wrecked the car in Bossier Parish and left on foot.

About two-and-a-half hours later, he was captured, hiding in the woods and brought to the Lincoln Parish Detention Center where he was held on $100,000 bond.

DeWoody, then 26, was placed in a 24-hour-watch cell.

Jailbreak

Officers who were involved in his capture and arrest say they remember little about it. DeWoody’s was basically just another case until 8:45 p.m. Oct. 20.

That’s when he escaped while a guard was in the cell dispensing medication.

According to a Ruston Leader story, DeWoody ran into the booking area, where he passed a male officer and pulled out what appeared to be a homemade shank, a sharp weapon-like object, grabbed a female officer and threatened her.

Using the female officer as a shield, he forced his way out of the building, reportedly telling the other officers to stop following him.

“He backed her out of the front door of the detention center, and they didn’t (follow him),” retired 3rd Judicial Attorney Bob Levy said.

DeWoody let the hostage go and ran down Louisiana Hwy. 33.

Levy was part of the search team that looked in the woods near the jail

“As it turns out, he was never there for very long,” Levy recalled.

DeWoody stole a pickup truck from behind a nearby construction company and apparently took off down 1-20. The truck had the keys left in it.

Levy said his staff tagged DeWoody “the deer.”

“He was so fleet of foot and got out the gate so fast,” Levy said.

DeWoody’s escape “was really quite remarkable,” said Levy, who was also chairman of the detention center commission.

Only someone who was nimble would have been able to make it through one interior prison door that wasn’t closed all the way before the next door opened, he said.

“Phillip DeWoody’s escape was a serious wake-up call,” Levy said.

In the days following his escape — DeWoody was still on the lam—the late Detention Center Administrator Chuck James blamed human error as a result of fear as the reason DeWoody successfully got away.

The prison’s policies were solid, James said.

Court records show that while DeWoody was still on the loose, he robbed and raped a 71-year-old Bossier Parish woman. The crimes were never prosecuted at the victim’s request because of her age and undefined health considerations, the records say.

DeWoody was ultimately captured in Fort Worth and returned to the Bossier City jail where he planned an unsuccessful escape.

After he was returned to Lincoln Parish, on Nov. 28, 1993, DeWoody again attempted to escape from the detention center after he fashioned another homemade knife that he reportedly brandished at officers, stating “I’m going to kill you.”

Records indicate he was subsequently transferred to the Union Parish Detention Center

Fit to stand trial

Two sanity commissions appointed by the 3rd Judicial District Court found DeWoody fit to stand trial.

Former Lincoln Parish Coroner Dr. Rel Gray wrote this: “While this man’s record speaks of a sociopathic personality and a habitual criminal, it’s my feeling that something about his manner and mood speaks of a person in desperate need of psychiatric help.”

But there was no trial.

DeWoody pled guilty to all of the local charges against him: two counts of armed robbery, one count of aggravated escape and one count of second-degree kidnapping.

Now-retired 3rd Judicial District Judge Joe Bleich sentenced DeWoody to 149 years in prison—two concurrent 99 year sentences for the armed robbery, 10 years for the escape and 40 years for the kidnapping. The escape and kidnapping charges were to run consecutively.

Each was the maximum sentence for each charge.

“There is a patently obvious fact that the defendant, if given opportunity of any leniency, would commit yet other crimes involving the most severe violence,” Bleich wrote in his sentencing report filed Dec. 7, 1993.

“He has utterly no regard or respect for law enforcement or human life. He had already been afforded leniency by the Department of Corrections, and within less than two months he began his violent rampage,” Bleich wrote.

A year later DeWoody argued his sentences were too harsh. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals ordered that the aggravated kidnapping sentence run concurrently with the sentence for the escape. Net effect: Phil DeWoody still faced 109 years in prison.

He served 26 years.

Parole requests

DeWoody had applied for parole at least twice before his June 2019 hearing. Both times, the Lincoln Parish Sheriff’s Office objected.

“Every time we got one, we objected to it,” Stone said.

Stone said he generally objects to 99% of the parole requests he receives.

“They got the sentence, and I don’t take a chance on giving them an OK, then something like this comes back and haunts you,” Stone said, referring to new crimes in which DeWoody is a suspect.

Stone objected to the June parole request, too, as did the DA’s office and DeWoody’s victims.

“Seldom does our society see such a continued course of criminal activity in which a defendant shows such ruthless regard for his victims,” 1st Assistant District Attorney Laurie Whitten James wrote in a letter to the parole committee dated April 15, 2019.

“To grant Mr. DeWoody parole would be a miscarriage of justice and an insult to the lives that he endangered through his criminal acts,” Whitten wrote.

But the parole committee didn’t seem to care.

In the audio of the 15-minute meeting, DeWoody can be heard telling the three-person committee he’s a changed man. He said he completed a number of classes while in prison and, at the time, was in his third semester of studying business administration online from Ashland University, a private school in Ashland, Ohio.

“I have remorse for the crimes that I’ve done and my victims that I’ve done these crimes to,” DeWoody tells the committee. “In the beginning I was on a path, and it took incarceration to make me realize that the people I’ve hurt .... I really want to show I’ve changed. I’ve matured since I’ve been here. ...Failure is not an option for me this time, you know.”

DeWoody claimed he’s gay and had problems with other inmates who wanted to have sexual relations with him.

Pearl Wise is a parole committee member from Monroe. She is a former probation and parole officer.

“All the law enforcement are opposed to your release,” she said to DeWoody.

“We are certainly willing to accept any stipulation to not go north of Alexandria or north of Opelousas,” DeWoody’s attorney Keith Nordyke interjects.

“That’s a good idea. I like that,” Wise said. “You also have victim opposition once again that’s been expressed. I just don’t .... Like you said, there’s nothing you can do about that. It still shows up.”

The Louisiana Parole Project, a program that helps get parolees back into regular life, was prepared to take DeWoody into their program. He was to work with the project and the Refinery Mission in Opelousas.

Telephone calls and emails from the Ruston Leader to the Louisiana Parole Project were not answered. Neither did the parole committee respond to similar inquiries asking about their action.

Based on the audio, the committee did not ask DeWoody any questions about his record.

“Mr. DeWoody, I’m prepared to give you a chance, and I’m confident, based on everything we’ve heard, you’re going to take good advantage of it,” committee member Keith Jones, a Baton Rouge attorney and Louisiana Tech University graduate, said.

Wise asked DeWoody to donate $500 to the state victim’s reparation fund within the first seven years of his release and pay restitution to the victims “if that’s determined.”

After his release DeWoody wanted to go to a truck driving academy, he said, and eventually move to Texas.

How was he eligible?

Evidently, DeWoody was first eligible to seek parole in 2013 under Act 790, a state law that makes prisoners eligible to be considered if they are over age 45 and have served a prescribed percentage of their sentence, depending on whether they are first- or second-time felony convictions.

After DeWoody became eligible, the law was amended to exclude prisoners convicted of certain crimes, including kidnapping. But DeWoody was grandfathered in under the original law.

James said she was “just shocked” when she learned DeWoody had been paroled.

But “there’s nothing we can do,” she said.

And the new crimes apparently implicating DeWoody after his parole?

“Obviously, it’s disturbing, it’s the worst possible outcome,” James said. “This is the reason the DA’s office opposed his parole in the first place.”