My other life as a killer on the run with my lover comes to an end in Tennessee
In order to tell you the following story I’m going to have to make an embarrassing admission: I LexisNexis myself every day. That is to say, I plug my own name into LexisNexis, the online cuttings service, to see if any stories have appeared about me in the past 24 hours. In terms of vanity, it is one up from Googling yourself since it includes sources — like the Evening Standard’s Londoner’s Diary — that are not picked up by Google. However, unlike Google, it is not free. Conducting a search does not cost anything, but if you want to read any of the ‘results’ you have to pay a charge of $1.50/ article. The upshot is that I never hit the ‘purchase’ button unless I am completely satisfied that the article in question is about me and not some other ‘Toby Young’.
In the past, this daily trawl of the world’s newspapers and magazines has produced some strange results, but none as strange as the following headline from the Associated Press on 13 February 2006: ‘Man convicted in ’96 killing escapes from Lansing’.
Now, the ‘Toby Young’ featured in this story clearly was not me, so I decided not to stump up $1.50 to read the article. But my curiosity was piqued.
The following day’s search produced an even stranger headline: ‘Dog trainer accused of smuggling convicted murderer out of prison’. Then, two days later, my trawl threw up another pair of headlines, both about the same incident: ‘Dog trainer uses a crate to help inmate break out, authorities say’ and ‘Woman who drove inmate out of prison led seemingly normal life’.
What on earth was going on? Piecing the story together, it looked as though the ‘Toby Young’ who was the subject of these articles was a convicted murderer who had escaped from prison with the help of a love-struck dog trainer. This was confirmed by two more headlines on 17 February: ‘More serious than puppy love?; Dog trainer accused of busting inmate out’ and ‘From Pet Rescue to Jail Break? “Dog Lady” aids escape and flees with inmate’.
I began to wonder what mysterious hold my doppelganger had over the ‘Dog Lady’. One clue was provided the next day: ‘Officials release photos of escaped inmate’s tattoos’. At this stage, the killer and his accomplice were still at large, but, according to a headline on 19 February, it didn’t look good for the dog trainer: ‘Prison affairs fizzle or flame out; when a woman helps a man break out of prison, she risks her life and livelihood, often with love as the motive’.
Sure enough, the story took a dramatic turn on 25 February: ‘Fugitives nabbed in Tennessee: Lansing inmate, woman volunteer are apprehended after chase’. In case there was any , a headline on 27 February confirmed ove was indeed the motive: ‘Fugitives’ Fever; A peek inside their temporary home in the woods reveals romance’.
Now, of all the headlines to appear so far, that was the most beguiling. What was it about their cabin hideaway in the woods of Tennessee that revealed ‘romance’? Soiled sheets? A pair of panties ripped in half? At this point, I have to confess, I was getting a slight sexual thrill from the story. I could imagine myself in the place of this other ‘Toby Young’, tearing off my shirt to reveal a glistening array of tattoos as the ‘Dog Lady’ knelt before me.
You can imagine my confusion, therefore, when I read the following headline on 3 March: ‘Toby Young to appear on charge of helping inmate escape’. Come again?!? Surely, a prisoner cannot be charged with aiding and abetting his own escape? I decided the time had come to shell out $1.50.
I quickly discovered that my doppelganger was not the convicted killer, but the ‘Dog Lady’. The other Toby Young, it turned out, was a 48-year-old mother-of-two who ran the Safe Harbor Prison Dogs programme at the Lansing Correctional Facility. It was here that she met and fell in love with John ‘Hooligan’ Michael Manard, a 27-year-old inmate whom she smuggled out of prison in a white van. The two fugitives were caught 12 days later in a remote fishing village. Poor Toby Young, who claimed she was suffering from depression at the time of the escape, was sentenced to two-and-a-half years and was released last week after serving 21 months. During her incarceration, her husband filed for divorce and her father died. She has yet to be reconciled with her two grown-up sons.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
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