Michigan fugitive captured in California after 37 years in hiding

Authorities tracked down a woman who escaped from a Michigan prison nearly four decades ago and had evaded detection by living under an assumed name in California. She is currently being held without bail. 

|
AP Photo/Michigan Department of Corrections
Judy Lynn Hayman, who authorities say escaped from a Michigan prison nearly 37 years ago while serving time for attempted larceny, has been found living under an alias in San Diego. She is now in jail awaiting extradition to Michigan, police said.

A 60-year-old woman who fled a Michigan prison nearly 37 years ago has been captured in San Diego, where she was living under an assumed name, law enforcement officials said on Wednesday.

Judy Lynn Hayman was arrested on a fugitive warrant earlier this week after a detective working cold cases stuck inside during a recent winter storm found her fingerprints in an FBI database, said Lieutenant Russ Marlan of the Michigan Department of Corrections.

"The investigator inside his desk had about 40 cases of these old fugitives that had never been apprehended," Marlan said. "He started working all these old cases."

He said Hayman's prints were in the database from previous arrests in California.

Prison records show Hayman had served eight months of a 16-24 month sentence after pleading guilty in 1976 to attempted larceny when she was 23 years old. Under Michigan law, attempted larceny is the attempted theft of property worth over $100.

"She was stealing clothing from a couple of stores in Detroit and Lavonia," Marlan said. "It was larceny, probably a reduced charged of attempted larceny - essentially shoplifting."

Hayman was living under the name Jamie Lewis when San Diego police found her at her home near Balboa Park, said San Diego police spokesman Lieutenant Kevin Meyer. Her 32-year-old son was visiting at the time.

She was being held without bail at Las Colinas Detection Facility.

Hayman, who also went by the names Brenda Bushner and Judy Kayman, could face additional time for leaving the Michigan prison.

Marlan said that when Hayman escaped in 1977, the Huron Valley Correctional facility, the state's only women's prison, had little security.

"An escape could have been walking away in the middle of the night," he said.

(Reporting by Ned Randolph; Editing by Dan Whitcomb and Cynthia Osterman)

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Michigan fugitive captured in California after 37 years in hiding
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-News-Wires/2014/0205/Michigan-fugitive-captured-in-California-after-37-years-in-hiding
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe