FUGITIVE CAPTURE

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Jul/Aug 2005 by Johnson, Linda J

Electronic documents help reporter track killer, 15 years after prison escape

The Kentucky State Police failed to find Ralph Annis for 15 years after he escaped from prison. I found him a few days after 1 went searching for him.

My discovery would eventually lead to this fugitive's capture, but it also would spark a wonderful debate within the newsroom over what to do with the information I had found. Should we go find Annis ourselves, and risk him fleeing again? Or, should we take our information to the police and possibly appear to be an agent for them?

Annis was no two-bit criminal. He was a murderer. He had pleaded guilty in 1978 to killing Melanie Kaye Gifford, his girlfriend's 10month-old baby from a small town north of Lexington, Ky. Annis had escaped from prison in July 1990 and lived, until his February 2005 arrest, in Corpus Christi, Texas.

I learned about Annis from the Kentucky Department of Corrections Web site under a category called "wanted inmates." Of the 15 people on the list of escapees, Annis was the only murderer and the most interesting one of the bunch.

I spoke with state police who had the escape file and the local detective who arrested Annis for the murder. I tracked down family members, and requested every document I could from the Department of Corrections, state police and the county courthouse.

Coughing up the alias

I started with the simple stuff: I found his first marriage and divorce, and Melanie's death certificate on the Internet and ordered them from VitalChek.com.

While reviewing old newspaper articles and Melanie's obit from the Cynthiana Democrat, the local paper that covered the murder, I noted that Ralph Annis was a pallbearer at her funeral. How could that be? I wondered.

The baby's mother refused to talk to me, and Annis' first wife didn't know where he was. She did tell me that he called her collect one time to say he was returning to Kentucky to turn himself in. She said the call originated in Corpus Christi, which was also the last place police believed him to be around 1993, based on an anonymous tip.

In the prison records, I found a marriage certificate for Annis and a woman he married while incarcerated. The corrections people had blacked out everything about her except her name. So, I ordered the marriage certificate from VitalChek.com and discovered the identity of the bride's parents.

According to documents, Annis had escaped while on furlough, picked up by his second wife, Jane. Annis' stepsister, who also hadn't heard from him since he escaped, told me that Jane's teenage son also left with them. That wasn't in the prison or police records I had.

Once I finally convinced the cops to cough up the alias they knew Annis had used at one time - Mike Winters - I decided I ought to look a bit for him before writing anything.

To my amazement, I found him almost immediately and was 98 percent certain it was Annis within a couple of days.

How did I find him? I plugged Annis' Social security number (retrieved from prison records) and his alias into the LexisNexis people finder and searched in the four states where I knew he had ties: Pennsylvania, where he was born; Kentucky, where he lived most of his young life; Indiana, where his second wife was from; and Texas, where the anonymous tip in 1993 placed him.

No one close to his age turned up in three of four states. But I found two "Mike Winters" in Corpus Christi. One was about 30 years old. I ruled him out and then checked the other one.

This Mike Winters was about a year younger than Annis and the first five digits of their Social security numbers matched. (Lexis often won't provide the last four digits.) Winters' number had been issued in Kentucky in 1967, about the time Annis would have been 16.

That piqued my interest. Using Nexis.com and Google.com, I got more and more suspicious. The Mike Winters in Corpus Christi didn't have a driver's license or voting record that I could find, nor did he appear to own any property.

To double check that, I went to the experts: our news research department. I asked Linda Minch to find everything she could on this guy, using both names and the Social security number. She came back with an AutoTrak record that turned out to be a gold mine.

It confirmed for me what I had learned about his life, that he was keeping a low profile. But it also gave me what appeared to be another wife - or perhaps the second wife with a different name.

This wife didn't show up in Texas marriage licenses, nor was there a divorce for Annis or Winters. (I later learned that the second wife died in 2000 of cancer, long after she and Annis had split up.) The third wife was Linda Winters.

We ran AutoTrak on her and discovered she had recently filed for bankruptcy protection.

I downloaded the bankruptcy files from PACER and started culling through them. It listed Mike Winters as her common-law husband and said he worked construction. She was the sole owner of the home where they lived, and that address matched one from the AutoTrak records.