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Posted on 05/02/2008 9:46:50 AM PDT by Santa Fe_Conservative
Lefevre was arrested on drug charges in the early 70’s. Growing up in Michigan, Lefevre says she fell into the wrong crowd when she was 19 years old. “there were just all these different drugs. [I] experimented and got involved in the wrong crowd,” says Lafevre.
Lefevre was later convicted on drug charges and sentenced to 10 - 20 years in prison. Lafevre said that she expected to get probation. “so it was a couple hundred dollars worth of drugs a transaction that my friend did, and I was just there in the car.”
She decided to ‘mitigate’ her own sentence and escaped by climbing over fence and fleeing from the Robert Scott Correctional facility in Detroit about a year into her sentence. “My grandfather was waiting a few blocks away. I thought they were going to shoot me, but I didn’t care, I just needed to get out there, it was a very wrong thing to do,” Said Lefevre.
I’ve been through 30 years of paying off a debt,” Lefevre says. “I hope that there is some consideration that I did turn my life around, that’s a very good way of putting it.”
******
Susan LeFevre Biography
As a biography, Susan LeFevre, a.k.a. Marie Walsh, is age 53. She grew up in Thomas Township, Michigan where in 1972 she graduated from Arthur Hill High School. Police say that LeFevre was involved in selling heroin, and she was arrested after selling the drug to an undercover officer twice. At the time, investigators believed she was making $2,000 a week selling heroin. In her Saginaw, Michigan apartment, police found $500-$600 cash, drug paraphernalia, and photos indicating that she knew several top drug dealers in the area.
LeFevre was sentenced to 10-20 years on February 27, 1975. Because she was only a moderate flight risk while in prison, she was given a day pass to work in a clinic. On February 2, 1976, she left for work and never came back. Instead, she went to California, where in 1985 she married Alan Walsh.
The couple had been living happily in the Del Mar area of San Diego County with their three children for 23 years. Aside from having difficulty holding down a steady job because she bailed during the background check, Susan LeFevre was living a normal, upper-middle class life as Marie Walsh. That is, until a tip to the authorities led them to compare the fingerprints on record with the California DMV with those in Michigan. Since her arrest on April 24, LeFevre has been awaiting extradition to Michigan.
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LeFevre, now 53, was living as Marie Walsh in Del Mar, a suburb of San Diego, Hetherington said.
“She was living in an affluent neighborhood, in what is likely a $2 million home,” Hetherington said.
Her husband told officials he had no knowledge of her drug-checkered past and criminal record.
“Did he know? It’s hard to say, but it seems unlikely that he wouldn’t know,” Hetherington said.
LeFevre, by the time she was 21, had used the aliases Susan Grham, Susan LaFure, Susan LeFever, Susan LeFure and Susan M. LeFeure, police records show.
LeFevre initially denied her past, but after federal agents showed her their evidence of fingerprints and old photographs, she admitted who she was, Hetherington said.
Police arrested her when she was 19 for taking $600 from an undercover officer during a heroin drug sting in Thomas Township on Feb. 20, 1974, court records show. As part of a plea agreement, prosecutors dropped a charge of conspiracy to deliver heroin to agents Jan. 8, 1974.
“I basically lost my sister 30 years ago,” said her brother, David E. LeFevre, 52, of Ellington Township in Tuscola County, located between Caro and Cass City.
LeFevre said his sister “got into the wrong element so many years ago.”
“She got into a lot of parties, which lends itself into some drugs,” he said. “Years ago when I learned (of her involvement with drugs), it shocked me.
“My sister hung around a different group of people — musicians, no big celebrities. She kind of changed.”
LeFevre said he heard rumors of her life on the lam numerous times.
“At one time I heard she was living with a man who was the same age as my father, but I don’t know if it’s true,” he said.
Court records show LeFevre was living with Richard A. Anderson, who was two years older than her, at the time of her arrest. He also faced multiple drug charges over the years.
A man and wife out for a walk along Banner, near East (M-13), found Anderson’s murdered body in a water-filled ditch in September 1981.
Anderson, a Vietnam veteran, was a paroled heroin dealer and burglar, records show. Detectives said someone shot him several times in the head, “execution” style. Police have yet to catch his killer.
Anderson served two years of a 10- to 20-year sentence for selling heroin, and the parole board let him out in 1977.
LeFevre and Anderson received the same sentence the same day, and was a fugitive almost five years when Anderson’s killer shot him.
She was 19 when she was arrested with a friend during an undercover drug operation at a pizza parlor outside Saginaw, Mich., in 1974. Apparently, LeFevre was making several thousand dollars a week at that time from selling heroin and she had connections with top drug dealers in the area. She pleaded guilty and completed just one year from her 10 to 20 years sentence before escaping with the help of her grandfather, in February 1976.
******
Lefevre, known to her neighbors as Marie Walsh, says she was arrested as a teen for selling $200 worth of drugs to an undercover cop; authorities counter that she was a major trafficker working for a $2,000-per-week heroin operation. “I really wanted to keep this secret,” said Lefevre, a mainstay of the Michigan Department of Corrections most-wanted list.
LeFevre was arrested in 1974 in Michigan at the age of 19 and convicted of selling heroin. While she claims she was only a passenger in the car stopped by police, law enforcement officers have a different recollection of LeFevre.
Authorities at the time searched her apartment and found $600, drug paraphernalia, and photographs they say implicated her in larger drug ring. Her conviction stemmed from charges that she sold $200 worth of heroin to an undercover officer.
“That was it, the only time I was ever arrested,” said LeFevre during an interview from her prison cell. She says she pled guilty, thinking she would be given a lighter sentence.
Added LeFevre, “I was promised probation. I was a stupid little John Lennon, hippie-ish girl, a pothead.”
While some reports claim that LeFevre’s husband, Alan Walsh, was unaware of her past, he isn’t saying whether or not he knew. LeFevre herself said in a television interview with San Diego’s NBC station that she had told her husband about her escape. “I thought it was only fair,” she told the TV interviewer. “You can’t go into a marriage like this without telling them something.”
Lefevre’s children were interviewed and also said they had no idea of their mother’s troubled past.
“This is so awful,” said LeFevre’s daughter, who spoke to reporters but did not want to give her name. “This is a really horrible situation.”
Lefevre told the press that her escape has hung over her head constantly, and she thinks about it every day.
She also says she hopes the judge will show some leniency, as she has worked hard to create a life of responsible citizenship.
“I’ve been through 30 years of paying off a debt,” she says. While some housewives might agree that caring for a house and raising three children does at times feel like a prison sentence, others wonder at what, exactly, she has been doing to pay off her debt to society. Some might argue that marrying a wealthy man and staying out of the limelight doesn’t count.
However, Michigan authorities said Wednesday that Lefevre was a major drug trafficker whose drug-dealing operation was making about $2,000 a week selling heroin. Undercover officers bought from her at least twice and a search of her Saginaw apartment turned up $500 to $600 in cash, paraphernalia for cutting heroin and photos that showed she was acquainted with the “higher-ups” in the Saginaw drug world, said Michigan Department of Corrections spokesman Russ Marlan.
He said the sentence reflected the severity of her crimes.
“In 1975, you didn't get 10 years for being a minor trafficker,” Marlan said.
Michigan state police believed that Lefevre used others to sell the drugs for her. However, she was not believed to be a heavy narcotic user, Marlan said.
She escaped by walking away early the morning of Feb. 26, 1976, using a pass that allowed her to work at a clinic, Marlan said. Around 7:30 a.m., an hour after she left the prison grounds, the clinic called and said she did not show up for work.
A fugitive warrant for her arrest was issued the next day.
The department also listed six aliases for her, including Susan Grham and Susan Lafure.
Lefevre will be required to finish at least nine years of her sentence, Marlan said. Any mitigating circumstances about how and what she had done with her life since her escape would not be heard until she is up for parole, he said.
He said there is no appeal process unless a court intervenes, something Marlan said he has never seen happen.
“She was tried, convicted and sentenced to prison and she escaped,” Marlan said. “She's got a prison sentence and she's got to finish it.”
I did not assume she was an angel.
I think she should not be imprisoned again, and should just get a fine and probation.
quote EDINVA “This situation presents a conundrum. The woman has obvioiusly totally reversed the downhill slide she took in her late teens after the death of her high school sweetheart. She basically developed an entire new and respectable personhod, as it were.
Yet the state has an obligation to enforce the law. They cannot set the precedent of letting someone off completely when they’ve broken the law just because they got away with it for 30+ years. On the other hand, prison is supposed to be for rehabilitation (which it rarely is). She seems to have done a good job of rehabilitation.
If she had told her husband and children, she’d have put them in the position of either having to turn her in or being complicit in her crime. Some secrets are best kept to oneself. It appears in every way she was a good wife and mother for all these years.
When you compare her crime to the Doehrn/Ayers’ from the same era, she should be commended. At least by developing a different life and lifestyle, she’s shown a form of remorse. We’ve seen none from them, and they have been out in the open living the lives of community leaders.” unquote
I agree with your post.
Thanks. It’s going to take a Solomon-like judge to deal with this (and in MI I am not counting on finding one).
It definitely gives a much fuller picture of this character.
It's interesting that her Vietnam boyfriend was killed in America seven years after she was sentenced, not in Vietnam before she got involved in drugdealing - as the original article implied.
It's also interesting that she escaped from a work release at a civilian clinic - not in a daring over-the-wall escape from a violent prison as she claimed.
This woman has created a fictional reality she still inhabits, it would seem.
It's also interesting that her husband will not say if he was aware of her past or not.
Thanks again.
Again, she has already been sentenced.
wow, that's a pretty bizarre view of individual rights & responsibilties. Also sounds more like something Joseph Stalin would say than Ronald Reagan.
Sure hope you're not in charge of anything important.
I have to agree with you on this. Sad, sad story. At nineteen sentenced to 20 years? Then she ran scared.
Our judicial system supposedly rehabilitates those convicted...seems she was rehabilitated. I hope the governor commutes the sentence or whatever needs to be done.
Are you a libertarian? In my teens I was one. Then I decided I didn't want to deal with druggies anymore.
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Daylateiapologize ping
Well, it certainly sounded more like you consider individuals as property of the state. That's the way Joseph Stalin and a host of unsavory characters looked at people.
Why would the label "libertarian" mean much to you? I have only ever registered as a Republican, but John McCain makes me feel dirty for having that label.
Coming back to the business at hand however, the government does not have anything of the sort of a capitalistic "investment of some $200,000" in a person of 19 years old (or any other person for that matter).
We free individuals have a rather heavy investment in our government, if you want to look at it in those terms, but I owe my government nothing other than what it takes to keep the pot holes filled and the borders secure (neither of which seems of much importance to any of our current crop of Presidential candidates).
Your view that the government has a monetary investment in every 19 year old is, at the very least a Fascist view and certainly not the true understanding of anyone I would prefer to associate with, let alone have help manage any part of our government.
Your tag line is rather humorous given your idea that free men are "owned property" of the state. What exactly does this mean in that context? "Leftism is powered by the evil force of envy"
Statism and Fascism could also be seen as 'powered by the evil force of envy' if you wish
Cheers,
Lloyd
>>The reality is that SSN’s are not random numbers that you can make up.<<
The article doesn’t say that she used random numbers; it says she “made up” the SSN she’s using. She could have had a vague idea of what the numbers were and simply added her own.
I make up telephone numbers all the time to give to store clerks who ask. I know what area codes, obviously, there are in my area plus I have a decent idea of what exchange codes are used, plus I use variations of numbers I’ve had in the past. I’m not going to say my phone number is (888) 911-9111. I have little doubt I’ve given someone else’s phone number to a clerk.
You can't go and get a drivers license (like she did) on the vague assumption that the SSN you chose might match someone of your geenral age and description when it is run through the state computer.
She bought an SSN.
Your made-up telephone numbers are no big deal to you when you are lying to a store clerk, but if it were the DMV or the IRS or some other authority with the ability to have you punished, you would not give a made-up number.
Especially if you were already a felon on the run.
You would have to give a plausible number that checked out upon further scrutiny.
I don’t think you understand what I’m saying. It isn’t that tough to figure out what the “template” SSN is and what it is based on. Just because you are 25 or 30 years old and in California in 1981 doesn’t mean you can’t have a SSN with a template from someone who was issued one in Maine in, say, 1972. You’re also making an erroneous assumption that there was ANY scrutiny of SSNs in 1981 or for a period after that.
I’m not comparing making up my phone numbers to using an illegal SSN. What I’m saying is that it isn’t (or wasn’t then) hard to learn the “template” then make up the few remaining numbers and it coincidentally was the same as someone who had that number. So it IS plausible. While you may be correct that she bought it, I don’t know why she’d lie about it now. Just not answer the question.
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