Texas Seven Blended In on the Lam
Jan. 25 -- Until the case of the Texas Seven was featured on national television, citizens around a trailer park in Colorado mistook the notorious prison escapees for a group of friendly religious missionaries attempting to be hip.
Neighbors got used to loud Christian music booming from their trailer, and for three weeks the seven fugitives apparently did not slip up in their ruse.
Their identities were not betrayed by the fact that they were seven men living together, nor by the arsenal of guns and weapons authorities say they had in their trailer. Even the crudely dyed hair some of the men were using as disguises did not give them away — and was taken as an attempt to be stylish.
"You know, we actually commented at how silly [George] Rivas looked because he had this yellow hair and brown eyebrows and everything," said Gina Holder, who with her husband Wade runs the Woodland Park, Colo., trailer park where the men stayed. "But really, we just blew it off as trying to be faddish."
Fugitives Captured
Four of the men — George Rivas, Michael Rodriguez, Randy Halprin and Joseph Garcia — were seized by authorities on Monday after a tip by the Holders, and a fifth, Larry Harper, committed suicide as police closed in. Two other men, Patrick Murphy Jr. and Donald Newbury, surrendered at a Colorado Springs hotel on Wednesday.
"We attempted to be as friendly and neighborly as we could," Murphy said in a television interview before he gave up. "As far as the Christian meetings, that was only one man, and he was the man who committed suicide. That was part of the cover, I guess you could say. He was trying to pass us off as like a church work group traveling around."
As the Holders spoke on ABC's Good Morning America today, Wade Holder said not even a peek inside the men's trailer to flip a circuit breaker raised his suspicions. He saw no evidence of any arsenal there.
"I had no idea," he said. "The place was very neat and clean."
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