This one came courtesy of Duke Blackburn, the wiry, intense chief of security for the Georgia Department of Corrections (see Dogs). I spent an hour or so with Vianna but I don't know what to make of her. I know she was lying to me about some of this, but I have a hard time believing she's dangerous. There's no doubt, however, that she's extraordinarily good at running from the law.

 

    

She wears a plain white cotton jumpsuit, her skin is sallow and her hair is dyed a muddy brown. Only her vivid blue eyes stand out, darting nervously around the stark white room.

    She blends in with her surroundings.

     She is Vianna Edith Branham, 42, a convicted murderer returned to prison in Georgia after 12 years as an escapee.

    She blended in so well during those 12 years on the lam that she was an uplsterer, a painter, a student, a stripper and a caretaker of Alzheimer's patients. She even went unnoticed as she built her small frame from a drug freak's scrawniness into that of a bodybuilder buff enough to win prizes in public competitions.

    She also had a son, but she never married his father.

    "He asked me to marry him," she said. "I couldn't do it, of course. I wasn't even me."

    However well-planned and ingenious their escape, fugitive convicts are rarely able to overcome the gravity-strong pull of the familiar. The first thing their hunters do, routinely, is put a watch on the fugitive's mother's house, or spouse's house, or some other loved one's residence. Sooner or later, and usually sooner, the escaped prisoner will return to old haunts, contact family and friends.

    Vianna Branham didn't do that.

    She went to a place she'd never been, a place she'd scarcely even heard of.

   "For nine years she had no contact with a single soul who knew her," said Jeff May of the Metro Fugitive Squad, who has hunted her for six years. "She never got in trouble, she never got fingerprinted, she never made contact with anyone she knew."

    Beyond that, she counted on her chameleon-like qualities to keep from being recognized.

    "I think I look kind of ordinary," she said. "I never worried about it." Her freedom ended 10 days ago, when federal agents arrested her in El Paso, Texas. And, almost inevitably, it was a family connection that put the hunters on her trail, although they won't reveal exactly who it was or what prompted it.

    If ever a youth was lost, it was Vianna Branham, and she doesn't even know why. She talks of hunting with her father, and helping him on construction jobs, before she ran away from home in Illinois at the age of 12.

    "There's no real reason other than adolescence that caused me to go off the wall," she mused in her Midwestern accent in an interview room at Metro State Prison off Moreland Avenue. "Stupid, just stupid."

    At the age of 17, she had had a daughter and put the child up for adoption. Later, still drifting, she had a son. "He has a good life now," she said, but avoided saying where he is.

    In New Orleans, she picked up a heroin habit. "I left New Orleans to kick the heroin," she said. But when she got to Atlanta she "turned to other junk. I called myself a trash can --- I'd use anything I could get."

    She was high on something --- "I can't even remember what" --- on the day in February of 1979 when she killed Charles Brown in an attempt to snatch his wife's purse in front of their East Point home. She shot him in the throat when he grabbed her.

    Branham pleaded guilty and drew life plus 10 years at the Women's Correctional Institute in Hardwick, then the state's only prison for women. She served eight years and then was turned down at her first chance for parole.

    She started planning her escape in 1987. She said she was afraid for her safety, and incidents of abuse at the prison, since closed, have been well-documented. Female prisoners rarely escape, and security at the east Georgia prison was lax. Branham's job was cutting grass, and she was allowed outside the fence with her mower.

    "My mother went into a coma and died when I was sentenced to life," she said. "She left me $2,000. I had my cousin get the cash and send it to a friend of mine."

    On May 18, the date Branham chose, her friend drove by the prison and dropped a nondescript bag containing the money into a roadside ditch. Branham put on spandex tights and a pajama top --- "It looked kinda like a workout outfit" --- under her white-and-blue jumpsuit, boarded her riding mower and headed for the front gate.

    "I told the lady in the tower I was going to mow the warden's lawn," she said. "Then I told her I'd pick her some mulberries. I don't know why I threw that out. I wasn't coming back."

    For 12 years, wanted posters have reported she got into a Chevrolet Impala that stopped to pick her up. Branham insists that isn't true. She said she abandoned the mower in a pecan orchard and started walking up a highway, unsure of the geography around Hardwick. She only knew that the woods off the highway were part of a swamp.

    "Everybody knew about that. They said it was full of snakes and alligators," she said with a shiver.

    "I planned on hitching a ride but the first thing to come along was a prison truck. I panicked and ran into the woods. It sure enough was swamp. I smushed and sloshed along best I could, and after a while I heard the dogs. But I knew from hunting with my daddy they wouldn't be able to track me in the swamp."

    When she came back out on the road, she said, "some nice old fella" took her to a truck stop, and a trucker gave her a ride to Augusta.

    At the Augusta airport, she bought a ticket to Alamogordo, N.M.

     In 1987, the Department of Corrections did not hunt its fugitives with the intensity it does now, and Branham's trail quickly grew cold. She said she chose southwestern New Mexico because "I had a friend who told me about it. It just seemed right. The mountains are really beautiful." Left unsaid is the fact that she'd never been near the place.

    She arrived with $1,500, became Linda Kay Branham, and started putting together a life. Whether it was as blameless as she makes it seem is questionable, according to law enforcement officers, but certainly she avoided trouble and usually held a job.

    She met a man --- "he's Spanish" --- and began living with him. A couple of years after her escape, she gave birth to their son, but a few years after that she asked her lover to leave. "He was alcoholic, and he was getting to be emotionally abusive."

    After the breakup, she said, "I was depressed. My doctor told me I had a hormone imbalance. I remembered that when I was in prison, I used to run, maybe five miles, every other day. I wasn't depressed then. So I went to the gym and started lifting weights."

    Branham claims she tuned her body up to show quality in only a year and denies using steroids. She entered her first competition in 1996, she said, and then won the state middleweight championship for women. She never worried about being recognized and, in truth, she scarcely resembled the woman who fled Hardwick prison. In her long-sleeved prison jumpsuit, the 5-foot-3 Branham doesn't give any hint of great muscularity until a movement stretches the trouser legs tight over her thighs.

    She said she was a good mother and set a good example for her son. "I always told my boy to stay away from guns," she recalled. "Don't touch 'em, don't pick 'em up. I kinda harped on it. One day he turned around to me and said: 'Mom, have you shot someone?'

    " 'Never mind,' " I said to him. "Just do what I say. Don't mess with guns.' "In 1998, she said, "I had a feeling time was getting short." She said she moved to El Paso, leaving her son at their country house in the care of neighbors and his father, because "I wanted him to get used to me being gone."

    In El Paso, she wandered into a gym that offered her a free membership and free entry in a bodybuilder's contest. She won fifth place but she couldn't find a job. She started dancing at The Naked Harem. She frequently came back to Alamogordo for the weekend.

    This year, her cold trail suddenly turned hot. "We received a call on July 2 that the FBI had received a tip that she was living in Alamogordo as Linda Kay Branham," said May, who heads the Department of Corrections team within the fugitive squad.

    Special Agent Gary Brotan, stationed in Las Cruces, went to Alamogordo and found the tip was very likely true. Neighbors told him Branham was working in El Paso and would be coming home on the weekend to see her son. One of them agreed to let Brotan set up surveillance inside her house.

    But, May said, "during the surveillance Brotan got word that Branham had been tipped to him and was on the run."

    Brotan went to El Paso, got a publicity picture of Branham, and tracked her activities there. But nobody knew where she had gone.

    On Aug. 16, May said, Branham called both Brotan and the Department of Corrections in Atlanta, and "indicated she would turn herself in at Las Cruces on the 18th." May flew to Las Cruces and waited with Brotan. Branham didn't show.

    "I got scared," she said. "I was scared of going back to that prison." She wrote to her son in Alamogordo, telling him who his mother really was. "I said, 'Now you know why I always told you never to pick up guns.' "

    A month later, May found that Branham had fled from El Paso to Rockingham, N.C., another place she had never been. But he was several weeks behind her. Branham had gone to Dallas and taken a job caring for Alzheimer's patients. "It paid $100 a day," she said, "and it was good work. I could be happy doing that."

    While watching television at the home, she said, she saw a Geraldo Rivera program on prisons which touched on the scandal at Hardwick, reported how several new women's prisons had been established and contained an interview with Metro State Warden Guy Hickman. "He seemed really proud of the place," she said, and "I couldn't see how he could talk like that if it was as bad as it used to be. So I decided to stop running."

    She flew to El Paso the next day. On Sept. 29th, she was spotted in the border town, and Brotan led a team that arrested her in her apartment at 7:30 p.m. the following day.

    After her arrest, she called her father. "He said a woman came by named Nicole, looking for me. He said she's been calling all the time." It was, Branham realized immediately, the daughter she had given up for adoption 25 years ago. "She's real excited about meeting me," Branham said, thrusting out her arms to display her prison jumpsuit. "Well, great. Look at me." She hasn't called Nicole back yet.

    May flew to El Paso to bring Branham back.

    "He's a really nice fellow," she said. "I always said I didn't mean to kill that man. I had no intention of doing it. Jeff told me he had stayed in touch with the man's wife. He said, 'She knows that you didn't mean to kill him, and she has forgiven you.'

    "That made me feel so much better," Branham said.

    "A life sentence is what I got," she said, looking at the concrete block walls around her. "That life is gone. The part of me that craved drugs is gone. I've definitely changed."

    However changed she may be, Vianna Branham is unlikely to see any fairy tale ending to her escape. Prison authorities say it will probably be 10 years --- some of those under close security --- before she has any chance at all of freedom again.  -- Atlanta Journal Constitution, Sunday, Oct. 10, 1999

 

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