This is the second in a series of seven stories chronicling the days that escaped Alabama prison inmate Casey White and jail officer Vicky White spent hiding in Evansville one year ago this week.
EVANSVILLE — James Stinson woke up on May 4, 2022 with a bee in his bonnet. Something odd had happened late the previous afternoon at the do-it-yourself car wash he manages, and it bugged him.
The call he would place to Evansville-Vanderburgh Central Dispatch at 9:19 a.m. that day made him a hero to many who cheered the apprehension of Alabama fugitives Casey and Vicky White and a true-crime celebrity. But it would also put him at odds with members of the U.S. Marshals Service here and in Alabama, who all but said Stinson grossly exaggerated his role in the case.
“His version and the real version is a little bit wonky,” said Detective Justin Bean, an Indiana State Police trooper assigned to the Marshals Service and lead local investigator on the White case.
More:The stories you’ve never heard about Casey and Vicky White’s time in Evansville. Here’s Part 1.
Stinson had found a dark, four-door Ford F-150 truck with a Tennessee license plate abandoned in a wash bay at Weinbach Car Wash on Evansville’s Southeast Side, the keys still inside and windows down. In one of the numerous media interviews he would later give, he recounted how he had approached the truck with trepidation, glancing inside half-afraid that he would find someone sleeping or dead. He started it to see if it ran.
No one ever came to get the truck, which only made the alarm bells in Stinson’s head ring louder.
Normally he would just have the truck towed, Stinson later told the Courier & Press, but this time he checked his security cameras. The video showed that over the span of five minutes just after 4 p.m. on May 3, a man driving a dark F-150 truck pulled it into a wash bay. A gray Cadillac sedan seemed to be shadowing the truck, which dipped briefly into a nearby gas station before heading over to the car wash. But the Cadillac drove north on Weinbach past the car wash, disappearing from view for about two minutes and leaving the tall man to loiter in the wash bay.
The man opened both doors on the truck’s driver’s side, standing between them and seemingly fiddling with something. Stinson recalls wondering whether he was putting a gun in his waistband or perhaps urinating.
The man stepped outside the wash bay, looking up Weinbach as if to wonder whether the Cadillac had abandoned him. More than a minute later the Caddy reappeared, turning east onto adjoining Graham Avenue to pick him up, apparently having turned back south toward the car wash.
Two hours had passed since Vicky and Casey White purchased the Cadillac from Bob McCarty at McCarty’s Diamonds & Fine Jewelry on Evansville’s West Side. They wouldn’t be seen again for days.
More:It’s been a wild few weeks for Evansville car wash manager who helped spot Alabama fugitives
‘It’s kind of a non-emergency’
Stinson called Central Dispatch, mentioning three times in a three-minute call that he had video footage of the suspicious character — but he did not mention Casey White or Vicky White. Stinson would say repeatedly in the days and weeks to follow that he suspected or knew from the start he was looking at Casey White, matching the tall man’s tattoos to photos of the 6-foot-9 White.
“It’s kind of a non-emergency,” Stinson began the call to Central Dispatch.
He went on to report the truck, the keys, the Tennessee license plate, the open windows and the tall white man, adding that, “the guy’s kind of suspicious.”
“It’s odd that the windows are down and the keys are in it,” Stinson told the dispatcher.
But Stinson would later tell the Courier & Press, “I called the police on that truck because I knew it was connected to Casey and Vicky White.”
Why not tell Central Dispatch then that he suspected the Whites were in Evansville?
“A man that was with me said, ‘James, it can’t be. You’re f–ing goofy.’ You’re just f—ing goofy,'” Stinson said. “He said, ‘What makes you think they’d be in Evansville?!'”
Cowed by the other man’s ridicule, Stinson said he lost his nerve.
A little more than an hour later, another man called Central Dispatch to press for officers to come back to the car wash after an initial check. He didn’t mention the Whites, either.
Evansville police ran the extended cab Ford F-150’s VIN number through the National Motor Vehicle Title Information System more than once after Stinson reported it on May 4, but it didn’t come back stolen. The Whites had purchased it days before from a man in Williamson County, Tennessee, for $6,000 in cash. EPD didn’t yet know the car was connected to the fugitive couple.
“That officer (at the car wash) ran the plate, he realized that it didn’t match the truck, so he got out and he ran the VIN to make sure that the truck wasn’t stolen,” said Nathan Cooper, the EPD officer who had run the F-150 through police databases at Motel 41 the day before. “The plate that was on that truck actually went to a gold, older model Dodge truck.”
Neither the plate nor the VIN number identifying the truck came up as stolen, Cooper said.
Stinson is still angry that something more wasn’t done with his initial reports. If Evansville police had taken the issue of the mismatched plate and truck more seriously, he charged, Vicky White might still be alive.
But Cooper said a mismatched plate and vehicle is not by itself a situation that requires a law enforcement response. If neither the VIN number nor the license plate come up as stolen, he said, “at that point it’s an abandoned vehicle.”
“We can’t do anything with that because it’s just an infraction,” Cooper said. “If we got behind that truck, and he was driving on a public roadway, and I ran his plate and I realized that didn’t match, then I would pull that car over.”
Stinson had the truck towed away.
Four days into their escape from the Lauderdale County Detention Center, inmate Casey White and jailer Vicky White were still at large because no law enforcement officer saw an obvious reason to stop the F-150 in traffic. Now the fugitives had washed their hands of the truck for good. Or so they thought.
Stinson’s reports pay off
In the yawning gap of days that followed without a major break in the case, the U.S. marshals’ discovery of the man who sold the F-150 to Casey White would materialize into one. Casey had been dropped off by a woman in an orange Ford Edge, a car that had been linked to the fugitive couple back in Alabama.
The F-150 didn’t have tags, but marshals ran its VIN number through the NMVTIS. They were fishing in hopes that someone had checked the number over the last few days.
They got a hit from Weinbach Car Wash in Evansville, Indiana — from the checks by EPD that had been done at Stinson’s insistence.
The U.S. Marshals Service is necessarily circumspect with information in a manhunt for fugitives, lead investigator Justin Bean said. The fewer people who have sensitive information, the smaller the risk it will fall into the wrong hands. So the marshals didn’t mention the Whites to EPD when they called about the hits on the F-150.
Bean was driving back home from a baseball game in Indianapolis with his son when he got the call from Gabe Guerrero, then deputy commander of the U.S. Marshals’ Great Lakes Fugitive Task Force. Bean is assigned to the task force. It was Sunday night, May 8.
Guerrero told Bean marshals in Alabama had called him with the news that EPD came across the F-150 at Weinbach Car Wash a few days earlier.
“At this point, nobody knew any information about anything except myself, (Guerrero) and a couple marshals from Alabama,” Bean said. “Those are the only people who knew anything.”
Bean’s assignment: Follow up on the business with Weinbach Car Wash. The manager’s name was James Stinson.
‘You ain’t going to believe this’
U.S. marshals would remember their conversations with Stinson far differently than the man on the other end of the line. To begin with, Stinson insists he spoke to just one of them: Wade Thomas in Alabama. He played a voicemail Thomas left for him at 8 p.m. that Sunday night and showed the Courier & Press a text message from Thomas asking him to call ASAP.
“(Thomas) asked me, ‘Did you have a Ford truck towed from your car wash?'” Stinson said. “I said, ‘Yes sir.’ I said, ‘This is about that Casey White, ain’t it?’ He said, ‘Yeah, we think so.'”
Stinson said he called Thomas again the next morning — the Monday Casey White would be captured and Vicky White would die by her own hand — to tell him he’d recognized Vicky on his security camera footage.
“I said, ‘Guess what?’ I said, ‘You ain’t going to believe this,'” Stinson said. “He said, ‘What is it, James?’ I said, ‘Everybody says that Casey’s done killed Vicky, he’s dumped her body, she’s dead.’ I got her on tape picking him up. (Thomas) said, ‘Man, you’re the bomb. You’re the s–t.'”
Stinson also said Thomas had told him a team of U.S. marshals was en route to his house Sunday night — but when they didn’t show, he didn’t belabor the point Monday morning.
Thomas told the Courier & Press that Stinson is “making up his own story.”
“(Stinson) was aggravated at something else regarding the (Evansville) police, and I’m like, ‘OK, but that’s not — I just need this information,'” he said. “I was just trying to confirm something through him and he confirmed it, and that was the extent of our conversation.
“There has been an issue with what (Stinson) says is factual has not been factual before. Yet again, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to put two and two together afterwards.”
Stinson said he never talked to Justin Bean, but Bean said they did talk. It was a straightforward conversation, the veteran lawman said.
“I identified myself. I asked (Stinson) if at the car wash, they had video surveillance and, if they did, does that video surveillance record? He said yes,” Bean said.
“And then the only other question I asked him was, ‘Were you the one that called and had a Ford truck towed?’ And he said yes. So we came up with a time he said he would be available (Monday) morning that we can meet up and go review the video surveillance that he had.”
Bean never mentioned Casey or Vicky White, he said, and neither did Stinson.
Breakthrough
Ella Shemwell was a zombie. The ambitious young WEVV reporter had filled in for a co-worker to anchor the station’s 10 p.m. newscast on Sunday, leaving Evansville about an hour later for her home in Owensboro, Kentucky. Now she was sitting in WEVV’s Monday morning production meeting, having driven back to Evansville on just a few hours’ sleep.
Reporters were supposed to come to these meetings with a couple of story pitches, but Shemwell was running on fumes. She was the only reporter who didn’t have any stories set up.
A web producer interrupted the meeting to say someone had called about an escaped inmate. Shemwell remembered having heard about a jail inmate in a nearby county who walked away from work release. She could take that story.
Get more information from the caller, Shemwell’s bosses told the web producer.
“He comes back and says, ‘This guy says he has spotted the Alabama fugitives on his camera at a car wash here in Evansville,'” Shemwell recalled with a smile.
“We didn’t ask any questions. They said, ‘Go, go, go.’ So I took off running, running out the door.”
Shemwell pulled up breathlessly at Weinbach Car Wash a few minutes after her cameraman — at about the same time local and Alabama marshals rolled up. It was obvious these were serious men.
Bean was not pleased.
“I asked (Stinson), ‘Why is the media here?’” he said. “And his response to me was, ‘Well, if the U.S. marshals are involved, something’s got to be big.'”
Stinson apparently had intuited that the marshals’ interest in his video footage was connected to the fugitives from Alabama.
Stinson told the Courier & Press the marshals had agreed to appear at the car wash at 9 a.m. When they didn’t show by 9:10, he said, he got steamed. That’s why he called WEVV.
“I got aggravated because nobody would listen to me,” he said.
But Bean wasn’t worried about Stinson’s feelings.
The Whites’ trail had gone cold after marshals found the man in Williamson County, Tennessee, who sold Casey the F-150 a few days before. Now they had video evidence. They parsed through it over and over, quickly becoming convinced they were indeed looking at Casey White.
Vicky White? The marshals couldn’t make out the figure in the Cadillac for the glare of the windshield. But the Caddy’s windows weren’t tinted, they could tell that much.
Casey and, probably, Vicky White had been in Evansville late on the afternoon of May 3. Bean was certain of it now. But that was more than five days ago.
The Whites can’t still be in Evansville, Bean thought. Can they?
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