The New York Times has an interesting piece on Bucky–not just on this case, but on Bucky as a person. The article starts by explaining Bucky’s background and childhood:
His father went by the nickname Buck, and so he was called Bucky, a smiling boy in the old pictures, the woods behind him. He lived in a shack near here with a sister and poor parents, and played outside, sitting on a make-believe couch and watching a pretend television, both made of hay.
“He’d play in the woods,” said Shawn Horton, 46, a lifelong acquaintance. “Hide-and-seek. Small-game hunting. A normal country boy.”
But as the boy, Ralph J. Phillips, grew, his game of hide-and-seek became far less innocent. “At one time, he had quite a cache of stolen vehicles in the woods,” Ms. Horton said. “I believe it was just the thrill of it for him.”
His latest round of hide-and-seek has brought hundreds of state troopers, national attention and tragedy to these woods in Chautauqua County. The police said he was the prime suspect in the Aug. 31 shootings of two state troopers, one of them killed, the other critically injured in an ambush from the woods. He is also a suspect in the shooting of a trooper on June 10 during a traffic stop, in which the officer was wounded, and in the robbery of a gun store.
The article then delves into the question of how this two-bit criminal could have turned into a murderer:
Mr. Phillips, 44, has a long criminal history, stretching back perhaps 30 years, but it is not a history of bloodshed. That contradiction has left his family and old friends wondering just what it was, if he was the gunman, that transformed him from a unrepentant thief into someone ready to commit murder.
Most believe that when the police, four months into the hunt, arrested his daughter, her boyfriend and Mr. Phillips’s former girlfriend, and the authorities temporarily took custody of his daughter’s three young children, Mr. Phillips went from a man bent on escape, and who they say had already shot one trooper, to a man filled with rage.
The article then goes into some information about what is currently happening in the Bucky search, and then back to Bucky’s background and formation:
In interviews, Mr. Phillips’s daughter, her maternal grandmother, his former brother-in-law and his estranged wife paint a complex picture of the fugitive. In their telling, Mr. Phillips grew from an abused and neglected boy to a thief who stole just for the rush of it, preferably leading the police into a chase.
For more than half his life — since 1983 — he has lived almost entirely behind bars. Short periods of freedom ended in crime and capture. He seemed, they said, more comfortable locked up.
Some women were drawn to him. He was gentle, handsome, mysterious. Indeed, Mr. Phillips, since his escape, has returned to several of the women from his past, according to the police and his wife, Terry Phillips, 43, who admits that she spent a day with him during his flight, early in the summer. They ran mundane errands, calmly strolling through a grocery store to buy detergent.
That was June 9, Ms. Phillips said. The next day, the first trooper was shot.
“What the hell is he doing?” she asked during a telephone interview on Wednesday, given on the condition that her current residence, in another state, not be revealed, for fear of putting herself in danger. “Why is he doing that?”
Mr. Phillips was born on June 19, 1962, to Ralph and April Phillips. His father was some 40 years older than his mother, and was prone to drink and to violent outbursts, several members of Mr. Phillips’s extended family said.
“He’d make him sleep in a barn,” said Emery Masiker, 43, a contractor and Christmas tree farmer who was once married to Mr. Phillips’s sister, and who was close to his mother until her death. “He was just an old, tired man.”
His father may have steered him down the wrong path early on. “He was the one who taught him how to jump cars,” said Norma Gloss, 65, whose daughter had a child with Mr. Phillips.
Mr. Phillips and his future wife, Terry, played together as early as age 7, she said, recalling playing house in the hay and provoking a bull so it would chase him. She said Mr. Phillips was sent to a home for delinquent boys, though she did not know for how long, and they had not seen each other for six years, when he pulled up with a smile and a stolen car. He was 13. “He came up to the driveway and said, ‘Come on, let’s go for a drive,’ ” she said.
Then he was in custody again, she said. His juvenile record was not available, but those who know him said Mr. Phillips was a compulsive thief.
“He went from bicycles to tractors to cars,” said Art Clever, 62, who owns a general store near the Phillips family’s now-crumbling home. He said Mr. Phillips was once chased into the store by four police officers, their guns drawn, and was arrested in the back office.
Mr. Masiker said what he stole did not seem to matter. “Cigarettes, guns, money,” he said. “ He’d steal a set of pop machine keys and come back with piles and piles of coins. He’d be all right for a couple of days, but then, like an alcoholic, he’d go back again.”
He fathered a daughter in December 1982 with his girlfriend Kasey Gloss, but he has spent most of the 23 years since then in prison, according to records.
He spent three years shuttling between three prisons for stealing property from a garage in 1983. Nine months after his release, he was locked up again, for entering a home and threatening the residents with a rifle. He was released three years later, and was back in prison nine months after that.
“I call them sabbaticals,” Ms. Horton said of the stints of freedom.
His longest stint behind bars, for burglary and selling drugs, began on Nov. 5, 1992, and lasted 13 years. Soon after he began serving that sentence, one of his girlfriends was caught trying to sneak him a handcuff key hidden in her mouth, according to parole records and his friends.
A Native American by blood, he enmeshed himself in Indian prison groups, his daughter said. He corresponded with Terry, his childhood friend and future wife, and she became a frequent visitor at Auburn Correctional Facility. They were married in a prison ceremony in 1995, she said.
“In the visiting room, you’ve got time to talk, when it’s just you two,” she said. “We talked about our pasts as children, when we were 13. That’s all he wanted.” But a series of disciplinary violations, including one for “tampering with electricity,” resulted in his transfer to prisons farther away.
“He built a CB radio in prison,” Ms. Phillips said. “He would invent. He did something with wires and a battery and he made a little night light.”
They split up in 2003, at his urging, and he told her to live her own life, she said. They never divorced.
He was released last November, a 43-year-old man, and moved to a halfway house in Buffalo. He seemed eager to reconnect with his daughter, whom he knew almost exclusively from her few prison visits.
“I don’t drink or drug anymore,” he wrote in one of the many letters that the daughter, Patrina Wright, now 23, keeps in a shoebox, and from which she read excerpts. “My new image, you might say. No more prison for me, love. All done.”
He continued: “I’m doing everything I am supposed to do, so don’t worry, okay? Things are different now, and I want to just be free.”
He was free, for 49 days. Then he was accused of violating his parole, after a counselor at the halfway house reported that Mr. Phillips had threatened his daughter and her family.
Mr. Phillips’s lawyer, John Keaney, said there was no threat. In his brief period of freedom, the lawyer said, Mr. Phillips had been given a pass to leave Buffalo.
He shared a Christmas dinner with, among others, a former friend who had let Mr. Phillips take the blame for some of his own crimes in 1992, Mr. Keaney said.
The counselor wondered if spending more time in Chautauqua County, with his daughter, as Mr. Phillips wanted to do, was a good idea, because of the people like the former friend whom he came into contact with.
Mr. Phillips replied that there was no problem, with unfortunate bluntness. Referring to the former friend, “He said: ‘If I wanted to — I was carving a turkey two feet away from him. I could have stabbed him. I could get a gun and shoot him, and I wouldn’t be sitting here asking you for a pass,’ ” Mr. Keaney said.
Mr. Phillips’s daughter said her father would never have threatened her. “He just wanted his family,” she said. “He wanted to be a grandpa.”
He wrote her from his cell: “I want you to know the depth of my love for you, and I’ll prove myself to you by proving I can put the past behind me.” He escaped several weeks later.
A question arises: how can a man who has been locked up for so long be so knowledgeable about the outdoors? Mr. Masiker said he did not believe that his old friend was the survivalist he has been painted to be.
“He goes to work like everybody else,” he said, referring to recent thefts. “He’s not woods guy, he’s not skinning raccoons. He’s not this Indian hunting guy. He’s an opportunist.”
The grocer, Mr. Clever, predicted a violent end. “He’s a dead man walking,” he said. “Everyone around here has guns. If anybody sees him, they’re going to shoot him.”
His wife was surprised, two months after the escape, to receive a call from him. “He said, ‘Hey, can I come over?’ ” she said. “I said, ‘Yeah,’ and I gave him my address. I’m like, ‘You’re going to go to the Laundromat with me?’ He goes, ‘Yeah.’ ”
They shopped, and washed the clothes, and he returned to her home for a few short hours. His departure bore little resemblance to that teenager’s hopeful arrival in the driveway 30 years earlier, played in reverse this time and drained of light. “We said goodbye, she said, “and he walked away in the dark, toward the car.”
I’ve been a critic of a lot of the news stories about Bucky, but I found this one well researched and interesting.