In 2022, Vicky White told her colleagues she was ready to retire. For 17 years, she’d been working round-the-clock hours at the Lauderdale County Detention Center in Florence, Alabama, as the assistant director of operations. Her co-workers wondered how the place would function without her. Beloved by staff and detainees alike, Vicky was known both for competence and her compassion. “She treated everybody like they were somebody,” says former Lauderdale County Detention Center resident Tyler Purser in the documentary Jailbreak: Love on the Run. “She was like [the] mother … that everybody in there never had growing up.”
Vicky told certain co-workers that she would go out with a bang. They didn’t know what she meant, but the details became clear on her last day on the job — April 29, 2022. After her retirement party, Vicky told her fellow officers that she was bringing a resident named Casey White (no relation) to the Florence courthouse for a mental health evaluation. But the two never came back.
In Jailbreak: Love on the Run, Vicky White’s friends and former colleagues try to figure out just how an incarcerated person and one of the employees in the detention center where he was being held managed to fall in love and plan a prison break.
During her 17 years at the Lauderdale County Detention Center, Vicky White was seen as indispensable. “If you had a question about anything, you called Vicky,” recalls Sergeant Dylan Elrod, the detention center’s booking officer. She even played a role in busting other officers who became entangled with inmates and tried to smuggle in contraband for them. “She was really good at it,” says administrative assistant Chantelle Brown in the doc. “I would go out on a limb to say that she took pride in it. It made her feel some sense of satisfaction to be able to uncover the truth.”
Vicky had been married once, but that relationship ended in divorce. In 2021, she confided to some of her co-workers that she was dating two men at once, one of whom she said was a younger man — she was 55 at the time, and he was 38 — but beyond that, they didn’t know his identity. Other residents at the detention center began to suspect that something was up when they saw Casey hand Vicky letters to be mailed without any addresses written on the envelope.
Considered by many to be extremely dangerous, Casey White was already convicted on a felony charge when he was transferred to the Lauderdale County Detention Center in August 2020. While serving out a 75-year prison sentence for a string of violent crimes, he confessed to an unrelated separate murder and was sent to the detention center in order to await trial. Employees and inmates recall Casey as being friendly and charming, particularly when he wanted something.
“You have to be very strong-minded as a woman to work in a jail with male inmates,” field training officer Sergeant Renee Lewis says in the doc, recalling a time when Casey brazenly asked her for a hug, citing the fact that it had been years since he’d touched a woman. “You can’t cross that fine line,” adds former officer Joyce Brawly. “You don’t want to be [the residents’] enemy, but they can’t be your friend.”
Jailbreak: Love on the Run premieres on Netflix on Sept. 25.
