Ahhhh, Florida. I know I bust your balls, but I love ya. I really do. Consistently, I will find about one or two Florida-based stories a week that genuinely make me smile. There’s just something about the state that perpetuates ridiculousness. Florida is so damn ridiculous, I affectionately refer to it as the “Russia of the United States.” So what happened this week in our nation’s greatest state? Oh, nothing major, just the discovery of a FBI fugitive who’s been living there since the late ’70s.
According to Daily Mail, Fugitive William Claybourne Taylor had been living under assumed name James Manion when he was arrested by FBI last Thursday. Taylor lived in Reidsville with his wife, Sheryl, where they lived a quiet life and ran a wallpaper store.
“A man on the run for 40 years after a deadly attack in Florida evaded capture in a mundane manner, according to authorities and friends. He got married, settled in the quiet town of Reidsville, North Carolina, and ran a wallpaper store in Greensboro. People said the man they knew as James Emmet Manion and his wife were cordial but quiet, blending into the community of about 14,000 near the Virginia border. He made sure his dog Prancer received regular haircuts, voted Republican in several elections and was seen working in his tree-shaded yard.
‘I couldn’t say enough nice things about both of them. There was never an inkling of anything amiss,’ said Preston Trigg, who grew up in Reidsville and kept in touch with the couple after he helped sell them his mother’s house in 2002.
Well, turns out Mr. Trigg is a horrible judge of character, because as it turns out, his boy James Manion is actually William Taylor, and he’s a straight-up murderer. Uh, whoops.
“The fugitive — whose real name is William Claybourne Taylor — was the triggerman in an attempt to assassinate the then-mayor of the city of Williston, Eugene Bailey, authorities said. The mayor was wounded but another government official, former Immigration and Naturalization official Walter Scott, died in the attack. Taylor is scheduled to have a court hearing in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Thursday – a week after his capture. He disappeared in 1980 after posting $20,000 bail following his arrest and after he was indicted on charges of murder and aggravated battery, authorities said. The 1977 shooting failed to kill Bailey, despite the fact that he was shot three times at point blank range by alleged gunman Taylor after the car he was a passenger in drove of the side of the road and crashed into some trees.
It took local authorities three years to arrest Taylor, his older brother Ray and another man for their involvement in the botched hit job. The trio had been hoping to cash in by representing Bailey’s family in the wake of his death, with struggling lawyer Ray planning to serve as executor of the deceased man’s $2.5million estate. Ray, who in years after the plot had risen in the legal ranks to become a successful Tennessee prosecutor, was convicted in 1980 as the mastermind behind the plot. He appealed that conviction however over the next decade and in 1990 agreed to plead guilty to a charge of second-degree murder, receiving a 25-year-sentence that included time served for the decade he had already spent behind bars prior to his conviction. Ray has since completed his sentence and is a free man. The third man involved in the shooting, Paul Allen, was the driver of the car, and avoided prison completely after he agreed to testify against Ray during his murder trial.”
Oh, Florida. America just wouldn’t be the same without ya.
