In 2022, Vicky White told her colleagues she was ready to retire. For 17 years, she’d been working long 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 compassion. “She treated everybody like they were somebody,” says former Lauderdale County Detention Center inmate Tyler Purser in the documentary Jailbreak: Love on the Run. “She was like [the] mother … that everybody in there never had growing up.”
Directed by Dan Abrams and executive produced by Rachel Stockman, Jailbreak: Love on the Run brings together Vicky White’s friends and former colleagues. They try to figure out how an incarcerated person and one of the employees in the detention center managed to fall in love and plan a prison break.
“What made Vicky’s story so surprising was how trapped she felt and how little her co-workers knew about her private life,” Stockman tells Tudum.
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 supervisor. 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 inmates at the detention center began to suspect that something was up when they saw Casey hand Vicky cards to be mailed without any addresses written on the envelope.
“In her jailhouse phone calls, she spoke about how her life revolved around work and pleasing others,” Stockman says. “After work, she would drink every day. Casey became her escape.”
Considered by many to be extremely dangerous, Casey White was already convicted on multiple felony charges when he was transferred to the Lauderdale County Detention Center in August 2020. While serving out a 75-year prison sentence for those 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.
“Casey White was described as a ‘romancer’ by one of his former cellmates, and those who worked at the jail said he was a polite, even charming, prisoner,” Stockman says. Vicky, who was used to doing things for others, fell for Casey’s manipulation, especially when he claimed he was being framed for a murder he didn’t commit. He made her believe in him.”
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 Casey to the Florence courthouse for a mental health evaluation. Vicky asked an officer to bring Casey up to booking and shackle him, which the officer did. She left with Casey for the courthouse, but hours later, when neither of them returned, everyone knew that something had gone awry.
When the authorities found Vicky’s car, they also found a handcuff key and Casey’s prison-issued footwear left behind. When they reviewed security camera footage, they saw that Vicky had broken protocol. A further investigation revealed she had recently cleared out her checking account and had a secret phone number — one that had been in contact with Casey more than 1,000 times over the past two years. The documentary features recordings of phone calls between Casey and Vicky that have never been heard by the public. In them, the two discuss their plans for the future and profess their love for each other.
Vicky and Casey fled together from the Lauderdale County Jail and managed to elude authorities for 11 days. When the couple left a motel and got back into the car, the authorities gave chase and ran them into a ditch. Casey was apprehended immediately, but it looked as though Vicky had suffered a serious head injury. She was transported to the hospital but died from what turned out to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Stockman says she and the filmmaking team hope their retelling of Vicky’s story helps peel back its many complicated layers.
“When we first started this project, the focus was on Casey White as the manipulative villain,” Stockman says. “But as filming progressed, we uncovered that Vicky had her own significant degree of control. She held the keys — both literally and figuratively. Yet beneath that power, she was lonely and vulnerable — emotions many women can relate to. Initially, I couldn’t understand how such a well-liked, stellar employee would throw everything away for a criminal. But by the end of production, I understood — and it was both heartbreaking and tragic.”
“She gave [Casey] 11 days of freedom,” says former corrections nurse Kylie O’Bryant in Jailbreak: Love on the Run. “And it cost her her life.”
Watch Jailbreak: Love on the Run on Netflix now, or listen to this episode of You Can’t Make This Up, where host Rebecca Lavoie interviews executive producers Dan Abrams and Rachel Stockman.
