By BARBARA BARRETT AND MATTHEW EISLEY, Staff Writers
In the past 11 days, prison escapee William Glenn Barefoot apparently has hidden behind a shed, tucked himself between $400 sheets and tied up a brother and sister with a length of stereo wire.
He has eluded law enforcement since overpowering a Hoke County jailer Oct. 25 and fleeing into the night.
Barefoot, 40, should be in prison serving 85 years after being convicted of attempted murder two years ago. Instead, he is considered armed and dangerous and possibly driving a new, midnight blue Dodge Magnum station wagon.
Agencies across North Carolina are hunting him.
The latest apparent sighting of Barefoot was Wednesday, when a man fitting his description broke into a western Cumberland County home and confronted a brother and sister who returned while he was there.
Police suspect Barefoot was the man who tied up Evans Chambers Wise Jr., 33, and his sister, Alisha Lynn Valdez, 36.
Wise was up from Florida visiting Valdez, and officials said the man stole the rented car he was driving, the 2005 Magnum, with Florida license plate W04-GII.
"Where he went from there, and what he's done, we don't know," said Maj. Sam Pennica, chief of detectives for the Cumberland County Sheriff's Department.
Throughout Wednesday and Thursday, officers across the state looked for the blue Magnum. Police in the Triangle stopped several motorists in similar cars Wednesday and Thursday, including stops in Orange and Chatham counties.
Barefoot was serving an 85-year sentence for a daylong crime spree in 2001, when he and another man, Timothy Jordan, robbed homes in Robeson, Hoke and Scotland counties and tried to kill a Scotland sheriff's deputy. Barefoot shot the deputy three times, but the officer lived.
Keith Acree, spokesman for the state Department of Correction, said Barefoot broke out of the Hoke County jail a few hours after he was transferred there from Alexander Correctional Institution in Taylorsville, in Western North Carolina.
Barefoot was in Hoke County for a court hearing on other charges related to the same incidents three years ago.
"He's just a very dangerous individual," said Maj. Neil Godfrey, chief deputy for the Moore County Sheriff's Department and a former agent with the State Bureau of Investigation.
"The deputy they attempted to kill, it's by the grace of God they didn't kill him," Godfrey said.
Hours before Barefoot escaped, relatives talked to him in Hoke County, said Annie Barefoot, the felon's sister-in-law.
"He called us from there, but he didn't give us no hint he was going to do something so stupid," she said.
After midnight Oct. 25, he overpowered a Hoke County jailer, took her keys and fled with her sport utility vehicle, authorities said.
He was sighted shortly thereafter by a deputy in Moore County, who chased him until Barefoot crashed the vehicle in Aberdeen and dashed into the woods, Godfrey said.
Days later, Barefoot was spotted hunkered down in the woods behind his brother's home in Cumberland County, shoeless and bleeding from his legs.
Annie Barefoot said the felon's girlfriend apparently talked to him on the phone and told him to come by Saturday night, when the family was having a Halloween party.
William Barefoot, whom the family calls Glenn, was spotted about 10 a.m. Sunday. He told several relatives he had been in the woods since 3 a.m., hungry, tired and looking for his girlfriend.
He asked for food and a phone, but the family refused him, Annie Barefoot said.
Instead, they told him to surrender, that they would surround him to keep the law from killing him, Annie Barefoot said.
They called the SBI, she said, and Barefoot ran.
Tuesday in Hoke County, Judith Grivet heard on the news that a convicted felon was still on the loose. She double-locked the doors and checked the window locks in her rural home, being teased by her husband all the while that she was overreacting.
The next afternoon Grivet, who is 3 months pregnant, picked up her 4-year-old daughter from the baby sitter and came home to find her front door ajar.
Someone had taken Triscuits and bottled water and broken into her husband's medical bag in the garage. The person had washed and perhaps taken a nap in her bed. Police found blood on the pillow and near the foot of the sheets.
Officers cut up the sheets, part of a $400 bedroom set, and took samples as evidence.
"I would just warn everyone: No matter where you live, it doesn't matter how safe you think you are, keep your doors locked," said Grivet, 24.
About four miles away, in southern Cumberland County, a man fitting Barefoot's description tied up Wise and Valdez on Strickland Bridge Road.
The suspect asked them for directions to Chapel Hill, but Pennica, of the Cumberland County Sheriff's Department, said that might have been a ruse.
"If you're on the run and you don't want to be caught, do you tell people where you're going?" Pennica asked.
Barefoot is among 193 people on the lam from the N.C. Department of Correction.
(Staff writer Jessica Rocha contributed to this report.)Staff writer Barbara Barrett can be reached at 829-4870 or bbarrett@newsobserver.com.
Staff writer Jessica Rocha contributed to this report.