Authors: Ken Englade
“Oh, good,” Wilson said. “If she calls back, tell her I’m staying at the Safari Beach Resort in Osoyoos, British Columbia.” He gave her the number, but added that he would be moving to another motel later that day.
Culos called immigration officials, who notified the RCMP. Within an hour, eight armed officers had surrounded the small hotel where Wilson was staying, a pleasant, peaceful inn on the bank of Lake Osoyoos. One of the officers then dialed Wilson’s room and, once the lawyer was on the line, suggested he “come out with his hands up.” Wilson quickly complied. Seemingly relieved that his ordeal was ended, he offered no resistance.
Joy, however, proved much more elusive. McGowan and the Dallas County DA’s Office continued to keep a watch for her in Dallas just in case she tried to slip back into the city. However, they figured that she was safely out of their reach in a foreign country, probably Mexico, and would not be back to Texas. The soundness of their reasoning was proved early in August 1990, some two months after she fled from Vancouver, when a Dallas woman, Stephenie Grimes, called authorities and said she had been friends with Joy—whom she knew as “Jodie Packer”—a few weeks earlier when they both were attending Spanish language classes in Cuernavaca, Mexico. The two had even shared a room in the home of a Mexican family. In late July, “Jodie” told Grimes that she and her husband were having marital problems and she had to drop out of school in order to meet him in Mexico City. She said goodbye to Grimes and left. After “Jodie” was gone, Grimes discovered that her Mexican travel visa had been stolen, apparently by Joy, ever resourceful in her search for new identification.
Grimes added that she did not know who “Jodie” really was until she saw Joy’s picture in a Dallas newspaper. But, when Grimes had last seen her, Joy/Jodie told her that she planned to come back to the language school for the fall term, which was to begin in mid-September. Authorities then set a trap for her, hoping she would show up as she had indicated she would. Not surprisingly, she did not.
In Dallas, other things were happening as well.
On July 12, 1990, Civil Court Judge Dee Miller dismissed Larry’s claims that Joy’s father, Henry Davis, had been part of a plot to steal his money. But on August 6, another civil court judge, Bob O’Donnell, issued a default judgment against Joy, awarding Larry $31.2 million in damages from his ex-wife: $200,000 for fraud, $300,000 for embezzlement; $10 million for pain, suffering, and mental anguish; $20.6 million in exemplary damages, and $100,000 in court fees. Since Joy was not there to testify in her own behalf, the judge accepted Larry’s testimony on its face.
McGowan and the DA’s office, however, could not have cared less about the civil cases. They were interested only in the criminal proceedings. As far as they were concerned, default judgments were valueless; they wanted Joy back so she could be tried for capital murder and sentenced to die in the state’s lethal injection chamber. They would have a long wait.
On September 14, 1990, Joy got national publicity when her case was aired on Fox Television’s “America’s Most Wanted,” the popular television show. Dallas actress Suzanne Savoy played the part of Joy. Although the program drew a lot of responses, there was nothing that would lead authorities to Joy.
In actuality, she was getting even farther away, slipping ever deeper into the strange netherworld of the serious fugitive. By the time of the TV show, Joy had been missing for five months and her trail was getting colder. In retrospect, it is clear that a large part of her success in eluding authorities was because she had help, and that aid apparently came, according to federal officials, from Jodie Packer.
After Joy left Canada for Mexico and it was discovered that she had used identification under the name of her ex-lover, authorities contacted him and asked how she had obtained his voter registration card and credit card. That was easy to answer, he said: She stole them. That claim began to seem dubious when, some months later, authorities began to suspect that Packer may have been helping Joy all along.
In July 1990, Packer allegedly went to a post office in the northern Dallas suburb of Piano and, using fraudulent documents, applied for a passport in the name of an uncle, Donald Averille Airhart. The real Airhart had been killed in a hunting accident a quarter century earlier. From what authorities pieced together later, in September someone went to Oklahoma City and applied for a passport in the name of Elizabeth May Sharp, a Dallas woman who was about Joy’s age and who had died several months previously. Soon, Joy would bring Sharp back to life, if only temporarily. But all of that was discovered after the fact. In reality, by the fall of 1990, some six months after Joy fled with Mike Wilson, Dallas authorities had no idea where she was, how she was surviving, what names she was using, or where she was going to turn up next.
From what was later made public, it appeared that Joy, after leaving Cuernavaca in July, traveled randomly, perhaps through Central or South America, before flying to Frankfurt, Germany. From there, it is believed she took a train to Zurich, and then went either by train or car to Nice, situated along the French Côte d’Azur.
In December, she rented a villa in the town of St. Paul de Vence, a village considerably off the beaten path, tucked away in the hills above Nice and Cannes. Traveling up the winding, plunging roads, she found a furnished flat of the type the French call a
meuble
. Essentially, it consisted of the upper half of a two-story house at 1370 Rue de St. Jeannet. It was within walking distance of a former residence of the well-known artist Pablo Picasso. The apartment was composed of one bedroom, one bath, and an L-shaped living room/dining room. The main part of the flat, including the large, attractive bath, overlooked the
collines de Vence
(the Vence hills) and a garden maintained by the landlady, who lived below. For this, Joy paid an off-season rate of 3,500 French francs per month, about $700 U.S. During the high season, the same place would cost almost twice as much.
Joy told the landlady that her name was Elizabeth May Sharp, that she and her “husband,” a man named “Don,” had driven from Switzerland and had fallen in love with the area. She said they had two sons in college in Texas but she wanted to stay for a few months in France while “Don” traveled through Europe and the Middle East. She wanted a place that would make her feel as if she were at home, a place with a garden and flowers.
26
In the meantime, Jodie Packer, apparently traveling under the name of his late uncle, Donald Airhart, was building a cover story in Dallas to explain his frequent absences. Since he allegedly was flying regularly to France to see Joy, he needed some kind of excuse to protect himself at home. He told friends and employees he was trying to line up business in the Middle East, thus he would be gone quite a lot. After the Gulf War, he refined the tale by claiming that he was vying for contracts involving the rebuilding of Kuwait.
In France, Joy worked to build a new identity. Soon after she arrived in Vence, she had a hairdresser cut her wavy, dark hair short and add blond highlights. And, unlike in Texas where she dressed very casually, Joy began affecting well-made French and Italian clothes, preferring pants to skirts and blouses. On her wrists and fingers, she began sporting tasteful, expensive jewelry.
The Gulf War, for unknown reasons, was apparently a particularly traumatic event for Joy, who seemed to be suffering from rampant paranoia.
Telling her landlady that she feared imminent doom as the result of the conflict, and that she was particularly afraid of biological warfare, she sealed the windows, doors, and vents of her flat with thick layers of newspaper and masking tape. And, although she was known as a compulsive house cleaner when she lived in Dallas, she went to the opposite extreme in France, letting the trash pile up in cupboards and corners. A half-inch-thick coating of grease was allowed to accumulate on the stove, and she neglected to dust the furniture or sweep the floors.
From the day she arrived, she was regarded as somewhat eccentric by her neighbors, reclusive but not altogether unfriendly. Virtually the only times she ventured out of the apartment were to work in the garden or to go to lunch with the landlady. On those occasions, Joy always picked up the check and always paid in cash.
But, after the war began, her eccentricity tipped over into fixation. After the United States started bombing Iraq, she seldom went out of the flat except at night, and when she did she wore a pair of large, dark glasses and was always snugly muffled so as little of her face as possible was visible. Her connection to the outside world dwindled until it consisted mainly of infrequent, hurried shopping trips and irregular French lessons from a female tutor who came to her flat.
In early March 1991, when her short-term lease was scheduled to expire, Joy arranged to rent another apartment not far away. But two weeks before she was scheduled to move, an event drastically changed her plans.
When Joy rented the villa she also rented a small car, an Opel Corsa. Early in March, on one of her infrequent excursions away from her flat, she was involved in a minor road accident. At that point, she panicked, abandoning the vehicle on the side of the road and scurrying back to her hideaway.
For some reason, French police, in the process of investigating the accident, became suspicious and began checking the background of “Elizabeth May Sharp.” In the process, they discovered that Sharp was really Joy Jeannine Davis Aylor, who was wanted in Texas for murder.
They formed a task force and went to her house to arrest her, slipping down the steep driveway that led to her flat in the cold, predawn darkness. Just in case she tried to run, they surrounded the dwelling.
Once the officers were in place, a French police inspector named Roland Seja knocked on her door. It was a few minutes before seven on the morning of Saturday, March 16. When Joy answered, Seja told her he needed for her to come with him to police headquarters so he could clear up the matter of the wrecked rental car.
“Of course,” Joy replied, but since he had caught her before she could perform her morning toilette, would she be permitted to shower first?
“
Mais oui, madame
,” Seja replied politely, pulling up a chair.
Joy disappeared into the bathroom and Seja heard the water running. A few minutes later, she reappeared, wearing a shapeless sweat suit. A few minutes later, they left together for the short ride to Nice.
Once they were at police headquarters, Seja confronted her with the evidence that proved she was actually Joy Aylor. When she saw that she had been found out, Joy’s composure collapsed. Obviously distraught, she asked to be allowed to visit the ladies room. Shown where it was, she went inside and closed the door. When she did not come out a few minutes later, a matron forced the door open and went inside. Joy was sprawled on the floor, bleeding from slashes on her wrists.
Before she went with Seja, officers determined, she had palmed a razor blade and hidden it in the waistband of her jogging suit. Then she had used it to cut her wrists once she was alone in the restroom. The injuries were not life-threatening; she had been discovered in time.
Joy was rushed to a local hospital, where her wounds were treated and she was placed under guard until she could recover sufficiently to be sent to jail.
As soon as her family was notified of her arrest, her younger sister, Elizabeth, along with Michelle Mulder, daughter of Joy’s Dallas attorney, flew to Nice to see what they could do to help. The first sight Elizabeth had of Joy was in the hospital, where she found a thin, wan woman propped up in bed with casts on her wrists up to her elbows. After they greeted each other, Joy gave her sister a scrawled list, almost illegible because of the casts. It was, she said, an accounting of her possessions at the flat. Would Elizabeth please go and collect them?
Elizabeth was amazed by Joy’s incredible command of detail. The list not only catalogued her possessions but detailed exactly where each could be found, right down to a needle Joy had dropped while sewing a new button on a blouse.
Soon after her arrest, Mulder himself flew to France to interview his client, converting some details of that meeting into an anecdote he seemed to revel in relating. When he showed up for that first meeting, he had tucked under his arm a huge box of chocolates, which he gave to Joy’s matron as an expression of appreciation for helping Joy through a difficult period. The gift, he said, was well received.
Although the interview with Joy was beneficial, it grew tedious when Joy kept asking him, with different variations, three basic questions: When can I get out? What are they going to do to me? Am I going to have to go back?
As helpful as he wanted to be, Mulder said that by the end of the day he was weary of hearing those three questions. It was with some relief that he knew he would not be able to visit Joy again the next day, a Saturday, because that was a day reserved for families. Finally, when he was ready to leave, he told Joy he regretted that he could not come back because of the family-only rule. His excuse, however, was shattered when the matron to whom he had given the candy interrupted. “Because your lawyer has been so nice,” the guard told Joy, “I’m going to make an exception and let him come back on Saturday.”
At that point, Mulder said with a sigh, he had no choice but to return and try to figure out new ways to calm Joy’s fears.
In a more serious vein, French police were glad they had taken precautions when they went to the villa to arrest Joy. When they searched the flat, they found a half dozen credit cards, each bearing a different name, and a bag filled with currency from a number of countries, including several in Central and South America. Given the slightest warning, Joy would undoubtedly have fled again. During her ten months on the run, Joy is believed to have used a number of identities, calling herself at various times Mrs. John Storms, Jodie Packer, Jodi Packer, Leigh Curry, Stephenie Grimes, J. Taylor, and Elizabeth May Sharp. If she had other aliases, they have not been revealed by French or U.S. authorities.