On December 7, 1996, first-time-offender-turned-fugitive Glen Godwin appears on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List.
In August 1981, Godwin, a young business owner, had been convicted of a murder committed one year earlier in Riverside County, California, and sentenced to 26 years to life in prison. According to his roommate’s testimony, Godwin had stomped on, choked and then stabbed Kim LeValley, an acquaintance and local drug dealer, 28 times before using homemade explosives to blow up his body in the desert near Palm Springs.
Godwin may have had no previous record, but he didn't lack for criminal ingenuity, or boldness. He made the Ten Most Wanted list after one attempted escape and one successful one. Later, while on the lam in Mexico, he made yet another prison break.
In 1985, while serving his sentence at Soledad Prison, Godwin married Shelley Rose. He was then transferred to Folsom Prison, a maximum-security facility, where he escaped through a 300-yard storm drain and floated across the American River on a raft to freedom in June 1987. Apparently gaining assistance from someone who cut the iron bars on the storm drain from the outside, Godwin was the third person to escape from Folsom in 25 years. Lorenz Karlic, who had once shared a cell with Godwin, was arrested in Hesperia, California, for aiding Godwin in his escape.
After two years without any leads on either Glen or Shelley, who was last seen renting a car at the San Jose Airport, authorities were notified of a man in a Mexican prison under the name of Stewart Carrera, whose fingerprints matched those of Godwin’s. Reportedly, Mexican authorities had arrested Glen on drugs and weapons charges six months after his escape.
While California officials were working to have Godwin extradited back to the United States, he murdered a fellow inmate in Puerto Vallarta Prison—an attempt to avoid returning to the high-security prisons in California. Shortly thereafter, he escaped from the Mexican jail.
Shelley Godwin, who, unbeknownst to California law enforcement officials, had divorced her husband and remarried in Texas, was apprehended in Dallas when a story on the Godwin case appeared on television’s America’s Most Wanted.
Glen Godwin remains at large. He was removed from the Most Wanted List in May 2016.
