Two fugitives who gave themselves up to the FBI in Chicago on Tuesday had spent the past seven years in Pittsburgh working under assumed names and raising families, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said Wednesday.
Donna Jean Willmott, known in Pittsburgh as Jo Elliott, was a well-regarded volunteer with the Pittsburgh AIDS Task Force.Willmott's fellow fugitive, Claude Daniel Marks, was known locally as William Gregory Peters and was a former employee of a video production firm.
The newspaper said these descriptions were at odds with the pictures painted by prosecutors and FBI agents in Chicago, where Willmott, 44, and Marks, 45, surrendered to face charges they had participated in a foiled 1985 plot to free a Puerto Rican nationalist from Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas.
Marks and Willmott - both on the FBI's "Ten Most Wanted" list and pursued since 1985 - surrendered in Chicago after months of negotiations through their lawyer, the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Chicago said.
They allegedly had planned to use high explosives and a helicopter to free Oscar Lopez from prison. Lopez was an alleged leader of the FALN - Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional Puertorriquena - which espouses Puerto Rican independence.