Somehow, this seems quite fitting

God, it’s been ages since I’ve written up a crime story on the blog, but it’s nice to get back to highlighting the weird, the bizarre and the frightening, at least on a limited scale. So here’s the tale of escaped murderer Charles Victor Thompson and how he got caught:

HOUSTON, Texas (CNN) — A Texas
death-row inmate who escaped from a Houston jail last week was arrested
Sunday night outside a liquor store in Shreveport, Louisiana, police
and U.S. marshals said.

Charles Victor Thompson, 35, was the

subject of a 78-hour, nationwide manhunt after he escaped Thursday by

shedding his handcuffs and prison jumpsuit for street clothes in a

jailhouse booth after telling deputies he was meeting with a lawyer.

Thompson

offered authorities no resistance when arrested, said Marianne Matus, a

spokeswoman for the U.S. Marshals Service office in Houston.

Matus

said marshals had received “several credible tips” that Thompson was in

the area, and police found him about 8 p.m. on a pay phone outside a

liquor store in Shreveport, about 240 miles north of Houston.

“He

appeared to be intoxicated,” Matus said. The officers walked up to the

escaped killer and asked him his name. He told them, “You know who I

am.”

Authorities said Thompson had a bicycle with him.

Why do I find the fact that he had a bicycle with him funny? Anyway, a witness claims the arrest was “more dramatic than reported”:

Jebran Siddiqui, a clerk at the liquor store, said the arrest was

more dramatic than Matus described. Siddiqui said he was working at the

shop’s drive-through window when he saw “some maniac kind of guy

running around outside.” About the same time, he saw another man get

out of a car with a shotgun.

He said Thompson was heading toward

his store and he feared a shootout was in the works — so he grabbed a

gun and walked to the door.

“I was shaking, like shivering and

everything, but I wasn’t losing my grip,” Siddiqui said. “I think he

was planning to come inside the store and, I don’t know, hold us

hostage or something.”

The man with a shotgun turned out to be an

undercover police officer, and several other officers swarmed in and

“took him down pretty brutally” within three feet of the store,

Siddiqui said.

An investigation will begin into how Thompson could have just walked out of jail with fake ID claiming to be from the Attorney General’s Office.