A dangerous killer remains at large after a prison break in Ohio earlier this week.
At 11 a.m. on Tuesday morning, officials at the Allen/Oakwood Correctional Institution in Lima, Ohio, conducted a prisoner count and discovered that 47-year-old James Lee — convicted of burglary, breaking and entering, safecracking, and judicial sanction — was missing. Officials then followed up with a second “emergency prisoner count” and found that yet another inmate was missing: 50-year-old Bradley Gillespie, a murderer responsible for fatally shooting two people.
Gillespie was captured on surveillance footage at 8:41 a.m. on Monday, more than 24 hours before he was discovered missing. The two convicts are believed to have escaped together and enjoyed a fairly decent head start on law enforcement.
Just after 3:15 a.m. on Wednesday, police in Henderson, Kentucky, about 350 miles southwest of Lima, received reports about a stolen vehicle. When police spotted the vehicle near U.S. 41, the driver of the vehicle refused to pull over, instigating a chase. The stolen vehicle eventually crashed in a Henderson neighborhood, and the driver, later identified as Lee, was rearrested. However, Gillespie, who was riding shotgun, managed to evade recapture.
Gillespie first entered the Lima prison in November 2016 after he was convicted of fatally shooting 21-year-old Hannah Fischer and her 47-year-old ex-boyfriend, Frank Tracy Jr. on separate occasions earlier that year. Tracy, himself a felon, was initially suspected of murdering his ex that February, but police reconsidered the situation a month later when Tracy was discovered shot to death in an area cemetery. Prosecutors suspected that Gillespie was motivated to murder the two victims because of a drug deal gone bad.
Now, six and a half years into Gillespie’s two consecutive terms of 15 years to life, he remains on the loose. Police have repeatedly warned area residents that Gillespie “should be considered dangerous.” “You are asked to lock your doors and call 911 if you have any information,” WFIE informed readers, repeating similar statements from local, state, and federal law enforcement. The United States Marshals Service claimed that a $20,000 reward is being offered to anyone with information that leads to the rearrest of Gillespie, though the Ohio State Highway Patrol remains in command of the search.
Escaped northwest Ohio prison inmate captured in Kentucky; convicted murderer still on the run
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