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Jury considers fate of warden’s wife who disappeared with killer

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Jurors have resumed deliberations in the trial of a former Oklahoma prison warden’s wife accused of helping a convicted killer escape and then living with him on a Texas ranch until their arrest more than a decade later.

Bobbi Parker, 49, is charged with helping Randolph Franklin Dial escape from the Oklahoma State Reformatory in Granite, where her husband was deputy warden, in 1994. Dial had been sentenced to life in prison in 1986 after he confessed to the 1981 killing of martial arts instructor Kelly Dean Hogan, 27.

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Jurors began deliberating Monday. The Parkers have two daughters, who were 8 and 10 at the time of their mother’s disappearance.

Prosecutors say that Parker fell in love with Dial, became his mistress and helped him escape from the prison that her husband ran -- and that the couple lived on the lam as husband and wife under assumed names (Richard and Samantha ‘Sam’ Deahl) during a ‘decade of deception.’

After their capture, Dial told investigators that he had held Parker captive.

Defense attorneys say Dial drugged and kidnapped Parker, threatening to hurt her family if she tried to escape.

The two were discovered living on a Campti, Texas, ranch in 2005 after officials followed up on a tip generated by the TV show ‘America’s Most Wanted.’

At the time, Dial, 60, told investigators that his relationship with Parker was never romantic, that they lived in separate rooms and that she likely developed a type of Stockholm syndrome that kept her with him.

Jurors deliberated for about an hour late Monday.

Parker stood next to her husband Monday night, but didn’t answer questions from the media after a long day at the Greer County Courthouse, according to KOCO-TV.

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She faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted. Dial died in prison in 2007.

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-- Molly Hennessy-Fiske in Houston

Jim Beckel / The Oklahoman / Associated Press

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