He Skipped Parole and Got a Job--in Probation Office

For seven months, Wil Adams helped monitor felons in Alaska from a courthouse office in Barrow, right across the street from the police station and only a few feet from the district attorney.

He didn’t tell his bosses in the probation office the name by which authorities in Virginia knew him--Skip Adams-Taylor, convicted of strangling a woman 17 years ago.

He left Virginia last year after his release from prison, but authorities there have issued an arrest warrant and vowed to revoke his parole.

Adams-Taylor, 37, fled Barrow last month as Alaska authorities began to piece together his past--learning first of his crime, then that the convicted murderer and the parole clerk shared the same Social Security number and birth date.

“It began to cause the hair on the back of your neck to stand up,” said Lynda Zaugg, an Alaska corrections official who oversees probation offices.

Adams-Taylor was convicted of strangling Joyce Robertson at her Arlington, Va., apartment and stealing her stereo in 1980. He served 14 years of a 30-year sentence for first-degree murder and grand larceny.

Because he said he was from Australia, he was paroled into the custody of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, which planned to deport him. But the agency then learned that he was a U.S. citizen and released him in February 1996, advising him to report to his parole officer.

He never did. Virginia officials thought he had been deported--until Alaska authorities contacted them last month.

In February, Adams-Taylor turned up in Barrow, the nation’s northernmost city about 700 miles north of Anchorage, where he took the parole office job and its $35,000 annual salary.

He was articulate, with excellent computer and typing skills, said Ron Murray, the probation officer who hired Adams-Taylor.

Nothing of note turned up in a state criminal history check. As a clerk, a more thorough background check by the FBI--including fingerprints--was not conducted; the fingerprint checks have since been added.

The ruse didn’t begin to unravel until Adams-Taylor complained about an Eskimo seal hunt in a letter to an Anchorage newspaper. Eskimo leaders responded with a formal complaint to the corrections agency, upset with the apparent use of a state computer to write the letter.

A state investigation followed, as did calls to Virginia authorities.

On Sept. 2, after a clerk remembered Adams-Taylor saying his first name was George, the agency did another criminal check and turned up an alias for the Virginia killer. He was suspended a day later after officials found pornography on his computer.

Meanwhile, the agency learned some of the details about his Virginia past. Troopers confronted him at the Anchorage airport, where he refused to allow himself to be fingerprinted or have his luggage searched and denied being Adams-Taylor.

Troopers, unsure who he was and with no warrant from Virginia, let him go. That warrant has since been issued by the Virginia Parole Board.

“If we find him,” said Richard Crossen, the board’s deputy director, “we are going to revoke his parole, and he’ll serve the balance of his sentence”--almost 15 years.

A week ago, Adams-Taylor contacted the corrections agency seeking his last paycheck. Officials said he has also contacted a former employer in Florida, seeking references so he could apply for jobs at hotels in Key West--about 4,100 miles from Barrow.