LANSING, Kan. (AP) On Feb. 12, 2006, Toby Young drove her white cargo van through Lansing prisons final gate and then asked out loud: Are you in here?
In the back of the van were stray dogs ready for adoption. They had been trained by inmates as part of the Safe Harbor Prison Dogs program Young founded. But Young wasnt talking to the dogs.
When she drove the van off the gravel road and onto flat pavement outside the prison grounds, a lanky arm popped out of a box inside a dog crate, and John Manard, convicted murderer, started laughing.
Young never thought the escape she had planned with Manard would work. She had fallen in love with the tall, red-headed 27-year-old who escorted her around the prison on her regular visits. But now the 48-year-old wife and mother of two was terrified: terrified of getting caught, terrified of the consequences.
Drive! Drive! Drive! Manard told her. And Young drove.
Toby Young had always been perfect. (Now remarried, she goes by the last name Dorr.)
In high school, she didnt have a curfew and would still come home earlier than her siblings, who did have curfews. She married her high school sweetheart and worked 50-60 hours a week at Sprint while getting a degree and raising children.
But by 2004, her happy visage masked a crumbling marriage and an empty-nesters depression, she said. After surviving thyroid cancer, she decided shed throw herself into something new: a prison dog program at Lansing Correctional Facility.
You know, when John Manard suggested that maybe we should escape, I mean the first thing I thought of was I can be relieved of all this duty. And so to me that was a breath of fresh air, said Dorr, who is writing a memoir
Manard, 6-foot-2 with a deep voice and swaggering walk, had caught Dorrs attention from the beginning of his involvement in the program.
In October 2005, he began accompanying Dorr around the prison. Every time Dorr was in the prison, Manard was with her, and they spent a lot of time together talking. In Manard, Dorr found a man who saw the world as she did.
I think at that point in my life, I was just desperate to be loved, to feel like somebody loved me, Dorr said. Maybe John was wearing his inmate hat and he was perceptive enough to notice a need in me and capitalized on it. But I do think that he cared for me.
Manard was serving a life sentence for first-degree murder for his role in a fatal 1996 Overland Park carjacking. In a letter to The Star for this article, he called himself a 17-year-old child and said he made a huge mistake. It was never officially determined at trial who pulled the trigger that killed the passenger in the car, but Manards accomplice said he was the one holding the handgun and claimed it went off accidentally.
I loved Toby and was 100 percent committed to her, Manard wrote. Ive always been given the role of the master manipulating, scumbag criminal with no morals and Toby the, poor manipulated, naive, gullible, depressed, desperate, good girl, that I took advantage of.
I NEVER manipulated her in the least! he wrote. I loved Toby with all that I was.
