Post date: Oct 08, 2011 6:43:30 PM
Wife of captured fugitive George Wright, a U.S.-born murderer and alleged hijacker arrested in Portugal last week after 41 years on the run, says he did not tell her all about his past life and they had a harmonious marriage.
COLARES, PORTUGAL (OCTOBER 8, 2011) REUTERS - The wife of a convicted U.S.-born murderer and alleged hijacker arrested in Portugal last week said her husband was sorry to have got involved in the events that lead to him being on the run for 41 years.
Maria do Rosario Valente, 55, told Reuters in an interview on Saturday (October 8) that she is allowed three visits a week to 68-year old George Wright.
Wright was convicted in 1963 for the murder of gas station owner Walter Patterson during an armed robbery in Wall, New Jersey.
While serving his 15 to 30-year sentence, he escaped from a New Jersey prison in 1970.
The FBI linked him to the commandeering, along with four other hijackers with children in tow, of a passenger plane from Detroit that was forced to land in Algeria in 1972, and said he used to be a member of the Black Liberation Army - a black-nationalist militant group. He was never formally charged with the hijacking.
While four other hijackers were arrested and convicted in France in 1976, Wright remained at large until he was arrested by Portuguese police on the outskirts of Lisbon, tracked down with the support of the FBI and other U.S. authorities after he tried to contact his relatives in the United States.
Valente, who is a Portuguese national, met Wright in the 1970s. They wed in 1990, after the couple had two children.
She maintains she knew only of the robbery and his escape from jail.
"Somewhere down the line he told me that he had, you know, been involved in a robbery, and he had been sentenced to some jail time, and he had escaped after a while, after several years. That's about the extent of what I knew," Valente said, speaking in her home near the town of Colares, Portugal.
Valente maintains that Wright was not the one responsible for killing Patterson, saying "it was one of the other guys" involved in the robbery that day.
"He's getting all the flack for being a murderer," she said.
"I never questioned him, you know, never wondered really," Valente said when asked about Wright's full disclosure of his past and the extent of what she knew.
"He was, I felt, being transparent with me...he was always good to me. Always showed, you know, that he loved me, he was an honest worker, everybody loved him," she added.
Asked whether they ever spoke about the possibility of Wright being captured and keeping up a front for some 20 years, Valente said they led very normal lives.
"We didn't hide," she explained.
"I thought maybe if it comes to light, maybe he has prescribed or not. I don't know. But it was never very much at the front of our thoughts."
"He is sorry that he got involved in that robbery, and obviously in the hijacking too," Rosario Valente said.
Wright is held without bail by Portuguese authorities and appeared before a judge for an initial extradition hearing last week.
Wright's lawyer is fighting extradition to the United States, where he fears he would be killed in jail.
The lawyer, Manuel Luis Ferreira, told Reuters that Wright had legally assumed a new identity, first as a Guinea Bissau citizen and later as a Portuguese citizen named Jorge dos Santos and should serve the remainder of the sentence in Portugal.
Luis Ferreira said that Wright believed he would be unfairly treated by the FBI after a 1972 plane hijacking in which FBI agents had to deliver ransom money wearing only swimsuits.
Wright's Guinea Bissau identity was legally granted to him in the 1980s by the country's government, which was supportive of black liberation movements.