(ominous guitar music)
I don't know how many people were kidnapped in 1968.
(flowing somber guitar music)
But I was one of them.
(flowing guitar music)
Albert Lepard and John Parker kidnapped me in the summer,
and I thought I would die.
My name is Lovejoy Boteler,
(gunshot fires)
and I wrote,
"Crooked Snake: The Life and Crimes of Albert Lepard."
(lighthearted music)
The bizarre kidnapping has stuck in
Lovejoy Boteler's memory for over five decades.
In 1968, we had a farm,
north of Grenada, Mississippi.
And I was down in the field plowing that day.
(tractor engine roaring)
I saw two men,
two white men,
coming down our field run.
The small red headed fellow did all the talking,
"Hey man, how you doing?"
And being overly friendly.
I was a little wary
from the very start,
and they wanted a ride to Grenada,
they said they had been walking all day.
I initially said I had to work,
I couldn't just give them a ride to Grenada.
They kept on and they wanted a drink of water,
I gave them a drink of water.
(water pouring)
I just had a sense that if I didn't give them a ride,
there would be trouble.
And so I agreed I thought,
Well, I'll just drop them off at the edge of the town,
and they'll be somebody else's problem.
(somber shakers music)
(car door bangs)
So I told them to get in I would give them a ride.
I'd pulled down the field road,
maybe 50, 75 feet,
when there was movement to my right side,
and the red headed fellow stuck a revolver in my ribs,
and said they were escaped convicts.
"Dude, stop the truck and get out."
Well, of course I naturally considered
and thought that they were getting ready to kill me.
And you can imagine how frightening
that would be if you put yourself in that situation.
But they didn't.
They told me to get it back in
and get into the center, which I did.
And the fellow who had never spoken came around
and started driving,
they asked me where the nearest state line was.
And I said, "100 miles north to Tennessee."
So here we go,
we turned north on Highway 51,
my mind was racing.
The fella who I didn't know who he was,
Albert Lepard, still had the pistol on me.
He was sitting on the right shotgun side.
I was considering maybe trying
to grab his arm,
and grab the pistol.
And we would wrestle,
but I was a little bigger than him,
and maybe I could get the door open,
and we'd fall out of the truck
and that kind of thing.
I'm glad I didn't do anything because,
later, knowing these fellows,
and who they were,
they would've made very quick work of me.
♪ Oh, oh ♪
(somber guitar music)
They did pull in to our little country store out there,
a place called the Eastland Corner.
I asked them what they were getting ready to do,
and they said they were gonna rob the store.
I said, "Whoa, wait a minute, wait a minute."
"Look, I've got money,
"There's money in the pocket of the truck,
"you can have my money."
Which I had about $30,
and in 1968,
that was a pretty good little bit of money.
We pull on out,
they get gas at a station on down the road.
Truck had been sitting on empty.
We are on Interstate 55,
headed from Memphis.
No one knew where I was.
I figured at some point,
I'd better try to talk to these fellows,
and figure my way out,
because I didn't know what was gonna happen
in the next five minutes.
I asked the guy driving
what he was in Parchman for,
and he said, "Armed robbery."
And I asked the red headed fellow
and he said, "Murder."
I didn't ask too many more questions then.
(laughing)
It got kind of quiet.
(tractor engine roaring)
At some point,
he asked me,
"What are y'all growing on that farm?"
And I said, "Soy beans, cotton."
"Oh, I know all about that,
"I know all about that."
Still trying to be friendly.
So as we were reaching the Tennessee state line,
they told me there would probably be roadblocks
on the state line.
If any shooting broke out,
to get on the floorboard.
I said, "Look, before any shooting breaks out,
"if you will just let me out
"on the side of the Interstate right here,
"I promise, I'll just find my way back to Grenada,
"I'll get on my truck,
"I won't say a word to anybody."
But the next thing we knew,
we were in Memphis.
(melancholy flute music)
They pulled over on a street there in Memphis,
they both got out of the truck,
they both turned and walked away,
and I could see them disappearing in the...
The rear-view mirror.
I pulled into an Esso station,
told the man what had happened,
the attendant, he called the police.
So I went on down to police headquarters,
in the meanwhile,
they picked up Albert Lepard and John Parker,
at the Adler Hotel,
right on the Mississippi river,
a little low rent place there.
And I picked him out of all on it.
I had to give a deposition to the FBI
because they had crossed state lines with me.
That brought in FBI kidnapping charges.
(somber flute music)
The officers asked me if I knew anybody in Memphis,
And I told them my aunt and uncle were there.
And then they called my uncle and aunt,
and then my aunt Addie brought a big piece
of German chocolate cake down for me and...
So now it kinda came to an end.
Next morning, the sheriff came out to the house
and talked to my Dad
and told him that this man Albert Lepard was crazy.
I was very, very lucky.
(low tone music)
Albert Lepard was born into a poor sharecropping family
in a region of Mississippi,
Central Mississippi, in the Sydney Ash Valley.
They were all illiterate.
So crumb ridden area
of Mississippi because of their poverty.
Albert committed a murder in 1959,
of his great aunt.
And in the process, he tied her up
set her on fire, burned her up.
It was a torch murder.
And of course he was caught,
he and his cousin.
And they were sentenced to life in Parchman.
Parchman is in the
Mississippi State Penitentiary.
Years later, Boteler learned more
about his kidnapper.
Albert Leper was a very likable person.
Convicts would tell me that if Albert told you something,
you could bank on it,
It wasn't true,
He was very truthful.
He had a winning personality,
and his relatives would say
that he was always singing as a child,
He was a real hard worker,
And then he just got into that bad trouble.
He was a small guy,
but everyone I talked to uniformly would say he
was really the toughest man they ever met in their life.
(dogs barking)
Lepard escaped from prison, six times.
He was on the Lam in Southern Mississippi,
When he met his end in 1973.
(whooshing music)
One night, he went into the shawls store.
They are a little country store
and they were just about to close up,
hold the pistol,
said, "This is a G.D. robbery,
"give me all your money."
Well, they're hustling.
He kept a 20 gauge shotgun above the door.
He heard what was going on.
So Clifton quietly took the 20 gauge
down the door was cracked a little bit
brought the 20 gauge up,
got a beat on Lepard,
but Lepard saw it,
and Lepard got off first shot with his pistol.
(gunshot fires)
And hit the doorframe right
by Clifton's head and split it,
and then shot again.
(gunshot fires)
And Clifton later said that it was so close to his ear,
he felt the wind off that bullet.
And then Clifton shot,
and caught Lepard in his arm,
and nearly blew his arm off.
The impact, took him backwards to the floor,
and he was cussing,
the gun spun away from him on the floor,
and Lepard started crawling for the gun.
Clifton came out and said, "Don't go for it,
"I'll kill you."
And of course Lepard reached and grabbed the gun
and rolled over.
(gunshot fires)
And Clifton shot him in the chest
from about eight feet away from where he was.
That ended it right there.
It was all over.
Boteler says there's thing
about his running with Lepard that still puzzles him.
About three weeks later,
I was cleaning the truck up and cleaning the pocket out.
I found two 1922 silver dollars
in there that apparently Albert Lepard
had put in there for me,
for some reason.
I've never quite figured that out.
This is Inside Edition Digital.