Old life reclaims fugitive

RALEIGH -- A knock on the door last week resurrected a past Robert Andrew LaRoche spent two decades burying.

A U.S. marshal flashed him a faded photo of Bobby Rea Irwin Jr., a broken, vulnerable man he abandoned two decades ago.

Irwin looked the marshal in the eye, asking: "What took you so long to find me?"

Irwin was a fugitive, wanted since 1991 for violating the terms of a probation a judge ordered after he gunned down a leader of the Aryan Brotherhood, a white supremacist group. Irwin says he was avenging a brutal kidnapping he endured the month before.

"I was out of my mind," Irwin said Friday in an interview at the Wake County jail, where he awaits extradition to his native Arizona. "I guess I did a pre-emptive strike before that sort of thing became fashionable."

Irwin's story is confirmed through police reports, court documents, newspaper clippings and interviews with law enforcement officials here and in Arizona.

At 55, Irwin doesn't look like a vigilante. He is a computer tech who carved out a quiet, simple life in North Raleigh a decade ago. He fixes herbal tea for his wife, Teresa, each night and straps coats on his dogs when he walks them in the rain.

The brown curls of his youth have thinned and faded to gray. He needs glasses to see, and a stent keeps his heart beating after a massive attack earlier this year. He weeps when he contemplates his predicament.

But the tattoos that stain his skin helped link LaRoche to the fugitive police hunted: a snake around a stake; the name of an old sweetheart scribbled through a heart. The pattern on the tip of his ring finger, unchanged after all these years, sealed his fate.

Now, Irwin's bound for Phoenix, back to the place and memories that nearly broke him.

It was 1988, and Irwin, then 34, spent his days laboring at a pharmaceutical manufacturer outside Phoenix. By night, he roamed the bars.

That's where he met Patti Owen, the estranged wife of William Owen, a leader of the Aryan Brotherhood. The two started dating.

William Owen and an associate visited Irwin one night.

Even now, Irwin can't find the words to describe that night. He stares at his hands and nods when a reporter reads a media account of his assault. The men beat Irwin, raped and sodomized him with a samurai sword. They left him for dead in the desert.

"I've spent a long time trying to put this out of my mind," Irwin says, a tear sliding down his cheek.

He reported the attack to sheriff's deputies and offered an address for Owen.

A night became two. A week turned into four. Owen was still loose.

Panic consumed Irwin. He installed bars on his doors and windows. He quit his job and wore a fake beard and wig when he dared leave home. He kept watch all night, a gun at his side.

One afternoon in September of 1988, Irwin loaded his shotgun and drove to Owen's home. He crouched behind a shed and waited. As he emptied his gun into Owen, relief washed over him.

"I knew he wasn't going to come back and bother me or anyone else," Irwin said.

Caught in Indiana

Phoenix police tracked him down in Indiana days later. He spent a year and a half in jail, awaiting trial.

In December 1989, he pleaded guilty to manslaughter, after police took into account his attack. He was put on probation for five years. A judge allowed him to serve probation out-of-state, beyond the reach of the Aryan Brotherhood.

Irwin got a job managing a grocery store in Fort Wayne, Ind., and tried to get on with his life.

In early 1991, two years into his five-year probation, Irwin says someone kept calling his store and hanging up. Irwin tried to push the fear out of his mind.

In early March, Irwin says that as he left the store to deposit the night receipts at the bank, a masked man jumped into his path. Another man pushed the barrel of a gun against his spine and whispered in his ear. "We won't kill you tonight," Irwin recalls the masked man saying. "That would be too easy."

Irwin says he needed no further warning. That night, he loaded his pickup and vanished. So did Bobby ReaIrwin Jr.

Escape to Canada

For months, Irwin says he camped in the wilds of Canada. Finally, the cold pushed him south again. In the heat of summer, Irwin drifted to Albuquerque, N.M.

By then, he'd chosen the name Robert Andrew LaRoche. Irwin liked the sound of it: a nice rhythm, distinguished. Slowly, Robert Andrew LaRoche was born on paper, too, though Irwin refuses to divulge how he did that.

When Irwin decided he wanted to go to college, he took a GED test and earned a diploma for "Robert Andrew LaRoche," even though he'd long ago finished high school.

Irwin struggled to find his way in Albuquerque and thought he might join a monastery. He joined a Greek Orthodox Church to prepare.

That's where he met Teresa, a New Yorker with a warm voice and bubbly presence.

They were friends first. Teresa did most of the talking, filling his silences with stories about books she'd read and classes she had taken.

Teresa says he was vague about his past.

Once, Irwin offered: "I once was somebody else, but I got into some trouble. It's all fixed now."

She pressed. He withdrew. She eventually let it go.

In time, the two fell in love and married. She became Teresa LaRoche. He became whole.

Life in the Triangle

They moved to North Carolina in the late 1990s, lured by the promise of good technology jobs in Research Triangle Park. Irwin had completed a degree in computer science after he and Teresa married.

Irwin says he landed a job with IBM, testing computer systems. Over the next dec ade, he hopped between tech jobs at big companies: Bayer, Syngenta, SunTrust Bank.

Irwin and his wife joined Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church. He sang in the choir. Teresa endeared herself to congregants.

Each evening, Teresa cooked dinner, while Irwin walked the dogs to the end of the cul-de-sac in their duplex community just beyond I-540. "We tried to be good, productive citizens," Irwin said. "I did a lot better job of rehabilitating myself than the state ever could have done."

Now and again, Irwin would worry about his past catching up with him. He would search the Web sites for police departments in Fort Wayne and Phoenix, looking for a mention of Bobby Rea Irwin Jr. He saw none.

"I figured I had been declared legally dead," he said.

He stopped looking over his shoulder, too, no longer scared a member of the Aryan Brotherhood would find him.

Caught in Raleigh

Monday seemed like most days for the LaRoches.

That evening, Teresa was shopping for dinner as Irwin tinkered with a computer in the back bedroom.

An unmarked SUV rolled up and down his street. A handful of officers hid in the background, ready to pounce if Irwin resisted the marshals.

Irwin didn't. Twenty years was a good run, he figured.

He went to the Wake County jail and rolled his finger in ink to prove to the marshals what he had admitted at his doorstep.

Hours later, Teresa LaRoche was begging a magistrate to tell her what had happened to her husband. She repeated his name. She spelled it. She wrote it out: "Robert Andrew LaRoche."

She met blank stares.

Finally, a magistrate introduced her to her husband: Bobby Rea Irwin.

"He was just an average Joe," Teresa LaRoche said this week. "Who knew he was burying so much?"

News researcher Brooke Cain contributed to this report.

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