You may not know about him yet, but Bobby Love’s life has the makings for the next great Netflix documentary.
Love, aka Walter Miller, is a former fugitive from North Carolina. He managed a jailbreak in Raleigh, N.C., then made his way to New York in 1977 and got married before authorities were able to track him down in 2015.
In an 11-part series with the popular blog, Humans of New York, Bobby and his wife Cheryl Love tell the story of their romance and their endearing journey as spouses.
Cheryl was making tea on what appeared to be a normal morning in their house when police officers showed up at her door. At first, she thought they were checking up on the neighbor adjacent to their home, but authorities rushed to the back of their home and asked Bobby for his “real name.”
That’s when her life, the one she built with the man she knew as Bobby, began to change forever.
“It didn’t make any sense. I’d been married to Bobby for 40 years. He didn’t even have a criminal record,” she said. “At this point I’m crying, and I screamed: ‘Bobby, what’s going on? Did you kill somebody?’ And he tells me: ‘This goes way back, Cheryl. Back before I met you. Way back to North Carolina.’”
Later in the series, Bobby goes into detail about his life before Cheryl, including his troubled youth and the time he spent in a juvenile detention center. He recounts how he first started robbing banks in North Carolina when he moved in with his brother, who lived in Washington, D.C. Eventually, Bobby tripped a silent alarm and was shot in his rear end by police who were waiting for him in a parking lot.
“All hell broke loose. I tried to get away, ducking and weaving, running through cars,” he said. “But I got shot in the buttocks. The bullet went right through me. I woke up in the hospital — with a hole in the front and back of my coat.”
Police charged him with robbery and armed robbery with a firearm, according to The News & Observer. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison at the Triangle Correctional Center, which closed in August 1994. His mother died while he was serving his sentence.
But eventually, Bobby was able to escape prison while on work detail by opening a back latch on a prison bus and running until authorities were out of sight, according to part six of the story.
“I could hear the alarm blaring behind me, but I didn’t look back. I peeled off my green clothes and just kept running. The sweat was coming off me. I looked like trouble, so I did my best to keep out of the white neighborhoods. Every time I passed a brother, I asked for directions to the Greyhound station. Everyone kept telling me: ‘Keep going, keep going, keep going.’ When I finally got there, I found a brother in the parking lot who agreed to buy me a one way ticket to New York.
Bobby then met his wife a few years after arriving in New York City, when they worked at Baptist Medical Center, he said. He'd taken on another identity using the name of the son of one of his longtime friends. The couple married on March 30, 1985, and had four children.
Following his arrest in 2015, Bobby was released from prison on January 5, 2016, serving less than a year behind bars, per a report from the Daily News.
Finally free of the burden of his double life, Bobby told the Daily News about his plans to move on.
"I'm excited to be back with my children and my wife," the former hospital worker said. "I'm trying to put my life back together."
