SHE'LL NEVER FORGET THE DAY HIS PAST CAUGHT UP

Amalia Richardson Was Walking Her Dog On The Beach When The RCMP
Arrested Her Husband

ROCHESTER, N.Y. - The frantic, pleading words on the answering-machine
messages still burn in Amalia Richardson's memory.

"Where are you? Where are you? I've been arrested."

And a second one.

"Where are you? Please, please can you help? You must be somewhere out
there."

Amalia Richardson says she will never forget that day in November
1998, when her husband, Allen Richardson, was taken into custody by
RCMP and Immigration Canada officers.

It is that second message that still haunts her.

"It stuck in my mind - it was horrible."

The arrest at the University of B.C.'s Triumf facility brought to an
end her husband's three decades as a fugitive from U.S. justice.

It led last week to a Rochester, N.Y., judge sending him back to jail
to complete the three years and nine months left in a 1971 prison sentence.

In a lengthy interview with The Sunday Province, Amailia revealed this
week that she knew about Allen's secret since they first decided to
have longterm relationship in 1993.

"I was going through my second bout of cancer," she said. "I was
trying to explain to him that I had a health problem, and he was
explaining what had happened to him in the past."

That past included his 1971 conviction as a U.S. citizen in a New York
state court of up to four years in prison for selling seven hits of
LSD, worth $20 US, to an undercover cop.

It also included a spell in that hellhole of a prison called Attica
and an escape from a prison work camp to Canada.

There was the false identity taken from a dead infant in Toronto and a
move to the West Coast.

And there was an exemplary life as a UBC research laboratory
technician, vintage sports car nut, bluegrass musician and all-round
decent guy.

But when Amalia heard her husband's voice on the answering machine
that November afternoon, she knew the past had finally caught up.

Dressed in a blue-and-white dress and a white sweater, Amalia told her
story at an airport cafe, slipping tea from a styrofoam cup while
waiting to fly to New York City.

Although she'd just seen a judge send her husband back to jail, she
spoke in a strong voice, while her emotions swung from anger to laughter.

While her eyes sometimes filled with tears, she never once cried.

The couple had met through a common love of old automobiles at a
vintage-car rally in 1992.

They got married in 1995 and lived in a house near Horseshoe Bay.

Amailia, who's battled cancer since 1987, doesn't work, but is a
full-time SPCA volunteer.

The day Allen was arrested, she was out walking the family dog at
Jericho Beach.

By the time she got home at 2 p.m., she found the first message on the
answering machine.

"First, I had to track him down," she said. "Nobody knew and nobody
would tell me."

"An RCMP officer at UBC was a little cheeky, saying, 'I think your
husband's got a few stories to tell you,' and I hung up on him."

"They thought they'd got a big one. They were going to send him back
across the border that night."

Amalia phoned a friend who is a Vancouver judge and got the names of a
couple of lawyers.

"I phoned Michael Bolton and he said, 'Come down and we'll sort it all
out,'" she said.

The lawyer faxed the city jail, where Richardson was being held.

"I came back home at midnight and there's another message
saying,"Where are you? Please, please, can you help? You must be
somewhere out there.' But by then, I knew Michael had seen him."

After she posted bail, she said, she went to the city lockup the
following night to pick up her husband.

It was like a scene out of a bad movie. She was directed to a back
alley off Cordova Street.

"There were all kinds of weirdos on Main Street - drug addicts, a guy
being sick in a flowerbed," she remembered.

The alley had a series of garage doors.

"I thought, 'It's a setup and the Americans have come and taken him
away. He's not going to come out," she said.

"Then this garage door went up and they pushed him out."

The 52-year-old Amalia, born and raised in London, describes herself
as a "tough old Brit."

She said that she grew up in the '60s and understands her husband's
crime.

"It's not as if he bashed his old granny or stole some money," she
said.

Over the years Allen buried the memories of his six weeks in Atica
prison.

"He was there long enough to see some real nasty horrors" she said. "I
had to get him to talk about it again."

Richardson's arrest - as a 19-year-old called Christopher Perlstein -
came while he was a student activist at Rochester Institute of Technology.

"Right after the Kent State massacre, he led a little demonstration
from RIT to Rochester University," she said.

"The police were involved and everyone got very antsy. I think the
dean earmarked him as a troublemaker."

Ironically, she said, he had volunteered for the U.S. army about a
year before he went to college.

"He had a bad back and they had their quota," she said. "They'd
turned him down and then his friends started going [to Vietnam] and
not coming back."

"He felt very strongly. I think they wanted him off the campus."

She said that her husband cannot remember selling LSD to the cop who
set him up.

"When you read back [through court records], the cop allegedly put it
in his wallet and carried it for three days with the label 'Taken from
persons unknown,'" she added.

When it was analyzed, it was found to be a trace amount.

So there he was, a 21-year-old with no previous record, being sent to
Attica.

"The minute he walked in the door at Attica, some fearful person
walked up to him and propositioned him," she said.

"He thought, 'Gee I'm going to have to cope with this.'"

After six weeks, Richardson was transferred to a work camp.

He fled when he was told he was being returned to the jail, where a
bloody riot had killed 43 inmates and hostages.

Another irony, said Amalia, is that he was never told how soon he
might be paroled.

He escaped in September 1971 but would have been eligible for parole
the following April.

When he got to Toronto, Richardson linked up with an "underground
railway of draft-dodgers and deserters" to get his new identity.

Although she doesn't know all the details, he got his new name from
"someone who died as a baby."

After he moved to Canada, Richardson kept in touch with his parents in
New York state.

"His father died last year and his mother the year before that," she
said. "That was hard because he couldn't go to the funerals."

"He and his mother were very close...His parents were supportive from
the very early days."

How did the immigration authorities get wind of him after almost 30
years?

While newspapers have talked of an informant, nothing shows up in the
records.

She thinks it may be a disgruntled relative and that police did a
computer trace on his phone calls to the United States.

While she worries about his life behind bars, she believes her husband
will survive.

"Allen's resilient and he's very mature," she said.

"One of the things I liked about him when I first met him is that he's
really a grown-up, rounded-off man. Maybe whatever happened way back
when helped."

She also said her husband has a great sense of humour.

"I'm a very emotional person and he's a very steady person, but I know
he'll come back," she added.

Amalia gets strength from the outpouring of letters of support from
friends in Canada.

More than 100 of them were given to the court this week in the hope
that it would make the judge grant a lenient sentence.

"That's what's kept us sane," she said. "I read them in bed and I
thought it is astounding that all these people came out of all these
different corners of Vancouver - bluegrass people, music people,
vintage-car people, people he's helped or spoken to along the way.

"I was astounded. I said,'You know, sweetheart, at the end of the day
it's like reading your obituary before you're dead and you get to see
what people think of you."

His 20-month battle to stay in Canada forced Amalia to put her battle
with breast cancer on the back burner.

"I've had a whole bunch of treatment in 1986 and 1983 - I'm on a
seven-year cycle and the cycle is now," she said. "I have had a
couple of scans that have to be checked out."

She points to a bump on her palm the size of a cherry tomato.

"And I have a lump on my hand that has to be checked out," she said.
"As long as my health stands up, I can stand up to anything."

Richardson To Miss Family Funeral

West Vancouver's Amalia Richardson flew to England to bury her mother
just hours after visiting her husband in a New York state prison.

"My mother died today," said Richardson, 52, by phone from JFK Airport
on Friday.

"I've just been to see Allen in prison. It's hard for him,
particularly with what's ahppened to my mother."

Her 50-year-old husband is at Downstate Correctional Facility, at
Fishkill, N.Y., after turning himself in Wednesday, ending three
decades as a fugitive in Canada.

A judge ordered him to serve what's left of four-year, 1971 sentence
for selling $20 US worth of LSD to an undercover cop in Rochester, N.Y.

"Security is tight," she said. "You're allowed to sit with him. He
sits there in his prison pyjamas and they watch you. He's very stoic,
but I could see by the tension he's not happy."

Amalia said she wished she could have got back in time to see her
mother, who suffered a stroke on Wednesday.

"I couldn't leave before I went to see Allen," she said. "The worst
thing is, we are going through this stress and he is in there and I'm
here. He's not even been given a book or magazine to read, never mind
a newspaper."

She said her husband is anxious to hear when the U.S. parole board
will consider his early release.