Deadly inmate escape leads to surrender 36 hours later

The 34-year-old Hyatte, a native of nearby Rhea County with a history of holdups and at least five escapes, pleaded guilty Tuesday morning to robbing Big E’s Tobacco Shop in Rockwood in 2002.

The deal with prosecutors would add six years to the 35-year sentence Hyatte began serving two years ago for robbery and assault.

“I’m going to spend the rest of my life in prison. I didn’t really hurt nobody,” Hyatte was heard to say, holding back tears.

Corrections officer Wayne “Cotton” Morgan, 56, tried to comfort him. But Morgan would soon be dead, shot in the stomach in broad daylight in the courthouse parking lot.

Thirty-six hours later, Hyatte and a former prison nurse who married him last year surrendered to police who had surrounded their budget motel room in Columbus, Ohio, nearly 400 miles to the north, after a bold and apparently long-planned escape.

On Friday, they face extradition back to Tennessee under warrants of first-degree murder.

The Roane County courtroom was nearly empty Tuesday as Hyatt rose to face the judge, and then glanced at his wife, Jennifer Hyatte, in the front row.

“She got up while he was making the plea,” recalled Larry “Porky” Harris, the other corrections officer guarding Hyatte. “He looked back at her and nodded. And she got up and left, right when it was fixing to end.”

About 10 a.m. while some 40 people milled around the parking lot of the white-columned courthouse, Morgan and Harris led the inmate back to the prison van for a return trip to Brushy Mountain Correctional Complex.

“It ain’t a two-minute walk down to the parking lot where the van was,” Harris said. “We just arrived at the van when she started shooting.”

Jennifer Hyatte was a licensed practical nurse with no criminal background, but she came up behind Morgan with a gun, Harris said. George Hyatte then yelled, “Shoot him!” and she started firing, authorities say.

Morgan was fatally wounded, but she kept firing at Harris in a two-minute gun battle later described by Tennessee Bureau of Investigation Director Mark Gywn as a “Bonnie and Clyde-style shootout.”

The pair jumped into a Ford Explorer registered to Jennifer Hyatte and fled. The SUV was found a half-mile away at a sandwich shop around 10:30 a.m. Blood inside suggested the driver was wounded.

Authorities quickly began searching for a gold Chevrolet van that had been parked at the shop overnight. The van was stolen from one of Jennifer Hyatte’s home-health care clients in suburban Nashville.

Officials disclosed she had stayed in a Kingston motel Monday night, but refused to discuss the possibility of accomplices.

As the hours passed, the search expanded. Authorities knew that three years before, George Hyatt and another prisoner had gotten as far as Florida after breaking out of a county jail.

Wednesday afternoon, SWAT teams nearly caught up with the fugitives at a motel in Erlanger, Ky., near Cincinnati, about 275 miles away. Gywn said they missed them by minutes. The gold van was confiscated.

Cabdriver Mike Wagers picked them up in Erlanger and gave them a 116-mile ride to Columbus. The couple gave him two $100 bills for the $185 fare.

“I didn’t feel uncomfortable,” Wagers said. “I had been paid, so my guard was really down.”

But he became suspicious when they told him they were headed to an Amway convention. Their sales pitch didn’t seem nearly aggressive enough.

“Amway people are all about Amway, and when they didn’t try any conversation further about it, that’s when I pretty much thought, ‘Well, they’re not with Amway; they’re doing something else,'” he said.

Jennifer Hyatte, who by now had colored her dark blond hair to black, and George Hyatte checked into a Best Value Inn for a three-night stay. They told the clerk they lost their IDs.

Alerted by a friend, the cab driver eventually made the connection to the shootings and called authorities. Officers surrounded the couple’s room and ordered the pair outside. The room they left behind was littered with junk food wrappers and cans of Mountain Dew and Hawaiian Punch.

As Jennifer Hyatte was led from the room, she yelled back to her husband, “Baby, baby. It’ll be OK! It’ll be OK!”

“At some point they will be brought back to Roane County to face charges,” TBI director Gwyn said shortly after the arrest. “If nothing else, we can give the Morgan family some closure to this tragic event.

Morgan, a decorated Vietnam veteran and Sunday school teacher, will be buried with military honors Friday after a service at Central Middle School in Wartburg.