Father warned authorities daughter might act

Utah Department of Corrections officials acknowledge receiving the information from Floyd Forsyth, and said the officer planned to contact his counterparts in Tennessee on Tuesday — the same day police say Jennifer Hyatte shot and killed a prison guard as her husband, George Hyatte, was being led from a courthouse.

The couple, now held in a jail in Ohio where they were captured Wednesday, are fighting extradition to Tennessee on warrants of first-degree murder.

Floyd Forsyth said that in a phone conversation three weeks ago his daughter asked him if he “had any spare handcuff keys.” Forsyth said Jennifer, 31, told him she was expecting her husband to be released from prison soon and planned to “handcuff him to the bed.”

That remark and his daughter’s frequently changing accounts of her husband’s legal status triggered the instincts Forsyth said he developed over 16 years as an Emery County sheriff’s deputy.

“I thought, ‘OK, now I know.’ I thought maybe she was going to pass him a key,” Forsyth, now a diesel mechanic, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from his Huntington home.

“But there was no doubt in my mind that she was going do something. I just didn’t know it would be this.”

Forsyth’s concerns were buttressed by other remarks his daughter made. She planned, Forsyth said, to let her ex-husband, Eli Gourdin, keep their three children with him in Smithfield, Utah, “for a while.” And, Forsyth said, his daughter told him she was putting her own possessions in storage.

“She says ‘Dad, my head is screwed up,'” Forsyth said.

Forsyth, who is currently on probation for a drug conviction, shared his suspicions with his probation officer on July 28 and gave him a copy of a letter from George Hyatte, a convicted robber, that included Hyatte’s prison identification information.

“I told him, ‘I think we’ve got a problem here,'” Forsyth said, adding that he asked the officer to contact authorities in Tennessee.

On Tuesday, Forsyth learned the call hadn’t been made.

Corrections Department spokesman Jack Ford said the conversation was documented in a report by the probation officer, but that the information was left in another officer’s car. It was later retrieved, and the officer had planned to call Tennessee officials this week, Ford said.

Nothing in law compels the department to make such notifications.

“It’s common courtesy certainly, and we would expect people to pass that information to us,” Ford said. “His intention was to do so.”

In hindsight the department should have tried to act sooner, Ford said, although Forsyth’s information “didn’t appear to raise any red flags.”

“We wish we had done it sooner, but even then, you wonder would that have changed anything?” Ford said.

Forsyth thinks there’s a chance it would, but says he’s not angry with the department.

“I’m too angry (about Jennifer) to be pissed off at them,” he said.