Fugitive caught after 1,000-mile drive in music star's tour bus

AN AMERICAN convict who escaped from a prison van to pay a final visit to his dying mother ended up driving himself on a 1,000-mile odyssey through Dixieland in a tour bus stolen from the country music star Crystal Gayle.

In a plot reminiscent of the 1977 fugitive movie Smokey and the Bandit, Christopher Gay also took an 18-wheel articulated lorry to evade capture during a five-state manhunt, and was finally arrested indulging his passion for motor racing at Florida's famed Daytona speedway.

Gay's grand adventure began during a toilet stop in Hardeeville, South Carolina, when he fled from the van taking him to Alabama to answer the latest charges of a long career in burglary, fraud and theft.

He drove 300 miles north to Manchester, Tennessee, in a stolen pick-up truck, before swapping it for a fully laden Wal-Mart lorry for the final 20 miles of the journey to the Nashville suburb of Pleasant View, where his mother, Anna Shull, has just weeks to live due to colon cancer.

But he was thwarted just 50 yards from his target by police surrounding his mother's trailer, and Gay, 33, disappeared into nearby woods.

"What he done was wrong, but he knows his momma don't have long," said Ms Shull, 56. "He's got a heart as big as his head."

After emerging from the woods, Gay took a tour bus belonging to Ms Gayle, who had a 1977 UK hit with Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue, from a garage in nearby Whites Creek.

He drove the bus south through Tennessee and Georgia to a racetrack in Lakeland, Florida, where he claimed to be an assistant of NASCAR racing champion Tony Stewart. "We figured something was wrong because he didn't look the part and he didn't act the part," said the track manager, Barry Williams, who noted the bus's registration plate and called the police.

The authorities finally caught up with Gay 100 miles away in Daytona Beach as he watched another racing event.

Last night, he was in the Volusia County jail, awaiting extradition to Alabama or Tennessee, where he is also wanted on outstanding arrest warrants.

It is the third time that Gay has escaped from custody, according to his mother, and the second time he had done so to visit a dying parent.

In 2005, she said, he got away from a jail in Nashville to see his father, who was deteriorat-ing with Alzheimer's disease at the city's Centennial Medical Centre.

He gave himself up after the visit, she told the Tennessean newspaper.