Godwin, Glen

Very little is known about the early life of Glenn Stuart Godwin. Glen is known to have been born on June 26, 1958 in Miami, Florida. In the 1980s, Godwin resided in Palm Springs, California . 22-year-old Glen was far from a criminal lifestyle and at various times worked as a builder and mechanic. In the 1980th year, Glen Godwin decided to start a small business supplying tools in the field of construction and engineering.

On August 1, 1980, Glen Godwin and his roommate, 29-year-old Frank Soto, Jr., were lured into their apartments to rob 26-year-old Kim Robert LiValley. As a pilot by profession, LiValley was also known in the area as a smuggler of narcotic substances who transported them by air across the US border. Lively offered fierce resistance to the criminals, during which Godwin inflicted 36 knife wounds on Kim, from which he died. LiValley’s car and his corpse were driven to a desert 100 miles from Blythe, California, where it was blown up to destroy traces of a crime. The burnt remains of a car and a body were found on August 3, 1980. The investigation found that the day before the assassination, Kim LiVelly told his mother that he was going to Palm Springs in order to visit his acquaintance named Glen Godwin. Godwin and Soto were soon detained to testify, but were released. Godwin said that another acquaintance of the deceased named Roy Dicky could be involved in the murder. After testifying, Godwin and Soto left California and settled in Texas. During a further investigation, Roy Dickie was arrested and charged with the murder of LiValley Glen Godwin. In the beginning of 1981, Frank Soto Jr. and Glen Godwin were successively arrested. Soto, faced with accusations of complicity in the murder, made a deal with justice and testified against Glen Godwin ^[3] .

The trial took place in the spring of 1981. At court, Glen refused to plead guilty and stated that Soto was the direct executor of the murder. Frank Soto Jr., in turn, testified against Godwin. Roy Dickey and several other witnesses also testified against Glen Godwin in court, claiming that his former friend had repeatedly shown destructive behavior towards his accomplices. During the trial, Godwin repeatedly tried to influence Soto's mental activity by infringing on his life. Shortly before the verdict was announced, Godwin, through a series of telephone conversations, arranged with another prisoner to kill Frank Soto in the county prison, where Soto was awaiting sentence. The plot was uncovered and despite audio recordings of telephone conversations, charges of attempted murder were never brought against Glen Godwin. In March 1981 ^[4] . Glen Godwin and Frank Soto Jr. were sentenced to life imprisonment with the right to apply for parole upon serving 26 years in prison. Frank Soto, as an incentive for making a deal with justice, was sent to Texas to serve his sentence in order to avoid possible encroachment on his life by Glenn Godwin ^[3] .

After being convicted, Glen Godwin was sent to serve his sentence at the Deuel Vocational Institute in Tracy. In 1986, Godwin was charged with preparing to escape from an institution. As punishment, Glen was sent to the Folsom State Prison High Security Prison in January 1987. On Friday, June 5, 1987, the disappearance of Glenn Godwin became known. A few hours later, his prison clothes, as well as an inflatable raft, were discovered outside the prison on the banks of the American River. Godwin was put on the wanted list, a search operation involving dog handlers with dogs lost the track of a criminal in one of the nearby hills. During the investigation, it was revealed that Glen Godwin sawed a prison fence with a hacksaw, got access to the prison drainage system, broke through a sewer pipe and crawled inside it through sewage over 300 meters to the source of sewage into the river ^[5] . Almost immediately after the escape, the investigation found out that Godwin had free accomplices when planning the escape ^[6] , who had previously sawed off a thick grate in the sewer pipe at the place where the sewage source flows into the river and provided the fugitive with an inflatable raft. In total, only 3 hours passed from the moment Glen Godwin disappeared to the discovery of his escape route ^[7] . The investigation soon established that one of Glen Godwin’s accomplices was the 30-year-old Lorenz Karlich, who was arrested on June 9, 1987 in the district of San Bernardino. Karlich served his sentence in prison at the Deuel Vocational Institute in the early 1980s with Godwin, and was known for the fact that in March 1978 he managed to escape from it. Karlich was caught, returned to prison, convicted again, but was released in 1984. Glenn Govin's wife, 23-year-old Shelley Godwin, who married him in 1985, was also wanted. During the investigation, it became known that on the day of her husband’s escape, Shelley Godwin did not go to work and rented two cars, after which she disappeared in an unknown direction ^[8] . Subsequently, Lorenz Karlich was charged and in 1988 he was convicted and sentenced to 1 year in prison ^[9] .

On February 9, 1989, Godwin was unexpectedly arrested in the city of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, on charges of drug smuggling. Godwin used a pseudonym and was known by the name of Stuart Carrera, but his identity was confirmed by fingerprint examination of fingerprints. After his arrest, US authorities began negotiations with the Mexican authorities to extradite the fugitive ^[10] . Glen's wife, Shelley Godwin, was arrested a year later - in February 1990, in Dallas, Texas, the investigation suggested that Godwin probably lived in Texas for some time after the escape ^[11] .

After his arrest, Godwin was convicted by the Mexican authorities and received 7 years in prison as punishment. ^[12] To serve his sentence, he was sent to the Puente Grande prison in the city of Guadalajara , the Mexican state of Jalisco ^[13] . The decision to extradite Godwin to the United States was made in early 1991. Learning about this, Glen in April 1991, while in prison, committed the murder of another prisoner in order to delay the process of extradition ^[14] . Godwin was charged with the murder and a new trial was being prepared against him, as part of his preparation, Glen Godwin organized a plan for escaping from prison, which he ultimately completed on September 26, 1991, after which Glen Stuart Godwin’s traces were finally lost ^[15] .

After escaping from a Mexican prison, Glen Godwin was put on the international wanted list. After several years of unsuccessful searches and verification of several hundred conflicting evidence, the FBI in October 1996 added the fugitive to the list of the first ten criminals most wanted in the United States, the states of North and Central America and awarded a reward for providing information on his whereabouts ^{[16 ]} . Over the next two decades, Godwin has consistently been on the list of the ten most wanted FBI criminals. Over the years of his search, it became known that Glen Godwin, using several pseudonyms, carries out drug trafficking operations in Mexico, Central and South America. In different years, in order to identify Godwin, the FBI drew up various options for changing his appearance, taking into account the years lived. Finally, only on May 26, 2016 Glen Stewart Godwin was removed from the list of ten, despite the fact that he was never caught and his whereabouts since the autumn of 1991 have not been established ^[17] . ^[18]

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