A Baptist minister has been returned to Illinois, almost eight years after he fled the state in 1983 while on parole for killing his wife and attempting to kill a girlfriend in Du Page County.
Rev. Edmund Lopes, who later became a minister and was serving a small congregation in southeastern Washington state, was arrested in December after his past was uncovered.
He was returned from Washington by a U.S. marshal and turned over to Illinois authorities Thursday, according to Nic Howell, a spokesman for the Illinois Department of Corrections.
Howell declined to say where the 56-year-old Lopes was being held.
Authorities wanted Lopes returned to Illinois to determine whether he should serve more of his 50- to 99-year prison sentence.
A preliminary hearing on that issue will be held within ”a few days”
before the Prisoner Review Board, Howell said.
Lopes served 12 years in prison after he was convicted of the murder of his wife, Phyllis, and the attempted murder of a girlfriend within one month in 1971.
Within a week of his parole in 1983, Lopes fled, married a prison pen pal and settled in West Richland, Wash.
Police in Brockton, Mass., have sought to question Lopes about the 1966 death of another girlfriend.
In December, Lopes told two ministers and a reporter that he killed a woman in Massachussetts, but that he could remember no details.
But since his arrest in Washington, Lopes has refused to talk to East Coast investigators.
