Fort Pierce, Fla. ? The knock came as Eddie Miller was sitting in his favorite armchair watching “Texas Justice” on TV. He opened the door to find a plainclothes detective and two uniformed St. Lucie County sheriff’s deputies.

“Mr. Mayes!” said Detective Greg Farliss to the grizzled man behind the barred screen door.

“Where you get that from?” Miller answered.

“That’s your name,” the detective replied, undeterred.

Miller didn’t see any point in arguing. After all, when he walked off that prison work detail and into the piney woods of east Georgia, 44 years of freedom were more than he could have ever hoped for.

“Well, here I am then,” said the 69-year-old retired fruit picker said. “You got your man.”

Criminal history

Eddie “Bee” Mayes grew up in Warren County, Ga. In his early teens, Mayes spent a couple of years in a juvenile facility for burglary. When he got out, he decided to head to Fort Pierce, Fla., where he was told there was money to be made picking fruit and vegetables.

In late 1956, Mayes went home to Georgia to visit family. One night, he was driving around with his half brother, Frank Ellis, and Frank’s friend, W.C. Clarke, when he fell asleep in the back seat.

Mayes says he awoke to the sound of sirens and the flashing of lights.

The Augusta Chronicle of Nov. 29, 1956, reported that three men had been charged with several holdups and robberies in five counties between Athens and Augusta.

Mayes ended up pleading guilty after being advised that he’d only serve a little bit of time. When the concurrent and consecutive sentences were tallied, Mayes was looking at a minimum of 35 years.

Eddie Miller, 69, leaves Autry State Prison accompanied by his wife, Ethel, left, and nephew Cody Thomas. Miller, who was charged with several holdups and robberies in 1956 and sent to jail, escaped in 1960. He spent 44 years as a free man before he was recaptured in 2004. Parole Board officials in Georgia commuted his sentence.

Work camp, escape

Mayes was sent to the Jefferson County Public Works Camp, an unfenced facility a couple of counties south of home.

The inmates would be driven out into the county to dig ditches, clear brush or lay water lines. One day about four years into his sentence, the guards took Mayes out to the pit where lumber was soaked in creosote preservative.

Before long, Mayes had managed to get the chemical in his eyes, which began to burn.

Mayes says he complained to a guard, who accused him of slacking off.

He was given 10 days in “the hole.” Mayes says he was stripped to his shorts, placed in a tiny, windowless cell, and put on bread and water.

“I tell you, it was rough,” he says. “A lot of the nights I laid down on the floor crying.”

Not long after that stint was over, a guard accused Mayes of not working fast enough. Another 10 days in the hole.

The day that punishment ended, July 22, 1960, Mayes went back to work detail.

Mayes asked the warden for permission to get a drink of water. He quenched his thirst, then walked back past the guards and just kept walking.

“Shoot me and get it over,” Mayes recalled saying to himself as he marched toward the woods, the guns to his back. “‘Cause I’m gone.”

There were no shots, and Mayes walked on.

He emerged from the woods onto U.S. 1, flagged down a tractor-trailer and asked the driver if he could take to Fort Pierce.

Quiet life

Mayes settled back into the migrant work he’d done before going home for that fateful visit. He picked tomatoes and peppers around St. Lucie County and headed north to pick apples in New York’s Hudson Valley.

He called himself Miller, the name of the man he believed to be his father.

Miller began to believe he was home free.

In the fall of 1966, Miller was working a white potato field near Rochester, N.Y., when a girl caught his eye. Ethel Jones, 18, was the niece of two of Miller’s oldest Florida friends.

He told her where he was born, but he never mentioned the name Mayes — or the troubles associated with it.

The couple married in 1969 and raised two sons and a daughter. As the years passed, Miller worked the fields and kept his nose clean. He didn’t drink or smoke, and his only brushes with the law were a speeding citation and a $500 fine for transporting fruit without a ticket.

Miller had long since ceased worrying about being reincarcerated. He had no idea that his arrest warrant had been updated in 1991 and entered into the new computerized criminal identification system. This system included an alias:

Eddie Miller.

Recapture

On March 5, Ethel Miller went out for a hair appointment. On her way home, she called her husband to see if he wanted her to bring him something for lunch.

He told her to pick him up a sandwich from McDonald’s.

When Ethel arrived home 15 minutes later, the house was empty. There wasn’t even a note.

About four hours later, at 6:30, her husband called her from the St. Lucie County Jail.

“What are you doing in Rock Road jail?” she asked.

“Let me tell you, honey,” he replied, “it’s a long story. I should have told you a long lot of years ago. … They had an old warrant out on me.”

The authorities had been on Miller’s trail for three months.

In late December, Miller had applied to be put on a visitor’s list at Avon Park Correctional Institution, where his oldest son, Tony, was serving 27 months for armed burglary.

During a routine background check, a data entry operator got a hit on an old Georgia warrant. The birth dates didn’t match, but the name Eddie Miller did.

She contacted Georgia authorities.

Five days after the arrest, talking over a jail phone through a thick glass barrier, Miller apologized to his wife for not telling her about his past. She told him she and the family were behind him, and that the entire church was praying for him.

“Don’t worry,” she told him. “We’ll just pray and let the Lord work it out, because God will work it out.”

Miller was transferred to Autry State Prison, a close-security prison in the south Georgia town of Pelham.

Unit manager Keith Jones says Miller had the air of a man who was resigned to take whatever fate had in store for him.

The Department of Corrections notified the State Board of Pardons and Paroles of Miller’s recapture. Noting his age and 44 years of clean living, the board voted to consider Miller for commutation.

Miller had no idea the board had taken up his case.

On June 1, Miller was sitting around the unit common area when Jones walked up.

“I’ve got some good news for you,” he told Miller. “The 11th of this month you’ll be a free man.”

A beaming Miller shook Jones’ hand. His fellow inmates slapped him on the back.

Second chance

The parole board noted that none of the crimes to which the young Mayes had pleaded involved weapons. There are too many young violent offenders who need the prison beds, and board member Mike Light says the decision to show Miller mercy was a rare unanimous one.

“He’s shown that’s he’s worthy of a second chance,” Light says.

Miller still wonders how his alias ended up in the system. Officials could not say exactly.

What Miller does know for sure is that he has been blessed.

“When you get down to praying,” he says, “you know God will answer your prayers.”

Eddie says he intends to make his adopted name legal. Ethel is just fine with that.

The way she sees it, Eddie Mayes died in prison 44 years ago.