"Ours is a love story not a crime story," Byron Smoot, June 1, 1999

After a long day of counseling patients, Betsy Feil was speeding along the Baltimore Beltway when she heard her pager vibrate. Not an unusual occurrence for the busy psychologist, except that when she glanced down at the display, she saw that the caller was her lover. That was odd. He couldn't page her. He was in prison, and paging their lovers isn't a right afforded those behind bars.

But it was his signal, unmistakably: The digital readout said "007."

When she pulled over and called the number, she learned why he was able to page her.

He was no longer in prison.

He had escaped. In a hushed voice, Byron Smoot told her he and a buddy had wiggled through the barbed wire fence at the Maryland Correctional Institution in Jessup and were outside a liquor store less than a mile from the prison. Now, he needed her.

He had cut himself badly and broken both ankles.

Without pause, Feil leaped back into her Subaru wagon and rushed off toward Jessup. Somewhere in her mind, she knew she was making a momentous decision, that this was the point in her life between Before and After.

But she forced herself to focus only on how she would stop Byron's bleeding.

Twenty minutes later, she pulled into Mel's Liquor, and Smoot, an armed robber, and his bunkmate, murderer Gregory Lee Lawrence, hobbled to her car.

Feil was appalled by Smoot's condition. Blood dripped from his face and soaked his shirt. His flesh looked like tapioca pudding.

The two escapees fell exhausted into her car. As she pulled into traffic, Betsy Feil knew everything had changed.

Her Main Line Philadelphia upbringing, her Ivy League education, her professional standing, all of it would now be seen through a new lens. She would be known as the psychologist who helped her prisoner lover escape.

The counselor on infidelity had also, incidentally, betrayed the man most people believed to be her husband.

The role of counselor

The thief and the therapist first met in the summer of 1997, when Betsy Feil went to work at the Correctional Mental Health Center, where prisoners with severe mental illnesses are treated.

Feil, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, had earned her doctorate the year before from Catholic University in Washington.

To become a licensed psychotherapist in Maryland, Feil needed 2,000 hours of supervised training. The Correctional Mental Health Center is one of the few places she could work and receive hours toward accreditation.

Byron Smoot, a short, voluble thief with fits of grandiosity, had been sent to the center from a prison in Hagerstown where he had been serving a 30-year sentence for 11 armed robberies. The prison system had transferred him there after he tried to kill himself.

Feil was assigned as Smoot's therapist, and for the next nine months they met five days a week.

Their sessions ended abruptly -- because of Feil's relationship with another inmate.

While performing therapy with Smoot, Feil was also seeing the prisoner in the cell next to his, Richard "Crazy Horse" Crowell, a 34-year-old self-described alcoholic who frequently got arrested for barroom brawling.

His dubious distinction in prison was a tattoo. It was supposed to say, "Cold Beer. Hot Women," but the inmate tattoo artist got confused.

So Crowell's forearm reads, "Hot Beer. Cold Women."

Feil's attachment to Crowell became something more than professional, enough so that her bosses forbade her from seeing Crowell anymore. That was not the end of it, however.

Feil established a post office box where Crowell could write to her. He addressed her as "Miss Marbles" because, he said in an interview this week, "her eyes looked like marbles."

When prison officials found out about the correspondence, they fired Feil.

The reason Feil had gotten a post office box was that she didn't want Crowell's letters coming to her home in Annapolis. She shared that house with Glenn Bosshard, an unemployed maker of lady's handbags.

The two had lived together for 11 years and held a marriage ceremony three years ago. But the marriage is not legal: They never got a marriage license for fear that it would reduce Bosshard's disability checks.

About a month after Feil's firing, Crowell got paroled, and the psychologist made her first trip to pick up a former prisoner-in-need. She dropped him off at his friend's house in Annapolis, but the next day, he showed up drunk on her lawn.

Bosshard extracted a promise from Feil: never bring an inmate home again.

Letters from Crowell kept arriving at the post office box, however, and one day Feil discovered a new pen pal: an obviously smitten Smoot.

Crowell recalled that Smoot, 39, was well-liked by other prisoners. He was easy-going and soft-spoken, and he ran laps around the prison yard to stay in shape.

The son of a minister and still married to a Methodist minister, Smoot had converted to Islam. His nickname was Gazu, after a purple Martian from the Flintstones cartoon.

Unusually meticulous, Smoot had wanted the prison to establish an award for the cleanest cell, and he was especially proud of the plastic cover he made for his toilet. (So obsessive was he about cleanliness that he even tidied it up before his escape.)

In his letter, Smoot urged Feil to visit him, advising her that he had been transferred out of the mental health unit to a medium-security facility in Jessup.

They began a correspondence, and Feil started accepting his collect calls, while hiding the phone bills from Bosshard. Soon she was mailing postage stamps and clothing to Smoot.

Then came the visits. In the next seven months, prison records show, she visited him 58 times.

The visits escalated to twice a week, on Sunday and Wednesday nights. They met in a large room covered with murals painted by the inmates. The tables were triangular and the inmates were allowed to embrace their visitors only at the beginning and end of the visit.

Feil came in the last hour of the four-hour visiting period because the guards usually let them have a few extra minutes to embrace. They would kiss and stroke each other across the table.

Child of privilege

"I really care for him," Feil said of Smoot this week in her first interview since the prison break.

The petite woman with long, graying hair would not otherwise be quoted directly. But she attempted in the interview to provide her own psychological profile.

The youngest of four girls, Feil was raised in affluence in Philadelphia, in a stone mansion with an elevator and swimming pool. But her childhood was not idyllic.

Her father was a wealthy investor and retired Army colonel whose family owned the Feil Brewery in Philadelphia. She said he was also an alcoholic prone to violent outbursts. Feil read incessantly as a child to escape from the spectacle of her parents' deteriorating marriage. They divorced when she was 10.

She excelled in school and had high professional aspirations, but as an adult, Feil felt a schism in her life between the upright careerist and a woman desperately unfulfilled.

She met Bosshard, a craftsman with a ninth-grade education, in 1988 at a self-help group meeting for children of alcoholics.

Bosshard, a lanky man who suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, a painful rheumatic disorder, said he was instantly attracted to Feil. Back then, she had a natural streak of white in her brown hair and resembled his favorite singer, Bonnie Raitt.

Three years ago, the couple had a waterside marriage ceremony in Annapolis. More than half of their guests were in the mental health field.

"I made her dinner every night and played her a new song on my guitar," Bosshard said last week. "I adored her."

But Feil felt much lacking in her life.

To her family and friends she was always known as Betsy, a gregarious, exceptionally bright woman who was passionate about helping the underprivileged. But in her relationship with Smoot, she insisted that he call her Elizabeth.

Their letters and calls progressed from expressions of adoration to graphic sexual fantasies. Smoot, who received a typewriter from Feil, wrote about their future together, one that included marriage.

"My objective in this relationship dear, is to show you that with-out each other, life would never be complete," Smoot wrote in a letter to Feil on Dec. 7, 1998.

On some level, though, Feil felt uneasy:

"[I]t is only a matter of time before everything blows up in my face," she wrote to Smoot, "and I dread finding out how that will affect me and you and Glenn and my life overall. I expect I will feel terrible."

She knew that her life was going to be blown apart.

She says she didn't know it would be the night of May 18.

Aiding and abetting

She was driving home from her practice at Life Care Health in Towson when her beeper vibrated in her purple backpack.

Feil, who has since been charged with obstruction of justice and aiding and abetting a fugitive, insists she did not know Smoot planned an escape.

Smoot, in a letter to The Sun, also said she did not know his intentions: "She only came to save her lover's life."

But when she left for work that afternoon, Bosshard said, Feil had taken an overnight bag and new lingerie.

After picking up the escapees, Feil drove to a motel -- she refused to say where. She and Smoot shared a room, she said, and stayed up all night holding each other, but they never had sex.

Feil fed him orange juice and applied butterfly bandages to his wounds. Smoot composed a poem for her, called "Tomorrow's Sorrow."

"That night I knew a dark cloud was before us," Smoot wrote The Sun. "My escape would reveal our affair and there would be no more secrets. She cried not knowing wheather [sic] we'd see each other again."

The next morning, Feil went to work in Towson. She canceled her therapy appointments and called Bosshard, who said he had been up all night with the state police. By now, they had learned about Feil's many visits to Smoot.

Bosshard told her the state police wanted to interview her at the Glen Burnie barracks. Neither the police nor Feil will say what happened at the meeting, although the police say she was not truthful.

A few days later, they charged her with obstruction of justice.

Bosshard, who met her at the barracks, saw blood inside her Subaru and also found a package of Smoot's love letters to his wife. He flew into a rage and sped off to their home.

When Feil arrived there with her sister, Bosshard confronted Feil, and she admitted having an affair with Smoot, Bosshard said. He threw a vase against the wall.

"Up until then," he said, "I thought our biggest problem was my daughter's phone habits."

Feil went home with her sister to Westminster.

The next day Smoot was apprehended in a $37-a-night motel on Pulaski Highway.

Bosshard, now in a frenzy, was telling WBAL-TV that his "wife was sexually involved with Smoot." The station broadcast photos Bosshard had provided of Feil in black lingerie.

He gave her clothing to charity and friends. He called all of her patients from Life Care Health and told them to sue Feil for malpractice. He hired an attorney to begin legal action against Feil and began aggressively courting the media.

He gave copies of her private diaries and love letters to reporters before handing them to the state police. And he chased her through the streets of Annapolis in his car, trying to serve her with a restraining order.

Bosshard, who was arrested and released on $10,000 bond for that incident, is enraged that his wife's bond related to the escape was about half that amount.

Finally, he packed her belongings and put them all on the front lawn underneath a tent. On the boxes he wrote "SMOOT" which, he said, he now regards as her name.

He believes the Betsy that he knew -- the Elizabeth that Smoot loves -- belongs in prison, and that could be where she eventually ends up. If convicted on all charges, she could be sentenced to 12 years.

Already, her career is in ruins, she's in bankruptcy, and she spends her days shuttling between appointments with lawyers.

She said this week that she never thought of herself as the type of woman who would fall in love with a prisoner.

Yet she still proclaims her undiminished love for Smoot. She can't imagine a future without him.

Pub Date: 6/12/99