In this Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018 photo provided by Piscataquis County Sheriff’s Office, convicted murderer Arnold Nash stands for a booking photo, in Dover-Foxcroft, Maine. Nash was serving a 45-year sentence for killing his former neighbor in 1991. He previously escaped from Maine Correctional Center in Windham in 1973 and from the Maine State Prison in 1981. (Piscataquis County Sheriff’s Office via AP)
A convicted murder was arrested Tuesday morning in Piscataquis County, five days after he escaped from a minimum-security prison in Charleston.
Arnold Nash, who has been in prison since he was convicted in 1992 of murdering his neighbor, was arrested by the Piscataquis County Sheriff’s deputy around 6:45 a.m. as Nash walked along the side of Bangor Road, according Dover-Foxcroft police and Stephen McCausland, spokesman for the Maine Department of Public Safety. Nash was taken to the Piscataquis County Jail.
Nash, 65, formerly of Hancock County, was last seen around 8:20 p.m. Thursday at the minimum-security unit at the Mountain View Correctional Facility in Charleston. There had been no sightings of him since the escape.
Nash has a history of escape, once from the Maine Correctional Center in Windham in 1973 when he was still a teenager, and again in 1981 from the former Maine State Prison in Thomaston. The latter escape, which involved another inmate, Milton Wallace, led to one of the most infamous manhunts in state history, the Moody Mountain Manhunt. The men were captured in the woods of the Waldo County town of Morrill after 22 days.
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Joseph Fitzpatrick, Maine’s corrections commissioner, said Monday that Nash has been at Mountain View for the last six months and was at another minimum-security prison, Downeast Correctional Center in Machiasport, for six months before that.
Nash had served about 26 years of a 45-year maximum sentence for the 1991 murder of Wilbur Gibeault in the town of North Sullivan in Hancock County. Fitzpatrick said Nash had earned a significant amount of both statutory and meritorious good time, which is likely why he was due to be released so soon. Before his escape last week, Nash only had two infractions since 1992, and both were minor, Fitzpatrick said. He showed no signs of violence or aggression.
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