Federal authorities Thursday were seeking the whereabouts of an 81-year-old, once-condemned man who escaped from an Ohio prison in 1973 while serving a life sentence and was believed to have worked at a hospital in Lynwood decades ago.
Lester Eubanks is one of the U.S. Marshals Service’s 15 most wanted fugitives.
Eubanks was convicted in the 1965 rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl, crimes he committed while free on bond after an attempted rape that allegedly occurred a few months before the killing, according to the USMS. He was sentenced to death, but in 1972 his sentence was commuted to life without parole.
“Less than two years after the sentence modification, Eubanks was placed in the Ohio Corrections Medical Center and given the privilege of an honor assignment which allowed him outside the prison walls,” according to a USMS statement.
He escaped during that assignment, on Dec. 7, 1973, and has not been seen by authorities since.
Eubanks was last seen in Southern California in the 1970s and was using the alias “Victor Young,” according to the USMS, which reported that he was believed to have worked as a janitor at St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood in the late 1980s or early 1990s and was known to frequent Gardena, South Central L.A., Long Beach and North Hollywood.
The USMS Cold Case Unit in Northern Ohio was assigned Eubanks’ case in 2016 and, with assistance from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, developed an age progression photo series that shows what he might look like now and over the years since his escape.
There is a $50,000 reward for information leading to Eubanks’ location and the resolution of the case.
Anyone who knows anything that could help investigators find him was urged to call the Northern Ohio Violent Fugitive Task Force at 1-866-4-WANTED.