The Alabama inmate who escaped jail last year with his jailer was sentenced to life in prison for the jail break on Thursday.

Casey White pleaded guilty last month to the escape in exchange for prosecutors dropping a murder charge related to the death of Lauderdale County Assistant Director of Corrections Vicky White, as CrimeOnline previously reported. The jailer led the inmate out of jail on April 29, 2022, sparking an 11-day manhunt that ended in Evansville, Indiana, with Vicky White’s suicide and Casey White back in custody.

“I feel like the most hated man in the world,” White told the court after Lauderdale County Circuit Judge Benjamin Graves handed down the sentence, WHNT reported. “I loved Vicky and I wouldn’t drag her name through the mud for anyone in this courtroom. Vicky took me out because she said, ‘right was right. Wrong is wrong.’ First person to show me affection. First person to give me a hug in six years.”

“I apologize to her family because she said that’s the only thing she regretted … leaving her family,” he said before returning to his seat.

Vicky White’s family was in the courtroom for the sentencing but did not speak. Lauderdale County District Attorney Chris Connolly said in court that her mother had wanted to speak but found it “too emotional.”

White was serving a 75-year sentence for burglary, robbery, kidnapping and attempted murder, stemming from a 2015 standoff with the Limestone County Sheriff’s Office — and awaiting trial for the 2015 murder of Connie Ridgeway — when he and Vicky White fled. Surveillance video shows the pair getting into a patrol vehicle, which was later abandoned. The two — who are not related — then drove away in a Ford Edge Vicky White bought just days earlier.

The Edge was later found abandoned in Tennessee.

At a hearing in May when he pleaded guilty to the escape charge, Casey White said the couple had planned to start over somewhere. “It wasn’t supposed to go that way,” he said. “Things happened … and we was in love.”

White’s trial for the murder of Ridgeway is scheduled to begin in August.

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[Featured image: FILE – Casey White and Vicky White (U.S. Marshals Service, Lauderdale County Sheriff’s Office via AP, File)]