Accused killers sent to Jackson prison after quick court hearing

The two Georgia convicts accused of killing a pair of corrections officers on a prison bus last week and then escaping were back in Putnam County Wednesday for a first-appearance hearing in court.

Murder suspects Ricky Dubose and Donnie Rowe, who fled to Tennessee after corrections officers Curtis Billue and Christopher Monica were shot and killed June 13, were whisked back to Georgia in the wee hours of the morning.

A caravan of five SUVs delivered the men to the Putnam jail shortly before 6 a.m.

“I’m confident they didn’t know we were coming,” said Putnam Sheriff Howard Sills, who led the group of lawmen who retrieved the fugitives from a jail in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, not far from where the escapees were captured last Thursday.

At Wednesday’s hearing, prosecutors, as The Telegraph reported late last week, spoke of their likely intention to seek the death penalty for Rowe and Dubose but did not formally do so.

Rowe and Dubose sat shackled side by side in the courtroom. Rowe, already serving a life-without-parole sentence for a string of violent crimes including a Macon armed robbery in 2001, appeared to listen intently, while the younger Dubose seemed aloof. He glanced around the room as camera shutters clacked in a balcony behind him.

Rowe answered the judge with a “yes, ma’am” once, but neither prisoner said much if anything during the 12-minute proceeding.

After the hearing, a sheriff’s caravan drove the pair to the state prison in Jackson where they were en route last week when they escaped.

This story was originally published June 21, 2017 at 9:18 AM with the headline "Accused killers sent to Jackson prison after quick court hearing."