The Evaders

The sun was still tucked behind the Atlantic Ocean when the jet's tires touched tarmac. It was just before dawn on June 23, 2010, and most of the passengers on Spirit Airlines flight 826 were asleep when the cabin lights flickered on.

Joe Dyer

Courtesy of Harmony Storms

Kristin and Scott in happier times.

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One couple, however, had spent the night wide awake, a nagging unease keeping them from getting any shut-eye.

Their short journey had begun at 2:30 a.m. in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. It ended two hours later at the Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood International Airport. Since it was the cheapest way to get from Central America to the States, the flight was packed. Crowded into cramped seats were young Honduran families with crying babies and American expats returning home, all attracted by the late-night flight's bargain rates.

As the jet crawled through a pre-dawn fog up to its gate, flight attendants began whispering to each other, their eyes nervously darting around the crowded cabin. Something wasn't right.

The whine of the engines stopped and a stale silence filled the plane. Dewy-eyed passengers and a befuddled crew stared at each other for what seemed like an eternity until the intercom crackled to life.

"Everyone remain seated," said the voice on the speaker. "Everyone except Scott and Kristin Haynes."

Heads swiveled. Whispers merged into a hissing murmur, the word "terrorists" with a question mark attached audible above the fray. But then, when a pair of laid-back- looking blond gringos stood up, alarm turned to confusion. Whatever these Hayneses had done, what they looked like most were two Teva-wearing grandparents on permanent vacation. Not the kind of people you'd expect to be handcuffed and escorted off of a plane by stone-faced federal marshals.

But for Scott and Kristin, the trip was finally over. What their fellow passengers couldn't have guessed was that the kind-looking couple now perp-walking down the narrow aisle were actually fugitives in the final frame of a protracted cat-and-mouse game with the IRS.

Unbeknownst to the Hayneses, the moment they'd landed on U.S. soil Uncle Sam had them in his grip. After a hearing in Fort Lauderdale's federal courthouse, they were transferred to Spokane, near Colbert, the eastern Washington town they'd lived in before escaping to Roatán, a palm-studded tropical isle off the Honduran coast, in 2004.

Instead of a stateside sojourn studded with family suppers and trips to the mall, the 56-year-old husband and wife sat in separate cells for 23 hours a day in the Spokane County Jail for nearly five months. After that, they were both given federal prison terms, which they're still serving today.

Their problem? Too many cherubs.

Scott Haynes and Kristin Whitney met cute at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City in 1971. He was a music major and a rowdy member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon who'd grown up near San Diego playing guitar, speaking Spanish, and generally epitomizing the SoCal surfer-dude look. She was a shy Delta Gamma pledge and one of four kids in a precociously artistic Utah family.

At a dance one evening, Scott's fraternity brother Wade Bledsoe brought Kristin as his date. There were no sparks between him and Kristin, says Bledsoe, but his friend Scott was smitten. "At the end of the night he came up and said, 'Hey, would you mind if I ask her out?' I said no, not at all—she won't even talk to me."

Scott and Kristin were an instant pair. Around him, her shyness evaporated. Around her, he was the same hard-partying guy he'd always been, only now with a partner in crime. But while they met in college, neither stuck around long enough to get their degree. Harmony Storms, the pair's pretty, petite 34-year-old daughter who followed her parents to Roatán, says that her mom often followed her dad's lead, and that he just wasn't meant for the strictures of a university education.

"My dad didn't conform all that well to their standards," she says from the wooden hilltop home with ocean views she shares with her husband and two toddlers. "They wanted to structure him in a way he didn't want. He likes to do things his way."

Scott's nonconformity was also evident to his friends. Lorne Tucker, another fellow frat boy, says that like a lot of undergrads, Scott was apolitical in college—his reading list never straying far from Clancy, Crichton, and the other masters of the airport paperback. But following school, Tucker claims, his friend changed. On camping and skiing trips, the formerly disinterested rocker now had a fire in his belly. "Sometimes he would get too opinionated," says Tucker. "And sometimes it was better to bite your tongue. Scott has never been a lover of the government or the system. Especially the tax system."

After marrying, Scott and Kristin stayed in Utah near her parents. Then two years later, after Harmony's birth, they relocated to Long Beach, Calif. Scott joined a touring band that mixed originals and '70s rock covers. He also started a successful recruiting agency headhunting programmers and systems analysts. But he'd soon cede the role of family breadwinner.

While Kristin had never gotten her degree, she was showing uncommon artistic promise, working tirelessly to perfect paintings and sculptures, even though she was no longer being graded for her work. Living in Southern California, the family often made weekend sojourns to Mexican beaches. On the trips home, while stuck at the slow-moving border crossing, Kristin would buy figurines—chintzy plaster-of-Paris recreations of beatifically smiling cats, dogs, and birds—from roadside vendors.