MANGUM, Okla. -- The wife of a deputy prison warden who disappeared with a convicted killer and then lived on the lam with him for 10 years will stand trial on charges she helped the inmate escape, a judge ruled Tuesday.

Judge Brad Leverett said sufficient evidence was presented at a preliminary hearing to bring Bobbi Parker, 46, to trial on charges she helped Randolph Dial escape from the Oklahoma State Reformatory in Granite on Aug. 30, 1994.

Parker and Dial were found living at a chicken ranch in east Texas ranch on April 4, 2005, after their case was highlighted on the television show “America’s Most Wanted.”

“It’s clear from the evidence the court has heard so far that Ms. Parker was not kidnapped in 1994 as she claimed,” Leverett said after the conclusion of Tuesday’s testimony.

The charge against Parker carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison.

Dial died in June 2007 at age 62.

On Tuesday, the former warden of the prison, Jack Cowley, testified that Dial had been assigned to the prison’s minimum security unit and was helping to set up a fledgling pottery program in the detached garage behind the Parker’s house on the prison grounds.

Bobbi Parker was asked to oversee the program, and she quickly developed a relationship with the charismatic artist that Cowley said raised some concerns among staff at the prison who were leery of Dial.

“He was definitely a character,” Cowley said of Dial. “He was one of the ones who generally stood out, not just because of the art work but because of his intellectual ability.”

But concerns grew about the relationship developing between the deputy warden’s young wife and Dial, especially when the two were spotted chatting over a cup of coffee on a porch swing of the home, Cowley said.

“You don’t sit on the front porch and drink coffee,” Cowley said. “Just the appearance would be an impropriety.”

But Cowley said just as he was considering moving Dial’s pottery operation into a renovated building on the prison grounds, the couple disappeared.

As the case grew cold, Charles Sasser, a retired Tulsa police homicide detective, wrote a book about Dial and the escape.

Sasser testified Tuesday that years after the couple’s disappearance, he received a call in 2001 from Dial, who told Sasser he read his book a dozen times.

Sasser said he asked Dial whether Bobbi Parker was still alive.

“He said, ‘Of course she’s still alive. She’s right here. Do you want to talk to her?”’

Bobbi Parker then took the phone and talked briefly to Sasser, who said he encouraged her to call her children, who were 7 and 10 when she disappeared, to let them know she was safe.

Sasser said Parker responded it might be better if her children thought she was dead.

Sasser also testified he saw no indications that Parker was being held against her will.

“It was like two old married people,” he said.

Parker’s defense attorney maintains Dial kidnapped Parker at

knifepoint and held her against her will by threatening to use supposed mafia connections to harm her and her family if he were ever caught.

“From the get-go, Dial was intimidating to her,” said attorney Rick Cunningham. “He threatened her and her family, her two daughters ... and that became an oppressive part of that situation.

“She kind of resigned herself to her fate.”

That differed from the scene described by Robert Williams, an investigator with the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation.

Williams testified Monday that a search of the pair’s trailer, which had only one bed, uncovered photographs, mail the pair received, cards they exchanged, a box of condoms, instructions that come with Viagra and a vibrating sex toy.

“We found items that appeared to us as a husband and wife relationship between a man and a woman,” Williams said.

Parker told investigators the couple never were intimate, that she wasn’t attracted to Dial and that the sex toy was a gag gift from a friend, Williams said.

Williams said Parker had numerous opportunities to escape while living with Dial, including one time in which Dial suffered a massive heart attack and was near death. Instead, she wrote him a love letter authorities later found, Williams said.

Parker, meanwhile, has returned to her husband, Randy Parker, and the two are living together in McAlester, where Randy Parker works as an administrator for the Department of Corrections. The couple’s two daughters are now grown.

Randy Parker declined to comment about the case, but said the two are happily married and look forward to getting the case resolved.

Dial, who pleaded guilty to escape before his death, maintained Parker was an innocent victim and that he forced her at knifepoint to drive him away from the prison.

“I was a hostage-taker and will probably live to regret it,” Dial said in a jailhouse interview shortly after his capture. “But now I don’t. Doing a life sentence, at my age, I wouldn’t trade it for the past 10 ½ years.”