Her father had arranged for her to wed another man, but she and John fled Bridgeport and eloped in New York.

WSJ: Conn. couple named 'longest married' in US

She fled the sudden acclaim but eventually came to terms with her status.

CNN: AllPolitics - TIME This Week

Wisely, she fled the press hounds, but the only picture of her that photo editors could find to run incessantly made her look rather lumpish.

CNN: A Nose For Posterity

Last summer, reports said she fled Syria and took refuge in Russia, but Moscow dismissed that.

CNN: STORY HIGHLIGHTS

She fled to an aunt's house, but they broke through the gate, so she escaped to the mountains nearby, where she hid under a bed in the house of a friend.

ECONOMIST: The one-child policy

The court was told the pair fled and tried to hijack a car belonging to a passer-by, but she screamed and they ran off.

BBC: Leyhill open prison: Escaped prisoners' crime spree

In 2001, she fled briefly to Austria after a particularly vivid death threat scared not her, but her editors at Novaya Gazeta, one of Russia's few remaining independent papers.

ECONOMIST: Anna Politkovskaya