(NECN: Alysha Palumbo - Boston) - "I really didn't think the FBI wanted him alive, so I was very concerned," said Lindsey Cyr.
Cyr awoke to a 3am phone call from a U-S Marshall Thursday that the man she had a child with and lived with for 12 years - James "Whitey" Bulger - had been caught after 16 years on the run.
"I said 'is he hurt, is he alive' was my first question, he said 'he's fine,'" said Cyr.
Cyr and Bulger met in 1966, and had a son Douglas in '67.
She says Bulger never wanted a child because it made him vulnerable, but he loved him dearly and after Douglas died of Reyes disease at the age of six, she says Bulger was never the same.
Cyr said, "He said to me the night we were walking out of Mass General, he was never going to hurt like this again."
Cyr says when she last spoke with Bulger he was on the run, but she didn't expect him to end up in the U-S.
She said, "I had hoped Lichtenstein, we don't have an extradition treaty with them, that was my advice but no one took it."
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Cyr said she believes Bulger escaped with about $54 million dollars and she says he had money stashed all over the world, so he didn't need outside help.
But she thought women might be his undoing.
"I worried about him possibly deciding to go out for something strange once in a whie," said Cyr, "that was the way I'd always thought he'd get caught."
She says now that he's in custody, at least he'll finally be able to defend himself.
Cyr said, "I don't believe that everything that they're claiming that he did, he did, I think other people did it, put it on him and got deals for it."
But Cyr says she is surprised he was caught after all this time because she says Bulger told her he never wanted to go back to jail.
Cyr said, "He used laugh at me and say 'there's only one way out of this honey and my retirement plan is probably a bullet."
She says she has no plans to visit him when he's brought back to Massachusetts.
Cyr said it was tough for her when it came out last year that she had a son with Bulger, so she really just wants to stay out of it now, but she'll be happy to help him if he needs it.
