Wilderness Manhunt Starts All Over as Killer of 2 Escapes

Plenty of folks in these parts figured that mountain man Claude Dallas did what came naturally on Jan. 6, 1981, when the two game wardens came upon his campsite in Idaho and tried to arrest him for poaching.

Dallas shot them--but only, he later claimed, after one man drew his gun.

This week, when news broke that Claude Dallas had escaped from the Idaho State Correctional Penitentiary near Boise, folks weren’t surprised. The mountain man, they figured, was still doing what came naturally.

“Everybody said they knew he was going to escape,” A. J. Arave, warden of the Idaho prison, said Tuesday in a telephone interview. “Even his lawyer, when we told him, said, ‘I kinda figured on that.’

“Of everybody I did not want to escape,” the warden added, “he’s on the top of the list.”

On Tuesday, trackers using bloodhounds chased Dallas’ trail through the Nevada desert near Paradise Valley, north of Winnemucca, Dallas’ old stomping grounds. But late in the day the hounds lost the scent.

Deputies, acting on an anonymous tip, also staked out another location in the vicinity--but discovered they were about 18 hours too late.

“He could be anywhere by now,” conceded Humboldt County Sheriff Jim Bagwell.

The manhunt set off by Dallas’ escape on Easter Sunday from the prison seven miles south of Boise is the largest in this region since the last time Dallas was on the loose. After killing the two game wardens, Dallas’ mastery of survival in the wilds enabled him to elude authorities for nearly 14 months, while he traveled through the desolate region where Nevada, Oregon and Idaho meet, living off the land. Authorities say they fear Dallas might seek revenge against the person who provided the tip that led to his 1982 capture.

Already, some promising leads have turned up dry, and officers acknowledge they are already growing weary.

And as before--to the dismay of authorities--some citizens seem to be rooting for Dallas, portraying him as a romantic hero--a rugged, 19th-Century individualist rebelling against the rules and regulations of modern times.

“There’s the group that is glad he escaped,” Arave said, his voice rising in disgust and exasperation. “They’re calling and saying . . . that he shouldn’t have been caught in the first place.”

“Oh, he’s a nice guy,” a clerk at a garage in Winnemucca told a Times reporter. “A lot of people really do like him.” She requested anonymity.

Dallas, 36, claimed at his trial that he was acting in self-defense, and that apparently helped persuade a jury to convict him of manslaughter in the deaths of game wardens Bill Pogue and Conley Elms. Idaho prosecutors maintained that Dallas had killed the two men in cold blood. They noted that Dallas applied a coup de grace to each victim with a bullet to the brain.

Sentenced to 30 years in prison, Dallas seemed to be a model inmate, Arave said Tuesday.

“As far as the routine of prison life goes, I wouldn’t mind having a prison full of Claude Dallases. . . . He was a good prisoner. Awful quiet. Does what he’s supposed to do. Wants to work.”

But Arave said he was always wary of Dallas. Two years ago, the warden recalled, a pair of wire cutters was found in Dallas’ possession, and he was temporarily moved into tighter custody. “Whether or not he was attempting to escape then is pretty moot now,” the warden said.

Dallas was in “medium custody,” Arave said, when he received a visitor on Easter Sunday--longtime friend Geneva Holman. Geneva and her husband Herb, a Reno bank officer, had raised money for Dallas’ defense.

A short time after the visit, just after sunset, a large group of prisoners was checking into the compound from the visiting area. Someone gave Dallas’ name and prison number to a guard over an intercom, Arave said. But a routine head count at 10 p.m. showed Dallas was missing.

A search showed that Dallas had apparently slipped to “a blind spot” in the visitor’s area and cut through two fences to make his escape.

Police and FBI agents in Reno questioned Geneva Holman and dusted her Mercedes for fingerprints. But no sign of Dallas’ prints were found, Arave said from the prison command center.

The strongest signs suggested that Dallas had headed back to Nevada--and had traveled at least part way by car. Bloodhounds were called into the pursuit Monday, tracing the scent from some of Dallas’ prison clothes, found a matching scent on a stool in a Humboldt County tavern called The Bar, known to be an old hangout of Dallas’ in Humboldt County.

They lost the trail almost immediately, but an anonymous tip a few hours later brought deputies to a mobile home about a mile from The Bar, where they staked out the area for nearly 18 hours before moving in.

The mobile home and a camping trailer parked behind it were empty, but the dogs seemed to recognize Dallas’ scent and followed it three miles through the desert and brush to the edge of U.S. 95--where the trail disappeared again.

“We think he may have been picked up by a car,” Bagwell said. “And we tend to think this was a well-planned situation; that he had planned to be picked up there.”

Wind, rain and snow descended on this part of the desert Tuesday night, making it most unlikely that the dogs will be able to pick up Dallas’ scent again, Bagwell said. Investigators will go back to knocking on doors and asking questions today, he said.

Friends Claim No Knowledge

Bagwell said his deputies already have questioned many of Dallas’ friends and associates. “We’ve had no results. They’re cooperative, but they’re claiming no knowledge.”

Bagwell and Arave both said they have been working almost round-the-clock since Dallas escaped.

“We’re getting kind of harried,” said Bagwell. “All of our people are involved.”

Humboldt County, he explained, encompasses 10,000 square miles with a population of only 12,000 people. “We have 13 deputies to patrol the entire county, so we’re extremely limited to our ability to provide preventive law enforcement.”

Ronald B. Taylor reported from Nevada and Scott Harris from Los Angeles.