Badlands Search Turns Up Scent of Killer Dallas

Law enforcement officers and the bloodhounds tracking escaped killer Claude Dallas picked up a fresh scent of the renegade frontiersman Wednesday deep in the badlands of northern Nevada.

Just when it appeared that the trail of Dallas had gone as cold as the snowstorm that struck here overnight, authorities said the bloodhounds detected the outlaw’s scent about 50 miles northwest of this speck of a town, apparently heading toward the bleak, rugged Owyhee Desert that he knows so well.

Meanwhile, while lawmen pressed the search into the desert, other officers were being redeployed to check out reports that Dallas--a scoundrel to many, a martyr to some--had been sighted throughout the Northwest and in Canada.

“We think he only came back here a short time,” probably just long enough to pick up supplies from friends, said Humboldt County Sheriff James Bagwell. “He didn’t intend to stay. . . . If he had a chance, he got out of here.”

Seen ‘Virtually Everywhere’

“There are people that see him virtually everywhere,” Undersheriff Dee Pfeiffer said in a telephone interview from the Ada County, Ida., command center for the manhunt.

Meanwhile, some of Dallas’ acquaintances in northern Nevada were predicting that the outlaw, already convicted of killing two game wardens, would never be taken alive.

Authorities say they are more convinced than ever that confederates are aiding Dallas. Theories that a friend had driven him from the Idaho Sate Correctional Penitentiary to Nevada were reinforced Thursday when Dallas’ eyeglasses were found in the prison parking lot.

Sympathy for the killer may create other headaches for lawmen.

“We have to assume some of the information (being given to lawmen) might be intentionally wrong for purposes of misleading us,” Pfeiffer said. “He does have a lot of friends. And the people that are his friends are truly his friends.”

After an overnight snowstorm dropped temperatures into the 20s, the searchers and their bloodhounds were frustrated for most of Wednesday by 40-degree temperatures and 40-m.p.h. wind gusts. Airplanes were used to survey the vast sagebrush-covered range marked by sudden canyons and flat, look-alike hills.

A visit to Paradise Hill--the social center for surrounding ranches, comprised of a tavern, a run-down trailer court, a real estate office and a barn--revealed some of the sympathy for Dallas in these parts, described by many as a decent man who should have been left alone.

“He wasn’t here,” said Liz Nielsen, a friend of Dallas and wife of the owner of the tavern designated only by a sign that says “BAR.” “The bar was locked. He was never here.”

But on Monday, deputies said, customers were inside and drinking when the bloodhounds entered and picked up Dallas’ scent on a bar stool. Later, the dogs lost his trail at the highway, where lawmen believe the outlaw got into a car.

‘Nicest Guy’

“He is the nicest guy,” another friend declared. “Maybe this was his spring break. Everyone ought to be outdoors this time of year.”

Even Jean Baker, a friend of Bill Pogue, one of Dallas’ victims, described Dallas as a well-liked, soft-spoken man who probably killed “on the spur of the moment.”

But now, Baker added, “every man in uniform is in danger.”

When Dallas, 36, made his escape Sunday by cutting through two fences, it provided a new chapter in the tale of a notorious outlaw. A native of Ohio, Dallas came west to become a cowboy, eventually acquiring the frontier skills to live in the wilderness as a hunter and trapper.

When Idaho game wardens Pogue and Conley Elms visited Dallas’ remote campsite on Jan. 5, 1981, and tried to arrest him for poaching, Dallas killed both men. After eluding an extensive manhunt for almost 14 months, Dallas was wounded in a shoot-out and captured.

Dallas claimed self-defense at his trial, saying that Pogue had threatened to kill him and went for his gun. He was sentenced to 30 years for voluntary manslaughter, even though prosecutors had asserted that Dallas killed the men in cold blood and finished them off with a shot to their heads.

Visited Him in Prison

The last person known to have seen Dallas was Geneva Holman of Reno, a long-time friend, who visited him in prison the day of his escape.

“I got in the middle of something I didn’t know how I got in,” Holman said Wednesday. “I was a victim of circumstance.”

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