A Rage to Kill (15 page)

Asked to describe the intruder, she repeated that he had rusty hair, blue eyes and was built squarely. “He wore a white-and-pink shirt, brown trousers, and he carried an Army duffel bag. I got the impression he wanted to head toward Idaho.”

The man Mrs. Young described sounded exactly like Michael Olds.

Although FBI agents, state police, and representatives of every law enforcement department in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho were looking for Olds, Mrs. Lindsay and Tom Young, another twenty-four hours passed with no word. They assumed that he had kidnapped Mary Lindsay after he had abducted Young. The officers searching for Olds and his captives knew too well that he had killed before. It was unlikely he would have any compunction whatsoever about getting rid of elderly hostages if they got in his way.

On Thursday, their fears came true when searchers found the body of Mary Lindsay in high desert country near Burns, Oregon. Oregon State Police investigators from Ontario found that the pitiful victim had been shot and dumped near U.S. 20, the interstate that runs between Burns and Boise, Idaho.

Although the police searched the area thoroughly, they found no sign of Tom Young.

“Maybe he figures he needs Young,” one trooper speculated. “He could be hiding in the back seat and using the old man as a cover. I hope we get to them before he doesn’t need him anymore.”

That afternoon, another woman was reported missing along the route into Idaho. Ida Burley*, a heart patient, had vanished from her isolated ranch near Hazelton, Idaho. Mrs. Burley’s car was still on the ranch, but she was gone.

It was Friday night and sheriff’s deputies were interviewing Mrs. Burley’s worried relatives at her ranch, when they were surprised to see a car pull into the yard. The exhausted occupants were Tom Young and Ida Burley.

Perhaps in shock from their long ordeal, or led by some sense of honor, the pair said they had promised Michael Olds that they wouldn’t call the police if he let them go unharmed. And they had kept that promise.

But that promise had cost the police precious time. Tom Young said that he and Mrs. Burley had accompanied “Mike” all the way to Brigham City, Utah. They let him off there to catch a bus, and they had driven all the way back to Hazelton without stopping. They had passed any number of pay phones as they traveled well over a hundred miles, but they hadn’t stopped to call the police.

Tom Young explained, “We wanted to be stopped by the police but we promised the man we wouldn’t
contact
them. Mrs. Burley was driving and I told her to go like hell. ‘Go through red lights,’ I told her.”

It was a curious code of honor but one the duo had stuck to. Young said they had agreed to report their abductor
if
a policeman stopped them. Ironically, despite the fact that Ida Burley had broken the speed limit all the way back—three hours on the road—not one trooper had noticed them. “Where’s a cop when you need one?” Young joked feebly, but the officers around him couldn’t force a smile.

Tom Young was able to fill in some of the missing details about Olds’ path of destruction across Oregon, Idaho, and into Utah. He had been with Olds on Wednesday afternoon when he stopped at Mary Lindsay’s farmhouse near Pendleton, but he’d been helpless to stop him from kidnapping the elderly woman. He wasn’t sure why Olds had taken her. She rode with them in a crazy, meandering path back west across Oregon.

“He wanted me to take him to Portland by way of Mt. Hood,” the old man said. “But the roads up on the mountain are treacherous in early April and I told him I didn’t have snow tires.”

Olds had then directed him to go south to Salem, Albany, and then east again through Sisters and Bend toward Idaho. It was certainly the long way round and had made little sense to Young. They had been close to the Idaho border when they started. He figured that “Mike” had expected a roadblock, and was trying to find an unexpected route out of Oregon.

“He told me to push it to the floorboards and get through anyway I could,” Young said, “if we ever came to a roadblock.”

But there were no roadblocks. They had driven endlessly. They hadn’t even stopped to eat. First they devoured the sandwiches Mrs. Young had made, and then Olds had cleaned out Mary Lindsay’s refrigerator and they ate her food as they drove.

Mary Lindsay hadn’t lasted even a day with her kidnapper. Frightened and sick, she had been excess baggage for him. They were heading east again on an insane back-and-forth trip across Oregon, and it was about midnight on Wednesday night when Olds told Young to stop the car near Burns. Olds left the car with Mrs. Lindsay, and Young said he’d tried to see where they were going. But they had walked away into pitch darkness.

A few minutes later, “Mike came back alone,” Young said sadly. His captor had brushed aside questions about what had happened to the old woman. He hadn’t heard gunfire so Young tried to hope that she had been left unharmed and would be picked up and taken to safety. “I had my doubts, though.”

Ida Burley was next. Olds had abducted her at gunpoint when she answered a knock on her door on Thursday afternoon. By that time Tom Young was exhausted from driving all night, and Olds told Ida she would have to drive for awhile to spell Tom.

Tom Young said the nightmare had continued as they crossed over into Idaho, and they had had a moment of terror when they saw a state police car coming up behind them. But then it had passed them at high speed.

“And then just a couple of minutes later, another state trooper was right alongside us. I thought, ‘My God, man, don’t you stop us!’ ”

He knew his kidnapper well enough by then to realize they might all die if a shootout occurred. “Mike would have started shooting if they came up to the car,” he said. “God must have answered me because the police car continued on its way.”

When half an hour passed and no one stopped them, Young had realized the trooper hadn’t spotted them. He was partly relieved, partly worried. He kept wondering when it would be his turn to be walked into the countryside. Once he stopped being useful, he didn’t expect to survive.

By late Thursday night, they were approaching Brigham City, Utah. Mike said he wanted to go to a bus station. They took him there, and watched him walk away from Young’s car, half-afraid he would spin around and shoot at them. But he kept walking.

Ida Burley gunned the motor and they were free; they had outlasted him, although Tom Young hadn’t slept for three days and nights. But the gunman’s brainwashing power over them continued for three more hours as they raced back toward Idaho, bound by their promise not to call police, emotionally immobilized by their terror and shock.

On Friday night, an unmarked Oregon State Police car delivered Tom Young to Pendleton to be reunited with his grateful wife. Unshaven and weary, he was still able to joke, “What are all the flowers for? I’m not dead yet. I smell like a hog and I need a shave,” he added, smiling ruefully.

His wife had never expected to see him alive again, but she scolded him, “Don’t ever do that to me again.” Then she hugged the man she had been married to for forty-three years.

“I get hell as soon as I get home,” Young laughed as he hugged her back.

The investigators were relieved that Tom Young and Ida Burley were safe, but understandably frustrated that Olds had such a substantial lead on them. In the three hours that had elapsed before his whereabouts in Brigham City were reported, he could have gone anywhere. Buses leaving Brigham City were stopped and searched, but Michael Olds wasn’t on any of them. He might very well have only pretended he was going to take a bus out of Utah. He could be hitchhiking, driving a stolen car or riding the rails of a train.

Robert Davenport, Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Salt Lake City office, said that they had no leads as the weekend passed. “We just hope a lead will come up. There’s a good chance he may have left the area. We know he’s on the run. And he probably won’t stay in one place for very long.”

Davenport said his best guess was that Olds had headed east, since he was wanted for two murders in the west. It was possible he was going to his estranged wife who was thought to be in Wisconsin. Two of Olds’ victims were women, and he probably was still angry at his wife for deserting him. Stakeouts were placed near her residence in case Olds showed up.

A period of uneasy calm descended. If Olds followed his usual pattern, there would be more abductions, more terrified hostages forced to accompany him as he raced across the country. Police feared they would eventually find more bodies dumped along Olds’ trail.

Saturday. Sunday. Monday. The days passed without word of Michael Olds. Where was he? Was he traveling with someone unable to call for help? He preyed on the old, the sick—people alone on farms or ranches who might not be missed for several days. There were a lot of isolated farmhouses and open spaces between Utah and Wisconsin—or wherever Olds was heading.

And then, on the night of April 11—Monday—Michael Olds surfaced. Incredibly, he had made it all the way across the country without being recognized. McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania is a suburb that edges the west side of Pittsburgh, a community a long, long, way from the vast desert stretches of Oregon, Idaho and Utah.

In McKees Rocks, a young woman left work, headed toward her parked car, and looked up to see a wild-eyed man leveling a gun at her.

“Get in the car!” he ordered.

Her mind raced. She knew that if she got in her car with an armed man, her chance of survival would probably be nil. She might die if she resisted him, but at least she figured she would have a chance. If he shot her where she stood, he wouldn’t rape her. Being alone with him would be worse. She told him she wasn’t going to get in the car, and started backing up, leading him away from her car. It threw him off balance; he obviously didn’t want to draw attention to himself and her resistance was making him nervous. Good.

She saw another employee leaving the building and called out that there was a man with a gun on her. And then she ran. The man with the gun let her go. They called the McKees Rocks Police Department and reported the attempted abduction, describing the stocky stranger in detail.

Police dispatchers alerted officers on duty and a widescale search for the gunman was begun immediately. A McKees Rocks police lieutenant saw a man matching the description in the parking lot of the Eat-and-Park restaurant. As he watched from his squad car, the red-headed man walked into the restaurant. It was hard to keep him in sight in the crowded fast-food establishment.

By the time the police lieutenant entered the crowded restaurant, he realized the one place someone could hide was the rest room.

The lieutenant’s heart sank as he pushed through the men’s room door. The gunman was holding a seven-year-old boy hostage. There was no reasoning with him. The boy’s father rushed forward and offered to take his son’s place, but the gunman wasn’t having any of it; he took the father hostage, too.

Captain Konkiel of the McKees Rocks police force placed a call to the restaurant phone and he, too, offered to take the youngster’s place. But the nameless desperado knew a good thing when he had it. He wanted the boy and he wanted a car to make his getaway. Tense minutes ticked by as the McKees Rocks officers tried in vain to reason with him while he also debated with Konkiel on the phone. All the time he bargained with them, he held his revolver against the boy’s head.

“I’ve got nothing to look forward to but the electric chair,” the man panted. “You back off or you’ll have a dead boy and his father, too. I’ve killed before and it doesn’t mean anything more to me to kill them.”

They believed that this stranger meant what he said. Again, he demanded a getaway car. No amount of psychology and coaxing was going to shake him.

Finally, it was agreed that the boy’s mother would be allowed to get the family’s station wagon and drive it around to the back of the Eat-and-Park. There, the gunman and his two hostages would join her. The police knew they had to get him out of the men’s room and, more importantly, they had to defuse the situation to a point where he would ease the gun away from the boy’s head.

Bravely, the mother pulled the station wagon up to the back door, and the man with the gun backed out of the restaurant, keeping her husband and son with him. He signaled to the woman that he would drive. He placed the boy in the luggage area just inside the rear window so that no one would be able to shoot at him from behind without endangering the boy.

Slowly, the wagon pulled away and headed toward Pittsburgh along Route 65, with unmarked cars waiting to fall in behind in a cautious caravan.

Jimmy Laurie, Chief of the McKees Rocks Police Department, pulled a few cars behind the station wagon. He was driving an unmarked detective’s car. The gunman was unaware that Laurie was broadcasting his progress over all the police channels that linked the Pittsburgh Police Department with McKees Rocks.

Pittsburgh Patrolmen Howard Landers and Lewis Rauhecker were working a two-man car out of the Number 8 Precinct on the
P.M.
shift that night. They prepared to set up a roadblock at the McKees Rocks Bridge with an assist from Patrolmen Fred Green and Walt Long. But, suddenly the station wagon, which had been moving behind them, sped up and passed them. As it did, the man with the gun leaned out and pegged a shot at Landers. The police car braked to a screeching halt, and the bullet missed Landers by inches.

The station wagon stopped, too. Green and Long were out of their car and headed toward the wagon from the front as Rauhecker and Landers approached from the sides. The man with the gun had a bead on Green and Long and he raised his arm to fire at them. At that moment, the mother of the boy hostage realized that at least one of the patrolmen would be killed if she didn’t act. She reached from the back seat, and knocked the gunman’s arm off target. He swung his gun hand and pointed the .32 directly at Lewis Rauhecker’s heart.