Urban fugitives sometimes hide in remote places, but local officers are left to bring justice. These six stories reveal the risks and resilience of rural law enforcement.
Some criminal cases evade description as urban or rural: the ones that start out in cities, and end up in the country. That can be intentional. Bad guys know that rural and remote places have fewer available eyeballs (a great feature for criminals). Sometimes it’s just a fluke. Either way, officers in the woods, the plains, the mountains and small towns regularly find themselves sorting out the aftermath of ugly stuff that started somewhere else. Here are just a few.
The murder of NPS Ranger Margaret Anderson
On New Year’s Day, 2012, Ranger Margaret Anderson left her home, her two little girls and her husband — who was also a NPS law enforcement ranger — to work an early shift in Mt. Rainier National Park. She never came home.
The night before, a gunfight south of Seattle left four wounded, and the shooter a fugitive. The suspect and his bad decisions headed for the hundreds of miles of parkland surrounding Mt. Rainier.
The suspect ran a checkpoint where park staff checked for tire chains. A ranger tried to stop him, and a pursuit ensued. Ranger Anderson heard the radio traffic and drove to intercept him. The suspect stopped, shot her while she was still in the driver’s seat, then turned to shoot at the pursuing ranger. He held off backup officers with a barrage of rifle fire. It was more than an hour before officers with cobbled-together bits of armor were able to extract Anderson’s body from her vehicle. The suspect fled.
A manhunt with aid from multiple agencies found the suspect the next day, clad in jeans and a T-shirt, submerged in an icy creek. He’d survived two gunbattles in 24 hours and shot five people, but he couldn’t escape winter in the park.
Anderson’s husband, Ranger Eric Anderson, was quoted in an interview with Outside Magazine: “There’s a lot of disturbed people out there who see this mountain shining at them. How long before some nut says, ‘I can go to that mountain and slay a shitload of people and be on the news in a matter of minutes’? We’re close enough to the metro area. There are plenty of opportunities to run into any type of crime.”
The law enforcement understaffing Anderson lamented continues in our national parks, even as the number of visitors soars.
The Oklahoma livestreaming murders
The night before Halloween is called Mischief Night in some places, Devil’s Night in others. In 2016, it was the night a bad man lost a firefight with an Oklahoma State trooper on a barren stretch of highway, after a week-long manhunt.
On October 23, two small town officers went to a disturbance call and were shot by the two participants. One was arrested. The other, Michael Dale Vance, Jr., was a man with grudges, warrants for sexual assault and a hit list. He used Facebook Live to document his getaway in a stolen patrol car, then headed to a suburb of Oklahoma City, where he tried to decapitate his aunt and uncle, and ran again. The hunt continued with more shootings and some carjackings.
A week later the sheriff of (very) rural Dewey County pulled Vance over to tell him he was dragging trailer chains that might spark a wildfire. Vance stepped out of the stolen pickup and opened fire, spraying nearly 30 rounds into the sheriff’s rig, wounding him twice; two holes in the sheriff’s ball cap testified to the close call. The bleeding sheriff returned fire, forcing Vance back in his truck and on the road again.
This time Oklahoma State Police joined the chase. Vance’s wild week ended after an epic high-speed gun battle caught on dash camera, with a trooper calmly trading rifle fire with the murderer through his bullet-riddled windshield. Vance died in the middle of a country road, and three accomplices were sentenced for selling him guns and helping him escape.
The Chinese mafia weed murders
The story ended in Kingfisher County, Oklahoma,13 miles outside of the small town of Hennessy, with sheriff’s deputies responding to a mass murder in the dark of a November night in 2022. The site was a massive, fraudulently licensed marijuana operation. There was evidence of labor and drug trafficking, and now it was littered with corpses and one wounded witness.
But the story began in the capital of Fujian province in China, a city of more than 8 million people. The Chen brothers left China in the 90s to gamble on making a fortune in the United States. They opened cash-heavy businesses in the Bronx and bought properties in Flushing, a hotbed of Chinese organized crime.
When recreational weed was legalized in California, they bought houses by the lot and used them to grow gray market weed. The Chens became part of a growing crime industry, expanding into money laundering for Mexican and South American cartels, wire fraud, labor trafficking and identity theft.
Then Oklahoma followed the examples of California and Colorado by legalizing recreational cannabis. The new code sections were vaguely worded and easy to exploit, and weed plantations staffed by trafficked Chinese labor sprouted on the prairie.
It all came apart when a man who had worked on the Chens’ weed farm a year before arrived with a gun, demanding the immediate return of $300,000 he claimed to have invested. When the money wasn’t handed over, he opened fire. Both Chen brothers died in the barrage alongside the plantation’s manager and another worker. The gunman fled and was arrested in Miami when a LPR flagged his vehicle. The deputies sent to extradite him were followed by multiple vehicles on the drive back; their in-custody was terrified and refused to get out of the vehicle even for bathroom breaks, once they crossed the Oklahoma state line.
The gunman pleaded guilty to all four murders and was sentenced to life without parole. Oklahoma continues to struggle with crime associated with the cannabis trade.
The New Meadows murders
Vancouver, Washington, is a city of more than 360,000 people a few miles north of Portland. In 2022, violent crime had picked up and the jail in Clark County was overflowing. That’s how 29-year-old John Cody Hart was set free: he’d been waiting for months to go to court for attacking a date he’d met on Grindr, choking the man out and gouging his eyes, blinding him. Hart couldn’t go to court because he had been ruled incompetent to cooperate in his own defense, but he also couldn’t get a mental health bed, nor could he make bail.
The judge lost patience and ordered the county to get Hart into treatment or turn him loose. Hart was released in July under terms of supervision but instead of checking in with his caseworker, he traveled east till stopping in October in a tiny, idyllic Idaho town. He took a room at an inn run by a young couple who catered to skiers and other outdoor enthusiasts.
During his stay, the innkeepers confronted Hart when they found him rummaging for socks in the room of another guest. They called the sheriff’s office. A deputy arrived, and in typical small-town fashion, talked with Hart about his transgression. The minor incident seemed at an end, but for the voices in Hart’s head who called the innkeepers Bonnie and Clyde, and challenged Hart to deal with them. He responded by shooting the couple to death in the hotel lobby, and fleeing. He was arrested later that day when an off-duty deputy spotted his blue Subaru heading south on I-95 and tailed him until he could be stopped.
Idaho courts were less accommodating than Washington’s. Hart was determined to be competent to stand trial, and pleaded guilty to both murders. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
The Olympic Park bomber
A manhunt for the outlaw responsible for the 1996 Olympic Park bombing came to a quiet end when a cop in the tiny town of Murphy, North Carolina, caught Eric Rudolph dumpster diving behind the Save-a-Lot grocery store.
Rudolph had been on the run for seven years, and on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for five. Now he spends 23 hours a day in a Supermax prison in Colorado.
When the nail-filled bomb exploded in Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta, an Albany, Georgia woman was killed by the blast. More than 100 other people were wounded. The security guard who spotted the bomb and raised the alarm was arrested as the suspect, sending the investigation in the wrong direction. Although Richard Jewell was never charged, it was years before he was cleared by Rudolph’s confession.
In the meantime, Rudolph planted more bombs (including two more in Atlanta) and killed more people. One was an off-duty police officer working a side gig as security at a Birmingham, Alabama abortion clinic. Rudolph prided himself on his survival skills, camping in remote stretches of a national park, stashing explosives near the FBI command post that kept the manhunt alive, and stashing stolen food in bulk. In reality, he was a scavenger, stealing from nearby communities, and raiding loading docks and dumpsters like the one that proved his undoing. There were rumors that some sympathetic locals saw him as a folk hero and helped him, but nothing was ever proved.
Rudolph pled guilty to all charges, and told investigators the locations of all his stashed explosives in exchange for avoiding the death penalty. He’s serving four consecutive life sentences.
The Onion Field
All cops know the Onion Field the way they know Newhall, the North Hollywood bank robbery and the Miami FBI shootout. It’s a precedent-setting case that triggered a forever-imperative in police training: never give up your gun.
In March 1963, LAPD officers Ian Campbell and Karl Hettinger made a traffic stop in Hollywood that went catastrophically wrong. The driver was armed and got the drop on Campbell; Hettinger surrendered his gun in an attempt to keep his partner safe. The passenger, it turned out, was armed as well and both men had criminal records. The officers were kidnapped and driven for hours to a dark onion field outside Bakersfield. Campbell was executed there. Hettinger escaped and ran four miles to a farmhouse for help.
Both suspects were convicted and eventually died in prison. Although Hettinger returned to work, he was penalized for his survival and blamed, sometimes indirectly and sometimes openly, for allowing himself to be disarmed. He was accused of shoplifting in 1966 and forced to resign; he died at the age of 59.
The incident was studied, written about and memorialized in film. A training video was produced, using Hettinger’s experience as an example of what not to do. Joseph Wambaugh, the author of modern police novels, wrote a book about the incident, his first excursion into nonfiction. A New York Times review compared it to Truman Capote’s classic “In Cold Blood.” A movie was made of Wambaugh’s version and the award-winning TV series “Southland” based an episode on the event, even down to the intersection where Campbell and Hettinger were kidnapped.
Too many of these murder cases flew quietly under the radar not because of what happened, but because of where it happened. Nevertheless, the lives that were lost and the hard work of the officers who brought justice deserve honor. No one is worth more or less according to geography — or at least, they shouldn’t be.
Let me know what cases you would want added to this list. Email editor@police1.com.
