Posted on 02/05/2005 3:22:49 PM PST by SLB
OWYHEE COUNTY, Idaho -- As a young game warden in the mid-1980s, Jon Heggen was ordered by his boss to read a book.
The required text? "Give a Boy a Gun," by Jack Olsen, a crime writer who chronicled how poacher Claude Lafayette Dallas had killed Idaho Department of Fish and Game officers Conley Elms and Bill Pogue in an execution-style slaying in the remote Owyhee desert on Jan. 5, 1981.
Dallas, now a bespectacled, graying 54-year-old, walks out of an Idaho prison a free man Sunday.
"It's sure an emotional issue, and his release has heightened those emotions," said Heggen, now head of Fish and Game's enforcement bureau. "There's been a lot of tears shed the last two weeks."
Even today, agents grow furious over the killings, and the 1982 verdict by 12 jurors that Dallas was guilty of manslaughter -- not murder. That verdict is what's allowing Dallas to be released after almost 22 years. His 30-year sentence was cut by eight years for good behavior, despite a 1986 prison escape in which he was on the run for a year.
Game wardens say the department lost its innocence that day in the desert.
They say the killings -- Dallas shot Pogue and Elms with a .357 handgun, then fetched a .22 rifle and finished the wounded men off from close range with a bullet in the head -- changed Idaho Fish and Game forever. Officers who once viewed themselves as wilderness rangers suddenly became wary wilderness policemen.
"They spend a lot more time in training, how to handle yourself in situations. Scenarios like this we didn't train for before," said former Fish and Game Director Jerry Conley, who testified at Dallas' sentencing. "We remain horrified somebody could have gotten manslaughter for cruelly killing our people, and then following it up with shots from a .22 rifle."
For Conley and Heggen, Dallas is a remorseless killer.
But to those who see government as the enemy, Dallas became an object of admiration.
Women gathered daily at the 28-day trial in the Canyon County Courthouse in Caldwell, Idaho, held after Dallas had spent more than a year on the lam before being captured in April 1982.
The women were known as the "Dallas Cheerleaders."
A Canadian singer wrote a song, "The Ballad of Claude Dallas." There was a television movie.
Dallas' 1986 escape from a prison near Boise served only to heighten the legend perpetuated by his friends that he was a modern-day mountain man whose lifestyle got crossways with a heavy-handed U.S. government.
Manslaughter, not murder
Pogue and Elms were killed after confronting Dallas at his winter camp on the South Fork of the Owyhee River, one of the West's least-populated regions, where the 30-year-old trapper had come to trap animals. The officers were investigating reports that Dallas had killed two bobcats four days before Idaho's legal trapping season was to begin.
Jim Stevens, a potato farmer and friend of Dallas who was visiting the camp, witnessed the killings.
"Nobody has the right to come into my camp and violate my rights," Dallas later told Stevens. "In my mind it's justifiable homicide."
A jury of 10 women and two men found him guilty of voluntary manslaughter after deliberating seven days. The jury foreman, Milo M. Moore, now a retired Nampa, Idaho, shopkeeper, says Dallas might have been freed outright if he hadn't gotten his .22 caliber rifle to finish the pair off.
Moore said testimony about Pogue's reputation as a tough-guy lawman -- he'd been the Winnemucca, Nev., police chief in the 1960s -- influenced the verdict.
"We felt it was self-defense up to a certain point," Moore said in a recent interview. "Had he not shot them in the head, it would have been a different verdict."
Moore is convinced Pogue had come "gunning" for the poacher, and said Pogue was on trial in some jurors' minds more than Dallas.
One of his lawyers, Bill Mauk, still sees Dallas as a victim: He fired on the officers after his privacy had been violated and after he was threatened by government agents enforcing game laws he didn't believe applied to him.
Sentence complete
Kevin Kempf, the warden at the Idaho Correctional Institution at Orofino, where Dallas has been since Jan. 15 when he was moved from a Kansas prison, won't say where Dallas will be released.
"He's prepared. It doesn't appear he's going to be leaving our facility without any direction or without a plan," said Kempf, who interviewed Dallas when he arrived in Idaho in a van guarded by three Idaho correction officers.
While Idaho and Nevada laws forbid felons convicted of crimes such as manslaughter from possessing a firearm, many of Dallas' other civil rights will be restored.
Dallas did not respond to interview requests from The Associated Press. Neither did members of the Pogue family. Efforts to contact the Elms family were also unsuccessful.
But Fish and Game officers say they're observing Dallas's Feb. 6 release date as an opportunity to remember the sacrifice of men they still call by their first names: Conley and Bill.
Gary Loveland, a retired game warden, said he turned down Pogue's request to accompany him on that fateful patrol because of a prior commitment. Conley Elms went instead.
"Anybody that commits first-degree murder shouldn't get out of prison," Loveland said. "Claude Dallas should at least do life."
The courts disagree.
In the eyes of the law, Dallas' debt to society has been paid in full. He's "topping out," said Kempf, his sentence completed.
My comment: I won't be surprised if this guy kills again.
The courts disagree.
Nonsense. The law disagrees.
Frankly, I have no idea about the facts of the killings, but I do know that he was only convicted of manslaughter and must be released when his sentence is up. "The courts" have nothing to say about it.
Very similar circumstances to the Gordon Kahl case, IMHO.
In most of the country, except Idaho and Massachusetts, he'd gone on trial for that and the jury wouldn't have been given the degree of latitude they had.
Given that the "law" failed to bring this mad-dog killer to heel, it's gonna' be up to other people. Maybe Mr. Dallas will get lost in the woods somewhere.
It's a big woods you know!
I will say that I'm very disturbed by the coup de grâce administered by Dallas. But we have to trust that the jury in this case thought they had made the correct decision in reducing the charges to manslaughter.
(Unlike the O.J. Simpson case where the jury chose to completely overlook Simpson's obvious guilt in order to make a racist political statement.)
I was stationed at Mountain Home AFB Idaho when this occured, and as I recall, one officers body was thrown into the river; the other was buried somewhere in Nevada. I can't remember if they ever found the one buried in Nevada, I imagine that it was located at some point.
I think the mindset back in those days for some was that they lived in the wilderness and took what they needed. I think Dallas had some prior run ins with the BLM. But a lot of folks living in the wild had some resentment towards rangers.
I never really followed the case much after I left Idaho in 82, but I do recall the capture of him after he escaped. I guess I just figured he would rot in jail after all he had done. Too bad that's not the case.
I doubt this Dallas guy wil kill again unless someone pushes him.
"Unlike the O.J. Simpson case where the jury chose to completely overlook Simpson's obvious guilt in order to make a racist political statement."
That may indeed have been the jury's desire, but I do think the case suffered from prosecutorial blunders. The gloves that didn't fit being only the most memorable. One stumbling block that remains for me, even though I'm quite sure OJ Simpson killed those people, is that in a case like that you'd expect to have buckets of blood. The DA had only drops, maybe droplets. Needing to convict "beyond a reasonable doubt" I've never been sure about the jury's motive.
But he is shunned. But he is a moron, so he doesn't mind. Too bad his children may end up destroyed because of it.
But what do I know? Hell, there's hunting/trapping forums that have people talking about Dallas like he's some kind of hero.
Dallas = Mumia
VICTIM???? I don't give a darned what the jury of limp-wristed jerks decided back then - It matters not what the jury felt about the perp. HE blasted the officers with a handgun, then went and got ANOTHER gun and shot them both in the head to MAKE SURE they were DEAD. He then disposed of the bodies.
Excuse me, but that is 100% Capitol Murder - PERIOD. I don't care if this poacher was supposedly "providing for a family" or "doing what he needed to". The EXACT same thing could be said for a lot of burglars and bank robbers -
The SOB should have gotten the electric chair or hanged. At the BARE MINIMUM, he should never have seen the light of day.
I guess justice just doesn't matter to some folks.
If I recall the Olsen book (and I have it around here somewhere), at the time most game agents in Idaho didn't cary sidearms.
Absolutely agree. My question is if Dallas thought what he had done was justified, why did he go on the lam after it happened? He was harbored by many of his friends and as far as I recall, none of them were charged with abetting.
It's probably not wise on the part of the whackjobs to stir up the Forestry folks.
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