By the time Angel reached Donalsonville at just before dawn on the morning of May 18, he’d already been radioed that the car which had been stolen in Livingston had been recovered in West Virginia, and that one of its occupants, George Dungee, was in custody in the little town of Welch, West Virginia.
As he began making plans for an immediate flight to Welsh, he was informed by Director Beardsley that several high officials of the Georgia Department of Public Safety had decided to go along as well.
As Angel well knew, none of these officials had ever gone to Donalsonville. In fact, they had scarcely communicated with the agents assigned to the case, and knew nothing of the subsequent investigation. Still, they had determined to go to West Virginia for the capture, and as a result, Angel’s more immediate travel plans were put on hold so that the considerably more complicated travel arrangements and security measures of the accompanying officials could be made. Angel could see the writing on the wall. A criminal investigation was about to turn into a media event.
While Dungee was narrating his version of the last few days’ terrible events and Angel was frantically trying to leave Georgia, West Virginia authorities were in the process of concentrating and enlarging their effort to capture the three other men who were still at large.
By early evening, scores of men and women were pouring into the area of the abandoned car, and shortly after 8:00 P.M., a command post to control and alert them was set up in the offices of the Olga Coal Company in Caretta, West Virginia.
Using topographical maps, West Virginia officials established checkpoints at every imaginable point in the area around and between Caretta and Yukon, where the men had last been seen. By 9:00 P.M., roadblocks had been set up throughout the adjoining counties, while specifically designated road patrols fanned out in all directions from the central site of P. C. Mincus’s green Caprice.
An hour later, after creating search grids of the entire region, full police dragnets were launched on foot into the surrounding hills. For the next few hours, perhaps as many as a hundred men and women, scattered at various points over many square miles, began moving through the thick darkness that had by then descended over the West Virginia borderland.
All through the night, in sortie after sortie, they pushed through the thick summer undergrowth toward a group of heavily armed men they could but faintly hope to glimpse before being seen themselves and fired upon.
At the same time as foot and automobile patrols continued to search the difficult terrain of the West Virginia hill country, Ronnie Angel was literally in the air. Having obtained warrants for all four fugitives, along with an array of forms related to their formal extradition, he was now on route to West Virginia.
He was not alone, however. The “Uniforms,” as he called them, were everywhere, and although they’d assured him that they had only come along to assist him, Angel continued to worry that they might do or say something which might endanger the case, a possibility he wanted to avoid at all cost. Accordingly, he had determined that neither he nor any of the agents under his command would attempt to question any of the fugitives until they were in formal custody in Georgia. Instead, they would limit their activities to the gathering of physical evidence, the processing of the crime scenes, and the final provision for the transfer of the Isaacs brothers, Coleman, and Dungee to Georgia.
Meanwhile, by the time the first morning light had broken over southern West Virginia, almost two hundred men and women had gathered either for direct action or to hold on standby for a full-scale, inch-by-inch search of the wooded area into which the Isaacs brothers and Wayne Coleman had disappeared. All during the night they had been marshaling their forces. Helicopters and small planes had been brought in from nearby bases for airborne searches to be conducted at first light. Scores of patrol cars cruised the winding roads, while perhaps as many as a hundred officers gathered at grid points to await the final assault, their rifle barrels forming a stiff, black thicket against the morning sky.
While additional forces had been massing during the night for a sweep far more extensive than the ones that had been launched late the preceding afternoon, other officers had been moving relentlessly through the nightbound woods since sunset.
Still others had arrived somewhat later. Two of them, Harold Hall and L. D. Townley, had come with Prince, a prize tracking dog they’d brought with them from the Bland Correctional Institute in White-gate, Virginia, a town nearly two hundred miles away.
At around midnight, Price, his handlers, and Troopers F. E. Thomas and L. R. Bailey moved into the woods. Some minutes previously, Prince had been allowed to sniff his way through the abandoned car, and had then shot off across Route 16, entering the woods at full run at exactly the spot where, hours before, Officer Ryan had seen the fugitives disappear into the undergrowth.
For the next four hours, Prince continued to bound through the heavy brush, but in a pattern that began to concern Thomas and the dog’s handlers. He would run up and down the hills, moving back and forth from the woods to the command headquarters in Carreta in a way that suggested he might not be trailing the fugitives at all, but rather some particular police officer. In other words, Prince had perhaps begun to follow the posse that was following him, literally chasing his own tail.
At three in the morning, with Prince still moving in this confused pattern, Thomas and Prince’s handlers, now utterly exhausted by the long slog through the dark undergrowth, decided to return the dog to the original site of the abandoned car, then make a wide arc around the area to avoid his picking up any scent other than those he’d picked up in the car.
The results were immediate.
“It was like everything just suddenly came clear to him,” Thomas recalled. “He just took off into the woods and kept going for the next few hours without any letup at all.”
Suddenly, Prince’s large black muzzle rose into the air, the indisputable sign that the fugitives were near at hand, that the dog no longer needed to trail them over ground, but rather that their scent still hung in the air around him.
The men continued to follow him through the brush, now tensed and watchful, their guns at the ready. Within a few minutes, Prince began to froth at the mouth, barely able to contain his excitement as he closed in upon his targets, yet still carefully obeying the foremost law of his training, never, under any circumstances, to bark unless commanded to do so by his handler.
Convinced that they were now very close to the fugitives they had been tracking for eight hours, the men began to move more slowly, their eyes darting about constantly, searching for the first sign.
It was a shirt, and they all saw it at exactly the same time. Through a clearing, approximately a hundred yards away, they could see several figures lying on the ground beneath a granite overhang that jutted out at the base of the mountainside.
Instantly, the four trackers dispersed around the cove, silently taking cover in positions that matched the remaining three points of the compass, thus blocking all avenues of escape for the men who slept obliviously beneath the overhang.
Once the officers were in place, Thomas called to the prone figures he could see sleeping on the ground some forty yards away. They did not rouse themselves in any way, and when he saw no response, Thomas decided that a more determined effort to get the sleeping men’s attention was required. He emptied a twenty-round clip from his AR-15 into the mountainside above their heads.
As the men stirred within the cove, Thomas called to them again. “This is the West Virginia State Police,” he cried. “Lay down your weapons, and stay on your stomachs.”
The stirring stopped.
“Now, the one closest to us, crawl out and down this way with your hands over your head,” Thomas commanded.
One by one the men followed Thomas’s instructions until they all lay flat on the ground, one behind the other, in a strange human line, fingers touching feet, faces in the dirt.
Once they’d been handcuffed and read their rights, Thomas and Bailey searched the cove, while Hall and Townley kept the prisoners covered. The searches completed, it was now time to move the prisoners out of the woods.
But there was a problem. Since Thomas and the other trackers had been following Prince through a solid darkness, they now found themselves in a completely unfamiliar terrain.
“We were lost,” Thomas remembered. “We were just in the woods somewhere with four prisoners who had killed six people, but with no idea exactly where to take them.”
Their only hint was the sound of traffic. It was sporadic and very distant, but from time to time a car could be heard moving along a mountain road. Each time they heard it, they moved in its direction, while at the same time vaguely following the meandering course of a little mountain stream.
At last, it led them home, and through the trees Thomas and the others could see people gathering on the road above them.
Waiting on that road, stretching out in all directions, some in uniform, others in plain clothes, scores of officers and local residents watched as Thomas, his beleaguered but triumphant posse, and the men they had captured, slowly ascended the hill toward them. When they were about halfway up it, still trudging wearily through the heavy brush, they heard the first gentle round of what would be a long applause.