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On that bitter day six years ago, Idaho Fish and Game Officers Bill Pogue and Conley Elms, chasing a poacher, trekked to Dallas' winter quarters at Bull Camp, a secluded stretch of sage about 110 miles south of Boise. They confronted Dallas and searched his camp, where they discovered deer meat and bobcat hides. Pogue, a no-nonsense officer with a flair for pen-and-ink sketches, told the poacher he'd broken the game laws. An argument ensued. Though Dallas claims Pogue started to draw first, the jumpy poacher blasted Pogue with his .357 Ruger Security-Six revolver, then spun and nailed Elms. He finished them off with a .22 Marlin rifle bullet behind the ears. After dumping Elms' body in the river, Dallas hauled Pogue's body about 80 miles southwest to Paradise Hill, Nev., and buried it in the desert.
With $100, a backpack and his guns, Dallas fled. He ran across the West for 15 months, until he was captured near Paradise Hill. During his 1982 trial, Dallas pleaded self-defense. The prosecution argued murder one. The jury found him guilty of voluntary manslaughter, and the judge sentenced him to 30 years. But the cagey Dallas spent only 39 months behind the chain link fences before snipping his way out almost ten months ago.
Lawmen guess Dallas hightailed it back to Paradise Hill, a one-blink junction in northern Nevada. Bloodhounds tracked his scent to a barstool, then to an unmade bed in a nearby trailer and finally to an abrupt end at Highway 95. Though every waitress and cowhand between Boise and Reno seems to know Dallas, no one admits spotting him since the jailbreak.
"They're trackin' a mountain man, they're not chasin' a city slicker," contends Margarette Eckstein, who runs a roadside coffee shop in Burns Junction, Ore. Eckstein remembers Dallas well. "He was a gentle man, minded his own business, bought his gloves and candy bars," recalls the grandmotherly figure. Though she admits Dallas did wrong, she won't help catch him. "I haven't seen him," Eckstein professes, adding in a conspiratorial stage whisper as she delivers the cheeseburgers, "and if I had, I wouldn't tell anybody."
Mere mention of Claude Dallas can spark a shoving match in any Great Basin saloon or diner. At the Koffeepot Cafe, several miles from the site of Dallas' trial, Tiny, an Idaho-size chunk of a man, bellows about Dallas while nursing a large RC Cola. His reverence for the poacher scarcely exceeds his antipathy for the law. "Pogue being a sumbitch," Tiny admits, "don't make it right that Dallas shot him in the head after shooting him once." But for Tiny, and others, a blistering rancor justified the first bullet.
Sympathetic Dallas fans abound. During his trial, one group of rapturous women was dubbed the "Dallas cheerleaders," and today others are pushing a petition to grant Dallas amnesty. They claim he did no wrong. Norma Hebbel, 61, explains, "Claude did what a lot of people would want to do. They should've given him a medal, not tried him."