A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

before when they came upon a reddish-haired man standing in the middle of the road. He had signalled to them to stop, and then waved a gun at them and commandeered their car.
    The Youngs had been forced to drive to their home, and the gunman had held them hostage all night. “He told us he’d killed before and he wasn’t afraid to do it again,” Mrs. Young told Umatilla County deputies.
    On Wednesday morning, the man said he was going to take their car. They were relieved just to have him out of their house, but he dashed those hopes when he said that he was taking Mr. Young with him. Mrs. Young told the deputies that she packed them a lunch of sandwiches, partly because she was worried about her husband’s being hungry and partly because she thought if she was friendly to the kidnapper, he might not hurt her husband.
    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