A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

up. There’s a good chance he may have left the area. We know he’s on the run. And he probably won’t stay in one place for very long.”
    Davenport said his best guess was that Olds had headed east, since he was wanted for two murders in the west. It was possible he was going to his estranged wife who was thought to be in Wisconsin. Two of Olds’ victims were women, and he probably was still angry at his wife for deserting him. Stakeouts were placed near her residence in case Olds showed up.

    A period of uneasy calm descended. If Olds followed his usual pattern, there would be more abductions, more terrified hostages forced to accompany him as he raced across the country. Police feared they would eventually find more bodies dumped along Olds’ trail.
    Saturday. Sunday. Monday. The days passed without word of Michael Olds. Where was he? Was he traveling with someone unable to call for help? He preyed on the old, the sick—people alone on farms or ranches who might not be missed for several days. There were a lot of isolated farmhouses and open spaces between Utah and Wisconsin—or wherever Olds was heading.
    And then, on the night of April 11—Monday—Michael Olds surfaced. Incredibly, he had made it all the way across the country without being recognized. McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania is a suburb that edges the west side of Pittsburgh, a community a long, long, way from the vast desert stretches of Oregon, Idaho and Utah.
    In McKees Rocks, a young woman left work, headed toward her parked car, and looked up to see a wild-eyed man leveling a gun at her.
    “Get in the car!” he ordered.
    Her mind raced. She knew that if she got in her car with an armed man, her chance of survival would probably be nil. She might die if she resisted him, but at least she figured she would have a chance. If he shot her where she stood, he wouldn’t rape her. Being alone with him would be worse. She told him she wasn’t going to get in the car, and started backing up, leading him away from her car. It threw him off balance; he obviously didn’t want to draw attention to himself and her resistance was making him nervous. Good.
    She saw another employee leaving the building and called out that there was a man with a gun on her. And then she ran. The man with the gun let her go. They called the McKees Rocks Police Department and reported the attempted abduction, describing the stocky stranger in detail.
    Police dispatchers alerted officers on duty and a widescale search for the gunman was begun immediately. A McKees Rocks police lieutenant saw a man matching the description in the parking lot of the Eat-and-Park restaurant. As he watched from his squad car, the red-headed man walked into the restaurant. It was hard to keep him in sight in the crowded fast-food establishment.
    By the time the police lieutenant entered the crowded restaurant, he realized the one place someone could hide was the rest room.
    The lieutenant’s heart sank as he pushed through the men’s room door. The gunman was holding a seven-year-old boy hostage. There was no reasoning with him. The boy’s father rushed forward and offered to take his son’s place, but the gunman wasn’t having any of it; he took the father hostage, too.
    Captain Konkiel of the McKees Rocks police force placed a call to the restaurant phone and he, too, offered to take the youngster’s place. But the nameless desperado knew a good thing when he had it. He wanted the boy and he wanted a car to make his getaway. Tense minutes ticked by as the McKees Rocks officers tried in vain to reason with him while he also debated with Konkiel on the phone. All the time he bargained with them, he held his revolver against the boy’s head.
    “I’ve got nothing to look forward to but the electric chair,” the man panted. “You back off or you’ll have a dead boy and his father, too. I’ve killed before and it doesn’t mean anything more to me to kill them.”
    They believed that this stranger meant what he said. Again, he demanded a getaway car. No amount of psychology and coaxing was going to shake him.
    Finally, it was agreed that the boy’s mother would be allowed to get the family’s station wagon and drive it around to the back of the Eat-and-Park. There, the gunman and his two hostages would join her. The police knew they had to get him out of the men’s room and, more importantly, they had to defuse the situation to a point where he would ease the gun away from the boy’s