Empty Promises

officers who now looked for Carl Cletus Bowles for the second time. None of them had forgotten the fallen deputy in Eugene. They knew that any cop who approached Bowles faced the same danger.
    It was almost a month after Bowles’s escape when he finally made headlines again. On Thursday, June 13, a pretty young woman entered a mom-and-pop grocery store in South Eugene and carried half a rack of beer to the checkout counter. She was asked for proof of age and presented a driver’s license bearing the name Jill Fina—in Eugene, of all places, where the names of Carl Bowles and Jill Fina were familiar to almost every man on the street! The son of the store owner sold her the beer and then attempted to follow her when she left the store. When he lost sight of her, he ran back to call the police. They had been waiting for this call, and already had a contingency plan. Stealthily, a cordon of local officers and FBI agents positioned themselves around a fourteen-block area. The search moved into high gear when the sun rose the next morning. At 8:00 A.M. , two federal agents in a stakeout car spotted a man who looked remarkably like Carl Bowles at the corner of South 34th and Willamette Street. They approached him to ask for his I.D.
    He showed his identification all right; he waited until they were thirty feet away from him and then opened fire with a handgun. The agents returned fire as they ducked behind a parked car, but Bowles escaped by running between houses into a thickly wooded area. The Eugene-area task force was made up of seventy-five officers, including FBI agents, Springfield and Eugene city police, Oregon State Police, and Lane County deputies. They began a house-to-house search. When residents of the area tried to return to the streets where they lived, they were stopped and told to stay away; it wasn’t safe to go home. Those who were at home were urged to keep their doors and windows locked and open them only to law enforcement officers with proper identification.
    Shortly after the search began, Jill Fina was spotted in a guest house behind a residence in the neighborhood. She didn’t resist arrest. She was subsequently charged with hindering prosecution. The woman who owned the guest house was not at home and had no idea that her cottage had been appropriated by the fugitives.
    Jill, in custody after her abortive escape honeymoon, seemed to have tired of adventure and danger. She had huge dark circles beneath her eyes as she told the FBI that she and Bowles had been in the Eugene area for seventeen days. She named two men who had assisted them by driving them to a commune-type residence on May 28. There they were outfitted with camping equipment and driven to a rural area outside Eugene. They had stayed out in the woods until one of the men picked them up and drove them to the house where she was arrested.
    Jill admitted that she had been in on Carl’s escape from the beginning. Prior to the actual escape, she had coordinated the arrangements with the Eugene contacts. She either did not know or would not say where her uncle-companion was at the present moment.
    The two men who allegedly helped the escapees were charged with willfully and knowingly harboring an escaped prisoner. The charges were soon dropped on one of the men, however.
    Two days later and 500 miles away, Carl Bowles surfaced again. Somehow he had evaded the tight net that lawmen had dropped over Lane County and had headed east. Kootenai County, Idaho, Sheriff Thor Fladwed would eventually be able to reconstruct Bowles’s zigzagging travels.
    Sometime during the morning hours of Sunday, June 16, Carl Bowles commandeered a mobile home owned by an elderly couple in Kingston, Idaho, by threatening them with his gun. This location was about fifteen miles east of Coeur d’Alene, well into Idaho. For reasons known only to him, Bowles was heading west at that point, toward Washington State. The trio had driven along Interstate 90 to a spot west of Coeur d’Alene when the elderly man refused to go any farther. Bowles “slapped them around a bit,” but left them alive when he fled.
    A short time after that, he stopped an automobile driven by a resident of Post Falls, a hamlet of 3,000 just inside the Idaho state line. With an armed Bowles beside him, the driver drove only a few miles before he smashed into a utility pole. Either he was so frightened that he lost control of his car or he hit the pole deliberately. At any rate, Bowles took