Empty Promises

despite massive searches neither the Hunters nor their car turned up in the Yakima area.
    Hoyt Cupp flew to Bowles’s bedside and talked to him for two and a half hours in an attempt to learn what had really happened to the Hunters. “I uncovered no significant facts,” Cupp said wearily. “He still insists that he left the Hunters safe in Yakima, and that there was no bodily harm. He said he hitchhiked from Yakima to Coeur d’Alene. I do not feel he has been truthful.”
    The eastern half of Washington baked under temperatures in the mid-nineties as the fruitless search for the Hunters went on. The couple’s son went to Carl Bowles’s bedside and begged him to tell him where his parents were. But Bowles only said in a convincingly sincere voice that they were perfectly fine when he got out of their car in Yakima. Nothing could shake him from his story.
    On Friday, June 21, the Hunters’ Chevrolet was found on a quiet residential street in Spokane, 250 miles east of Yakima. All that nearby homeowners knew was that the car had been there for about a week. No one had seen anyone get into or out of the car. FBI agents processed the vehicle and found a wallet and two pair of men’s glasses in the trunk. “But there was no indication there had been any bodies in there.”
    Hope for the safe return of the Hunters faded rapidly. Investigators who had contacted the oil company the missing couple had patronized for years found that their credit card had been used at a Yakima self-service gas station on June 15, but station attendants could not remember who purchased the fuel.
    Lane County detectives proceeded with their investigation as if it were a double homicide. Only the missing couple’s son held out hope. “It’s my objective opinion,” he said, “that he did not shoot them. I think he left them somewhere, probably where they can’t escape.” There were lots of spots in the broad plains, dry deserts, and sweeping hills between Yakima and Spokane where the missing couple could have been left. They might have been locked in some deserted barn or stranded on some rattlesnake-infested wasteland miles from help.
    Finally the bodies of a very tall man and a woman were found in a densely wooded area on farmland about 20 miles south of Spokane. Dr. Lois Shanks, the Spokane County Coroner, said that postmortem exams showed that Earl Hunter had been shot in the chest and head, but there was no definitive cause of death for Vi Hunter.
    Earl Hunter had been almost a foot taller than the tiny escapee and outweighed him by close to a hundred pounds. But Carl Bowles had a gun. Why he chose to shoot the Hunters after driving them hundreds of miles from their home would forever remain a mystery. He had let everyone else he’d ever captured go free. Perhaps Earl Hunter rushed him for the gun and he panicked. No one will ever know.
    Federal charges were filed against Bowles for kidnapping and murder. It became obvious that he had never been rehabilitated, for all the kindness shown to him. He was as dangerous as a lion in the streets. Indeed, when Judge Edwin E. Allen had sentenced Bowles to life back in 1965, he meant life. “The defendant in this case should at no time be considered for parole, work release … or any type of program thought up in the future. For the protection of society, he must be imprisoned for the rest of his natural life.”
    Carl Bowles was only twenty-four years old, a handsome, almost baby-faced young man, when he heard this sentence pronounced. His name has faded from the headlines, but the ten people Bowles took as hostages will never forget him nor will the wife and four children of the lawman he killed or the descendants of the Hunters.
    Bowles is now fifty-eight years old. After pleading guilty to three counts of second-degree murder on June 27, 1974, at a special court session held in a conference room at the Kootenai Memorial Hospital in Coeur d’ Alene where he was recovering from his wounds, he was transferred to the Idaho State Penitentiary to begin serving a seventy-five-year sentence.
    When federal charges were added to his long list of felonies, Carl Cletus Bowles was moved to a federal prison. He lives there today, in one of the most escape-proof prisons known to mankind. Bowles, who was given extraordinary consideration and who laughed in the face of prison officials, spends his days and nights in a federal prison that is built seven floors beneath the earth. It is doubtful