the fugitive

A cunning killer escapes from St. Elizabeths. Seventeen years later, Bill Bonk decides to track him down.

By Harry Jaffe   •  Washingtonian  •  January 1994

 

Harry Hantman was a model prisoner in the maximum-security ward for the criminally insane at St. Elizabeths Hospital.

A tall, lean student at Georgetown University, Hantman didn’t fit the profile of someone who would rape and murder an 11-year-old girl. He was friendly, but his face was pockmarked and sometimes he was shy. Most everyone knew that his father was a decorated World War II veteran and a respected businessman.

At the hospital he was diligent about doing his chores. He quickly gained the trust of the psychiatrists, and they granted him privileges. He could roam the 330-acre expanse of St. Elizabeths, which overlooks DC from a hill across the Anacostia River. The hospital staff invited him to their July 4th family picnics.

“The fact that he came from a well-known family and the nature of his case gave him notoriety,” says Dr. Thomas Polley, director of St. Elizabeths criminal ward. “For his own safety, the court segregated him from the other prisoners. It’s the only time that’s ever happened.”

Hantman was doing so well that the psychiatrists permitted him to drive away from St. Elizabeths with a lone escort on December 25, 1973, to attend Christmas services at a church in Bethesda. The two men drove past the guard and out the metal gates to what is now Martin Luther King Avenue. They crossed a bridge over the Anacostia River and proceeded north through the city to the Maryland suburbs.

Harry Anthony Hantman and his escort–one killer, one guard–arrived at the church and looked for a parking space. The lot was full. The escort dropped Harry off by the church door and arranged to meet him inside.

“See you later,” Harry said.

 

 

IN HINDSIGHT, it seems strange that Harry Hantman was ever allowed out of the hospital’s iron gates.

 

Five and a half years before that Christmas day in 1973, police were called to the Concord, an elegant apartment building on New Hampshire A venue m::ar Dupont Circle. It was the evening of August4, 1968. Donna Lee Evans had gone to the basement to fetch the laundry. When the 11-year-old didn’t return, her parents searched the basement and called for help.

 

Police officers unlocked a basement storage room and found her, face down, on the floor. She was dead from a single shot to the head, and she was naked from the waist down under her striped dress. There was a 16-foot-long trail of blood leading from her head to an apartment next to the storage room. The door was open. The trail continued to the bed where the little girl had been raped. Sidney Hantman, Harry’s father, was part-owner of the Concord, and Harry lived in the apartment.

 

Five hours later, DC homicide detective A.H. Mosrie arrived at the Hantman home on Apple Grove Road in White Oak, near Silver Spring. Harry, who was 20, said he’d spent the weekend with a friend at Assateague Island and had returned straight to Apple Grove Road.

 

“He was cool,” Mosrie says. “Heimpressed me as being a real intelligent guy. He thought he was smarter than anyone else, especially a cop. He looked at me like- ‘Hey, prove it.’ ”

 

Mosrie found Hantman’ s fingerprints on a can of Glee Black Cherry soda in the laundry room. He found Hantman’s glasses near Donna Lee Evans’s body. Hantman’s pubic hairs matched those on towels near the little girl’s head. Police arrested him on charges of rape and murder.

At his trial, psychiatrists testified that Hantman’s “schizophrenic” condition had caused him to rape and murder the girl. The judge declared him not guilty by reason of insanity and sent him to St. Elizabeths. “I thought it was a good decision when they put him away,” Mosrie says. ”At least he was off the streets.”

 

As soon as Hantman arrived at St. Elizabeths, his family started lobbying for his release. His father bombarded the hospital with letters. First, Harry was given the freedom to roam the hospital’s sprawling campus, then escorted on weekly visits to his private psychiatrist in Bethesda. At a 1971 hearing, psychiatrists said he was ready to continue his studies at Georgetown, but a judge turned down the request.

 

Hantman had permission to attend church on Christmas Day in 1973 when–in the terminology of St. Elizabeths–he “eloped.”

 

SEVENTEEN YEARS, ten months, and two days later, US Marshal Bill Bonk picked up a file marked “Harry A. Hantman: escaped St. Elizabeths 12-25-73.”

 

Hantman’s case was one of hundreds the US Marshals Service was reviewing in an attempt to solve cold cases. One of its jobs is to capture fugitives from justice; at the time, 1,800 names were on its list. Hantman’s file was less than an inch thick. “No one else wanted it,” says Bonk. It was October 27, 1991.

 

Bonk opened the case jacket. On a yellow piece of paper was a handwritten note from 1986: “May be in Sweden.”

 

Tall and built like a bear, Bonk isn’t the Clint Eastwood type. He wears thick glasses and doesn’t talk much. He answers the phone “Bonk.” He works in the federal courthouse at Third Street and Constitution Avenue. To get to his office, you take the elevator to the sixth floor, walk down two long hallways and up a flight of battered stairs. Behind the heavy metal door marked with the marshals service insignia, past the wall with the “Wanted” posters and down the hall,

Bonk shares an office with a pair of battering rams, bulletproof helmets, and a pile of handcuffs. His window looks out on the roof.

 

Bonk thumbed through the Hantman file. In the “Stipulation,” with its description of the crime scene, he read that Donna Lee Evans had been barefoot when she left her apartment at 6: 15 that summer Sunday evening. He read that her face was covered with two blood-soaked pillow cases, that her body was still warm. “A cloth gag was found inserted in the deceased’s mouth,” the document read. “A strip of white cloth covered the gag and was tied and knotted behind the deceased’s head. Her hands were tied behind her back with strips of white cloth…The deceased’s panties were found on the floor near the bed…The deceased’s hymen was perforated.”

 

Bonk retrieved the testimony from Hantman’s day in court three months after the murder. He read that Hantman was under pressure from trying to succeed in too many college classes, according to one psychiatrist. “He was a cross, collicky, agitated infant,” claimed another, the first sign of ”an anxiety state” that became ”powerful hostile and sexual impulses which bombarded the patient’s will.” He was also a sexual novice who had done little “necking or petting.”

 

District Judge G.M. Curran seemed skeptical, especially when one psychiatrist said Hantman felt “rejected” because his mother, Lillian, placed “severe religious demands” on him. “Are you telling me he felt rejected because his mother said God was watching over him?” the judge asked.

 

Despite apparent misgivings, Curran made his ruling that Hantman was not guilty by reason of insanity. ”No! No!’ ‘ Donna Lee Evans’s oldest sister cried out. “He’s no crazier than anyone else in this courtroom!”

 

AFTER READING the Hantman file, Bonk interviewed former DC detective Crispen Preston. ” You ever heard of the movie Silence of the Lambs?” Preston asked. “That’s what we’ re talking about here. This guy’s evil, pure evil. And he’s not a stupid person, either.”

 

Bill Bonk found himself obsessed by the horror of Hantman’s crime and the mystery of his disappearance. Bonk had been a marshal for less than two years. ”Here’s a guy who committed a heinous act, and he’s out there,” he said to himself. “This person needs to be reeled in.”

 

 

THE ONLY public notice that Harry Hantman had escaped was a two-inch item in the Washington Star–News on

February 4, 1974. It was accompanied by a sketch of a gaunt man with sideburns and a scraggly goatee.

 

Another news item- one that Bonk wasn’t aware of- turned out to be more significant. It was the obituary of Thomas A.

Dorian, who died of cancer on August 4, 1973.

 

Like Hantman, Dorian had an innocent, bookish face. Each man had sandy-brown hair and a goatee. Hantman had studied at Georgetown, hoping to go to law school; Dorian had been about to begin graduate courses in physics at George Washington University.

 

On February 27, 1974, Harry Hantman applied for an Oregon driver’s license in the name of Tom Dorian. In March, he got his high school equivalency degree-as Tom Dorian–from Lane Community College in Oregon. A few months later, he paid cash for a new Land Rover in Portland. Before the year was out he’d enrolled as Dorian at the University of Oregon.

For the next 20 years, Harry Hantman was Tom Dorian.

”There was no way he could have pulled the whole thing off without his family’s help,” says Bonk. “He was penniless. How did he get out west? How else could he have bought the Land Rover?”

 

HARRY HANTMAN’S family was the focus of some scrutiny during the 1968 trial.

“The family environment was distant and fraught with tension,” Dr. Francis F. Barnes testified. Sidney Hantman was Jewish; Lillian Hantman was Catholic. According to the psychiatrists, the religious split was at the root of Harry’s instability. He and his brother, Bill, were raised as Catholics by their mother. In photographs taken in the 1940s at local nightclubs like the Rainbow Room and the Del Rio, Lillian Hantman is a radiant, round-faced young woman with flowers in her hair. But by the 1960s, she’d stopped going out of the house. “The patient’s mother was preoccupied by nervous conflicts,” Barnes testified. “The defendant described from childhood a feeling that God would send him to hell as soon as he died if he failed to finish a meal.”

Harry’s brother Bill, a few years older, was also a casualty. “Harry was the favorite son,” says a family friend . “No matter what Bill did, it wasn’t enough.’ ‘

Sidney Hantman, a reserved man, had dark eyes and an intense stare. He’d lost his right arm when his aircraft was hit on a bombing run over Germany, and he returned to become a champion of disabled veterans. He chaired a national veterans organization–a post that kept him traveling–and was welcomed at the White House. In the 1960s he went into real estate and became part-owner of the Concord. “The father was psychologically and geographically distant from the family and took no part in the upbringing, ” Barnes said.

When detective Crispen Preston arrived to search the Hantman home at 405 Apple Grove Road in the hours after the murder, Lillian Hantman at first barred the door. ” The dad was sitting in the living room, crying the whole time,” he recalls. “She was on a tirade, screaming at us during the search. That woman dominated the house. She was a bitch on wheels.”

When it came time that evening to take Harry away, his mother barred the door again, and when they walked him away, she screamed: “Why are you wasting your time with my son? Why aren’t you out there trying to catch rapists and murderers?’ ‘

The judge and the police were leery of the psychiatrists’ depiction of Harry’s dysfunctional family, but events would bear out their diagnosis in blood.

 

IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST, Harry Hantman was surviving quite well.

“He was living in God’s country,” says Bonk, “taking college classes, building a cabin in the woods. Yet he had no job.”

Slipping into the identity of Tom Dorian, Hantman became a professional student. He took courses at the University of Oregon in Eugene. He dyed his hair and goatee black. He explored the mountains and at first gravitated toward the college campuses around Corvallis, near the coast.

Oregon, with its tolerance for the unconventional, was a fugitive’s paradise. Katharine Ann Powers, the Vietnam-era radical who recently surrendered 20 years after being charged in the killing of a Boston cop, lived in Corvallis.

Hantman sought refuge even farther from civilization. In 1976 he paid $6,000 for about six acres in Hells Canyon, a remote and rugged region near the Snake River just west of the Idaho line. He built a cabin with stained-glass windows and filled its bookshelves with hardbound classics.

At his trial, the psychiatrists testified that as a child Hantman had cringed when anyone so much as stepped on a bug. But in the mountains of Oregon, he went on a weapons spree. By 1979 he was amassing a $50,000 arsenal of high powered rifles, shotguns, and semi-automatic handguns. His business card read TOM DORIAN, BIG GAME HUNTING GUIDE. He offered wildlife tours by horseback and Land Rover. Photographs show him wearing chaps and a Western hat. He fished for salmon in the Snake River.

In 1981 an older woman came to visit him. She was gaunt and gray-haired. She said her name was Lillian Dorian. In Bill Bonk’s judgment, she was Harry’s mother and was carrying gold Krugerrands, which were her son’s primary means of support.

But whatever Hantman got from his mother and from his guide service wasn’t enough. In the mid-1980s he turned to counterfeiting, and in 1985 the Secret Service took him into custody. He wasn’t prosecuted, but he was fingerprinted under a grand jury subpoena. A federal check of criminal records failed to connect him to Harry Hantman—even though it was found that he was using a dead man’s Social Security number. So, in the eyes of the law, Hantman was now Tom Dorian. In effect, the government had given him a new identity.

Hantman tried not to attract any more attention, but there was the matter of the fence. Although there were a few other cabins along the logging roads in Hells Canyon, Hantman’s was the only one with an eight-foot chain-link fence around it. The fence provoked letters to the local newspaper, but Harry refused to take it down.

A woman who was his girlfriend at the time described the homestead as “Auschwitz in the wilderness.”

 

THE EIGHT-FOOT chain-link fence that went up around 405 Apple Grove Road in White Oak caused even more consternation among its neighbors. It went up in the early 1970s with a triple strand of barbed wire on top, around the time that Sidney Hantman died of a heart attack while changing the oil in his car. He was in his early 50s.

Not long after, Lillian Hantman stopped leaving the house. The front yard became overgrown. “It looked like something out of a horror movie,” says a friend of Bill Hantman.

Bill Hantman, who continued to live with his mother, had a “whole pharmacy” of pills, the friend says. He chain-smoked Marlboro 100s. He made up his own drink, “The Bill,” made with soft drinks and Canadian Club. “He was a lost soul,” the friend says. “His life was waking, eating, sleeping, drinking.”

Bill drank steadily during law school, according to the friend. He got a law degree but practiced only in a part-time job with a local attorney. “He loved to party,” the friend says. “We used to get together and drink and drive. He never grew out of that stage.”

Lillian Hantman sat all day by the front window, peering through the curtains and taking down the license numbers of passing cars. She thought that traffic helicopters were the prying eyes of the FBI, that the tree-pruner was a CIA agent. She drank cheap red wine and saved Mason jars of tapwater in the basement to prove that she was being poisoned. Also in the basement were bags of bullets, canisters of Mace, and bulletproof vests.

“The house was disgusting,” Bill’s friend says. “It stank. They never opened the windows. They’d get mail and throw it in a corner. Milk jugs and trash were stacked inside the house in piles almost to the ceiling. They were too poor or too paranoid to have someone come to haul it away.”

Bill and his mother talked about selling their house and moving to Florida. Bill’s friend came over one night in October 1988 to explore the idea and meet with a real estate agent. In the midst of a discussion about whether the Waterford chandelier should stay with the house, Bill stopped and looked at his friend. “I already know what I’m going to do,” Bill said. He opened his mouth, pointed his index finger inside, and pulled an imaginary trigger. Bill had told his friend twice before that he was going to kill the cat, the dog, his mother, and then himself.

“Where’s the gun?” the friend demanded. “I’m not leaving until I get it.”

He didn’t find the gun, but he stayed until Bill drank himself to sleep at 2 AM. He called the next night. The phone rang and rang. He kept calling until someone answered. It was a Montgomery County police officer, who told him to come over. A dozen police cars were lined up outside. As he approached the house, one officer asked, “Where’s Harry?”

In the kitchen, Lillian Hantman was lying in a pool of blood on the linoleum floor. She had her wool cap and bedroom slippers on. Bill Hantman was on his bed, lying atop a Notre Dame blanket. The .38 was in his right hand. “I’d never seen him look so at peace,” says the friend.

Police ruled it a murder/suicide. They figured that Bill Hant man had shot his mother, walked into the bedroom, lay down on the bed, put the pistol in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. There was no evidence that Harry Hantman had had anything to do with this business. Even Bill Bonk ruled that out.

Not everyone was convinced. “Harry did it,” says DC detective Crispen Preston. Montgomery County police staked out the funeral. Harry didn’t show.

 

ON DECEMBER 6,1989, Portland police responded to a kidnapping complaint. A woman named Karen Apland told police that she’d heard someone knocking on her back door. She opened it, saw Tom Dorian, and tried to close it. They had had a relationship, but it had ended, and she was scared of him. Dorian had pushed his way in, threw Apland to the floor, sprayed her with Mace, put a stun gun to her neck, and started zapping her. She struggled free, but Dorian bent her arm behind her back and started to lead her to his car.

“I’m in control,” he said. “Don’t fight.”

Apland saw neighbors nearby and screamed. He said, “I’ll shoot you if you don’t shut up. The people ran over and wrestled him to the ground. When police searched his van, they found a shotgun, a loaded .38 caliber revolver, two cans of Mace, a paper bag containing 13 plastic handcuffs, three metal handcuffs, two pairs of leg irons, one box of .45 caliber ammunition, a backpack with a loaded .45 semi-automatic handgun, two loaded extra magazines, and the stun gun.

Tom Dorian was convicted of burglary, kidnapping, and as sault. Multnomah County Judge William Keys sentenced him to 60 months’ probation and an 18-month prison term, which he began serving on July 26, 1990. “It was not a stranger-to- stranger crime,” Keys says. “I had to suppress the report about the stuff in his car because it was a bad search. And a lot of people testified that Dorian was just a very bright hermit.”

Dorian was paroled on October 7, 1991, three months shy of his full sentence. Once again, the authorities had failed to match his fingerprints with those of Harry Hantman.

 

BILL HANTMAN’S friend, who was given possession of everything in the house, found a strongbox in the basement of 405 Apple Grove. He opened it and found mementos from Harry’s life—including his graduation ring from Archbishop Carroll High School. In Lillian Hantman’s dresser drawer, he found an audio cassette tape. It contained a conversation; the voices sounded urgent:

“I’m fine and I’ll be back in touch when I can,” a high-pitched male voice said.

“I love you with all my heart and soul,” came the voice of an older woman.

“I love you and Bill very, very dearly,” the man said.

“We love you with all our hearts and souls and our bodies,” she responded. “My breath is your breath.”

Then the male voice reeled off a stream of numbers, a few letters, more numbers, and finally the question, “Can you process this?’’

Bill’s friend had never met Harry, but he had no doubt about the identity of the male voice. “This must be Harry,” he thought. “He’s out there.”

The friend called the FBI in Silver Spring. He told an agent that he had evidence about someone who had escaped from St. Elizabeths. According to the friend, the agent told him to call St. Elizabeths to see if Harry was still at large. The friend made another try at alerting the FBI but was rebuffed again.

He put the tape in his dresser.

 

WHEN BILL BONK opened Hantman’s file three years later, all he had to go on was the note that Harry might be in Sweden.

There was no trace of Donna Lee Evans’s family in Washington, but he learned that she’d been buried in Baltimore. He called the cemetery, where a woman said the family was very private. He left his name. An hour later he got a call from Donna’s oldest sister, Barbara. Bonk asked if she’d heard anything about Harry Hantman. She said he was in St. Elizabeths. Bonk told her that he’d escaped 18 years earlier.

“I knew he wasn’t crazy,” she said

Bonk went to the Hantman home, expecting to question the family. He didn’t know about the murder/suicide until the neighbors told him. There was nothing in the file about it.

He tracked down the two retired DC detectives, Crispen Preston and A.H. Mosrie, and got in touch with Montgomery County detective Margaret Burriss, who’d also investigated the murder/suicide. He asked for any evidence. Burriss gave him photographs from the crime scene; they gave him a window into the Hantmans’ world. He got a copy of the death certificated for Lillian and Bill Hantmann, found the name of the family lawyer who’d identified the bodies, and questioned him. The lawyer was not cooperative, but he did mention that Bill’s friend had taken many of the family’s belongings.

A marshal working with Bonk called the friend and asked about Harry. “He’s dead, right?” the marshal asked. The friend said he had an audio tape that might prove otherwise. It’s all in code.”

Bonk sent marshals to pick up the tape. He listened to it and shipped it to decoding specialists. It took months, but they broke enough of the code—it turned out to be based on pages and words in a French-English dictionary—to establish that the calls had been made in 1983. They didn’t find Hartman’s location, but Bonk now knew at least that his quarry had been alive in 1983—ten years after he’d escaped.

“It was our first major break,” Bonk says. “It hooked me into the case.”

Bonk took his evidence to headquarters. His superiors agreed to make it a major case, commissioned Philadelphia sculptor Frank Bender to create a bust of what Harry might look like, and began to prepare an episode about Hantman for the TV show America’s Most Wanted.

It was the winter of 1992. Bonk had been on the case for more than a year.

 

ON FEBRUARY 13, 1993, Corvallis police were called to Good Samaritan Hospital investigate a possible rape. The victim was a Japanese exchange student named Rikako Fujita. Her alleged assailant was Tom Dorian.

Fujita told police that she’d met Dorian at Oregon State University in the fall of 1992. They had become lovers, but Fukita broke off the relationship, she said, after Dorian had driven her to a deserted location, asked her to take her clothes off in the back of his van, and used strapping tape to bind her arms behind her back.

Despite this episode, she told police, she had wanted to stay friends with him. Twice she called Dorian to ask him out to dinner. On the second night, he drove her several miles south of town and parked the van off a narrow road. He moved over to her seat.

“Don’t do this,” she said, according to a police report. “I don’t want any sex.” He ordered her to the back of the van, where he kept a mattress. She said he raped her. He drove her home. She called the Center Against Rape and Domestic Violence.

On March 2, 1993, a grand jury in Benton County indicted Tom Dorian for first-degree rape, sodomy, and kidnapping. When police when to arrest him, he was gone.

 

A DAY LATER, T. Michael Earp, senior inspector in the marshals service enforcement division, placed an urgent call to Bonk. A week earlier, the marshals had sent out sets of Hantman’s fingerprints to law-enforcement agencies in 50 states.

“Can you get over here now to check this out?” Earp asked. “Thomas A. Dorian, also known as Harry Hantman.”

“You’re bullshitting me,” Bonk said.

Out in Nevada, an officer with the Western States Identification Network had taken the prints that Bonk had sent and plugged thim into a computerized fingerprint identification system. He’d made the Hantman-Dorian match and notified Earp.

Bonk raced across the 14th Street Bridge to the marshals service headquarters in Arlington. He still wasn’t sure he had his man, so he sent fingerprints of both Hantman and Dorian to the FBI. They were the same—and the bureau merged its files on Dorian and Hantman. Bonk then called the marshals in Portland for a photograph of Tom Dorian. He was standing at the fax machine when it rolled off.

“As soon as the photo came over and I saw the profile and the nose, I said ‘Bam! That’s him,’” says Bonk. The Dorian’s rap sheet with the charges of burglary, rape, assault, and kidnapping came next. Earp gathered all the evidence and asked Bonk, “Can you be ready to go tomorrow.”

 

BILL BLONK FLEW to Oregon with his partner, Mark Shealey. They arrived in Corvallis and began peeling back the layers of Harry Hantman’s life as Tom Dorian.

He was married to a nurse named Linda Cannon and apparently was living with her in her house near Joseph, a town of 1,000 at the mouth of Hells Canyon. The two marshals backtracked to Karen Apland—Hantman’s 1989 victim—and found out about the cabin in Hells Canyon. She told them about the guns, the Krugerrands, the fence. Over the next two weeks, they hit the back roads and found the only fenced-in cabin in Hells Canyon. No Hantman. They watched the house and learned later that he had been there at the time.

Linda Cannon disappeared, too. The nursing supervisor at her hospital said she’d left on a 10-day vacation.

Bonk and Shealey, accompanied by other marshals, tracked Cannon to Walla Walla, Washington, by way of an ATM withdrawal she’d made the day before they lost track of her. They searched every hotel and motel for the Subaru station wagon they thought she was driving. They started showing a photograph of Cannon to every motel clerk in town.

“She was here last night,” the clerk at a Super 8 motel said. She was driving a blue Cavalier.

A check of calls made from the room turned up one to another Super 8 motel in Lewiston, just across the Idaho line, but she wasn’t checked in there. They called ahead to Lewiston police and asked them to place a lookout for the blue Cavalier. Then they called every motel in Lewiston.

At 9 the next morning, Bonk and the other marshals sat down at a diner. He ordered prime rib and scrambled eggs. They were tiring of the chase. One of the marshals went to his car and called the police in Lewiston. When Bonk looked out the window, he saw the marshal frantically waving. Lewiston police had spotted the Cavalier at the Tapadera Motor Inn.

Bonk called he Tapadera desk clerk and asked if Cannon were checked in. “Why, yes,” the clerk said. “She’s right here.” Bonk thanked her and hung up, but Cannon had heard the conversation. She threw her bags in the car and took off.

Bonk and others raced the 70 minutes along winding roads to Lewiston. Five miles from town, they called the police again and had them put out an all-points bulletin. A member of the Lewiston narcotics squad then spotted Cannon’s car going north. “A heavyset woman is driving,” he said. “A guy with a Fu Manchu beard is riding shotgun.”

The Cavalier stopped in the parking lot of a Super 8 Motel a quarter-mile from Lewiston. The marshals pulled into the Idaho State Police station at the edge of town to plan the arrest. A cop on surveillance kept calling in details: “The guys out of the car…I’ve lost sight of him…He’s back at the car.”

By now there were twelve Lewiston policemen and state troopers with the eight marshals. They put on bulletproof vests and got into a convoy of eight cars. Speeding north, they reached the Super 8 parking lot. The Cavalier was still there. The police cars surrounded it. Twenty lawmen jumped out with shotguns and pistols trained on the man and woman inside.

One of the marshals opened the passenger door, threw the man to the ground, put his foot on the man’s neck, and said, “Hello, Harry. Good to see you. They miss you at St. E’s.”

 

BILL BONK got into the back of a squad car with the man he’d been hunting for a year and a half. “Linda’s not in on this,” Hantman said. It was the voice on the tape.

“Do you know why you’re under arrest?” Bonk asked.

“I’m under arrest?”

“You’re wanted under three warrants from Oregon. You violated parole and probation, and you were indicted for rape. And there’s the matter from St. Elizabeths.”

Hantman stared straight ahead. He didn’t say a word.

“It was anticlimactic, really,” says Bonk. “I was just majorly relieved.”

Hantman had kept all of his papers—every receipt, every note. That’s how the marshals discovered the arms cache in Grangerville, Idaho, with the guns and the Mace and the implements of bondage. Along with the other charges, the feds slapped Hantman with a weapons count.

Linda Cannon says she knew nothing of Dorian’s former life. When the cops had aimed their weapons at her, she’d said, “All this for a date rape?”

 

TOM DORIAN has yet to acknowledge his life as Harry Hantman.

He pleaded guilty to second-degree rape for his assault on Rikako Fujita. He wrote letter after letter asking for leniency, even after it became known that he was the Harry Hantman who’d raped and murdered Donna Lee Evans in 1968.

But on the bench was County Judge William Keys—who had also presided over Dorian’s trial in the Karen Apland assault case in 1989. Now Keys gave him the maximum sentence, five years in prison for violating probation, added to two and a half years in the Fujita case. He is in the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institute in Pendleton.

“Boy, was I pissed,” Keys says in an interview. “I was mad at myself for being hoodwinked when I had Dorian on trial the first time. I felt partially responsible for that young girl being raped in Corvallis. You’re talking about a really, really, really dangerous guy, especially dangerous because he’s so smart. I certainly hope he goes back to Washington, DC, and they keep him for a long, long time. He’s one scary son of a gun. I’d come back and testify against him.”

 

WILL HARRY HANTMAN be brought back to Washington?

Good question, says Assistant United States Attorney Daniel Seikaly, the prosecutor assigned to the case. “I’ve never run across anything like this before.” At some point, he says, Hantman will be brought back to St. Elizabets. But if he’s insane, how can he be guilty of the crimes he’s serving time for? And if he’s still not guilty of reason by insanity, why is he serving time in an Oregon prison? “We can’t hold him at St. Elizabeths unless we can prove that he’s a continuing danger to himself and others,” Seikaly says.

Meanwhile, police and marshals in Oregon are still scrutinizing Hantman’s past to see if he might be responsible for other criminal acts. There is, for example, the Green River rapes, in which more than a dozen prostitutes were murdered in Oregon during the 1980s. Was it Hantman?

“That’s the million-dollar question,” says a deputy in Oregon. “A lot of questions were raised out here as we tried to find out what he was doing for 20 years.”

Short of that, Hantman could be prosecuted for his escape from St. Elizabeths in 1973. But chances are, according to Seikaly, that he’ll be back in St. E’s, where he could again begin the process of trying to prove that he’s well enough for release.

“He gets sicker but wilier all the time,” says Seikaly.

At St. Elizabeths, only one other patient has escaped during the last 25 years. They want no part of Harry Hantman. “I’m not sure that he belongs with us,” says Thomas Polley, director of the criminal ward.

Retired detective A.H. Mosrie, who investigated Hantman for the 1968 murder of 11-year-old Donna Lee Evans, says, “I’m glad Bonk wasn’t tracking me. They guy’s a real bulldog.”

Bonk called Barbara Evans in Baltimore to say that the man who had raped and murdered her sister was again behind bard.

Barbara Evans wept.

“You’d think that after 20 years I’d be over it,” she said. “But I’m not.”