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| Small town still shaken by 50-year-old crime |
On May 11, 1966, William Diller Hollenbaugh, an afoot farmhand accepted as "the Bicycle Man" because he rode his bike everywhere, kidnapped 17-year-old Peggy Ann Bradnick, avaricious her off the artery as she absolved home from school.
The kidnapping came afterwards a administration of terror. Hollenbaugh, who had ahead spent 20 years in either bastille or accompaniment asylums, was the doubtable in a cord of shootings and break-ins throughout the area, including one that resulted in a bounded agriculturalist accident a leg.
Hollenbaugh captivated Bradnick earnest for a week, aboriginal chaining her to a timberline and again boring her through the mountains, eluding, what was at the time, the better manhunt in U.S. history. It included added than 1,000 bounded and accompaniment police, FBI agents, National Guardsmen and volunteers scouring the mountains.
On May 17, they cornered Hollenbaugh. He accursed on his pursuers, fatally acid FBI abettor Terry Anderson. He aswell dead one of the seek dogs and blood-soaked another.
Hollenbaugh was tracked to a adjoining farm, breadth he was gunned down afterwards an barter of fire.
Bob Downs remembers it well. At the time, in accession to alive construction, he endemic a little cabin not far from the freeway altering at Fort Littleton, and abounding of the FBI agents complex in the manhunt backward there, including Anderson.
He volunteered to abetment authorities, accompanying them on patrols, armed with his deer rifle. He went with a accompaniment trooper, agreeable down the turnpike, to yield the blood-soaked seek dog to the University of Pennsylvania veterinary hospital in Philadelphia, active lights and siren the absolute way. The owners of the cabin still accept a account of the dog on the bank in the lobby.
"That was the better affair to anytime appear about here," Downs, 76, now retired, said as he sipped coffee at Cutchall's Gulf, appropriate beyond accompaniment Route 522 from the Fort Littleton freeway interchange.
That was, until Sunday morning.
They were still talking about it two canicule afterwards at Cutchall's. It seems everybody in these locations stops by Cutchall's at one time or accession during the day. It's one of the few businesses off the interchange.
As the sun rose Sunday morning, a bit afore 7 a.m., a 54-year-old retired accompaniment trooper from adjoining Newville called Clarence Briggs, abysmal in debt and bankrupt, approved to rob the freeway collections from that morning, appearing, heavily armed, at the altering just as the clandestine aegis bouncer accession the receipts had arrived.
It went badly. Briggs attempt and dead Danny Crouse, a 55-year-old freeway assessment beneficiary who had been on the job for alone three months, and the aegis guard, Ronald Heist, a 71-year-old retired York City cop who formed accession tolls for York's Schaad Detective Agency.
Briggs was afterwards attempt and dead afterwards exchanging battery with accompaniment badge as he was appointment the money from the Schaad van to his car in the parking lot adjoining to Cutchall's.
Ronnie Hoffman collection appropriate through it, accession at Cutchall's for his morning coffee just afterwards Briggs had been shot. He anticipation the badge had just arrested the guy and had him on the ground. It was alone afterwards that he abstruse of the ambit of the abandon that occurred at the asleep interchange. Had he accustomed moments earlier, he would accept been active through a crossfire.
"I didn't apperceive what was traveling on," Hoffman, a 70-year-old retired agriculturalist and architecture worker. "If I'd known, I would accept gotten outta there."
Randy Miller accustomed at Cutchall's anon afterwards it happened. He absolved out against the gas pump to see what was accident and a accompaniment trooper yelled at him to get aback inside.
"I just capital to get out of there," he said.
Miller, Hoffman and his brother Willis, and an array of added locals accommodated just about every morning at Cutchall's to accept coffee, account and "tell lies to anniversary other," one of them said. They apperceive everybody and accost them if they airing in, badinage that they should be cutting dejected vests like the greeters at Walmart.
They bethink seeing Crouse endlessly in the abundance now and again for coffee. He was new, and they didn't apperceive him well. They weren't even abiding of his name, alone acumen that he was one of the two men Briggs dead afterwards they saw his account in the paper.him."
Fort Littleton isn't abundant added than the interchange. Aback in the '60s, Willis Hoffman said, the abode was jumping and home to affluence of industry. Now, the better employer in the breadth is JLG, which articles lift accessories for a array of industries. Some association hit the freeway every morning for jobs elsewhere, some active as far as Carlisle and Harrisburg for work.
And that fabricated the abandon so abundant added shocking, they said. These kinds of things, they all said, don't appear about here, in their little boondocks nestled in the Appalachians, about 20 afar west of Dejected Mountain. If bad things happen, Shaw said, it's usually humans from elsewhere, brought to Fort Littleton by the turnpike.
"It gets afterpiece and afterpiece all the time," Ronnie Hoffman said.
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