Born to Lose (20 page)

Linda was nearly finished shopping but dawdled over small items for the next day's party. Finally, she approached the checkout counter, where she was greeted by cashier Mary Green, who rang up the red wagon and, among other things, party hats, cake decorations, and a “Happy Birthday” banner. Another employee put Linda's purchases in two bags and Linda said she could take it from there. Then Linda, with Lori Mae holding on, walked out of the store—and onto the most sordid page of Maryland crime.

“I just looked at my watch,” Shirley Clites recalled, “wondering when Luther would come out with the paint. It was 1:00 P.M. I saw a very pretty lady and a little girl come out of the store. The first thing I noticed was the blonde hair on the little girl, because I've always loved blonde hair. As they got closer to their car, I saw the man in the white Chevy get out of his car and walk down to the side of her car.”

When he saw the girl and her baby come out of the store, Hoss got out of the white Chevy, taking with him the items he wanted. He wouldn't be returning. The J. C. Higgins revolver was stuck in his waistband. He gauged his gait to arrive at the GTO the same moment as the mother and child.

Linda had reached the driver's side of her car. Letting go of Lori Mae's hand and putting her purchases on the ground so she could open the car door, she was surprised to see a man come out of nowhere, standing not two feet from her. Linda's back was to her driver's door, and Lori Mae was standing beside her. The man faced her, standing altogether too close for someone she did not recognize. Before she could blink, the man threatened, “If you open your mouth, I will blow your head off.” It was only then that Linda saw the gun. He held it low, at his belt. She grabbed for Lori Mae's hand. “Hear me?” the man said. “I'm not playing around. Get in the car.”

Shirley Clites, her car parked beside the GTO but on its passenger side, watched as the man said something to the young woman. “They spoke for a few seconds,” Clites said, “but I couldn't hear them. It didn't seem so unusual but something nagged at me. In the next moment, the woman got behind the wheel while the man got in the back with the child, him seated directly behind the woman.”

Just as Clites witnessed this interchange, Bob Mullen and his wife, BeLinda, were walking toward Kings through the parking lot. BeLinda recalled “seeing a GTO, and I liked that car so I paid attention to it. There was a man standing there wearing a blue denim jacket and dark pants, and he needed a shave. He was there with a girl I thought I recognized. I said to Bob, ‘Isn't that the girl you went to school with?' He looked over his shoulder and
maybe didn't see her and he just kept walking. Going by, I took another look at the GTO and it seemed to me the guy and girl were having an argument, then they were getting in the car. Maybe it was her brother or something. It was none of my business. I caught up with Bob and we went in the store.”

Shirley Clites continued to watch as the three occupants of the GTO got situated. “The baby in the back with the man,” Clites said, “was not properly secured in the car seat. The woman kept looking back at the little girl. The woman was also looking either out her side of the window or straight ahead. All this took place in a brief time, half a minute or so.”

Then came the few seconds that would come to haunt Shirley Clites for the rest of her life: “The woman turned her head my way. She looked me in the face and pulled the door lock either up or down while looking at me. Our eyes were locked. I heard her say to the man, ‘You won't hurt her, will you?' But then the key was turned and the car moved forward. The little girl was crying as they drove away.”

Inside the store, Bob and BeLinda Mullen stopped by the window and waited for the GTO to come around. “She was driving, the girl I thought Bob knew,” recalled BeLinda. “There was someone in the back, but he was down in the seat like you couldn't see too much and I thought the baby was in the front. Bob said, ‘Yeah, that's Linda, we graduated together,' and then we went about our business.”

The GTO turned left out of the lot onto Route 40. Hoss had already climbed from the back into the front passenger seat. Linda Peugeot's first cousin, Norman Gordon, was at a gas station only a mile from Kings. “At a distance, I seen a GTO I thought was Linda's,” Gordon remembered. “I watched it go by and it was sure enough her. There was someone else in the car but I couldn't see who it was. I just thought it was her mother. They were heading toward Eckhart, so I guessed they were going to my house because they come up all the time. So when I got home, asked my wife, I said, ‘Are they here?' and she said no.”

“When my brother came out of Kings,” Shirley Clites said, “I told him what I saw and said it didn't look right. When I got home I called my sister-in-law, Shelby Gable. The next day Shelby called me and said she heard on the radio a woman and her daughter were missing. I called Deputy Sheriff Tyree because I knew him. In no time him and two other officers were at my house. Sheriff Tyree told me if I had had a newer car it might have been me. I drove a '56 Chevy with a wire hanger for an antenna. I relive this day over and over again. I wish I'd done something different but it was the late sixties and this just never happened in Cumberland, Maryland.”

Eight miles west from LaVale on Route 40, Linda Peugeot pulled into a gas station. She listened to instructions from her captor. “ … And if you don't act right,” she heard, “you're dead, but the baby gets it first.”

Linda spoke as normally as she could to the attendant, then used money from her purse to pay for the filled-up tank. As they left the station, Linda was told to keep going west on Route 40; twenty minutes later, the gun-toting man beside her said, “See the 219 sign? Take it north.” Linda did so, and in a dozen minutes the GTO had crossed the Mason-Dixon Line into Pennsylvania.

Linda often looked in the rearview mirror to check on Lori Mae, who was alternately crying, fussing, or merely staring wide-eyed at her mother or at the strange man who, her child's sense told her, was not nice. At times, Linda would reach her hand back to touch her daughter and say soothing things. After a few such gestures, Linda heard, “For Christ's sake, stop that. You're gonna wreck the car. Keep both hands on the wheel and keep drivin'!”

After passing through Meyersdale, Pennsylvania, Linda spoke to her abductor. “Sir, I don't know what to say. I can barely think of what has happened here, but won't you please let us go? We'll just stop and get out, and Lori Mae and I—that's my daughter's name, you know, Lori Mae, and mine is Linda— we'll get out real fast and walk away. The car means nothing, please have it. We can walk and find a ride home … so, does that sound okay?”

Linda started to slow the car, hoping her idea was acceptable. It wasn't. She saw the gun point her way. “Don't slow down, don't speed either. Stay on this road and keep goin'.”

The next town north, Berlin, had come and gone. The man remained uncommunicative. He had pulled out a map and was studying it. The gun was on the floorboard at his feet, but Linda had no chance to make a successful grab at it, even if she had been able to muster the courage for the attempt. “Where do you want to go?” she asked.

No answer.

“Can I ask you your name?”

Hoss then answered both questions. “Canada, and no, you can't ask me my name.”

Linda sensed that the man was less agitated, less threatening. Maybe he too was scared over all of this and was himself looking for a way out. Linda, by no means sure of herself and barely able to control her own fear, thought it would be better to talk with him than not.

“I don't understand this,” Linda began. “We were only shopping … tomorrow's Lori Mae's birthday. She's two, and I was getting some things for the
party …” Lori Mae began crying again in the backseat, and Linda lost it up front, bursting into tears herself. She knew her words made no sense. What would a man like this one care about shopping or birthday plans? No longer trying to placate her captor, Linda instead cried out, “Why me? Why us?”

Both females crying at once got on Hoss's nerves. He told Linda to shut up and to do something about the baby. Earlier, not far out of Frostburg where the gasoline was purchased, Hoss had rifled through Linda's purse. In the parking lot at Kings, noticing that both the woman and her baby were dressed nicely, he'd figured there could be a fair amount of money in her purse, but he found less than ten dollars. Still, the getaway car was the right choice. If it came to it, the Goat's powerful engine would outrun a cop car.

To quiet Linda, Hoss said, “All right, cut the cryin' an' I'll let you go in Johnstown.” This news brought considerable relief to Linda. She wondered if her kidnapper was lying, but why would he be? After all, it made perfect sense to drop her and Lori Mae off somewhere. He'd taken her car and money and she did not know his identity. What point would there be in keeping them any longer? With this in mind, Linda did all she could to calm herself and her confused daughter.

Hoss forced Linda to do all the driving. More than once, he cautioned her to drive carefully, stick to the speed limit. Occasionally, when she felt it was safe to do so, Linda would ask a question.

“How close is Johnstown?”

“'Bout an hour up the road.”

“Will you keep the car?”

“Why, do you want it back?”

“No, no I don't. I want my baby and me to be safe. We'll walk. We'll be fine.”

Now and again, Hoss would absently pick up the gun, sometimes tracing a trail on his map with the barrel. When he laid it down, it was always out of Linda's reach. Hoss could not see his hostage making a bold move anyway. She was very nervous, eyes filled with tears, and worried over her daughter. She would grip the steering wheel to keep her hands from shaking. Even in this condition, Hoss thought, this Linda girl was as pretty up close as she'd been at a distance, when he first saw her in the parking lot. Yeah, he mused, real pretty.

“What will you tell the cops?”

“Nothing. I won't call them. Nothing at all. I'll call my Mom. She'll come to get me and then if I have to say anything, I'll say I, uh, was driving and got lost and wound up in Pennsylvania. Then I'll say I took Lori Mae into a store
and when we came back out, the car was gone. Someone took it. I don't care if you get away. Nothing matters like that. I promise, I won't say a thing.”

At the time of utterance, Linda may have believed her fantastic statements, but Hoss knew for sure that, once out of his clutches, she'd be spilling her guts to the first citizen or cop she laid eyes on, remembering every detail of his dress and appearance and giving, of course, a perfect description of her car.

At the southern reaches of Johnstown, with high hope of release from this nightmare, Linda tendered a suggestion. “Here we are. Here's Johnstown, where you're going to let us off. Can we drive close to downtown? Then you can go, and I'll call home.”

“No, I don't want to get too close to town. There might be roadblocks up.”

At first, Linda thought he was referring to road construction, then it hit her like a slam in the stomach. She'd already figured he was on the run from something, from the law, that he'd robbed some place and couldn't get back to his car or it wouldn't start, so that's why he'd forced her to drive him away, but surely roadblocks wouldn't be set up in Pennsylvania for a crime in Maryland—unless what happened was so serious … Oh, God, what has he done?

“I want you to take this next road coming up on the right, to Scalp and Elton. We'll get on 160 and that'll take us up around north of Johnstown till we can get back on 219.”

Panicked, Linda said loudly, almost a yell, “But what about Johnstown?” Hoss told her not to worry, that he'd let her off a little further north.

After going through the tiny communities of Salix, Sidman, and Saint Michael, the GTO reunited with 219, the same road they'd been on since minutes after the kidnapping, while still in Maryland. Hoss again pulled out his map. He noticed that Pittsburgh lay directly west about 70 miles. He wondered what was going on there. He thought of Jodine. He wanted to see her, but that would have to wait. He'd talk to her soon, though. He'd have to, just to hear her voice for a minute or two.

Linda screamed out of frustration, snapping Hoss away from his thoughts. “You liar! Why aren't we stopping? Take the car and go! I'm pulling over.”

“You stop an' I'll kill ya!” Hoss yelled. Linda kept braking. Only when the gun barrel poked hard into her ribs did she relent.

This shouting match scared Lori Mae into an incessant wail which further shortened Hoss's temper, making him spew more threats in Linda's direction. After a very unsettling ten minutes, Lori Mae's wails subsided into crying, then whimpering. Finally she fell quiet.

Hoss kept his voice low. “If you go off screamin' again and get that kid goin', I swear …”

On edge, exhausted, Linda pleaded, “Let us go. I don't know what you're running from but I'm no good to you and you don't like children around you. Lori Mae's just scared, you should know. We're only holding you back. We have to go home.”

“I'll think about it, but you have to shut up and keep your kid from cryin' every damn mile.”

. . .

In and around Cumberland, Maryland, it was a gorgeous day of 70 degrees. There was not a whiff of anything awry save for that little scraping in the mind of Shirley Clites, who'd thought she'd seen something amiss in Kings parking lot.

Edna Thompson had cleaned her stove and finished other housework. She looked at her watch. It was 3:30 P.M. Her husband would be home in two hours, while her daughter and little Lori Mae ought to be home any minute.

Driving all this time at a criminal's mercy had strained Linda close to the breaking point. She had never been this far north into Pennsylvania. Also, since bypassing Johnstown, Linda had seen no other towns of note. Seeing virtually nothing but fields, hills, and woods made her feel all the more isolated. Hoss's refusal to release them in Johnstown had been a crushing blow to Linda. Then her captor's promise to drop them off “a little further north” came to nothing. When Linda brought it up, Hoss would tell her to relax, it would just be a little bit more, or he'd become volatile and wave the gun, making the atmosphere inside the GTO unbearable, hideous.