Mystery Man in the Mountains

This story caught my eye.  I think that a lot of people here have thought about changing their name, burning their clothes and disappearing into the woods. For most, it is a dream, idealized and romanticized.  It wouldn’t be as easy as we daydream about.  If you’ve ever read about Eric Rudolph, you understand that flying under the radar is a full time job.  Extract the heinous crimes that Rudolph committed and it is an interesting story of survival.

While Rudolph sits in his cell here in Colorado, there’s someone new making headlines.  Who?  The authorities don’t really know.  They have their suspicions, but no hard evidence.  No matching finger  prints, just clues about the way that this man lives and what he is capable of doing.

In southern Utah, a game camera took the picture above.  Do you suppose that’s an SKS or an AK on his shoulder?  I don’t see a bayonet lug on the bottom of the barrel.  Most SKS’s have them.

Authorities believe that this man is responsible for over two dozen burglaries in the past few years.  Dude’s M.O. is pretty hard to figure out.  Sometimes he breaks into a cabin and takes high end contents and leaves a mess, other times he has broken in, cracked open a gun safe, laid out all of the guns as if to admire them, then left the cabin – without the weapons.

Authorities have stated that they think that this man could be one of the FLDS “Lost Boys”, a young man kicked out of a fundamentalist Mormon sect so that the elder men in the group could marry the girls that were his age.  Thinning the competition, so to speak.

The theory above interests me.  If that is the case, the young man is doing what he needs to do to survive.  The media implies that he gets his supplies out of the cabins that he breaks into, but I guarantee that if this man has been on the run through the wilderness for the past five years, he knows more than a little about the woods.

Interesting story.  What is your theory?

Pax Domini,

MOH