Florida authorities on Tuesday used the lost-dog trick to apprehend a Colorado fugitive who has been on the lam for 35 years.
“You seen a bulldog that we’re looking for?” a plainclothes officer yelled at a man standing in front of Gary L. McFall’s old trailer on a 5-acre wooded lot in Old Town, Fla.
The man in the front yard said he was just visiting and hadn’t seen the dog. But he yelled for McFall, who was in the trailer. When McFall came out, Dixie County sheriff’s investigator Scott Harden ran up and said, “I guess you know why we’re here.”
McFall, 62, said he had no idea. At that point, Harden told McFall he was going to lift McFall’s T-shirt to see if he had a massive scar on his chest that McFall had for much of his life.
“You got me,” McFall told Harden.
“He was a lot better about the situation than I would have been,” Harden said of McFall’s reaction.
McFall was sentenced Feb. 24, 1970, to six to 14 years in the Colorado state penitentiary for an aggravated robbery committed in Denver on March 7, 1967. McFall was later transferred to the Colorado State Hospital for observation. He escaped from there in November 1971.
Harden and Detective James Ruland of the Port Richey, Fla., Police Department teamed with two other investigators, Wesley Clark of the U.S. Marine Corps and Bill Flint of the Colorado Department of Corrections, to bring Colorado’s oldest pending escape case to a close.
Florida investigators said McFall, who went by the name of Robert Gary Davault, had turned his life around. He had no criminal record in Florida, was a member of the Baptist church, had operated a paint and body shop, married and raised two stepsons. His wife had died.
In January 2004, according to investigators, McFall slipped up.
He was in Yuma, Ariz., and had gone to Marine Corps Air Station, Yuma, saying he was a disabled veteran and wanted to cash a check on the base. According to Marine 1st Lt. Kevin Schultz, many visitors to Arizona come to the base in the winter under the same circumstances.
McFall was sent to the “pass and ID” building at the base, where military police immediately discovered discrepancies between his driver’s license and registration papers and discovered a warrant for McFall’s arrest. Because he was a civilian, the Marines couldn’t hold him and turned him over to the Yuma police.
According to Katherine Sanguinetti, spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Corrections, Yuma police let McFall go because the 1971 warrant for his arrest was valid only in Colorado, not nationwide.
After his release, Colorado authorities issued a nationwide arrest warrant. In addition, the Marines became interested in McFall after McFall started sending the U.S. Navy letters demanding $5 million for false arrest.
The four investigators teamed up. Ten days ago, they figured out that Robert Gary Davault was Gary McFall. They traced him from his old residences in Port Richey and New Port Richey to Old Town.
Harden said he won’t forget the look on McFall’s face.
“He just stood there with a ‘deer in the headlight’ look,” Harden said.
Ruland said McFall told him he had “been waiting for this moment for 35 years.”
“He said he had had a phone in his hand waiting to call to turn himself in” many times over the years, Ruland said.
Staff writer Howard Pankratz can be reached at 303-820-1939 or hpankratz@denverpost.com.
