SALT LAKE CITY — He’s eluded authorities for more than five years, a mountain man who roams the wilderness of southern Utah, breaking into remote cabins in winter, living in luxury off hot food, alcohol and coffee before stealing provisions and vanishing into the woods.
Investigators have clawed for clues, scouring cabins for fingerprints that have turned up no matches and chasing reports of brief encounters only to come up short, always a step behind the mysterious freeloader.
They’ve found abandoned camps, dozens of guns, high-end outdoor gear stolen from the homes and trash strewn around the forest floor.
But the man authorities say is armed and dangerous and responsible for more than two dozen burglaries has continued to outrun the law across a swath of mountains not far from Zion National Park. He has roamed across 1,000 square miles of rugged wilderness where snow can pile 10 feet deep in winter.
Although there have been no violent confrontations, detectives say he’s a time bomb. Lately he has been leaving the cabins in disarray and riddled with bullets after defacing religious icons, and a recent note left behind in one cabin warned, “Get off my mountain.”
“You wouldn’t want to come across that guy,” said Iron County Detective Jody Edwards, who has been working the case since 2007.
Theories about his identity have ranged from two men on the FBI’s Most Wanted List — one sought for the 2004 killing of an armored-truck guard in Phoenix, another for killing his wife and two children in Arizona. Some also have speculated the man might be a castaway from the nearby compounds of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the polygamous sect run by jailed leader Warren Jeffs.
The FBI recently discounted the theory that he was the fugitive sought in the armored-truck-guard killing after authorities got the first pictures of the mountain man from a motion-triggered surveillance camera outside a cabin. The photos — showing a sandy-haired man in camouflage on snowshoes, a rifle slung over his shoulder — were taken sometime in December.
“We believe that is not Jason Derek Brown,” said FBI special agent Manuel Johnson.
Edwards wasn’t so quick to rule out the possibility, given the close resemblance to the 42-year-old Brown, who was raised Mormon and is a highly educated, well-traveled avid outdoorsman.
Johnson said the FBI has considered the possibility that the cabin burglar might be Robert William Fisher, described as a survivalist, hunter and angler who authorities say killed his family, then blew up their house in Scottsdale, Ariz., in 2001. However, Johnson has doubts that Fisher, at 50 years old, is the man in the surveillance photos. That man appears much younger.
So while detectives believe they are getting close, buoyed by the recent photos, the shadowy survivalist remains an enigma. No missing-person report appears to fit, and fingerprints lifted from cabins have yielded no match.
Meanwhile, cabin owners are growing more frightened by the day and are left wondering who might be sleeping in their beds this winter.
“He’s scaring the daylights out of cabin owners. Now, everyone’s packing guns,” said Jud Hendrickson, a 62-year-old mortgage adviser from nearby St. George who keeps a trailer in the area.
