How Cops Caught the Last Real Hermit in America
Illustration/(AP Photo/Andy Molloy, Kennebec Journal)

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Crime

How Cops Caught the Last Real Hermit in America

The story of a man living in the woods alone for almost three decades, terrorizing locals and spawning a legend—until one determined cop trapped him.

The following is an excerpt from Michael Finkel's new bookThe Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit, out Tuesday, March 7.

The trees are mostly skinny where the hermit lives, but they're tangled over giant boulders with deadfall everywhere like pick-up sticks. There are no trails. Navigation, for nearly everyone, is a thrashing, branch-snapping ordeal, and at dark the place seems impenetrable.

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This is when the hermit moves. He waits until midnight, shoulders his backpack and his bag of break-in tools, and sets out from camp. A penlight is clipped to a chain around his neck, but he doesn't need it yet. Every step is memorized.

He threads through the forest with precision and grace, twisting, striding, hardly a twig broken. On the ground there are still mounds of snow, sun-cupped and dirty, and slicks of mud—springtime, central Maine—but he avoids all of it. He bounds from rock to root to rock without a boot-print left behind.

One print, the hermit fears, might be enough to give him away. Secrecy is a fragile state, a single time undone and forever finished. A boot-print, if you're truly committed, is therefore not allowed, not once. Too risky. So he glides like a ghost between the hemlocks and maples and white birches and elms until he emerges at the rocky shoreline of a frozen pond.

It has a name, Little Pond, often called Little North Pond, though the hermit doesn't know it. He's stripped the world to his essentials, and proper names are not essential. He knows the season, intimately, its every gradation. He knows the moon, a sliver less than half tonight, waning. Typically, he'd await the new moon—darker is better—but his hunger had become critical. He knows the hour and minute. He's wearing an old windup watch to ensure that he budgets enough time to return before daybreak. He doesn't know, at least not without calculating, the year or the decade.

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His intention is to cross the frozen water, but this plan is fast abandoned. The day had been relatively warm, a couple of ticks above freezing—the temperature he knows—and while he'd hunkered in his camp, the weather had worked against him. Solid ice is a gift to trackless stealth, but this touch of softness will emboss every footfall.

So the long way it is, back in the trees with the roots and the rocks. He knows the whole hopscotch for miles, all around Little North Pond and then to the farthest reaches of North Pond itself. He passes a dozen cabins, modest wood-sided vacation homes, unpainted, shut tight for the off-season. He's been inside many of them, but now is not the time. For nearly an hour he continues, still attempting to avoid footprints or broken branches. Some roots he's stepped on so often that they're worn smooth from repetition. Even knowing this, no tracker could ever find him.

He stops just before reaching his destination, the Pine Tree summer camp. The camp isn't open, but maintenance has been around, and they've probably left some food in the kitchen, and there's likely leftovers from last season. From the shadow of the forest he observes the Pine Tree property, scanning the bunkhouses, the tool shop, the rec center, the dining hall. No one. A couple of cars are in the lot, as usual. Still, he waits. You can never be too cautious.

Eventually he's ready. Motion-detecting floodlights and cameras are scattered around the Pine Tree grounds, installed chiefly because of him, but these are a joke. Their boundaries are fixed—learn where they are and keep away. The hermit zigzags across the camp and stops at a specific rock, turns it over, grabs the key hidden beneath, and pockets it for later use. Then he climbs a slope to the parking lot and tests each vehicle's doors. A Ford pickup opens. He clicks on his pen-light and peeks inside.

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Candy! Always good. Ten rolls of Smarties, tossed in the cup holders. He stuffs them in another pocket. He also takes a rain poncho, unopened in its packaging, and a silver-colored Armitron analog watch. It's not an expensive watch—if it looks valuable, the hermit will not steal it. He has a moral code. But extra watches are important; when you live outside with rain and snow, breakage is inevitable.

He vectors past a few more motion cameras to a back door of the dining hall. Here he sets down his canvas gym bag of break-in tools and unzips it. Inside is a pair of putty knives, a paint scraper, a Leatherman multi-tool, several long-necked flathead screwdrivers, and three backup flashlights, among other items. He knows this door—it's already slightly scraped and dented from his work—and he selects a screwdriver and slots it into the gap between the door and frame, near the knob.

One expert twist and the door pops open, and he slips inside.

Penlight on, clamped in his mouth. He's in the large camp kitchen, light flashing over stainless steel, a ceiling rack of sleeping ladles. Right turn, five paces, and to the pantry. He removes his backpack and scans the metal shelves. He grabs two tubs of coffee and drops them into his pack. Also some tortellini, a bag of marshmallows, a breakfast bar, and a pack of Humpty Dumpty potato chips.

What he really desires is at the other end of the kitchen, and he heads there now, takes out the key he'd collected from beneath the rock, and inserts it into the handle of the walk-in freezer. The key is attached to a plastic four-leaf-clover key chain with one of the leaves partially broken off. A three-and- a-half-leaf clover, perhaps still lucky yet. The handle turns and he enters the freezer, and the evening's entire mission, all the meticulous effort, feels immediately rewarded.

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He is deeply, almost dangerously hungry. Back at his tent, his edible supplies are a couple of crackers, some ground coffee, and a few packets of artificial sweetener. That's it. If he'd waited much longer, he would have risked becoming tent-bound from weakness. He shines his light on boxes of hamburger patties and blocks of cheese, bags of sausage and packs of bacon. His heart leaps and his stomach calls and he sets upon the food, loading it into his backpack; smorgasbord.

Jacket image courtesy of Knopf

Terry Hughes's wife nudges him awake and he hears the beeps and he's out of bed like a spring uncoiled, game on. Quick check of the monitor then a dash down the stairs, where everything's in place: gun, flashlight, cell phone, handcuffs, sneakers. Duty belt. Duty belt? No time, forget the belt, now jump in the truck and head off.

A right onto Oak Ridge, then left in a half mile, accelerating down the long driveway to the Pine Tree Camp. Headlights are off but the truck's still noisy, so he throws it in park and vaults out of the cab. He continues on foot, fast as he can though less agile than usual. The lack of a belt means his hands are encumbered with gear.

Even so, it's full speed toward the dining hall, hurdling boulders, dodging trees, then a crouching scuttle to an exterior window. Heart pulsing like a hummingbird's; from his bed to the window in four minutes flat.

Hughes takes a breath. Then he cautiously lifts his head and steals a peek through the window, straining his eyes against the dimness of the Pine Tree kitchen. And he sees it: a person carrying a flashlight, the pale beam emanating from the open door of the walk-in freezer. Could this really, after all these years, be him? It must be. Hughes is still in his pajama pants, and he pats the clip-on holster on his waistband to make sure—yes, his weapon's there, a little Glock .357 Sig. Loaded. No safety switch.

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The beam brightens and Hughes tenses and out of the freezer steps a man, hauling a backpack. He's not quite what Hughes expected. The man is bigger, for one thing, and cleaner, his face freshly shaved. He's wearing large nerdy eyeglasses and a wool ski cap; he roams the kitchen, seemingly unconcerned, selecting items as if in a grocery store.

Hughes permits himself a flicker of satisfaction. There are rare perfect moments in law enforcement, as Sergeant Hughes well knows. He's been a Maine game warden for 18 years, and before that, for nearly a decade, he was a US Marine. You might as well award him a Ph.D in grunt work, dead ends, and paper filing. But once in a beautiful while, wisdom gained through frustration pays dividends.

A few weeks previous, Hughes had resolved to end the reign of the hermit. He knew that none of the usual police methods were likely to work. After a quarter-century of intermittent investigations, including foot searches, flyovers, and fingerprint dusting, conducted by four separate law enforcement agencies—two county sheriff's departments, the state police, and the game warden service—no one had even figured out the hermit's name. So Hughes questioned experts in high-tech surveillance, he brainstormed with private detectives, he spitballed ideas with friends from the military. Nothing they came up with felt right.

He phoned some acquaintances working border patrol up at Rangeley, near the Maine-Quebec crossing. It turned out that one of the guys had just returned from a training camp in which new Homeland Security equipment had been introduced—devices that offered a better method of tracking people who tried to sneak across borders. This was closely guarded technology, Hughes was told, far too sophisticated for anything a game warden might need. It sounded ideal. Hughes vowed to keep quiet about the specifics, and soon three border patrol agents were tromping around the Pine Tree kitchen.

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They hid one sensor behind the ice machine, another on the juice dispenser. The data-receiving unit was installed in Hughes's home, at the top of the stairs, so that the alarm beeps would be audible in every room. Hughes devoted himself to learning the system until operating the device felt intuitive.

This was not enough. To trap the hermit, he could afford little margin for sloppiness. An errant noise while Hughes approached, an inadvertent glint from his flashlight, and his plan would probably fail. He memorized the motion lights, located the best spot to ditch his truck, and rehearsed every move from his house to the camp, shaving off seconds with each practice run. He made it a nightly habit to set out all his gear; the duty-belt oversight only proved he was human. Then he waited. It took two weeks. The beeps—first heard by his wife, Kim—came shortly after one o'clock in the morning.

All that, plus luck, for this perfect law enforcement moment. Hughes spies through the window as the burglar methodically fills his pack. No gray areas here; no circumstantial evidence. He has him dead to rights. And at the Pine Tree Camp, no less. Pine Tree caters to children and adults with physical and developmental disabilities—it's a nonprofit organization, run off donations. Hughes is a longtime volunteer. He sometimes fishes with the campers on North Pond, catching bass and white perch. What kind of a guy breaks into a summer camp for disabled people, over and over?

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Hughes eases away from the building, keeping his head low, and quietly makes a cell-phone call. Game wardens don't typically work burglary cases—usually it's more illegal hunters or lost hikers—and this effort has been chiefly a spare time obsession. He asks the dispatch office of the Maine State Police to alert Trooper Diane Vance, who has also been chasing the hermit. They've been colleagues forever, Hughes and Vance, both graduating from their respective academies the same year, then working together on and off for nearly two decades. His idea is to let Vance handle the arrest. And the paperwork. He returns to the window to keep guard.

As Hughes watches, the man cinches his pack and heaves it to his shoulders. He departs the kitchen and disappears from Hughes's view, into the vast empty dining room. He's moving toward an exit, Hughes surmises, a different one from the door he'd pried open. Instinctively, Hughes maneuvers around the building to the spot where the man seems to be headed. This exterior door, like all the ones to the Pine Tree dining hall, is painted cherry red, trimmed with a green wooden frame. Hughes is without help, deep in the night, seconds away from a potentially violent encounter.

It's a complicated instant, a fraught decision.

He is as prepared as possible for whatever might happen, fistfight to shootout. Hughes is 44 years old but still as strong as a rookie, with a jarhead haircut and a paper-crease jawline. He teaches hand-to-hand defensive tactics at the Maine Criminal Justice Academy. No way he's going to step aside and let the intruder go. The opportunity to disrupt a felony in progress overrides all concerns.

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The burglar, Hughes thinks, is probably a military vet, and therefore likely armed. Maybe this guy's combat ability is as good as his forest skills. Hughes holds his position by the cherry-red door, Glock in his right hand, flashlight in his left, his back against the building's wall. He waits, running the contingencies through his mind, until he hears a small clink and sees the door handle turning.

The burglar steps out of the dining hall and Hughes flips on his Maglite, blazing it directly in the man's eyes, and trains the .357 square in the center of his nose, steadying his gun hand atop his flashlight hand, both arms extended. The two men are maybe a body's length apart, so Hughes hops back a few feet—he doesn't want the guy lunging at him—while ferociously bellowing a single phrase: "Get on the ground! Get on the ground! Get on the ground!"

Warden Service Sgt. Terry Hughes, left, and State Police Trooper Diane Perkins-Vance talk about capturing Christopher Knight during a news conference on Wednesday April 10, 2013 in Augusta, Maine. (Photo by Joe Phelan/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images)

As Diane Vance drives through the dark toward the Pine Tree Camp, all she knows is that Terry Hughes is in a risky situation, without backup, pursuing a man with an amazing ability to disappear. She's pretty certain that by the time she gets there, the guy will be gone. Or worse. He could have a gun; he could use it. This is why she's wearing a bulletproof vest. Hughes, she's aware, is not.

Vance drives past the forest-green Maine Warden Service truck stashed beside the Pine Tree driveway and heads directly to the dining hall. There's no sign of anyone. She steps from her squad car, wary, and calls out, "Sergeant Hughes? Sergeant Hughes?"

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"I'm ten forty-six!" comes his response—Maine State Police code for suspect in custody—and Vance's concern promptly eases. Around a corner of the building she sees a scattered mess of food and a man lying on his stomach, arms behind his back. Upon being confronted by Hughes, the thief, stunned, had dropped to the cold cement without resistance. Only he's not completely in custody. The man is wearing a thick winter jacket, and the sleeves are interfering with Hughes's attempts to secure the handcuffs. Vance swoops in and restrains the suspect with her own set of cuffs, and now he's fully ten forty-six.

The officers guide the man into a sitting position, then help him to his feet. They pull everything out of his pockets—a pile of Smarties, the Armitron watch, the clover key chain—and check his backpack and gym bag for weapons. He could be a bomber, a terrorist, a murderer; the officers have no idea. They find only a Leatherman. The tool is engraved, commemorating the Pine Tree Camp overnight of 2000, 13 years earlier.

The man is obeying the officers' commands but is not answering questions. He avoids eye contact. During their pat-down and search, the officers were unable to locate any identification. He did have a wallet on him, camo-patterned with a velcro closure, but inside is only a sheaf of cash. The money is clearly very old, some of it moldy.

It's late, 2 AM, but Hughes phones the Pine Tree Camp's facilities director, Harvey Chesley, who says he'll be on his way. Hughes has a master key that allows him access to the dining hall—Chesley had given it to him, with his blessing; anything to catch the hermit—and he unlocks a door, flips on the lights, and he and Vance escort the suspect back inside the place he just burglarized.

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The dining room is cavernous and echoey, an expanse of blue linoleum beneath a vaulted ceiling of immense spruce rafters. It's the off-season, and all the tables and chairs are stacked against the walls. There is a row of windows on the pond side of the hall, but there's nothing to see in the dark.

Hughes and Vance drag a metal-framed chair with a maroon plastic seat into the center of the room, and they sit the suspect down, hands still locked behind his back.

The officers slide a folding table in front of him, then Vance also sits down, while Hughes remains standing. The man is still not speaking. The expression on his face appears blank and calm. It's unsettling; a person who has just been arrested after a sudden encounter should not be silent and impassive. Hughes wonders if he's insane.

(Photo by Andy Molloy/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images)

The man is wearing new-looking blue jeans, a hooded gray sweatshirt beneath a nice Columbia jacket, and sturdy work boots. It's like he has just gone shopping at the mall. His backpack is from LL Bean. Only his eyeglasses, with chunky plastic frames, seem outdated. There's no dirt on him anywhere, and little more than a shading of stubble on his chin. He has no noticeable body odor. His thinning hair, mostly covered by his wool cap, is neatly cropped. His skin is strangely pale, with several scabs on his wrists. He's a little over six feet tall and broad-shouldered, maybe 180 pounds.

Vance, like many officers who've searched for the hermit, always suspected that most of the story was mythical. Now she feels more certain. No way did this guy emerge from the woods. He has a home somewhere, or a hotel room, and was just coming around to burglarize places.

The camp facilities director, Chesley, soon arrives, as do the camp's maintenance man and, later, another game warden. Chesley immediately identifies the watch the officers had removed from the suspect's pocket. It belongs to his son, Alex, who'd left it in his truck, parked in the Pine Tree lot. The timepiece was not valuable but did have sentimental meaning; it had been a gift to Alex from his grandfather. The watch on the suspect's wrist, meanwhile, is claimed by the maintenance man, Steve Treadwell—it had been given to him by the Sappi Fine Paper Company, marking his 25th year of working at the Skowhegan plant.

There's a lot of commotion in the room, and the suspect's composure starts to fade. He remains seated and quiet but is soon visibly suffering, his arms shaking. Then Hughes has an idea. His confrontation with the man had been threatening and traumatic, but perhaps Vance can create a calmer atmosphere. Hughes herds all the men through a swinging door into the kitchen, leaving Vance alone with the suspect.

For a little while, she lets the air in the dining hall settle. She's followed this case, intrigued and bemused, for the entirety of her 18 years on the force. She switches the handcuffs so the man's arms are in front and he can sit more comfortably. Hughes comes out with bottles of water and a plate of cookies, then retreats to the kitchen. Vance removes the handcuffs completely. The man takes a drink. He's been in custody for more than an hour and a half. Perhaps he's realized there will be no disappearing this time. Calmly, evenly, Vance reads him his rights. He has the right to remain silent. She asks for his name.

"My name is Christopher Thomas Knight," says the hermit.

From The Stranger in the Woodsby Michael Finkel. Copyright © 2017 by Michael Finkel. Published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.