MONROE – Six years into his prison sentence for shooting a Seattle police officer, Michael Ansel Dunaway vanished.
Dunaway, then 32, walked away from the minimum-security honor farm at the Washington State Reformatory in Monroe. Guards taking a routine inmate count on Aug. 27, 1982, saw
Dunaway in his bunk just after 6 a.m., according prison records.
Two hours later, there was a dummy in his place.
Dunaway allegedly fashioned a fake, snoozing inmate using a canvas-stuffed plastic bag, a Thermos bottle and several pairs of shoes. The hodgepodge was laid out under his prison-issued blanket.
Dunaway remained on the lam for 23 years.
Turns out he was living 1,100 miles away under a fake identity — that of his paraplegic nephew.
Federal authorities in 2005 caught up with the longtime fugitive in Keith County, Neb. He was married, had kids and kept to himself, except when he was slinging food at a truck stop, according to 2005 news reports from the Lincoln Journal Star.
Dunaway came to the attention of Social Security investigators after his nephew, who lived in Wisconsin, complained that he wasn’t getting his disability checks. Dunaway had hijacked the man’s Social Security number a decade earlier.
Dunaway, now 61, is back behind bars in Washington. He was transferred in March from a Nebraska federal lockup to the Washington Corrections Center in Shelton.
He’s here to serve the rest of his sentence for the 1975 shootout with a Seattle police officer, prison officials said. Dunaway opened fire on the beat cop during a traffic stop. The officer survived the gunfire, and Dunaway was arrested the next day.
Dunaway now is facing a new felony. Snohomish County prosecutors recently charged him with first-degree escape for his 1982 disappearing act.
Snohomish County deputy prosecutor Sherry King said it’s the oldest active case she’s come across.
About a month after Dunaway disappeared, the prosecutor’s office received a letter from the prison’s then-superintendent, Kenneth DuCharme. The letter explained that Dunaway had “effected an escape” and “remained at large,” according to court papers.
The charging papers offer few details about how Dunaway made it undetected away from the farm.
The incident report attached to the DuCharme’s letter detailed some of the investigation, including interviews with other honor farm inmates. They told investigators that Dunaway was having problems with his girlfriend, who lived in Vancouver, Wash. They also said that Dunaway was eager to sell off his few prison possessions.
Prosecutors filed an escape charge in Everett District Court in 1982. A judge issued a warrant for his arrest. The charge and warrant remained filed in district court for nearly 30 years — a bad break for Dunaway.
If prosecutors hadn’t filed the charge back then, the statute of limitations would have long ago been up on the escape charge.
Dunaway is expected to be locked up until at least 2015 — that’s the time left on his 1976 convictions.
He could be facing more time in prison if convicted of escape. He won’t be going back to the honor farm — the state Department of Corrections in 2001 shut down the 72-year-old operation.
Dunaway’s already served about four years in a federal prison in Nebraska. Authorities there busted him for using his nephew’s identity to buy a .22-caliber pistol.
Shortly after he was arrested, Dunaway gave an interview to a reporter at the Lincoln Journal Star. Known as Jim Schultz to his wife and folks around Ogallala, Neb., he provided sketchy details about his prison break.
He offered up a few more details of his life on the run.
Dunaway kept to himself and didn’t stay out late. He avoided drinking too much in public, fearing a loose tongue would be his undoing.
“It’s more stringent parole than anything they could’ve ever come up with,” Dunaway told the newspaper.
Dunaway said he knew federal authorities were onto him. He’d broke the news about his double life to his wife a few months before his arrest. She doubted his story and chalked it up to another one of her husband’s tall tales.
She later told the reporter she was selling the house, along with her husband’s possessions.
Dunaway told the Lincoln Journal Star he had thought about running again, but he didn’t have another fresh start in him.
Instead, he found peace behind bars. He was sleeping better. His blood pressure had dropped.
“You couldn’t blast me out of here if you tried,” Dunaway said after his arrest.
Diana Hefley: 425-339-3463; hefley@heraldnet.com.
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