Alleged cabin burglar ends long run in wilderness
SALTLAKECITY— Troy James Knapp was dodging authorities, again.
The fugitive with a fondness for whiskey and a dislike of living near people had been wanted for a string of break-ins over a period of several years in Utah’s mountains.
Knapp survived by holing up inside the cabins, sleeping in the owners’ beds, eating their food and listening to their AMradios for updates on the manhunt. And then, authorities say, he would take off, stealing items such as guns and high-end camping equipment and vanishing into the woods where he lived off dandelions and wild game. Over the weekend, authorities were on his trail. By Tuesday, his life on the lam came to an end, done in by an educated guess by searchers who had grown to know his tendencies, the tracks he left with his snowshoes and the sounds of him chopping wood outside a cabin near a mountain reservoir.
In trouble early
Now in police custody, Knapp is telling authorities how he managed to evade them for so long across a mountainous region stretching for 180 miles.
“He really has a fascinating story to tell, and right now he’s willing to tell it,” Sanpete County Sheriff Brian Nielson said.
Knapp, born in Saginaw, Mich., got into trouble with the law early. As a teenager, he was convicted of breaking and entering, passing bad checks and unlawful flight from authorities, according to court records. His most serious offense, an arrest for felony assault in Michigan, was reduced in 1994 to a charge of malicious destruction of property after he agreed to plead guilty.
“He says, ‘I don’t hate people. I just don’t like living with them,’ ” Sevier County Sheriff Nathan Curtis said.
With no known occupation, Knapp drifted across the country and ended up in prison in California for burglary. He fell off the radar in 2004 when he “went on the run” while on parole, said Bobby Haase, a spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
Fingerprints found
By 2007, Utah authorities began investigating a string of cabin burglaries they believed were tied to one person. It wasn’t until early 2012 that they identified Knapp as the suspect from cabin surveillance photos and fingerprints lifted from one cabin.
It was in Kane County, near Zion National Park, where authorities lifted Knapp’s fingerprints from items in a cabin. The prints matched sets in criminal databases.
Knapp is believed to have left that area in early 2012. He started to make his way north from Kane into Sevier, Sanpete and Emery counties, where he was occasionally spotted by hunters. Knapp has told detectives he was feeling stressed trying to hide from hunters last fall, Nielson said.
Even authorities have found something to admire in Knapp’s knack for survival and evasion. He stepped on saplings to avoid leaving discernible boot tracks and changed stolen footwear often to confuse searchers. He walked alongside trails instead of on them and kept mostly to backcountry.
Copying methods
He used some of those tactics in his final flight. At Joe’s Valley in the Manti-LaSal National Forest, deputies found boot prints around two burglarized cabins. The tracks led in no apparent direction, Emery County sheriff’s Cpt. Jeff Thomas said.
Deputies copied his silent mode of travel on snowshoes over three days and nights as they tried to track Knapp across rugged terrain.
To get this far, deputies had to think like Knapp. He moved often and swiftly across the backcountry, covering 20 miles in a day, Curtis said.
By 10 a.m. Tuesday, 40 officers took positions around the reservoir. Knapp fired off shots at a helicopter that flushed him out of a cabin. He tried to escape into the woods but ran into three armed officers. He laid down his rifle and surrendered.