Fugitive Captured In Michigan After 50 Years On The Lam

A convicted murderer from Pittsburgh was caught in Michigan this week, nearly 50 years after eluding authorities.

Leonard Moses was doing time for tossing a Molotov cocktail on the porch of a Pittsburgh home in 1968. The action caused the death of Mary Amplo, who was engulfed in flames following the arson.

Moses was convicted and sentenced to life in prison back in 1969. In 1971, he was allowed to attend the funeral of his grandmother. He slipped out a side door at the church, and escaped from the deputies guarding him at the service. He disappeared in to street traffic, still in handcuffs.

This month, his fingerprints were matched by the FBI with a man named Paul Dickson, a traveling pharmacist, who was arrested for stealing 40 dollars worth of oxycodone. Dickson had been working in Michigan since at least 1999.

How Dickson got out of his handcuffs and earned a pharmacy are questions to ponder as Dickson, awaits extradition to Pittsburgh from Grand Blanc, near Flint.

Dickson was arrested there after his fingerprints were matched on a nationwide crime clearinghouse site following his drug arrest earlier this year.

“As the years pass, the trail grows cold,” FBI field officer Michael Christman told the Pittsburgh Tribune Friday. “It was really modern technology that came to our rescue in this situation.”

Specifically, it was the Next Generation Identification system that eventually tracked down Moses.