Pittsburgh fugitive on the run for nearly 50 years arrested in Michigan

After nearly 50 years on the run, a Pittsburgh man who escaped authorities in 1971 was done in by $43.

Leonard Rayne Moses had been working as a traveling pharmacist under the name Paul Dickson in Michigan since at least 1999, according to federal authorities. He’d served two years of a life sentence for first-degree murder when he escaped from police, disappearing from the radar for 49 years.

“We’ve never forgotten about this case,” said Allegheny County Sheriff William Mullen at a Friday morning press conference outside the FBI’s Pittsburgh field office on East Carson Street.

The half-century charade began to unravel early this year when the manager of a CVS in St. Clair Shores, Mich., discovered Moses had pocketed 80 Hydrocodone pills while he was working in the pharmacy.

Moses, under the guise of Dickson, was charged with embezzling $43.20 – the cost of the pills.

In October, the fingerprints of “Dickson” were entered into a nationwide database, which the FBI’s Next Generation Identification system matched to Moses, said Michael Christman, Special Agent in Charge of the field office.

In 1971, Moses was 19 and serving a life sentence for first-degree murder when he was permitted to attend his grandmother’s funeral in Homewood on June 1. According to newspaper reports from the time, Moses ran from deputies when they arrived for the funeral at Nazarene Baptist Church.

Moses “escaped through a side door before disappearing in heavy sidewalk and street traffic,” according to an Associated Press report printed in The Evening Standard on June 2, 1971. The North Hills News Record reported three days later that deputies fired three shots at Moses but he was not hit, and he was still in handcuffs, according to the report.

Christman could not provide specifics about Moses’s arrest Thursday by the FBI Detroit’s Fugitive Task Force in Grand Blanc, Mich., but said it was without incident.

“I know the officers yelled the name ‘Moses’ and they got a response,” Christman said.

Moses was 15 when he and several others threw a Molotov cocktail through the window of a Bennett Street home on April 6, 1968, during the unrest that followed the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Mary Amplo, 72, was inside the home at the time. She died just over three months later.

Moses went to trial in 1969, according to reports from The Pittsburgh Press at the time. Dr. Cyril Wecht testified that Amplo died from pneumonia “contracted while confined to bed for treatment of third-degree burns over 55% of her body.”

In the same article, Amplo’s daughter, Mary Gurgiolo is quoted as saying she heard a crash and a scream.

“I ran downstairs and saw my mother standing in flames – a human torch,” according to the 1969 report. “I didn’t know what to do.”

A jury of eight men and four women convicted Moses of first-degree murder after an hour of deliberations, according to an Associated Press report printed in the Indiana Gazette. He was sentenced to life in prison.

FBI Pittsburgh Announces Arrest of Wanted Fugitive Nearly 50 Years After His Escape from Custody @FBIPittsburgh https://t.co/6RfZbd9qHo pic.twitter.com/56Q7CDjw6S

— FBI (@FBI) November 13, 2020

Christman said the FBI and sheriff’s office would ramp up efforts in the case throughout the years, and the investigation took them to multiple states over the decades. They surged efforts most recently in 2016, interviewing Moses’s family members and acquaintances, analyzing records, engaging in a public information blitz and offering a reward, he said.

“We even set up a national tip line,” he said. “We received over 2,000 tips in one month, however we were still unable to locate and apprehend Leonard Moses.”

It was the automated technology of the Next Generation Identification system that offered a lucky break.

“As the years pass, the trail grows cold,” he said. “It was really modern technology that came to our rescue in this situation.”

Moses is being held in Michigan’s Genesee County Jail pending an extradition hearing.