Thursday, March 18, 2004 | 9:25 a.m.
A man from Pennsylvania who killed his wife with an ax.
A school principal from Indiana who abducted an 11-year-old girl.
A white supremacist who killed a postal worker then opened fire on a Jewish community center in Los Angeles.
And Charles McCoy, the alleged Ohio highway sniper.
All were fugitives from justice who, for whatever reason, surfaced in Las Vegas.
"It's just an easy place to get lost," Special Agent Todd Palmer, spokesman for the FBI's Las Vegas office, said. "People are constantly moving 24 hours a day. You can walk down the street at 2 in the morning and no one will stop you. There is a ready supply of money here."
"On the flip side," he continued, "If you are a person who is going to go down and you want to have one last hurrah, you come to Las Vegas."
McCoy, 28, was arrested Wednesday on an Ohio arrest warrant charging him with felonious assault in connection with two dozen shootings along highways in that state. The shootings began in May and the last one was Feb. 14.
McCoy left his Columbus home Friday and left a note for his family saying he was going to an arcade.
Instead, McCoy came to the ultimate arcade -- Las Vegas.
Authorities believe he had been here for about a day and a half before police zeroed in on him.
His arrest came after a local man, 60-year-old Conrad Malsom, spotted McCoy at the Stardust sports book. Metro patrol officers, general assignment detectives and members of the multi-agency Criminal Apprehension Team (CAT) were involved in his McCoy's apprehension.
The team, comprised of officers from the Metro and Henderson police departments and FBI agents, work leads to locate and apprehend fugitives. Last year, the team arrested 379 fugitives. As of Wednesday, they had arrested 74.
Hal Rothman, a professor of history at the University of Nevada Las Vegas who has written several books about the city, said Las Vegas is known as a place where you can reinvent yourself and hide.
"At the most basic level, people's perception of Las Vegas is it's an anonymous city," he said. "People feel they can be invisible here."
Fugitives can blend into the crowd in just about any large city, but Las Vegas has the added benefit of "being the iconography of leisure and excess," Rothman said.
Lt. Ted Lee, who was on the CAT task force for three and a half years until recently, said he thinks fugitives come to Las Vegas because of its strong economy. Some fugitives come here and get jobs using fake identification cards, he said.
He believes fugitives are also drawn here for the same reasons tourists are -- for the glitz and glamour, the resorts and because celebrities are often seen here.
In addition to CAT, the Las Vegas area also has FIST -- the Fugitive Investigative Strike Team, comprised of officers from the U.S. Marshals Service, Metro and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. That team has a similar mission -- to apprehend fugitives.
FIST has arrested 980 fugitives since it formed in 2000. To date, the team has arrested 50. Last year, the team arrested 317.
"Many people see Las Vegas as being so diverse that no one will notice them," Richard Winget, U.S. Marshal for Nevada, said.
Some high-profile fugitives who turned up in Las Vegas include William "Andy" Beith, a 28-year-old Baptist school principal from Indiana who in 2001 abducted an 11-year-old girl who attended his school. Police said the girl apparently went with Beith voluntarily, but she wasn't old enough to consent.
A patrol officer spotted Beith's pickup truck turning into an apartment complex and took him into custody.
A man wanted in a $4.8 million telemarketing scam was arrested in Las Vegas last year after a four-year manhunt. Derek Sykes, 72, had been living in Las Vegas under an assumed name for four years.
In 1999, Buford Furrow killed a postal worker in Chatsworth, Calif., then went to a Jewish community center and sprayed the lobby with 70 shots. Five people were shot and wounded.
After the shootings, Furrow, who police said was a white supremacist, fled to Las Vegas by taxicab then surrendered to authorities here.
In 2002, Gregory Vasilin, 40, allegedly killed his wife with an ax, called a news station in New York City and confessed, then hopped a flight to Las Vegas. He was arrested at a downtown casino the next day.
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