It seemed routine enough at first. On July 12, a Lewis County Sheriff's
deputy stopped in the Toledo area to investigate a stolen property case.
He
encountered a group of people who said they planned to buy a chain saw
from a man named "John." The deputy also discovered a car, registered
to James Ehrgott, 73, of Spokane.
At the time, the deputy didn't know that James Ehrgott was dead, that
the car was stolen, and that "John," the man who would later be accused
of Ehrgott's murder, had been convicted of rape three times and was now
hiding not far away in the bushes.
In the weeks that followed,
John Wayne Thomson managed to slip past police in three states, driving
from Spokane through Lewis and Cowlitz counties to Southern California.
Along the way, he is thought to have killed three people, including
Longview resident Lori Hamm.
But with multiple police agencies working night and day to find him,
how did Thomson manage to escape the Northwest? And how did he travel
more than 1,000 miles in a stolen car before he was nabbed on Aug. 7,
not by the police, but by two newspaper employees in Victorville,
Calif.?
Most importantly, could the deaths of some of Thomson's alleged victims have been prevented? ...
... At the very least, if police don't disclose key developments in a
high-profile case, the press should ask why, said
Keith Woods, the dean
of faculty at the Poynter Institute, a national journalism research
organization.
"The public is in the dark about how both of us
operate -- the police and the media," Woods said. "We have to
understand that the public's stake in this is that things go as well as
they could in an investigation like this."
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