Man on the run for 50 years after giving police the slip at the funeral of his FBI-arrested grandmother

A MAN who had been on the run from the FBI for nearly 50 years after escaping from the police during his grandmother’s funeral has been arrested again, authorities said today.

Leonard Moses had been jailed for life for throwing Molotov cocktails along with a group of others during the riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr in 1968. Gasoline pumps set fire to the Pittsburgh home of Mary Amplo, who she was badly burned and later died as a result of her injuries.

In 1971, Moses was granted a license to attend his grandmother’s funeral and he used the occasion to turn the police around, changing his name to Paul Dickson and working, at least since 1999, as a traveling pharmacist in the state of Michigan, police. said.

The FBI renewed its search in 2016, questioning his family once more and offering a reward for his arrest, as well as establishing a dedicated information hotline.

Despite more than 2,000 notices, the FBI “was still unable to locate and arrest Leonard Moses,” FBI agent Michael Christman, an FBI official, told a news conference in Pittsburgh.

But earlier this year, he was detained and questioned in the course of a separate investigation, the nature of which the FBI did not reveal.

Legal records show that Paul Dickson, born in 1949, was arrested in the state in April for fraud and writing illegal prescriptions for controlled substances.

In the course of the investigation, the suspect’s fingerprints were taken and entered into a law enforcement database, which ultimately turned out to be a match with the federal records the FBI had on Moses.

Yesterday he was arrested without incident at his home in Grand Blanc, Michigan, and was due to be transferred to Pennsylvania.

“I hope this arrest brings closure to members of the family of Mary Amplo, who was murdered in 1968,” Christman said.

– © AFP 2020