Escaped murderer's goal was to land in Canada. He wouldn't be the first to flee across the border
MLK assassin, serial killers and still-imprisoned Indigenous activist fled to Canada
Convicted murderer Danelo Cavalcante was captured in Pennsylvania on Wednesday, two weeks after he "crab-walked" up an outside wall at a county jail as part of his escape.
While Cavalcante hails from Brazil, he may have had another, closer country in mind after escaping.
"He stated he intended to carjack somebody in the next 24 hours and that he was going to head north to Canada," a U.S. Marshals Service official told ABC News on Wednesday.
While it's debatable whether Cavalcante could've slipped across the Canadian border undetected, here's a look at some of the other fugitives wanted in the U.S. who made their way here:
Beer empire heir killer
Killer Joseph Corbett used several aliases after hopping the border. He'd killed Adolph Coors III in a botched 1960 kidnapping-for-ransom attempt of the beer empire heir in Colorado. Corbett worked at a Toronto factory for several weeks, cashed a cheque at a Winnipeg bank, and for a time travelled in a red convertible.
He was nabbed on Oct. 29, 1960, while staying at Vancouver's Maxine Motel on Bidwell Street.
"I give up. I'm the man you want," he reportedly told the police.
According to the Denver Post, Corbett told a parole board in 1979 he was a "pretty commonplace man who through sheer, bizarre circumstances got involved in something notorious."
Corbett had escaped from a California prison in 1955 following an earlier homicide conviction.
He was freed, legally, in 1996. He took his own life in 2009 at 80.
Martin Luther King Jr.'s killer
The first time James Earl Ray fled to Canada, it was after escaping a Missouri prison by hiding in a baker's box in 1967. He made it to Toronto and Montreal, but hopped back into the U.S. and spent a peripatetic several months before assassinating Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968.
Ray was back in Toronto by April 6, eventually bunking at Dundas Street W. and Ossington Ave. rooming houses.
Ray managed to look up and steal the identities of several Scarborough residents of similar age, including — unbeknownst to him — a Toronto police officer. He obtained a Canadian passport at a Bloor St. travel agency in the name of Ramon Sneyd.
"Sneyd couldn't believe his good fortune," writes Hampton Sides in 2010's Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History. "He'd had no idea how easy it was in wholesome, trusting Canada to acquire travel papers and inhabit another person's identity: no birth certificate required, no proof of residence, no character witnesses."
It's believed Ray flew to Europe out of Toronto International Airport on May 6, even as local papers two weeks earlier reported his possible presence in the city, albeit under a different alias.
A month later, suspicious British immigration officials detained Ray, who was travelling with a pistol. Ray, described by his own brother as a white supremacist, recanted his initial confession to King's killing and died while incarcerated in 1998.
Fugitive and activist
Leonard Peltier was captured by the RCMP in Hinton, Alta., on Feb. 6, 1976, but his case reverberates until this day.
Hundreds of activists and Indigenous leaders rallied outside the White House on Tuesday on Peltier's 79th birthday, urging President Joe Biden to grant clemency to the Native American leader.
Peltier was convicted in 1977 for the killing of two FBI agents two years earlier at Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, but his case has become a crusade, with Bishop Desmond Tutu and Robert Redford urging for his release and U2 and Steven Van Zandt recording songs about his plight.
Key figures involved in Peltier's prosecution have stepped forward over the years to lobby for clemency, including the judge who presided over Peltier's 1986 appeal and former U.S. attorney James Reynolds, whose office handled the prosecution and appeal.
It has never been conclusively proven who fired the fatal shots, and two men with Peltier at the time of the shooting were acquitted at trial in the 1970s.
"We were not able to prove that Mr. Peltier personally committed any offence on the Pine Ridge Reservation," Reynolds wrote in an open letter.
Not just a Bay shoplifter
While there are other serial killers who fled to Canada, the most dramatic capture of one occurred at a Hudson's Bay store in Calgary in July 1985. That day, a high school teacher who worked part-time at the department store suspected Charles Ng of shoplifting.
Ng wrestled with the employee and others, even managing to fire a shot from his Luger pistol that led to minor injuries before being subdued. It was eventually learned he was wanted in connection with a series of California slayings at the residence of accomplice Leonard Lake. (Lake shocked police by killing himself with cyanide tablets while detained on a relatively minor matter, sparking the search of his property).
Ng wasn't extradited until 1991, when the Supreme Court of Canada ended a yearslong court battle over whether he could be sent to face a death penalty case. He was convicted of 11 murders in 1999 and remains on California death row.
Cop, model, killer and Thunder Bay waitress
The saga of Lawrencia (Bambi) Bembenek received substantial news coverage while spawning books and TV movies, one starring Tatum O'Neal.
Bembenek had dabbled in modelling, worked as a Playboy Club waitress and had briefly been a Milwaukee police officer.
In 1982, she was convicted of killing her lover's ex-wife. Weeks after a bid for a new trial was denied, she squeezed through a laundry window while a friend waited in a car near a Wisconsin prison in July 1990. She managed to obtain a Canadian social insurance number and worked as a server at restaurants in Thunder Bay, Ont., until she was caught a week after being featured on America's Most Wanted.
"I can never believe in a million years that this girl did what they said she did," a manager at one of the restaurants told reporters after her October 1990 capture there.
She returned to the U.S., would eventually be freed in the 1990s, and died at 52 in 2010. Until the end of her life, Bembenek had vocal supporters who believed she was wrongfully convicted on the basis of so-called junk science, namely disputed hair evidence.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
With files from the Canadian Press and the Associated Press