The Con Man Wore Hiking Boots

Because of its anonymity, isolation and ample charity, it's a good place for bad people to hide out. Though serious crimes are rare in this American Garden of Eden, they do happen.

In 1988, for instance, two women were shot, one fatally, by a drifter named Stephen Roy Carr who had been living along the trail in Pennsylvania's Michaux State Forest. Two years later, near Duncannon, Pa., a thru-hiking couple was murdered -- one shot, one stabbed -- in a trail shelter by a man who was on the run from Florida police. In 1996, two women were stabbed to death on a side trail near the AT in Virginia's Shenandoah National Park. Police eventually charged a man with the murders, but DNA evidence from the crime scene unraveled the case against him. It remains unsolved.

Trail officials insist the AT is as safe as any small town. But it still draws odd characters who don't fit in elsewhere. This past summer, there was "Greenhorn," a drug user who aggressively panhandled from other hikers for 10 months until he was tracked down by a ranger, and another man whose habit of lugging heavy suitcases over the steep mountains of Virginia earned him the nickname "Samsonite Man."

During the summer of 2004, it was David Lescoe who was looking for an escape.

Lescoe, who turned 33 that summer, had grown up in an outdoorsy family living in Nanticoke, Pa., near Wilkes-Barre. His family members took him to Nebo Baptist Church every Sunday, but they knew early that he was troubled. While Lescoe had once brought a gun to school and was charged with a break-in, his overriding problems were drugs and alcohol, family members say. He could never fully quit his addictions, but he was gifted with an honest face and a genius for making his family and friends believe he had.

"He would promise you the world," says his younger brother, Andrew Lescoe, who still lives outside Nanticoke. "He would promise you that he's going to straighten up, and he's going on the straight and narrow path. He would do it for a couple days." And then, most of the time, he would go back to his old ways.

Family members recall a couple of his most painful relapses: Once, his grandfather turned over to him an air-conditioning repair business that had been built up over 30 years. David suddenly left town, and the business died. Another time, he persuaded his mother to co-sign for a house note, then again left town and stuck her with the bills.

"David is a very loving, loving boy, but you know what I think: He played roles for the people he needed," says his aunt Shirley Sincavage. One of his frequent tactics was to promise to go back to church. "Pretty soon you didn't know who the real David was."

By last summer, the teenage delinquent had grown into a slender man covered in tattoos who supported himself with occasional carpentry jobs. He'd moved to Woonsocket, R.I., where he ran into some kind of trouble regarding his only child, an elementary-school-age daughter from a failed marriage. There was an accusation of abuse, and -- though to this day it still hasn't lead to a charge against him -- Sincavage says he felt the world closing in.

"Auntie," she remembers him saying on July 14, 2004, "I swear to you, I did nothing to that girl." The next day, he was gone.

Ten days later, thru-hikers using the trail names Coyote, Buckeye, Big Stick, Erik and Dave were stopping for the night near Bear Mountain, N.Y. As they settled in, the group was pestered by another hiker, who insisted they sleep in the shelter with him. "There's plenty of room! Look, there's even bunks," he said, according to Coyote -- real name Sarah Holt, 27 -- who wrote about her thru-hike for her hometown paper in Brunswick, Maine.

"I just remember thinking to myself that he wasn't a thru-hiker," says Buckeye, real name Kevin McClellan, 24, of Columbus, Ohio. The guy didn't have the fancy polymer-fiber clothes that thru-hikers wear, and his boots looked too clunky for someone hiking more than 2,000 miles. "He was probably out for a couple days."