The Con Man Wore Hiking Boots

Lescoe, of course, didn't have access to that, because no one back home knew where he was. So how did he eat? The answer, according to those who followed his career on the trail, was a blend of Blanche DuBois and Yogi Bear. He mostly depended on the kindness of strangers, but then sometimes he stole their pickanick baskets.

One of his hiking companions was "Dances With Moose," real name Brian Matthews, 27, from Wakefield, Mass., who hiked with Lescoe for two weeks in late July and early August. He says Lescoe ate a lot of stolen food from Holt's bag, and routinely scavenged in "hiker boxes," where previous backpackers had left behind excess food.

He also was good at getting money and food from strangers, who were impressed by the long story about his plans for suicide and subsequent conversion. "People gave him things all the time, but he never asked," says Matthews, who heard about Lescoe's suicidal thoughts right after meeting him on the trail ("That's kind of a rare thing to hear, especially within the first 10 minutes," he says). That night, he found himself offering to buy Lescoe a hamburger at a bar in Unionville, where the trail hugs the New York-New Jersey border.

Even the trail's few authority figures helped Lescoe out. When he was in Delaware Water Gap, along the Pennsylvania-New Jersey border, Lescoe had eaten bad mushrooms and collapsed. This was long before he was known to be different from other thru-hikers, and park rangers and others did a "carryout," lugging Lescoe out of the woods on a stretcher so he could be treated at a hospital.

But the trail's famous charity appears to have run out on him in early September in central Virginia, when his food and money were exhausted and the weather suddenly became fierce. Soon, he found himself as he had been at Dan Nicholls's place -- hungry and desperate.

Though the Appalachian Trail passes within several hundred yards of Wintergreen, the world of the trail and the world of the affluent Virginia ski resort could not be more different. Wintergreen is a place where a 12-member police department protects a few hundred year-round residents. It is a place where crimes get solved.

On September 10, the first of several curious burglary calls came in to Wintergreen Police Investigator Steve Southworth, a button-down police veteran who had moved west after working in the Richmond suburbs. At a house up on Laurel Springs Drive, the closets had been ransacked, some liquor had been drunk, and there was a bowl of soup sitting in the microwave.

Already, this one was strange: The TV, VCR and other burglar-friendly valuables were untouched. "Looked like somebody that was really hungry and thirsty," Southworth recalls.

The pattern repeated itself three times over the next few weeks, as weekend residents came home and discovered more break-ins. In one of the houses, where the window had been pried open, the burglar had drunk hard liquor and had eaten an astounding four cans of Progresso soup ("I mean, I can hardly put one down," says an impressed Southworth). In that house, the intruder left behind old socks, a map of the Appalachian Trail and a battered fishing tackle box. In another house, the only thing stolen was a fanny pack. At the hardest-hit house, the burglar had taken a North Face tent, a backpack and a nice set of hiking poles. Also gone: a 1968 Volkswagen Beetle and bag upon bag of crabmeat the house's owner had picked to eat over the winter.

Two weeks after the burglaries, the stolen VW Bug was recovered, drenched with the smell of spoiled crabmeat. It had been left at a remote Appalachian Trail entrance at the James River Footbridge, north of Lynchburg, Va. The burglar, the police concluded, was back on the trail.

Law enforcement figured he was making eight to 12 miles a day, which meant that, a few days after the car was found, he had to be somewhere in Bland County, south of Pearisburg, Va. And, when Teddy Mullins, an officer for the U.S. Forest Service, went out looking, there he was.

"Howdy. How are you doing?" asked Mullins, blocking the hiker's path but remaining friendly. Mullins had little more to go on than a description, taken from a security camera in Wintergreen, of a white man with a beard and a backpack, which describes pretty much every male thru-hiker. He wanted to make sure he had the right guy. So he made small talk, asking about damage from a hurricane that had recently passed.

"Oh, by the way, I'm Teddy Mullins," the officer said. "What's your name?"

Lescoe told Mullins his trail name: Saved.

"But what's your actual name?"

Lescoe gave it up, first and last (though Mullins didn't ask him to spell it, and originally thought it was "Lasco"). Mullins saw hiking poles and a backpack that seemed to match the descriptions of loot missing from Wintergreen. "All the little pieces together, it was adding up in a hurry."

But he was under orders not to make an arrest by himself, since the word on the trail was that Saved had a large knife and might be suicidal. Mullins politely excused himself, walked up the trail to a mountaintop and called for backup on his cell phone. Then he doubled back to his car and drove to a spot on the trail that was eight or nine miles ahead of the hiker. He waited 4 1/2 hours, until long after Lescoe should have passed. Nothing. "Then I was concerned," Mullins says. He left his hiding place, and along with other officers, searched all eight miles of trail back to where he and Lescoe had met. Still nothing.

Officers searched trail shelters, rousting out hikers in late evening with flashlights. No Saved. By 2 a.m., more than 12 hours after Mullins and Lescoe had met on the trail, the searchers gave up for the night.

Over the next few days in October, investigators heard about two more stolen cars at AT trailheads, one in Bland County, Va., and one in a nearby section of eastern Tennessee.

But these leads, like the others, always ended fruitlessly back at the AT. "He was gone," Southworth says.

In October, Janet Hensley, the owner of a trailside hostel in Tennessee, posted a message on the hiker bulletin board www.whiteblaze.net. Its heading was one word: "Thief!"

"It is with a certain amount of anger and sadness that I feel that I have to start letting the AT community know about a situation," she began. The posting included most everything that authorities knew about Lescoe at the time: his height, age, tattoos and trail name.

A few days later, the same description wound up in the e-mail inbox of Dan Nicholls, back at the log cabin in New Jersey where the whole thing had began. "I thought, man, it does look like him," Nicholls says. He was hurt by the idea: "If this is him, then he's making a mockery" of the whole conversion experience.

He contacted authorities, and they at first had hopes of tracking Lescoe down using a voice mail he had left Nicholls. But that turned out to be too technically difficult. Finally, there came a good opportunity: In January, Lescoe sent Nicholls an e-mail, asking for a copy of the "TAKE THAT, SATAN!" memo that summarized his conversion.

Nicholls wrote back: What's your mailing address?

The next day, a woman in Lizella, Ga. -- a town outside Macon hundreds of miles from where Lescoe had been last seen -- opened Nicholls's e-mail at work. Thinking she was being helpful, she wrote back, giving the address of the trailer next door to her home.

That was where a nice man named David had been living for three months, since he had shown up out of nowhere, smelling to high heaven, and had been taken in by the Lizella Baptist Church. He had a job, fellow parishioners willing to share their trailer and their Internet account, and he was scheduled to speak about his conversion during the church's upcoming ski trip. That's why he was asking Nicholls for his account of the conversion: He was preparing his talk, says Todd Remaley, a park ranger who worked on the case.

About midnight the next day, January 21, a task force of federal marshals and local law enforcement officers knocked on the trailer's door. Six months and more than 1,000 miles after he left Woonsocket, Saved was under arrest.

Law-enforcement-wise, the Lescoe case was a cinch to wrap up. On the ride back to Virginia, Lescoe told the same story he'd been telling to everyone along the trail -- only this time with Wintergreen investigator Southworth's digital recorder running.

In all, he talked for seven hours, even telling Southworth about a break-in he didn't know about: Lescoe had gotten hungry and hit a concession stand in Pennsylvania's Caledonia State Park, taking money, hamburgers and boxes of taffy. There was also a two-page confession, and a fingerprint that matched prints from the burglarized houses and the stolen Beetle.

So far, Lescoe has been charged in three Virginia counties. Two charges are for the Wintergreen burglaries, which happened to straddle a county line. The other is in Bland County, where Mullins met him and then lost him on the trail that day. There, authorities believe he laid low for four or five days, breaking into four empty cabins and stealing another car.

So far, he's pleaded guilty in all three and has been sentenced to a total of 10 years. Through a jail official, Lescoe declined to be interviewed for this story.

For the people Lescoe met on his journey, the ending hasn't been as neat. In the months since his capture, they have struggled to figure out: Was he just a genuinely lost, friendly soul, who had moments of weakness on the trail? People in Georgia think so. "If there was something malicious about him, it didn't show up in the nearly three months that he was here," says Doug Davis, pastor of Lizella Baptist. "There was nothing not to like about him."

But many in the world of thru-hikers take a harder view: Lescoe was a flimflammer, who exploited the AT community's charity and trust. Before he was caught, angry posters on whiteblaze.net entertained fantasies that he should be shot or his gear should be burned.

"He's a criminal, and that hurt. That hurt the community," says Janet Hensley, the Tennessee hostel operator whose posting helped lead to Lescoe's capture.

Of all the people involved in Saved's story, nobody has had a harder time figuring him out than Dan Nicholls. In February, after Lescoe was captured, Nicholls sent a letter to him in Virginia's Charlottesville/Albemarle Regional Jail. He told Lescoe that using the name Saved while committing burglaries was "like spitting in the face of your Saviour." And Nicholls asked a question that had been on his mind for months. "Did you really receive Christ as your Saviour at my place?" he wrote. "If you didn't, you have got to be the world's ultimate con man."

Nicholls waited more than three months for a reply. He got none. Then, in June, he re-sent the letter to Lescoe. This time he attached a $25 money order. The money got Lescoe's attention. He wrote back, citing a verse in the King James Bible that Nicholls had given him, Romans 3:23: "For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God."

David A. Fahrenthold is a Boston-based correspondent for The Post.