The Death Row Inmate Who Beat America's Biggest Manhunt

On May 12, 1992, a man serving four consecutive life sentences put on a white lab coat and walked out the front of Arizona's maximum security prison at Florence. For the next 54 days, roughly 400 officers — sheriff's deputies, state troopers, Border Patrol and the FBI — failed to find him. He was caught because he got thirsty. This is the accurate version of the Danny Ray Horning story, including the parts that usually get left out. The press called him Rambo. They reported he was a Special Forces veteran with survival and evasion training, and that story explained why hundreds of officers kept coming up empty. His own brother said he was a tank mechanic with no special training of any kind. Half the legend was invented in real time by a task force that needed to explain its own failure. And before any of it — before the escape, before the Grand Canyon, before the roadblock he rode straight through with two hostages in the front seat — there was a 1979 conviction for molesting his own daughter, and a man named Sammy McCullough who was shot in the head with a .22, dismembered, and recovered from the San Joaquin River in garbage bags. Horning has been on California's death row since 1994. The shirts with his face on them are still being sold. 📚 SOURCES Contemporary reporting from UPI, the Seattle Times, the Deseret News and ABC15 Arizona; California Supreme Court records in People v. Horning (2004); Arizona Department of Corrections records. 🔔 New prison-escape documentaries every week. 💬 The question the whole case turns on: why does evading capture earn a man admirers, no matter what he did to end up being chased? 👇 #TrueCrime #PrisonEscape #Manhunt