This is the best article you will find...and where I got a lot of my info. It's lengthy, but VERY informative.
The capture of Frank Dryman
Long life on the lam
Killer led a life that belied the crimeBy JOHN S. ADAMS Tribune Capitol Bureau
ARIZONA CITY, Ariz. — “It all began when a young boy was hitchhiking to Canada to see his girlfriend …” Frank Dryman wrote those words on May 1, 1960, in an appeal to the Montana Board of Pardons and Parole, seeking commutation of his life sentence for murder.
The commutation was eventually granted, but how Dryman’s story ends remains to be written.
Arizona sheriff’s deputies arrested Dryman, a.k.a. Victor Houston, on March 23 — 38 years after he jumped parole in California, disappearing into the desert and leaving a wife and five stepchildren behind.
Montana’s longest-running fugitive, he was returned to the Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge late Friday afternoon.
Dryman spent 14 years in Deer Lodge for murdering Clarence Pellett 59 years ago today along a muddy road abut 18 miles north of Shelby. Dryman was paroled in 1969, and, according to prison records, spent the next two years, nine months and 11 days living a productive and lawful life in Southern California. Dryman married, started a sign-painting business and followed the rules of his lifetime parole.
Then, on Aug. 30, 1971, he disappeared without a trace.
Were it not for the nagging curiosity of the victim’s grandson, a Bellevue, Wash., oral surgeon, the story might have ended there. Clem Pellett’s determination to find out what happened to his grandfather’s missing killer eventually led authorities to a run-down wedding chapel on the edge of a rural Arizona desert town.
There, living in a tiny trailer surrounded by overgrown prickly pear and cholla cactuses, they found Victor Houston.
The ink on his tattoos had faded. The slick James Dean hairdo was reduced to thin tufts of white. The cocky gaze of a 19year-old killer was replaced with the sagging, hard-worn face of a man who spent decades living in the desert among the cactuses and rattlesnakes.
Victor Houston, a mostly blind and ailing wedding deacon, was actually Frank Dryman.
After 38 years on the lam, Clarence Pellett’s missing murderer — a man who twice escaped the hangman’s noose — had finally been caught.
The last name on his birth certificate reads Dryman, but the man who murdered Clarence Pellett spent the first 17 years of his life as Frank Robert Valentine.
“Always he was plagued by his name or names,” Dryman wrote of himself nine years into his prison sentence.
He was baptized and enlisted in the Navy as Valentine. But he is known in Montana and throughout the legal system as Dryman. He sometimes signed both signatures to official legal documents and letters to the parole board.
Once paroled, he resumed using the name Valentine. When he married in August 1969, he did so under the name Valentine.
His siblings, except for a halfbrother from a different father, all bore the name Valentine.
When he arrived in southern Arizona sometime in the mid-1970s, Frank Valentine took on the alias Victor Houston, a name one family member said he “pulled out of the air.”
Frank Dryman, Frank Valentine and Victor Houston are the same person. (For the purposes of this story, the name he went by at the timeframe in the narrative will be used)
The murder
Frank Robert Valentine was honorably discharged from the Navy in June 1949. He was 18 years old. He bounced around the country, working odd jobs along the way before landing in Reno, Nev.
According to his own writings, it was there, in February 1951, that he bought a .45-caliber automatic pistol. On April 2 of that year, Frank Valentine, then 19, left Reno on his way to Las Vegas.
“In Vegas, I began hitchhiking north with the vague idea of seeing my girlfriend in Canada,” he wrote while in prison. “I was carrying a shoulder holster. It was, of course, habit only, as I had no intention of ever using it.”
By April 4, Valentine had made his way into northcentral Montana. He found he was unprepared for the harsh weather, “dressed only in a light suit and a plastic rain coat.”
“Stopping in Great Falls briefly, I went to the draft board and told them I was in Montana …” Dryman wrote. “Then I received a ride with two young women and a man going to Shelby. They were nice people, and we laughed a lot on the trip.”
They dropped Valentine off in Shelby, where the spring snowstorm was even worse.
“Time passed and I was logged down by the cold. Numb and blue, with the icy wind raging down the prairie,” Dryman wrote.
Finally, around 7:30 p.m., a car stopped and Dryman got in.
“Without noticing, or caring, who was driving, we traveled several miles ... Then my gun was in my hand, and I heard myself telling the driver to drive off the highway,” Dryman later wrote. “It was as though I was in a dream. My ears were ringing, and I never even heard his reply, if there was one.”
The driver was Clarence E. Pellett, 59, a father of six who operated a café at Four Corners, where the highway north intersected with the east-west road to nearby Kevin and Oilmont.
On April 5, a sheriff’s posse found Pellett’s bullet-riddled body in a muddy field. He had been shot seven times in the back with a .45-caliber pistol.
Dryman claims he doesn’t remember killing Pellett. In a letter to the parole board, written nine years later, he said the next thing he remembered after telling Pellett to pull over was standing over the victim’s body, the warm gun in his hand.
“I knelt beside him to see if he can be helped,” Dryman wrote years later. “It’s easy to see that he is dead, so I ran for the car and drove fast towards Canada.”
The sentence
Valentine, or Dryman as he was known to authorities, was captured by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police the next day and returned to Shelby. He confessed to the murder April 8, after several days of questioning by Toole County authorities.
“In Shelby, the officials convinced me that I was guilty, and I pleaded the same and asked that I pay the supreme penalty,” Dryman wrote.
On the afternoon of April 12, 1951, District Judge R.M. Hattersley granted Dryman’s wish. Hattersley ordered that Dryman be “hung by his neck until dead.”
“I had no lawyer, and asked for none, and the courtroom was bare as his honor passed sentence,” Dryman wrote of that day.
He was sentenced to die June 1. The night before the hanging, after he already had requested his final meal, Dryman was spared.
Without his knowledge, a group of local citizens who were concerned that Dryman didn’t receive a fair trial formed the “Dryman Clemency Committee.” They hired a lawyer and appealed his death sentence to the Montana Supreme Court.
The court ordered a new trial and, on Jan. 13, 1953, Dryman was again sentenced to hang.
His case again was appealed to the state Supreme Court and a third trial eventually was ordered. The venue was moved to Havre, where a Hill County jury once again found Dryman guilty. Dryman was spared the death penalty and instead sentenced to life in prison, which by state statute at the time amounted to 30 years.
Prison and parole
According to prison records, Dryman was a model prisoner. His supervisors described him as “industrious” and “ambitious.”
A talented artist from the time he was a child, Dryman picked up sign painting and drafting while in prison. He earned his diploma and was taking correspondence courses to earn his engineering degree.
“In the opinion of the work supervisor there has been a definite change for the better in this inmate,” wrote one prison official in a progress report.
After three appeals to the parole board for a commutation of his sentence, Dryman was released to his younger brother Jim in Chino, Calif., on Jan. 7, 1969.
At that point, Dryman went back to using the name Valentine. He got a job working at a furniture company, where he made $2.25 per hour, but he was soon laid off. He found a job at a steel factory, but was again laid off.
So he started his own signpainting business. His parole officer found him to be a hard worker who was committed to succeeding as a parolee.
“It appears that the subject has motivation at this time to meet his parole obligations and there did not appear to be any difficulties,” parole officer J. Allen wrote on Jan. 16, 1969.
In August of that year, Valentine married Bryle Cahill, a divorcée with five children.
The couple moved to Rialto, Calif., where the Valentines continued to operate a sign shop. Business was good, and by the summer of 1970 they were bringing in about $1,000 a month.
“This man continues to make a satisfactory adjustment,” Allen wrote in his Aug. 25, 1970, report.
But soon thereafter trouble began to surface. According to parole records, Valentine and his wife began having marital problems. His wife complained that Valentine was working too much and not paying enough attention to her and her children. Valentine, meanwhile, was having difficulties adjusting to life on the outside after spending the better part of 18 years in prison.
The couple split up and his wife moved into an apartment with the children. They reunited months later, and for a while things seemed to be OK. But when the parole officer checked on Valentine in December, Beryl said Frank had disappeared five weeks earlier. The last time she saw him was on Oct. 27, 1971, she told the parole officer. According to his wife, Valentine gave no reason for leaving.
Dryman disappears
Dryman’s only biological daughter, 28-year-old Cathie Houston of Portales, N.M., said in an a recent interview with the Tribune that her father told her he left his life in California because, “he wasn’t happy.” She said she didn’t know of her father’s past life until after he was arrested in Arizona last month. She recently visited him several times in the Pinal County Jail, where she learned more.
“He said he was stuck in a bad marriage with a bunch of kids that weren’t his,” Houston said. “He just wanted to get away from it all. He didn’t care about his parole. He was miserable, and he just wanted to start his life over.” After his disappearance, Valentine’s parole officer contacted members of his family but none heard from him until long after authorities gave up looking for Valentine. His ailing mother, Gladys Foster, once wrote a letter to prison officials begging them to help her find her missing son.
“In fact, I hope you people have caught him. At least I would know where he is,” Foster wrote in 1976.
Before disappearing, Valentine stocked up on camping equipment and clothes. His wife told authorities he might be living in the desert.
Valentine grew up outside Las Vegas. His father, Frank Valentine Sr., was a construction worker on the Hoover Dam and the family lived near there until Frank was 6.
When Valentine failed to resurface after several months, his wife initiated divorce proceedings. Montana authorities put out a warrant for his arrest on March 27, 1972. His parole revoked, Frank Dryman, a.k.a Frank Valentine, was once again a wanted man.
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Dryman family photo in 1954.
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Dryman at a U.S. Navy reunion.
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Dryman ran a business in Arizona City, Ariz., under the name Victor Houston.
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Dryman marries a couple. He was a Notary Public.
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Dryman served on the USS Princeton off the shores of Hawaii.
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Dryman holds a grandchild earlier this year.
A new life
It’s unclear when, exactly, Frank Valentine arrived in Arizona City, Ariz., and became Victor Houston. Some residents of the small, dusty, desert town about 60 miles south of Phoenix think he rolled into town in the mid-1970s.
Dryman, or Victor Houston as he is known to the 4,000 or so residents there, declined to be interviewed in jail in Arizona.
Dryman may have lived in Nevada for a period of time. A California private investigator contacted Montana prison officials in December 1972, and informed them that Dryman was living in Las Vegas. Authorities issued a warrant for his arrest there, but after years of searching they turned up nothing.
“He told me he spent some time in Nevada once,” said Jack Lindholme, an Arizona City man who, along with his wife Patricia, helped care for Houston when his health began to decline in recent years. “I was teasing him about getting his deacon’s license out of the back of a magazine, and he told me he had actually gone to seminary in Nevada.”
Houston, who ran the Cactus Rose Wedding Chapel from his home in Arizona City, at some point began living with a woman named Debbie, and her daughter Wendy. It’s unclear if Houston and Debbie were ever legally married, but they had a child, Cathie, when Houston was 50.
“He never thought he could have kids,” Cathie said. “I was a surprise.”
The couple split when Cathie was a child, but they remained friendly for years. They even lived on the property for a few years so Cathie would have both of her parents nearby.
Houston was a fan of old Western movie heroes. Posters and autographed photos of John Wayne, Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson adorn the walls of his humble trailer, alongside dozens of family photos chronicling seven decades of family life. A plaque above a shelf in his living room showcases several badges he wore over the years as a volunteer for the local sheriff’s posse and for a security company he started.
Friends and neighbors say Houston is a gruff and not particularly friendly man, but he is known locally as a hard worker and is generally well-respected in the community.
“Here he was a community activist,” Patricia Lindholme said. “He was on the board of directors for the Moose Club. When AARP had a charter here, he was active in that. Everything he did here was diametrically opposed to Frank Dryman.”
Lindholme said Houston once told her that he killed a man.
“He said it was a bar fight and that he served his time,” Lindholme said. “I just left it at that.”
Wedding chapel
In Arizona City, Houston built a very public life.
“Rattlesnake Vic” or “Pink Panther,” as he was known to some, bought two acres on the south end of town, which he nicknamed “Jackass Flats” and opened a sign-painting shop and wedding chapel there. He officiated over hundreds of weddings over the years, Cathie said, and his signpainting truck was a familiar sight throughout the region.
“He was a wonderful artist,” his daughter said.
He painted signs on fire trucks and police cars. His services were sought after by shop owners, real estate agents and even the town itself.
“Up until a few years ago, the sign welcoming you to Arizona City was painted by my dad,” Cathie said.
He took cash for jobs ranging from hunting rattlesnakes to officiating over weddings to notarizing public documents. He also sold cactuses and desert knickknacks from a small booth inside his fenced cactus garden.
He was the town’s official weather reporter for the National Weather Service. He volunteered for the local sheriff’s posse and search and rescue team. In 2002, he completed the Pinal County Volunteer Sheriff’s Academy, a process that required him to submit to fingerprinting and a background check. People in town were shocked to learn that the well-known Vic Houston was the same man who murdered a café owner in Montana nearly six decades earlier.
“It’s a good thing I was sitting down. It was like somebody had hit me between the eyes with a ball bat,” said Gary, a brusque, cowboy of a man who said he was one of Houston’s closest friends. Gary did not want his last name used in this story.
“Vic is well-known in this country. Anybody who needed something or needed help, any civic thing, election committee, census. You name it, and Vic helped out,” Gary said.
A card hanging on Houston’s refrigerator bears a quote from Ethel Percy Andrus, California’s first female high school principal, which sums up Houston’s life in Arizona: “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are today.”
“That’s how my dad lived his life,” Cathie said. “He wasn’t perfect, but he was a good man who tried to do good by others.”
Dryman’s future
Clem Pellett, the man who led authorities to his grandfather’s killer, said he never expected to find Frank Dryman, and he definitely didn’t expect to find Dryman alive.
“That was a total shock,” said Pellett, who grew up in Great Falls. His father was longtime local dentist Marion Pellett.
Now that Dryman is back behind bars in Montana, Pellett said he’s satisfied with whatever the state parole board decides to do with him.
“This isn’t about revenge,” Pellett said. “I’d happy with whatever their decision is.”
It’s not entirely clear at this point what the future holds for Frank Dryman. He’s in poor health, and his daughter suspects that the cancer he beat years ago has returned. He’s nearly blind, mostly deaf and suffers from an ailing liver.
An official for the Board of Pardons and Parole did not immediately respond to an e-mail inquiry about Dryman, but a parole revocation hearing is expected to take place sometime within the next few months. At that point, Dryman could be re-paroled, or he could be sent back to prison to serve out his life sentence. He also could seek a pardon from the governor.
In the meantime, prison doctors are evaluating his health.
Cathie said she just wants her father to be able to return to his trailer and live out his remaining days in the desert.
“I don’t know why Montana would even want him back,” said Cathie. “He’s just a sick, scared old man.”
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Sat Oct 22, 2011 11:24 pm
If LE didn't check prints of released inmates from Deer Lodge after LB, that would be criminal. 
) that the Z prints aren't of adequate quality to be entered into AVIS or whatever that is.
