The hunter, his dog and a fugitive
Local tracker apprehends father of three slain B.C. children, who had been on the run for more than a week
MARK HUME
From Thursday's Globe and Mail
April 17, 2008 at 3:53 AM EDT
MERRITT, B.C. — Allan Dwayne Schoenborn looked exhausted and had his head down when Kim Robinson, a man who thinks nothing of tracking down wounded grizzly bears, found him alone yesterday in the mountains outside this small B.C. town.
"The guy looked whipped. He was skin and bone. Who would be afraid of that?" Mr. Robinson said of the prime suspect in the killing of Mr. Schoenborn's children.
"I've dealt with wounded grizzlies and shit. The guy didn't mean anything [frightening] to me," he said, standing in the kitchen doorway of the trailer where he lives with his family just outside Merritt, his thumbs hooked in the pockets of his jeans.
Sticking out of one pocket was a curved grizzly claw, about eight centimetres long. Mr. Robinson said it was a reminder of a bear that hurt him once. He hurt the bear more.
His left eye was slightly bruised and cut from a fall he had taken off a bank earlier in the day while searching for Mr. Schoenborn, who has been the object of an RCMP manhunt.
Mr. Robinson said he got up after he fell, stopped the bleeding, and kept looking.
Tied up nearby in his yard were a dozen hunting dogs that he uses to track cougars and bears - and Blaze, a bull mastiff that he takes along for dangerous work.
Blaze was with him when he found Mr. Schoenborn after a man, who police have not identified, waved him down and told him he had seen someone with a dog up in the woods about two kilometres southeast of Merritt.
Mr. Robinson, who was already searching the area, went to look. And he found Mr. Schoenborn hunkered down in the woods, guarded by a big white dog that attacked him.
Blaze took down the dog and Mr. Robinson calmly levelled his rifle on the suspect.
"He looked at me and asked me if I was going to kill him," said Mr. Robinson, who looks as tough as the wind-swept mountains around Merritt, where he spent the past 10 days searching for Mr. Schoenborn in his spare time.
"I said no, I won't kill you. I said I would if I had to," said Mr. Robinson, who held a .22 Savage rifle on the man, whom police have sought since April 6, when the bodies of his three children, Kaitlynne, 10, Max, 8 and Cordon, 5, were found in the family's mobile home.
"I told him he wasn't allowed to move."
Then Mr. Robinson, who had been in touch earlier with RCMP search crews, called an officer on his cellphone and told him he might have what they were looking for.
"At first I wasn't convinced it was him," he said. "But the officer told me a few things to look for ... which I don't want to go into, and then I was sure it was him."
Mr. Robinson, who has three children of his own (Paul, Josh and Luke), said he started searching the hills around Merritt after police came up empty.
A trapper and hunter who knows every crevice and hole in the hills because he has tracked down grizzly bears and cougars in them, Mr. Robinson said he went about the search as if he were hunting an animal.
"It's been cold at night. So you look on the south slopes during the day. If you've been out in the cold, you know that's where you'd go [to get sunlight]," he said.
Mr. Robinson followed creek beds, and looked for a route from the Schoenborn home that would lead quickly into the forest while staying away from houses.
That all pointed to the area where he eventually came across Mr. Schoenborn.
"I don't know that he was there all this time," he said. "I went through there a few times and didn't see anything."
This time he did.
He said he just walked up, his gun ready, with Blaze pulling hard on the chain leash.
"He's a killer dog," he says. "The other dogs, they are hunters and will take off if they get the scent of a cougar. He stays close enough to take care of me. ... I take him when things need to be killed. That's just what he does." Mr. Robinson said he loosed Blaze only long enough to take down Mr. Schoenborn's dog, then pulled him back.
Later, when police arrived, Mr. Schoenborn's dog tried to attack them.
"I caught him by the neck and held him down," he said of the dog.
While Mr. Robinson told his story, one of his sons, Paul, answered a flood of telephone calls from the media.
"It doesn't surprise me," he said, when asked what he thought of what his dad had done.
"He's always been a hero to me. He believes in God, loves my mom [Linda] and did an awesome job raising this family."
Mr. Robinson, who has been hunting for about 40 years, raises, trains and sells dogs for hunting big game. He has had a few run-ins with conservation officials.
He was banned from hunting from 2003 to 2007 after he was convicted in May, 2001, of illegally selling bear gall bladders. A 2001 conviction for shooting a bear and failing to remove the edible parts was overturned on appeal.
RCMP Staff Sergeant Scott Tod said Mr. Schoenborn was taken into custody after Mr. Robinson called a police search team that was working in the area.
He said he had not been charged because police had not yet had a chance to meet with the Crown to seek charge approval.
Staff Sgt. Tod said there was no sign that Mr. Schoenborn had tried to commit suicide and "he was not injured" in the arrest, which took place without incident.
He said he didn't know how Mr. Schoenborn had survived in the hills since April 6 without food or winter clothing.
"That's a question that we have. ... I know he was taken in [to hospital] for dehydration and he was in pretty tough shape, but we don't know how he [survived]."
With a report from Robert Matas
