guilford

I thought this was interesting. It took them 40 years to find the guy that assassinated a mayor! He was doing fine as a small business owner in Reidsville.

How one of the FBI's ‘most wanted' hid from feds in small-town North Carolina

In his small town in North Carolina, neighbors knew him as James Manion, a "nice guy" who did not speak much but usually waved while working in his yard or walking his dog down a narrow, tree-lined street.

For years, neighbors told the Associated Press, he ran a small wallpaper business — before it went belly-up. He got married. He got a fishing license and, they said, spent his free time with his wife on the water.

"I couldn't say enough nice things about both of them. There was never an inkling of anything amiss," Preston Trigg, who said he sold the couple his mother's house in Reidsville in 2002, told the AP.

But outside the quiet and cozy life he had built on Pennrose Drive in Reidsville, a town near the North Carolina-Virginia border, FBI agents were closing in on him after a nearly 40-year search for an accused killer named William Claybourne Taylor — a blond-haired, blue-eyed man with an array of talents and a will to disappear. Agents knocked on his door last week and soon confirmed that it was him.

[Police say he killed the wrong man nearly 40 years ago. The FBI caught him Thursday.]

Taylor, 67, was arrested at his home on July 28 for being a fugitive from justice. At his initial court appearance, the judge told him he was accused of running from the law.

"That's what the papers say," Taylor replied, according to the AP.

During an extradition hearing on Thursday morning, Taylor did not speak, but his attorney said he agreed to go back to Florida, where he was indicted in the 1977 murder of a retired Immigration and Naturalization Service official and the attempted assassination of a former Florida mayor, according to the news agency.

Howard Neumann, the chief assistant district attorney for Guilford County, N.C., told The Washington Post that given the nature of the charges, he suspects authorities from Florida will be in North Carolina "rather hastily" to take him.

On a Saturday in January 1977, authorities said, Taylor, along with older brother Raymond Taylor and a getaway driver, pulled alongside a Buick on U.S. 27 near Ocala, Fla.

Inside the car was Eugene T. Bailey, a wealthy former mayor of Williston, Fla.

Police said Ray Taylor, a lawyer in Williston, a tiny town outside Gainesville, wanted to be executor of Bailey's will and had plotted to kill him and then profit by representing his family's estate and collecting thousands of dollars in legal fees, according to a 2013 article in the Gainesville Sun.

Police said he enlisted his brother, "Clay" Taylor, as the triggerman.

The first bullet cut through the car's rear window and fatally struck retired INS official Walter H. Scott, according to reports. The car then screeched from the roadway and crashed into a cluster of pine trees.

The Post's Katie Mettler reported last week:

A gunman in a mask emerged from the "swampy scrubland," the Ocala Star Banner reported, and shot the mayor three times with a pistol — once in the face, twice in the torso.

The mayor, somehow, survived, according to reports. Two other men in the car escaped unscathed.

Authorities labeled the shooting an assassination attempt, but it took them three years to indict and then track down their suspects — brothers William "Clay" Claybourne Taylor and Raymond "Ray" Ellis Taylor Jr.

By that time, the Taylor brothers were living in Tennessee.

In 1980, police arrested Clay Taylor as well as Ray, who was working as an assistant district attorney. After denying the crime for years, Ray eventually pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 25 years in prison, police said.

After Clay Taylor was indicted on charges of murder and aggravated battery, he posted a $20,000 bond and disappeared, police said.

Federal authorities issued a warrant for his arrest for unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. His picture — showing a young man with shaggy hair and a full mustache — made the FBI's most-wanted list.

The FBI poster listed Taylor as "armed and dangerous."

It said the 30-something suspect was a bisexual who sometimes wore facial hair and sometimes dyed his hair red. It said he might be working as a "dance instructor, trumpet player, convenience store clerk, keypunch operator, painter, welder."

It said he enjoyed adult bookstores and a stiff drink.

It's still unclear who knew Taylor's real history.

"He kept secrets pretty good if he did it for 39 years," Jack Greene, who said he installed wallpaper that Taylor sold, recently told the Greensboro News & Record. "Maybe the best place to hide is in plain sight."

Numbers listed for Taylor and his wife, Sheryl, were no longer working, but the Greensboro News & Record reported that when reached by phone, his sister-in-law told reporters, "We're just a little confused."

Neil Hendrix, a neighbor, told the AP that there was "nothing out of the ordinary about him."

"He was just a nice guy," Hendrix told the news agency. "I would have never suspected, but you never know."

Taylor's dog groomer, Kim Merricks, said that although he kept to himself, he did talk about his dog, Prancer.

"He lit up every time he talked about his dog. He loved that dog. That was his baby," she said. She added: "I'm still kind of numb about it. I'm still waiting on proof that it's him because he was such a nice guy."

Taylor is being held without bond in Guilford County. He is set to be moved back to Marion County, Fla.

"William Claybourne Taylor thought he could avoid taking responsibility for this horrible crime, but our agents continued an exhaustive search year after year," Michelle S. Klimt, special agent in charge of the FBI Jacksonville division, said in a statement. "To echo the words of former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, ‘the FBI always gets its man.'

"We thank our law enforcement partners for their assistance and hope this news brings comfort to the families of Taylor's victims."

The FBI referred questions to local authorities in Guilford and Marion counties. Taylor's attorney also was not available for comment.

Mary Gene French, Bailey's 91-year-old daughter, said that she was relieved her father's accused killer was finally behind bars.

"Ever since that happened, I've been looking over my shoulder," she told the Associated Press. "So I'm doing just fine now. I hope they hold him. I hope they don't let him get away again."