He scurried beneath the pines to hide from the police chopper and its infrared eye. He climbed a tree to evade the bloodhounds.
Once, he draped his camouflaged body with twigs and leaves, lying motionless as an all-terrain search vehicle nearly ran him over. Another time, he all but laughed at how easy it would have been to gun down a line of sitting-duck police officers.
These were a fugitive's tales, an account of Joseph C. Palczynski's 10 days on the lam. They were the experiences claimed by a wanted man who seemed both lucky and cunning.
"He took a lot of pride in the fact that he could stay one step ahead of the police," said David P. Henninger, a lawyer who talked with Palczynski frequently during a four-day hostage standoff that ended Tuesday with a police raid and Palczynski's death.
Sometimes, calming Palczynski meant stroking his ego.
"I'd say, `Joe, you're like Swamp Fox,' " Henninger said, referring to Francis Marion, the Revolutionary War guerrilla who fought in the South Carolina wilderness. "You're like Robin Hood -- they couldn't find you in the woods.
"He'd turn around and tell the hostages, `My lawyer says I'm like Swamp Fox!' "
In eluding capture for two weeks, Palczynski combined his rudimentary knowledge of most things paramilitary with a knack for exploiting good fortune and his pursuers' near misses.
Early in the rampage, police swarmed around a Rosedale motel and rescued Palczynski's estranged girlfriend, Tracy Whitehead, who had been taken captive. As viewers watched on live television, police seemed about to capture Palczynski. Before they saw him again, he'd gone to Virginia and come back equipped to live in the woods.
The man he allegedly abducted in Virginia turned out to be a devout Jehovah's Witness who'd recently read an article on cooperating with kidnappers. When Palczynski sent the man into a busy store in White Marsh to buy a television, the man dutifully returned to the parking lot -- without calling police.
At one point during the search in the eastern Baltimore County community of Chase, a SWAT team came within minutes of trapping Palczynski in a trailer.
"Somehow he was able to elude us for a long period of time," said Lt. Kevin B. Novak, a county police spokesman. "Whether it was skill, luck or a combination of both, that we will never know."
