Associated Press

March 25, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

HELENA, Mont.

A hitchhiker originally sentenced to be executed for the 1951 killing of a Montana man who picked him up during a blizzard has been found running a wedding chapel under an assumed name in Arizona 38 years after he skipped out on parole.

Frank Dryman was found after the victim’s grandson hired an investigator who tracked the fugitive to his Arizona City notary and chapel business, where he was known as Victor Houston.

Now 78, Dryman was awaiting extradition proceedings Wednesday, a day after his arrest by the Pinal County sheriff’s office.

Dryman initially received a hanging sentence after a quick trial in 1955. His case became the focus of a battle over the death penalty and frontier justice, and he received a new sentence of life in prison with the help of the Montana Supreme Court.

In 1969, after just 15 years in prison, he was paroled. The Montana Department of Corrections said that today, the soonest a person convicted of murder could gain parole is 30 years.

Dryman disappeared three years later. No Montana offender had been missing longer.

“He just went into thin air in 1972,” said Clem Pellett, the victim’s grandson. “I don’t think that my grandfather’s death was well- represented; it just got lost in all the ideologic conversation of the time.”

Pellett, a surgeon in Bellevue, Wash., pursued the case after first learning details last year while digging through old newspaper clippings in storage. He said the issue was never discussed in the family.

Pellett said he was driven by a sense of curiosity, and does not feel like he needs any revenge since he never knew his grandfather, Clarence Pellett, and knew little about the murder.

Newspaper clippings from the time say that Clarence Pellett stopped to pick up Frank Dryman in 1951 during a spring blizzard near Shelby, a small town in northern Montana.

Pellett, who ran a small cafe, was shot seven times in the back as he tried to run away, according to the accounts.

The private investigator hired by the grandson used scores of documents the family dug up from old parole records, the Montana Historical Society and Internet searches to trace Dryman to the Cactus Rose Wedding Chapel.

Pellett told Montana corrections officials of the discovery. Officials said Dryman acknowledged his identity to officers. A call to the wedding chapel Wednesday was not answered.

The Montana Department of Corrections said that Dryman will be sent back to the state prison. He will face a parole revocation hearing within the next few months — and possible resumption of his life in prison sentence.