Dryman denied parole in 64-year-old killing

Convicted killer Frank Dryman was too ill to attend his parole hearing.

Gray and frail, Dryman walks with the aid of a cane, an oxygen tube cinched close to his nose. He is nearly blind and hard of hearing. At 84, the man whose violent crime once enraged Hi-Line residents 64 years ago is now a hollow shell of the wild kid he once was.

But the brutality of the murder he committed still resonates among his victim's family. It was a cruel and senseless act that changed their lives forever.

"We grew up as kids with a lot of fear," Dorothy Lescantz told parole board members at Dryman's parole hearing on Tuesday. "It was a huge thing that changed our entire family. He needs to stay where he's at."

The Montana Board of Parole declined to release Frank Dryman on Tuesday. His case was, however, placed in administrative review, meaning the parole board will review it again in one year.

These are the final chapters of an unlikely crime saga extending back to the early 1950s.

On a cold evening in 1951, Dryman fired six bullets into Lescantz's grandfather, Clarence Pellett, and left his body in a pasture on the side of the road north of Shelby. Pellett had tried to extend a kindness to Dryman.

Then a teenager, Dryman was hitchhiking north on his way to Canada when the 59-year-old Pellett stopped to give him a ride during a blinding snowstorm. When Pellett turned off the road to let Dryman out, the 19-year-old leveled a .45-caliber handgun at him and ordered Pellett to drive on. A few miles later, Dryman ordered Pellet to pull off the road and get out of the car.

"My grandfather went to his knees and started praying for his life," Pellett's grandson, Clem Pellett, said. "He raised the gun and my grandfather struggled to his feet. He was 59 years old and a little overweight. He tried to run."

Dryman fired seven times. The first bullet missed Pellett. The second pierced the back of fleeing man's neck and exited through his left eye. Dryman ran up to where Pellett lay on the snow-covered ground and fired five more rounds into his back. Then Dryman stole Pellett's car and drove north to the Canadian border.

Pellett was the well-liked owner of a small cafe on the highway north of Shelby. He had a wife and six children. His killing shocked and enraged the people of Toole County and left lasting scars on his children and grandchildren who were told from then on to never pick up hitchhikers.

However, Dryman's story was far from over. He was arrested almost immediately by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and extradited back to Montana. Following a quick trial, Dryman was found guilty of deliberate homicide and ordered to hang on June 1, 1951.

But fate and politics intervened on Frank Dryman's behalf. Almost immediately, a coalition of social activists, legal reformers and supporters from the Methodist Church took up Dryman's cause. The founded the "Dryman Defense Committee," arguing that the teen's rapid death sentence was little more than "frontier-style vigilantism."

Following four years of legal maneuvering, Dryman's sentence was reduced to life in prison. He spent the next 14 years in prison, winning parole in 1969.

Dryman was sent to live with his brother in California, where he married a woman with five children. Then in 1972, Frank Dryman disappeared.

For 38 years nobody knew where the convicted murderer was. It wasn't until Clarence Pellett's grandson, Clem Pellett, took up the cause that Dryman was again brought to justice.

Clem Pellett knew little of his grandfather's killing. The Pellett family had broken up only a few years after Clarence Pellett's murder, and Clem's father never spoke of what had happened — only repeating the family axiom to never pick up hitchhikers.

It wasn't until Clem Pellett's mother died that he learned the truth. Going through a box of old documents, he found yellowing newspaper clippings describing the murder and subsequent trial of Frank Dryman.

The discovery launched a private search that concluded with an amazing discovery.

In 2010, a private investigator hired by Pellett tracked down a man known as Victor Houston. Houston worked as a sign painter in and around Glendale, Ariz., and was the owner of the Cactus Rose Wedding Chapel. The investigator, Patrick Cote, was led to Houston using a Social Security number once used by Dryman to apply for veterans benefits.

The similarities between Houston and Dryman were suspicious. The two men's reported birthdays were only two days apart and they shared the same general physical characteristics.

However the real tip-off were the tattoos on Houston's hands; a skull inked across his left hand and anchor on his right, and stars on his fingers covering up the jailhouse tattoo letters LOVE. It was a match to the identifying marks detailed in Dryman's police report from 1972.

Victor Houston was Frank Dryman. He'd been missing for 38 years — Montana's longest existing fugitive.

Dryman was arrested and brought back to Montana as a parole absconder in 2010. For the past five years he's been in the custody of the Montana Department of Corrections. On Tuesday, Dryman asked to be released from corrections custody and placed in an assisted living home for U.S. military veterans.

He did not, however, express a great deal of remorse for the decisions he's made in his life. After hearing statements from various members of the Pellett family urging the parole board to deny Dryman's request, he lashed out specifically at Clem Pellett.

"Mr. Pellett, the man who started this, is not from this state and he wrote all the scripts that the people just read," Dryman told the parole board. "He's made a fortune off of me. He wrote a book and made a lot of money."

"Let's face it," Dryman continued, "Montana State Prison in 1969 found that I was eligible for parole. Yes, I was gone 40 years. I am very sorry about it — yes.

"What the heck. Why am I even here? You people have already made up your minds. I'm 84 years old and I don't give a darn."

"Frank Dryman, I forgive you," Clem Pellett responded. "But it doesn't mean you deserve this forgiveness, because you haven't shown one, even minuscule morsel of remorse."

Clarence Pellett's great-granddaughter, Penne Swenson was less sanguine about the life and times of Frank Dryman.

"He thinks that he is above the law and above exception," Swenson said of Dryman. "I think it would be a tremendous disservice to the community and to Montana to let him be paroled."

"It was a vicious, vicious murder," Swenson added. "People like that, you can't rehabilitate them. They have no empathy. If they don't get what they want they just take it — whether it's somebody's life or whatever it is. He had the opportunity when he was paroled to follow the rules just like everybody else, and he chose to be above the law — again. Nobody else gets to do that."

Frank Dryman's case will be reviewed again in 2016.