The Wandering Lama

William Earl Lama, 49, is a nimble little man (116 Ibs.) of elusive gaze and elusive ways. The police chief of Cornwall Township, Ont., aptly named Robert Henry Hawkshaw, had been after him ever since Lama's wife and nine-year-old daughter were found last Aug. 16, murdered with a knife, in the tin-covered Lama shack. There were "at least 71 reports that he'd been seen," but every time the police got there, Lama "had gone."

He was never very far away. He hid out in his own house at Harrison's Corners and in the bush, picked up food where he could. Once, police passed within three feet of him. Another time he was in the basement of a house in nearby Moulinette while police sleuthed around upstairs. People who sighted him, wraithlike in the night, called him "the Wandering Lama." Small boys jeeringly wrote on fences: "Lama was here."

Then a part-time county constable from Moulinette, who hadn't made a big arrest in 20 years, heard noises in the empty house next door. The police surrounded the house, yelled, "Come out!" Lama sheepishly came out, bummed a cigaret and said he couldn't have committed the murders because he was in Montreal that day. As Chief Hawkshaw clapped Lama in jail, the Chief sighed: "I'm too old for this sort of thing. I'm 50."

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