The Battle of Gobbler's Knob

To inhabitants of the rugged Pennsylvania mountain country around Shade Gap (pop. 140), he was known as "Bicycle Bill" because of the battered, red bike he always rode, head down, carrying one of his mongrel dogs in a handlebar basket. His real name was William Diller Hollenbaugh. Short, skinny and stooped, missing five front teeth, he had spent six of his 44 years in prison, 13 in an insane asylum. Since moving to the Shade Gap area several years ago, he had lived as a hermit in a two-room hilltop shack, subsisting on wild game and state relief checks.

Two years ago, women in the area reported a series of insensate attacks. A mother driving her car was halted by a pile of logs, after which a hidden rifleman opened fire, shattering her infant son's nursing bottle. One night, as his wife prepared for bed, another resident surprised a Peeping Tom, who blasted the husband's left leg off. On another occasion a masked intruder shot a woman in the hand, carried her into the woods and tried to rape her--but was impotent and broke into tears. Police questioned Bicycle Bill but could get no evidence that he was "the Mountain Man," as the sniper-molester came to be called. Besides, most people considered Bill harmless, if "tetched."

Giant Noose. Last week they knew better. The lesson began one afternoon when shapely, blue-eyed Peggy Ann Bradnick, 17, stepped off a school bus with five younger brothers and sisters and began walking down a dirt road to her farm home. A masked, rifle-toting man stepped from the woods. Before dragging Peggy into the dense brush, he snapped: "I don't want any sass from you kids. I'm taking this girl."

Searchers, who suspected this time that the abductor was Bicycle Bill, combed the area for five days without finding a trace of man or girl. Then, while helping to scour a rocky ridge, FBI Agent Terry Anderson, 42, spotted one of Hollenbaugh's dogs, followed it --and was shot dead. More bullets fired from the underbrush killed one tracking German shepherd that lunged after the fugitive, and wounded the dog's partner. When Hollenbaugh and Peggy were spotted moving away from the scene shortly afterward, the authorities mounted the biggest man hunt in Pennsylvania's history. As night fell more FBI men, National Guardsmen in armored personnel carriers, state troopers, game wardens and armed civilians --some 800 in all--ringed the ridge with a giant noose eight miles in perimeter, and prepared to move in at daybreak.

Last Stop. They did not have to. Early next morning Cambria County Deputy Sheriff Francis Sharpe, 37, who had spent the night in a friend's cabin under Gobbler's Knob Mountain, went to the cabin's adjoining washhouse. As he entered, he was shot in the belly by Hollenbaugh, who had apparently sought overnight refuge there with Peggy. Hollenbaugh ordered the wounded Sharpe to the deputy's car, forced the girl to lie down on the back floor, and told the lawman to drive the car down a farm road toward Highway 522. Ten feet from the highway, and only 200 yards from the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the car was stopped by a cattle-guard gate. Hollenbaugh got no farther.

As suspicious state troopers closed in, he jumped out, pulling the teen-ager with him. He opened fire with a pistol, ducked behind a corncrib and ran across the road to a farmhouse. Two shots rang out simultaneously--one fired by Larry Rubeck, 15, from the farmhouse, the other by a state policeman. Hollenbaugh fell dying, blood spurting from a severed jugular. Peggy dashed into the arms of Pittsburgh Newsman (and TIME Stringer) Scott Rombach. "Thank God!" she cried. "I'm safe!"

"Shy & Meek." She was hospitalized for physical and nervous exhaustion. Why had Bicycle Bill taken her? One explanation was offered by Psychiatrist John P. Shovlin, superintendent of the state hospital where Hollenbaugh had been confined. Recalling him as a typically "shy, meek" schizophrenic who "was always retreating," Shovlin noted: "These people find it painful to associate with people of their own age. They sometimes seek the companionship of someone much younger."

His prognosis was confirmed by Peggy's own story, which indicated that Bicycle Bill had long planned to spirit her away. Though she did not know him, he knew her name. The caves where they hid had been stocked with cans of corn and baked beans, which he shared with her. At night when he slept, Bicycle Bill chained her by her neck to a tree, and a couple of times tugged her along by a chain leash. But he did not physically injure her. When after several days Peggy's brown suede shoes wore out, he wrapped her feet in old newspapers and gave her a pair of his overshoes.

"He did not purposely harm me in any way," said Peggy, "other than the fear, the tension, and the hardship of being in the woods and being away from my family."

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