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Wednesday, October 24, 2001
A scary encounter on farm
By Jesse Hyde
Deseret News staff writer
PRICE – The peacocks began acting strange Monday at dusk.
They ignored corn scattered in front of them and flew to the
top of a haystack, where they craned their necks to watch something in
the bushes.
Farmer Terry D’Ambrosio talks about encounter with suspects.

Stuart W. Johnson, Deseret News
Carbon County farmer Terry D’Ambrosio says he had had a strange
feeling all day about two murder suspects on the loose. And it just
wasn’t right for his birds to act this way.
He would later tell police that the birds tipped him off -
and the subsequent events provided clues that led to the end of the most
intense manhunt the local sheriff had seen.
D’Ambrosio, a stocky man who wears a beard, walked around
his shop to see what the peacocks were watching and saw a man walking up
a dirt road toward the potato cellar.
Like everyone else in Price, D’Ambrosio knew a manhunt was
on for a father and son suspected in the slaying of two hunters Sunday
near Flaming Gorge Dam. He had heard the men escaped into a heavily
wooded area near his property following a high-speed chase with police.
He thought about his elderly mother home alone in the
farmhouse, then he ran back to his shop, loaded his shotgun and filled
his pockets with shells.
When he emerged from the shop, the man had disappeared, so
D’Ambrosio cautiously walked down to the cellar with his two dogs and
hid behind a piece of farm equipment.
One of his dogs, a pit bull named Scrappy, began sniffing in
the weeds 10 feet from where D’Ambrosio stood.
“I hollered for the man to come out and he didn’t. So I
said, ‘You better get out here. I got a loaded shotgun and I’m not
joking around.’ “
A tired-looking young man with tattered clothing rose from
the brush. His pants were torn from the hip pocket down. He told
D’Ambrosio he was on his way back to Oregon and his car had broken down.
He didn’t have a gun, he said, and he was just hungry.
D’Ambrosio then led the man at gunpoint to the cellar and
told him to fill a sack with potatoes. He also gave the man a watermelon
and some carrots.
“Are you alone?” D’Ambrosio asked.
“No,” the man said. “I’m with my dad.”
D’Ambrosio said he was now 90 percent sure he was dealing
with one of the suspects.
“At that point, I got scared. I had the younger man at
gunpoint, but I didn’t know where his dad was. I could’ve been shot just
like that.”
He led the man out of the cellar and opened a gate for him
to leave. He saw the other man crouched in the weeds.
D’Ambrosio later learned one of the men had a .44 caliber
pistol in his pocket and the young man was wearing a bullet-proof vest.
“I know there are some suspected killers in the area,”
D’Ambrosio told the men as they walked away. “I don’t know if that’s who
you are, but if it isn’t, be careful because police are in the area.”
The older man returned and shook D’Ambrosio’s hand in
gratitude and then the pair walked casually away from the farmer toward
the river.
D’Ambrosio had his brother call the police, and then he
called his niece Jessica Ori, who lives across the river, and told her
to take her 2-year-old son and leave. She went to her mother-in-law’s
house, just up the road from the farm.
D’Ambrosio’s family stayed up all night. Ori’s father-in-law
and husband shined spotlights across a hay field behind their house and
stood on the deck with a pistol and a shotgun. A police helicopter
circled above the farm all night.
The men must have followed the river behind the D’Ambrosios’
farm for a quarter mile before they hid inside a small pump house.
Tuesday morning, police came upon the shed and captured Michael
Heffelinger, 23, and his father, Lewis, 53, without incident. Of the
25-30 tips the police got Monday night, it was D’Ambrosio’s that led to
the arrests.
“It doesn’t sink in until later,” D’Ambrosio said hours
after the capture. “They didn’t seem harmful to me.”

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