Supremacist A Suspect In Two Kidnappings Bank Robber Caught Near Priest Lake Linked To Stevens, Ferry County Crimes
Authorities announced Friday that they believe last year’s militia-style kidnapping of Colville business owners Malcolm and Jill Friedman was the work of white-supremacist Faron Lovelace.
Lovelace, who was the 15th most-wanted criminal in America until his Aug. 18 arrest at North Idaho’s Priest Lake, also is a suspect in a similar kidnapping last summer in Ferry County.
Lovelace, 39, is an escaped bank robber who has said he wants to be executed rather than go back to prison. After officers arrested him near his Priest Lake squatter’s camp, Lovelace led them to the grave of 24-year-old Jeremy C. Scott.
Bonner County sheriff’s officers said Lovelace told them he shot Scott, a fellow racist, in the back of the head in July 1995 after a falling out.
That killing occurred just a few weeks after the Friedmans were robbed at gunpoint in their Colville home, kidnapped and driven to Spokane in their own vehicle, then dropped off at a north Spokane restaurant.
The Colville incident began when Jill Friedman was confronted inside her home by an armed intruder. The man ordered her to call her husband at their grocery store and tell him to come home. When Malcolm Friedman arrived at home, he became the hostage while Jill Friedman was sent back to the store to get cash. After she returned with the money, the gunman forced the couple to drive to Spokane.
The Friedmans said the man who robbed them indicated he was part of a group that targeted them because of their Jewish name. The couple, who own two grocery stores and a restaurant, actually are Episcopalian.
Stevens County Sheriff Craig Thayer said he will ask Prosecutor Jerry Wetle next week to file kidnapping, burglary and robbery charges against Lovelace on the basis of statements he made and other evidence.
“We have corroborating physical evidence that goes along with the interviews,” Thayer said. “It all meshed.”
Thayer declined to say what the evidence is, but the suspect took guns as well as money from the Friedmans.
Meanwhile, Ferry County Sheriff Pete Warner confirmed that Lovelace is a suspect in a similar kidnapping in that county shortly after the June 18, 1995, crime against the Friedmans.
Just as Spokane County sheriff’s officers doubted the Friedmans’ story, Warner said the incident reported in Ferry County was so bizarre “we didn’t know whether it was fabricated or it was real.”
Jill Friedman said she is “eternally grateful” to the Stevens County Sheriff’s Department and others who took the story seriously from the beginning.
Warner declined to elaborate on the Ferry County incident except to say that a number of firearms were stolen and it “looks awfully similar” to the Friedman case. The suspect’s method of operation was “almost the same,” he said. “It looks very suspicious.”
For Jill Friedman, identification of Lovelace as the kidnapping suspect ended a year of secondguessing about whether she should have complied with the demands of the camouflage-clad gunman who broke into her home.
Friedman said she several times considered “pulling some kind of Steven Seagal move,” starting when the man emerged from another room in her home, pushed her down and put a gun to her head.
When the gunman forced her to call her husband home, Friedman considered blurting out a warning over the telephone.
She said she was allowed to go to another room after her husband arrived and the gunman relaxed a bit. At that point, Friedman said, she got out a loaded .44-Magnum pistol and cocked it.
Her first irrational thought as she considered whether to shoot the intruder was that it would spoil her carpet and walls, Friedman said. Then “something told me, ‘Don’t do something foolish and get you or Malcolm killed,”’ she recalled.
Friedman said she still isn’t sure whether it was just the instinct for self-preservation or an answer to her prayer for guidance. But she put the gun away and believes now she made the right decision.
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