Fugitive Caught In Own Tangled Web Man With 20-Year Run Of Aliases Didn’T Know The Chase Had Ended

With murder-for-hire charges long since abandoned, a mysterious impostor who once hid out in Chewelah, Wash., probably could have gone home to Canada years ago.

Instead, the fugitive now faces up to 20 years in a Nevada prison for allegedly stealing the identity of a King County Sheriff’s Office accountant.

Identified through fingerprints as William Donald Walton, 59, the “John Doe” suspect is to be arraigned today in Reno, Nev., on one count of “unlawfully obtaining and using the personal identification information of another.” Other charges and deportation proceedings are pending.

A judge will have to make a legal determination of the suspect’s identity.

Authorities say the impostor used King County resident Roy Vasquez’s unblemished record to obtain a number of jobs in the criminal justice system in Nevada.

The suspect attended a law-enforcement academy, worked as a hospital security supervisor, a part-time bailiff in Reno Justice Court and was even honored as a deputy constable of the month in Incline Village at Lake Tahoe. Earlier, he was a deputy constable in Sparks, Nev.

Reno police are still piecing together Walton’s tangled history. A British citizen, he was charged in a bungled murder-for-hire conspiracy in 1978-79 in Lethbridge, Alberta, but Canadian authorities “stayed” the charge long ago.

The charge could be revived, but that is unlikely, Cpl. Jamie Johnston of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police told the Lethbridge Herald newspaper.

“Canada, or at least Alberta, has no further legal interest in him,” Johnston said.

Newspaper clippings show two other men, Scott Mitchell and Raymond Bolokoski Blaine, were convicted in a failed murder conspiracy that one judge called “inept and stupid” and another called “a childish, bizarre James Bond scenario.” Mitchell got two years in jail; Blaine, six months.

Testimony indicated the men were angry because of business dealings with Bob Eden, whose guard dog business went bankrupt. Mitchell and Blaine were convicted of trying to hire a hit man to kill Eden, but the supposed assassin turned out to be an undercover RCMP officer and the suspects couldn’t come up with the $6,500 they agreed to pay.

Details of Walton’s suspected involvement in the scheme were not available. A judge found enough evidence in a preliminary hearing to hold Walton for trial, but he fled in October 1980 before the trial could be scheduled.

Authorities now believe Walton went to the Seattle area and lived there and in the Inland Northwest, including Chewelah, in the early 1980s. Little is known about what he did in the Spokane area, except that he may have used the name of a man who was born in Coeur d’Alene, Sterling Smith. Documents in Walton’s possession indicate he may have identified himself in this area as Roy Vasquez and the Rev. Sterling Smith.

Chewelah Police Chief Michael Clements and Stevens County Sheriff Craig Thayer were unable to find any record of the names Walton may have used in Stevens County.

Efforts to locate the real Sterling Smith were unsuccessful, although The Spokesman-Review published an obituary for lifelong Spokane resident Sterling A. Smith, who died in 1993 at age 83.

“The whole Sterling Smith thing, we don’t know what he did with that identity,” Reno Police Sgt. Todd Shipley said. “He kept to himself, and he kept his family close.”

His second family, anyway. Walton left a wife and children behind in Lethbridge.

Reno police haven’t been able to question his new wife, Regina Linda Ariz, who - according to a marriage license - married “David Norman Walton” in March 1984 in Bothell, Wash. Ariz suffered a heart attack and was hospitalized about the time Walton was arrested May 26.

Deputy Washoe County District Attorney Roy Stralla said David Norman Walton, whose British driver’s license was found in William Donald Walton’s possession, is believed to be the suspect’s brother. The brother’s identity is one of about a dozen names the suspect is believed to have used.

Shipley said a photograph suggests Walton’s father was a British police officer. The U.S. State Department, the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service are working with Interpol and foreign police agencies to sort out international connections that may include South Africa and Mexico as well as Canada and Great Britain.

There are indications that Walton was a “wannabe militia kind of guy” who sold firearms equipment, such as holsters, and information of interest to people with far-right political beliefs, Shipley said. Using the Internet, the suspect continued selling that kind of merchandise from his home in the Reno area. He has been tied to transactions in Idaho, Nevada, California, Texas and Iowa.

“He has put on a lot of fronts with people, identifying that he has done various things throughout his life,” Shipley said.

In particular, Shipley said, Walton “told everyone he was an American soldier in Vietnam and was a chopper pilot. He liked to tell people that, and he had a big interest in the Vietnam War.”

Walton held a variety of jobs in the criminal justice system in the Reno area under the name of Roy Vasquez, Shipley said.

Vasquez is a King County sheriff’s revenue processor whose identity Walton used during most of his 20 years as a fugitive, Shipley said.

“It’s amazing just how far and wide this fellow was using my name,” Vasquez said.

The impostor got away with it, in part, because Vasquez pays his bills and doesn’t get into trouble with the law. The impostor also stayed out of trouble and usually paid his bills, but the men didn’t pay each other’s taxes.

The real Vasquez protested in 1995 when the Internal Revenue Service started hounding him for additional income tax. He assumed everything was OK when the IRS backed off, “but a year later they came back at me.” Then he got turned down for a loan and discovered his credit record wasn’t as spotless as he thought.

Recently, a collection agency threatened him over a relatively small unpaid bill he knew nothing about.

When the IRS asked earlier this year why he didn’t report $30,000 of income from his job as a security supervisor at St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center in Reno, Vasquez asked one of his co-workers at the King County Sheriff’s Office to look him up in police databases. Sure enough, he had a Nevada driver’s license even though he had never lived there. So Vasquez went to Reno and got police there to arrest the alleged impostor last month.

Vasquez had never met Walton, as far as he knows, and doesn’t know how Walton got his Social Security number. He speculates that he may have been tricked by a false job advertisement years ago when he was looking for work and submitted a lot of applications.

It appears the impostor’s choice of Vasquez may have been based on similarities between the two men. In person, no one could confuse the Hispanic Vasquez with Walton, who speaks with an English accent. On paper, though, both men are 59 and have similar heights and weights.

“Fortunately, this guy didn’t do anything to get me in trouble,” Vasquez said. “I could be facing a police officer pointing a gun at me, thinking I was a dangerous criminal.”

Lethbridge attorney Harold Moodie, who represented Walton when he was charged in 1980, recalls his client as a “nice guy” except that he abandoned a wife and two sons.

“I’m sure he did not want to cause anybody any harm,” Moodie said, citing the public service jobs Walton held after fleeing Lethbridge.

But Stralla, the attorney who’s prosecuting Walton, thinks the suspect had another reason for choosing law enforcement and judicial jobs.

“He always kept himself close to law enforcement,” Stralla said. “He had access, we believe, to the criminal justice information system, which would allow him to check whether there were active warrants or people looking for him.”

Police also believe Walton used his law enforcement connections in a “skip tracer” business he operated on the side - helping debt collectors and process servers find people who are on the lam.

Sandra Chereb of the Associated Press and Craig Albrecht of the Lethbridge Herald contributed to this report.