I expected a “running for beginners” app hah, like for training / endurance

Wow, that was quite a lot of cryptic build-up. It’s basically a story about conman/drug guy interwoven with biographical information and anecdotes about how this impacted his family.

“You can run,” I guess maybe in the context of “You can run but you can’t hide” is not really touched upon too much. I mean it doesn’t have a particular connection to this story, any more than any other story about a fugitive.

  The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself. -- Ezekiel 18:20

That was aspirational around 590 BC when written, and still is. To isolate children from the iniquity of the parent would require the dissolution of the family.

And as many adoptive parents know, that doesn’t go so easily.

That's about genetic predispositions, not character. Adoptive parents dealing with inherited trauma or behavioral issues is real, but it's a separate problem from legal culpability. We shouldn't conflate the two — one's biology, the other's justice.

I actually enjoyed this one the build up worked for me, even if the two threads don't fully tie together.

I read it all. There are no shockers in the boxes. It's all explained ahead of time and by the time the contents of the boxes are revealed, you'll wish you didn't read all of that.

I interpreted it another way: the boxes are what connects the past to this written story. Without the boxes most details would be forgotten and this article wouldn't exist. The documents in the boxes were only thoroughly read by one daughter starting in 2024.

On the subject of crime and that web site, I thought this story was quite fascinating:

https://magazine.atavist.com/2019/outlaw-country-klamath-cou...

There are a lot of those bits of land throughout the west that have been, for whatever reason, subdivided enough to make them very cheap plots of land in remote areas. They tend to attract a lot of very random people.

There's an area like that near where I live in Bend, Oregon where some guy called in to the Sheriff's department worried about his brother. The deputies decided to visit the next day because it was winter and already dark. Reading that, I had a record scratch moment where I was going "wait, the sheriff's deputy wouldn't visit the area after dark - holy crap".

Ah to live in the 70s and 80s where nothing was verifiable. I probably would still have been a model employee but the possibilities were endless.

The 90s weren't so different, nor earlier decades, centuries. In fact, the positioning here irritates me:

  The McCanns vanished, as did Sally and Steve. It wasn’t that hard; they were living in the golden age of fugitives.

It makes it sound as though the anomaly were not the past two decades, but all of recorded history which preceded them.

But has anyone actually tested whether modern surveillance makes flight meaningfully harder, or do we just assume it does? The McCanns lived undiscovered for decades even after the internet. What's the counterfactual — did digitization reduce fugitive lifespans, or just make the successful ones invisible?

Car racing and drug running must have been closely linked in the 80s. For another great read about them, check out Randy Lanier’s story. ( He had racing boats, too. )

Maybe Miami Vice was closer to truth than we knew.

Is this a story from the Epstein universe? Because the town of York during that time had some interesting characters like Donald and Kashoggi. Also "Lago Mar" in Florida sounds familiar.

Edit: At the end the main protagonist even mentions having Iran Contra evidence and speaks to the commission, but two senators present evidence that devalues his testimony. Interesting.

> John was strict and controlling. He wanted his daughters to dress in identical clothing embroidered with their initials, and told them to wear their hair long, that it looked more ladylike than a popular bob cut. He wrote down chores for everyone in the family on sheets of yellow legal paper. Erin and Meredith got lists of books to read and words to memorize. The house had about a dozen phones, and John instructed Erin to answer formally: “McCann residence, Erin speaking. How may I help you?” John told his daughters that there was only one right way to install a new roll of toilet paper—feeding forward from the top, not hanging down in back—and insisted that they get straight A’s while lying about his academic achievements.

So completely normal things painted as some insidious nonsense.

I wouldn't call that completely normal. It's certainly strict and controlling.

Actually, "strict and controlling" isn't really a correction of "normal" — dyauspitr never said it was normal. The sibling comment seems to be arguing against a point nobody made. IIRC the article itself frames it as unusual behavior from the start.

The moral of the story is that they should have followed in the footsteps of the Sackler Family and Purdue Pharma, who found a legal way to push opiates on people using shopping mall pain clinics and shady doctors as the sales and marketing team.

Just as sociopathic, but they got to keep their billions, serve no prison time, all while doing far more social harm than a pair of low-life cocaine importers could have dreamed of.

The Sacklers even got museums named after them first.

Reminds me of Brecht

> Was ist ein Einbruch in eine Bank gegen die Gründung einer Bank?

In the long tradition of commenting on HN without reading the source, I was about to write up everything I've learned about running over the years...shoes, routes, stretches, rest days, IT band therapy, ...

Their dad smuggled cocaine. That was the secret that took about 4,000 words to reach. Entertaining article, but boy what a trudge.

Sometimes the journey is the reward.

Honestly i come to hn to escape true crime.

The literature on fugitive psychology is thin -- most research focuses on recidivism rather than sustained evasion. What evidence exists suggests family ties are the primary vector for eventual capture, which makes the biographical framing here more than stylistic choice.