Daniel Remeta: On the Road to Destruction

Albright spotted a red-and-blue car matching the description the highway patrol had broadcast near the Levant, Kansas, interchange, which is about 45 miles from the Colorado line. He stopped the vehicle, but before he could take any action, Remeta jumped out of the passenger's side of the car and fired the .357 through the deputy's car. Remeta pulled off four shots, hitting Albright twice: once in the right arm and in the chest. As Albright slumped to the side, lying on the front seat of the cruiser, he recalled later that he expected to die.

"I just closed my eyes and waited for another shot," he told the Topeka Capital-Journal several years later.

Instead, Remeta, thinking  the shots had done the job, got back into the car and sped off.

Before he lost consciousness, Albright watched the car leave I-70 for U.S. 24. He radioed for help and told the dispatcher what had happened.

  Albright didn't know everything that occurred, and in his semi-conscious state, the officer, who would later testify that he was shot by Hunter, possibly saw Hunter raise the .22 pistol and fire — except that by all accounts, Hunter was trying to shoot Remeta. Believing that he had just one chance to escape, Hunter tried to shoot Remeta as he returned to the vehicle. Instead, the hitchhiker managed to shoot Dunn in the leg.

Remeta knew he had to ditch the car and find new transportation. About 10 minutes after he shot Albright, he directed Walter to drive to a grain elevator nearby.

There were three men working that day at the grain elevator. Maurice Christie was inside the shack that served as an office and 29-year-old Rick Schroeder, a friendly, well-respected father of two toddlers, and Glenn Moore, 55, were outside near Moore's pickup truck when the outlaws roared in.

The gang bailed out of Walter's car with guns drawn, forcing Schroeder and Moore into the bed of the truck. Remeta saw Maurice Christie watching through the window of the office, and when Hunter kicked in one of the office windows and Christie turned, Remeta shot him in the back and left him for dead.

Years later, Randy Jones, Chief of Police for Colby, reflected on why Remeta took the two men. At the time of the spree, Jones was a Colby patrolman.

"I'm sure things were happening very fast, and they took them not knowing how they were going to utilize them," Jones said.

With Walter again driving, the wounded Dunn and the panic-stricken Hunter in the cab, the gang fled the grain elevator and drove for several minutes before Remeta ordered Walter to stop.

Remeta then told Schroeder and Moore that he didn't want or need any hostages, and ordered them out of the truck. He told the men to lie down in the road and proceeded to shoot each of them in the back of the head.