he was not front and center with lights blaring. then one night in late 2002, 2 1/2 years after david arrived in oregon, a friend of jon s called to say he caught the tale end of america s most wanted and had seen a picture of a man who looked eerily like david. jon immediately called his mom. what was your mother s response? ridiculous. that s just absurd. she said, honey, we already did a background check on him and he came out clean. i said, mom, this is really serious. i can just call them. they can verify. he doesn t even have to know. was she game? she s like, no, no, you re just going to create a lot of heartache for someone who has already been through enough, losing his family and it s not him. it can t be him. jon tried to put the matter out of his mind but was still deeply troubled that david carson seemed to be splitting the family apart. he spent less and less time at the ranch. then on mother s day, 2004, he
david felt that it was too much for lueene. she started complaining about the cleanup. well, it never was that way before, because she did not have to do all the cleaning up. everybody else pitched in. but he used that as a guise for it being too much for lueene because he did not want these people there. looking back, jaime says he should have seen what was happening. he was losing his wife. that s what i call master of manipulation. he s a master of manipulation. he s like a chess player. someone like a bobby fischer who is always thinking ten moves ahead. but back then all they knew was they felt increasingly unwelcome at the ranch. it seemed the stranger was becoming the man of the house. jaime felt anxious and sad, but wasn t sure how to handle the situation. while his son wondered and worried what this man, who was already causing a rift in the family, was really up to.
burst into flames and they all perished in the car wreck, but he survived. immediately you feel compassion for the person, think oh, what a tragic thing. the stranger was convincing and jaime, the father, quickly grew fond of the quiet, intelligent man from maine. and it turned out he was very handy. especially when it came to construction. jaime, who was recovering from prostate cancer and was 67 at the time, needed someone just like david to help him out at his home in florence, oregon, 60 miles west of his business in eugene. within a few weeks, jaime invited the stranger to stay at what he called the ranch, the spacious secluded hilltop dream house he shared with his wife lueene. i like him very much. that s why i invite him here. jaime and lueene had many friends, especially from their church. none closer than richard and donna dobson. full of electricity. full of life. the center place for people to
decided to make a special effort to see his mom. he was shocked by how the situation had deteriorated. their close family friend was there as well. david will not come and eat at the table with jaime. that s how the disrespect had grown to that magnitude. jon said his dad seemed utterly defeated, but rather than tell david carson to leave his home, he decided he should be the one to go. so then two days later my father calls me on the phone. he says, i ve come to a decision. i m not going to go back to the ranch anymore. i m not going to live there. i m not wanted there, i m not happy there. i get a terrible knot in my stomach every time i drive up the road. and then he showed me some boxes. they even packed my things and sent me with this stuff. they said they don t want it there in the house. so i m not wanted there. indeed, his dad even seemed a little afraid of the stranger. and there was more. so i decide i m going to give them the house, i m going to sign it over to the
i just i was totally distraught. i felt horrible. i thought to myself, i kept thinking, what if this is all a big huge mistake, what if this guy really is innocent and he s not he s not the guy that we think he is. and he s going to go through this horrible experience after losing his family. i mean, in my mind, i was sure that it was him. jon had made contact with an fbi agent. the following morning, he called his mother to make sure she was at work. and i knew the kids were at school, so i called the agent and i said, go get him. and they came here and pretended to be church workers coming to talk to him. and arrested him? and they arrested him without incident. for the four years david carson lived at the ranch he d been pretending to be someone he was not. even perfecting his deceit right under their noses. in his room at the jaramillo home, authorities found these 20 books on how to get a new identity and disappear. and when they found out that