MURDERS AT DAWN

By ADAM COHEN

It seemed like the plot of a very bad movie, but it wasn't, and before it was over Chris Foote and Spring Wright were dead. Five intruders in ski masks, two with body armor, stormed a three-bedroom bungalow in the Maryvale area of Phoenix, Ariz., at 4 a.m. one day last week, using a sledgehammer to bludgeon their way into the house. In one bedroom they found Louisa Sharrah and proceeded to bind her arms with plastic cuffs and strike her with a metal flashlight. The men woke her young children and held them at gunpoint as they screamed in terror. Then the invaders kicked in the door to the bedroom where Foote, a 23-year-old construction worker, and his girlfriend, Wright, a 19-year-old college student, had been sleeping. Gunfire erupted as the men forced in the door. From his bed, Foote fired a 9-mm handgun at his assailants and managed to wound two of them, but he and Wright died in a fusillade.

The lunacy of the attack only grew later that day; the victims' families learned that the killers appeared to be bounty hunters who had hit the wrong house. The five, who were all captured and arrested over the following three days, carried papers indicating they had been looking for a California fugitive, who seems to have had no connection to the dead couple or anyone else in the house. The ragtag crew of bounty hunters included Michael Martin Sanders, 40, convicted in 1978 on a weapons charge and in 1982 of retaliating against a murder witness. "Calling yourself a bounty hunter does not give you a license to kill," said Maricopa County prosecutor Richard Romley, who has filed second-degree murder charges against Sanders and his colleagues. But the circumstances surrounding the killings were so unusual that prosecutors have not ruled out the possibility that the men were actually trying to rob the house and are claiming to be bounty hunters as a cover. The California case is five years old, and the fugitive is no longer being sought. The bond company that the men said they were working for claims never to have hired or even heard of them.

The Phoenix murders have turned a light onto a dark corner of the criminal-justice system. Bounty hunters are largely independent contractors hired by the nation's estimated $4 billion bail-bond industry to track down criminal defendants who jump bail. Lately, they have taken to calling themselves "bail-enforcement agents" or "fugitive-recovery agents." There are more than 10,000 nationwide, and last year they found tens of thousands of fugitives, generally taking home a fee of about 10% of the bail in question. The profession dates back in the U.S. to the days of the Wild West, when shorthanded sheriffs had to enlist free-lance help in tracking down stagecoach robbers and cattle rustlers. Bounty hunters have been celebrated in popular culture--The Hunter, a Steve McQueen movie was inspired by the story of legendary bounty hunter Ralph Thorson, and Midnight Run presented Robert De Niro as a bounty hunter. "It harks back to the endless Western frontier, where no law existed and bounty hunters crossed state lines in pursuit of justice," says Robert McCrie, a professor at New York City's John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

The law of the Old West still sets the standard of conduct for many in the field but not the geographic boundaries; bounty hunters roam from Manhattan to Southern California, renegades of the American criminal-justice system. Incredibly, only a handful of states have licensing requirements for bounty hunters. "The business is wide open," says Phoenix bail agent Linda Ownbey. "Anybody can get in, and anything can happen."

Because they are not government officers but private actors enforcing the contractual terms of the bail bond, bounty hunters generally don't need court orders to burst into private homes, nor do they have to observe constitutional niceties like Miranda warnings. An 1873 Supreme Court decision held that bounty hunters may pursue a defendant "into another State; may arrest him on the Sabbath; and, if necessary, may break and enter his house for that purpose." Says Arizona lawyer Gary Klahr: "In Phoenix, it's harder now to repossess a car--you're supposed to alert the police first--than it is to repossess a human being."

Last week's deaths are only the latest in a long line of serious bounty-hunting mishaps. Ten years ago, also in Phoenix, an 18-year-old California bounty hunter, looking to pick up a $1,500 bounty with his dad, shot and killed an unarmed fleeing man. Richard Bachellor died as his wife and three-year-old son looked on. In 1994 a grandmother of 13 was picked up--kidnapped, in effect--by bounty hunters as she sat on the steps of her Manhattan home. Jrae Mason was 13 cm taller and weighed considerably less than the fugitive, and looked nothing like her photograph. Bounty hunters handcuffed her, and thus began a five-day escapade that ended with Mason's being turned over to the sheriff in Tuscaloosa, Ala. When she turned out to be the wrong person, the bondsman gave her a $24 bus ticket back home, says her lawyer David Breitbart.

After last week's killings, Chris Foote's family called for the Arizona legislature to rein in bounty hunters. A bill imposing licensing requirements and background checks for the profession is expected next session. Last year a Kansas City judge sentenced a bounty hunter to six months in jail for searching a private home after the occupant produced an ID showing he was not the man wanted. Texas requires bounty hunters to obtain arrest warrants and be accompanied by peace officers, security officers or licensed private investigators. Curbs have not come easily. Says Gene Newman, president of the Professional Bail Agents of the U.S.: "Whenever we try to pass laws, we hit a lot of resistance from Rambo wannabes who call their legislators."

It may be civil lawsuits that produce the most dramatic reform. Last year a federal jury in New York awarded Mason $1.2 million for her abduction to Alabama, a judgment that, though later reduced by the judge, sent a chill through the bounty-hunting community. Another family, terrorized in a Southern California Motel 6, won a $1.15 million verdict. Despite last week's deaths, damage awards like these are inexorably exerting a civilizing effect on a profession with a reputation for cutting legal corners. "The days of kicking doors and slapping whores are over," says Don Floyd, owner of Northeast Bail Bonds in Atlanta, who tries to be selective about the bounty hunters he employs. Otherwise, he says, "I couldn't defend all the lawsuits I'd have."

--Reported by Richard Woodbury/Phoenix and Greg Fulton/Atlanta

With reporting by RICHARD WOODBURY/PHOENIX AND GREG FULTON/ATLANTA