This has been a time of great fear in some areas, as the search goes on for two escaped murderers from Clinton Correctional Facility at Dannemora, but it isn't the first time the area has been gripped as a manhunt is underway. Bill Carey says nearly 40 years ago, the Adirondacks learned to lock its doors after hearing of the case of Robert Garrow.
It was 1968 when Robert Garrow walked out of prison after serving just six years of a 20-year sentence for a brutal rape. He was being rewarded for good behavior -- a decision left to be questioned.
"He was a guy that broke the law, I think, from day one. Doing all sorts of crimes that I'm aware of. Of course, maybe, there were more. But, he was not a nice man," said Dick Case, a former Syracuse newspaper columnist.
Little is known about Garrow's activities in the 5 years after he left Auburn prison. But by July of 1973, Robert Garrow added murder to his repertoire when he raped and killed Syracuse teenager Alicia Hauck, and buried her body in a forgotten corner of Oakwood Cemetery.
It was the beginning of a month long killing spree, and the scene shifted to the Adirondacks.
In Weverton, Warren County, two hikers, Daniel Porter and Susan Petz were viscously killed. Two weeks later in Wells, Hamilton County, he attacked four campers. Three escaped, but one, Phillip Domblewski, died.
The hunt for the Adirondack killer was on -- with little success.
"He was, after all, an experienced woodsman -- unlike the two gentlemen who have escaped most recently. He knew his way around the woods. It took the authorities a while to find him," Case said.
"Everyone was locking their doors, just terrified that this man was going to show up," said Lawrence Gooley, who wrote the book on Robert Garrow's terror spree "Terror in the Adirondacks."
"It was on the 12th day when they captured Robert -- made it back to the town where he grew up, Mineville-Witherbee. He was captured three days later -- shot and captured," Gooley said.
Garrow, on the run for most of the summer of 1973, now claimed he could not walk. While there were skeptics, Garrow traveled by wheelchair. When he was sent to prison to serve time for murder, he demanded he not be sent to Clinton Correctional in Dannemora.
"His target was Fishkill. It's a maximum security prison, with a minimum security wing, which held elderly and disabled prisoners. And the way Garrow's story played out was, eventually, he did get moved there," Gooley said.
Four years passed at Fishkill. His son had visited the prisoner delivering a bucket of fried chicken. If guards at the minimum security wing had looked more closely, they would have found a gun hidden inside.
A week later, a prison bed check showed Garrow was gone.
"His plan for escape was involving making this dummy in the bed, and climbing over a fence into the woods surrounding the prison," Case said.
Another manhunt. Another round of fear -- lasting three days before a party of searchers spotted Garrow in a grassy area not far from the prison walls.
"They cornered him and the surprise of surprises was that when they ordered him to freeze, he stood up and shot someone," Gooley said.
The search team fired back. Robert Garrow, at age 42, was dead.
Garrow was classified a serial killer, responsible for four deaths in that bloody summer of 1973, but he, eventually, admitted to several rapes -- all involving young girls, normally under 16 years of age.
"People felt a sense of relief this bad guy had been taken out the way you would expect him to be," Case said.