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As Dale Blue was driving home from work last April 24, he saw no hint of the surprise party about to be sprung in his honor. He never caught a glimpse of any of the TV trucks or police cars or SUVs full of FBI and BCA agents that were massing near the apartment building where Blue lived in downtown Anoka, waiting for him to get home. Instead he walked in the door as usual, to the news that an FBI agent had phoned and would be calling again.

Blue's son, Michael Benson, had escaped from a locked unit at the state hospital in St. Peter a week earlier, and Blue and his girlfriend, Sharon Lang, were getting used to fielding calls from cops. He didn't mind; he understood that when a prisoner escaped—particularly one as dangerous as Benson, a thoroughly unrepentant serial rapist—cops always kept tabs on the family, because sooner or later escapees usually called on their families for help. Blue had only been home for a moment when the phone rang again. He agreed to meet the FBI agent on the other end of the line the next day.

A few minutes later, a dozen armed officers burst into the apartment. They seized Blue, patted him down, handcuffed him, and placed him under arrest on charges of aiding and abetting his son's escape. They then proceeded to search his wallet and his home. They demanded to see Lang's ID, but when she reached for her purse, the two agents closest to her jumped. One barked that she shouldn't make any more quick movements.

Two of the agents took Blue into the tiny apartment's bedroom and told him it was his last chance to tell them what he knew or they were taking him to jail. When he insisted he knew nothing, they led him down a short, dark hallway and out the building's main door into the parking lot.

It took a moment for Blue's eyes to adjust to the harsh sunlight outside, and the scene he beheld might have made him think he was hallucinating. Some 50 SUVs clogged the leafy downtown Anoka side street, and armed officers ringed the small building. The FBI, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and police from Anoka and St. Peter were there, as were TV vans, satellite trucks, and a phalanx of six rolling video cameras. Front and center: a crew from the reality-TV manhunt show, America's Most Wanted.

Stories about the hunt for Benson dominated the news at the time, and in the coming days and weeks the clips of Blue being arrested and paraded in front of cameras were broadcast over and over—nationally as well as locally, thanks to America's Most Wanted. The show's webpage titled the Benson/Blue story "A Family Affair," and the purported details were offered up breathlessly: Blue smuggled saw blades to Benson inside a pair of boots so Benson could cut a bar from his window, and might have subsequently helped Benson elude capture. To frustrate any effort to aid Benson, Blue was booked into the Nicollet County jail on $1 million in bail—an amount befitting a killer.

But a review of the investigators' reports in the case shows officials had no real evidence against Blue. In fact, even before they began questioning him, investigators had several good leads on who had helped Benson and the three other men who broke out with him. They had even arrested the mother of another escapee, who quickly confessed to being the intended getaway driver. More potentially explosive, they had indications that staffers at the St. Peter facility may have helped.

 

Yet despite the evidence pointing to others, Blue would not be released on bail until two weeks after his son's capture on May 2. And the charges against him would not be dropped until mid-August, when his frustrated attorney demanded a hearing to determine whether there had ever even been probable cause to arrest Blue in the first place. Even today, the Nicollet County attorney says he is continuing to investigate Blue—yet he has not charged the confessed getaway driver or any of the escapees' other alleged accomplices.

Blue would like the return of the $18,000—the sum total of his retirement account—that the ordeal has cost him in legal fees and expenses. And he'd like the return of the "evidence" police seized from his home. But more than that he'd like public vindication, and some acknowledgement that he was arrested chiefly because, as the father of a sex offender, people figure he's probably no better than his son.

"To arrest someone because they're blood-related, that doesn't happen in this country," says Blue. "It might happen in some Third World country, but it's not supposed to happen in this country."

 

If Blue had nothing to do with his son's escape, it wasn't for lack of Benson's trying to recruit him. On March 21, Blue and Lang were in Oklahoma for the funeral of one of Lang's relatives when Blue's cell phone rang. The number that came up indicated Benson was calling from a state hospital. Blue wasn't prepared to deal with him then, so he ignored the call. Benson tried again every few hours, 18 times in total. After several days, Blue took a call from a number he didn't recognize. The woman on the other end was calling on behalf of her uncle, another St. Peter confinee, Blue says. The uncle wanted Blue to pick up the next time Benson called.

Benson finally caught up with his father right after Blue returned to Anoka the following Saturday. Like other calls made from Minnesota's sex offender lockups, the call was recorded, and after Benson's escape, investigators transcribed it. Benson told Blue he'd been moved from Moose Lake to St. Peter and asked Blue to visit the next day. When Blue said he was tired, Benson asked if he'd come Monday. Benson protested that he had a job. Benson pressed harder, and Blue became exasperated. Benson pleaded, saying he was about to be moved "back up to prison," which Blue took to mean Moose Lake. Blue eventually agreed to consider a visit on the following weekend.

It all made sense a couple of days later when Blue got a letter in which Benson said he planned to escape and hoped Blue would help. "The reason I wanted to talk to you in person is I wanted you to take a look at the town of St. Peter," Benson wrote. "As I stated earlier we have a solid, sound and good plan. Nothing is perfect, so just in case something unforeseen happens in the next 14 days we will have to move. And that means we won't have a ride. If I make an emergency phone call to you I would need you to be in the parking lot of the bowling alley by 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Any later and we're toast."

After laying out the risks to Blue as he saw them, Benson concluded his letter by saying he'd understand if his father didn't show up, but he'd be incommunicado for several months. If Blue did visit, he warned he might not be allowed contact because Benson had been caught with a tool in his room: "If you only knew how close a call that was you would truly laugh," he bragged.

When officers from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension first showed up at Blue's home to tell him Benson had escaped, he showed them the letter. It's not hard to see why investigators would read Benson's words and presume a certain level of intimacy between father and son, but Blue told them that he'd written back telling Benson to straighten out and take responsibility for his crimes.

In fact, it wasn't the first time father and son had had this exchange. "He was always talking about escaping, but to me it was just chitter-chatter. He asked about a crop-duster one time and I thought, 'This guy is nuts,'" says Blue. "I had also called his social worker at Moose Lake and tried to tell them about his talking about escaping, but they weren't interested."

After Benson's capture, Blue's attorney hired a Minneapolis forensic document examiner to test the notebook in which Blue said he had written his reply to his son's request for help. She used electrically charged particles to highlight the indentations several pages down on the notebook in question; a composite of several pages revealed Blue's response in stark relief.

"NO!! I won't be part of something where innocent people may get hurt," the father's reply reads. "I couldn't live with that on my mind. I don't know your friends or what they are capable of. Michael, you're 40+ years old, soon you'll be in your fifties—where does it all end? You've wasted your whole life fighting the system. You've lost and you're still loosing [sic]."

Blue then writes that he's sorry he wasn't a part of his kids' early lives, "but back in the '60s it was unheard of [for] fathers to have custody.... I won't allow you to walk on the family or use them," he continues. "Just be straight with all of us.... No games! When you have something to say that isn't B.S.—call me."

Two days after the visit from BCA agents, Blue showed Benson's letter to agents from the FBI and then showed it to them again a day or two later when they came back. One of the agents then called asking for a copy, so Lang agreed to fax it to the bureau. During her conversation with the agent, she says, she joked that it was Blue's property and she hoped he wouldn't be mad.

After Blue's arrest, Lang stayed right where officers asked her to, on the couch, while the remaining cops tore the two rooms apart. They were particularly interested in two pairs of boots in the closet and asked Lang why they were different sizes. They were different brands, she explained, and didn't fit the same. Unsatisfied, investigators pulled the boots open and took pictures of the size designations in each pair.

 

An agent Lang had never seen before started sifting through a basket of DVDs and books on the floor by the couch. The officer shouted to his colleagues that he'd "found something," and that they should see what Lang "was hiding."

As Lang remembers it, her jaw dropped. One of the FBI agents in particular should have known better, she thought: It was the letter she had already faxed to his office a couple of days before. She looked at the agent, who was rifling through her desk. The agent said nothing, however, and kept his back to her.

Later, when Lang saw the application for a search warrant, she grew appalled all over again. Her quip that the letter was Blue's and perhaps she ought not fax it had morphed. In the version of the story the cops told the judge, Blue had threatened to kill Lang for revealing the letter.

In St. Peter, Blue says, officials immediately began applying pressure. They told him his estranged daughter was coming to visit from her home in Indiana. He concluded it was a setup the second she arrived. While Lang had been made to do her visiting from behind a glass partition, his daughter was allowed in the jail library. Lang says guards at the jail told her the woman was brought in by the FBI in an effort to get Blue to say where Benson was.

Similarly, Blue says he quickly saw through the jail guards' seemingly generous offers to let him visit the library; every time he did, inmates were waiting to grill him about his son's whereabouts.

Michael Benson was in a bar in Kansas City drinking with one of the regulars when the episode of America's Most Wanted featuring him and his father aired the following Saturday. He demanded that the bartender turn the sound down. But in a novelistic twist that would earn the story national play, the bartender turned out to be such a huge fan of the show that she had Tivo'd it at home. It was past 4:00 a.m. when she settled down to watch—and recognized Benson. Apprehended at the home of a new drinking buddy, Benson told police his father had nothing to do with his escape and bragged at some length about his almost-successful plot and how easy it had been to fool hospital staff.

"My father had absolutely nothing to do with my escape," Benson wrote in a letter to City Pages shortly after his capture. "He wanted me (as so many family members of other MSOP detainees feel as well) 'to work with the program'.... The authorities knew that by showboating my father in a jail jumpsuit on TV and in the newspapers that I would turn myself in, which I was intending to do if I had not been arrested." (For the record, Blue says he doubts Benson would ever have turned himself in for his father's sake.)

The weakness of the evidence, coupled with Blue's reconstructed reply letter, impressed a judge enough to win a reduction in bail from $1 million to $10,000 a week after Benson's capture. Yet prosecutors still refused to drop the charges, and his attorney, Marsh Halberg, spent the next two months asking to see the evidence linking his client to the escape. In August Halberg filed a motion pointing out that most of the evidence he had been given pointed toward other suspects, and asked the court for a hearing to determine whether there was even probable cause to charge Blue.

In response, prosecutors offered Blue a plea bargain called a continuance for dismissal. He would not have to admit guilt, there would be no penalty, and the charges would quietly be dismissed entirely in a year provided Blue did not "re-offend." Angry, Blue demanded a trial.

"Usually the complaint is just the tip of the iceberg. But here that's all there was, was the tip—there was nothing below," Halberg says. "Dale felt any negotiation short of an outright and immediate dismissal would imply he had done something wrong and that was not acceptable to him. Dale is a very proud man and his reputation means everything to him."

On August 11, Nicollet County Attorney Michael Riley Sr. dropped the charges, but did so "without prejudice," saying "further investigation" was in order. The Star Tribune, where Blue's photo and news of his arrest had been part of a front-page story on Benson's escape, published a 238-word note about it on page 5B.

 

On the wall behind the overstuffed couch that dominates Blue's crowded two-room apartment is a shadowbox holding an array of artifacts from his Ojibwe heritage. A small black medicine bag is pinned to one corner—"When I go, it goes with me," he explains. To its left, his grandmother's faded apron fans out diagonally. Open the frame and it still smells like her cooking, he says.

Dale Blue is 60, but possessed of thick black hair that does nothing to betray his age. Of medium build, he's barrel-chested and clear-eyed. In conversation he's usually laconic, becoming animated only when talking about an upcoming powwow. He turns palpably remorseful when the topic switches to Benson.

Blue was raised on the White Earth reservation by his grandmother and grandfather, who worked as a deputy sheriff, bricklayer, carpenter, and bus driver. After high school, he went to a technical college for a couple of years before Vietnam intervened. He spent 14 months there in 1968 and 1969 as a sniper with the 101st Airborne, assigned to the Fourth Infantry Division. He rose to the rank of sergeant, fighting in the Tet Offensive and receiving both the silver and bronze stars as well as a Purple Heart. "I don't like to brag about them," he says. "I leave that to the guys who died or were hurt there."

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