UGA prof wanted in slayings joins list of well-known eluders

It’s been nine days since UGA professor George M. Zinkhan disappeared after killing his wife and two others in front of an Athens theater. Though his red Jeep was recovered on Friday authorities have yet to locate the reserved academic.

Related George Zinkhan news:

• Photos: Zinkhan's body found
• Fellow professor sent into hiding
• Details of suicide
• Dog finds body
• Reaction in Athens
• Timeline of events
• Audio: 911 call
• FBI: Zinkhan's wife had sought divorce

Zinkhan joins other well-known fugitives from justice, past and present. A sampling:

MISSING:

Former DeKalb County Sheriff’s Deputy Derrick Yancey

On April 4th, Yancey – indicted in August for killing his wife, Linda, 44, and a Guatemalan day laborer, 20-year-old Marcial Cax Puluc – removed his ankle monitor and escaped from his mother’s Jonesboro home. A judge had released Yancey on $150,000 bond and placed him under house arrest. A series of mistakes helped facilitate his escape, including uncertainty about whom to call, voice mail messages left unanswered for hours and previous false alarms. Despite some early tips, including one that placed him at the Greyhound bus station in downtown Atlanta, Yancey’s whereabouts remain a mystery.

Dan Cooper, aka D.B. Cooper

On Nov. 24, 1971, a man identifying himself as Dan Cooper (later misidentified as D.B. Cooper) hijacked a Northwest Orient jet en route to Seattle. Cooper’s demands — four parachutes and $200,000 — were met and the flight was re-directed to Reno. As the plane flew over the southwestern Washington wilderness Cooper jumped, never to be seen again. It remains the only unsolved plane hijacking in American history. The FBI believes he didn’t survive the leap but are still following leads that may link to the notorious bandit. In March 2008, children unearthed a bloody parachute near Amboy, Washington, around the location where Cooper would’ve likely landed. Experts later determined it did not belong to the hijacker.

APPREHENDED:

Christopher Daniel Gay, aka “Little Houdini”

On March 16th, in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Lakeland, Fla, police apprehended Gay, who had escaped custody for a third time this decade.

The career criminal snuck out of a police cruiser at a Kennesaw Waffle House nearly two weeks earlier. Though he’s proven adept at escaping captivity, Little Houdini never managed to stay free for very long.

Following his latest escape Florida officials say he stole a tractor-trailer, using it to pilfer a front-end loader from a nearby construction site. He was arrested inside the 18-wheeler —- with the earth-moving machine still on board.

It wasn’t the first time he was arrested in Lakeland. He was previously apprehended there after stealing Crystal Gayle’s tour bus and driving it to a NASCAR race.

Gay faces significant jail time, with a 2007 warrant for his arrest from Nashville and charges in Cobb County and Florida.

James Sullivan

For nearly 15 years the Buckhead millionaire lived the high life on the lam, wanted for the 1987 contract murder of his estranged wife, socialite and Atlanta native Lita McClinton.

Returning from a walk on the beach, Sullivan was arrested at his condominium on the coast of Thailand in 2002. Authorities say he had relocated there in 1998 with his fiancee Chongwattana “Nana” Reynolds, a Thai native and Florida divorcee.

Sullivan was convicted on March 14, 2006, of arranging his wife’s death to avoid a costly divorce. He was sentenced to life without parole, spending the rest of his days in a 7 1/2-foot-5-foot single cell in the maximum security Georgia State Prison in Reidsville.

Eric Rudolph

Nearly seven years after his crude nail bomb exploded in Centennial Olympic Park, Eric Rudolph was arrested in Murphy, North Carolina, where a rookie police officer spotted him scavenging for food in a garbage can behind a grocery store.

Rudolph had been on the run for five years, hiding out in the Appalachian wilderness, where he survived on a diet of acorns, salamanders and stolen vegetables and grain.

After his capture the radical survivalist confessed to the 1997 bombings of a Sandy Springs abortion clinic, an Atlanta lesbian bar and, in 1998, a Birmingham abortion provider.

In 2005 Rudolph agreed to plead guilty to all charges in exchange for avoiding the death penalty. He’s serving consecutive life sentences at Colorado’s Supermax prison, where “Unabomber” Theodore Kaczynski, “shoe bomber” Richard Reid and former FBI agent turned Soviet spy Robert Hanssen are also incarcerated.