The Quiet One

Around Chestnut Ridge in southwestern Pennsylvania, mountain folk were wary of the mean-tempered, sharpshooting Raymond clan. In 1922 Albert Raymond had fussed with his wife, ended by shooting her and killing himself. Grandson Gerald Raymond had been led to jail recently for threatening to kill a man. Only a month ago, the family's hot blood ran true--and freely--when Patriarch Norval Raymond, 69, blasted a son-in-law in the face with a shotgun. Yet one Raymond seemed free of the curse of violence: short (5 ft. 5 in.), wiry Dan, 43, an avid hunter who liked his outdoor job as a pipeline worker for a natural gas company and lived with his wife and four children in tiny (pop. 300) Chalk Hill.

One evening last week. Dan Raymond took down his high-powered Magnum rifle with telescopic sight (one of 13 guns he owned) and said matter-of-factly to his wife Nellie: "I'm going to use this." Fearful of her strangely sullen husband, Nellie Raymond fled with the children.

A few minutes before 8 o'clock next morning, Raymond walked 20 feet from his red-shingled bungalow to the narrow country road, hailed a passing state highway department truck and asked the driver and helper to spread cinders on his driveway. After they agreed, Sharpshooter Raymond re-entered the house and opened fire. First he picked off the driver (his helper scampered for the woods, unhurt), then two women who were driving by, killed the mother and blasted the father and two children of a family driving down the road, wounded two other passers-by before state police arrived.

Firing from the small windows of his concrete block cellar, Raymond kept police pinned down from 8:30 a.m. to midafternoon, escaped the stream of bullets pumped into the house by a 30-cal. machine gun set up in a general store 200 yards away. Finally, frustrated state police sent an urgent appeal to Governor David Lawrence, who approved use of a Walker bulldog tank manned by National Guardsmen to flush the killer. Rushed in by flatcar, the 25-ton tank lumbered to Chalk Hill, circled the bullet-pocked bungalow as police fired from the cover.

Toward sundown, almost nine hours after the siege had begun, the bungalow caught fire. Shotgun in hand, Raymond leaped from a second-story window and sprinted for his car parked in the driveway. Machine-gun bullets ripped him down. Four innocent men and women were dead; five others were wounded. And the curse had claimed the quiet one.

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