Gary and Linda Haas

Case background and investigation

Gary and Linda Haas, both 61 and recently retired, left their home in Tecumseh, Oklahoma, in early August 2010 for Pagosa Springs, Colorado, where, according to the US Attorney's Office for the District of New Mexico, they had spent the previous 11 summers with family and friends. They were towing a camping trailer behind their pickup truck. On August 2, 2010, they stopped at a rest area off Interstate 40 in Quay County, New Mexico.

Three days earlier, on July 30, inmates John Charles McCluskey and Tracy Allen Province had escaped from an Arizona state prison with help from Casslyn Mae Welch. A third inmate who escaped with them was separated from the group and caught two days later. According to an FBI account of the case, the three had been travelling in a small stolen sedan and stopped at the rest area intending to take a camper or trailer.

Federal prosecutors said the three carjacked the Haases at gunpoint and had them drive to a location between Tucumcari and Santa Rosa, where McCluskey shot both of them inside the trailer. The group then towed the trailer to a remote part of Guadalupe County, unhitched it and set it on fire with the bodies inside. They left the couple's truck at a shopping center in Albuquerque.

New Mexico State Police and the Guadalupe County Sheriff found the burned trailer and the couple's remains on August 4, 2010, and the truck was located in Albuquerque later that day. The FBI said that although the truck had been wiped down, fingerprint and DNA evidence identified the three. Province was arrested in Wyoming on August 9, and McCluskey and Welch were arrested at a campground in Arizona on August 19 after a US Forest Service employee alerted authorities. The FBI said the handgun used in the killings was recovered there and that McCluskey was wearing a cap belonging to Gary Haas.

Federal arrest warrants on carjacking and firearms charges were announced on August 23, 2010. According to Wikipedia's account, Province and Welch reached plea agreements and testified against McCluskey, whose trial began with jury selection in July 2013 and ended in a guilty verdict on October 7, 2013. The jury did not reach the unanimous decision required for a death sentence.

On June 2, 2014, Province was sentenced to life in prison and Welch to 40 years. The following day, US District Judge Judith Herrera sentenced McCluskey to life plus 235 years on the 20 counts of conviction, the Albuquerque Journal reported. Relatives of the couple spoke at the hearing. McCluskey died in March 2017, aged 52, at a federal prison near Florence, Colorado, according to KFOR.