“He just looked at me, slowly got into the car and drove away,” Norwood recalls.

That was because Norwood had stumbled up to his assailants’ getaway driver, a man he would later come to know as Richard Savage. Norwood then ran into a nearby Laundromat and called the police. His attackers, later identified as William Buckley and another Savage associate named Dean DeLuca, managed to escape.

Norwood had no idea why he was being attacked or who was after him. He bought a.357 Magnum and started carrying it wherever he went. However, the weapon didn’t help him much on Oct. 1. That afternoon, when he turned the ignition key in his car in a University of Arkansas parking lot, a bomb beneath his car partially exploded. The car was destroyed but Norwood escaped without injury.

While some members of the gang waited for another chance to get Norwood, others were working on new assignments.

In Lexington, Ky., investigators say a woman named Mary Alice Wolf hired Savage to kill her ex-husband’s new wife, Victoria Barshear. Savage sent Doutre, Buckley and DeLuca to do the job but it never got done. After seeing Barshear, the hired killers decided she was too pretty to kill and left town.

But Dana Free was still unfinished business. And at 3 a.m. on Oct. 12, William Buckley, the man who had already messed up earlier chances at Free, as well as Norwood and Barshear, threw two grenades into a house in Pasadena, Tex. No one was hurt in the explosion, and Free wasn’t even there. The home belonged to his ex-wife and 14-year-old son, who were inside asleep when the grenades came crashing through the living room window.

The gang’s next assignment was potentially the most lethal they ever attempted. On Oct. 30, at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, an American Airlines flight from Austin, with 154 people on board, was taxiing toward the terminal when a small bomb exploded in the luggage hold. Passengers were rushed off the plane, scared but unhurt.

Investigators found the remains of a time bomb in luggage belonging to passenger Mary Theilman. She had been meant to die, presumably along with the rest of the passengers. A month later, authorities charged Theilman’s husband, Albert, with the crime. It would be a year before they would charge William Buckley with selling him the bomb.

In October, Richard Savage began receiving calls from a man in Palm Beach County, Florida. The man, Robert Spearman, said that he had this problem. He was married and didn’t want to be. But he didn’t want a divorce.

On Oct. 16, Savage flew to Palm Beach to meet Spearman and take a $2,000 down payment on a $20,000 contract to kill Spearman’s 48-year-old wife, Anita. Five days later, Savage sent Sean Doutre and Ronald Emert, another associate from the Continental Club, to West Palm Beach to collect the balance.

In the weeks after Doutre and Emert left with the money, Robert Spearman placed several more calls to the Continental Club. Authorities would later charge that these were calls to find out what was happening on the deal and to demand quick service from Savage.

Whatever they were for, Spearman no longer needed to call after the early hours of Nov. 16. On that morning, after Spearman had exited his Palm Beach Gardens home to drop by his marine contracting company’s office, Sean Doutre entered the house through an unlocked door and found Anita Spearman, who was recovering from a mastectomy, asleep. Doutre beat her to death as she lay on her bed.

A short time later, Robert Spearman came home to find his wife dead and the house ransacked. He quickly called the sheriff’s department, portraying himself as a grieving husband. It was an act authorities would not take long to see through.

There were allthese victims, all these bizarre crimes, but seemingly nothing that linked them. This widespread dispersal of investigative effort should have insured the gang’s getaway. But it wasn’t to be. For in addition to having bungled many of their murder attempts, the hit men had operated in a way that belied the very promises of their classified ad.

The ad stated they would be discreet and very private. But they had rented cars, kept receipts, made long-distance phone calls, made themselves memorable to witnesses. They ran out on bills, kept stolen weapons and carried large quantities of cash. They left high-powered weapons displayed on the seats of their cars. And most of all, they talked too much.

This is how discreet and private Sean Doutre was: The day after he killed Anita Spearman, he was stopped by police in Maryville, Tenn., for a traffic violation. On the backseat of his car was a 12-gauge shotgun stolen from Spearman’s house the morning of the murder.

The case of the want-ad killers probably could have been broken with Doutre’s arrest. But when officers checked the serial number of the shotgun against a national computer index of stolen property, they drew a blank. In Palm Beach County, the murder was only a day old and the serial number of the stolen shotgun had not yet been entered in the computer’s data bank.

But Doutre did at least put investigators hard on the trail of Richard Savage. Along with the shotgun, Maryville police had found a submachine gun in Doutre’s car. The weapon automatically meant that the nearest AFT office would be called to see if anybody wanted to question Doutre.

Grant McGarrity, a Knoxville agent, visited Doutre in jail that afternoon. Doutre was talkative, volunteering that he worked for a man named Savage who was in the business of sending people out on contract murders. Of course, Doutre denied that he had committed a crime himself.

It was interesting information. McGarrity had heard of Richard Savage and was already gathering information about weapons being mailed to and from the Continental Club.

Because Doutre said nothing that incriminated himself, he was able to post bond on the weapons charge and leave Maryville. However, the stolen shotgun remained behind in the police department’s evidence lockup.

While all this was happening, Doug Norwood, the Arkansas law student, was still scared and looking over his shoulder. Police were making little headway in their investigations of the shooting and bombing that had nearly killed him. Nor were they listening to his theory that his girlfriend’s ex-husband had put hit men on his trail.

Nevertheless, Norwood ’s wariness eventually helped save him a third time, and helped break open the case. On Jan. 20, 1986, Norwood grew suspicious of a car that followed him to the university, and called the two campus detectives who were investigating the bombing.

The police stopped the car and began talking to its driver, Michael Wayne Jackson. One officer spotted the barrel of a gun protruding from beneath a sweater on the front seat. Jackson was arrested and police confiscated several guns, including a semiautomatic rifle.

“There is no doubt in my mind,” says Norwood, “that Jackson was going to spray me with that machine gun.”

Jackson proved to be as talkative as Sean Doutre. He told police that he and Savage had been hired by Larry Gray, the ex-husband of Norwood ’s girlfriend, to kill Norwood. And he added that Gray had contacted them through a classified ad in Soldier of Fortune magazine.

The next break came on Feb. 5, when Sean Doutre was arrested again near Athens, Ga., simply because he had left a nearby motel without paying his long-distance phone bill. Once again, law officers listened raptly as Doutre gave details about Savage and the murder-forhire business.

Shortly afterward, ATF agent McGarrity decided to visit a former Savage associate named Ronald Emert, who had been jailed in Knoxville on drug charges. Emert turned out to be one more key to the puzzle. In exchange for not being charged in any murder-for-hire plot, he told McGarrity about the trip he had made to Florida with Doutre to collect money from a man named Spearman. He also told McGarrity to check with the Maryville police about a shotgun that was gathering dust in their evidence closet.