HALE BECAME EVEN MORE VIOLENT after his sons left, and Elishaba feared that he might soon take her life. So on a frosty morning in late March 2005, after Hale left the homestead early with two of his youngest sons to gather supplies in town, she decided to make her break.

As soon as Hale departed, she hurriedly gathered food, sleeping bags, and two white sheets—one for her and one for Jerusalem, at 16 Hale's second-oldest daughter—that the sisters could use to camouflage themselves in the snow. Elishaba talked with Joseph by phone, and the two made a hasty plan to meet in McCarthy, where they could then all return to Glennallen. But getting to McCarthy meant that Elishaba and Jerusalem would have to make it down the McCarthy–Green Butte Road before their father began his return. They would have a few hours, but there was no way of knowing exactly how many. And once in town, they would have to hide until their brothers arrived.

Elishaba and Jerusalem said goodbye to Country Rose and their remaining brothers and sisters, then loaded a snowmobile. But when they turned the ignition, nothing happened—Hale had removed the spark plug. Jerusalem ran to the toolshed and scrounged up a spare, and after a little banging around inside the engine housing, they made it about a half-mile down the road to a snowy meadow. Then the engine belt snapped. Jerusalem plodded back up the trail with the spark plug to fetch another machine, while Elishaba hunched over the engine, desperately trying to repair the belt with bailing wire and a pair of pliers.

"It was like a dream where you run for your life and nothing's working," she later told reporter Tom Kizzia, of the Anchorage Daily News, in the only interview she's given on her escape. "Where you try to run and can't run."

Elishaba knew her father could be starting up the road any minute, and even if she gave up and returned to the homestead, he'd notice the snowmobile in the meadow and realize she'd tried to get away. There was no turning back. Finally, after a few agonizing minutes, Jeru­salem returned on a second snowmobile, and the sisters set off again for McCarthy.

Meanwhile, in town, Hale and John Adams had spent the morning loading sleds. When they finished, Hale hitched a sled to his snowmobile and set out for the homestead with his two sons riding along. Adams, who agreed to shuttle out another load, told Hale that he had an errand to run but would catch up. Some 20 minutes later, when Adams made the turn onto McCarthy–Green Butte Road, he was surprised to see two female riders speed past him in the opposite direction.

Adams caught up with Hale at the edge of the homestead, where he was debating with his sons about whether any snowmobiles were missing. Hale seemed agitated and soon mounted his own snowmobile and headed back to McCarthy alone. Adams followed a few minutes later.

"I could tell that something had gotten to him," recalls Adams. "He's usually careful on a snowmobile, but as I followed his tracks, I could see that he was going as fast as he could." A few times, Hale's course veered off the trail. Footprints revealed that on several occasions, Hale had marshaled the strength to push his 500-pound machine out of deep snow.

When Adams arrived back in McCarthy, Hale was at his in-town camp. Hale mentioned something about Elishaba and Jerusalem going missing, and Adams realized the women he'd seen must have been the sisters. He'd later learn that they had pulled off the road, into the forest between Hillbilly Heaven and McCarthy, where they'd waited, concealed, until Hale passed.

Still, the escape plan was falling apart. By the time Joseph and Joshua made it to McCarthy, Hale was there, too. There'd been some confusion on the phone about the hastily arranged meeting place, and the girls, not trusting anyone to provide shelter, decided to hide in the woods outside town. Joseph and Joshua knew their sisters were somewhere nearby, but none of the children wanted another violent confrontation with their father, so the brothers returned to Glennallen to await word from them. Elishaba and Jerusalem remained in the woods for two days, wrapping themselves in the sleeping bags and white sheets while their father patrolled nearby roads and trails.

On the third day, once the sound of their father's snowmobile engine had stopped reverberating through the forest, the girls went to Adams's house and called their brothers in Glennallen; Joseph and Joshua picked them up that night. Six months later, after much coaching by Jim Buckingham—and a few more acts of violence inflicted by Hale on the younger children—the siblings went to the police.

Hale was arrested outside Anchorage on October 6. The next day, when the arraigning judge asked Hale to state his profession, he said simply, "I am a father."