Mountain Man's Hideout Found -- Burrow High On Whitehorse Mountain Was Burglary Suspect's Home For Years

WHITEHORSE MOUNTAIN - In a ring of fallen cedar trees, near a small stream not far from the ridge of this Snohomish County peak, Mincio Donciev dug himself a home.

Hidden but for the hundreds of cans and bottles that surrounded it, Donciev lived here as long as 12 years before police captured him and charged him with burglarizing vacation cabins at the foot of the mountain near Darrington.

Police suspect he may be responsible for 71 break-ins at the Stillaguamish Country Club, a collection of 64 cabins on the banks of the Stillaguamish River.

Donciev was caught two weeks ago, tripped by sensors hidden in the path he took down the mountain, but until last weekend his life as a mountain man was shrouded in mystery.

While police knew his name, gleaned from fingerprints left behind, they knew only that he lived somewhere in the mountains, a hermit who moved in the dead of night. He was a man so private he would bushwhack almost 10 miles up and down a steep, wooded mountainside to forage supper.

In the end, his feet gave him away.

Last Saturday, a team of trackers, led by longtime Border Patrol expert Joel Hardin, found Donciev's lair, a 4-by-6-foot root cellar of a home dug beneath fallen cedar logs, supported by hewn timbers and covered with brush.

It had a tiny opening sealed with black plastic over a cave complete with a bed, a fire pit and tools neatly attached to nails. Several flashlights, most without batteries, rested on a shelf, along with razors, bars of soap, Tylenol, a mousetrap - even a bottle of perfume.

Several plastic bags were filled with clothes and bedding. Except for a half-eaten jar of pickle relish next to the door, there was no food, which puzzled Hardin. Donciev reportedly said he had not eaten for two days when he was caught.

Some of the clothes had been disassembled and resewn. With broad stitches, an insert was sewn into a pair of wool pants to make them larger.

Outside, hundreds of cans and bottles were strewn, a makeshift garbage dump. "If he had buried his garbage, geez, he would have been hard to find," Hardin said.

A few yards away, dozens of glass jars were aligned neatly under a fallen tree. A cooking pot was under another. "Imagine living in this place for 12 years," said Matt Condon, a tracker from Mountlake Terrace who helped in the search, as he scanned the tiny vault.

Rubber boots propped on a stick in a corner of the hideaway were of particular interest to Hardin, who had been following Donciev's trail since November. The tread on some of the boots matched tracks Hardin had found on the trail.

Hardin was brought into the case by the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office, which had been fielding complaints from residents along the Stillaguamish River that someone - for years - had been breaking into their homes. Pressure was mounting to catch the burglar.

Hardin, considered one of the nation's foremost trackers, quickly picked up Donciev's trail. Last December, he followed it for three miles before officials decided to borrow motion sensors the size of a half-dollar from the U.S. Forest Service and implant them on the trail Hardin had discovered.

At 5:50 p.m. on March 1, the radio beeped on Phil Vining's kitchen table. The first of three sensors had been triggered. Someone was moving along Donciev's trail, and he was going downhill. 5:55 p.m., 6 p.m. - like clockwork, the sensors rang.

Vining, vice president of Snohomish County Search and Rescue and a tracker, alerted police. When Donciev emerged from a home he allegedly had broken into, he was surrounded by Snohomish County deputies and police dogs.

He was bitten severely by a police dog when he resisted arrest and is now under police guard at Harborview Medical Center. Donciev has been unavailable for interviews.

He has been charged with two burglaries, but authorities think he may be responsible for dozens more.

Tom Dial owns the cabin 200 yards from where Donciev was apprehended. He said it has been broken into four times, including the night of the arrest.

"The things he took were all survival things - food, flashlights, batteries," he said, adding that he was sad to lose a good pair of wool pants. "In all the years, no one ever saw him. He was an odd character, but I never feared him."

Vining, who lives near Darrington, assisted in Saturday's search. He has mixed feelings about Donciev's arrest. Vining had been tracking Donciev for five years, curious about the mountain man known to locals as "The Bulgarian."

"He never took anything of value," said Vining. "He was a legend. And he was in my neighborhood."

Donciev, 68, is a former policeman and convicted murderer from Bulgaria. Police say he tried to burn down the Seattle house of a former girlfriend in 1985, then disappeared into the mountains near Darrington.

According to officials in Bulgaria, Donciev was convicted of murder in 1966 when, working as a shepherd, he killed a villager he caught stealing lambs. He escaped from a labor camp in 1970 and entered the United States 12 years later as a legal immigrant.

Affection for Diet Coke

He took small, steady steps. He had a 10 1/2-inch boot with a narrow heel, a walking stick with a sharp point, and an affection for Diet Coke.

These were the clues, almost the only clues, Hardin had when he, Vining and Condon set off into the woods Saturday for what would be a six-hour hike, an almost vertical climb in a search for the mountain man's home.

Hardin bent to inspect an indentation in the mud. A heel print, he announced - fresh, heading down. He was sure it was from Donciev's last trip down the mountain.

Another print and Hardin was discouraged. It was older, left perhaps months ago, but he followed it anyway. It would have to lead to the same place.

Hardin knew Donciev didn't follow a trail; he was smart enough to take different routes so as not to beat a path. But scattered along the hillside were telltale signs: empty cans of Diet Coke, cans stabbed open with the blade of a knife.

"Everything from here on up would be him," said Hardin.

Scattered cedar trees had been blazed, the bark peeled back as beacons. Hardin could see ferns flattened where Donciev had rested, twigs snapped by his foot. Hardin followed footsteps down to a creek and then back up the hill; Donciev apparently had paused for a drink.

"He's a billy goat," said Condon, as he headed up the steep incline, marveling that Donciev had the endurance to climb the mountain over and over again.

Hardin carried just one thing out of Donciev's home, a plastic bucket that hid a semiautomatic gun and 50 rounds of ammunition that he plans to turn over to authorities. When apprehended, Donciev had two guns, three knives and a sharp walking stick. He reportedly told police he needed them to scare off animals.

Yesterday, Hardin said he wants to go back. There were too many things that didn't make sense. Why was there not a scrap of food? Why were there no cooking utensils in the cave? Why was the sleeping bag rolled up and sealed in plastic bags?

"Something's missing," he said. "I think he had more stuff cached. There's pieces that just don't quite fit." And there may be another home, a fish camp, where he reportedly told authorities he lived for four months while he speared fish.

Hardin was disappointed the cave wasn't more elaborate. Living in the woods as long as Donciev had, Hardin thought he'd find a home with more imagination. But there was no question in his mind that the buried house was Donciev's.

"He was living exactly where I imagined it would be," he said, "but what a god-awful climb."

Susan Gilmore's phone message number is 206-464-2054. Her e-mail address is: sugi-new@seatimes.com