Fugitives

He appears in a restaurant, picks up everyone's tab, then vanishes with his many guards. He stars in his wedding, government officials among the guests. He is captured, then released. Twice. Or maybe not. Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, Mexico's most-wanted drug-trafficking fugitive, chalks up more sightings than Elvis. He is everywhere, and nowhere, a long-sought criminal always a step ahead of the law, yet always in sight or mind.

When 34-year-old Ana Maria Garcia went missing last month, the Ontario woman's family immediately suspected her boyfriend was somehow involved, authorities said. There was a trail of blood leading from the couple's bedroom to the living room and, like Garcia, Mario Reyes was nowhere to be found. "We knew right away," said Garcia's brother, Lorenzo Garcia. "Because he never left her alone for a moment. He was very possessive."

A former Los Angeles County probation department clerk who fled the country earlier this year after she was charged with bigamy and insurance fraud was captured in Mexico over the weekend, authorities said Monday. Damaris Ninet Amesquita, 30, was found Saturday by a bail bonds agent in Mexicali, said Los Angeles County district attorney's spokeswoman Sandi Gibbons.

A former Roman Catholic priest and convicted child molester is in jail after allegedly being on the run for more than two years. Federal authorities say Wilputte Sherwood, 63, a priest in Phoenix before his conviction on child sex charges, was arrested Sunday as he was leaving a San Francisco church. Authorities say he was on the lam after failing to report for probation in 2005 after his release from an Arizona prison, where he served a 10-year sentence. Sherwood faces extradition proceedings for his return to Arizona.

At a hearing next month, the words "People versus Roman Polanski" will ring out in a courtroom for the first time in 30 years. Those gathered are certain to include prosecutors, defense attorneys and a throng of reporters, but the Oscar-winning director is not expected. That empty chair at the defense table, experts say, makes his request for a dismissal of the three-decade-old sex charge a legal long-shot.

In Denmark, Stein Bagger's spectacular fall from technology golden boy to alleged scam artist and international fugitive has captivated many of the country's 5 million residents. His purported fraud, said to be as high as $170 million, is the biggest scandal in 20 years. But when Bagger, 41, strode into the Los Angeles police station near skid row on Saturday morning, officers wondered whether he was delusional. "I am Stein Bagger," the man said, putting his hands on the counter.

When Marine Lance Cpl. Lance Hering returned home to his family in Boulder, Colo., in August 2006 after a combat tour in Iraq, he seemed unusually quiet. His parents, Lloyd and Elynne Hering, were aware that he had been hospitalized briefly in Iraq and Germany in the final months of his deployment. They thought he was "emotionally flat," but they knew better than to pry.

Manuel Benitez, a former child actor who was the main suspect in his girlfriend's 2004 slaying, had been on the run for more than four years with the couple's young son when police finally caught up with him this week in El Monte. There was no indication that anyone knew the "suspicious person with a child" first reported to authorities Tuesday was the man once featured on "America's Most Wanted."

Where's Mullah Omar? It has been more than five years since the Taliban's supreme leader, a onetime village cleric, vanished into the trackless terrain outside his fallen Afghan stronghold, Kandahar. And his likeliest source of sanctuary is thought to be the belt of rugged tribal territory straddling the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where the law of no nation prevails.

A self-described Taliban spokesman has told Afghan agents that the militia's chief, Mullah Mohammed Omar, lives in southwestern Pakistan and is protected by that country's powerful intelligence service. Pakistan denied the allegation by Mohammed Hanif, made on a video given to reporters Wednesday. Omar's whereabouts have been a mystery since he went into hiding after the Taliban government he headed was toppled by a U.S.-led invasion in 2001 after the Sept. 11 attacks. The U.S.