Hammes was later charged with embezzling more than $8.7 million from his employer over an 11-year period. “Agents recovered boxes of documents at his home that detailed the fraudulent transactions,” said Special Agent Jonathan Jones, one of the investigators who worked the case from the FBI’s Cincinnati Field Office. “It was also discovered that he was doing research on the Internet about how to disappear.”

As it turns out, for the majority of his six years on the run, Hammes was hiding in plain sight on the Appalachian Trail, the nearly 2,200-mile wilderness path that runs from Georgia to Maine. Hammes, who went by the trail name “Bismarck,” came to be known and liked by fellow hikers on the trail. No one guessed his real identity or that he was wanted by the FBI.

Court documents show that Hammes' embezzlement began around 1998. As a controller, he was responsible for all financial accounting and internal controls for his division, including supervising accounts payable to several hundred outside vendors. He carried out the fraud by establishing a new bank account for an existing vendor at a different bank. He then deposited hefty payments to that vendor—often $100,000 at a time—in the phantom account that he alone controlled. He then could transfer money from the phantom account to his personal accounts.

“He knew how to cover his tracks by manipulating audits and ledger entries,” Jones said. “He got away with it for so long because he knew how to manipulate his subordinates and how not to raise accounting red flags.”

Eventually, bank employees who handled accounts for the victim company and the vendor discovered canceled checks being returned from a bank they were unfamiliar with, and the scheme began to unravel. Hammes was also coming under scrutiny from the Internal Revenue Service for failing to file tax returns. He had invested a majority of the stolen funds in the stock market and lost most of that when the market had a severe downturn in 2008.

While he was a fugitive, his wife divorced him. Hammes apparently had little contact with the outside world while he was hiking, so he may not have known that his case had attracted widespread media attention, including segments on popular crime reenactment shows such as American Greed and America’s Most Wanted.