Complicating matters was the revelation that the 64-year-old wasn’t even the intended target.

Instead it was the former immigration official’s millionaire friend and small town Williston mayor, Eugene T. Bailey, whom the drive-by shooter eventually tracked down when the Buick swerved into a cluster of pine trees and came to a sudden halt. A gunman in a mask emerged from the “swampy scrubland,” the Ocala Star Banner reported, and shot the mayor three times with a pistol — once in the face, twice in the torso.

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The mayor, somehow, survived, according to reports. Two other men in the car escaped unscathed.

Authorities labeled the shooting an assassination attempt, but it took them three years to indict and then track down their suspects — brothers William “Clay” Claybourne Taylor and Raymond “Ray” Ellis Taylor Jr.

Ray Taylor, a struggling attorney in Williston, had moved to Chattanooga, Tenn., where he worked as an assistant district attorney, reported the Orlando Sentinel. Nearby was his younger brother, Clay Taylor.

Authorities theorized that the elder Taylor, lusting for the mayor’s money, masterminded the assassination so he could be appointed executor of the man’s multi-million dollar estate. He sent Clay Taylor, police alleged, as his hired gun.

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After denying the allegations for years, Ray Taylor eventually pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in 1990.

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His younger brother has yet to stand trial.

After police arrested Clay Taylor in 1980 in Chattanooga, a judge agreed to let the man post bail as long as he returned to Florida for his court date. But Taylor never showed.

The FBI put his face on a Most Wanted poster and plastered it in post offices across the nation. Authorities initially thought he fled to Brazil on a forged passport, according to a 1990 Orlando Sentinel story. Officials chased leads in New Jersey, where he was reportedly spotted by an undercover cop, and back to Florida and the city of Tampa, where Taylor, an ex-Marine, had assumed the alias of a dead FBI agent.

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But for 36 years, fugitive Clay Taylor eluded capture — until Thursday.

Working off new information, the FBI tracked Taylor to Reidsville, N.C., according to a statement, where he was living under a false name. Agents from the FBI Charlotte Division’s Greensboro Resident Agency took him into custody without incident. Taylor, now 67, denied he was the man the FBI had been chasing for decades, but a fingerprint test confirmed his identity, the Gainesville Sun reported.

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“William Claybourne Taylor thought he could avoid taking responsibility for this horrible crime, but our agents continued an exhaustive search year after year,” Michelle S. Klimt, special agent in charge of the FBI Jacksonville Division, said in a news release about Taylor’s capture. “To echo the words of former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, ‘the FBI always gets its man.’ We thank our law enforcement partners for their assistance and hope this news brings comfort to the families of Taylor’s victims.”

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The FBI released little information about how they found Taylor in North Carolina, but the fugitive’s Most Wanted poster offered an odd mix of details about the man’s life on the lam for nearly the past 40 years.

It read:

“Taylor sometimes wears a mustache and has been known to dye his hair red. He reportedly is bisexual, frequents adult bookstores, and is a heavy drinker. Taylor has ties to the Chattanooga, Tennessee area. He may have a United States passport in the name of Michael Ferris Cauley.”

His listed occupations were even more eclectic: “dance instructor, trumpet player, convenience store clerk, keypunch operator, painter, welder and advertising.”