"I couldn't sleep last night," he says to me. "Finally I got up. I turned on the TV, but there was nothing but sex and guns. I turned it off. I sat there listening to the sounds of the night."

Wright strikes a match. The fire slowly catches. He's silent for a moment, an old man with high blood pressure, bad knees, and glaucoma, facing the rest of his life in prison.

"Then I woke up Rosário. I held her. I told her how scared I was. Then we both cried."

···

During my flight back from Portugal, I try to sort out how I feel about Wright. I'm troubled, of course, by the gas-station crime—even if it wasn't his gun that fired, he still let an innocent man die. He never called for help. Still, he was a teenager at the time. You can no longer use youthful rashness as an excuse when you're 29, brandishing a loaded weapon on an airplane and holding more than ninety people hostage. That incident could've easily ended in disaster. Wright is fortunate it did not. And I am not entirely sure there aren't other crimes—crimes for which Wright wasn't caught. He may still have secrets inside him. We'll never know.

But after spending so much time with Wright, I'm convinced that a man can, indeed, change. He says that his younger self—the person who committed those crimes—feels like a stranger, and I believe him. He seems to be an amazing father; his family is heartbreakingly lovely, as kind and tender and giving as any family I have ever encountered. His daughter needs him. I would let him babysit my own children without hesitation.

And yet as the former FBI agent, Gallagher, tells me, running from a crime and staying hidden for a long period should not be rewarded. That sets a terrible precedent. And the lament that he'll be taken away from his wife and children does not stir Gallagher in the least, for that is precisely what Wright did to Walter Patterson, the man gunned down in his gas station.

Ann Patterson, Walter's daughter, is certainly not willing to pardon Wright. Her father's funeral was three days before her fifteenth birthday. "I just wanted him to sit up and tell us everything was going to be all right," she remembers thinking. Her mother, shattered by the crime, died a year later, leaving Ann and her younger sister orphans.

Until Wright's arrest, she never told her own children how their grandfather died. "It was painful for me to have to bring it up." When she closes her eyes, she says, she can still vividly picture the last moment she ever saw him alive. "He went out and got into the truck"—his green 1958 Chevy pickup—"and I stood in the kitchen window. It was not quite dark. There were all the Thanksgiving leftovers on the table. And I waved good-bye."

···

Back home in the United States, I speak with Wright several times over the phone. He says he feels crippled that he can't leave the house and provide for his family. Rosário tells me the wait is further damaging his health. Nobody knows how long the court will take to rule. The crucial issue, his lawyer explains, is the matter of Wright's citizenship. If the judges decide Wright is Portuguese, he is unlikely to be extradited. If he's American, he'll promptly be shipped off to prison.

It turns out that it doesn't take long at all. On November 17, 2011, at 3 p.m. Portugal time, a fax arrives at his lawyer's office. A legal decision. The three-judge panel is unanimous. Without question, with no reservations, Wright is Portuguese. He's lived in the country so long. He married a local woman. He hasn't set foot in the United States since 1972. Extradition is denied. The statute of limitations on all his crimes has been reached. He will receive no punishment.

A technician is immediately dispatched to Wright's house to remove his monitoring anklet. As the band falls away, it appears that Wright has eluded the law yet again. He remains concerned that U.S. authorities will continue to fight for his extradition—but over the next few months, culminating with a final ruling on February 28, every appeal is denied. The judges' decision is binding.

He'll likely never be able to leave Portugal; the moment he does, the FBI has told me, someone will be waiting to arrest him. "Fine with me," Wright says. But what he can do is stroll out the front door of his house, through the brown beads, beyond the hinged gate, and he can kick off his slippers and feel the sun-warmed cobbles on his feet, the sea breeze over his shaved head—for the first time in fifty years, a free man.

Michael Finkel is the author of True Story.