"Roll that window down," William Hickman demanded. "I might want to shoot out of that door."

Hickman had just stepped into the green Hudson, which was idling at the corner of a west Los Angeles street, and stuck a pistol in the driver's ribs.

The driver, shocked, did as he was told. Frank Peck had never seen this gunman before and tried not to look too closely at him as he cranked down the window. Hickman soon booted the San Diego businessman from the car and headed off on his own.

Peck could count himself lucky. The 19-year-old who stole his new car liked to kill people -- and to do so as gruesomely as possible.

Three days before, on Dec. 15, 1927, Hickman had kidnapped a preteen girl named Marion Parker. He wrote cruel ransom notes to the girl's parents, signing them "Death" or "Fox-Fate." When Marion's father, Perry Parker, drove up to the designated spot to deliver the money, he saw his daughter sitting in a vehicle with Hickman. His heart leapt. This nightmare was almost over!

Hickman hefted a shotgun and, with a handkerchief tied around his face, pulled the car up to Parker's. Marion's father peered into the dark interior of the Hudson and asked if Marion was okay. "Yes," Hickman said, "she is sleeping." Parker handed over the $1,500 ransom loot, and then Hickman pressed down on the accelerator, causing the Hudson to leap forward. At the end of the block, the kidnapper slowed the car and tossed Marion into a gutter.

She was dead. The girl had been cut in half, some of her internal organs plucked out and replaced with towels, her hands severed. Her eyes were held open with black thread.

The murder shocked the country, and Hickman's getaway sparked one of the biggest U.S. manhunts ever. "Hundreds of thousands of peace officers (and) millions of citizens, armed with a telling description of the fiend, were on watch for him the country over," one news report offered.

"California forgot Christmas," a stunned chronicler declared, noting that the horror of the killing terrified people across the Golden State. The Los Angeles Times called the murder "the most horrible crime" of the decade -- this just three years after the infamous Leopold-Loeb case in Chicago.

But not everyone viewed Hickman only as a fiend. A young Russian immigrant and aspiring writer named Ayn Rand found the killer fascinating. She closely followed news coverage of Hickman, and in her journal she proclaimed him "a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy." Rand decided that this teenage criminal, in some key ways, represented the "ideal man."

Hickman, a high-school honor student before turning to robbery and violence, thought he had pulled off the perfect crime. But just five days after he raced out of Southern California, a gas-station attendant in Portland spotted him. Then came word that a gold certificate from the ransom payout had surfaced in Arlington, west of Pendleton.

On the afternoon of Dec. 22, police officers Tom Gurdane and Cecil "Buck" Lieuallen set out to find the fugitive. Based on where Hickman had been seen, they decided he had to be traveling on one of a handful of roads.

Sure enough, as Gurdane and Lieuallen were driving on Old Oregon Trail Road outside the eastern Oregon town of Echo, a green Hudson ghosted past them. The officers knew that Frank Peck's stolen car was a green Hudson.

Plus, the vehicle's driver looked squirrelly.

"I figured there was something wrong when a young fellow was wearing dark glasses on a day when it was as cloudy as today," Gurdane later told reporters. "I knew it was Hickman, so we turned the car around."

Gurdane, Pendleton's police chief, and Lieuallen, a highway patrolman, chased the Hudson for about two miles. Hickman realized he couldn't outrun his pursuers, and he pulled over.

The officers, guns drawn, hustled to the Hudson, which also contained two hitchhikers Hickman had picked up. When the murder suspect emerged from the car, a .45 automatic bounced off the running board. Hickman asked why they had pulled him over, hoping they hadn't recognized him.

"What are you doing with that gun?" Gurdane asked the teen.

"It's customary to carry a gun when you are traveling," Hickman replied.

"Maybe," the police chief said, "but you don't need to keep it between your knees."

News of the capture spread quickly, and reporters rushed to the Pendleton Jail -- including a couple of Portland newshounds who chartered a stunt plane to make the trip. When a newspaper photographer asked Hickman to pose, the murder suspect happily obliged. "What should I look like, a crook?" he asked.

Later, he confessed to Parker Branin, a Pendleton journalist, and Lieuallen.

How big was the Hickman story? It made the front page of newspapers across the country. In Portland, The Oregonian offered eight articles across the top of its first page -- and each one was about the suspected murderer's capture. Gurdane and Lieuallen, the paper announced, were "suddenly famous." (Lieuallen would parlay his fame into a successful political career in Pendleton.)

Rand -- who was living in Los Angeles and just beginning to develop the "Objectivist" philosophy that would recast self-interest as heroism and influence politicians such as current Speaker of the House Paul Ryan -- paid close attention to Hickman's confession in Pendleton.

She began working on a novella in 1928 called "The Little Street," which focused on how society's inherent mediocrity worked against the exceptional, driven individual. She would admit that the inspiration for it came from a comment Hickman supposedly made after his capture: "What is good for me is right."

The author who would later write the classic political novels "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged" added that Danny Renahan, the murderous protagonist of "Little Street," was "a Hickman with a purpose. And without the degeneracy. It is more exact to say that the model is not Hickman, but what Hickman suggested to me."

In her journal, she criticized newspapers for attempting to "degrade" Hickman in their coverage. "It was as though it infuriated them to see strength, pride and courage in this criminal and to see that they could not break him," she wrote. "(I)t seemed to be the mob's subconscious fury at the sight of such virtues in its enemy."

In her biography "Ayn Rand and the World She Made," Anne Conover Heller called the novella "stunningly harsh and antisocial."

Hickman wasn't in Pendleton long. Officers escorted him back to Los Angeles, where in a dramatic trial he pleaded "not guilty by reason of insanity." Jurors didn't buy the defense. Less than a year after his capture, prison officials executed him by hanging at San Quentin State Prison. He never showed any real remorse for the death of little Marion Parker.

"Marion and I were good friends, and we had a good time when we were together," he said the day of his capture. "I really liked her."

-- Douglas Perry