OIL CITY, Pa. — In a faded photograph taken 24 years ago, newlyweds hold hands and smile, anxious and expectant. Wearing a homemade dress, Mary Waagner, 48, married a man with a hunger for adventure who would become one of the FBI's 10 most-wanted fugitives. He was arrested Dec. 5 at a copy shop in suburban Cincinnati.

        In interviews with The Derrick, the daily newspaper in Oil City, Ms. Waagner described her marriage to Clayton Lee Waagner, two years raising nine children alone and her struggle to keep her family together as her husband went on a cross-country mission, allegedly to kill workers at abortion clinics.

        The newspaper interviewed her at the family's ramshackle, sparsely furnished Amish-built wood home tucked in the western Pennsylvania woods about 50 miles north of Pittsburgh. The house has insulation showing on wooden walls and a toilet that still needs to be installed.

        Ms. Waagner said faith brought them together — she turning to Christianity to recover from having an abortion after being date-raped at 19, and he turning to God to repair a broken childhood with four fathers. They met at Pat Robertson's 700 Club in Virginia, where her husband worked at the time.

        From the beginning, the couple began a marriage on the run.

        During their planned two-week backpacking honeymoon in 1977, a bear ransacked their camp, forcing them to hike 14 miles through the mountains in the dark.

        “We only made it through with the Lord's grace,” Ms. Waagner said. “We always said it was some way to start a marriage.”

        They moved constantly, occasionally pausing for her husband's run-ins with the law.

        Before their first anniversary, he was arrested for breaking into homes and spent three years in an Ohio prison. There he taught himself about computers — skills authorities say would allow him to elude them for 10 months despite robbing banks, stealing cars and periodic features on America's Most Wanted.

        Ms. Waagner estimates the family moved 39 times in the past 24 years, including a stint running a commercial fishing boat in Alaska.

        “He'd become bored and the challenge was gone,” she said. “He'd want to get on and do something else.”

        After a six-year federal prison term for stealing computer equipment and carrying an unlicensed handgun, they found land near Clintonville, Pa., and Ms. Waagner thought things would settle down.

        But then her husband got wrapped up in the millennium bug and buffeted by family tragedies.

        As the family hunkered down for the cataclysm her husband believed would happen, their eldest daughter's baby girl died after being born prematurely.

        “All he could think was that they didn't want to lose this baby and little boys and girls farther along than this are being killed every day,” Ms. Waagner said.

        Mr. Waagner would soon leave his family for a place on the Most Wanted list.

        After reportedly surveying 100 abortion clinics in 19 states in 1999, Mr. Waagner eluded the authorities in the Allegheny National Forest. He came out, stole a Winnebago, gathered his family and headed west in hopes of reaching Seattle.

        He was arrested in Illinois when the Winnebago broke down. Authorities found four handguns inside.

        Mr. Waagner was sent to the DeWitt County Jail in Clinton, Ill., to await sentencing. His family returned to the unfinished homestead to wait again.

        Then, in February, Mr. Waagner apparently used a comb to spring a lock on a door and wriggled through a roof drain, leading authorities on a 10-month cross-country manhunt.

        In June, someone purporting to be Mr. Waagner posted a message on the Internet, vowing to kill people who worked at abortion and reproductive health clinics.

        His wife doesn't believe that he ever intended to follow through with his threats.

        Mr. Waagner “just does not have murder in his heart, it is just not there. I just know that man could never take a life,” Ms. Waagner said.

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