Colby, Thomas County

A Kansas Highway Patrol officer reported that a blue-and-red car was heading west on I-70, and Thomas County Undersheriff Ben Albright heard the call. A typical rural Kansas community, Thomas County was, at the time, home to around 8,600 people, most of whom lived near the county seat, Colby. It is fertile, flat prairie country, and generally doesn't receive a second glance from the people who zoom by on I-70. If they notice Thomas County at all, it's because at the county line where Thomas and Sherman counties meet, they have to adjust their clocks between Central and Mountain Time.

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For Daniel Remeta, Lisa Dunn, Mark Walter, and James Hunter, Thomas County would be their place of reckoning. In a little under an hour, the group would do more to change Thomas County than anyone had ever done in the county's 100-year history. Their cold-blooded acts of violence would drive home, once and for all, the notion of I-70 as a sewer pipe, an unwelcome intrusion into the peaceful way of life in Colby and the other communities of Thomas County. In a matter of minutes, they would change how people there felt about outsiders and tempt Good Samaritans to become vigilantes. Fate had decided the time had come for Danny Remeta to show the people of Thomas County just how malevolent a man can be.

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