Larry Gene Cole, 75, was serving a life sentence for a murder conviction when he died Monday in Oregon State Penitentiary’s hospice care.

A 75-year-old man died Monday in hospice care at the Oregon State Penitentiary while serving a life sentence without parole for the kidnapping and shooting of two Oregon park rangers in 1999.

Larry Gene Cole, originally from West Virginia, was convicted in Tillamook County Circuit Court in 2001 for forcing park rangers Danny Blumenthal and John I. “Jack” Kerwin to hike into a dark grove of Sitka spruce at gunpoint before shooting each of them in the head and driving away in Blumenthal’s stolen pickup truck.

Kerwin, who was 53 at the time, survived the attack after doctors removed two bullets from his jaw. Blumenthal, 50, died after being shot three times execution-style.

In Cole’s 2001 trial, Kerwin testified that he begged for his life while a hooded gunman bound him and stood over him. He said the man took his and Blumenthal’s wallets and the truck keys and marched them up to Cape Falcon Trail where he shot them. Kerwin wasn’t able to identify the shooter because he wore a hood.

Police arrested Cole hours after the shooting while he was driving Blumenthal’s truck. Cole claimed he knew nothing about the shooting. Cole testified that he moved around the South robbing methamphetamine labs with three accomplices and had traveled to the West Coast, arriving in Oregon a few days before the shooting. He said he and his partners had planned to rob a meth lab in Tillamook.

Cole told the jury that he had been framed for the shooting of the park rangers.

He said a man who he had been camping with at the state park left the camp on the morning of the shooting and returned sometime later agitated and out of breath. Cole said the man handed him a set of keys and told him to drive a pickup truck to Portland.

On April 26, 2001, a Tillamook County jury found Cole guilty of 20 charges stemming from the shooting of the two park rangers.

Cole’s attorney emphasized during his closing arguments that there was no physical evidence linking Cole to the crime scene.

Bill Porter, who is still the Tillamook County district attorney, called Cole’s explanation “blatantly ridiculous” at the time and said Cole executed Blumenthal and shot Kerwin simply because he was “cold, wet, hungry and didn’t want any witnesses to the robbery.”

“It’s difficult to imagine a more cold-blooded crime,” Porter said at the trial.

Cole was among the FBI’s most-wanted fugitives 25 years before he was convicted of the kidnapping and shooting of the park rangers.

In March 1974, Cole and his wife, Bonnie Cole, kidnapped a Virginia real estate agent at gunpoint while she was showing them properties in Roanoke, Virginia. The couple taped Betty Van Balen’s hands behind her back, bound her ankles and strapped a sticky strip across her mouth before stuffing her in the trunk of her Chrysler, according to a 2001 Oregonian story recounting the incident.

Cole then demanded $25,000 in ransom from Van Balen’s husband, Frank Van Balen, the owner of a fiberglass plant where Cole had worked for several months. Van Balen met Cole and his wife in the Appalachian Mountains to pay the ransom. After taking the money, Cole and his wife escaped in the Van Balen’s car.

In May 1974, a federal judge in Roanoke, Virginia, sentenced Cole to 25 years in prison for abducting Van Balen. Cole was released on parole in 1984.

He entered Oregon Department of Corrections custody in July 2001 without the possibility of parole.