Police identified the mastermind in a string of odd burglaries across the North Hills as an Etna man. But the suspect with the longest, most sordid and most violent criminal record in the gang of five -- James "Sonny" Watson -- was tracked down and arrested Thursday in Charleston, W.Va.

Mr. Watson, at 67 the oldest of the conspirators, is mentioned only briefly in the charges announced this week by Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr.

He was charged on Tuesday with two burglaries, compared to the 25 burglaries attributed to ringleader Timothy Sunday, along with two counts each of theft and conspiracy.

But Mr. Watson has a criminal record dating to the 1970s, including convictions for rape, armed robbery and murder for hire. He escaped from a West Virginia mental hospital in 1980 by jumping out a window. And he showed repeatedly in the years that followed that he would go to great lengths -- from castrating himself to shooting at a police officer to bribing jail guards -- to win and to keep his freedom.

"[Mr. Watson] kept repeating, 'I'll stop him. They're all after me and I'm not going to be locked up,' " his friend, Mary Herron, testified in February 1981, describing how a panicked Mr. Watson planned to kill Ross police Sgt. Carl M. Zotter when the officer stopped his car for displaying an illegal cardboard license plate.

Mr. Watson, formerly of Denver Drive in Stowe, was wanted for robbing a grocery in Fairmont, W.Va., of $1,800 in August 1977 when he and two others were arrested the following month outside the former Viking Hotel on Banksville Road.

One of those companions, William T. Heinhold, was a suspect in the West Virginia holdup and also had robbed a Green Tree-area Shop & Save of $16,000 in mid-August, according to news accounts.

The money was never recovered, however; Mr. Heinhold and Mr. Watson were hard drug users and had spent it on heroin, expensive hotel rooms and restaurants, police said at the time.

Local police then planned to extradite Mr. Watson to West Virginia to face armed robbery charges for his grocery store holdup there.

While in state prison in West Virginia for rape and armed robbery, Mr. Watson castrated himself in 1979. He later told defense psychiatrists that he wanted to appease unknown people whom he feared were "out to get him," according to news accounts.

But Mr. Watson's self-mutilation also earned him release from state prison to Weston State Mental Hospital, where he was put under observation. In June 1980, he threatened to kill a social worker, climbed through a conference-room window and escaped hospital grounds.

Witnesses spotted Mr. Watson several times and police officers with bloodhounds trailed him during the week following his escape. But he got away, making it back to Pittsburgh -- and still more crimes.

On Aug. 12, he and an accomplice held up another grocery, the former Thorofare Supermarket on the North Side. Mr. Watson and another man went into the store at about 8 p.m. with a gun in a paper bag, and made off with about $3,600 from the store's cash registers.

On Aug. 18, Mr. Watson, fellow mental hospital escapee Larry L. Arnold and Ms. Herron were stopped by Sgt. Zotter on Route 19 in Ross. Sgt. Zotter later testified that he heard Mr. Watson say, "Don't move ... I'm going to kill you," as he approached the car.

The officer, however, turned and ran off in a zig-zag pattern. Witnesses testified that Mr. Watson got out of his car, fixed his sights on Sgt. Zotter's back and fired at least five shots.

"But the policeman -- who said he could hear the bullets whizzing by him -- escaped unharmed," The Pittsburgh Press reported Sept. 3, 1980.

Mr. Watson was arrested Aug. 19, after police discovered him hiding under a bed at a friend's apartment on Halket Street in Oakland. But instead of surrendering peaceably, as he had in 1977, narcotics officers said they had to hit Mr. Watson with a blackjack to subdue him before he could be arrested.

Mr. Watson was later acquitted of the shooting by reason of insanity, with a large part of his defense resting on his self-castration.

Like Sgt. Zotter, what arresting officers didn't know at the time was why Mr. Watson was so desperate to evade capture: Not only was he wanted in West Virginia, but also he had been one of two hit men in a 1978 murder-for-hire scheme.

Arrested in September 1981 at the Allegheny County Jail, where he had been held since his arrest the previous summer for shooting at Sgt. Zotter, Mr. Watson was named as one of five men who conspired in the contract killing of Norman R. McGregor.

Mr. McGregor, of West Mifflin, was gunned down on his front porch several hours after midnight on Dec. 14, 1978. Prosecutors said Mr. Watson and Robert "The Codfish" Bricker stalked Mr. McGregor for nearly six months -- lying in wait for him in tall weeds across the street from his house and outside the two bars he was known to frequent -- before ambushing him in front of his Gordon Lane home as his wife slept inside.

"[Mr. Watson] was more or less like the enforcer for that gang," said Allegheny County Sheriff William Mullen, who then was a lieutenant on the Pittsburgh police force. "He had a reputation of being a violent individual."

Two racketeers turned informants said Mr. Bricker took credit for the killings and received much of the $10,000 payoff, while another informant said Mr. Watson did the shooting.

The man whom police said ordered the killing, vending machine company owner Thomas Skelton of Squirrel Hill, was acquitted of the murder. Mr. Bricker was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.

And Mr. Watson, convicted of third-degree murder in October 1982, received a 10- to 20-year sentence in addition to sentences for his previous crimes in West Virginia and Pennsylvania.

While in jail, then in prison, Mr. Watson tried to escape twice -- once in July 1981 by bribing a county jail guard to make copies of the jail's keys and again in June 1985 by persuading a metal shop foreman in the former Western Penitentiary to give him black gunpowder.

Mr. Watson was moved to a West Virginia prison in 2001, where he served out a robbery sentence until 2005.

Now, Mr. Watson is back behind bars, though Sheriff Mullen questioned why he wasn't there all along.

"It doesn't surprise me that he's back at it at all," the sheriff said. "It surprises me that he got out of jail."