Conductor Merritt immediately phoned the incident into the Southern Pacific agents at Ashland, Oregon. Southern Pacific phoned Chief Special Agent Dan O'Connell at San Francisco. Soon posses and National Guard troops were searching the mountains to find the culprits. Some railroad men formed their own posses to revenge their fallen comrades. But it was too late, the three men had already escaped.
Meanwhile, men at the Siskiyou station immediately refired the helper engine and backed it up to the stalled train. It hauled the train back into fresh air. At the same time, men hooked up the original engine to the mail car and hauled it down the West side of the mountain to a bypass track at White Point. The mail car was taken to the Southern Pacific Yard at Ashland where authorities found the remains of the postal clerk, Elvin E. Dougherty.
The bandits made their identification easy. As they fled the scene, Roy dropped his Colt on the railroad tracks as he ran away. Though the Colt had had its serial number scratched off there was another secret number on the gun that was easily traceable to the DeAutremont brothers. Another brother dropped a pair of tar stained overalls and a box of black paper to try to throw bloodhounds off the track. Amazingly he left a crumpled receipt for a piece of registered mail in the pocket of the overalls. That receipt made it easy to trace the DeAutremont brothers. Hugh was 19 years old at the time, and the twins, Ray and Roy, were 23 years old.
Rewards were offered and their pictures posted everywhere. They remained at large for almost four years. Over two and a half million wanted posters were circulated in the U.S. and overseas. They were printed in English, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, and Portuguese. Pictures of the dynamited car and the murdered men were printed in papers across the country. Hugh was finally picked up in Manila in the Philippine Islands in February 1927. He had enlisted in the U.S. Army under an assumed name. His picture was recognized on a poster hung in the post office near San Francisco Bay by Thomas Reynolds who knew him slightly. Roy and Ray were captured in Stuebenville, Ohio. Albert Collingsworth recognized the twins from a newspaper story about them. He told Emma L. Maynard what he thought and she passed its on to the law. The twins were using an assumed name of Goodwin. Ray had married and adopted the name while on the run. When arrested he left a wife and small child behind.
