‘MANHUNT’--HOW TRUE? : A CBS docudrama about the nation’s most-wanted criminal is drawing fire for alleged inaccuracies.

When two Idaho game wardens caught Claude Dallas poaching in 1981, Dallas pulled a revolver from under his heavy coat, killed the lawmen, and fled into the wilds.

Now both widows of the game wardens say that a CBS docudrama about Dallas is going to murder the truth.

Nearly six years later, CBS will air “Manhunt for Claude Dallas” about the trapper who was convicted of the two killings but who later escaped from prison. Dallas, whose life as a mountain man has spawned a myth of the Old West in the 1980s, is now No. 1 on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list. (“Manhunt” is scheduled to air Tuesday night at 9 p.m. on KCBS Channel 2).

The TV movie depicts the killings of Bill Pogue (played by Claude Akins) and Conley Elms (Ed O’Brien), the only game wardens in America ever slain in the line of duty. Sheriff Tim Nettleton of Idaho’s Owyhee County, who led the investigation in the celebrated case, says that the net effect of what CBS is doing is to favor Dallas’ contention that he shot in self-defense.

One of the widows, Dee Pogue, told Calendar that she regards the book on which the docudrama is based as fiction. The other widow, Sheri Elms, said almost everyone seems to forget that “this man is a cold-blooded murderer of two police officers.”

“I don’t think CBS cares about the truth or cares about whether the movie is factual,” said Bill Pogue’s brother, Eddie. “CBS just wants to make money.”

An inquiry by Calendar shows that while the movie covers the broad outlines of the case, it also excludes crucial facts and alters others.

CBS re-creates the killings twice, but leaves out what the only witness--Dallas’ friend Jim Stevens--says were last words of game warden Pogue that suggest he was shot without warning.

In both depictions, CBS dresses Dallas in clothing that suggests that the game wardens knew--or should have known--that he was armed. In fact, Dallas actually wore a heavy fireman’s coat that concealed his .357 Magnum revolver. CBS also shows game warden Elms reaching into his open jacket for his readily accessible handgun when, in fact, Elms’ gun was buried beneath a tight-fitting sweater covered by a zipped jacket.

“Manhunt’s” producer-director Jerry London (“Shogun,” “Hogan’s Heroes”), Lance Evans, director of the Dramas Based on Fact Unit at CBS Program Practices, and Evans’ subordinate, senior editor Tom Fortuna, told Calendar that they knew these facts but agreed to exclude or change them. They acknowledged that accurate dialogue and wardrobing would not have interfered with the drama of telling the story. All three characterized the exclusions and alterations as merely matters of “dramatic license” that don’t materially affect the impression left with viewers.

But the impact on audiences of these exclusions and reversals of fact is powerful: According to London himself, an audience at an advance showing of the docudrama was split on whether Dallas murdered the two lawmen or shot in self defense.

The movie is based on the book “Outlaw: The True Story of Claude Dallas” (Morrow: $12.95; McGraw-Hill: $4.95 paperback), a compellingly written tale that recounts the romantic legends surrounding Dallas.

Since his trial, Claude Lafayette Dallas Jr., 36, has become a folk hero to some people. To some, he’s the last true cowboy of the Old West, a man born 100 years too late whose only crime was standing up to the unreasonable demands of a couple of hard-nosed fin-feather-and-fur cops trying to enforce a trivial law against shooting deer and trapping bobcats out of season.

In a telephone interview from his home in Boulder, Colo., author Jeff Long said he’s not troubled by the changes in the docudrama, explaining that they are the kind of liberties “I’d expect from a TV movie.”

Long, producer London and CBS’ Evans and Fortuna all said that the film, which opens under the rubric “based on a true story,” is truthful. Labeling a TV movie as true can be worth as many as 10 additional audience share points, the CBS research department has found in the past, which creates powerful financial incentives for independent producers and the network to bill a story as true.

CBS’ Evans said that his and Fortuna’s research went beyond Long’s book and that “we added a lot of information about (Dallas’) past, his criminal activities as a poacher, his threats against law enforcement in the past, to fill out the context of the film.”

But the acknowledged inaccuracies raise questions about CBS’s standards for docudramas and to what extent viewers should believe what they see on the screen. Indeed, the art form itself has been criticized repeatedly as inherently distorting, but this film raises further questions of integrity because CBS acknowledges that it knew the facts about the shootings and yet didn’t portray them accurately.

After Dallas (played by Matt Sallinger) killed the game wardens, he fled and was caught 16 months later after a ferocious firefight with FBI agents and local lawmen. He was tried for murder and convicted of two counts of manslaughter. Long said the jury lowered the charge after Dallas’ lawyers, in effect, made the focus of the trial not Dallas’ shooting, but Pogue’s hard-nosed style of enforcing game laws.

Dallas was serving a 30-year sentence when he escaped last spring. He is believed to be living in desolate high desert where Idaho, Oregon and Nevada meet. Sheriff Nettleton (played by Rip Torn) told Calendar that Dallas is a cold-blooded cop killer who will certainly try to kill any lawmen attempting to recapture him.

Sheriff Nettleton, the widows Pogue and Elms and brother Eddie Pogue all say that the CBS docudrama is not based on the best available material and is so seriously flawed in its overall portrayal that it’s not to be believed.

“I consider the book ‘Outlaw’ to be a piece of fiction,” Dee Pogue said. “Any movie coming from that book has to be an even bigger fiction.”

Added Eddie Pogue: “A movie based on Jeff Long’s book is not going to be an accurate portrayal. It’s just out there to sell. . . . I think it’s a sick joke to take a cold-blooded cop killer and try to make him into an American hero.”

“My story tells it just as it is,” Long told Calendar when advised of Mrs. Pogue’s charge. “I took no liberties with the facts.”

Dee Pogue said that she wishes CBS had based its movie instead on “Give a Boy a Gun: A True Story of Law and Disorder in the American West” by Jack Olsen (Delacorte: $16.95; Dell: $3.95 paperback).

Olsen’s book came out nine months after Long’s and included extensive material from police documents that Long told Calendar he never examined. Olsen’s book also features lengthy interviews with people, including Sheriff Nettleton, who said they spoke only briefly with Long.

“I trust Jack Olsen implicitly,” Dee Pogue said. She complained that journalists, even from the nation’s most prestigious media, have repeatedly written what she regards as sensationalized and romanticized stories about Dallas, that they failed to do enough reporting to get beyond the myths.

Olsen portrays Dallas not as a romantic, self-sufficient mountain man like Jeremiah Johnston but as a sociopath raised to hate cops. Both books say friends brought Dallas boxes of canned goods and fresh fruit so he could survive in the wilderness. (The film is shot not in the scrub brush desert, but in the lush, tree-covered mountains of Colorado.)

Wayne Cornell, the city editor of the Idaho Press-Tribune in Nampa, has followed the case closely. In his book, Long acknowledges Cornell’s help. But when asked about the accuracy of the two books, Cornell said: “I think the book by Jack Olsen is by far the more accurate description of the entire proceeding.”

What does Dallas himself think about Long’s book “Outlaw”? From prison, he wrote Olsen: “It’s not the true story of anybody I know.”

Producer London said he believes his first obligation is to be true to the book he bought: “The criterion is whether you get a film that is as good as the book. When I read ‘Outlaw,’ I thought it was a very interesting piece of entertainment.

“Since I bought that book, I wanted to tell the story in that book,” London said, adding that his attorney advised him that “if I only do what’s in the book then I’m in the clear.”

London emphasized that he believes “you’ve got to be honorable to the material.”

He has read Olsen’s book: “I tried to resist reading it, but I couldn’t. . . .” He emphasized that he made a “very special effort” not to include anything from “Give a Boy a Gun,” to which he did not own the dramatic rights.

Olsen disagrees with London on the director’s ethical duties: “His obligation isn’t to any book,” Olsen said. “His obligation is to the truth.”

Long said that, based on John Gay’s teleplay, he is pleased that the docudrama shows fidelity to his book. “I was impressed,” he said of the script. “London and Gay were meticulous about trying to make sure all the facts were correct.”

The first time viewers of “Manhunt for Claude Dallas” see the killings played out is near the opening. They get a long shot that CBS’ Evans says is intended to be from the point of view of the only witness, Jim Stevens.

In this version, Pogue and Elms arrive after being tipped that a poacher is at Bull Camp and that he may be carrying a .357 magnum revolver. On arriving at the rim above Bull Camp, Pogue and Elms take a .22-caliber revolver from Dallas that he used to dispatch animals caught in his traps.

Dallas is shown wearing an unlined, three-quarter-length brown coat, open to the wind. Viewers do not see a .357 Magnum revolver in a holster on his right hip. As portrayed by CBS, it is difficult to imagine how the game wardens could have failed to notice the powerful weapon, especially when they had negotiated the steep hike from the rim down to Bull Camp.

Once Dallas and the game wardens reach Bull Camp, Pogue is shown taking a pistol from Dallas’ friend Jim Stevens, who was visiting Dallas’ campsite. Pogue empties the Stevens’ revolver, drops the bullets into Stevens’ blue-denim jacket breast pocket and hands him the unloaded gun.

Suddenly, shots are heard off-camera (The scene is shot this way because Stevens testified that he didn’t see the actual shooting.) The camera shows the two lawmen falling as Dallas gets his rifle from his tent and gives each wounded man a coup de grace to the head.

Stevens had repeatedly told investigators that an instant before the first bullet flew from Dallas’ gun, the game warden shouted “Oh no!” But in the docudrama Bill Pogue’s last words are never heard. Sheriff Nettleton and others believe those two words establish that Dallas drew on the game wardens without warning and that they show Pogue was shocked to discover that Dallas was armed.

“Those words are very, very important,” said author Olsen. He noted that it’s absurd to believe that Pogue would disarm Stevens and not take every gun that he believed Dallas had on him, especially since Pogue had been warned that Dallas was dangerous. Sheriff Nettleton, who has read the teleplay, said that the scene “is the version that the defense wanted the jury to believe.”

It’s during the docudrama’s second rendition of the shooting, shown as a flashback during Dallas’ trial testimony, that the liberties CBS allowed with the facts stand out most.

At his trial, Dallas testified about a long and convoluted argument with Pogue. Dallas portrayed Pogue as provoking him by telling him he was being taken to jail. “You can go easy or you can go hard,” Dallas quoted Pogue as saying. Stevens testified that he never heard such a remark.

London said he believes that it will be obvious to viewers that Dallas’ testimony is self-serving. London also thinks that Pogue must have said something that provoked Dallas, and that Pogue felt “his manhood threatened” by Dallas’ resistence to being cited or arrested.

In the flashback version, Dallas says, “You can’t shoot a man” for poaching, and then he and Pogue go for their guns. Next, Dallas turns his revolver on Elms, who is wearing an open jacket with his gun--hanging from a shoulder holster--readily accessible. Just as Elms is about to get his hand on his gun, Dallas shoots him down.

But rather than wearing an open coat with a gun that he could quickly draw, as CBS shows, Elms was in fact wearing a zipped jacket, under which he had on a tight-fitting sweater under which he had his gun.

Further, the clothing Dallas wears in the docudrama suggests a scene from “Gunfight at the OK Corral,” with the long coat open to the wind. In fact, Dallas was wearing a thick fireman’s coat, slick yellow on the outside, that would not have shown the bulge of a revolver on his hip. The coat was fastened shut, Stevens said. Nettleton said this suggests that only by stealth could Dallas have pulled his gun and shot the unsuspecting game wardens.

Eddie Pogue, Dee Pogue and the sheriff say that it’s an outrage that CBS gives even the slightest impression that Pogue may have gone for his gun to shoot Dallas or that Pogue would have even hinted he would shoot a man over a misdemeanor game violation.

Sheriff Nettleton also noted, as did Olsen, that if Dallas’ version of the shootings were true, than it would be to Dallas’ benefit to produce the game wardens’ guns. But Dallas, who threw Elms’ body into a river after taking his gun and badge, and who buried Pogue’s body in a shallow grave miles away, has testified that he cannot recall where he buried the guns. The sheriff and author Long said they consider that an obvious, self-serving lie.

“There’s no question Claude Dallas knows exactly where those guns are buried,” Long said.

Another fact CBS left out that might affect how audiences will interpret the events: Stevens told investigators that, after the shootings, Dallas said, “I never could have taken them on the rim.” Sheriff Nettleton said that this remark shows that Dallas lured Pogue and Elms into his camp so he could murder them. The judge who presided at the trial barred Stevens from testifying about this remark because Dallas made it after the killings.

On the issue of Dallas’ coat being open or fastened shut, CBS fact-checker Fortuna said: “You are talking wardrobing there. We usually are not that concerned with what they are wearing. That never seemed to be much of an issue. . . .”

Fortuna’s boss, Evans, said, “It’s our feeling that the story is accurate as we researched it and the audience will not come away with negative reactions. . . . The script and the finished film portray the two points of view of the murders as accurately and correctly as need be.”

Evans added that, in docudramas, “It is very standard for us to accept dramatic license. I think it would be fair to say that in every drama based on fact that we do. You can’t tell these stories without adding some bit of dramatic license.”

CBS, producer-director London said, “felt that the whole gist of the crime was in Dallas’ shooting both lawmen in the back of the head.” That, and concealing the bodies, showed Dallas’ criminal intent, London said.

“The networks are interested in what the public wants to watch,” London said in describing how, as an independent producer, he pitches ideas for TV movies to the networks. “They have a feeling about what are ratings-getters and what are not, and it changes every six months.”

London said he believes it is unclear what happened that morning at Bull Camp--that no one will ever know the true story.