The Blue Book Burglar

The Social Register was a who’s who of America’s rich and powerful—the heirs of robber barons, scions of political dynasties, and descendants of Mayflower passengers. It was also the perfect hit list for the country’s hardest-working art thief.

_{By Jack Rodolico}

The Atavist Magazine, No. 168

Jack Rodolico is a freelance writer and radio reporter. His work has aired on NPR, the BBC, Marketplace, and 99% Invisible.

Editor: Jonah Ogles
Art Director: Ed Johnson
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checker: Jake Conley
Illustrator: Nada Hayek

Published in October 2025.

The phone inside the mansion rang relentlessly—five times, twenty, forty—echoing from the spacious kitchen to the bedrooms upstairs. The house was a 5,200-square-foot Georgian Colonial constructed of red brick. It had a pool and a tennis court, and it stood at the end of a long wooded driveway, off a secluded cul-de-sac in Greenwich, Connecticut. The town was the crown jewel of the state’s so-called Gold Coast, a swath of wealthy enclaves where Prescott Bush—father of George H. W.—was buried, where Robert F. Kennedy got married, and where Donald Trump would soon purchase his starter mansion. The owners of the red-brick mansion were a banker and his wife (herself the daughter of another banker) whose wedding had been written up in the New York Times. It was Independence Day 1980, and like many people in their social set, they were vacationing on the South Shore of Long Island.

That’s exactly what the caller was hoping for. As the phone rang again and again, his two accomplices listened outside the home. The caller hung up after fifty rings. The men hiding in the dark were confident that the home was empty, but they took one more precaution to be absolutely sure. Once the ringing stopped, they snipped the phone line clean through, setting off a silent alarm that notified police of a break-in. The men then hid in the trees near the house and waited. A Greenwich patrolman pulled up, surveyed the property, assumed it was a false alarm, and left.

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It was time. The two men broke a pane of glass near the back door, entered the mansion, and proceeded to plunder its contents. From a linen closet they took several pillowcases and filled them with approximately 350 pieces of silver: salad forks, fish knives, and bouillon spoons; a pair of grape shears and a cold-meat fork; a baby’s hairbrush and an ashtray; something called a star-footed muffineer. In the master bedroom, they emptied drawers of pearls, a gold watch, and a diamond-and-platinum band. They were thorough, searching cabinets in the library and lowering a pull-down ladder to ransack the attic. They took choice baubles, such as a porcelain umbrella stand and a tea caddy with an ivory finial.

In the living room, the men did something out of the ordinary for most house thieves: They removed a handful of paintings from the walls, but stole just two. These were landscapes by eighteenth-century Dutch and American painters whose names were unlikely to appear in an art history textbook. They were valuable pieces of art, but obscure ones.

Once the thieves had collected what they came for, they exited the house and walked to the end of the driveway. The third accomplice, who had been circling the block in a getaway car since calling the residence, picked them up there, and together they drove off into the night.

When the adjusters at Tiffany & Co. later appraised what had been taken from the mansion, the inventory stretched to five pages. The robbery was valued at more than $100,000, a figure that, when adjusted for inflation, nearly quadruples in today’s dollars—although the art has likely increased tenfold in value.

Greenwich detective Jim Hirsch had become somewhat inured to such crimes when he first heard about the burglary. Home robberies peaked nationally in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and Greenwich, where many houses were essentially poorly guarded museums, attracted talented thieves. There was the Silver Bandit, who snuck into the dining room of a home while its occupants were sleeping to steal antique silver. There was the Dinner Set Gang, who, while the rich entertained in the dining room, tore apart the bedrooms in search of jewelry. These thieves were a “pain in the ass,” Hirsch told me.

It would take Hirsch some time to discern what was exceptional about the crew that pulled off the Independence Day heist. For one, their M.O. was supremely cautious. Even more unusual was that this crew had an eye for quality, be it silver, jewels, antiques, or art. “They knew when they saw something,” said Hirsch. “They knew value.”

Actually, just one of the thieves knew value. And he was not yet done stealing the prized possessions of the East Coast elite. Not even close.

While stealing art is a challenge, selling it—and making a profit—is much, much harder.

I came across the Greenwich case in 2017. At the time, I was part of a team producing an investigative podcast about the 1990 robbery of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The Gardner burglary is a case of utmost superlatives. It ranks as the largest property theft in U.S. history, and has been called “the greatest art heist ever.” More than half a billion dollars’ worth of masterpieces were stolen, including Rembrandt’s only seascape. None of them have been recovered, and no one has ever been charged for the crime.

And yet I couldn’t help but wonder: Greatest art heist compared with what?

In searching for an answer, I learned everything I could about art robberies big and small, from the decades before and since the Gardner heist. I interviewed cops and crooks, academics and insurance adjusters. I pulled news clips about museum jobs across the U.S. and Europe. I read papers about organized-crime syndicates looting archaeological sites in Asia and the Middle East. I learned a lot about this rarified corner of the crime world—for instance, that the black market values stolen art at about 10 percent of the legitimate market price, and that authorities are most likely to recover missing pieces at the point of sale, whether that’s a Christie’s auction or a handoff in a hotel room to an undercover cop pretending to be a cash buyer. While stealing art is a challenge, selling it—and making a profit—is much, much harder.

So when I read a news story about the thief who had led the crew behind the Greenwich robbery, I wanted to know more. The red-brick mansion burglarized in 1980 was just one hit on a long list of them. Dozens of homes owned by members of America’s moneyed class were raided by the same thief and his crew. They were after art, but not the sort that would draw interest from the press. They wanted lesser-known works, and lots of them—the kinds of pieces that would be relatively easy to sell because the entire world wasn’t looking for them.

Over the course of my reporting, I came to believe that the ringleader of these crimes was in a class by himself. I doubt there’s such a thing as the greatest art thief of all time, but I don’t know of any burglar who worked so hard.

Jim Hirsch admired the titans of finance, politics, business, and industry he was sworn to protect. “Loved ’em,” he said. I interviewed Hirsch in a conference room at a Greenwich hedge fund where he’d taken a job as head of security after retiring from the police force. “Old money is tremendous. New money stinks. They seem to think they’re something special,” Hirsch said.

He told me about a friend of his: Andrew Rockefeller, of the Rockefellers, who passed away a few years ago. “Nicest guy you ever want to meet. Khaki pants, Top-Siders, and a sport shirt.” Hirsch was proud to know Rockefeller and his ilk. “Super, super people who remained friends with you after you left the job,” he said.

So when more than eighty homes in Greenwich were stripped of riches on Hirsch’s watch between 1980 to 1982—and that’s not counting the dozens more that happened in nearby communities—he took it a little personally. “It was embarrassing,” he said.

What the burglars stole was as impressive as who they stole it from. From the home of a political strategist Richard Nixon once included on his “enemies list,” they took a collection of oriental rugs (worth $19,400 at the time) and cracked a safe to find a sizable collection of antique stamps ($60,249). From the palatial estate of a family so rich they gifted a library to Yale University, the thieves stole three Tiffany floor lamps ($31,000). “These are not lamps, these are lamps,” Hirsch told me. “Highly identifiable tempered lampshades. They’re magnificent.”

From an insurance executive, the thieves took a nineteenth-century Swiss music box ($20,000). From a Rockefeller—not Andrew, another one—they took a platinum bracelet embedded with 280 diamonds ($15,300). They broke in to the homes of a pioneering cardiologist, the chairman of the National Audubon Society’s board of directors, and a descendant of an early investor in Thomas Edison’s light bulb. They stole a pair of handheld fans originally owned by an emperor of France ($2,000) and a full-length raccoon-fur coat ($2,000). They stuffed an untold fortune’s worth of silverware into countless pillowcases.

And then there were the paintings. The thieves homed in on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century oils, each canvas small enough to fit inside a briefcase. The works had humdrum titles such as A Hawking Party Resting at a Wayside Inn ($2,400), Hunter in Pink Coat on Brown Horse Jumping Fence ($3,000), and H.M.S. Duncannon 120 Guns ($5,000). They were painted by long-dead British, American, and Dutch artists for whom there was a boutique market of small galleries catering to the tastes of the very types of people the art was stolen from. It was uncanny what the thieves recognized as valuable. For instance, from the widow of a descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence they stole an 1842 painting by a French artist, a work that had not been on the open market in generations because it was passed down through the family.

Victims of these thefts returned from vacations in Europe, Martha’s Vineyard, or the Virgin Islands to find their homes ransacked—although one police report stated, “The entry was not immediately noticed due to the enormity of the house.” Losing family heirlooms was bad enough, but the violation of privacy and security was something else. “The property’s always insured,” Hirsch told me. “The problem that your home was invaded is a whole different world. There were some people that sold their houses. Some people used to greet you at the door with a baseball bat after that.”

DNA evidence was not yet a forensic tool, which was unfortunate since the thieves left behind plenty of it, often on cigarette butts stubbed out in the course of the robberies. Once, in a guest bathroom, a burglar defecated in the toilet and did not flush.

As the rate of the robberies picked up, from about one per month in 1980 to several per weekend in 1982, police began to notice patterns: the pillowcases used as loot bags, the broad array of high-value spoils, the timing (always after dark and on weekends). “You could take the complainant’s name off any of these burglary reports and exchange it with any other one,” Hirsch once told a newspaper reporter. “They were all identical.” Law enforcement concluded that the burglars cut the phone lines in the homes they targeted to deliberately trigger alarm systems, most likely to watch hapless patrolmen visit and then leave the scene.

Who was buying all the loot from the thieves? The cops figured it was someone with art-world savvy. “A burglar is only as good as his fence,” a detective from Bedford, New York, just across the state line from Greenwich, told a New York Times reporter. “A junkie doesn’t have a good fence—he goes to a pawnbroker. But someone who steals paintings, he has a good fence. You know you’re not dealing with something run-of-the-mill.”

Law enforcement also became convinced that there was a link among the victims. Not just their wealth and the location of their homes—something more singular. Detectives in Fairfield County, Connecticut, and Westchester County, New York, cross-referenced their cases. Did the victims belong to any clubs? Only the most exclusive yacht and country clubs in the country, but there wasn’t one they all belonged to. What about academic affiliations? Collectively, they’d been to every elite boarding school and Ivy League university, but they weren’t all, say, graduates of Yale. Did they use the same arborist? Was the same individual collecting their trash? No and no. The police did notice one thing: Many of the victims’ phone numbers were not publicly listed, which made the fifty-ring calls odd—to say nothing of the hang-up calls some targets had received prior to being robbed.

Two years into the crime wave, investigators were no closer to identifying the burglars, who were more prolific than ever. Over Memorial Day weekend in 1982, they hit five houses in Bedford alone. In Greenwich, they were returning to rob homes they’d previously struck. Police decided to cast a wider net via teletype, a messaging system used by law enforcement around the country, in the hope that someone, somewhere, knew something useful. According to Hirsch, the teletype spelled out the thieves’ methods and asked any department experiencing similar crimes in its jurisdiction to contact the Greenwich police.

The next morning, Hirsch got a call from a cop in Massachusetts who wanted to know: Had he ever heard of a book called the Social Register?

Blue Book members were the richest of the rich, the oldest of old money. Their homes were almost guaranteed to be chock-full of high-value loot.

America’s aristocracy traces its lineage to a time between the end of the Civil War and the dawn of the twentieth century, in the Gilded Age. Think Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt. Robber barons built obscene fortunes, monopolies lined the pockets of corrupt politicians, and unchecked capitalism opened a permanent chasm between the very rich and everyone else. The upper crust loved to throw opulent balls and banquets, which allowed hosts to show off their money, power, and influence, and prominent socialites kept so-called visiting lists of well-connected friends, acquaintances, and business contacts.

Louis Keller was not part of the new aristocracy, but he recognized a business opportunity in these quasi-private lists. He collected them, consolidated them, and produced a master copy of high society, selling it only to those who’d made the cut. First published in 1886, the Social Register was a thin, elegantly bound book with pumpkin-colored lettering on a black background. When later editions featured a blue cover, it became known as the Blue Book.

The first edition drew exclusively from the social lists of people with homes in Newport, Rhode Island, a favorite vacation destination of the elite. In time there were Blue Books for almost every major U.S. city. A group called the Social Register Association became the gatekeeper of the Blue Book, and it created strict rules for new entries. A person could be listed because of marriage to someone already included in the book, if they were elected president of the United States, or if they were nominated by an existing member. For many years, the Social Register was classist as well as anti-Semitic and racist; excluded Jewish society members in Chicago created their own version of the Blue Book in 1918, and the Social Register did not include a Black member for nearly a century after its creation.

In 1976, the city books were consolidated into a single volume covering high society nationwide. It listed approximately 50,000 names. By the 1980s, being in the book still had low-key cultural cachet, particularly for direct descendants of Gilded Age gentry. Members could flip through the Social Register’s pages to learn the essentials about each other. What school did so-and-so attend? What yacht club did they belong to? Were they related to someone on the Mayflower? And, for the purposes of correspondence, what was their address and telephone number?

While it was difficult to get listed in the Blue Book, it did not take a criminal genius to obtain a copy. “All you gotta do is one burglary in one house, and there they are!” said Roland Anderson, a retired Massachusetts detective who, as far as I could ascertain, was the first person to suspect that the burglars targeting Greenwich, Bedford, and other wealthy East Coast communities were using the Social Register as a hit list.

Anderson spent forty years as a cop in the Boston suburb of Weston, which, during his tenure, was the richest town in Massachusetts. Now 82, “Rolie” Anderson possesses a stunning memory for details about burglars he chased in the 1970s. When I met with him for an interview, he drove me around Weston as if still on patrol. “That one up there was hit,” he said, gesturing toward a single-family home large enough to be a castle. “Think of the dark of night. They entered through a cellar window near the garage. And they cleaned it out.”

When Anderson joined the force, in 1968, home robberies were common but not lucrative; burglars typically struck during the daytime, when victims were at work, stealing televisions and maybe a fistful of jewelry. But in 1978, two years before the Greenwich robberies began, a more ambitious crew commenced working in Weston. “We started to see the oriental rugs rolled up, antique furnishings taken,” Anderson said. “And, in some cases, paintings.” The thieves also cut their targets’ phone lines during robberies. Anderson questioned victims about their affiliations, hoping to figure out why the thieves had singled them out. One of them said, “Well, we are listed in the Social Register.”

Anderson had never heard of it. But thumbing through the book’s pages, he decided that what the thieves were doing made perfect sense. Any big house in Weston was likely to be a decent target for a thief, but Blue Book members were the richest of the rich, the oldest of old money. Their homes were almost guaranteed to be chock-full of high-value loot.

In an era of police work that Anderson calls “the dark ages,” he was particularly effective at shoe-leather investigating. That included combing through teletypes, which were, he said, “the only network we really had among all of us.” Though reading all the messages that came over the transom could be tedious and time-consuming, Anderson and his colleagues still did it “every single day.” That’s how he discovered a slew of identical unsolved robberies in virtually every exclusive Boston suburb, as well as tony communities in Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Maine.

So he’d figured out the scheme. But who was behind it? Anderson studied the rap sheets of known antiques thieves and their associates, and soon built up a lengthy, almost encyclopedic list of men he believed were capable of pulling off the Social Register robberies. “Rolie Anderson is probably the best detective I’ve ever worked with,” said Arthur Bourque, a former trooper with the Massachusetts State Police’s major crimes unit. “He’s just got a ferocious appetite for background and research.”

On November 19, 1979, Bourque met with Anderson and produced the single oldest law enforcement document I obtained about the Blue Book burglaries. The memo’s subject line reads: “Intelligence regarding antique thefts in Massachusetts received from Det. Rollie [sic] Anderson of the Weston, Mass. P.D.” It includes a list of fifty-eight names, all people Anderson believed were involved in organized antiques theft. But he had no way to know which of them—if any—were using the Blue Book. “They were so adept at what they were doing and how they did it,” Anderson told me.

No sooner had Anderson handed off his list of suspects to the state police than the Social Register robberies in northern New England stopped. Bourque concluded that the thieves suspected law enforcement was onto them. “There was just too much heat going on up here,” he said.

Two years later, in August 1982, Bourque stepped up to the long roll of paper issuing from his office’s teletype machine to inspect what had come in overnight. That’s where he found the notice describing a string of burglaries in Connecticut and New York with a familiar M.O.

Convinced that the thieves Anderson investigated had moved their operations south, Bourque dialed up Jim Hirsch. “Get ahold of this fuckin’ book,” Hirsch remembered Bourque telling him, “because whoever you got in town who’s in that book is a potential target.”

Armed with intelligence from Massachusetts, Greenwich police went into Labor Day weekend 1982 as prepared as they’d ever been to catch the burglars in the act. They suspected that the crew were driving down from Massachusetts to commit their crimes, so patrolmen were directed to look out for cars with Massachusetts plates. Police were confident that the homes of people in the Social Register were at risk. The problem was knowing which ones: Greenwich was home to more Blue Book members than any suburban community in America.

At 1:30 a.m. on Friday, a resident heard banging noises next door at the house of a Blue Book member who was away for the weekend. Police arrived to find the house’s phone line snipped and a window busted; a perpetrator had slashed his arm on the broken glass and fled before entering the home. Then, at 12:04 a.m. on Saturday, a Social Register family reported that they had returned from dinner to find their power and phone lines cut and their home robbed. According to a police memo, “The intruder/s had made entry to a room which can only be described as a vault.” There they filled seventeen pillowcases with sterling silver. While inspecting the outside of the home, cops “heard what they felt to be a large subject running away,” but they were unable to track him through the dark woods. Later, on Saturday night, a third Social Register family returned from vacation to find their home stripped of more than $80,000 in valuables.

Despite law enforcement’s best efforts, the thieves had a good haul to show for the weekend. But it would prove to be their last ride in Greenwich.

The following weekend, at 10:50 on Friday night, a Greenwich cop spotted a white 1982 Plymouth Reliant with Massachusetts plates. There were three men in it, and they were cruising down Round Hill Road, where seven homes had been hit over the previous two years, more than on any other street in town. Police followed the car onto the Merritt Parkway, where it set off eastbound toward Boston, then pulled it over. According to a police memo describing the stop, the men in the Reliant said they were returning from the racetrack at Belmont Park, on Long Island, and were looking for a place to eat.

The driver handed over a license that identified him as Dennis Quinn; the car was a rental, Quinn said, from a company in Cape Cod. The other two men had no identification but gave their surnames as Gallagher and Hogan. Quinn allowed the police to check the car’s trunk. “Nothing was found,” the memo states. “Subjects were allowed to continue on their way.”

The next morning, after Hirsch learned about the traffic stop, he compared the names the men had provided against Rolie Anderson’s list of suspects and found a match: Dennis Quinn, 34, short and slight, with a mop-top haircut and an aquiline nose. Police then found that Quinn had rented a hotel room near Greenwich nearly every weekend that summer.

As for the other two men, one of them was identified as Charles Gallagher, 26, tall and hulking, with a horseshoe mustache. He wasn’t on Anderson’s list, but he had a criminal record—larceny, breaking and entering, stealing government property, assault with a deadly weapon. Police records turned up nothing about the man who called himself Hogan.

So Hirsch went to the expert. He dialed up Anderson and described the unidentified man in the Reliant: five feet ten, paunchy, with blue eyes, shaggy brown hair, and a hooked nose above a chevron mustache. Anderson knew exactly who Hirsch was talking about, but his name wasn’t Hogan. It was Raymond Flynn.

amazingly, they appeared to commit yet another burglary right under the FBI’s nose.

After years of playing cat and mouse with the Blue Book thieves, law enforcement finally had information they could work with, and in the waning weeks of the summer of 1982, a rare collaboration began. A dozen local police departments from York, Maine, down to Long Island worked with state police from Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut to funnel intelligence to the FBI, which committed three dozen agents from six field offices to the investigation. The expansive team engaged in round-the-clock surveillance—including unmarked cars and fixed-wing aircraft—of Flynn, Quinn, and Gallagher, who were now officially known as the Social Register gang.

Eager to shut down the burglary operation, the FBI came up with a two-step plan: First observe Flynn, Quinn, and Gallagher robbing a home. Then follow the suspects to their fence. Step two was crucial. “It all revolves around their fence. And in some cases, like artwork, there’s probably only one real fence who can get rid of it, maybe two,” Bourque told me. “You can have twenty-five different burglary operations and one or two fences.”

Law enforcement tracked the Reliant the men had been driving to a rental company near Flynn’s home on Cape Cod. There they learned that the men often rented the same car. By the time the suspects rented it again and drove to the North Shore of Long Island—Great Gatsby territory, where Blue Book homes had been intermittently struck since 1980—the FBI had equipped it with a tracking device. According to a law enforcement memo, the suspects cased homes in Oyster Bay, Mill Neck, and Laurel Hollow, all towns “of Social Register caliber.” Three times, Quinn dropped off Flynn and Gallagher in ritzy neighborhoods. Though agents did not observe a robbery, they suspected that one had occurred because when the suspects convened at a Ramada Inn later that night, “they were observed to be carrying clothing, possibly attempting to conceal any contraband.”

The next morning, Flynn, Quinn, and Gallagher drove to a Western Union in Queens and picked up $1,500, which the FBI hypothesized had been wired to them by their fence as an advance on whatever they’d stolen the previous night. The suspects then proceeded to the Belmont Park racetrack. After gambling, they drove to Providence, Rhode Island, where they stopped for Chinese food. There, according to a police memo, the “suspects became involved in an argument between themselves and Gallagher walked out.” Flynn and Quinn hopped into the Plymouth and caught up with Gallagher as he ascended an entrance ramp to the highway. “Gallagher got into the car and a fistfight ensued,” the memo states. As the men threw punches inside the parked Plymouth, the FBI tail was forced to continue onto the highway to avoid being spotted. “Suspects then backed down the ramp,” the memo notes, “and FBI lost the car.”

The next weekend, the FBI were on their heels when Flynn, Quinn, and Gallagher drove the Plymouth to a Holiday Inn in Princeton, New Jersey. FBI agents booked the room next to the suspects as well as the room above, and from a surveillance van in the hotel’s parking lot, they snapped tight-framed black-and-white photographs: Quinn placing a call from a phone booth. Gallagher scratching his ass while pointing at a parked Corvette. Flynn, more than once, seeming to look directly into the camera. “Suspects were overheard to say that they only had six dollars among themselves,” reads a law enforcement memo.

Agents observed the men casing five Social Register homes in a single neighborhood on Saturday night. On Sunday night, undercover law enforcement followed the men back to the same area, where, amazingly, the crew appeared to commit yet another burglary right under the FBI’s nose. “When the suspects returned to the motel,” a memo states, “they were observed to be carrying a large box.” This time agents were able to confirm that a robbery had occurred: Someone had just stolen $25,000 worth of silver, jewelry, and three yellow pillowcases from the Princeton home of a great-great-great-grandson of President Martin Van Buren.

The next morning, the suspects picked up more cash from the Western Union in Queens and again drove to the racetrack. As they gambled, something happened that gave the FBI an advantage. “While the car was at the track parking lot, it sustained a flat tire,” a memo reads. There is no evidence that the FBI was responsible for the flat, but it was certainly a fortuitous development. When the thieves returned to the vehicle and opened the trunk to look for tools to change the tire, a photographer in the FBI’s surveillance van was perfectly positioned to see what was inside—including a yellow pillowcase. It was the kind of evidence law enforcement had been looking for.

Now all the agents had to do was follow the burglars to their fence. But when the thieves slammed the Reliant’s trunk shut, according to a memo, “the FBI [tracking] device fell from the car and was discovered by the suspects.” The men left the racetrack “very wary of any tails.”

Fence or no fence, the FBI was not about to lose the suspects again. Agents swarmed the car and arrested the Social Register gang on the Throgs Neck Bridge connecting Queens to the Bronx. Inside the Reliant, in addition to yellow pillowcases full of silver, agents found road atlases for the Northeast with various locations circled; hand-written lists of the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of 917 people listed in the Social Register; and a 1975 edition of the Blue Book for New York City and its wealthy suburbs.

Over his three-decade career, from 1967 to 1998, FBI agent Peter Melley worked all kinds of cases: terrorism, organized crime, even the bomb squad. “This was my one and only art theft case,” he told me. When I sat down in Melley’s dining room in Long Island for an interview, he presented me with an extraordinary artifact: the Blue Book seized from the Plymouth Reliant, its yellowed pages crammed with handwritten marginalia. I flipped through it with something approaching reverence.

Melley was not on the Throgs Neck Bridge on October 4, 1982, but the case landed on his desk shortly after the arrests. The Department of Justice tasked him with tying Flynn, Quinn, and Gallagher to as many Blue Book burglaries as possible and pressuring them to flip on their fence. He sent a memo to police departments requesting unsolved cases that fit the burglars’ M.O. He was quickly inundated with files—none of which definitively tied the men to the robberies.

When Melley visited them in jail, he quickly figured out who was in charge. “Quinn and Gallagher were not the most intelligent people in the world,” Melley said. Quinn was the wheelman, the getaway driver, while Gallagher struck Melley as more of an opportunist than a seasoned art thief. The two men refused to cooperate. Even if they had talked, Melley told me, “they wouldn’t have made much difference.” (Both pleaded guilty to interstate transportation of stolen property. Gallagher was sentenced to four years; Quinn got 18 months.)

Ray Flynn, on the other hand, “was a highly intelligent person,” Melley said. If the feds hoped to bring a case against the fence, Melley was sure, Flynn would have to talk.

Flynn was one of eight children raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his siblings were all upstanding. Some were veterans of the Army, Navy, and Coast Guard. Some were elementary school educators. One of his brothers was a Cape Cod police officer. Flynn started out on the straight and narrow. He attended Stony Brook University on Long Island but dropped out, according to Melley. Throughout his twenties, Flynn caught a slew of larceny charges, serving two yearlong sentences in state prison. In 1974, when he was 27, his Massachusetts rap sheet abruptly ceased growing, but not because he stopped breaking the law. “He was getting busted when he was younger,” Rolie Anderson said. “He was making some stupid mistakes.” Simply put, he stopped getting arrested because he got better at his line of work.

When Melley interviewed Flynn, he was facing several years in federal prison for the Blue Book burglaries. So prosecutors offered him a deal: Confess to the crimes, identify the fence and any other people involved in the scheme, and prosecutors would grant him immunity. That would allow him to return home to his wife and their children. “We wanted to know every crime he had ever committed,” Melley said.

But Flynn wouldn’t sing. Instead, in December 1982, he pleaded guilty at the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn to interstate commerce of stolen goods. Afterward he was moved to federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut.

Within a year, circumstances changed. In September 1983, Flynn learned that his family had been in a horrific car crash. His wife and daughter would recover, but his two-year-old son was in a coma. The news pushed Flynn over the edge, and he agreed to talk if it meant getting out of prison. “He gave us chapter and verse,” Melley said. “He was fully cooperative.”

Once Flynn started talking, he had a lot to say. “We must have spent about three or four months with him,” Melley said. “He took us all over Connecticut, Westchester County, and the North Shore, and showed us all the different homes they burglarized. He remembered when they did it and what they had taken. He had a phenomenal memory.”

Flynn answered all manner of niggling questions. For example, Melley had interviewed many Social Register targets who owned large purebred dogs. “They all swore up and down that they had the best guard dogs in the world,” Melley told me. “They invariably would tell us that the burglars obviously had drugged the dog.” But Flynn said they didn’t need to. “The dogs loved Charlie,” Melley remembered Flynn saying, referring to Gallagher. Flynn’s accomplice played with the dogs, fed them from the target’s refrigerator, locked them in a bathroom, and released them when the robbery was done.

With Flynn’s help, Melley solved burglaries at the homes of 103 members of the Social Register in six states, with property losses valued at upwards of $40 million in today’s dollars. Flynn also told the FBI that his crew wasn’t the only one using the Blue Book. He gave Melley the names of nine men from New England, most of them on Anderson’s list of suspected antiques thieves, who had used the Social Register as a hit list over the years. It turned out that between 1981 and 1982, three teams of thieves were breaking in to Blue Book houses in Connecticut, Long Island, Massachusetts, and Westchester County.

But to Melley’s mind, those other thieves were dabblers. Flynn was the one who’d perfected the Blue Book scheme. He’d been involved with the lion’s share of the robberies. And the 1975 copy of the Blue Book that Melley showed me when I interviewed him? That was Flynn’s. His notes were all over its pages.

How, though, had Flynn gotten so good at identifying quality art? Knowing which paintings to steal, and which to leave behind? The answer was his fence. Or at least one of them. Because, as Flynn confessed, he actually had two.

Over time and dozens if not hundreds of robberies, Flynn came to recognize by sight the kinds of paintings His Fence was looking for.

In February 1984, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York announced that a grand jury had indicted Anthony Ursillo, a 49-year-old antiques dealer in Providence, on twenty-four counts in connection to fencing the proceeds of sixty-one Blue Book burglaries. Ursillo had done time for breaking and entering, and the FBI in Boston long suspected he was dealing in stolen goods. The Tiffany lamps, the sterling silver, the antique baubles and tchotchkes—Flynn said Ursillo took it all.

Phone records showed that the burglars would call Ursillo after a robbery, after which he would wire them a down payment. Then he would meet the burglars in Rhode Island to exchange the goods for more cash. The evidence was damning. Ursillo took a plea deal and was sentenced to four years in prison and a $20,000 fine.

But Flynn said that he’d used a different fence for paintings, a Boston art dealer named Michael Filides. The child of Greek immigrants, and by all appearances a good citizen, Filides had worked his way up from a blue-collar background. He was briefly employed in finance before opening a gallery in the heart of the city’s arts district. An artist himself, Filides specialized in appraising nineteenth-century European paintings.

A federal grand jury indicted Filides, 51, on three charges of receiving stolen property and three charges of transporting it across state lines—all in connection with thirteen Blue Book burglaries. But the case against Filides wasn’t as cut-and-dried as the one against Ursillo. Filides didn’t deny buying art from Flynn. Rather, he claimed that he didn’t know that the works were stolen. “I am a victim of the lies of a convicted felon who is trying to shift his criminal conduct … onto me,” he told the press. That argument struck at the heart of the most serious charge against Filides—conspiracy in furtherance, which meant that he knew he was an integral part of the Blue Book robberies. Filides pleaded innocent to all charges and soon became the only person allegedly involved in the Social Register scheme to face a jury.

His trial began on June 4, 1984, with Flynn the star witness. Describing himself to jurors as a professional thief who made ends meet by “selling silver, gold, jewelry, antiques, and paintings from burglaries,” Flynn testified that he originally met Filides at the dealer’s gallery in 1976, when Flynn showed up with another burglar and a stolen painting. Flynn said that Filides not buy that piece, but he did offer tips for future targets: He wanted to fence landscapes and seascapes, not portraits, which were too easy to trace. He didn’t want any paintings larger than a suitcase, because that would make it too difficult to transport them to Europe, where Flynn claimed that Filides sold stolen art to other galleries. Flynn also said that Filides wanted paintings valued between $4,000 and $50,000—anything less would damage his reputation in the art business, and anything more would draw too many questions from buyers and insurance companies. Flynn even claimed that Filides provided him with a list of more than one hundred marketable French and Dutch artists whose work he and his crew should look for. Over time and dozens if not hundreds of robberies, Flynn came to recognize by sight the kinds of paintings Filides was looking for.

Testifying in his own defense, Filides was “alternately pained and bemused,” according to Newsday. He admitted that he had never questioned Flynn on the provenance of the art he came in with—something respectable dealers routinely do. Filides testified that, yes, he did often fly to Europe, despite his gallery turning an annual profit of only about $15,000. (Prosecutors pointed to this discrepancy as evidence that the dealer spent far more money than he “officially” earned.) Filides acknowledged, too, that he had sold paintings Flynn handed him. In fact, he still had several pieces in his possession at the time of Flynn’s arrest. (Filides eventually forfeited those works, twelve in all, to the FBI. They would be the only ones ever returned to the targets of the Social Register gang.) Still, Filides maintained that he had no idea anything he did was illegal.

A jury of nine men and three women deliberated for five days. They sent the judge twenty notes asking for explanations of legal issues and readings of testimony. On the fifth day, the foreman informed the judge, “We are hopelessly deadlocked on all seven counts in this case after infinite amounts of deliberation and many secret ballots.” The judge declared a mistrial. In an interview with a reporter, one of the jurors said they didn’t trust Flynn or Filides. Asked by the press how he felt about his odds in a new trial, Filides only smiled.

Melley sat through the whole thing. He had built the case against Filides—interviewing Blue Book victims, collating police reports from more than a dozen departments, driving Flynn all over New England to get eyes on the Social Register homes the thief had robbed. He knew prosecutors couldn’t bring Filides to court a second time without new evidence.

Melley wanted another witness, someone who would testify about Filides’s criminal activities. And that person needed to be someone who wasn’t a professional thief, because the feds needed the jury to trust them. “Fortunately,” Melley said, “Flynn had a very good memory.”

Flynn had first met Jack Farrell, a Boston insurance appraiser who worked for wealthy clients, at the racetrack—a place where they each spent a lot of time. As the two became more friendly, Flynn mentioned that he needed to get rid of some paintings of questionable origin. Farrell told Flynn he knew exactly who to turn to: Filides, a dealer willing to buy purloined art.

Though Farrell introduced the men well before Flynn began robbing Social Register homes, law enforcement decided to bring Farrell in as a character witness in Filides’s second trial, someone who could attest to the art dealer’s misbehavior. The trial began in September 1984, and the proceedings unfolded much as they had the first time—until Farrell arrived in the courtroom. Melley described his first appearance as if it were a scene from a movie. When Farrell walked in, everyone turned to get a look at him, including Filides. Prosecutors had told Filides that they’d be putting Farrell on the witness stand, and he’d made no objections. Now Melley wondered if that was because Filides hadn’t remembered Farrell. “Filides was looking at him like he had no concept,” Melley said. “Then all of a sudden, Farrell starts giving all these details.” Melley kept his eye on Filides, whose face fell as Farrell’s testimony proceeded.

Farrell did exactly what Melley had hoped he would: persuade jurors to believe Flynn when he said that Filides had been in on the Blue Book robberies. On October 2, a jury found Filides guilty of receiving stolen property, interstate transport of stolen property, and conspiracy.

Melley hoped for a yearslong sentence. But a few weeks later, District Court Judge I. Leo Glasser sentenced Filides to five years’ probation, a $30,000 fine, and a thousand hours of community service in the form of art lectures to disadvantaged Boston residents. The decision still mystifies Melley. “He was a person who deserved to be incarcerated. And, more importantly, had he been incarcerated, he would surely have cooperated and told us where the art went,” Melley said.

Of everyone involved in the conspiracy, Flynn was sentenced to the most time: five years behind bars. Thanks to his cooperation as a witness, though, he was out in less than twelve months.

Finding him wasn’t easy. All I had to go on was the Boston equivalent of John Smith—indeed, shortly after Ray Flynn’s arrest in 1982, voters in the city elected a mayor by the same name.

Most people involved in the Social Register robberies are now dead. Both fences are gone: Ursillo passed away in 1994, Filides three years later. Charlie Gallagher died in 2019. His obituary recounts a favorite expression: “I’ll be with you until the wheels fall off.”

As for Dennis Quinn, when I started working on this story, I traced him to a public housing apartment in the Boston area, which I visited twice. The first time, there was no answer when I knocked on his door, so I left a note. At my next visit, his name was no longer on the mail slot. This fall, I turned up his obituary: He died in April 2025, at 77.

The person I wanted to speak to the most was Ray Flynn. Other than a passing comment to a courthouse reporter at Filides’s trials, Flynn was never interviewed by a journalist. He never spoke publicly about the extent of his crimes, which, by all accounts, were voluminous.

Finding him wasn’t easy. All I had to go on was the Boston equivalent of John Smith—indeed, shortly after Ray Flynn’s arrest in 1982, voters in the city elected a mayor by the same name. I didn’t catch a break until I talked to Rolie Anderson, who immediately remembered Flynn’s middle initial, even decades after the investigation. It was X, for Xavier.

With his full name in hand, I found records that showed the Blue Book case was not the end of the line for Flynn. In 1996, he was arrested for robbing a room in the luxurious Mount Washington Hotel in New Hampshire. A manager and bellman doing a routine security check spotted him wearing tennis shorts and a dress shirt. When they asked if he was a guest, he ran away. Police then tracked him to a country road, where they nabbed him and recovered a diamond ring, a Tiffany watch, three credit cards, and a master room key to the hotel.

Flynn was convicted and sentenced to several years in prison; he was released in 2000. Prosecutors later brought other charges against him, mostly for breaking into other hotels. But in every instance he was either found not guilty, the charges were dismissed or dropped, or he was sentenced to probation. Still, buried in one of the police reports from these cases, I found Flynn’s phone number.

“Maybe I was a little adventurous. Maybe it was challenging to some degree.”

During my first phone call with Flynn, he took credit for two major heists. Years before the Blue Book robberies, in 1975, he claimed to have stolen a Winslow Homer painting from the public library in Malden, Massachusetts, in broad daylight. The next year, he said, he broke in to the Cambridge home of the president of Harvard University and stole six paintings valued at $380,000, including works by the French landscape painter Eugène Boudin.

I knew about these robberies from my research of famous art heists, but Flynn was never mentioned in the stories or police reports I’d read. Though I couldn’t confirm his connection to the Homer theft, an FBI agent I spoke to remembered driving past the Harvard president’s home with Flynn and Melley when Flynn, unprompted, told him, “Oh yeah, I did that one.” As I looked into the various crimes Flynn said he’d committed, the evidence I found often backed up what he’d told me. It never contradicted it. Flynn might have been a thief, but he didn’t strike me as a liar.

I hoped to learn more from Flynn. When I told him that I wanted to do a recorded interview, he suggested we meet at the Barnstable District Courthouse, of all places—the same place he’d beat his latest burglary charges. So I drove to Cape Cod, where Flynn was living. When I walked in, Flynn and his attorney were there to greet me in the lobby. Flynn looked healthy. He was trimmer than in his old mug shots, with short gray hair and no mustache. Dressed in business casual, he looked like he could be on his way to a country club.

His attorney ushered us into a small, windowless conference room. As soon as we sat down, Flynn said that he’d changed his mind; he didn’t want to be recorded anymore. We talked briefly about the story I wanted to tell—at one point, he stood up to mime taking a painting off the wall—and then he left.

This was the start of what became a yearslong back-and-forth between us. Flynn didn’t shy away from questions, but he always ended our conversations quickly. Sometimes I called and left a message, and he wouldn’t get back to me. During other periods we talked on multiple occasions in a single month. He was sad when I told him that Charles Gallagher was dead. More recently Flynn asked me, “How’s Pete Melley doing?”

Mostly, though, we talked about his crimes. The master room key for the Mount Washington Hotel? “It was like picking candy off a tree,” he said. Flynn claimed that he’d used the key to rob upwards of 150 rooms over the course of a decade before management finally caught him. Did he ever struggle to sell his stolen paintings? Sometimes, he said. But he never held on to them for long. “One thing you can do, which I did 200 times,” he told me, “is burn them.”

When I brought up the Social Register case, Flynn told me that he’d hit close to 500 Blue Book homes, far more than the hundred-some robberies the FBI had linked to him. When I relayed this claim to Melley and Anderson, both men found it credible.

I don’t know of any art thief who stole more and spent less time in jail. I found police reports and court records linking him to crimes ranging from 1965 to 2010. That’s not a job—it’s a career. Not that Flynn didn’t pay a price. When I asked about his family’s car accident, he said that his son woke up from a coma but remained in poor health, and died at the age of five. “You say to yourself, ‘If I was there, it wouldn’t have happened,’ ” Flynn told me. He and his wife are now divorced.

There are as many reasons to steal art as there are to steal anything else. There’s opportunism: In 1911, long before thieves in reflective vests plucked jewelry from the Louvre, an Italian handyman who had installed protective glass over the Mona Lisa stole the famous painting from the Paris museum. (The work was recovered twenty-eight months later, and the thief was arrested.) There’s kleptomania, as in the case of the French thief who stole more than 300 works from museums throughout Europe, and who remains under house arrest today. There are also more convoluted motivations, as with a Boston burglar who stole a Rembrandt to use as a bargaining chip, returning it in exchange for a reduction in the sentence he was facing for stealing other paintings.

But Flynn had a different reason altogether. A more mundane one. He found something he did well and worked at it—hard. “I needed fast money. I went to Las Vegas a lot,” he told me. “Maybe I was a little adventurous. Maybe it was challenging to some degree.”

Even now, Flynn’s motivation hasn’t changed much. Once, on a handshake deal at a bar on Cape Cod, he again agreed to let me record our conversation—if I was able to sell a podcast about him. But he later backed out when he realized that he wouldn’t make any money off the deal.

It’s not that Flynn is cagey; he’s calculating. As one of his lawyers told me, “Ray rhymes with pay.”

The Talented Mr. Bruseaux

^_The
Talented
_^Mr._Bruseaux

He made his name in Chicago investigating racial violence, solving crimes, and exposing corruption. But America’s first Black private detective was hiding secrets of his own.

_{BY MATTHEW WOLFE}

The Atavist Magazine, No. 165

Matthew Wolfe’s writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Harper’s, National Geographic, and The New Republic. His first book, about the Earth Liberation Front and radical environmentalism, will be published by Viking in 2026. His previous Atavist story, “The Ghosts of Pickering Trail,” was written with Will Hunt and appeared as issue no. 51.

Editor: Jonah Ogles
Art Director: Ed Johnson
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checker: Emily Injeian
Illustrator: Mark Harris

Published in July 2025.

Early in the evening of April 10, 1928, the day of Chicago’s municipal primary, a candidate for alderman named Octavius C. Granady was pulling up to a polling station, choked with voters fresh from work, when a man dressed in a gray overcoat and a fedora strolled up to his car, drew a pistol, and fired a volley of shots through the back window. Amazingly, the would-be killer missed his target. Granady’s driver slammed his foot on the gas, sending the vehicle, hung with campaign banners, burning rubber down Washburne Avenue. The gunman hopped onto the running board of a nearby Cadillac, which promptly gave chase.

The weeks leading up to the city’s election had been marked by a frenzy of political violence. Chicago’s flamboyantly amoral mayor, William “Big Bill” Thompson, who had recently won office on the populist slogan “America First,” enjoyed the backing of local gangsters, including the infamous syndicate kingpin Al Capone. To push through Thompson’s ticket of loyal supporters, Capone’s henchmen adopted a blunt approach to canvassing. Houses of political officials were bombed, poll workers beaten, and the citizenry intimidated by club-wielding thugs. Tabloids dubbed the election the Pineapple Primary—“pineapple” being slang for a hand grenade.

A brave coalition of civic reformers, however, was fighting back against the corruption afflicting the city. Among them was Octavius Granady. A Black lawyer and World War I veteran, Granady had volunteered to run against a longtime Thompson ally named Morris Eller, who was white, for the city council seat representing Chicago’s 20th Ward. The heavily contested race soon became the front line in the battle for the soul of the city. Fearing for his life as primary day approached, Granady had asked for protection from the police department. The request was denied.

After the attempt on his life, Granady’s car careened wildly for more than a mile through the crowded streets of the South Side, trying desperately to lose its pursuers. The hit man, still hunched low on the running board and clutching the Cadillac’s steel frame for balance, continued to snap off rounds. Then, while trying to maneuver a turn, Granady’s driver lost control and crashed into a curb.

Dazed, the candidate stumbled from the wreck, only to be met by a trio of attackers exiting the Cadillac. Squaring up, they brought him down in a spray of shotgun fire. As Granady lay dying, the assassins sped off, a banner for his opponent flapping from their vehicle’s chassis.

Nearly a decade into Prohibition, Chicagoans had become inured to a certain amount of murder and mayhem. But the daylight execution of a principled political reformer shocked the populace. A special prosecutor was appointed to bring the perpetrators to justice. His first task was to hire someone to lead the investigation into the killing—someone fearless and independent, free from influence by the city’s notoriously troubled police department. A series of reputable investigative agencies, however, failed to make any headway in the case. Frustrated, the prosecutor turned to an unlikely choice—a Black man, one who had been blazing an extraordinary path through the world of criminal investigation: Sheridan Bruseaux.

A little less than a decade before, Bruseaux had become, by all extant records, the United States’ first Black licensed private investigator. The industry was, at the time, a white man’s enterprise, with illustrious agencies such as Pinkerton and Baldwin-Felts marketing their services to the country’s moneyed elite. Bruseaux pitched his to Chicago’s growing Black bourgeoisie, who were beginning to suffer the same messy divorces and estate battles as their white counterparts. While Bruseaux snooped into embezzlement and infidelity—a private eye’s bread and butter—he also moonlighted as an avenger of racial violence, hunting perpetrators of lynchings and bombings. His advantage over his white competitors, Bruseaux would later claim, was his vast network of informants, hidden in plain sight: Black cooks and cleaners and doormen, an army of service workers who received no second glances but were privy to the city’s whispers and confidences.

Though Bruseaux has since been neglected by history, he was once a household name in the Black community. But as he prepared to take on the Granady case, the biggest of his career, his public persona revealed only part of his story. He had become wealthy and famous by unearthing other people’s secrets, but the man known as Sheridan Bruseaux was keeping a few of his own.

On April 26, 1890, Sheridan Bruseau—the second to last of fifteen children, nine of whom survived past adolescence—was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. Sheridan’s father, Alexander, had been born into slavery on a sugar plantation in Louisiana, a land of serpentine bayous and long fields of swaying cane. In harvest season, cutting gangs waded into the tall grass, hacking at the stalks with flat, double-sided knives from dawn to dusk. Among Southern slaves cane plantations inspired terror, so frequent was death from exhaustion, disease, or industrial accidents. (The famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass dubbed captivity on such plantations a “life of living death.”)

During the Civil War, when the Union Army marched into Louisiana, thousands of slaves dropped their blades and fled, many choosing to enlist with their liberators. In the summer of 1863, Alexander Bruseau, then 25, joined up and was mustered into the U.S. Colored Troops 79th Infantry. Following the Union’s final victory in 1865, Bruseau received $249.60 in military benefits from the Freedman’s Bureau and headed north to Arkansas. By the late 19th century, Little Rock was home to a thriving class of Black entrepreneurs and craftsmen. Most former slaves, though, had few marketable skills, and they were forced into menial work and subsistence incomes. Bruseau became a gardener. In 1877, he married a woman, Nancy, from North Carolina, with whom he had several children, including Sheridan. Their home, a simple frame shack near the city limits, sat in sight of a cemetery honoring the Confederate dead.

Under Jim Crow, Black Southerners were frequently subjected to spectacular violence. In 1904, when Sheridan was 14, the town of St. Charles two counties over became the site of one of the largest mass lynchings in U.S. history, in which 13 Black men were shot to death. Such brutal vigilantism often received the tacit support of journalists. Little Rock’s Arkansas Democrat once printed on its front page that a “black brute”—an alliterative phrase the publication had a special fondness for—accused of assaulting a “highly respected lady” was hanged from a telephone pole in the town of Tillar. The report noted that he had been left strung up for much of the next day. The alleged assailant was 17, only a year older than Sheridan.

After attending a local high school, then the recently established Arkansas Baptist College, Sheridan faced a cruelly delimited future. He took a series of low-paying service jobs—day laborer, messenger, porter. But soon an opportunity presented itself. With the onset of World War I, factories in northern cities began stamping out munitions and canned food. Word of higher wages and fairer treatment spread south. Between 1916 and 1919, around half a million Black Americans departed the rural districts of their birth for the North’s industrialized sprawl and hope of a more profitable, less frightening tomorrow. Sheridan, his mother, and many of his siblings were among them.

When Sheridan reemerged in Chicago, his last name was entered into the public record with an x on the end. Viewed one way, the addition was a simple embellishment—attempted evidence, perhaps, of an unprovable claim Bruseaux would later make to a journalist that he was of French descent. But it was also an act of reinvention. In the comparative safety of the North, Bruseaux was free to fashion a new self.

^The Chicago Defender, _{the city’s leading Black newspaper,} boasted that Keystone was the first detective agency to be run by “our group.”

If Bruseaux thought he was leaving racial violence behind in moving north, his optimism was quickly dashed. Across the nation, racial tensions were beginning to erupt. When the United States entered World War I, millions of white working men were sent overseas, many to fill the trenches of the Western Front. After the Armistice was signed at the end of 1918, many returned home to find their jobs and apartments filled by Black faces, newly arrived from the South. A violent backlash ensued. During the Red Summer of 1919, white residents of dozens of U.S. cities launched a program of attacks on Black homes and businesses, terrorizing and slaughtering hundreds of people. The Ku Klux Klan, an organization moribund for over four decades, was not only revived but became a political force.

Chicago did not escape the national mood. The city’s Black population had doubled between 1916 and 1919, and workers of all extractions furiously competed for shifts in packing houses and abattoirs while crowding into cramped apartments with exorbitant rents. The welcome received by migrating Black families, once so hopeful about a better life above the Mason-Dixon Line, was made no smoother by local newspapers. “Half a Million Darkies from Dixie Swarm the North to Better Themselves,” blustered a headline in the Chicago Tribune. In the months leading up to the summer of 1919, white mobs assaulted Black citizens in the streets and firebombed their properties. “It looks very much like Chicago is trying to rival the South in its race hatred against the Negro,” wrote the famed muckraker Ida B. Wells-Barnett in the Tribune in July 1919.

Just weeks later, on a sweltering late-July afternoon, a handful of Black teenagers, cooling themselves on a homemade raft, accidentally drifted into a zone of Lake Michigan considered off-limits to people of color. From the sandy shore, a white man began lobbing rocks at them. At first it seemed to the boys like a game: The vessel was a good distance from the beach, and their assailant’s aim was lazy. But then, just as 17-year-old Eugene Williams, who was swimming alongside the raft, popped out of the water, one of the rocks hit him in the forehead. Stunned, Williams sank to the bottom of the lake and drowned. When his distraught friends reported the incident to a white police officer, he refused to make an arrest. A brawl broke out, and the violence spread into the worst race riot in Chicago history. In a matter of days, 38 Chicagoans were dead and 500 were injured. The bloodshed only ended with the arrival of thousands of state militiamen and a chilling rain.

It was in this very moment, when the hot days of Red Summer were easing into autumn, that Sheridan Bruseaux hung a shingle for a new detective agency in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, then a center of Black life. Promoting his services in Black newspapers alongside ads for “High-Brown Face Powder,” Bruseaux, now 29, claimed an impressive pedigree. He proudly stated that, since leaving Arkansas, he’d earned a law degree from the University of Minnesota and spent the war years in Europe working for the government’s Secret Service, which ran a vast counterintelligence network. After a stint with an investigative firm in Chicago, Bruseaux had decided to go into business for himself.

In September 1919, Bruseaux opened the doors of the Keystone Detective Agency at 3333 South State, a popular address among Black entrepreneurs. The agency was the first of its kind to be owned by a Black man. The Chicago Defender, the city’s leading Black newspaper, boasted that Keystone was the first detective agency to be run by “our group.”

Tall and broad shouldered, with his short hair conked and split into a stylish side part, Bruseaux cultivated an air of old money, wearing the finely cut suits favored by bankers. (He’d one day be included on a list of the city’s best-dressed men.) Along with other investigative services, Bruseaux offered to shadow unfaithful spouses and locate lost relatives—a common concern for families whose members had been separated during the migration north. His agency made use of emerging technologies like fingerprinting, listening devices, and hidden cameras. Ambitious from the start, Bruseaux made it known that he was available for jobs anywhere in the country, publicizing his business with the slogan “We Cover the World.”

Drawing clients from the city’s growing Black middle class, Bruseaux assembled a diverse docket of cases. Investigations ranged from retrieving stolen jewels and catching currency forgers to debunking confidence men and quacks. In an early success, Keystone made the front page of the Chicago Whip for catching the trafficker of a 15-year-old girl “lured into the underworld.”

Bruseaux’s big break came a month after his agency’s founding, though it wasn’t exactly an investigative coup. The editor of the Chicago Defender hired him to set up the Black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, who had incurred the integration-minded Defender’s wrath by urging Black Americans to return to Africa and establish their own state. At the editor’s behest, Bruseaux bought two shares of stock in Garvey’s Black Star shipping company. By selling them, Garvey violated an obscure Illinois law forbidding the sale of equities without a state license, and he was briefly jailed. The arrest of a prominent activist was controversial—Garvey had plenty of supporters in the city—but it transformed Bruseaux into a boldface name. In just a few months, he’d have enough business to move from his humble Bronzeville office into two spacious suites decorated with oil paintings and panel mirrors.

Discovering that many of the prejudices that afflicted his family in Arkansas and Louisiana had followed him to Chicago, Bruseaux took on a sideline gig investigating racial violence. He dug into bombings of Black family homes on the South Side, the burning of a Black church, and the murder of a Black 16-year-old by a white druggist from whom the boy had tried to purchase pomade. By investigating such crimes, Bruseaux’s agency offered an alternative path to justice for Black Americans shunned by the legal system.

Bruseaux also began interrogating the root causes of social problems. One client hired him to look into the conditions causing Black unemployment in the Midwest. In a letter to an official at the Department of Labor, Bruseaux asked “why the Negro is constantly being discharged from positions, and even the commonest labor at which he has previously been employed.” Bruseaux frequently drew from interviews, surveys, and first-person observation—mirroring the pioneering work being done by sociologists at the University of Chicago. He waded into public debates, and once used statistics to dispute charges that Black men were responsible for a disproportionate amount of the city’s crime.

As Bruseaux’s profile grew, his work took him farther afield—to investigate a lynching in North Carolina; to reexamine the killing of a Black teenager by a policeman in Gary, Indiana; and to locate a Creek Indian girl in Oklahoma who claimed that she was coerced by a group of white men to sign over a deed to valuable oil lands.

Though Keystone promised in its ads that all client business would be kept “strictly confidential,” Bruseaux’s exploits were breathlessly covered by the press. When hired by attorneys to testify in court, he often delivered sensational evidence on the stand. In 1923, during the scandalous divorce proceedings of Williams Stokes, a millionaire real estate heir, and his second wife, Helen, Bruseaux was brought in to rebut a maid’s accusation that Mrs. Stokes had been seen in the apartment of another man. After the maid’s testimony, Bruseaux shocked the court by producing an affidavit from her mother stating that she was lying, forcing the witness to break down and admit that she had perjured herself. The move, one newspaper noted, “puts Mr. Bruseaux on record as one of the cleverest detectives in the country, not only of his own race, but any race.”

Not all coverage was favorable, however. The following year, Bruseaux earned the enmity of the Black-owned Chicago Whip after investigating its publisher for the theft of $8,000 in bonds. In an angry article, the paper dismissed Bruseaux as a “joke” and a “dining car detective.” It mocked his Arkansas accent, writing that “one could easily picture the sleuth trailing a plough in the southern cotton fields.” The Whip’s attack displayed a condescension commonly directed at new Black arrivals in the city. “Securely established Negro citizens were perturbed by the avalanche of their rustic brethren whose manners and personal appearance were not always so prepossessing as they might be,” noted Arna Bontemps in Anyplace But Here, a book about the Great Migration. “Feet used to a plowed field found it hard to steady themselves on a lurching streetcar, so that migrants stepped on toes and jostled their fellow passengers.” Some members of the Black professional class even complained that, in their uncouthness, Southerners such as Bruseaux were responsible for the new tension with white citizens, having upset a hard-won equilibrium—blaming them, in effect, for dragging racism up from the plantations.

Perhaps seeking to overcome this class prejudice, Bruseaux hosted extravagant parties. In 1923, after several years of public bachelordom, Bruseaux married Ethel Sewell, who the Chicago Defender reported was from a prominent Philadelphia family. The paper hailed her as one of the “most charming young matrons in Chicago.” By that time, Bruseaux was wealthy. Together the couple threw opulent soirees in their fashionable home on Grand Avenue, where they were neighbors of the champion boxer Jack Johnson (whose wife, it was reported, had once retained Bruseaux to probe her marriage). Guests of the Bruseauxs—among them actor Paul Robeson and jazz legend Louis Armstrong—were presented with expensive gifts like gold watches, glassware, and traveling bags.

By the mid-1920s, Chicago’s Black residents had built a thriving enclave, with its own stores, churches, theaters, newspapers, literary societies, and professional class. The latter half of the decade, as St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton observe in their 1945 study Black Metropolis, would be “the Fat Years”—the most prosperous in the community’s history. And Sheridan Bruseaux sat atop that plenitude, scraping cream from the scandals of the affluent. But as Bruseaux would soon discover, his position, based on perception as much as deed, was a precarious one.

The death of Octavius Granady happened, in part, by chance. When deciding who would run against Morris Eller, Granady and another reformer had flipped a coin; Granady lost.

Taking on Eller brought with it considerable risks. During his campaign, Granady’s staff were harassed and sabotaged, their headquarters raided and the telephone lines cut. A chilling rumor spread that, even if Granady won, he’d never serve a day in office. On the morning of the primary, one of Granady’s poll monitors was kidnapped by three men, who forced him into a car and bashed his head with a revolver. Chicago police stood around, the monitor later recalled, “watching in amusement.”

Danger was not unique to the alderman’s race. The Second City felt increasingly lawless. Its murder rate had skyrocketed and its governance was in decline—both thanks to Prohibition. One local sociologist described “an unholy alliance between organized crime and politics” that allowed criminality to flourish, an environment where Al Capone could reportedly raise $200,000 for mayor Thompson’s campaign in exchange for the freedom to run a violent empire.

Thompson was an opera buffa demagogue, a loud, self-styled cowboy who once set his 300-pound frame atop a horse and rode it into a city council meeting. In 1927, he’d staged a debate against two live rats: stand-ins for his political opponents. The Chicago Tribune later declared Thompson “a byword for collapse of the American civilization” and his political career synonymous with “filth, corruption, obscenity, idiocy, and bankruptcy.”

According to the New York Times, the city’s police department, under the command of a Thompson-appointed commissioner, accomplished little in its investigation of Granady’s murder. Fed-up state officials summoned a special attorney to look into the killing and the broader lawlessness plaguing the election. The man they chose for the job was the legendary square-jawed crime fighter Frank Loesch.

Loesch was a veteran Chicago prosecutor with an unimpeachable reputation for honesty and integrity, an eminence grise whom one newspaper compared to the Roman Republic’s Cato, waging a relentless battle against the city’s foes. He struck a profile that the Los Angeles Times described as “erect, snowy-haired and unafraid.” But Loesch, now 76, was too old to work alone. To find Granady’s killer, he would need a reliable deputy, someone to do the heavy lifting the investigation would require. Loesch didn’t trust Chicago’s usual authorities—he believed the police to be untrained, prosecutors ignorant, and judges corrupt. To build his case, Loesch needed a true outsider, someone unafraid of making enemies.

At the time of Granady’s killing, Sheridan Bruseaux’s practice was busier than ever, with operatives all over the country. He had become a community hero of sorts—a crusading sleuth fighting hatred and exploitation. Loesch offered him the job, and Bruseaux accepted. He was given a detail of three Black police officers to assist him, and charged with assembling a criminal case Loesch could bring to trial.

From the beginning, Bruseaux faced long odds. Finding witnesses wasn’t difficult; hundreds had observed either the initial attack on Granady, the frantic chase through the streets of Chicago, or the murder itself. But Capone’s thugs were said to be cruising the South Side, warning residents that they’d be killed if they testified in the case and offering $1,000 for the location of witnesses so the goons could intimidate them. Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that the criminal underworld had created a defense fund, levying a tax on gamblers, hoodlums, and saloonkeepers, to assist anyone who might be arrested for the crime.

Bruseaux was undaunted. He announced that his investigation would cover the whole city, leaving no complicit party untouched by the hand of justice. “Every man who comes within the scope of the inquiry will be investigated regardless of his political standing or his position within the police department,” Bruseaux told reporters. “And all such information gathered through the investigation will be presented to the grand jury without fear or favor.”

Persuading bystanders to reveal what they’d seen required all of Bruseaux’s skill and charm; keeping them alive posed more significant challenges. Weeks into the investigation, gangsters with shotguns, posing as insurance salesmen, tried to break into the home of James Huff, a Granady campaign worker and a passenger in the candidate’s car when it was attacked. Huff’s wife slipped out the back and notified Bruseaux, who dispatched a member of his detail to rush the witness and his family to safety.

Bruseaux soon realized that even his colleagues couldn’t be trusted. While he employed his own staff, he also received assistance from state investigators and local police. At one point, suspicious of a Black detective assigned to his detail, Bruseaux followed him from work. After trailing him through the city, Bruseaux watched as he knocked on the door of Oscar DePriest, an influential Black boss in the Thompson machine. Bruseaux kicked the detective off the case. By way of revenge, the police commissioner pulled the rest of Bruseaux’s detail. Loesch assigned Bruseaux a bodyguard, and after that only Bruseaux knew the names and locations of cooperating witnesses.

As Bruseaux dug deeper, he began to unearth a monstrous conspiracy. Witnesses told him that Granady had been pursued by not one but two cars—the Cadillac and, a short distance back, an olive-green Buick. (Bruseaux would eventually track down the former, sold two days after the assassination.) The Buick was said to have been driven by men in police uniforms—the same ones who then responded to the scene of the murder.

After weeks of work, Bruseaux finally identified the shooters: Harry Hochstein, Johnny Armando, and Sammy Kaplan. The men were not only freelance goons for Capone, they were also on the payrolls of powerful people associated with Granady’s rival, Morris Eller, whose banner had been affixed to the killers’ car. In fact, Hochstein and Armando worked directly for Eller’s campaign. What’s more, Bruseaux found evidence of far-reaching electoral fraud. On the day of the primary, gangs of Eller supporters had driven from polling place to polling place—venues often staffed entirely by America First clerks and judges—where they stuffed ballot boxes. Hundreds of “voters” who resided in vacant buildings or at nonexistent addresses cast ballots; some did so from beyond the grave.

In other instances, election officials appeared to have altered the ballot tallies to give Thompson candidates the edge. Bruseaux found too that, in the weeks leading up to the election, hired thugs extorted tribute from speakeasies, craps games, and brothels to finance Eller’s campaign. A gambling operator, for example, was taxed $600 per week—the equivalent of about $10,000 today.

At times during interviews, suspects seemed to be having Bruseaux on. The notebook of one reputed gangster showed multiple payments of $100 to police. When asked about them, the man claimed he liked to play “policy games,” or illegal lotteries, on the South Side. “And how do you spell policy?” asked an investigator assigned to the grand jury. “P-O-L-I-C-E,” he replied.

On June 29, 1928, Loesch stepped forward to address a swarm of reporters. He unveiled a series of shocking charges: In all, 19 suspects were indicted by a grand jury as part of a vast conspiracy to murder Octavius Granady and meddle with the election for the benefit of Morris Eller. Among them were five Chicago detectives, including the leader of a squad assigned to the 20th Ward on election day. Eller and his son, Emmanuel, were accused of providing protection to criminals in exchange for votes. Two witnesses, a barber and a collector on Eller’s payroll, testified that it was Eller himself who had supplied the 20th Ward’s gangsters with guns on the day of the primary.

Charges were also filed against Oscar DePriest, the politician whom Bruseaux had seen a police detective visit, for election fraud. DePriest, a South Side power broker, was in the midst of a campaign to become the first Black official elected to Congress in almost 30 years. The indictment asserted that DePriest and others had collected money from liquor, vice, and gambling establishments in exchange for police protection—cash that was then routed to a slush fund in Mayor Thompson’s America First campaign.

Announcing the indictments, Loesch, who was usually grim faced, couldn’t help but break into a smile. “Gentlemen,” he informed reporters, “we have them.”

The indictments were built on the efforts of Bruseaux, who—overcoming what Loesch described as “insurmountable obstacles”—had secured the testimony of more than 100 witnesses. The detective estimated that he’d uncovered more than $5 million that had been illicitly collected for Thompson’s political machine from gangsters and corrupt politicians. Overnight, Bruseaux became a sensation, the daring gumshoe who stood up to corruption and sought justice for murder. Publications around the country rushed to interview him. The New York Amsterdam News, in a glowing profile, compared him to Sherlock Holmes. Even his journalistic bête noire, the Chicago Whip, which once had mocked Bruseaux’s unpolished style, reluctantly lauded his accomplishment.

Bruseaux was at the pinnacle of his career, his achievements sufficiently impressive that the NAACP took notice. Since 1915, the nation’s preeminent civil-rights group had awarded an annual prize recognizing the individual in America who best embodied Black excellence. The Spingarn Medal was its most prestigious honor, previously bestowed on such trailblazers as the Army’s first Black colonel, Charles Young, and agricultural scientist George Washington Carver. In early 1929, when the organization was considering nominees, Bruseaux’s name was at the top of the list.

Records show that W. E. B. DuBois, the NAACP’s cofounder and head of publicity, received dozens of letters from Black luminaries written on Bruseaux’s behalf—the most for any candidate. Among Bruseaux’s supporters was Ida B. Wells-Barnett, another NAACP cofounder now living in Chicago. “Every day for six months, I thrilled with pride over the tributes to this negro’s ability,” her handwritten note to DuBois read. “Because Mr. Bruseaux could neither be bribed nor bullied … he has won a signal victory for the forces of law and order, and the gratitude of the entire city.” Arthur Mitchell, a well-known Chicago lawyer, noted that the Tribune had been unstinting in its praise of Bruseaux—no small matter for a paper, Mitchell observed, that “heretofore had been thought to be most unfriendly to ambitious Colored men.… Winning the commendation of this paper for the race and changing its attitude on many racial questions is, within itself … worthy of the highest commendation.”

Soon, Bruseaux was reported to be in the running for a top post at the Justice Department, with an annual salary of $10,000 (around $187,000 today). While traveling for business, Bruseaux happened to pass through his erstwhile hometown of Little Rock, where he was feted by onetime neighbors. His picture was hung in his former high school, at a ceremony attended by the city’s Black elite—the high society from which, growing up, he had been excluded. Where Bruseaux’s horizons had once been stifled, his future now seemed limitless.

But just as Bruseaux was taking a victory lap, his life began to unravel.

^_The^{investigators working} for Bruseaux faced danger, too—one of his deputies was stabbed in the back _{on his way} home from work, leaving him _{bleeding but alive.}

In retrospect, there were early signs that Loesch’s case against Granady’s alleged killers might run into trouble once it went to trial. Emmanuel Eller was an elected judge, and despite the criminal charges against him, it was in his court that the men accused of shooting his father’s political opponent first appeared, in July 1928. Judge Eller immediately cut their bond, allowing their release. A few weeks later, one of Morris Eller’s henchman suspected of participating in Granady’s killing was found murdered under a pile of rubbish in an alley—“a warning,” a city official declared, “from those pulling the strings that it isn’t healthy to squawk.” Soon after, a second suspect, wanted for questioning, was also found dead, his body slumped over a car steering wheel with eight shots to the head. The investigators working for Bruseaux faced danger, too—one of them was stabbed in the back on his way home from work, leaving him bleeding but alive.

That November, the Thompson machine was smashed in the general election, with every one of the mayor’s candidates soundly defeated, including Morris Eller. But the defendants in Loesch’s case had yet to be prosecuted. The date of the proceedings was repeatedly delayed, and by the time the first witness entered the courtroom to give testimony, 19 months had passed since Granady’s assassination. Readying for trial, Bruseaux became so stressed that he was hospitalized for ulcers. He was right to be anxious, because what transpired in the courtroom was, in the words of one journalist, a farce.

Bruseaux, Loesch, and the state’s attorney disagreed about whether to indict the police officers in the second car, the green Buick, that chased Granady. Ultimately, the cops faced trial, but Judge Joseph David appeared conspicuously preferential toward them, dismissing witnesses who claimed to have seen the men participate in Granady’s murder as “liars.” David even hinted that he would set aside a guilty verdict, should the jury reach one. Some witnesses’ testimony had changed since they were first interviewed—a bystander to the murder, asked in court to identify one of the shooters, pointed to a defense attorney.

Perhaps to some degree these shifting recollections were a result of the time that had elapsed since the crime is unclear. But witness tampering was also a specialty of Mayor Thompson’s most powerful supporter, Al Capone, and it would be another year and a half before he was charged with tax evasion and forced to cede his throne as king of Chicago’s underworld.

The Granady trial was briefly halted when one of the prosecution’s star witnesses, Margaret Welch, was reportedly threatened with death. On November 1, 1929, the 23-year-old was set to tell the jury that she had overheard two of the defendants—John Armando, one of the alleged shooters, and James Belcastro, accused of driving the Cadillac—mention killing Granady in the days following the murder. On the morning of her testimony, according to the Tribune, Welch received an anonymous telephone call informing her that if she went through with it, she’d get her head blown off. To prove that they were serious, Welch’s harassers kidnapped her brother, reducing her to a state of hysterical collapse.

When she was finally coaxed into court a few weeks later, Welch’s hand shook as she took the oath. After giving her name and address, she fell to her knees and begged the judge to protect her. (“And some people pay $5.50 a seat to see a show,” mused a front-row spectator.) After being escorted to the county hospital, Welch never retook the stand. The charges against Armando and Belcastro were dismissed, and the men were set free.

Then, suddenly, a serious charge was leveled against Bruseaux. Under cross examination, several witnesses for the prosecution claimed that the detective had bribed them. A few said that Bruseaux had promised them jobs and paid their expenses in exchange for testimony, and one witness, a preacher named Joseph McMillan, declared that Bruseaux offered him $1,000 to identify Armando as one of the shooters. Though Granady’s own driver had already testified that it was Armando who fired off rounds from the running board of the Cadillac, Judge David was incensed, declaring the preacher’s allegation “far more serious than murder.”

Around the same time, an anonymous letter was mailed to the court accusing Bruseaux of a variety of crimes. The letter’s contents were never revealed; David, in a fit of rage, tore up the document, yelling that something should be done about the detective. “If the things they say about this man Bruseaux are true,” thundered the judge, “he ought to be in the penitentiary.”

Bruseaux vehemently denied the bribery charges, calling them “ridiculous,” but they weakened the prosecution’s case. After a series of unfavorable rulings, the judge dismissed the indictments against some of the defendants. Ultimately, the 15 of Eller’s henchmen who remained on trial escaped with fines after being found guilty of conspiracy.

Many of the broader corruption allegations also faded away. Morris Eller and his son were never tried in court, and both would remain active in law and politics for years. Loesch dropped the indictment against Oscar DePriest, and Bruseaux would claim publicly that DePriest, set up by political foes, was innocent of any crime. It’s unclear whether Bruseaux was bowing to political pressure or if he’d been hasty in his initial accusations. Regardless, DePriest, who had won his congressional race, becoming the first Black man elected to the House of Representatives since Reconstruction, had already had his revenge.

Archival records show that, in early 1929, one of DePriest’s associates, writing on the politician’s letterhead, mailed the NAACP a court document indicating that Bruseaux had been indicted for bigamy in 1917, two years before starting his detective agency. In 1906, while living in Arkansas, Bruseaux had married a young woman, and he’d never dissolved their union. The Spingarn Medal was awarded in the spring of 1929, well before the fiasco of the Granady trial. The NAACP presented it to the president of Howard University. Bruseaux had been passed over.

The accusations against Sheridan Bruseaux that aired during the Granady trial, though dubious, hinted at a larger pattern of lies and ethical shortcuts. The year before, in the midst of preparations for the case, the leader of a Black fraternal organization in Indiana claimed Bruseaux had tried to shake him down for $5,000. In 1930, the former head of the National Bar Association, C. F. Stradford, accused Bruseaux of extortion, stemming from a case in which Stradford had represented an abortionist. Bruseaux, he claimed, made himself “an involuntary, uninvited partner of anyone who receives or has an attractive sum,” adding that “money disappears quickly when one is making a bid for social position by giving expensive parties.” Nor was it the first time Bruseaux had been accused of trying to strong-arm clients: One Black newspaper stated that such a charge was “exactly in keeping” with its opinion of the detective and warned the public against associating with him.

His image tarnished, Bruseaux’s reputation within the Black community began to fade. Still, he worked steadily over the next several years. He exposed bank officers who used customers’ deposit to fund dog-race tracks; investigated the mysterious murder of the National Baptist Convention’s chief auditor, whose body was found in a river shot six times; and helped dismantle a prolific counterfeiting ring. Then Bruseaux’s desire to defend the Black community collided with his tendency to blur the truth, in a way that led to his undoing.

On June 19, 1936, the great boxer Joe Louis, then undefeated, was scheduled to fight German heavyweight Max Schmeling. The bout, with its inescapable political overtones—Schmeling was the pride of the Nazi Reich, Joe Louis a rising star of Black America—was an international spectacle. During the fight, staged in Yankee Stadium and broadcast to tens of millions over the radio, Schmeling, an eight-to-one underdog, launched a series of right crosses at Louis’s jaw, until finally, in the 12th round, the Brown Bomber hit the mat and was counted out. In the Black community, grief at the loss was apocalyptic. The poet Langston Hughes, who attended the event, described watching grown men sob like children on the streets of Harlem after the defeat. Hitler, meanwhile, cabled his congratulations to Schmeling.

Louis’s fans searched for an explanation as to how their hero came up short. In was in this sensitive moment that Bruseaux stepped forward to offer a hypothesis. Louis, he declared, hadn’t been beat, he’d been drugged. In an affidavit, Bruseaux claimed that, just before the fight, one of the boxer’s physicians had administered an injection that hindered Louis’s left arm—a story, Bruseaux said, related to him by Louis’s sister. Asked for comment, Louis and his managers angrily rejected Bruseaux’s theory. “I had no shot of any kind except a few hard rights from Schmeling’s glove,” Louis told the Chicago Tribune. Louis’s sister, for her part, said that she’d never told Bruseaux any such thing.

Whatever Bruseaux was attempting with the stunt, it backfired. He became an object of national ridicule, with one sportswriter labeling his affidavit “too screwy to be believed.” Louis’s managers claimed that Bruseaux had tried to extort them, threatening to go to the press with his accusation if they didn’t pay him off, and accused the detective of operating a “shakedown racket.” They filed a lawsuit against Bruseaux for libel, as did Louis’s physician. Bruseaux countersued, claiming defamation. The matter was settled out of court.

As he fell from grace, his case load thinned, and Bruseaux became financially overextended. In 1937, he sent a pleading letter to Arthur Mitchell, asking to borrow $150 because a catering company was trying to seize his car. Then, in his mid-fifties, Bruseaux hit a new public low: He was arrested and charged with grand larceny and blackmail after a client’s husband alleged that Bruseaux attempted to extort $1,900 from him. Bruseaux claimed that the charge was retaliation for tracking down the husband, who had skipped town with much of his wife’s money.

Bruseaux was given one last opportunity to salvage his reputation. In 1943, the detective was quietly hired to investigate another incident of racial violence, a riot in Detroit. On a hot summer day—much like the one in 1919, when Chicago exploded into violence—a pair of false rumors spread through the city: that a group of Black men had raped a white woman, and that a mob of white people had thrown a Black infant from a bridge. When the smoke from the resulting riots cleared, 25 Black Detroiters were dead, most of them killed by police, as were nine white residents. Civic leaders prevailed upon Bruseaux to investigate what had happened. His detective agency, after all, had been founded upon the ashes of a similar incident.

Bruseaux arranged focus groups of Detroit residents and asked them about life in the city. With the help of a team of research assistants, he canvassed the city’s neighborhoods to better understand the context in which the riot erupted. His report blamed the violence and resulting deaths on social conditions, namely overcrowding and competition for jobs and housing.

Despite its insights, the report did little to restore the detective’s prestige. As Bruseaux got older, his fabrications intensified, even as he developed a late-life obsession with the use of polygraphs. In his last known interview, with Ebony magazine in 1949, he unfurled a sad tapestry of self-aggrandizing lies, claiming that he had personally handled some 4,000 cases, that he’d turned down J. Edgar Hoover’s job as director of the FBI, and that he’d led an investigation into a famous divorce case in which, records show, he played no part. The magazine printed his fabulations as fact.

In 1950, after a short illness, Sheridan Bruseaux passed away at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City, at the age of 60. Though he was once the toast of Chicago, his obituary in the Tribune consisted of only a single paragraph, buried in the back of the paper.

Emerging from nowhere, ^{Bruseaux had fashioned himself into a}Gatsby _of Chicago’s ascendant Black bourgeoisie.

In the 75 years since his death, Bruseaux has mostly faded from history. Other than a few stray mentions in books about Marcus Garvey and Joe Louis, nothing of substance has been written about him. Bruseaux and his wife, Ethel, who passed in 1973, had no children together. Records show that Bruseaux had a daughter years before, from an extramarital relationship, and a single surviving great-granddaughter. When I reached out to her, though, she had little information to offer, noting that Bruseaux had not been involved in the life of her grandmother, who, to her recollection, never mentioned him.

Ethel, who was married to Bruseaux for 27 years, has numerous living relatives. She gave birth to a daughter before meeting her husband, when she was a teenager living in Baltimore. The daughter’s name was Dorniece; she was sent to live with cousins in southern Maryland.

I met Ethel’s great-grandson Damon Caldwell for coffee in Manhattan’s Columbus Circle, just a block from where Bruseaux died. Now in his sixties and retired, Caldwell graduated from Stanford University, followed by Harvard Business School, then enjoyed a long, successful career. As it turned out, his daughter, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, was researching the changing nature of anti-Black violence during almost the exact years when her great-great-step-grandfather was investigating instances of that violence.

Caldwell had heard only vague accounts of Bruseaux, who, as a result of family lore, he’d always thought was a lawyer. Asked if Ethel had indeed hailed from a prominent Philadelphia family, as newspapers reported, Caldwell laughed: That was likely one of Bruseaux’s exaggerations.

Archival sources reveal that much of the professional backstory Bruseaux used to buttress the Keystone Detective Agency was bogus. During World War I, he was not employed in Europe by the Secret Service. According to his draft registration card, in 1917 he worked as a waiter on the Tacoma Eastern Railroad. He’d obtained an exemption from military duty by claiming that he needed to support his wife and mother. Nor did Bruseaux ever receive a law degree from the University of Minnesota—there’s no record he was ever even in the state. And while he was at one time employed by Chicago’s McGuire & White Detective Agency, it appears to have been in the role of telephone operator.

Bruseaux even appears to have been, at one time, the type of con artist he later investigated. In 1918, the year before he opened Keystone, a short article in the Chicago Whip reported that a “Sheridan Bruseau,” while pretending to be the head waiter at a local hotel, had fleeced a number of men by promising them jobs in the dining room in exchange for a fee. When the men realized they’d been deceived by Bruseau’s “smooth line of talk,” they threatened him. “Fellow employees testified to the unfaithful regard that Mr. Bruseau has for the truth, and seemingly are not surprised at this unlawful practice,” the article read. “It is also said that women have fallen prey to his beautiful word pictures to obtain them jobs as chambermaids.” (If Bruseaux added an x to his name to avoid association with his past misdeeds, it seemed to work—the Whip, which later set itself against Bruseaux, appears to have overlooked the fact that he had been in its pages before.)

Bruseaux, Caldwell and I agreed, was a complicated figure—a wealthy, charming man of tremendous talent who was also dishonest, profligate, and, at times, morally compromising. He stood as a paradox, someone who adopted advanced research methods in pursuit of justice, but also spread falsehoods when it suited him. Emerging from nowhere, he fashioned himself into a Gatsby of Chicago’s ascendant Black bourgeoisie. “It was refreshing to see that, at that time period, an African-American man could remake himself,” Caldwell told me. “He came from nothing and became something.”

Would Bruseaux have achieved the same success if he had been honest about his past—if, while starting up his business, he’d copped to being, not a highly educated former government agent, but a mere porter with a two-year degree from a humble Baptist college? Almost certainly not.

Once he was established, however, his investigative skills were exemplary. By an act of will, Bruseaux became the very thing he’d claimed to be. Yet like the fictional Gatsby—a character who, Fitzgerald wrote, seemed to spring from his own Platonic conception—Bruseaux, though mastering a profession dedicated to seeking out obscure truths, hid himself in fiction. The raw facts of his own life seemed, perhaps, too shameful for candor.

Conversations with a Hit Man

Conversations
with a Hit Man

A former FBI agent traveled to Louisiana to ask a hired killer about a murder that haunted him. Then they started talking about a different case altogether.

_{By David Howard}

The Atavist Magazine, No. 164

David Howard is a journalist and the author of Chasing Phil: The Adventures of Two Undercover Agents with the World’s Most Charming Con Man. He previously worked as an editor for Backpacker, Bicycling, Popular Mechanics, and Prevention.

Editor: Jonah Ogles
Art Director: Ed Johnson
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checker: Kyla Jones
Illustrator: Björn Griesbach

Published in June 2025.

1

The killer is happy to see us. That’s the first thing we notice when we spot Larry Thompson halfway across the visitation room of the David Wade Correctional Center. He rises from a chair and waves, his face unfurling into an avuncular grin. Our separate journeys to this prison in Homer, Louisiana—me from Maine, and Myron Fuller from the mountains of Utah—afforded plenty of time to set expectations, and neither of us anticipated a Norman Rockwell greeting. I pictured a menacing scene bathed in the neo-noir lighting of The Silence of the Lambs. And Fuller? He long believed that the next time he and Thompson saw each other would be through gun sights.

The visitation room Warden Jerry Goodwin escorted us into is large, square, and filled with cafeteria-style tables. It’s December 2021. Lights on a small artificial Christmas tree wink, at once cheery and monstrously sad. Vending machines line one wall, glowing sentinels filled with bags of junk food. During normal visiting hours, the chatter of reunited families animates the room. But Fuller is a retired FBI agent with an illustrious career, I’m an experienced journalist, and Thompson is a model inmate, his vast criminal history notwithstanding. As such, Goodwin has granted us special privileges: an open-ended block of time, and a dedicated room with no bars or glass partitions, just a bored-looking guard at a nearby desk.

“Larry,” Fuller says.

“Good to see you,” Thompson drawls. The two old adversaries take chairs facing each other across six feet of wood laminate. I perch on a bench halfway between them and fan out the objects I’ve been permitted: notepad, pen, digital recorder.

At 78, Thompson is 18 years into an 80-year prison sentence for attempted first-degree murder and aggravated burglary. (A 35-year federal term theoretically begins after that.) One morning in 2003, Larry and his son Larry Neal Thompson Jr., along with four other men, robbed an Intertrust Armored Services car. They were spotted by a witness—a rare event in Thompson’s long criminal career—and a cop chased their escape van. One of the men shot an AK-47 through the officer’s window, wounding him. A massive manhunt ensued, and after several hours all six of the perpetrators were caught. They were subsequently convicted. Then, in 2014, Thompson confessed to four murders for hire in exchange for a reduced prison term for his son. (That deal never went through, because the official overseeing it died before it could be finalized.) Thompson was later transferred to Wade from the maximum-security Louisiana State Penitentiary—better known as Angola.

Seated before us, he wears the standard-issue uniform: blue jeans and a light-blue chambray shirt. His hangdog blue eyes are framed by gaffer-taped tortoiseshell glasses that rest atop his prominent nose. His hands are missing parts of two fingers. “This one I cut off with an electric drill,” he’ll tell us later, holding up the stump of his left index finger. Then he’ll wave the remains of his right ring finger. “My dog bit me on this one.”

The warden tells us goodbye, then turns to Thompson. “Behave yourself,” he says, not unpleasantly. Goodwin hesitates for a beat, as if he wants to say something to us or is curious about why we’re here. Cops come to interview prisoners all the time, of course, but he doesn’t see many 79-year-old retired FBI agents dropping in on one of his more notorious inmates.

Fuller shakes Goodwin’s hand and thanks him. The truth, as best Fuller can grasp it himself, is that he’s hoping to dislodge a few ghosts from his psyche. He enjoyed an illustrious 31-year career in the bureau, with one notable exception: his tenure running the office in Shreveport, Louisiana, from 1981 to 1985.

What went wrong? Only everything. Crooked cops. Investigations that inexplicably faceplanted. Political interference. Wiseguys and one particularly ethically challenged attorney. And, most prominently, a murder Fuller believes he could have prevented: Maria Marshall, a mother of three. It was a hired job; her husband, saddled with debt, wanted to collect the life insurance. The hit man was Larry Thompson.

Soon after that crime, Fuller decided to prematurely end his Louisiana interlude. He left angry, frustrated, and defeated. When he crossed into Mississippi on his way to FBI headquarters in Washington, he climbed out of his car, walked back to the state line, and emptied his bladder onto the far side of it.

Fuller now has what looks like a retiree’s idyllic life. He travels to Europe with his wife. He plays golf, hikes with his dogs, and skis Utah powder. But some part of him can’t leave Shreveport behind. And in small, sleepless hours, he finds himself absorbed in long-ago memories.

Recently, he decided that four decades was enough time to stew in regret. He located Thompson in an online registry, sent him a letter, and then connected with him by phone. Thompson agreed to a visit. Fuller invited me along because we’d built a rapport when I interviewed him for a book, and we both sensed that it would make for a good story.

So Fuller is here now, he guesses, to confront his past, to see if certain elements of his former life might finally be pinned down and examined. He can’t change what happened, but maybe it’s possible to understand how it all went sideways.

They have certain things in common, the hit man and the agent. Both arrived at their twilight years looking strikingly similar: They have bald heads and are slender, fit, and just under six feet tall. And long ago, both were raised on the wrong side of the poverty line in the Deep South.

Born in 1941, Fuller grew up on a subsistence cotton farm near Beebe, Arkansas. His family didn’t have electricity until he was seven. One morning when he was twelve, his father overfilled the woodstove and burned the house down. The insurance had lapsed, and all that was left as the family stood in the snow that morning was the equipment in the barn and the underwear they’d slept in.

After a stretch of teenage fecklessness, Fuller earned a degree in school administration and was offered a job in Colorado that would make him the state’s youngest principal. His wife, Patricia, was pregnant at the time, and it felt as if he’d punched his ticket into stable adulthood. But before they could move to Colorado, Patricia was abruptly taken by a mysterious fever; their unborn daughter died with her. Fuller turned down the Colorado job and spent the next several months reeling. He was still trying to figure out how to put his life back together when he played golf one day with an acquaintance who was about to apply for a job at the FBI. Fuller thought the work sounded interesting and soon applied himself.

As a young agent in New York City, he developed a knack for talking with criminals, including a con man named Mel Weinberg. Other agents had dismissed Weinberg as a habitual liar looking to pare down his prison sentence, but Fuller saw potential. They teamed up for the notorious Abscam investigation, which swept up seven members of Congress for taking bribes. (Bradley Cooper plays a caricature of Fuller in American Hustle, the film loosely based on the case.)

While still riding high from the Abscam probe, Fuller was offered the job in Shreveport. Here was an opportunity to return to the South—a fraught, complex place, but home nonetheless. His marching orders couldn’t have been plainer. “There’s something wrong down there,” his boss told him, referring to Shreveport. “Go fix that fucking place.” Fuller had heard that the city’s police department was riddled with corruption. The FBI should have been all over it, but Fuller saw no evidence of that.

On their first night in town, he and his second wife, Dawn, dined with agent Jim Smith, the interim boss. Curiously, Smith told him that everything was under control and that Fuller could look forward to spending afternoons playing golf. “You just come down here, enjoy yourself, and wait for your next promotion,” he said.

Fuller soon began receiving anonymous tips about dirty cops in town. One tipster even warned, “You have a corrupt agent in your office.” This rattled him, but he pushed forward. He looked for an avenue to start investigating the Shreveport police. Before long, Fuller says, his boss called to inform him that he must be doing something right, because Louisiana congressman Buddy Roemer had complained that Fuller was being too “aggressive.”

Roemer’s feathers weren’t the only ones ruffled. Local contacts told Fuller’s office that they’d heard rumors: Someone was going to plant a bomb under his car; someone was planning to throw acid in his face. Even his successes were followed by setbacks: He took down a mob-connected illegal gambling operation, but the U.S. attorney shuttered his police probe. No one wanted to rock the boat. They wanted him to play more golf.

Then, in 1984, an informant revealed that a contract had been taken out on the life of a blond woman. That was all the FBI could glean. Several weeks later, two New Jersey–based detectives walked into Fuller’s office. They were investigating a murder at a picnic area north of Atlantic City, and their suspect was Larry Thompson. “Wait a minute,” Fuller asked. “Is the victim by any chance blond?”

One of them produced a picture of Maria Marshall. Fuller slumped in his chair, sickened, and put his face in his hands. Thompson, a career criminal in Louisiana, had been on his radar; he felt that he should have been able to stop the murder.

Several years later, Fuller was sitting in the waiting room at his dentist’s office when he came across a review of Joe McGinniss’s true-crime book Blind Faith. Fuller was horrified when he realized that the book was about the Marshall killing. By then Marshall’s husband, Robert, had been convicted of capital murder. Thompson was acquitted based on testimony from several witnesses, including his son, that placed him in Louisiana on the day of the murder. (He would later confess to the crime.)

The details of the murder—and the anguish it caused Marshall’s family—devastated Fuller. McGinniss’s book became a bestseller, then an Emmy-nominated miniseries. And after each replaying of the tragedy, Fuller found himself awash again in guilt. On one occasion, he became short of breath, felt his pulse pounding, and scrambled to call an ambulance. I’m going to die right here, he thought. It was a panic attack, and more would follow. He began carrying Xanax for when he felt one coming on.

“I’ve been a criminal all my life,” he says, sounding almost surprised, as if the reality of it only now dawned on him. “I don’t know why. It just happened, you know?”

“I think the one and only time we ever met was when you visited us in the office there in Shreveport. Remember that?”

Smiling across at Thompson, Fuller eases into the prison visit with a conversational chess opening. An early memory, from 1982, well before the Marshall case.

“Yeah,” Thompson says. “I came to see Jimmy Hairford.”

Hairford was a well-connected FBI asset who, unknown to Fuller, was also an intermediary between the criminal underworld and the bureau, assisting either side depending on what was most useful or profitable for him. For the right number of cash-filled bags, Hairford could make sentences shrink or criminal charges vanish from state or federal court.

Thompson doesn’t recall exactly why he went to see Hairford that day, but he remembers the general thrust of their meetings. “I paid him a lot of money,” he says. Asked to elaborate, he adds, “He helped me with—” and then stops himself. After a pause, Thompson chuckles and says, “…in a deal one time.”

The two men slip into class-reunion mode: who they knew back when and how. Eventually, Fuller pauses. “Why are you talking to us?” he asks.

“Well, you asked me to.”

“Why did you agree to it?”

Thompson lifts his shoulders in a languid shrug. “Ain’t no big thing to me.”

His speech has a melodious quality that he emphasizes with long pauses. Sometimes he halts because he can’t recall the particulars of a story; other times it’s clear he’s intentionally holding back. In these moments, his thin lips spread into a tight smirk, he tilts his head back provocatively, and he crosses his arms.

Thompson is a tangle of contradictions. He’s a self-professed family man who accompanied his eldest son on an armored-truck robbery that sent them both to prison. He claims to be protective of children but confessed to killing two mothers of young kids. He calls himself “just a country-ass plain-vanilla boy,” and then asserts that “there’s not a whole lot of people in the world who can do what I do—or did. Why I was able to do that, I don’t know. It just come natural to me.”

He grew up “poor-off,” the third of six children. His father was an itinerant carpenter and Baptist choir leader who taught him the value of hard work; Thompson was plowing fields behind a mule by age ten. His parents hauled their six kids to Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, and South Carolina—the whole family shoehorned into a 40-foot trailer. When they finally settled in Shreveport in 1954, Larry was a puckish 11-year-old.

He absorbed the region’s deeply embedded racism. For his first armed theft, at age ten, he stole a Black farmer’s tractor using a borrowed pistol. On weekends during his teen years, he and his Sunday school teacher hunted Black people for sport. “We caught a [N-word] on the street after dark. We whupped his ass,” Thompson says. At age 13 or 14, he committed his first murder—an assault that went too far—and dumped the body in the Red River, the rust-colored waterway that separates Shreveport from Bossier City. (He was never questioned by police in the case.)

Thompson claims that he was expelled from Fair Park High School more than 160 times, for exploits such as detonating fireworks refashioned into bombs. But, he says, “My daddy worked for the school board at the time, so he could get me back in school.” His parents tried to set him straight—they would “ream my ass out,” he says. “But what’re you gonna do?”

He’s at a loss to explain how he broke so bad. “I’ve been a criminal all my life,” he says, sounding almost surprised, as if the reality of it only now dawned on him. “I don’t know why. It just happened, you know?”

The first time he was arrested, Thompson was 19 and just out of high school. He and a friend were caught breaking into a wrecking yard. His skittish buddy gave away their location under a junked car, and Thompson was sentenced to four months in Angola. While in prison, he says, “I got my nose broke twice, I got my jaw broke, I got stabbed in my right lung, had six ribs broken.”

If his brief stint at Angola was meant to change him, it fell flat. Instead, the lesson he absorbed was to commit crimes only with people who were equally capable—or, better yet, to do them alone. “When I went in there, I weighed 129 pounds,” he says. “When I got out, I weighed 164, and I was as hard as this table.” He raps the surface between him and Fuller with what remains of his right hand.

In fact, the bureau made Thompson so uncomfortable that he hatched a plan to shoot Fuller and a few other agents.

Thompson first appeared on Fuller’s radar as a suspect in two bank robberies: one in Shreveport and another in nearby DeSoto Parish. Soon after that, the FBI heard from other banks across the South that someone was prying open night-deposit boxes and emptying out the cash. When law enforcement asked around, informants mentioned Thompson’s name.

The agents Fuller assigned to investigate the rash of bank jobs made zero headway. They would hear that a robbery was planned and put the suspected location under watch, then a different bank across town would get hit. Thompson seemed to know exactly what they were doing. Fuller countered with an around-the-clock surveillance team from the bureau’s office in New Orleans, thinking that it might prevent Thompson from getting wind of their activities. This too failed. “They stuck out like a sore thumb,” Fuller recalls. “The police would come by and say, ‘Hey, who are you guys?’ ”

As time passed, Fuller learned more about Thompson’s reputation. If a building suspiciously burned, or a prostitution or drug or dogfighting ring was robbed, Thompson’s name always came up. He was also a known hit man. But the FBI could never pin him down.

In conversation with us, Thompson confirms masterminding the bank heists; he says that he pried open and emptied around 300 night-deposit boxes, lifting bags of cash like bird eggs from their nests with a custom-made grappling hook. He also talks about the hits he carried out—to him they were just jobs he was hired to do. He never thought about his victims, nor did he ask for the reasons behind the killings. “It didn’t matter to me. As long as you had the money to pay me, I didn’t care,” he says. He worked carefully and efficiently, and when possible made his targets vanish. “Never heard from again,” he says.

When Fuller asks how many hits there were, Thompson gets quiet. He allows that there were bodies “from coast to coast and border to border.” Fuller says that he heard the number 14. “There were several more than that,” Thompson replies.

We wait for elaboration. Instead, for ten seconds, Thompson stares serenely at us. Through us. A sphinx in prison-issue cornflower blue.

Despite all the mayhem he perpetrated, Thompson spent barely a night in jail for most of the seventies and eighties. “Local lawmen call him lucky, a modern-day Jesse James—smart enough to do the crime but pay no time,” the Shreveport Times reported in 1987. Philip Martin, a local journalist who covered his exploits, once wrote, “I’ve never been more terrified than when I heard Larry Thompson laughing at the other end of the telephone line.”

Fuller harbored a persistent suspicion that underworld currents ferried Thompson beyond the bureau’s grasp—that he slipped through trap doors and escape hatches opened by someone in law enforcement, maybe even Fuller’s own office. “My snitches were better than your snitches,” Thompson told him when Fuller first reached out about meeting. Now, as we sit in the prison, riveted, he elaborates. Justice was for sale back then. Certain cops had his back. This rang true to Fuller: He once heard that on at least one occasion, when Thompson was caught in a dragnet, he escaped in the trunk of a police cruiser.

Thompson also claims to have built relationships with courthouse clerks, prosecutors, and judges. Some friends he genuinely liked and some he paid for, though it was a Venn diagram, not separate circles. Some of these people were on the payroll of Carlos Marcello, the don of New Orleans’s most powerful crime family from 1947 until the mid 1980s, and a figure believed to be linked to the Kennedy assassination. Thompson tells us he was close with Marcello.

Fuller nods. This makes sense to him. And what was Thompson’s role in Marcello’s operation? After one of his long pauses, Thompson says, “Problem solver.” A problem might take the form of someone who “knew too much, or they were gonna tell somebody something, or go to court, testify against somebody,” he says.

Despite the compromised cops and corrupt judges, Thompson tells us, Fuller came closer to catching him than the FBI ever realized. In fact, the bureau made him so uncomfortable that he hatched a plan to shoot Fuller and a few other agents. “I told [agent] Jim MaGee in y’all’s office the time I came up there, I said, ‘The only thing that saved you was, I left Shreveport [for California],’ ” Thompson recalls, arms folded. “ ’Cause I was gonna start knocking y’all’s ass off.”

Fuller stares at him, digesting this.

“I had more pictures of you than you had of me,” Thompson continues. “Coming in and out of that building, I got you both front end and back.”

“So how were you going to do this?”

“Long-range.” Thompson holds up his hand in the shape of a gun.

“I always thought that this was going to end in a gun battle.”

Thompson snorts. “You don’t want to get into no gun battle with me.”

A former Shreveport cop said that D’Artois asked him to “take care of Jim Leslie” in exchange for money.

Another of Thompson’s associates in Shreveport was George D’Artois, the longtime public-safety commissioner. When Fuller mentions his name, Thompson says, “I liked George. George was my kind of people.”

D’Artois was only 36 when he was elected commissioner in 1962, which wasn’t surprising, because he seemed born for the job. A prototypical good old boy and a Shreveport native, he had a thick round face, dark eyes, and a sandy-brown crew cut. A World War II veteran and Marine, D’Artois both played to and reinforced the city’s darkest impulses—especially when it came to race—during his 14 years in office. The absence of any notable race-related uprisings in Shreveport during the civil-rights era was directly linked to his scorched-earth tenure. In 1963, he denied a march permit to Little Union Baptist Church members holding a memorial for the four girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing. To ensure they didn’t defy his order, D’Artois—who controlled the city’s police, fire, and traffic departments—assembled a 200-man riot squad. Cops on horseback rode onto the steps of the church and beat the pastor so badly he was hospitalized.

Many Shreveport residents knew that D’Artois was lenient when it came to gambling dens and Sunday liquor sales, and that his henchman did the rounds every Monday, collecting his cut of the business. Once, when three well-to-do young white men were arrested for gambling, D’Artois vaporized the charges. The Shreveport Times later wrote that “D’Artois had many high-placed friends in the city, friends for whom he didn’t mind doing favors.”

By April 1976, however, D’Artois’s excesses were causing him major agita. The Shreveport Times reported that he had received $17,300 from a fund designated for police informants, for which D’Artois couldn’t produce receipts. There were also revelations that D’Artois, a heavy gambler, had been chartering flights to Hot Springs, Arkansas, a gambling haven and Mafia outpost.

Then, in May, reports surfaced that a well-known public relations maven and campaign strategist named Jim Leslie had evidence of further wrongdoing. Leslie had created commercials for D’Artois’s 1975 reelection campaign, and the commissioner twice tried to pay him for the work with $3,500 drawn from a city account instead of his own campaign funds; D’Artois altered the invoice to make it appear that the work had been done for the city’s Department of Public Safety. Leslie refused the payment both times.

Shortly after the news broke, D’Artois was hospitalized for heart problems. While there, according to testimony later given to a grand jury, D’Artois asked several people to kill Leslie. One of them, a former Shreveport cop, said that D’Artois asked him to “take care of Jim Leslie” in exchange for money.

Around the same time, Leslie was holding a meeting in his office with a colleague named Elliott Stonecipher and several other people. The phone rang; it was D’Artois. Leslie turned away from the people around him, and the air in the room stiffened. After he hung up, Leslie flipped his chair back around and Stonecipher saw that he’d turned white. “I never saw Jim Leslie that color,” he says. “And then in full voice, nodding his head, [Leslie said]: ‘Man’s gonna have me killed.’ ”

Leslie testified in front of a Caddo Parish grand jury that June, and D’Artois was charged with attempted felony theft of city funds for one of the checks he tried to give Leslie. A month later, Leslie turned up dead in Baton Rouge, gunned down in the middle of the night in the parking lot of the Prince Murat Inn.

Within a couple hours of our arrival at Wade, Fuller appears to feel something like relief: Yes, things went badly in Shreveport. But look at the forces arrayed against him.

Thompson, for his part, is relishing his role as underworld tour guide and historian. When the topic turns to his brief relocation to California in the 1980s, Fuller asks, “Did you do anything out there that was illegal?”

“Only about every ten minutes,” Thompson replies. They both laugh.

Then the conversation takes an interesting turn. Fuller recently read The Commissioner, a 2009 book about Jim Leslie’s murder. Although the case pre-dated his arrival in Shreveport by half a decade, Fuller had long been fascinated by it—how it revealed the city’s brokenness. The story was front-page news in Louisiana for years, spawning two books and several investigative newspaper series. The Commissioner author Bill Keith once described the case as “the second most highly publicized murder in Louisiana history, second only to that of Huey Long,” a U.S. senator who was assassinated in 1935. He added: “Leslie’s unsolved murder no doubt is one of Louisiana’s greatest mysteries.”

Keith’s book lays out the case, now fully enshrined in Shreveport lore, that D’Artois paid someone to carry out the murder. Fuller puts the theory to Thompson. “When he contracted [a hit man] to take care of Jim Leslie, were you interested in that?” he asks.

“Who do you think killed Jim Leslie?” Thompson replies.

Fuller starts to repeat the local lore, then stops. “Are you saying you were involved with that?”

“I’m not. I’m just asking you who—”

“You’re asking me what I think,” Fuller says. “I can only think what I read in that book.”

He then asks whether Thompson agrees with the version of events Keith describes. Thompson looks away.

“Yea or nay?” Fuller finally says. “Does that fit your recollection of what happened?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s interesting. What do you say?”

“I know.”

“I’m starting to realize that.”

Thompson folds his arms. “See,” he says, “my name never came up in that deal.”

The conversation soon pivots away, but Thompson’s answers—really, his nonanswers—stick with me all afternoon. Toward the end of our visit, I return to the topic. “That Leslie murder,” I ask. “Do you remember where that happened?”

Thompson nods. “That hotel parking lot.”

After six hours, we thank Thompson for his time. He gives us copies of two unpublished fictionalized memoirs, one of which is handwritten. Salient details have been changed, he says, but the events really took place. “It’s got a lot of stuff in it,” he says. He pauses, then adds: “I guess a person—a real sharp person of your caliber, maybe—could figure out some things that went on.”

There’s a lot to digest from the day. But as we drive away, headlights piercing the darkness along Interstate 20, Fuller and I find ourselves returning to Jim Leslie. What did Thompson mean that he knew what happened that night?

We traveled to Wade thinking the trip would be worthwhile if Fuller were finally able to put the ghosts of Shreveport to rest. And he unpacked just how alone he really was amid the crookedness and corruption. But expectations are clay, and they get remolded. Fuller has the answers he originally sought, but now there’s a whole new set of questions—ones about Jim Leslie and Larry Thompson. Before we know it, we’re talking about going back.

2

It should have been a night for Jim Leslie to savor. On July 8, 1976, the Louisiana State Senate passed what was known as the Right to Work Bill. One of the most fiercely debated pieces of legislation in decades, the law did away with mandatory union membership and allowed businesses to hire nonunion workers.

Given the interests involved, this was a staggering achievement. Labor had a muscular presence in Louisiana, largely because it was controlled by organized crime. Developers were ordered to kick back as much as 25 percent of the cost of construction, and those who wouldn’t play along sometimes faced dire consequences. Plants blew up and buildings burned. In January 1976, a gang of more than 75 men commandeered a forklift to smash through the gate of a Jupiter Chemical construction site, where the company was building a new facility using non-AFL-CIO crews. The mob fired hundreds of rounds, killing one man and injuring five others.

Hired by the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, Leslie inserted himself into the debate by creating a savvy ad campaign intended to build support for the Right to Work Bill. He was known for creating some of Louisiana’s first sophisticated TV spots. His reputation was as a brilliant influencer, and he was in high demand. He had run about 60 political campaigns by then, winning more than 80 percent of them. He had already opened three satellite offices—in Dallas, Baton Rouge, and Monroe, Louisiana—and seemed destined for the national stage; people speculated that he would spearhead the Southern arm of a presidential campaign, maybe as soon as 1980.

No one in Shreveport was surprised by his success. Leslie was a soft-spoken jokester and spellbinding storyteller with a dimpled chin, a Paul McCartney mop of hair, and a prodigious work ethic. At 20, he’d dropped out of college to become a reporter at the Shreveport Times, where he latched on to daring stories. After wrangling an invitation to a Ku Klux Klan meeting, he wrote a piece describing 60 robed members conducting a cross burning. He exposed after-hours liquor sales and served as the prosecution’s star witness when the city shut down two well-known club operators. Once, while covering a shootout between police and a fugitive, Leslie was so excited that he yelled “Shoot! Shoot!” at the staff photographer behind him, only to look back and see his colleague waving a firearm. “No, no! The camera!” he shouted.

Leslie became a public relations executive in 1964, and when his employer announced a move to Houston in 1967, he remained in Shreveport and opened his own agency. In 1972, he scored a chance to lead J. Bennett Johnston’s long-shot campaign for U.S. Senate; after his man won, Leslie’s phone never stopped ringing. In 1975, he elevated Anthony Guarisco from little-known attorney to state senator by filming a commercial featuring an actor dressed in 18th-century garb, quoting poetry. For the Right to Work campaign, he crafted a TV spot that showed labor leaders dangling state legislators on marionette strings. He was a Dixie Don Draper.

That July night, after the successful legislative vote, Leslie headed to Baton Rouge’s Camelot Club for an after-party, and then to the Sheraton Inn for drinks with colleagues. But he was not in a celebratory mood, according to Stonecipher. Leslie was married, but he slept around and feared he was facing divorce papers back home. “Jim knew what was waiting on him, family-wise, as soon as he got back to Shreveport,” Stonecipher says. “He was depressed.”

Eventually, Leslie said goodnight and made the short drive to the Prince Murat Inn, where he was staying. As he pulled into a parking spot, fireworks detonated close by, vestiges perhaps of the summer’s raucous celebration of the U.S. Bicentennial. It was about 1:50 a.m. when he exited his car. He was still wearing his work clothes: brown checked suit, yellow dress shirt, tie.

He’d taken about a dozen steps when a shotgun blast exploded into his upper back, tearing through his heart and lungs. Leslie staggered sideways and fell face down onto the asphalt, dead before he landed.

Curtis saw a white 1976 Oldsmobile Cutlass pull onto the property: Jim Leslie’s car. Moments later he heard the blast.

John Curtis thought the sound he heard was a cherry bomb. Partiers had been setting off fireworks on the other side of the fence bordering the Prince Murat, in an adjacent shopping center with a grocery store and a club called the Cahoots Lounge. Curtis, the hotel’s assistant manager, had just come outside to see whether the revelry was spreading into the Prince Murat’s parking lot when he saw a white 1976 Oldsmobile Cutlass pull onto the property: Jim Leslie’s car.

Moments later he heard the blast. He quickly walked 100 feet to the corner of the hotel, where he could peer into the back lot, and saw a body in a widening pool of blood. Curtis summoned the hotel’s security guard, who checked on the body and told Curtis to dial 911.

Baton Rouge Police detective Chris Schroeder happened to be nearby at the time, checking out a report of possible shots fired. He entered the Prince Murat’s lot “simply to drive around the building to check,” he’d later testify. But then he saw a man “waving frantically, pointing around the corner.” It was Curtis. Schroeder accelerated, then had to slam on the brakes to avoid running over the body.

Once Leslie was confirmed dead, Schroeder radioed a patrolman dealing with fireworks complaints and told him to look for a man with a shotgun instead. Curtis didn’t see or hear a car leave the hotel, so police thought the shooter might be on foot. They fanned out, searching a large warehouse on the back side of the neighboring shopping center, but came up empty. Meanwhile, officers began processing the scene. Finding a loose board in a wooden fence near where Leslie had parked, they surmised that the killer had pushed a gun barrel between two slats to fire the shot.

The murder became national news. The New York Times covered it, and radio legend Paul Harvey commented on it during his noon broadcast. Rumors churned that Leslie was targeted in retaliation for the Right to Work legislation. But Stonecipher and many others in Shreveport immediately thought someone else was responsible: George D’Artois. Having been present for the call between Leslie and D’Artois, Stonecipher concluded that Leslie had prophesied his own death.

As police looked for ties to the disgraced commissioner, there was a startling development: Before they could solve Leslie’s killing, a second murder took place.

Rusty Griffith likely felt some anxiety about the meeting on the evening of October 15, 1976. Griffith, 34, was a 400-pound Shreveport man with a mustache and dense curly hair. He had many livelihoods, some of which were legitimate: He ran a seafood business; several nightclubs, including one called Big Daddy’s Lounge; and a limousine service that ferried people from Dallas and Houston to the Louisiana Downs racetrack in Bossier City. His links to organized crime were well-known. He shared an office with Don Gardner, 39, a large, bearded former wrestler from Shreveport. Both consorted with a group of dodgy characters loosely known in law-enforcement circles as the Dixie Mafia. Among them were a trio of men from Baton Rouge: Steve Simoneaux, Clayton Kimble, and Jules Ron Kimbel. The latter two were siblings but spelled their surnames differently.

That night, as dusk approached, Griffith drove his brown Cadillac into the Three Rivers Wildlife Management Area, a dense forest nestled between the Mississippi and Red Rivers in Concordia Parish, about 200 miles southeast of Shreveport. Jules Ron Kimbel had asked him to meet there. What Griffith expected remains unclear, but it may have been trouble. About three weeks earlier, he and Kimbel had been indicted in Mississippi for interstate transportation of a stolen bulldozer, part of a Dixie Mafia scheme in which heavy equipment was swiped and taken to Mexico to be fenced.

Griffith met Kimbel as planned, on one of Three Rivers’ dirt roads. While they talked, another vehicle pulled up. The driver rolled down his window, and someone fired a shotgun into Griffith’s face. He died at the scene. Griffith’s address book, found in his car, included contact information for numerous organized-crime figures—and for George D’Artois.

As police investigated the killing, various Dixie Mafia members claimed that Griffith possessed recordings of conversations about the machinery thefts, illegal gambling activities, and the Leslie murder. These sources said there was concern that Griffith might use the recordings to reduce a potential sentence in the heavy-equipment case. The theory of his murder quickly became that someone had silenced him and sent a warning to others, in case there were copies of the tapes.

By November 7, Jules Ron Kimbel had been booked as a material witness in the Griffith murder, and so began what the Shreveport Times would later describe as one of “countless investigations by parish and city law enforcement from Baton Rouge to Shreveport” into the deaths of Griffith and Leslie. Soon, Gardner and six others were arrested for first-degree murder in the Griffith case.

As for the Leslie murder, it was difficult to piece together a working theory. By April 1977, the state had added Clayton Kimble and Steve Simoneaux to its list of witnesses, but their stories were ever changing and influenced by the promise of immunity in exchange for testimony, the possibility of a get-out-of-jail-free card for parole violations, and a $35,000 reward in the Leslie case offered by the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry. The best version of events investigators could piece together was this: Two weeks before the Leslie murder, Griffith and Gardner asked Clayton Kimble if he could find someone to kill Leslie for D’Artois. At a second meeting, Kimble was offered $30,000 to do the job himself but declined; killing wasn’t his kind of work. The three men agreed that the murder should happen in Baton Rouge to insinuate a link to organized labor and deflect attention from D’Artois. Gardner then gave Kimble $5,000 as a deposit while he looked for someone to take the contract.

Five days before Leslie was killed, Kimble returned the money, saying that he couldn’t find any takers. Griffith then said he and Gardner would do it themselves. They decided that Griffith would hide behind the hotel fence with a shotgun while Gardner waited in a car parked in the space closest to Leslie’s room. When Leslie arrived, Gardner would leave, prompting Leslie to pull into his spot, and Griffith would do the deed.

Kimble told police that several hours after the murder, the conspirators met at a Denny’s, where Griffith and Gardner reported that the plan had worked. Seconds after Griffith killed Leslie, Gardner had retrieved him from behind the fence. The two men then drove to a bridge over the Mississippi River and threw the shotgun Griffith used into the water below.

Police obtained an arrest warrant for first-degree murder for Gardner, who denied involvement and said he was in Shreveport the night Leslie was killed. (He also denied having anything to do with Griffith’s death.) Investigators brought the same charge against D’Artois, which only added to his legal headaches. Over the previous year, a grand jury had indicted him for tampering with evidence seized in gambling raids; for the theft of more than $32,000 in city funds; for intimidating grand jury witnesses; and for malfeasance of office. He had resigned from office the previous July.

On April 19, 1977, Caddo Parish sheriff’s deputies showed up at D’Artois’s home to arrest him. He quickly locked himself in his attic with a .357 Magnum. Officers persuaded him to come out—only for D’Artois to barricade himself in a bathroom. After an eight-hour siege, three deputies crashed through the bathroom door. One of them told the Shreveport Times that D’Artois “was grabbing for the gun when we pinned him to the floor.”

It took only a few weeks for the Leslie and Griffith cases to begin to fall apart. The police had no physical evidence linking any of the purported participants to either murder; they were relying entirely on Kimble, Kimbel, and Simoneaux and their shifting, conflicting accounts: While the three men sometimes agreed that Griffith had shot Leslie, in other moments Simoneaux claimed Clayton Kimble had pulled the trigger, or that “a man from Dallas” had done it.

One by one, charges against the defendants in the Griffith case were dropped for lack of evidence. After the prosecutor in the Leslie case refused to grant Simoneaux, Kimble, and Kimbel immunity, the men took the stand at a hearing and pleaded the Fifth. The murder charges against D’Artois and Gardner were quickly dismissed. But D’Artois didn’t have long to enjoy his emancipation. On June 8, he underwent heart surgery in Houston; three days later, at the age of 51, he died from complications, taking countless secrets with him.

D’Artois’s death, along with the collapse of the two cases, left people wondering whether the murders would ever be solved. Then, in 1981, a new federal grand jury was empaneled. The state rounded up the same cast of characters and pegged the late D’Artois as the ringleader in both crimes—directing men to take out Leslie because he was talking to law enforcement, and to murder Griffith because he seemed like he was about to squeal. But after reviewing the evidence, the grand jury issued an indictment that only brought charges in Griffith’s slaying.

In 1982, five people were put on trial: Clayton Kimble, Jules Ron Kimbel, Don Gardner, and two peripheral Dixie Mafia players, Kenneth Brouillette and Benny O’Quinn. They were charged with violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, statute; conspiracy to violate RICO; conspiracy to violate Griffith’s civil rights by murdering him; and obstruction of justice. Steve Simoneaux, who was in prison at the time for a series of robberies of expensive watches in Dallas, took a plea deal and served as star witness; his testimony would reduce his potential life sentence to 20 years. After more than three weeks of proceedings, Kimble and Kimbel were convicted. Brouillete and O’Quinn were acquitted, and a mistrial was declared for Gardner; prosecutors said it would be too expensive to retry him.

Leslie’s murder was a point of discussion during the Griffith case, given how intertwined the two men’s killings seemed to be. And U.S. Attorney Don Beckner assured the press that his office, along with the FBI, was still pursuing indictments for Leslie’s death. But Beckner never did bring charges against anyone; he wasn’t able to build the case he’d hoped for.

That result was unsatisfying but perhaps predictable, given the lack of physical evidence and the dependence on unreliable narrators. When Kimble and Kimbel appealed the verdict in the Griffith case, a panel of three judges noted: “Simoneaux acknowledged that he was dishonorable and that he had repeatedly lied, including lies under oath, to save his own skin.” (They upheld the brothers’ convictions anyway.)

No one found the situation more unpalatable than Elliott Stonecipher. He grew up in Shreveport, in a tiny house in the wrong-side-of-the-tracks Caddo Heights neighborhood. A stellar student, he was also a skilled public speaker, and by the time he returned from college he was touted as the city’s future. “I was supposed to be the mayor of Shreveport,” Stonecipher says.

But he was never willing to traffic in the kind of machinations necessary to reach the mayor’s office. Instead, he worked as a pollster, public speaker, and political strategist. In the 2010s, Stonecipher launched an effort to finally untangle Leslie’s unsolved murder, thinking he could lean on his access to Shreveport’s levers of power. He dug through records in the National Archives and at Louisiana State University Shreveport, and attempted to track down people rumored to be involved. But in his telling, the wealthy and powerful didn’t want the matter revisited. Longtime friends suggested that he let it lie and chastised him for reopening old wounds. Potential clients said their boards of directors weren’t comfortable hiring him. “I was simply viewed as a turncoat,” he says. “And those are not tolerated by the wealthy leadership of Shreveport.”

Stonecipher has gone as far as he can with his search for answers. He’s eager for help. And in an interview, he makes a provocative claim: He believes that authorities identified the man who shot Leslie, and that it wasn’t Rusty Griffith. It was the guy from Dallas Simoneaux had once mentioned, a shadowy mob-connected assassin named Rick Roberts. Stonecipher has never been able to track him down—but maybe we can.

Murdering someone with a shotgun in the middle of a major city without being spotted seemed well beyond the Dixie Mafia’s skill set.

The first mention Fuller and I find of Rick Roberts is in the 1981 grand jury indictment. It’s odd, however. He was one of nine people named as conspirators in Griffith’s murder, but he was never charged, and he wasn’t included in the indictment’s description of the conspiracy. When it covered the indictment, the Shreveport Times ran a front-page grid with a photo or sketch of everyone named by the grand jury—except Roberts. We also find a story in the Times about a taped interview in which Simoneaux told investigators that Roberts took part in planning Leslie’s murder, then served as the getaway driver—a role that hardly seemed to require a seasoned hit man.

We find more references to Roberts at the LSU Shreveport library. The archive has a robust section on George D’Artois, and at some point pages of testimony from the grand jury proceedings were deposited there. (By law that testimony is sealed, but someone apparently wanted it in public view.) The documents include testimony that put Roberts in Griffith’s orbit and at the scene of Leslie’s murder: A witness said Roberts worked at one of Griffith’s establishments, the Inside Out Club, but left for Dallas after Griffith unloaded it. Clayton Kimble recalled that the afternoon before the Leslie murder, various conspirators gathered at a Holiday Inn, where Griffith had a “buddy … which we found out later was Mr. Rick Roberts.” Kimble further claimed that he saw Roberts in the back seat of Griffith’s Cadillac, the supposed getaway car, shortly before the murder, and that Simoneaux told him after Leslie’s death that “Rick Roberts killed a man.” But Kimble also said that he never saw Roberts after the murder. “I took for granted that he possibly drove the red and white [Cadillac] wherever it had to go,” Kimble testified, referring to the vehicle he’d previously placed Roberts in.

Roberts was called to testify before the grand jury too, but his testimony isn’t in the library’s files. There’s only a cover page and a second sheet noting where the proceedings took place and who was present.

Was it possible that Griffith, working on behalf of D’Artois, contracted Roberts to shoot Leslie? On the surface, the idea of a professional assassin made sense. Murdering someone with a shotgun in the middle of a major city without being spotted seemed well beyond the Dixie Mafia’s skill set. As Fuller and I zoomed out, questions mounted. How could Griffith have wedged a shotgun into a narrow space in a fence, fired, extracted the weapon, shimmied his 400-pound bulk out of the tight space between the fence and a loading dock, then driven away with Gardner—all within seconds? How could a car have sped away from the scene without the Prince Murat’s assistant manager, who was standing outside the hotel when the murder happened, seeing or hearing it?

And also: Where the hell was Rick Roberts?

With questions about the Leslie murder rattling around in our heads, Fuller and I return to Wade in March 2022, curious to follow up on the richly embroidered account of Thompson’s life as a hired gun and career criminal in one of his fictionalized memoirs, titled The Killer P.I. His character is a consummate professional: no drinking or drugs to impede clear and quick thinking. (“Never trust a drunk” was one of his mantras.) He is unfailingly polite, avoids conversation, and keeps his face and head covered, though he sometimes wears only a bandage on his cheek: If someone is asked to describe him later, that’s the detail they’ll focus on. By then he’ll have long since removed it.

Thompson tells us that, as a hit man, he adhered to a set of rigidly compartmentalized behaviors. His killings usually lacked any direct connection to him. He used pseudonyms and avoided anyone involved with a hit—including the person who hired him. He limited contact to an intermediary who shared his adherence to the Mafia’s code of silence. “Everybody that I’ve done business with all my life will tell you that I’m very secretive about what I do,” he says.

Fuller and I are eager to learn how this approach informed some of his most notorious hits, including the Maria Marshall murder, which Thompson breaks down for us in detail. But we also want to glean more about the Leslie murder. I tell Thompson that there’s something I want to ask him about from our first meeting. We noticed how readily he recalled the detail about the murder’s location.

“You answered so quickly,” I venture, “it sounded as if you were there.”

He smiles and says, “I probably was.”

3

By the time we arrive at Wade for our third visit, Fuller and I have become fairly obsessed with the Leslie murder. A known hit man who seemingly admits to involvement in a notorious unsolved crime will do that. We’ve copied or photographed thousands of pages of files kept at the LSU Shreveport archive—old newspaper stories, police reports, transcripts, George D’Artois campaign materials—and pored over them. Fuller has plunged into his early FBI days, exploring possible links to one of his assets in New York City: a former New Orleans–based Marcello-family mobster. He has reconnected with former colleagues from the Shreveport office and cold-called law enforcement who were active in the seventies. We hope that Thompson can provide some additional intel.

We greet him by asking about his recent bout with COVID and how his job in the prison kitchen is going; during wild boar season, he tells us, local hunters sometimes drop off cuts of meat. After catching up, I hand him a summary of the East Baton Rouge Parish sheriff’s investigation of Leslie’s murder. I point out something that’s already obvious: Although the probe seemed exhaustive, Thompson’s name didn’t come up, which seems to undercut his claim that he was there that night.

It’s a gambit. Fuller and I have now talked to Thompson for a total of 15 or so hours. We have a pretty good idea of how he communicates. If we draw inferences or make intuitive leaps that are accurate, he’ll confirm them in his own way: “Maybe I was” or “I may have.” Our understanding of his code has allowed us to develop a kind of Larry Thompson operating manual. He doesn’t respond well to overly broad questions. “Tell me what happened that night” goes nowhere. We steer him onto a subject and then sit quietly, asking questions but also leaving conversational space to fill.

Thompson reads the investigation summary slowly, looking as if he’s just chewed tinfoil. “I don’t know where they get all this shit right here,” he says when he finishes.

I ask how he—or whoever was in the parking lot that night—knew when Leslie would return to the hotel. Thompson says that he had a spy, someone who reported back when Leslie had left the party. “I was by a phone,” he says, “waiting for that call.”

We nudge him on. Was the plan to shoot through the hotel fence, as police believed the killer did? Thompson shakes his head. He accurately recalls the makeup of the fence, but says, “I didn’t have to go through no fence.”

At this point the room ionizes. It’s happening, I think. Thompson is not only telling us that he was there, but he’s confessing, in his own elliptical way, to having pulled the trigger. Not wanting to break the spell, I resist the urge to look over at Fuller. Somewhere outside a door slams. The conversation unfolds with an eerie calm.

“You were not behind the fence?” I ask.

“No.”

“So you were just in the parking lot?”

He nods. “Behind an automobile.”

He knew Leslie’s room number, he says, and “it don’t take a rocket scientist to figure out where he’s gonna park at.” When Leslie pulled in, Thompson tells us, he slipped from behind an adjacent vehicle and fired his gun.

He says he knew that the blast would draw attention, so he’d planned a non-getaway getaway: He’d checked into the Prince Murat under a pseudonym the previous day. After killing Leslie, he hustled straight through the back entrance of the hotel and headed to his room, where he stashed the shotgun under his bed. “How many of the police are gonna think the man who shot that man was in the hotel?” he says. At about 6 a.m., Thompson quietly got into a car he’d parked elsewhere in the lot, drove to Shreveport, and disposed of the gun.

We ask him: Why did he do it? Did D’Artois order the hit, as was widely believed?

Speaking deliberately, pausing for long intervals, Thompson says the hit was connected to labor and thus to organized crime—no surprise, given the contentious Right to Work vote. Leslie was “talking to the wrong people,” Thompson says. “You didn’t talk to the wrong people back in the day, ’cause there was a lot of money floating around back then, and they didn’t mind spending it.”

Some of that money, Thompson says, took the form of bribes—specifically, his buddy Carlos Marcello had tried to influence the state senate’s vote. Leslie became aware of this and was sharing the sensitive information with people in the capital. Why take that risk? Thompson believes Leslie became so successful so fast that he felt untouchable.

“We used to call that too big for your britches,” Fuller says.

“That’s exactly what we got there,” Thompson replies. “He thought he was somebody he wasn’t.”

When Thompson is done telling his story, we sit quietly for a while. “You said quite a bit there,” I say.

Thompson gazes at us and nods. “I shouldn’t have,” he replies.

Scott almost seems impressed by the planning that went into the crime. “That has a lot of Larry Thompson in it right there,” he says.

It’s a balmy May evening when Fuller and I emerge from Wade Correctional. I feel both dazed and wired. We walk silently to the car, letting the enormity of what we’ve heard sink in. We climb into the rental and Fuller looks at me with raised eyebrows. “Well,” he says. I can see how energized he is. He’s not just back in the middle of an investigation; he finally has the chance to get to the bottom of something in Shreveport.

Is there a chance Thompson merely told us what we wanted to hear? It’s possible. He could be looking to burnish his legend or simply keep us entertained and coming back. Then again, Thompson has a full visitation list; he has no shortage of company. And his version of events feels utterly plausible: a known hit man pulling off a professional job, a crime no one was ever able to solve.

More than that, his story explained what hadn’t made sense as we dug into the police investigation—for instance, how, in the short time it took the hotel’s assistant manager to see Leslie’s body, the killer had supposedly maneuvered from behind the fence and vanished in a getaway car without being seen or heard. If Thompson was telling the truth, the answer was now as clear as it was obvious: He didn’t.

To check our instincts, we run the story past law enforcement who know Thompson. When we talk to Larry Scott, a former Shreveport cop acquainted with Thompson since the 1980s, he almost seems impressed by the planning that supposedly went into the crime. “That has a lot of Larry Thompson in it right there,” he says. Scott also believes that organized crime was likely responsible for the hit. “The union was 100 percent behind killing Jim Leslie,” he says. “They just let [the police] go after D’Artois.”

But how was it that Thompson was never linked to the Leslie murder? “My first thought is that Larry is very good at what he does,” Ford McWilliams, a former Caddo Parish prosecutor, tells us. “He killed all these people and robbed all these banks and night deposits, but he knew to keep his mouth shut. If he had a loose end, he tied it up, and he was just very professional. He didn’t make mistakes.”

Robert “Robbo” Davidson is a former chief detective for the DeSoto Parish Sheriff’s Department. He has met with Thompson many times in prison and investigated one of the cold cases Thompson confessed to in an effort to reduce his son’s prison time; arguably no one in law enforcement knows the hit man better. Davidson not only thinks Thompson’s description of the Leslie murder is believable, but he also finds it strange that Thompson’s name didn’t come up during the investigation. “He was so close to D’Artois,” Robertson says. “I think the first person [D’Artois would] go to was Larry Thompson.” But the case was mostly built in Baton Rouge, not Shreveport, and before Thompson had achieved the peak of his notoriety. If his name did come up, it could have slipped through the cracks.

What about the motive—did the bribes Thompson mentioned actually occur? I look up people Leslie worked for; most of them are gone, but Anthony Guarisco, whom he helped get elected to the state senate, is still alive. When I search his name online, something astonishing pops up: Guarisco was mentioned at the end of an Associated Press story about Leslie’s murder. Citing a New Orleans newspaper, the piece says that Guarisco told federal authorities he declined an offer of $10,000 to help clear a campaign debt if he opposed the Right to Work Bill.

I connect with Guarisco via email, and he sends me a document titled “The Bribe.” It’s only an introduction to the story I want to know—a 326-word passage that begins with a detailed description of Leslie heading to work on the day of the vote. I reply by asking Guarisco to elaborate over the phone, but when I later mention that I’d like to loop in a retired FBI agent when we talk, he decides he has nothing to share about the Leslie case.

Fuller reaches out to Mike Barnett, a retired colonel from the East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Department, which investigated the Leslie killing. Barnett agrees that Leslie was murdered because he inserted himself into an extremely charged political issue. If the mob couldn’t stop the Right to Work Bill with bribes, maybe a reminder of the cost of going against them would help their interests in the future. “I think they believed it was going to intimidate a lot of legislators,” Barnett says.

We are building consensus around the idea that Thompson might have pulled the trigger, but if that’s true, a key question remains: What about the elusive Rick Roberts? Was he involved?

Fuller, who once worked in the FBI’s Dallas office, canvasses his law-enforcement contacts throughout Louisiana and Texas: longtime members of sheriff’s offices, mob investigators, veteran agents, people who knew criminal heavyweights of all kinds. None had heard of a hit man named Rick Roberts.

Elliott Stonecipher says he was equally baffled when he tried to find him. “I tried every way I could to get a lead on Rick Roberts,” he says. “I couldn’t find cops that knew him, couldn’t find anybody.”

“Imagine that. Nobody’s ever seen him. Don’t know what he looks like, don’t know what he sounds like. And nobody’s ever met him.”

When Warden Goodwin ushers us in for a fourth prison visit, Thompson seems glad to see us. A certain camaraderie has developed. After all those years as rivals, Fuller and Thompson have become, if not exactly friends, at least not not friends.

This time we’ve brought pointed questions about the Leslie case, based on details drawn from police and forensic reports. Even after so much time has passed, the hit man’s answers largely match what we know to be true. He estimates that he was 30 feet from Leslie when he fired the shotgun, echoing the distance cited in the initial police report (31 feet). The description of him slipping into his hotel room fits the timeline of how long it took the assistant manager to see Leslie’s body.

I have another question for Thompson, one that’s been percolating since our most recent conversation with Stonecipher, about the purported Dallas hit man. I remind Thompson that in his fictional memoirs, his character uses a pseudonym while working as a contract killer. It’s part of that character’s modus operandi to leave no trace. Then I ask: Did he ever use the name Rick Roberts?

Without hesitation he chuckles. “I don’t know, I might have,” he says.

We’ve learned to pay close attention to Thompson’s reactions. Fuller has occasionally thrown in questions about murders he knows Thompson didn’t commit. When Thompson wasn’t involved, he says so immediately. It’s like introducing a control into an experiment. Now his response to the question of Roberts’s identity feels unpremeditated.

“Rick?” Fuller says. “Can we call you Rick?”

Thompson laughs deeply. “That don’t mean I’d like to answer to it,” he says. “I would use a lot of names over the years, but nobody’d ever know who it really was.”

The admission is such that I have to force myself to stay plugged into the moment. But there’s something in the room that makes it easy. Maybe Thompson is energized by the chance to confess after all these years, and I’m feeling it—Fuller is, too. We are three people who have little in common but are emotionally joined, like the survivors of a plane crash or an infantry unit under fire.

We explain that we’ve done extensive research in archives and throughout the law-enforcement community for information about a hit man named Rick Roberts.

Thompson nods. “They can’t find him, can they?”

“They can’t,” I say.

“Amazing how someone could just slip by like that.”

“Allegedly,” Fuller says, “he might be in Dallas.”

“Son of a bitch,” Thompson replies. “Imagine that. Nobody’s ever seen him. Don’t know what he looks like, don’t know what he sounds like. And nobody’s ever met him.”

Two things come to me. One is that Thompson was never considered a suspect in the investigation in part because none of the other men charged in connection with the crime ever mentioned his name. If Thompson is now telling the truth about using a pseudonym, that was by design. Keeping his identity a secret from the Dixie Mafia guys who knew Leslie was going to be murdered would have been as much a part of the planning as where to dump the gun afterward.

The second thought is a wisp of a memory, something Thompson told us the first time we visited, when Fuller initially asked about the murder. If we’d understood more then, we might have divined its meaning: See, he told us then, my name never came up in that deal.

There’s just one problem with the theory we’re working out in our interview: Investigators and prosecutors did talk to someone named Rick Roberts. We know this because of the bare-bones documents we found at the library, pointing to his grand jury testimony in 1981. Finding other evidence of his existence will require a trip west.

In early 2023, Fuller and I drive to the Fort Worth, Texas, branch of the National Archives, which holds transcripts and court filings from the 1982 trial. The staff brings out three boxes and we dig in; there are more than 10,000 pages. They’re divided into binders, each containing a single day’s testimony. Every binder begins with a table of contents naming the day’s witnesses. I churn through them all, scanning the contents. When I open the binder for June 9, 1982, my pulse thumps in my forehead. There he is, on page 58.

The transcript takes up a mere ten pages, double-spaced. It reveals little. Roberts knew Rusty Griffith; he’d worked at Griffith’s lounge in Shreveport; they’d talked about a development project in Costa Rica; before that, Roberts sold advertising for Holiday Inn. Roberts said that he only ever spoken to Don Gardner once in his life, and never met the four other defendants charged with conspiring to kill Griffith. When asked about the Leslie murder, Roberts replied, “The only thing I know is that he was killed, and that I have given testimony in front of two grand juries already concerning the fact that I knew nothing of that situation at all.”

“Have you ever been a hit man?” he was asked.

“No, sir.”

“Do you know what that term means?”

“I believe so. I don’t even own a gun.”

Prodded one last time for any knowledge of either killing, Roberts said, “I know nothing about anything. I was just a victim of circumstances, being at the wrong time in the wrong place.” And with that he was dismissed.

I show the pages to Fuller, my mind churning. Rick Roberts did exist, and if he played a role in Leslie’s killing, he seems to have artfully avoided any blame. Does that mean Thompson was lying about using a pseudonym? Could Thompson be protecting Roberts? Or, more improbably, could Thompson have been interviewed by the police or appeared in front of a grand jury in character?

Fortunately, Wade Correctional is our next stop.

Fuller and I sit, thunderstruck. This, it occurs to me, is literally how you get away with murder.

This visit, we don’t spend much time on preliminaries. Once we’ve settled into the meeting room, I hand over the first page of the Roberts testimony. Thompson is unfazed; he says he sort of knew Roberts. We watch for a reaction, but Thompson reveals nothing. I begin to wonder if he even remembers our previous conversation.

We let it slide for the moment and move on to other subjects, but later I return to the topic. Since Roberts turned out to be a real person, maybe there was some kind of miscommunication before, I suggest. Is Thompson certain he used the name as an alias? “Yeah, I’ve used it,” he says.

“So it’s just a coincidence that this guy’s name is also Rick Roberts?”

Thompson allows one of his trademark long pauses. “I guess,” he finally says. “I used a lot of names in different places. I can walk into a restaurant up there in Arkansas and they’ll call me Mr. Morrow.”

But, Fuller says, “You wouldn’t appear before a grand jury and raise your right hand and say your name is Rick Roberts and ‘I live at XYZ address,’ would you?”

Perusing the testimony again, Thompson finds a way to answer. “I’ll tell you one thing, I never worked for Rusty Griffith.”

As we mull over the riddle, Thompson grins, head tilted back. “When he smiles like that,” Fuller says to me, “there’s more behind the story.”

Then it strikes me: What if Thompson used Roberts’s name on the Leslie job because he wanted their identities to blend? What if the goal was to be confused with Rick Roberts, to deflect attention in the ensuing investigation?

When I put these questions to Thompson, he nods. “That could be what happened.”

The genius of this washes over me. If the police were given the name of a nonexistent person, that would raise suspicion. So Thompson could have used an alias that didn’t require him to invent a new identity. He could have borrowed the name of a real person—someone he knew would be quickly dismissed as a suspect, and whose name was commonplace to boot. When I advance this idea, Thompson, arms folded, says: “Might’ve happened just like that.”

Fuller and I sit, thunderstruck. This, it occurs to me, is literally how you get away with murder.

Fuller and I then try to get a deeper understanding of why the hit was ordered. Thompson claims that Leslie was given information by someone associated with Carlos Marcello about the mob’s attempts to infiltrate the state firefighters’ union. “Organized crime wasn’t controlling that union here [in Louisiana] at the time—not like they did up north—and they were trying to get that established here,” Thompson says.

These efforts may or may not have included the bribe attempts he mentioned earlier, like the one that former state senator Anthony Guarisco declined. But it wasn’t the bribes that led to Leslie’s demise; it was his loose talk about them. Thompson tells us that Leslie scheduled a meeting with law enforcement to discuss the payoffs on July 9, only hours after he was murdered. “You can’t do what he was doing and get away with it, not back then,” Thompson says. “Or do what he was doing to the person he tried to do it to.”

Leslie’s stature made him a real threat. “He had the power of the media,” Fuller says.

“Right, that was his power right there,” Thompson replies. “He had a lot of ears, and he was using some of those ears in the wrong way, and it was getting back to the right people.”

We later confirm a key element of this account: According to an investigative series in Baton Rouge’s Morning Advocate, Leslie was due in a meeting with U.S. Attorney Douglas Gonzales Sr. the morning after he was killed. The timing of the hit worked in another way, too: By waiting until after the Right to Work vote, Marcello’s people could pin the hit on D’Artois—who was in ever deeper legal trouble.

Outside the prison, Fuller and I linger in the humid air for a while, somewhat dazed and in disbelief. It took five trips to Louisiana and nearly 40 hours of conversation. But after three years circling a case that had gone ice cold—47 years after Jim Leslie was shot dead—everything seems to fit together.

EPILOGUE

During our last trip to Shreveport, in March 2025, a source tells us that Louisiana has created a cold-case task force to try to pin Jim Leslie’s murder on Larry Thompson. The unit’s existence promises something we weren’t sure we’d obtain on our own: closure.

It’s unlikely that filing charges will accomplish more than that. Wade’s new warden, Michele Dauzat, tells me that Thompson, now 81, has been moved to another prison. He isn’t responding to our communications like he used to. When Thompson was at Wade, he answered emails within hours; now he doesn’t reply for days, if at all. Extending his sentence would be a symbolic gesture, given the term he’s currently serving, his advanced age, and some kidney-related health problems he mentioned to us. He might agree to a deal to shorten his son’s prison term, but it’s unclear whether he’d be offered one.

Still, there are plenty of people that resolution would mean a lot to—most prominently Elliott Stonecipher. “Everything that happened to Jim is insane,” he says. “Everything organized labor got away with, not to mention organized crime, is insane.”

Stonecipher has told us countless hours’ worth of stories over the years about the ways Shreveport broke his heart. The racial schisms. The corruption. But one is particularly personal: Jim Leslie and George D’Artois were both buried in the city’s venerable Forest Park Cemetery, less than a year apart. It bothered Stonecipher that the crowd for D’Artois’s funeral rivaled that of Leslie’s. “They couldn’t get in all of the cars that wanted to be in the funeral,” he recalls. “And Forest Park’s road goes on forever.”

For Stonecipher, it was a reminder that Shreveport had learned nothing from the senseless tragedy of Leslie’s death. “I never got over that, and frankly, it changed everything that I ever felt about my hometown,” Stonecipher says. “It never came back.”

As for Myron Fuller, Shreveport was the one place during his 31 years in the FBI where he struggled to find a gear. Clandestine forces conspired against him, investigations blinked out, people died. He came back looking for a reckoning. He needed to know it wasn’t all on him.

He comes away not only with a deeper understanding of his time in Shreveport, but with something more: He may have cracked open one of the most famous unsolved murders in Louisiana history. “When you’re in the middle of the forest, you can’t see the trees,” he says. “When you get out of there and look down from a bird’s-eye view? Holy shit. So that’s what this has done for me.”

Our last night in Shreveport, we have no plan. We drive for a bit, get hungry, and spontaneously land at Ernest’s Orleans, a place long known as an organized-crime hangout. It still has an unreconstructed mafioso vibe, as if it were lifted straight from a 1970s Scorsese film. A guy wearing a gigantic cowboy hat sits at a table near ours with an ostentatiously dressed woman. The waiter, a portly, uniformed man who also seems from another era, confirms the mob history: Yes, Carlos Marcello came here.

Fuller orders a whiskey on the rocks, looks around. When he talks about Shreveport, the edge is gone. The ghosts have vanished. But only for him. For the city, they remain.

The After Dark Bandit

The
After Dark
Bandit

The police couldn’t figure out how the perpetrator ripped off two banks at the same time. Until they discovered there wasn’t just one robber but a pair of them: identical twin brothers.

By Andrew Dubbins

The Atavist Magazine, No. 158

Andrew Dubbins is the author of Into Enemy Waters: A World War II Story of the Demolition Divers Who Became the Navy Seals. His writing has appeared in The Daily Beast, Los Angeles Magazine, Alta, and Slate, among other publications. He lives in Los Angeles.

Editor: Jonah Ogles
Art Director: Ed Johnson
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checker: Alison Van Houten
Illustrator: Darya Shnykina

Published in December 2024.

The Manhunt

The light was giving way to darkness as detective Patrick Brear arrived at the CBC Bank in Heathcote, an old gold-mining town in southern Australia nestled between mountains and surrounded by dense forest. The quaint two-story redbrick building had been the scene of a crime. Earlier that afternoon, on April 27, 1979, a bank robber shot Ray Koch, a beloved veteran of the local police force. Two bullets ripped holes in Koch’s stomach and intestines, forcing surgeons to remove his spleen. He lost a dangerous amount of blood, and nobody was sure if “Kochy,” as he was affectionately known, would make it.

Brear, who worked for the state of Victoria’s Armed Robbery Squad, passed through the swarm of blue-uniformed police officers collecting evidence, then had a look at the bank’s CCTV footage. It showed the thief running into the bank carrying a Browning pistol and wearing a black leather jacket, black gloves, and a mask bearing the face of an old man. Brear thought he knew who the perpetrator was: the After Dark Bandit.

The bandit was the state’s most wanted man, suspected in two dozen armed robberies. Brear and his partner, detective John Beever, had been hunting him for over a year. They knew his MO well. He liked to hit rural targets just before they closed for the day, then escape into the bush under cover of darkness. The timing of many of his crimes was the inspiration for his nickname.

Though it pained Beever and Brear to admit it, there was something different about this criminal, almost superhuman. He was known to pull off two robberies within a half-hour of each other, in towns that were more than a dozen miles apart. Newspaper reporters theorized that he must be driving a very fast car. Brear and Beever had attempted to reenact one of the back-to-back jobs, but they couldn’t make it from one location to the other in time.

Just as unusual were the bandit’s mood swings. According to witnesses, he could be cheeky and chatty on one job, menacing and severe on the next. Early in his career, the After Dark Bandit had been cautious and deliberate, taking small sums from off-track betting storefronts, known as TAB agencies. But in recent months he’d grown bolder, emptying banks, sometimes in broad daylight. So audacious was the bandit that he’d robbed the CBC branch in Heathcote twice in the previous nine months. As he entered the bank on the third occasion, on April 27, the ledger keeper recognized him; she could be seen in security footage standing arms akimbo like a peeved schoolmarm. The bandit had stolen her orange Datsun to use as his getaway vehicle the last time he was there. He took it again this time, after shooting Koch and packing up the money he’d come for.

The bandit ditched the Datsun at the edge of town and was then seen speeding on a motorcycle into a forested area outside Heathcote. Law enforcement descended on the spot from far and wide; they came from various branches of the state’s police force, including an elite SWAT team and a dog squad. A police helicopter and two fixed-wing aircraft led an aerial search. Police on motorbikes were tasked with covering the dense, rugged terrain of the forest, where thickets of eucalyptus and pine covered abandoned goldfields. “We are very hopeful that he is in the area and we will get him,” a detective told journalists. “He has used a firearm, and we must treat him as very dangerous.”

The following morning, senior constable Rick Hasty was cruising in his police van through the city of Bendigo, 40 minutes northwest of Heathcote. Hasty was a friend of Koch’s and had just visited the wounded cop’s wife. He would have preferred to be helping with the manhunt, but was ordered to remain on duty in Bendigo, part of a skeleton crew of officers keeping an eye on the place. Nobody expected the robber to turn up there, since doing so would require snaking his way through the nearly 200 officers searching for him, a maneuver considered too bold even for the After Dark Bandit.

While sitting in traffic, Hasty spotted a man walking with a blue suitcase and sporting a red Zapata mustache. Hasty didn’t have any particular reason to suspect that this was the man his colleagues were looking for, but he had a feeling. “I just knew it was him,” Hasty told me. He watched the man cross the road and enter a dead-end alley. He parked his van and got out. As he walked into the alley, the man came toward him.

“What’s your name?” Hasty asked.

“Peter Morgan,” the man replied. “Why?”

“Because I run this fucking town and I want to know who’s in it.”

Hasty wasn’t carrying a gun, nor did he see any lumps in Morgan’s pockets suggesting a weapon. He felt confident that he could take the man if needed. Tough and fit, Hasty competed as a professional cyclist and had been a farmer before a drought pushed him onto the police force to make ends meet.

“Where you going?” Hasty asked.

“Going to Melbourne to watch footy.”

“What’s in the case?”

“Oh, it’s only knickknacks.”

“Can I have a look?”

“Sure.”

Hasty knelt down, opened the suitcase, and rifled through it. There was a can of Coca-Cola, a newspaper, and—inside a drawstring sack—a sawed-off shotgun, stacks of money, and a mask that looked like an old man’s face. Hasty turned to Morgan, who now had a Browning pistol aimed at him.

It’s a toy, Hasty thought. Then: No, it’s death.

Morgan shoved his pistol into Hasty’s stomach, and the two men wrestled in silence. Morgan pulled the trigger twice, but there wasn’t a bullet in the chamber. Hasty forced his adversary’s gun hand upward and the pistol fell. (Later he would claim that he pried the gun away, and Morgan that he dropped it in surrender.) Hasty then pushed Morgan up against the wall and grabbed him by the throat.

“You’ve got me,” Morgan said. “I just made you a hero.”

“If you fucking move,” Hasty replied, “I’ll kill you as you stand there.”

Later that day, police detectives arrived at Peter Morgan’s farm in Nyora, a small railroad town in the rolling hills of southern Victoria, about 140 miles from Heathcote. While searching the property where Morgan lived with his wife and son, law enforcement found two Valiant automobiles, a motorbike, cans of black spray paint, a flashlight, a compass, a sleeping bag, and a variety of guns. They also found a beanie and a striped brown jumper—articles the After Dark Bandit was known to have worn during robberies.

According to Brear, the most shocking piece of evidence was a black-and-white photograph. It showed Morgan in a posh restaurant, smiling while seated beside another man. The two had matching shirts, matching mustaches, matching sideburns, and matching faces.

Finally, it was clear to police how the bandit had managed to be in two places at once: Peter had an identical twin brother.

Detective Brear called his partner, Beever, and told him that the robber they’d been chasing wasn’t one man but two. “Bullshit,” Beever answered. But it was true. And it meant that the After Dark Bandit—or the other half of him—was still at large.

The Inheritance

Understanding the Morgan twins’ crime spree requires understanding their father. On December 15, 1949, a 19-year-old Kay Morgan carried a briefcase into the Commercial Bank in Eltham, a suburb of Melbourne known for its natural surroundings. Wearing a dark blue suit, gray felt hat, and sunglasses, the nervous teenager presented himself as a customer looking to open a new account, then drew a Browning pistol, according to newspaper reports. “The game is on!” he shouted. “I’ll take the lot!”

The teller opened the money drawer. “Here it is,” he said, tauntingly. “Come and get it.” Then the teller and the bank manager pulled pistols of their own from their pockets.

Kay fired a shot that went straight through the counter and between the teller’s legs, then another into the ceiling as he hurried from the bank. He ran to his getaway vehicle, a stolen gray Singer sports car parked across the street. The teller and the bank manager chased after him, firing 15 shots at the fleeing car and hitting it numerous times. Speeding out of Eltham, Kay crashed into an embankment a half-mile down the road, then escaped on foot into the bush.

Following a large manhunt, police captured Kay, acting on a tip from one of his friends. “I am pleased you have caught me,” Kay told them, according to a newspaper report. “I will tell you everything.” He confessed to the failed robbery, admitting that he had attempted it to repay a loan to his father, a prominent real estate developer. (His father refused to pay Kay’s bail.)

Kay served nearly three years behind bars, then moved to the countryside and married a childhood friend named Beryl. On October 30, 1953, they had identical twins, Peter and Doug. The family relocated to Melbourne, where Kay thrived as a property developer, until a credit squeeze in the 1960s bankrupted him. To stay afloat, Kay may have resorted to shady business dealings that threatened to catch up with him, prompting an abrupt move to New Zealand when the twins were barely in their teens.

Kay found work as a carpenter outside Wellington, the small, windy capital city at the mouth of the Cook Strait. But after offering to import a Holden sedan for his boss, then blowing the money at the racetrack, Kay returned to crime. He’d break into a post office at night, put the facility’s safe on a trolley, wheel it out to his car, and speed off into the night. Kay rented a house where he’d use a cold chisel to open the safes, often while the twins were playing in the other room. In addition to money, they usually contained stamps, which Kay liked to sell back to the post office he’d robbed. He told the boys that whatever they needed to do to get ahead in life was OK, so long as no one got hurt.

To disguise himself during his crimes, Kay wore fake glasses and used Brylcreem to darken and slick back his hair. Sometimes he asked the boys if they wanted to come along to “give him a hand.” Doug always volunteered. The twins provided excellent cover—the police were less likely to pull over a vehicle with an adorable boy or two in the back—and doubled as lookouts.

One night, when Doug was 12, Kay parked near a supermarket and told his son to keep an eye out. Doug watched his dad run toward the store, a silhouette in the moonlight. Kay robbed the market so often he’d left a piece of roofing loose for easy access. Doug had just wiggled into the driver’s seat—he thought it would feel cool to sit behind the wheel—when the market’s alarm started blaring. He waited for what felt like an eternity. Then the driver’s-side door suddenly flung open and his dad appeared out of the dark. “Move over,” Kay said as he slid into the car. Father and son peeled away from the scene.

Kay’s criminal career meant that the family was constantly on the run. Over the course of their childhood, Peter and Doug lived in some 40 houses and attended five schools, where they were often enrolled under false names. In photos from back then, it’s impossible to tell them apart. As early as infancy, their mom liked to dress her sons the same. They wore matching shoes and jumpers and had matching hairstyles. The twins were often each other’s only playmate. Indeed, the family’s status as fugitives made them a tight unit; Doug considered them “a gang of four.”

But then Beryl became suspicious that Kay—charismatic and handsome, a “cross between Steve McQueen and Paul Newman,” in Peter’s words—was seeing other women. One evening, during an especially heated argument, Beryl refused to let Kay take the car to rob a post office. Instead, he pushed a wheelbarrow to his target, planning to haul away the safe. The police showed up before he could clear out, and Kay was arrested—but not before the former boxer bashed one of them in the head with a crowbar.

With Kay in custody, his 13-year-old twins were left to dispose of the evidence of his crimes. According to Peter, Beryl drove them to Kay’s rental house, where they filled the family car with empty safes. Then she drove them to a nearby bridge where, one by one, in the pitch dark, they were tipped into the river below. (In Doug’s recollection, the brothers did this without their mother’s help.)

After serving an 18-month prison sentence, Kay was deported back to Australia, and his family followed. Kay vowed to go straight and resume working in construction. The twins worked alongside him; he’d taken them out of school when they were 15 and trained them himself. The teenagers also worked briefly at a bank; Doug, who’d earned high marks in math while still in school, rose to become a teller, while Peter remained a junior employee.

One Sunday morning in December 1971, 18-year-old Doug and Peter were relaxing at home when they heard a guttural scream from their parents’ bedroom. They ran inside to find 41-year-old Kay lying on the bed with his arms in the air, as if reaching for the ceiling. Doug tried to lower them while Peter watched from the edge of the bed as his father gasped for air.

Someone called for help, and a nurse hurried over from a church across the street, where she’d been attending service. When Doug checked on his father later that day, he found the nurse straightening Kay’s legs and tightening the sheets around him.

“He’s OK?” Doug asked.

“No,” said the nurse. “He’s dead.”

Kay’s sudden death brought the twins closer for a while. “It sort of cemented a bond with my brother [and me] against the world,” Doug said.

A half-century later, Doug remembers his tumultuous early years fondly. “My childhood was a great adventure,” he told me. “I still look back and I smile. Maybe it was the teamwork, maybe it was being part of something.” At his home in the countryside north of Melbourne, Doug showed me the dusty old train set he and Peter used to play with when Kay was prying open stolen safes, and offered me some of his dad’s favorite cookies. Outside he pushed forward the driver’s seat of his Land Rover. Underneath, wrapped in some of his mother’s curtains, was his father’s ashes. “He goes everywhere with me,” Doug said with a smirk.

Peter doesn’t find this funny. “If I want to visit my dad,” he told me on the anniversary of Kay’s death, “I’ll have to steal my brother’s car.”

Peter doesn’t know where Doug lives, and he doesn’t like to talk to him. Doug is fine with that. The roots of the men’s resentment run deep. As kids their personalities clashed—Doug was irreverent, while Peter was serious—and they were hyper-competitive. When Doug found himself in the principal’s office in first grade for kissing a girl behind a shed, he claimed that Peter was the guilty one and had blamed him to avoid getting in trouble. Their relationship could hold an edge of violence: They had water and pillow fights so intense that their mom shut herself up in another room to avoid the chaos. Sometimes one twin would pull his jumper over his head, then hold the other twin’s neck under his arm as if in a vise, making it appear like he was carrying his own severed head.

Kay’s sudden death brought the twins closer for a while. “It sort of cemented a bond with my brother [and me] against the world,” Doug said. It was what happened later, when they followed in their father’s footsteps and became prolific stickup men, that transformed what might have been a bygone rivalry into a bitter, unbridgeable rift.

As Peter tells it, for decades Doug made himself out to be the good twin and Peter the bad twin. Peter finds this ridiculous. He also insists that Doug is unworthy of any media attention for the robberies that had once captivated the public across Australia. In Peter’s view, there was only one After Dark Bandit.

The Late Checks

Within six months of Kay’s death, Beryl remarried. Doug considered it the gang of four’s second loss. Around the same time, the twins began working together in construction. They were young, but they’d been trained well by their dad and could pull in more than the average subcontractor—sometimes over $500 Australian a week. (The country stopped using pounds in 1966.) Over time, though, Peter grew to resent being dependent on other people for his livelihood. The twins were 23 and at a construction site when Peter read a newspaper article about the Boiler Suit Gang, a group of bank robbers named after the blue outfits they wore during robberies. “We could do that,” he said to his brother.

At first Doug brushed him off, but Peter kept bringing it up, and Doug was soon indulging Peter’s fantasies about how they’d pull off a heist. They talked about how most robberies occurred in cities, where a cop might be parked around the corner, leaving the perpetrator little time to escape. But if they went after rural targets, they could ascertain how many cops were in town and suss out where they’d be at a given time. The brothers could strike at dusk, just before closing, and use the falling darkness to conceal themselves as they fled. They could anticipate where police roadblocks would be set up and hike through the bush to avoid them. The idea, Peter told me, “was basically guerrilla warfare: Do the crime, disappear, and then reappear outside the search area.”

It was all just talk until money got tight. The twins had families to support. Their mother’s second husband had six children, and Peter had developed a romantic relationship with his 16-year-old stepsister, Pamela. Peter married her when he was 19—the same year Doug married another woman named Pamela. Both were shotgun weddings, the twins told me, and Peter and Doug were soon fathers.

In the lead-up to Easter in 1977, the twins were waiting on payment for a pair of house frames they’d built. The person who owed them said that the checks were in the mail, but they hadn’t arrived. Peter, feeling stuck, decided that a robbery would free him. He was also anxious about his health. He’d suffered rheumatic fever in his teens and then developed chest pains. (These were later diagnosed as symptoms of panic attacks.) He feared an early cardiac event like the one that killed his father, and figured that if he wouldn’t be around long enough to retire, he may as well “go out and get my gold watch now.”

Doug was open to the idea—he, too, had been raised by a man with a criminal mindset. “My father’s philosophy was that it’s OK to do whatever you want to maintain the lifestyle you want,” he told me. He also realized that, were they ever to be caught, the fact that they were twins might keep them out of jail. Prosecutors would be forced to prove which of them had committed the crime. As long as the brothers stayed silent, reasonable doubt would always cloud the truth.

The brothers planned to use a stolen car during the crime, but Doug declined to help with that. He also refused to carry out the robbery or use a gun. “I’ll do it all,” Peter said. Doug agreed to serve as an “assistant,” helping Peter get to and from the scene. The twins decided that Peter would get two-thirds of the loot and Doug the remainder.

On a rainy Holy Thursday, Peter walked into a car dealership in a suburb of Melbourne. He told the salesman that he was interested in the Ford Falcon GT. Capable of going up to 140 miles per hour, and priced at about $6,500 Australian, it was the best car in the yard. The new salesman couldn’t believe his good fortune. “It’s a surprise for my wife,” Peter told him, “so what I’d like to do is take the car to our house and show her what I’m going to buy her.”

Peter got behind the wheel, the salesman climbed in, and they sped off along a rain-slickened road. Peter drove to a random house nearby. The two got out, and the salesman began walking up the path, eager to meet Peter’s wife, who he presumed was inside. Peter drew an air pistol.

“This is where we part company,” Peter said. The salesman saw the gun. “What, and the car?” he managed to say. “Yeah,” Peter replied. He climbed back into the driver’s seat and sped away.

Peter drove to a nearby cemetery where Doug was waiting in a Leyland P76 with a few jerricans of gasoline for the stolen GT, so Peter didn’t have to risk showing his face at a filling station. Rain fell in sheets over the tombstones and pounded the roofs of the cars. Doug poured the gas into the tank, bid his brother goodbye, and drove off. Then Peter waited in the cemetery for darkness to come.

At dusk, Peter drove to a TAB agency in nearby Mernda and entered holding a Jager .22 semiautomatic assault rifle he’d purchased in Melbourne. The rain had drenched his khaki carpentry overalls. He’d planned to wear a stocking over his head, but the moisture on his face had made it hard to see, so he went unconcealed.

Peter ordered the manager to empty the cash drawers, then stuffed the bills into a bag and directed him to open the safe. The man refused. Instead he gave Peter a lecture, imploring him not to ruin his life. Looking back, Peter assumed that this was prompted by his appearance—he was a “23-year-old bloke” who looked like “a drowned rat” in his soaked work clothes. Rather than threaten to shoot, Peter backed out the door and leapt into the stolen GT.

Doug was waiting behind the wheel of the Leyland a few miles outside Mernda. When Peter rolled up in the GT, he threw the bag of money through the driver’s-side window. Doug yanked the steering wheel from its column and shoved the cash into the exposed space. Then the brothers drove off in different directions.

With his adrenaline pumping, Peter raced along a forestry road in the deluge. Suddenly, the GT slid off the asphalt into a rushing creek. Peter abandoned the vehicle and made his way on foot to the rendezvous point he and Doug had agreed on. Only later would Peter realize the uncanny parallels to his father’s bank robbery in nearby Eltham, the one that landed him in prison for several years: Like Kay, Peter had failed to access the establishment’s safe, and like his dad he’d crashed a stolen sports car.

The haul from the TAB agency came to $320. “You’re not much of a robber,” Doug said.

Peter was shaken by the experience. He worried that he’d screwed up his life for a couple hundred bucks. “The paranoia sets in,” he told me. “What if they know it’s me? What if the car salesman gave a really good description?”

When the cops failed to come knocking, Peter had an exhilarating realization: He’d gotten away with it. The missing checks from the construction job arrived four days after the robbery. By then it didn’t matter. Peter had tasted crime and wanted more. So did Doug.

The Bushrangers

In the late 18th century, Great Britain established Australia as a penal colony, primarily to alleviate overcrowding in British prisons. Over time, around 160,000 prisoners were transported to the continent. Those who were uneducated were made to perform backbreaking labor under threat of corporal punishment. Some escaped into the bush seeking freedom and turned to crime to stay alive.

Known as bushrangers, they adapted to life in the wilderness, forming outlaw bands that robbed travelers and settlers alike, stealing food, weapons, ammunition, bedding, and other supplies. Many bushrangers had short careers that ended in shootouts or capture, and in some cases execution. But a few gained notoriety for their bold escapades and their ability to evade capture for long periods in the wilderness.

The most infamous bushranger was Ned Kelly, born around 1854 in Victoria. Kelly’s father—just like the Morgan twins’—was a criminal. He’d been brought from Ireland to Australia as a convicted thief. Kelly eventually committed an infamous string of robberies and bush escapes. He was captured, tried, and hanged in 1880.

Unlike Kelly, who killed three police officers, the brothers agreed to avoid undue violence—they wanted the money, not to harm anyone. They pledged to walk away from a job if things got “too hot.” After the Mernda robbery, Doug decided that he wanted an equal role in the next heist, to prove that he was as tough as his brother. The twins set their sights on another betting agency, this one in the town of Berwick, on the southeastern fringes of Melbourne. It would be the first and only time the brothers pulled a job together.

Doug still felt squeamish about carrying a gun, so he went to a local army surplus store and paid $59 for an imitation pistol. It didn’t have a bore—the hole through the center of the barrel—so he’d need to avoid pointing it at anyone, or they might realize it was a fake.

On the evening of May 30, 1977, right before the robbery, Doug strolled past Berwick’s police station, a hundred yards from the betting agency. A cop car was parked out front. He punctured the tires with a screwdriver. Then the Morgan twins barged into the betting agency, with Peter carrying a rifle and Doug the imitation pistol. “I don’t like to boast,” Doug told me, recalling the event, “but the manager definitely opened the safe door when I went along.” The brothers filled their bags with $916, ran outside, and mounted a pair of bicycles. Peter had painted the bikes black so they’d be less visible at night. They coasted down a hill away from the betting agency, met up with a railroad line, and pedaled along the tracks to a car parked a short distance away.

For their next crime, Peter drew up what he called a “double job”—two heists committed within half an hour of each other. The first would distract police and clear the way for the second. The twins would wear identical jumpers, like when they were kids, to fool the authorities into thinking that both were carried out by a single perpetrator.

Peter did his part, stealing $1,277 from a betting agency in Hastings, but Doug got cold feet and aborted his portion of the plan. Twelve days later Doug sought redemption, charging into a betting agency in Koo Wee Rup armed with the imitation pistol and a sawed-off shotgun, which he vowed he’d use only to fire warning shots.

A month later, Peter planned another double job. He robbed $1,567 from a TAB agency in Lilydale, only to discover afterward that Doug had balked again. Ten days later Doug struck his assigned target, a betting agency in Healesville, a small town in the fertile Yarra Valley, where kangaroos were often spotted lazing in the shade. When he entered the TAB, a customer was placing a bet. Doug told the employee behind the counter to let the customer finish up before turning over the agency’s cash.

After exiting with $1,080, Doug leapt onto a bicycle and rode past the police station. He stashed the bike in some hedges and disappeared into the bush. Doug hiked about ten miles to a rendezvous point with Peter, scratching himself on blackberry bushes and lying prone as cars passed along the highway. It was like a game of hide-and-seek, he told me, “except your friend is going to shoot you.”

“You’re mainlining on adrenaline for six or eight hours,” Peter said. “That’s the most powerful drug in the world, adrenaline. And the cheapest.”

The twins were young and immature, and they’d found a way to make cash far more quickly than they could lugging lumber and bricks around construction sites. Plus, there was a sense of adventure in it all. Doug remembers sleeping under a giant fern during a storm and falling asleep to the sound of rain. Peter was once scouting an escape route on his motorbike when a dozen kangaroos rushed past. “For about 20 seconds, I’m part of the kangaroo flock,” he told me. Peter also thrived on the rush he felt after a job. “You’re mainlining on adrenaline for six or eight hours,” he said. “That’s the most powerful drug in the world, adrenaline. And the cheapest.”

The police were at a loss to figure out who was behind the brothers’ capers. Despite Peter carrying a gun in his left hand and Doug in his right, nobody caught on that there were two robbers and not one. The twins were “cleanskins,” meaning that they didn’t have a criminal record. Nor did they have any questionable friends, gang affiliations, or links to Australia’s underworld. “The only criminal we ever knew was our father,” Peter said. This kept them off authorities’ radar but also meant that they only had each other to confide in and rely on.

Peter was the planner, and a meticulous one. He kept a black book of potential jobs, with the locations of various TABs and banks, when they opened and closed, exit points, nearby police stations, and even coffee shops local law enforcement frequented. He gave each target a score based on its suitability. “Two ticks if the building was good, and maybe another tick if the getaway was good,” Peter said.

The twins decided not to do robberies in the summer months, because that was when Australia’s venomous snakes were about. If one of them was bitten, he’d have to turn himself in to avoid succumbing from the venom. They also didn’t use walkie-talkies, concerned that someone might pick up the frequency. Instead, they developed a way of communicating in code by flashlight. When one brother arrived at a rendezvous point and gave a signal in the darkness, the other would signal back if it was safe to meet.

The brothers never ate before a job. “You don’t want a full stomach when you’ve got to walk 20 kilometers,” Doug explained. To cut down on weight, they didn’t even bring water; they kept their mouths moist by chewing gum with flavored liquid in the center.

After a job, the tradition was to drive to Melbourne and eat at an all-night burger joint. They’d pick up the latest paper, which sometimes included news of their crime. Peter remembered one headline declaring that the police had the bandit surrounded and were expecting an early arrest. The twins laughed as they scarfed down hamburgers several towns away.

The Mask

Victoria’s Armed Robbery Squad operated out of the Russell Street Police Headquarters in downtown Melbourne. A blond-brick skyscraper crowned with a tall metal radio mast, the building stood across the road from the Old Melbourne Gaol, where Ned Kelly was hanged. Nineteen investigators had been allocated to the squad, and they were spread thin. Detective sergeant Jimmy Louden, who led one of the squad’s six crews, was in charge of the investigation into the prolific TAB robber, known initially as the Machine Gun Bandit because the assault rifle he sometimes carried resembled an automatic weapon. By August 1978, John Beever and Patrick Brear were running lead on the case.

Beever and Brear started by revisiting each crime scene. The detectives drove long distances to talk to small-town cops and reinterview witnesses, paying close attention to physical details of the bandit and his routine. He usually struck at around 7 p.m., and police noticed that he hadn’t been very active during the Australian summer of 1977–78. The officers concluded that this was because the summer months brought more daylight hours, preventing the bandit from using darkness to his advantage.

The robber was hitting targets all across southern Victoria, from windy Great Ocean Road in the west to the farm-studded flatlands of Wellington Shire in the east. Beever and Brear were especially baffled by robberies in Dromana and Sorrento that had occurred within 30 minutes of each other. The coastal towns were 15 miles apart on the Mornington Peninsula, a narrow boot-shaped strip of land south of Melbourne known for its vineyards, sheltered beaches, and great surf. As the bandit entered the agency in Sorrento, he told a female staff member, “Sorry I’m late, but I just held up the Dromana branch.” Beever and Brear were unable to cover the distance between the two towns in the time that elapsed between the robberies. “We were dealing with more than just your run-of-the-mill offender,” Brear said. “We were looking for a very smart operative.”

Once the bandit’s MO was established, Victoria police launched a broad-based surveillance effort code-named Operation Rimfire. The objective was to monitor TAB agencies in areas where the bandit was operating, in particular between the hours of 5 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. It was an enormous allocation of manpower for small-town police stations with just a handful of employees. Officers attended briefings and manned stakeouts in shifts. They were instructed to wear civilian clothes, stay near a telephone, and maintain radio contact. Meal breaks were forbidden. After the bandit struck while an officer was using the restroom, officers were ordered to hold their water, too.

As the search dragged on, the police grew annoyed by the public’s lack of assistance. The leader of Victoria’s Armed Robbery Squad, detective inspector Tom O’Keeffe, told the press, “It’s not a Ned Kelly fight between the coppers and the villain. It’s not a game people can join in by watching on TV.” He warned that the bandit was “a potential psychopath,” and compared him to rapists and murderers. “It looks like it’s a challenge to him,” he said, “and we accept the challenge.”

Doug feared that the heavy bag of cash tied around his neck might drown him, but managed to reach the bank and drag himself ashore.

Despite careful planning, close calls were unavoidable for the Morgan twins. During one escape, Doug encountered a roadblock on a bridge and had to slip into a swollen river to avoid detection. From under the bridge, he could see the cops above silhouetted by flashing lights. For a moment he considered yelling for help. He feared that the heavy bag of cash tied around his neck might drown him, but managed to reach the bank and drag himself ashore.

To stay ahead of police, the twins had to innovate. After one stickup in the bayside town of Edithvale, Peter experimented with a novel getaway method: a timber canoe. He built it himself, along with a paddle, to prevent the police from tracing it to a store. He navigated into foggy Port Phillip Bay with his stolen cash in a waterproof container, watching the lights of the police cars as they raced into town. Suddenly, the canoe started to sink—he hadn’t waterproofed it. Peter paddled frantically to shore, where he abandoned the vessel and hiked back to his car.

One day, Peter was perusing a collection of novelty items at an agricultural show in Melbourne when he spotted a mask. It looked like the face of an ugly old man and had a mop of curly hair attached, long enough that it ran to Peter’s collar. He decided that it offered perfect cover. He came to see the mask as the part of his robbery kit that distinguished him as a serious professional criminal, and resolved not to let his brother use it.

That was fine with Doug, who used handkerchiefs and bandanas to cover his face during robberies. He had no interest in wearing Peter’s mask, which he tried on just once. “It was a piece of shit,” he told me. “Your vision was really bad out of it, so you didn’t have peripheral.”

Peter felt that his brother was an unreliable partner. Doug wasn’t balking at jobs anymore, but he was sometimes unavailable because of practice with his recreational football team. “I was full on,” Peter said, “whereas for whatever reason, Douglas became reluctant.” Peter planned TAB heists in Drouin and Keilor without telling his brother.

But TABs were beginning to feel too small-time for the kind of criminal Peter saw himself as. In early 1978, he decided to hit his first bank.

The Nickname

Because banks closed earlier than TABs, Peter knew that he risked being seen before the sun went down. This meant it was imperative that he get into the bush faster than usual. He decided to steal a motorbike to do so. One of Peter’s rules was to only steal from businesses, not individuals, so he went to a used-car lot, asked to test-drive a Honda 500cc motorcycle, and zoomed away without paying for it.

The next day, March 7, 1978, Peter rode the stolen motorbike to the State Savings Bank in Mirboo North, a tranquil farming town. He ran inside armed with a shotgun and ordered the manager to fill up a bag with money. He then escaped to a nearby pine forest, stashed the bike, and set off on foot. When he stopped to rest, he rifled through his bag of money and found a brand-new .25-caliber Browning pistol inside. It belonged to the bank. A staff member must have tossed it inside for some reason during the robbery.

The take was a hefty $15,098, and Peter planned to spend his share. While Doug sometimes used his portion of the loot to purchase sports cars, Peter preferred ski boats, motorbikes, and guns. Like their father before them, both men enjoyed betting on horses and greyhounds. Peter used this as a way to launder his money: He’d place a bet with stolen cash at one window, then claim his winnings at another, receiving clean bills in return. (Since the races didn’t always go his way, he figures that the method amounted to about a 20 percent processing fee.)

Peter also took up horse trading. He bought horses at country markets, transported them to his property, and sold some to recreational riders while keeping others for himself. It was an ideal cover for the robberies, justifying his frequent travel and surplus cash, and providing an explanation for how he spent his time. He’d even use the horse trailer to haul stolen motorcycles to robbery locations. Peter accumulated so many horses—he estimates that he bought and sold about 100—that he bought a farm in Nyora and moved his family there.

Several of Peter’s Thoroughbreds competed on the local racing circuit. As kids the Morgan twins idolized the Skelton brothers, who were among the best jockeys in New Zealand. Now, as an owner of racehorses, Peter had the opportunity to lift R.J. Skelton into his saddle before a race. “He called me Mr. Morgan,” Peter bragged to Doug. However indirectly, the robberies were earning him power and respect.

Peter claims that he hid his crimes from his family. He’d wait until his wife left for work—Pamela managed a hardware company—before washing the stolen bank notes, dunking them in water, shoving them in a stocking, and running them in the clothes dryer to remove any ink stamps the bank had marked them with. Like his father, he also rented a safe house in Essendon, gave the landlady a phony story, and kept a car at the property in case he needed to disappear in a hurry.

Doug’s son, Michael, told me that his mother once opened the trunk of their car and found it full of cash. “But Father was good at lying,” Michael said. “He said he’d won it at the races.”

The Morgan brothers treated their wives with coldness at times, and despite their fraternal competitiveness, they often opted to spend time with each other rather than their families. Doug’s wife was saddened by his absence and neglect; Peter’s wife finally left, taking their son with her, after Peter returned from a three-day heist and refused to tell her where he’d been. Peter spent the next day losing $7,000 at the racetrack. When his wife returned with their son and a new toy she’d bought for him, Peter bitterly blamed her for his losses. That toy had cost seven grand, he thought.

Still, the Pamelas stuck by their husbands even as their families grew: Doug eventually had a son and a daughter, and Peter had two sons. Just as Kay brought the twins along on jobs, Peter sometimes took his four-year-old to scout potential targets and police stations. One day the toddler was in the car with his grandparents when he said, “We need to go and look at the cop shop!”

“Why?” they asked.

Because, the boy said, Dad always liked to check them out.

After the Mirboo North bank heist, the twins targeted a string of betting agencies. Following one stickup, in the town of Torquay, Doug was fleeing in the darkness when a local service-station owner gave chase. Doug turned and fired his gun, which was loaded with buckshot. He intended it to be a warning shot and had aimed at the ground, but a pellet struck the man’s lip.

At around 7 p.m., Peter heard about the robbery on the radio and fell into a fury. “The shooting broke my rules,” Peter told me. “There was to be no violence.” Waiting in his Valiant Charger at the rendezvous point, Peter extended the barrel of his Jager .22 rifle through the open window. I’m going to kill him, Peter thought. The gun was loaded and cocked, with the safety off. He saw Doug walking toward the vehicle in the darkness, finishing what was a 15-mile hike from Torquay. Peter was about to pull the trigger when he thought: What am I doing? He put the gun back down on his lap.

In the wake of the shooting of the service-station owner, police reporter Geoff Wilkinson published a story headlined “Hunt for 14-Raid TAB Thief,” portraying the criminal as a “potential killer.” Wilkinson—who would later write Double Trouble, a book about the twins, with coauthor Ross Brundrett—also gave the robber a new nickname, based on his propensity for nighttime heists: the After Dark Bandit.

The Briefcase

Doug’s shooting of the man in Torquay brought to the fore some fundamental disagreements between the Morgan brothers. Doug had always considered himself the better carpenter, better with girls, and their father’s favorite. Doug felt that Peter now saw himself as the better bank robber and was intent on rubbing it in. For his part, Peter felt like his brother was just “along for the ride,” enjoying the fruits of his efforts while pulling fewer jobs and bringing in less money. This inspired Peter’s nickname for Doug: Parasite. He felt that Doug lacked commitment. “It was a business,” Peter told me. “Not a legal business, but it was still a business.”

Peter was meticulous to the point of obsessive when preparing for a robbery, scouting targets for hours at a time and repeatedly assembling and disassembling his rifle in the dark like a commando. As Peter saw it, Doug had never taken anything seriously in his life. In their teens, they’d been evenly matched in most sports, but Peter had the edge in track and field. During one race in New Zealand, Doug unexpectedly got out to a huge lead, and Peter exhausted himself catching up. Then, halfway through the race, Doug stopped and walked off the track. “It was all just a big joke to him,” Peter told me.

Doug’s lackadaisical attitude clashed with Peter’s desire to expand their criminal enterprise to include higher-stakes bank jobs. The last TAB Peter ever hit was in the small dairy town of Maffra. It was the second half of a double robbery; Doug had struck a betting agency in Heyfield 25 minutes earlier. Peter, wearing his mask, entered the caged area behind the TAB’s counter and collected the money from the cash drawers. But when the manager opened the floor safe, it was empty. “Where’d you hide it?” asked Peter, rummaging through a waste bin to see if any money was stashed inside. The manager just smiled. Reading the papers afterward, Peter concluded that after Doug’s Heyfield heist, the police had notified all TABs in the area that the After Dark Bandit was on the prowl. Peter was less annoyed by the measly haul—a mere $463—than by the feeling that he’d been outsmarted.

Two weeks later, eager to show the police who was boss, Peter parked his motorcycle outside Heathcote’s CBC Bank, donned his mask, and ran inside carrying a sawed-off shotgun and a large bag. “I have to rob a bank because the coppers have got the TABs covered,” he told the frightened staff. He seized $15,106 in cash.

Carrying the stolen money out of the Heathcote CBC, Peter spotted a man seated in a car wearing a blue Victoria Police uniform. Peter, still in his mask, dragged the man out of the car and frisked him for a gun.

“You’re a cop,” Peter said.

“No,” lied the off-duty constable, terrified.

Peter threw the man’s keys into a nearby field, then climbed onto his motorcycle and sped off down Heathcote’s main street.

Soon after, flush with cash from the bank heist, the Morgan twins went to the races at Ballarat, a provincial city in the gold-rich Central Highlands of Victoria. They drove Peter’s Valiant Charger, which he’d recently souped up to outrun the cops. “It was my pride and joy, obviously,” Peter told me. In the boot of the car was a briefcase containing two shotguns and thousands of dollars in cash.

Before the races started, Doug vanished. Peter couldn’t find him in the restroom or anywhere else he searched. He’d never known his brother to skip a race, so Peter panicked, worrying that the police might have nabbed him. He decided to leave, but walking through the parking lot he realized that the cops might be waiting at his car. He crept between vehicles, trying to remain unseen, until he came to his spot. The Valiant was gone.

Peter took a taxi back to his house, where he found his car parked with the door and trunk open. The briefcase was gone, and there was a note on the steering wheel: “Thanks bro.”

Doug had stolen the car by having a copy of Peter’s key cut the previous day. “My greatest job,” Doug told me. “I robbed the robber.”

For three days, Peter said, he “hunted Doug around Victoria prepared to kill him.” He drove to every motel he could find. “I’m looking for my twin brother. He looks like me,” he told each proprietor. “There’s been a death in the family, and I can’t contact him.”

Doug told me that he robbed his brother because he was fed up with Peter calling him Parasite. Plus, he wanted to prove that he could get the better of his twin. “I showed him who’s the real master,” Doug said.

A few days after disappearing, Doug called Peter. “We need to talk,” he said.

“You’re a scumbag,” Peter replied.

Still, the brothers agreed to meet. When they sat down at a pub in Melbourne, according to Doug, he handed over Peter’s gun and half the money from the boot of his car. (As Peter tells it, Doug had already spent it all, and slid him an empty briefcase.) Doug explained that he’d been at a motel in the town of Sale. Peter hadn’t checked it because it was next to a police station.

The incident strained the already volatile relationship between the brothers, yet they continued their criminal partnership. Despite a mutual hatred, they were the last remaining members of the original gang of four, and neither could simply walk away.

The Gum Tree

Robbing Peter made Doug more confident than ever. In the spring of 1978, he told his brother that he intended to hit a bank. Peter asked for specifics, but Doug simply said that he had it all planned out.

In fact, all he’d done at that point was pick a target: the National Bank in Warburton, an old gold-mining town on the Yarra River, surrounded by the lush green mountains of the Great Dividing Range. Doug had banked there a few years earlier, and once when he looked over the teller’s shoulder, he saw heaps of cash in trays—far more than he’d seen when working in a bank as a teenager. “It told me this was a good bank to rob,” Doug said.

Five nights before the heist, Doug stole a small Honda motorbike from a local garage. On October 17, he rode around Warburton for four hours, scouting his getaway route. As the afternoon shadows lengthened, he found a hill overlooking the bank and sat there for 20 minutes, counting the customers going in and out of the building.

Doug stepped into the bank dressed in a long oilskin coat, his face covered by a black stocking and a balaclava. He vaulted over the counter, shouting, “You probably know who I am. I am the After Dark Bandit!” He announced that he’d shot people before, then he emptied the cash from the tellers’s boxes and locked everyone in the bathroom. He warned them not to contact the police, claiming that he knew where they lived.

After the holdup, Doug raced on his motorbike into the hills above Warburton. With the heavy bag of stolen money strapped to his wrist, he accidentally popped a wheelie that sent him swerving toward an oncoming bus, which he narrowly avoided hitting. He then doubled back over some dirt tracks he’d made that morning, forcing his pursuers to guess which direction he’d gone. After returning to the paved road, he puttered along for a distance before stopping. He threw the bike over a wire fence, covered it with branches, and set off on foot into the bush.

When he felt that he’d gone far enough to shake any pursuers, Doug took a rest against an enormous gum tree. “It was like a romantic painting,” he said. He opened his bag and counted the stolen cash: nearly $39,000. While some thieves might have considered the impressive haul ample reason to keep pulling jobs, Doug felt differently. “It was enough money to start a new life,” he recalled. “I could leave Australia. Maybe move to New Zealand or America. I could buy two houses in cash, maybe set up a business.”

He thought about his brother—blowing money on racehorses, doing jobs just to prove he could, and walking around like a movie gangster with the Browning pistol from the Mirboo North robbery tucked into a homemade holster. Doug didn’t want to be like his brother, because he didn’t like his brother. If Peter was going to continue to define himself by robbing banks, Doug would take the opposite tack. He pledged to never do another holdup.

In the distance he could hear the thrup-thrup-thrup of a police helicopter searching for him. He looked up at the canopy of the gum tree. Its long branches and flowing leaves provided perfect cover.

Later, when Peter discovered how much Doug had scored, their biggest haul to date, he scoffed. “Beginner’s luck,” he said.

“He was like a bomb just waiting to go off, and the trouble is, the bomb was going to destroy my life as well,” Doug said.

On March 14, 1979, Peter put on his rubber mask and darted inside the same Heathcote CBC he robbed the previous July. “Hello,” he cheerily greeted the staff. “Remember me?” He tossed a bag on the counter and told the tellers to fill it up. Peter then placed his sawed-off shotgun on the counter and caught one of the tellers looking at it. “This is your chance,” Peter said, daring them to grab the weapon.

He forced the customers into the storeroom. A few noted that the bandit had grown a pot belly, causing his shirt buttons to pop. In a subsequent news article headlined “The after-dark bandit casts a broader shadow,” journalist Lindsay Murdoch wrote, “Police say the bandit’s big spending of TAB and bank money is starting to show.”

Peter announced that he needed a getaway car, and ledger keeper Jan Murphy handed him the keys to her orange Datsun. He drove Murphy’s car to a small building in the countryside, where earlier that day he’d stashed his motorbike—an unregistered, customized machine with a top speed of 100 mph. Zipping away on the bike, Peter was free.

Doug thought that his brother was insane to rob the same bank twice. “He was like a bomb just waiting to go off, and the trouble is, the bomb was going to destroy my life as well,” Doug said.

Peter didn’t take his brother’s retirement all that seriously, and felt validated when, a few months after the revelation under the gum tree, Doug agreed to do another bank job. The heist was planned for the idyllic farming town of Heyfield. Peter gave Doug his motorbike and guns, and dropped him off about 12 miles from the target. Doug, who later said that he’d felt pressured into the job, yanked a few wires on the bike to render it inoperable, then spent the day sitting by a lake. When Peter found out, he was furious—about the broken bike and because his brother had pulled out of yet another robbery.

The twins had always fought, but their confrontations were becoming increasingly violent. Doug remembered Peter once holding his hair and kicking him in the face with his boot; another time, he said, Peter tried to run him down with a car. Doug also recalled punching Peter in the face and ramming his head through a plaster wall at a construction site. During one fierce fight, Doug begged Peter to give up the robberies. “You have to stop,” Doug said. “You’re going to get us killed.”

By then the twins had stolen close to $100,000, but for Peter it wasn’t enough. His goal was to become “the big guy in domestic horses in Victoria,” he told me. To do that, he needed a sizable nest egg. If Doug continued to dig in his heels and refuse to pull his weight, Peter figured that it would take six more jobs to get where he wanted to be.

The Church

For detectives Beever and Brear, each new robbery felt like a failure of their investigative work. But it also added to the pool of knowledge about the After Dark Bandit. They realized that he was becoming greedier, favoring banks over betting agencies, and also more daring and reckless. He was hitting targets during the day sometimes, and he’d robbed Heathcote CBC twice in eight months.

Beever and Brear’s working theory was that the bandit was a drug addict or gambler—someone “not very strong on investments,” in Brear’s words, who was spending the money he stole, then pulling another job when cash got low. The detectives recorded the dates of each robbery and the amounts taken. Using this information, they discerned what they thought was a pattern and tried to predict when he would strike again.

Beever thought that the next robbery would fall on April 27, and he sent a telex dispatch the day before, warning police in county stations to be on high alert. “Regarding the offender sought for numerous armed robberies on TAB agencies at banks in country areas, it is anticipated that this offender will commit a similar offence in the very near future,” Beever wrote. He urged police to monitor banks and TABs “in particular within half an hour either side of closing time,” to be “discreet in the surveillance,” and to stay off their radios. “It appears that this offender has monitored police broadcasts in the past,” Beever wrote.

Brear suspected that the target would be Heathcote CBC for a third time. He couldn’t say why—it was just “a hell of a strong gut feeling,” he told me. Sitting at Russell Street Police Headquarters, with nothing pressing on the day’s agenda, Brear suggested to Beever that they drive from Melbourne up to Heathcote, park near the CBC Bank, and watch for the thief. Beever doubted that the robber would hit Heathcote a third time, however, so the detectives stayed put.

Still, Brear was so convinced that Heathcote was the target that he called senior constable Ray Koch, one of two police officers in the small town. Brear urged him to keep an eye on the bank, and Koch reassured him that he was standing guard.

Around 4:40 p.m., 51-year-old Koch was cruising down Heathcote’s main street in his squad car when he decided to do another pass by the bank before it closed for the day. Koch gripped the steering wheel with his big hands. He was a strong, stocky man; his friends knew him as a gentle giant who enjoyed spending time with his wife and four kids. A pillar of the tight-knit community, he could often be found trap shooting, duck hunting, or drinking beer with friends.

Clad in his blue police jacket and trousers, Koch drove up to the brick bank, where he noticed a figure on a side street. It was Peter, who on an impulse had indeed chosen to hit Heathcote a third time, because he knew the bank inside and out. For the previous two hours, he had stood at the edge of a nearby football field, watching Koch’s police car pass the bank every 30 minutes. “Like clockwork,” he recalled. Come 4:30, Peter decided to strike, figuring he’d have half an hour to rob the bank before the cop returned. He didn’t expect Koch to come back early.

Peter had just put his mask on and was walking toward the bank when Koch pulled up. Upon hearing the car door open, Peter ducked behind a small tree, pulled off his mask, and shoved it in his jumper. He’d hoped to appear as a passerby. But then he changed his mind; instead of trying to blend in, he’d take action.

Peter drew the Browning .25 pistol, which he’d come to regard as his lucky gun. It was the same model his father had used in the Eltham bank shootout, and Peter always kept it cocked and loaded. Koch, now out of his vehicle and clearly facing the After Dark Bandit, made for the far side of his car for cover, but Peter came at him and grabbed him by the arm. Koch tried to seize the Browning, and as the men wrestled, Peter’s gun hand slid under Koch’s armpit and the weapon discharged. Koch was hit in the back of the hip. He dragged Peter to the ground as he fell. When the two men hit the pavement, there was another loud pop. Intense pain seared through Koch’s body. (Peter has always insisted that both shots were unintentional.)

As Koch bled under his jacket, Peter hoisted him to his feet, grabbed him by the elbow, and walked him toward the bank. Peter was about to don his mask and enter the building when he turned to Koch. “I should finish you right now, because you’re the only person that’s ever seen my face,” Peter said. “But I won’t.” Then he pulled the officer into the bank.

Peter ordered the bank staff, who knew his routine by now, to fill up his bag with cash and open the safe. Koch, meanwhile, sat in a chair by the door, moaning with pain. Peter wanted to get out of there fast, lest Koch’s colleagues show up. He also wanted Koch to pull through.

“When we finish this, you can ring for the ambulance,” Peter told a young bank teller.

“What’s the phone number?” the teller asked.

“You idiot!” yelled Peter, kicking the teller’s backside.

Once again Peter needed a getaway vehicle, and once again ledger keeper Jan Murphy offered the keys to her orange Datsun. Lugging $11,100 in stolen cash, he left through the rear of the bank and got in the car, which was parked in the same spot as the last time he stole it.

Peter drove the Datsun down a side street, then around the back of the football field and into Heathcote’s scrubby fairground, where he’d hidden a black Yamaha motorcycle. Because Doug had sabotaged Peter’s personal bike, he lifted this one from a garage the night before. Peter ditched the car and got on the bike just as a police car pulled into the fairground. Behind the wheel was Fred Hobley, the other half of Heathcote’s two-man police force, who minutes after Peter fled the bank got the call that Koch had been shot.

Peter maneuvered into a ditch and then up an embankment and onto the road, with the cop in pursuit. Hobley lifted his police radio. “I’m chasing the motorbike,” he reported. Hobley kept losing sight of Peter on a windy dirt road leading into the forest, but he could follow the dust stirred up by the bike’s tires.

Peter saw a vehicle up ahead also kicking up a cloud of dust. He turned onto a narrower track, then slowed down. Behind him the cop car sped past, following the other vehicle’s trail.

Peter puttered along slowly, drained from the adrenaline rush. After a few miles, he reached a spot where earlier that day he’d cut some tree branches to cover the bike and also stashed a bag of supplies—two cans of Coke, some blocks of chocolate, and a portable transistor radio. He grabbed the sack and started into the bush.

Doug drove to his brother’s farm, grabbed some guns from Peter’s shed, and loaded them into his car.

Later that evening, Doug was visiting his 17-year-old mistress, Wendy Breen. He’d been smitten by Wendy after she came to ride horses at Peter’s farm. “She probably went for the older man that had nice things, being young and from a working-class family,” Doug said. Now, while spending time at her home, he heard a news flash on the radio that a policeman had been shot. He knew right away that Peter was responsible, and that the two of them were in deep trouble.

Doug had played a minor part in the heist that day, dropping off Peter and his motorbike outside Heathcote in the predawn hours. Doug rationalized that this wasn’t as bad as holding up a bank—he was only driving. Still, he’d told Peter that this was the last time he would help. Now he drove to his brother’s farm, grabbed some guns from Peter’s shed, and loaded them into his car. He told me he’d planned to use them to fire warning shots if he encountered police.

As part of the heist, Doug was supposed to pick up Peter at 2 a.m. at a rendezvous point: a Catholic church outside the small farming town of Axedale. Fueled by adrenaline, Peter made it there early and sat on the steps of the old church, waiting for his brother. The night air was frigid, causing him to shiver. He thought about kicking down the door of the church to warm up inside but decided that wouldn’t be right. It was a church after all. He turned on his transistor radio and listened to the news about the shooting and the massive police manhunt. The whole world was going to come down on his shoulders, he thought.

Two a.m. came and went with no sign of Doug. Unbeknownst to Peter, his brother had decided to wait until morning to head to the church, hoping that the police presence would diminish with time. En route, Doug spotted a roadblock. He knew that if the cops searched his car, they’d discover the guns he’d concealed under a newspaper on the passenger seat, so he stopped at a convenience store and bought a Coke. Then he got back in his car and hung a U-turn. According to Doug, if either missed the rendezvous, their plan was to return 24 hours later.

By 10:15 a.m., Peter was fed up with waiting. Eager to make it home for his wedding anniversary celebration, he decided to hitch a ride on a nearby road. A woman driving with her daughter gave him a lift into the town of Bendigo. “Retrospectively,” he told me, “I should have went bush.” Peter walked into a Woolworths to buy a different suitcase to carry the cash from the bank job. On his way out, he thought he was probably in the clear. He was only ten minutes from Bendigo’s railway station, where he could finally make his way home. That’s when constable Rick Hasty spotted him, pinned him against the wall, and arrested him.

Peter was shoved into a police car with three burly cops. They drove him a couple hundred yards to the police station and escorted him inside.

Peter calmly asked for a white coffee with one and a half sugars. “He was a cocky smart-ass,” Hasty told me. “Don’t let him put it over you that he was sorry for [what he did].” Hasty added, “He should have been fucking shot between the eyes.” So many policemen crowded in to get a glimpse of the After Dark Bandit that Peter “couldn’t see the walls,” he told me. “All I could see was blue.”

Brear, who’d gone to Heathcote the night before after hearing about the shooting, now arrived at the Bendigo station. He and a couple of other cops took Peter into a room for questioning. The men slid a list of suspected robberies across the table and asked him which were his. To their surprise, Peter admitted to nearly every one, 23 in total. He also volunteered that his first robbery was in Mernda.

One of the stunned cops asked him the date of the crime. Peter said that it was Holy Thursday 1977.

Peter then described his robberies down to the exact amounts stolen and the weapons used. “He was very cooperative,” Brear told me. “He offered no resistance to us at all.” Peter was following in the footsteps of his father, who’d freely confessed to his crimes after the Eltham robbery. “If you ever do something wrong,” Kay had told his sons, “at least be a man and accept the punishment.”

Ten hours after Peter’s arrest, once the police had searched his home and discovered that he had a twin brother, detectives Beever and Brear sat Peter down for a second round of questioning. They said that they believed his twin had been involved in the heists, too. Given their recent feuding, Peter had no intention of covering for Doug.

Yes, he told the police, his brother was his partner in crime.

When Doug saw his name and face on TV, he realized that his brother had ratted him out. He figured that it was Peter’s revenge for stealing his car and money at the horse races. “I don’t think I really trusted people after that,” he told me.

Doug suspected that the cops would be watching his home, so he spent the next few days moving from motel to motel with Wendy. The police already knew his face, of course, and they had a description of Wendy, which was circulating in the newspapers: a petite blonde, “last seen wearing blue jeans and a navy jumper.” Doug needed a car the police couldn’t trace, so he put a deposit down on a Land Rover, the first model he remembered his father driving. His plan was to head deep into the bush with Wendy and lie low for a while.

But first he took Wendy to the beach in Frankston, a lively seaside suburb of Melbourne with a golden sandy shore. Doug was watching the surf when he saw police officers coming down the beach, pointing at him. He bolted but didn’t make it far. Within moments, he collided with a police car and the cops piled on top of him.

The Prison

Justice for the brothers was swift. Doug pled guilty to robbing 17 TABs and four banks; Peter admitted to the same crimes, plus the two TABs he’d hit alone. A jury acquitted Peter of intent to cause grievous bodily harm to Ray Koch but found him guilty of the lesser charge of using a firearm to resist arrest.

The judge sentenced the twins to 17 years, but on appeal the state argued that they deserved more jail time. They’d left countless victims in their wake. There were the bank tellers and the customers who’d been traumatized by the brothers’ crimes. There was also Rick Hasty, who for the next 15 years wouldn’t speak to anyone about his terrifying encounter with Peter. He drank to forget, costing him two marriages, and moved to a cul-de-sac in the countryside, where he still lives today, often venturing alone into the Outback. Then there was Koch, who survived his injuries, but not without consequence. Doctors were in such a hurry to save his life they didn’t have time to scan the 32 pints of blood—donated by friends and Heathcote locals—his surgery required. Many suspected it had been infected with hepatitis, which took Koch’s life 16 years later. “So Morgan actually did kill him,” Hasty told me.

As a result of the state’s appeal, Doug’s sentence was increased to more than 20 years, and Peter’s to nearly 22. “The longest sentence from a robbery in Victorian history,” Peter boasted to me. Doug served almost 11 years, and Peter 12, both at Pentridge Prison, known for its strict security measures and notorious inmates.

While behind bars, Peter and Doug’s wives divorced them, and the brothers faced violence from fellow inmates and guards. Doug told me that there were times he wanted to kill himself but found strength by pretending he was a tough-as-nails John Wayne character. He also developed a mantra: “Hang yourself on Thursday.” Meaning give it a few days—by then you’ll forget what was so depressing.

During our conversations, both Peter and Doug expressed remorse for their criminal acts, attributing them to youthful stupidity. “I have a chronic guilty conscience of what I did, on all levels,” Peter said. Doug posts videos of himself on Facebook that often delve into his feelings of regret. He records them the moment he wakes up, which he says is when his thoughts are clearest. Some are strikingly raw and poetic, such as his memory of standing on a hilltop before a robbery, watching a town’s “streetlights flicker on, the smoke escaping from the chimneys, the people keeping warm, innocently going about their business.”

He concludes: “I never forgot sitting there on that hill and how peaceful the town was. But I was not a bringer of peace. I was a bringer of grief.”

The final competition between the Morgan brothers is over their legacy, as each man seeks to prove who was the better thief and who became the better man.

Today, Doug leads tours of the old prison where he did his stretch, which ceased operations in 1997. Parts of the facility have been remade into the ritzy Interlude hotel, where guests stay in converted-cell suites and take a dip in the softly lit subterranean swimming pool. Doug told me that tourists often ask questions about the time he served: “What was it like?” “How did you make it through?” Doug might say something glib in the moment, but then chew over his response for days until he falls upon something closer to the truth.

Peter despises that his brother is a tour guide, calling him a “show pony.” But Doug told me that he doesn’t do it for the fame or the money. He says that he enjoys meeting people and talking to them. Often, after a tour, he’ll go to a chic bar inside the old prison called the BrewDog, where he’s served free beer, and swap stories with the people from his tours—locals, foreign tourists, even a cop once.

Doug likes to present himself as a loner. He’s had girlfriends since prison, but he told me that he never lets them spend the night. He took up painting behind bars and likes to capture scenes of isolation: a red mug in the corner of a white room, Ned Kelly seated alone in darkness, a tumbledown shack on a barren plain. The bush features prominently in Doug’s artwork, and he romanticizes his time alone there, running from the law.

But there are signs that he craves real community. After his release from prison, he got interested in charity work and became a Salvation Army volunteer. He still takes on construction jobs, even at the age of 70, because he enjoys mentoring younger carpenters. And he posts video diaries online, reaching into the ether for connection.

Peter told me that his parents were never affectionate. He recalled one time sitting in the back seat of the car with his mother, grandmother, and brother. “I pretended to be asleep so I could lean against my grandmother and get cuddled,” Peter said. “I got that from my grandmother, not my mother.” Perhaps somewhere in that Rosebud-like memory lies the origin of the Morgan brothers’ intense rivalry: Maybe as boys, Doug and Peter had to compete for scarce attention, affirmation, and love from their parents. It’s a rivalry that has lasted their whole lives. It didn’t surprise me, then, to hear that Peter, too, had tried his hand at painting, and was endeavoring to get a charity startup off the ground.

Both men were hobbled by leg injuries sustained during their nighttime bush escapes, but apart from a matching limp, the twins are no longer identical. Doug wears his brown hair long and has a tangled beard; Peter is mostly bald, with a neat white mustache. Peter, who retired from construction, told me that Doug’s Facebook videos are ruining the quiet life he tried to create for himself. Doug frequently portrays Peter as an egomaniac trapped in his gangster past. He points to Peter’s use of “ADB” in his email address, short for After Dark Bandit. Peter told me that he chose ADB because “AfterDarkBandit” was already taken—by Doug.

Peter claims that Doug was just his “gopher” and “sidekick” during the robberies, and yet Doug, because of his charity work, painting, and prison tours, has spent more time in the limelight in recent years than Peter has. Peter is planning to write a memoir, titled The Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth. Doug, of course, is considering a memoir of his own.

The final competition between the Morgan brothers is over their legacy, as each man seeks to prove who was the better thief and who became the better man. Their feud has reached its climax; neither brother knows where the other lives.

On a cloudy day in Melbourne in December 2023, Doug led his son, Michael, along with Michael’s wife and son, on a private tour through Pentridge’s B division, where the ground floor has been preserved. Doug walked his grandson into a small, dimly lit cell. “That’s your whole life,” Doug said. “You lived there all day. How would you like that for being a bank robber?”

Michael was shocked by the tour. “I never expected it to be so barbaric,” he told Doug. “From the outside, I don’t know what I expected. It just wasn’t this. These old, tiny, shitty cells.” It was the first time Michael had been past the visiting area. As a kid, he relished prison visits with his dad. “They take you down the path in the building, down to the garden, and these big old metal doors open,” Michael remembered. “It was always joyful, because in the garden I got to see my dad. He’d always have a Crunch bar for me.”

Doug, too, felt joy when his son visited, but a sense of melancholy, too. He told me about the time Michael pulled a tee out of his pocket, because his new stepdad was teaching him how to play golf. “I look at it and I go, ‘Well, if I was still a free man, he would be playing football, but now another man is raising my son,’ ” Doug said. “That’s when I realized a lot about the cost of crime.”

Michael is a successful salesman and marketing manager. I asked him if he’d ever thought about how he’d managed to break the cycle of crime that started with his grandfather. He said that he never really considered a life on the wrong side of the law. Sure, he’d felt a little rebellious toward the police as a kid, having witnessed them ransack his home searching for Doug—much like what Doug had experienced when law enforcement came looking for Kay. But Michael also experienced the consequences of crime, the visits to Pentridge where he could see his dad but never leave with him. “You have to live it,” he said, “[seeing] your parent in prison.”

Then Michael smirked. “It’s too hard these days anyway,” he added. He meant robbing banks.

Watch It Burn

Watch It Burn

Two scammers, a web of betrayal, and Europe’s fraud of the century.

By Jessica Camille Aguirre

The Atavist Magazine, No. 148

Jessica Camille Aguirre is a writer and magazine journalist whose work focuses on climate change and extremes. Her reporting has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, n+1, Harper’s Magazine, and The New York Review of Books, among other publications, and has been anthologized in the Best American Science and Nature Writing series. She is currently working on a book about Biosphere 2 and how re-creating nature shaped our understanding of the planet.

Editor: Jonah Ogles
Art Director: Ed Johnson
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checkers: Kyla Jones and Alma Beauvais
Illustrator: Stefano Summo

Published in February 2024.

A good scammer sees opportunity everywhere, including their own downfall. In 2006, the police showed up at Gustav Daphne’s house in Beverly Hills. They had come once before, when a neighbor complained about his trash. Daphne happened to be swimming in his pool at the time, and because he is French, he came to the front door in a tiny little bathing suit. The police were appalled; they gave him a reprimand about storing his garbage more tidily and scurried away.

This time was different. The cops came straight into the house. There were a dozen of them, wearing bulletproof vests. They took him outside in handcuffs and put him in a car. Maybe he was paranoid, having built a multimillion-dollar empire on fraud and deceit, nurturing connections with international criminal rings, but at first he thought that he was being kidnapped. When he saw the jail, he was relieved.

The feeling was short-lived. The jail was cleaner than those in Europe where he’d been held, but after a couple of hours he demanded a cigarette and was informed that smoking was prohibited. OK, he thought. There must be a way. There’s always a way. He would find the right people, negotiate the right conditions. He had to smoke! He loved to smoke. He loved it more than anything, except for women. He loved women! And smoking, and art, and shopping.

He found someone in the prison whom everyone called El Gordo, a Mexican guy who could hook people up with anything. Daphne asked for cigarettes and was given an address on the outside where he would need to have $300 delivered. This was not a problem. He didn’t crave money, but it was useful, so he accrued it. His mansion had once belonged to a silent film star; he sometimes commuted by helicopter. There wasn’t much Daphne couldn’t afford.

After Daphne’s cousin drove a Bentley to a shady neighborhood and made the cash drop on his behalf, Daphne went back to El Gordo to collect his cigarettes. El Gordo looked at him, then gave him a nicotine patch. “No smoking in prison,” El Gordo said.

By the time Daphne was extradited to Europe to face money laundering charges, which was the reason he’d been arrested in the first place, he had kicked his cigarette habit. He felt great. He was buoyant with health. He boarded a plane to Switzerland in handcuffs, was whisked to a prison near the Alps, and was put in a cell. Waiting for him there was a pouch of tobacco. He resisted for a few hours. Then he smoked the whole thing.

Eventually, Daphne was sent to a prison in France, where he could get anything he wanted: magazines, special meals, the Israeli cigarettes he preferred. His lawyer could also bring him things. So when he saw a segment on TV about climate change policy, he asked his lawyer to bring him more information about France’s plans to reduce emissions. Daphne had a preternatural ability to sniff out criminal prospects, and he’d caught a familiar whiff.

When Daphne read the materials his lawyer provided him, he learned about Europe’s carbon-emissions trading system, the first of its kind in the world. It had grown out of the Kyoto Protocol, the landmark international agreement to reduce global emissions. Sure enough, Daphne told me, he saw the blueprint for what would become his next illicit enterprise. As soon as he’d finished his time in prison, he began gaming the new emissions-trading system.

The scam would help Daphne accrue even more money, and it would make him famous. In the media he cut a dashing figure, partying with celebrities and oligarchs. He maintained his slim physique by avoiding carbohydrates like they were venom and dressed in blazers cut from blue velvet or embroidered with shimmering brocade flowers. He liked to wear a diamond-encrusted Chopard sun pendant on his partially bared chest and was rarely photographed without one of his hundreds of pairs of Tom Ford sunglasses, all aviator-style with gradient lenses. Always, it seemed, he had a cigarette hanging out of the side of his mouth.

Reporters dubbed Daphne the “prince of carbon,” but it wasn’t just his flamboyant charisma that elevated him to criminal royalty. So did the nature of his new fraud. Daphne was scamming the fight against climate change by exploiting a policy flaw that left billions for the taking.

No one was ever sure who was working with whom, who might be screwing someone else over, or who had started the whole thing.

I should say here that Gustav Daphne is a pseudonym. He remains a wanted man in France, so when I traveled to meet with him at his gated villa in Tel Aviv, he agreed to speak on the condition that I not use his name—any of his names. (He has a few aliases.) He kept saying what a bad idea it was to talk to me. He had turned over a new leaf, he insisted, and like a freshly avowed ascetic, he nurtured a few simple pleasures: taking his impeccably trained Belgian Malinois on sunset walks along the beach; going horseback riding with his daughters. He tried to steer clear of trouble, though it occasionally sought him out. A few weeks before we met, some masked guys on a motorcycle drove by firing guns at his home; when I visited, the front door was being replaced.

Still, his name is all over the French media. I warned him that, at least in some circles, a pseudonym would be a pretty weak shield for his identity. That was OK with him. He said that he wanted to put the past behind him and focus on his new ventures, like crypto investing. So, no name.

During my visit, Daphne took calls from his lawyers and asked favors of his wife and flirted with acquaintances over WhatsApp. He wore his Tom Ford sunglasses indoors and out. He showed me his art: a large Kandinsky painting in the foyer, a few Chagalls downstairs. The villa had some burly guys on staff and a cleaner from Sri Lanka who picked up after two fluffy indoor dogs that liked to avail themselves of the plush white carpets.

All this is part of Daphne’s downsized lifestyle. He used to have a bigger mansion, with a swimming pool and a tennis court, a gym and a movie theater. He once parked his yacht in the glittering harbors of the Côte d’Azur. But he has fashioned a new life for himself in Israel, which has yet to grant France’s request for his extradition.

Daphne wanted me to know that to him the carbon scam was a negligible chapter in a long and successful criminal career. It wasn’t his most lucrative scheme; it wasn’t even the first opportunity he’d pursued in the lumpish market of environmental interventions conceived by a civilization in ecological peril. Plus, he was just one of many people who ripped off the emissions-trading system.

Daphne and other scammers’ pillaging of Europe’s carbon market constitutes what the media have called “the fraud of the century”—billions of euros were stolen in a matter of months. The shadowy scheme attracted established crime rings and amateur hucksters alike, many of whom knew each other. But the scam lent itself to duplicity: No one was ever sure who was working with whom, who might be screwing someone else over, or who had started the whole thing. Its web reached the boxing rings of Las Vegas, the offices of Germany’s biggest bank, the caves along the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan where Osama bin Laden was hiding, and the gilded restaurants of Paris, where it also left blood spattered on the streets. It pulled in a playboy demi-celebrity, an Afghan refugee, a flashy street hustler who couldn’t accumulate enough bling, an immaculate businessman who hobnobbed with the queen of England, the doyenne of Marseille’s underground, and a man some people called the Brain.

The Brain’s real name is Grégory Zaoui, and he claims that the entire scam was his idea. Even though the fraud sprouted across Europe, Zaoui insists that he was the only person smart enough to have planted the seed. Daphne, he says, gets far too much credit for his role in ripping off the carbon market.

Zaoui is stout and broad chinned, with thick eyebrows and a sweep of dark hair. When he was involved in the carbon scam, he took pains to remain understated. He favored dress shirts in pale blue or white. Even when he was photographed alongside some of the highest-ranking politicians in France, including a president and a prime minister, his demeanor was almost retreating. When he spent money, he did it quietly; he twice rented out an entire Hermès store in central Paris so his girlfriend could shop in privacy. Journalists described him in terms they would never use for Daphne: discreet, cerebral, analytical. Even though they grew up within miles of each other, Daphne and Zaoui couldn’t be more different.

When Zaoui was hauled in front of police, some 15 years ago now, he said that he’d been betrayed. He went into the business with the wrong person, he claimed, which meant that his scheme was doomed from the start. Someone he’d once considered among his closest friends double-crossed him so wickedly that he never really reaped the rewards he deserved for being a carbon fraudster.

Zaoui agreed to meet me in Paris last May, at a restaurant in one of the city’s most luxurious hotels, the Lutetia, where a Coca-Cola costs 12 euros and an army of valets swarm the entrance. He arrived late wearing sweatpants and a raincoat, and he was in a frazzled state because he’d misplaced his card for the city’s charging stations, which he required to replenish the battery on his electric scooter. When he settled in, he wanted to set the record straight about his and Daphne’s respective roles in Europe’s carbon fraud. Until now, he told me, no one had truly understood the relationship between them. “He is the prince,” Zaoui told me. “But I am the king.”

Ever since he was a kid, Daphne was dissatisfied with the status quo. His parents moved from Algeria to a village one hour outside Paris in 1962, at the end of the Algerian War of Independence, when the pieds-noirs staged a mass exodus from the land their forebears colonized. In Daphne’s eyes, his parents were irredeemably middle-class; they cherished stability and predictability, eating the same thing for dinner on certain nights of the week (Mondays: steak and beans) and vacationing at the same place in the south of France every year during the same two weeks in August. They went to synagogue, but their suburban neighborhood was eclectic, and they were the only Jewish family who lived there. Daphne’s father was a tailor and his mother a teacher, and they saved for the kids’ bar mitzvahs and weddings by pinching pennies. They could afford the occasional luxury, but only because they were frugal. It drove Daphne crazy.

When he was 12, Daphne began purloining sleeping pills from his grandmother to trade for stuff other kids wanted to buy, including hashish. He was bombastic and impatient with school; he was more interested in exploring the larger world, which mostly meant Paris and its nightlife districts. Daphne began buying and studying the French financial newspaper Les Echos, and eventually he purchased stock in a mining company that experienced a quick jump in value, thanks to a contract it secured to help build the tunnel under the English Channel. With the money he made from trading, Daphne bought a pony.

When he was 14, he went to live with a girl in Paris, and a year later he began paying for his own apartment. His parents decided to send him to a private Jewish school in a suburb, and soon he saw opportunities for the kind of hustle he needed to support his lifestyle. He continued selling hashish and developed minor scams, silly ones. Sometimes he went around asking the girls at his school for money to buy a chocolate croissant, then pocketed what they gave him. It was easy—they were so nice, and they had so much money they didn’t care. He made 100 francs a day, about $12.

Daphne was a hopeless romantic, so he followed a love interest to university, where he studied pharmaceutical science. Then he met another woman, who was attending the Sorbonne, so he went there. He transferred to a third university, met his future wife while chasing another woman through Israel, and brought the former back to Paris. Eventually, she got pregnant and he realized that he needed to get his life together. Romance wasn’t going to pay the bills.

In the 1990s, he got a job at an insurance brokerage. He worked hard. He identified groups of people who needed coverage they weren’t getting elsewhere and made them offers. He was charming, persuasive. “People adopt me very easily,” Daphne told me. He can’t go to therapy, he said, because therapists have a bad habit of falling in love with him.

Daphne was successful. Eventually, he struck out on his own and opened insurance offices in Paris and Bordeaux. Things were going well, not outlandishly so, but his family was comfortable. Then one day some new clients walked through the door. They wanted to insure their cars, including fleets of Lamborghinis, and their lavish apartments. Daphne drew up their policies, and soon he was going with them on vacation, lounging on their yachts. He claims to have had no idea they were part of the international cocaine trade. He was just a man selling insurance and enjoying a little respite with his clients when he could get it.

Then came the moment that indelibly marked him. As Daphne tells it, he was minding his own business when law enforcement came for him and dragged him to court. He was accused of providing the traffickers with insurance certificates for items that weren’t covered by real policies and given a three-year sentence. While proceedings were still underway, he lost all his clients and his company fell apart. He swears that he was innocent, that the certificates had come from someone else, yet the government blew up his whole life. He wasn’t even 30.

Daphne vowed to show prosecutors who they were messing with. He dreamed of revenge. “If you ask me today, I can say it was stupid,” he told me. “But at that time, given the context, I said, ‘OK, I will fuck them.’ ”

By the time Zaoui was 16, he had more cash than the value of his parents’ house, and he bought himself tickets to the French Open.

A little more than 30 miles east of Daphne’s childhood home, in a rough neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris, Grégory Zaoui was also born into an immigrant family—in his case, Algerian-Tunisian. Adored by his mother and coddled by his aunts, Zaoui was a homebody. He hated the long separation from his family while he was at school. He could spend hours alone playing make-believe. One year he got a toy Range Rover from his aunts and developed an obsession with fast cars. He loved Star Wars and dreamed of being famous one day like the people who appeared on television.

On the cusp of adolescence, with virtually no friends, Zaoui began to envy what other kids had that his family didn’t. He became embarrassed by his parents’ economy Renault, and he fixated on the idea that he needed nice clothes and certain kinds of shoes. Sometimes he stopped eating; he fell into depression. Still, he nurtured ambitions. He started to do well at school and wanted to become a lawyer, then run for president.

After his bar mitzvah, Zaoui transferred to a Jewish school outside Paris—not the same one Daphne attended—and started to think that this feeling he had, of being outside things, of being apart, could be solved with money. Money wasn’t just the means to acquire the material goods he admired. It was also a path to freedom and a way to become exceptional. With his bar mitzvah cash, he purchased his first pair of Weston loafers.

His best friend from synagogue had parents who imported Levi’s wholesale, and Zaoui began to buy the jeans up. He resold them at his school at a comfortable markup, netting a few thousand francs per month. The ease of making money this way was a revelation. With the help of his mother, he began selling jeans more widely—he kept his merchandise stacked in his bedroom. At night he worked the coat check at a club in Paris that his father managed. He bootlegged movies on a VCR at home and sold those too. He started a delivery service using his scooter. By the time he was 16, he had more cash than the value of his parents’ house, and he bought himself tickets to the French Open.

Soon enough, Zaoui began importing jeans on his own and saw a way to increase his profit margin even further. In Europe, a value-added tax is typically levied at every point of sale in a supply chain. When Zaoui sold a pair of jeans, he charged the purchase price plus the state-mandated VAT, and was then supposed to surrender the VAT to the government. If he pocketed the VAT instead, he got richer. Quietly, Zaoui got into the game of VAT fraud.

Zaoui married young, but shortly after learning that his wife was pregnant with their first child, he was caught by customs and sentenced to two years in prison for his tax scheme. He was released in 1996—he served only a month on account of his good behavior—and made it home in time for his daughter’s birth. He planned to keep his future enterprises aboveboard, but after taking out loans to open a restaurant that failed, he found himself doing some import business on the side and once again pocketing the VAT.

At a certain point, Zaoui linked up with a hustler named Mardoché “Marco” Mouly, who ran scams with his brother. The Moulys paid off Zaoui’s restaurant debts and brought him in on a new company that purchased mobile phones from England, transported them to Denmark for sale, and skimmed off taxes in the process. Soon, Zaoui was making as much as 100 million francs per month from his office in the chicest neighborhood in Paris. While Marco Mouly spent the money he earned at cabarets, Zaoui considered himself a family man: He bought his loved ones Rolexes and Chanel bags.

Within a few years, the authorities became suspicious of Zaoui’s business and, in 2004, he was arrested again and sentenced to three years in prison. He appealed the decision and asked to be released while he awaited a ruling from the court. The judge granted his request on the condition that Zaoui post bail at 75,000 euros. Zaoui didn’t have that kind of cash on hand; his money was tied up in Denmark. By then he had three young children at home, aged eight, six, and three. It was early December, and Hanukkah was just beginning. Because it would take more than a week to transfer his money to France, Zaoui would have to spend the holiday in a prison cell, without his family.

Then Zaoui’s mother visited him with good news. “Be happy,” she said. “Your friend, he knew you had to get out, so he brought us a cashier’s check for 75,000 euros, which we just deposited with the court. Soon you’ll be out.” Zaoui left the visiting room and packed his things. When he was released, his wife was waiting for him with a driver, and they went directly to a toy store, where he bought piles of gifts. That night he dined at home, lit the first candle of the menorah, and played with his children.

Zaoui never forgot the generosity of the man who lent him cash. He was a buddy of Zaoui’s wife’s cousin; they had bonded previously over a shared passion for cars. By coming through so unexpectedly, the man secured a place in Zaoui’s heart. One day Zaoui would repay him, this friend named Kévin El Ghazouani.

Like Daphne, the groundwork of Zaoui’s participation in carbon fraud was laid behind bars. While Zaoui was waiting for bail money, he shared a cell with a man who installed solar panels in the south of France. The man told Zaoui to get out of mobile phones; the future was in businesses that protected the environment. All day every day, the guy went on and on about it: There was money to be made in solar panels, heat pumps, geothermal energy. “Remember the movie Forrest Gump, and Bubba?” Zaoui said. “This guy was like Bubba, but with ecological commercial systems instead of shrimp.”

By the time he was released, Zaoui was convinced that getting into one of these green business ventures was worth a try. He started his own solar-panel installation company. He went to trade shows. At one of them, in 2005, he learned about Europe’s emissions-trading system, which launched that year.

Any neoclassical economist will tell you that the whole problem with the environment, the reason there’s air pollution and shitty water and pesticide contamination and industrial runoff, is that these things aren’t priced into any market. So when it started to become clear that climate change constituted a global crisis, economists proposed creating markets for emissions. In the 1990s, Europeans were adamantly against the idea; they wanted industries to be taxed directly for what they pumped into the environment. But in meetings leading up to the Kyoto Protocol, American negotiators championed a suite of so-called flexible mechanisms, including carbon markets, and prevailed. (Infamously, the U.S. then refused to ratify the agreement.) European policymakers came around and created a cap-and-trade system that would eventually cover nearly half the emissions in the EU, including those produced by the energy sector, manufacturing, and airline travel.

The way the system was supposed to work was simple enough: The EU would set an annual cap on its overall emissions, then issue various emitters a certain number of EU allowances. Each EUA would entitle its holder to emit one ton of carbon. If a company had extra EUAs at the end of the year, meaning that it hadn’t emitted all the carbon it was allowed, it could put them up for sale, and companies that had too few EUAs could buy them. Companies could also purchase carbon offsets, which basically meant investing in sustainability measures in other countries.

The plan was for Europe to issue fewer EUAs year over year, so it would become progressively more expensive to emit carbon. The logic was that by leveraging the laws of supply and demand, industries could be pushed into less carbon-intensive production methods. Companies that decarbonized quickly would have more excess EUAs to sell, and companies that moved too slowly would pay an increasingly hefty price for the allowances they needed.

What made the market interesting to scammers was the potential for VAT fraud. To understand the scheme they cooked up, it’s important to know two things: Because economic policies in Europe are aimed at facilitating trade across borders, VAT is waived on sales between EU member states. Also, since governments only want to tax the value added at each stage of the economic process, they credit or reimburse the buyers of certain products for the VAT paid to suppliers.

For example, let’s say Albert in Austria sells apples to Bernard in Belgium for 90 euros, with no VAT attached because it’s a cross-border transaction. Bernard peels the apples and sells them to Carla, also in Belgium, for 100 euros plus 20 percent VAT. Carla makes applesauce and sells it to Daniel, also in Belgium, for 150 euros plus 20 percent VAT. In a functional system, Bernard would give the Belgian government the 20 euros he collected from Carla, and Carla would pay the 30 euros she collected from Daniel, minus the 20 euros she paid to Bernard, because the government sought only to tax the value Carla added to the product by converting peeled apples into applesauce. In a complex VAT-fraud scheme, almost all the buyers and sellers in this chain would be owned by a single entity operating in the background. Law enforcement refers to this kind of operation as a carousel.

VAT fraud has existed since the inception of Europe’s tax system. Mobile phones became popular targets for scammers because the devices are small, easy to ship, and have a relatively high value. Criminals imported phones from other EU countries, sold them to consumers with VAT tacked on, pocketed the tax, and disappeared before anyone was the wiser. Or they used carousel schemes, pretending to sell phones through a chain of businesses created for the express purpose of fraud and requesting VAT reimbursements from governments at each point of sale. According to European law enforcement, VAT fraud involving mobile phones alone has siphoned billions of euros away from public budgets.

When I learned about this kind of scam, I imagined truckloads of phones moving around Europe and ghost shipments languishing in dark warehouses. In some cases, though, VAT scammers dealt in fake goods: The only things real about their schemes were the fleets of empty vans driven around to generate sham import and export records.

The carbon market presented an unprecedented opportunity for VAT fraudsters. An EUA was just a serial number on a computer. It could be transferred with the push of a button on platforms that operated like stock exchanges, and it could be bought and sold by anyone—companies in carbon-heavy industries, as well as traders and bankers speculating on price fluctuations for EUAs.

One day in 2006, shortly after the carbon market debuted, Zaoui picked up the phone and called the headquarters of Powernext, a trading platform based in Paris. The volume of EUA sales was basically null at the time. Regulators had issued too many allowances, which made them almost worthless, and traders were avoiding the market because there wasn’t much money to be made. Still, Zaoui saw promise.

In a story he has repeated to anyone who will listen, Zaoui confirmed on the call with Powernext that French companies could join the exchange. What about ones registered in other European countries?

“Yes,” came the answer.

“And non-European foreign companies?”

“Yes.”

Finally, Zaoui asked if there was a French VAT on the trade of EUAs.

“Of course.”

Every time an allowance changed hands in France, the seller was supposed to collect VAT. Because there was no value added in the process—the EUA wasn’t made into applesauce—the buyer would get a VAT reimbursement. To defraud the system, then, someone could set up a carousel: buy EUAs VAT-free from outside France, sell them on Powernext with VAT tacked on, and get reimbursed.

Unlike VAT fraud with mobile phones, no empty vans were required. The carbon market rendered even the pretense of real-world trade unnecessary because its product was an absence, an unemitted ton of gas. All someone needed to exploit the system was a good internet connection that allowed them to make trade after trade among the entities in their carousel. As one scammer told me, “It was easier than sending an email.”

Daphne’s wife asked him to exude respectability when they were scheduled to meet with the school’s director. He arrived in a stretch Hummer.

While Daphne appealed his conviction for forging documents for the cocaine traffickers, he began to build an empire. He knew about VAT fraud in mobile phones, so like Zaoui and many other scammers that’s where he focused his efforts. His fortune was favored, as it so often had been, by a mix of happenstance and the force of his unabashed personality. During a trip to London—he was allowed to travel during the appeals process—he was drinking chamomile tea in the Four Seasons when he noticed a man wearing a green tie that had Nokia phones printed on it. He couldn’t stop staring; what a strange sartorial choice. He struck up a conversation. Soon, the man became one of Daphne’s most important UK partners in his VAT scheme.

By the time the French judge upheld Daphne’s conviction and increased his sentence to four years, Daphne was already living in Israel, and there was no way he was returning to France. He made contacts and built extensive networks of people willing to help him import and export fake goods, and he traveled around the world despite the risk it carried. On Mondays and Tuesdays, he went to London; on Wednesdays, he was in Madrid; on Thursdays and Fridays, he traveled to Marbella to oversee business in Malaga and Seville. Every Friday, he would fly to Tel Aviv to celebrate Shabbat with his family.

In 2005, Daphne moved to Los Angeles and set his family up in Beverly Hills. He swam in his pool and smoked in his mansion. He made a big donation to a private school to secure admission for his children. Daphne’s wife asked him to exude respectability when they were scheduled to meet with the school’s director. He arrived in a stretch Hummer.

Los Angeles was fun, but it didn’t last long. The year after he arrived was when the police came for him, and El Gordo wouldn’t give him cigarettes, and he was extradited to Switzerland. The money laundering charges he faced there were eventually dropped, but he still had to serve out the remainder of the French prison sentence he’d tried so hard to avoid. If there was a silver lining to the whole thing, it was learning about the carbon market. Daphne was able to plot out his new scam while counting down the days to his release.

Daphne told me that he was initially interested in a different program born of the Kyoto Protocol. Called REDD, it allowed polluters in developed countries to offset carbon emissions by paying developing countries not to cut down trees. Like the carbon market, REDD relied on nonexistent products—essentially, pledges to leave forests and their stores of carbon untouched. But how to verify that these pledges were serious or to measure their success? In truth, many people didn’t care. To Daphne, it seemed that REDD involved transactions in which the least amount of information was preferable, trades in which what appeared to be the case was more important than what really was. The whole thing relied on an attractive idea, and scrutinizing it too closely threatened to upend it. “So much bullshit,” Daphne said.

But what was bad for the planet was good for him. While in prison, Daphne kept the front companies from his mobile phone scheme alive, paying roughly 10,000 euros per month to compensate each of the straw managers that owned them on paper. When he saw that the companies might be useful in exploiting climate-change mitigation products, including EUAs, he made some inquiries. “A few months before I was released, I talked to this guy,” Daphne said. He wouldn’t say the man’s name on the record. “I told him about the companies, and we talked about the EUAs, the Kyoto Protocol and everything.”

They agreed to work together, and Daphne’s new partner hired some accountants and registered three companies on Powernext. But these weren’t Daphne’s old fronts.

“What were the three companies?” I asked him.

“Alors, now we have a problem,” he replied. Because they were companies that Grégory Zaoui claimed were his.

Once Zaoui confirmed that the EUAs were subject to VAT, he made an experimental trade, buying 30,000 euros’ worth of VAT-free EUAs from the Netherlands, then selling them with VAT included. It worked exactly as he had hoped. Just like that, he was 6,000 euros richer. He couldn’t believe how easy it was, and how dumb. “How did they come up with this stupid idea of applying a VAT on an asset that is immaterial?” Zaoui remembers thinking.

Now all Zaoui needed was a backer, someone whose money he could use to buy the allowances necessary to get the whole scheme rolling. He first reached out to one of his existing business partners, a powerful woman named Christiane Melgrani, who ran a fraud ring in Marseille. Zaoui and Melgrani were close; when one of his children was born, she traveled to Paris and gave his wife a gift of 50,000 euros. But by the time Zaoui was ready to game the carbon market, Melgrani had been arrested for an unrelated scheme. Worse still, a chunk of Zaoui’s money that was tied up with Melgrani through some Spanish bank accounts became inaccessible.

Zaoui knew that his scheme was a guaranteed moneymaker, so he figured he’d be doing a favor to anyone he went into business with. He remembered the man who’d bailed him out of jail in time for Hanukkah, Kévin El Ghazouani. Who better to do a favor for? Zaoui contacted El Ghazouani. “I’m going to bring you something where you’re going to make more money than you’ve ever made in your life,” Zaoui told him. “But at the outset, you have to invest a few hundred thousand euros.”

According to Zaoui, El Ghazouani came over to his office, on a quiet avenue near the Champs-Élysées, to talk. Zaoui told him that they’d have to be patient, waiting in the wild like crocodiles. In 2008, the EU would issue fewer carbon allowances, driving EUA prices up and finally creating more trading volume. When that happened, Zaoui would use one of the companies he already owned, Marceau Trade, as his main front. “And then, tac!” Zaoui said. He slapped his hands together like a crocodile’s jaw.

El Ghazouani didn’t say yes right away. He thought about it for a few days, then came back to Zaoui’s office. “Here’s my proposal,” he said, according to Zaoui. (El Ghazouani didn’t respond to my requests for comment, and his lawyer declined to talk.) El Ghazouani didn’t want to become a partner with Zaoui in Marceau Trade; he didn’t know how the company was set up or whether it had liabilities. He wanted to use other companies. According to Zaoui, El Ghazouani had already created four: Crépuscule, V&A Corporation, Azimat, and Golden Vector. “I’ll bring in some of my own managers, and we’ll do everything,” El Ghazouani told Zaoui. “We’ll start with a blank sheet of paper, and since we’ve got a lot of time because it’s not going to start right away, we’ll do it together.”

Zaoui and El Ghazouani agreed to split the profits evenly and got to work. Zaoui told me that they established one new trading company together—they named it Energy Stock Market—and made Crépuscule a brokerage that could both trade directly and make trades on behalf of the other entities on the Powernext platform. (Registering a brokerage in France involves an arduous application process, but Zaoui had gone through it with Marceau Trade and knew what to do.) Their companies were registered both in France and abroad, allowing the men to take advantage of VAT-free cross-border trades. El Ghazouani recruited people to “lead” the companies, poor guys from the suburbs of Paris who worked in restaurants, as trash collectors, as delivery drivers—men who would agree without hesitation to put their name on a piece of paper in exchange for a chunk of money.

In the spring and early summer of 2007, before they’d even started making trades, Zaoui and El Ghazouani would meet up in the morning and go to a cybercafé or a McDonald’s with free Wi-Fi—Zaoui told me they wanted to work from public IP addresses that couldn’t be linked to them. To make their businesses seem legitimate, they logged on to Powernext every day and sent emails from company addresses. The men got along well. El Ghazouani was slightly younger than Zaoui, and he hailed from Morocco, where he’d made money in a luxury car service. Although he’d recently married a former Miss Europe, he maintained the lifestyle of a bachelor. Meanwhile, Zaoui’s marriage was falling apart—his wife wasn’t interested in the wealth and power that obsessed him, and for months Zaoui had been having an affair with a TV personality who was wildly jealous and absorbed far too much of his time.

Zaoui had the sense that everything was building toward an apogee. “I knew that the beginning of 2008 was going to be explosive,” he said. “I was sure of myself. I had no doubts.”

The sense of imminent change seemed to suffuse his whole life. One day, Zaoui was headed home on his motorcycle when he saw a woman who was walking in the same direction he was riding. He couldn’t see her face, only her long hair swinging as she walked. He could tell that she was beautiful by the way she held herself. As he passed her, he turned to catch a glimpse of her face and saw that it was a woman he’d known in his adolescence.

Her name was Chirelle, and they’d had a fling on the beach one summer when he was a teenager. He had seen her again, years later, after he got married. He was rich by then and had taken all his cars with him on vacation to Cannes: his Ferrari, Mercedes, Porsche, Rolls Royce, all loaded on the back of a truck. When a valet at a casino pulled Zaoui’s car for the night—a Lamborghini Murciélago he’d modified so the engine was extra loud—everyone in the vicinity turned to look, and there was Chirelle, staring at him with her big green eyes. They hadn’t spoken then, just looked at each other as he got into his car with his wife and drove away.

Now Zaoui circled the block on his motorcycle, stopped next to Chirelle, and took off his helmet. She recognized him right away. “Are you hungry?” he asked her. They went to eat around the corner, at a restaurant run by the famous chef Alain Ducasse, and when he got home that night Zaoui knew that he wanted to spoil Chirelle like no man had ever spoiled a woman. He bought her a Bugatti in green, like her eyes. When she asked him what he did for work, he replied, “I work for the protection of the environment.”

It was late summer 2007 when everything changed. Zaoui and El Ghazouani had been seeing less of each other, meeting only once a week or so. One morning, Zaoui went to a café and tried to log on to the accounts of one of their firms. He got a message saying that his password was incorrect. He tried a second time, and when it failed again he became suspicious. There were only two people in the world who had access to the accounts, and he was one of them. He called El Ghazouani. “What’s going on?” he asked.

They agreed to speak in person. According to Zaoui, at the meeting El Ghazouani divulged that he’d overinvested. “I’m up to 300,000 euros,” he said. “I can’t keep it up anymore.” Without telling Zaoui, El Ghazouani had made a deal with someone else, giving them control of the companies. He made it sound like he was in dire straits, like he needed the money the deal would generate so badly that he didn’t have a choice.

Zaoui found it all baffling. If they’d just waited until the carbon market picked up, they would have made a fortune. Zaoui wondered if El Ghazouani was lying, but the two men had been through so much together, and Zaoui still felt fondness toward his friend. They debated what the companies were worth, and Zaoui demanded a cut of what El Ghazouani said he’d netted from offloading them. Eventually, El Ghazouani paid him 80,000 euros.

Losing the companies was a major setback, but Zaoui was still sure he was onto something big, so he tried to focus on the road ahead. He wanted to register a new brokerage that would only make deals for other trading companies, never skimming the VAT directly off trades of its own. In the event that other scammers began defrauding the carbon market, something Zaoui was confident would happen, he would offer his brokerage’s trading services for a commission.

The problem was that he lacked capital. He needed more than the 80,000 euros he’d received from El Ghazouani. He wanted investors, people who were serious about his vision. Zaoui reached out to people who had money at their disposal. One of them was Daphne.

The two men knew each other in passing from the world of mobile phone VAT fraud. Daphne remembered Zaoui showing up for dinner one night in Beverly Hills. They moved in the same circles, knew the same people. El Ghazouani had talked to Zaoui about Daphne, rhapsodizing about his business acumen.

By the time Zaoui called Daphne, it was early 2008. Daphne had gotten out of prison on parole and fled France, returning to Israel. According to Daphne, Zaoui said he’d “found something amazing,” and Daphne told him that he’d retired from scamming to spend time on things that brought him pleasure, including a stable where he kept racehorses. “I don’t work anymore at all. I don’t want to do anything. I’m with my horses,” Daphne said. Zaoui pressed him: “It’s really amazing. I need two million euros, please. Just trust me.” Daphne remained a firm no.

Undeterred by his streak of bad luck, Zaoui kept looking for funding. He eventually borrowed some from an acquaintance, which he used to found a company called Coer2 Commodities. As he predicted, the carbon market grew. In fact it exploded. As Europe reduced the number of allowances available to trade, the price of EUAs went up, and the market attracted more attention. The average trading volume in late 2008 was less than two million allowances per day, which represented an equivalent number of metric tons of carbon. Just a few months later, it was up to seven million per day. It reached 15 million in late May 2009, and early June saw a record of nearly 20 million. Many of these trades happened on BlueNext, which succeeded Powernext in late 2007 and grew to become the continent’s largest carbon exchange.

Broadly speaking, the value of the global carbon market, in which the European cap-and-trade system was by far the largest player, more than doubled between 2007 and 2009, reaching $144 billion. As the U.S. housing-market implosion ignited a worldwide financial crisis, it seemed as though EUAs offered a plush little haven in a global minefield of bad investments. “Unlike other markets, the carbon market hasn’t collapsed despite the fact that carbon as an asset is still somewhere between infancy and childhood,” Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said in March 2009.

What politicians had yet to realize was that the market was rife with fraud. As word spread through criminal networks about the easy money to be made from allowances, scammers all over Europe—and in some cases outside it—flocked to carbon-trading platforms. Once she was out of prison, Christiane Melgrani joined the fray. Zaoui’s old business partner Marco Mouly did, too, bringing along a glamorous Parisian playboy named Arnaud Mimran, who was later implicated in two murders and convicted of a kidnapping related to his carbon dealings. Many fraudsters sought relationships with big banks that could broker trades on carbon exchanges. Mohammad Safdar Gohir, a Brit who submitted more than 100 million euros in VAT-reimbursement claims to German authorities, called his contact at Deutsche Bank his “golden goose.” Some scammers funneled their spoils into terrorism; evidence of profits from a VAT scheme were found in a cave once occupied by Osama bin Laden.

In Zaoui’s view, some of the newcomers were sloppy. He made sure that his new brokerage was aboveboard, at least on paper. By poaching more than a dozen traders and bankers from serious financial firms, he manufactured a veneer of respectability; many of his employees had no idea he was involved in fraud. To bolster its image further, his firm expanded to include legitimate trading in crude-oil futures, gold, natural gas, and metals. Its analysts gave quotes to news agencies like Reuters. Zaoui told me that he made 80,000 to 100,000 euros a day from legal business alone.

Meanwhile, he was quietly doing what he had long plotted: taking commissions from companies that used his brokerage’s services to skim VAT from carbon trades. Zaoui estimated that he made hundreds of millions of euros from his illicit business, although he wouldn’t provide precise figures or share details about where all the money wound up. He was convinced that the cunning of his approach would shield him from ever getting caught. “I made a colossal profit as a broker, and what I did behind the scenes, nobody knew,” Zaoui told me. “The best way to go unnoticed is to be noticed. Like Goebbels said, ‘The bigger the lie, the more people believe it.’ ”

In the summer of 2008, Zaoui got a call from Igal Abikzer, the man who had first introduced him to Kévin El Ghazouani. “You know El Ghazouani is making a mockery of you,” Abikzer told Zaoui, according to legal documents.

Abikzer proceeded to share what he knew: El Ghazouani never offloaded the companies he ran with Zaoui. He retained control of the firms, including Crépuscule, so that he could run the VAT scam that Zaoui claimed was his idea. El Ghazouani had dumped Zaoui and was now in cahoots with someone else: Daphne. “Everyone in Israel knows,” Abikzer said.

Abikzer had come by these details inadvertently. One day, he called a friend in Israel who at that precise moment happened to be with Daphne. During their conversation, Abikzer heard a computer in the background receive a Skype call. Daphne answered, and it sounded to Abikzer like El Ghazouani was on the other end of the call. “Reconnect the computer. It disconnected,” he heard El Ghazouani say.

As soon as Abikzer hung up with his friend, he called El Ghazouani. “What’s up?” Abikzer asked. “Did your computer reconnect?”

The question seemed to catch El Ghazouani off guard. “Yeah, yeah, it works,” he replied.

After that, Abikzer learned that El Ghazouani was going around making fun of Zaoui for his misplaced trust, his naiveté. For Zaoui, the betrayal was grating. So was the revelation that Daphne had lied to him about being retired from scamming.

But there were things Zaoui didn’t know—things that surely would have angered him even more. Daphne told me that when Zaoui asked him for money in 2008, he had already set up a small apartment as an office in Tel Aviv and recruited a team of guys he knew to orchestrate carbon trades and funnel the stolen VAT to overseas accounts. Daphne was also using at least some of the companies Zaoui thought only he and El Ghazouani were running. “He was calling me, but he didn’t know I was already in,” Daphne said of Zaoui. “My God, they are so stupid, these guys.”

Daphne claimed that Crépuscule was his company from the start, something that as far as I knew he had never said publicly before. He told me that he established it long before carbon fraud was even possible; he initially used it to steal VAT from phone sales. Daphne still wouldn’t give me the name of the friend he went into business with while he was in prison, but based on what he was saying about Crépuscule, the man had to be El Ghazouani. And if Daphne and El Ghazouani were scheming together all along, that meant an unwitting Zaoui was working for Daphne when he set up Crépuscule as a brokerage on Powernext.

Zaoui suspected that El Ghazouani had betrayed him out of greed: Daphne had more money than Zaoui did, and a bigger profile in the fraud world. As for Daphne, Zaoui developed a different theory about his motives. “I was always with beautiful women, I had beautiful cars, I was with people in the artistic world. I didn’t hang out with thugs,” Zaoui told me. “I was naturally brilliant and it pissed him off. And then he stole from me.”

Zaoui said that once he learned the truth, he vowed to avoid doing deals with companies linked to Daphne and El Ghazouani, if he could help it. It’s a war, he told himself. But as the carbon market accelerated and the number of trading entities ballooned, it became increasingly difficult to discern who was connected to what. One person I spoke with in the French justice system, who asked that their name be withheld because they weren’t authorized to comment on the record, told me that it was impossible to know the depth of the carbon scammers’ collaboration or deception. When it came to Zaoui, Daphne, and El Ghazouani, “Sometimes they worked together, sometimes they didn’t—it depended on the company and the moment. It’s a jigsaw puzzle.”

In the fall of 2008, Zaoui confronted El Ghazouani in Paris. They met at a spot called the Milk Café in the Second Arrondissement, an opulent business neighborhood on the Right Bank. Any lingering affection Zaoui had for El Ghazouani was long gone. He was furious. “Listen, I know what you’ve done,” Zaoui said. “It’s a shame, because we could have made a lot of money.”

The first entity in Europe to sound the alarm on carbon fraud seems to have been the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations, or CDC, France’s state-owned bank. It was releasing millions of euros in VAT reimbursements to bank accounts set up in countries that weren’t signatories to the Kyoto Protocol, and its employees got suspicious. According to Marius-Cristian Frunza, a prominent European VAT-fraud expert, between October 2008 and the following June, the CDC sent 13 statements of concern about 35 companies to Tracfin, the French government agency that analyzes financial data for fraud. During the same time period, BlueNext sent at least nine additional alerts.

Tracfin had relationships with various financial institutions, including banks, private companies, and trading platforms; it was able to take tips from whistleblowers and keep their identities secret. After following up on reports from the CDC and BlueNext, Tracfin decided to take the matter to the customs police, who began to tease apart the carbon market’s layers of shell companies and straw managers, preparing cases they could take to court.

By June 2009, French authorities realized that VAT fraud was rampant. At a loss for what else to do, they announced that EUAs would now be exempt from VAT, and they shut down carbon trading for two days. Still, no one in the government was willing to admit that the country’s public coffers had been looted, and badly. “There is a risk of VAT fraud, so as a preventative measure we are changing the VAT regime,” a representative of the French Budget Ministry told Reuters. “There has been no evidence of VAT fraud. It is only a rumor … but it could have potentially hurt BlueNext’s ability to compete, so we had to react.” Overnight, France’s carbon market crashed.

When the French accounting office tallied how much money VAT fraudsters had stolen, it came to 1.6 billion euros. Among the worst offenders were the people behind Crépuscule. Data put together by Frunza show that the company made trades amounting to 65 million metric tons’ worth of carbon—the same volume moved by financial giants Société General and Deutsche Bank, representing half the allowances distributed to French industries. All told, Crépuscule’s trades were worth 827 million euros, and prosecutors would soon claim that those same trades had been used to pilfer some 150 million euros in VAT.

Zaoui was pissed off. Why should he be held accountable for carbon crimes committed by a company that, in his view, had been stolen out from under him?

On December 8, 2009, the police came to Zaoui’s apartment in Paris. His dogs, Anakin and Bugatti, started barking, and he immediately knew who was on the other side of the door. He texted Chirelle: “6 in the morning, cops raid.” Then he flushed his SIM cards down the toilet—all except one, which he dropped on the bathroom floor. Zaoui ripped up some work papers and flushed them too. It took two minutes for him to open the door, still in his underwear. The police drove him to Coer2’s offices on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, where they went through various computers.

A few days into custody, when Zaoui had a chance to review the files in the case against him, he realized that he was being investigated for Crépuscule’s crimes. The police had connected him to the company through phone taps related to mobile phone VAT fraud, but El Ghazouani had also been picked up for interrogation, and Zaoui believed his ex-friend had given the police his name and intimated that he was the brain behind the entire operation. Zaoui was pissed off. Why should he be held accountable for carbon crimes committed by a company that, in his view, had been stolen out from under him?

At the time, France kept fraud suspects in a prison called La Santé. Zaoui could only shower three times a week, and the cell he shared with three other men was tiny, less than 100 square feet. One of the men, also suspected of being a carbon scammer, knew Daphne. Zaoui asked the man if he had a phone number for Daphne, and one Friday night Zaoui called his rival in fraud.

“Listen to me,” he told Daphne. “I don’t want any money. I’m not asking you for money to pay my lawyers or anything. I’m in this situation where this case isn’t mine, and you know that very well. You took the companies over through Kévin. Now Kévin is blaming everything on me.”

Daphne was silent.

“I am just asking you for one thing,” Zaoui said. “Get me out of here. Tell me the story I need to tell. A name, something to get me out.”

What Daphne heard was a threat: If someone else didn’t come forward and take the fall for Crépuscule, Zaoui was going to tell law enforcement everything he knew.

“Ah, OK, Grégory Zaoui. I’ll call you back,” Daphne said lightly. Zaoui had contacted him on a phone registered in Daphne’s legal name. After hanging up, Daphne grabbed one of his other phones, a burner, and called Zaoui back.

“Listen, you son of a bitch. First of all, you call me from jail? It’s not very nice,” said Daphne. “Second of all, you can go as far as you want. If you want to push, I can find a lot of things against you beyond this case. So cool down.”

But Zaoui didn’t back off. He was miserable in prison. The only thing that could keep his spirits up was Chirelle’s visits. She made him laugh and forget where he was. They had sex surreptitiously in the visiting room. A few months into his detention, they found out that she was pregnant, a miracle baby. Zaoui had to get out of La Santé.

During another interrogation, Zaoui told the police about how El Ghazouani had betrayed him. “I will explain to you how we get from El Ghazouani to the person in Israel,” he said, referring to Daphne. He gave the police Daphne’s name and one of the aliases he used to travel. He gave them Daphne’s phone numbers, his addresses, the names of his businesses. Zaoui told them about a bar Daphne owned in Tel Aviv and about his posh villa. Zaoui told them everything.

There is a photograph of Daphne, at his eldest son’s bar mitzvah in 2010, striding along an empty patio next to a gleaming swimming pool. He’s wearing white snakeskin boots and immaculate white slacks, a tuxedo shirt under a purple satin evening coat with long tails. His gold-trimmed Tom Ford sunglasses shade his face. Behind him the lights and sound system of an enormous stage tower above lavish outdoor sofas. In the image, Daphne looks circumspect, as though he’s taking in the fruits of his labor and finding them wanting. A man surrounded by opulence, dissatisfied.

Money to Daphne began to seem like hot water to a frog—once immersed in it, he constantly adjusted his sense of what was normal. He felt like he was living someone else’s life, and it wasn’t what he’d imagined. “There is no wow to buying a car, there is no wow to buying a house, there is no wow to buying a building or taking a private plane,” Daphne told me. Being rich in the movies was a montage of glitz set to a thumping soundtrack. In reality there was just an ever more inflated set of expectations. When he began his criminal career, Daphne thought money would give him the freedom to do whatever he wanted, a repudiation of his narrow, predictable childhood. It wasn’t a path to recognition so much as an expression of self-love. “I love myself so much—I’m fucking in love with me. I have to confess, I watch myself in the mirror and I love me,” Daphne said.

This was the driving force of his criminal schemes; it didn’t much matter what the targets were. If he thought about it, he considered most of what he defrauded to be bullshit, systems corrupted by money and entangled in problems too complicated to solve.

After France discovered what the VAT scammers, including Daphne, had done with the emissions-trading system, other European countries began uncovering carbon fraud, too. Europol eventually reported that, across the continent, the total amount ripped off by carbon scammers was five billion euros. Frunza kept his own score; he thinks the actual figure is closer to ten billion. Whatever the total loss was, BlueNext didn’t survive it—the exchange was shuttered in 2012.

Markets are inherently fragile, rooted as they are in a common delusion, and the carbon market was especially chimerical because so many participants knew that they were profiting from a farce of their own making. They were trading for the sake of trading, fabricating the impression of value and demand where none existed. “In some countries,” Europol reported, “up to 90 percent of the whole market volume was caused by fraudulent activities.” As scams were exposed, the few bones of the market that remained tied to reality barely held. One national investigator told me that fraud placed the market in existential peril from which it took years to recover. (The market is now estimated to be worth 751 billion euros; at the beginning of 2024, one ton of carbon was trading at an average of 80 euros.)

When I asked Daphne if he thought that fraud had affected Europe’s efforts to slow climate change, he told me the carbon market was engineered to be ripped off, that the scams had actually helped give it countenance. Thanks to fraud, there was a period when the market was ballooning with money. “If there was no scam, and I’m not saying that the scam was good, but if there was no scam, the volume would have been almost zero,” Daphne told me.

In other words, better to have an empire of chicanery than an insignificant backwater hamlet. To Daphne, there was no real virtue in the market itself. What was the point of trying to reduce European emissions when China and the U.S. weren’t addressing theirs, and when climate solutions—wind turbines, electric cars—came with problems of their own? It made no difference if the carbon trades were real or fake. It only mattered that they took place, and that every trade was money made. Virtue here didn’t exist, but something else could.

In 2012, Israeli police began pressuring Daphne to testify against a gangster for a matter unrelated to carbon scamming. They picked him up for questioning and to let him know they had their eyes on him. They tried to scare him, asking if he’d like to be sent back to France for violating his parole, if he’d like to be molested in prison. He said sure, maybe he’d enjoy it. The police didn’t appreciate his sense of humor.

The pressure only grew after that, and Daphne eventually decided that it was better to serve out a sentence in France than be lorded over by Israeli law enforcement. He arrived in Paris on January 9, 2014. When his plane landed at Charles de Gaulle airport, he had only a few essentials with him: a fur vest, a crocodile-skin bag, a Richard Mille watch, a few thousand euros. The police were waiting. When he saw them, he took out his passport. “Yep, it’s me,” he said.

But the authorities wanted him for more than his parole violation. Daphne was also a target of an investigation focused on Crépuscule, and there was a warrant for his arrest. He stood accused of running the brokerage’s carbon scheme and being its main beneficiary. El Ghazouani and a handful of intermediaries and straw managers were also investigated and arrested. Zaoui was indicted, too. If he thought that providing information about El Ghazouani and Daphne would save him from prosecution, he was wrong: French authorities said he was the mastermind of Crépuscule’s operation. That meant he would be tried alongside the men he said had betrayed him.

In some ways, the Crépuscule defendants were the exception. Prosecuting carbon fraud was difficult. Even when a case could be built against a scammer, bringing it to court could be an ordeal—many fraudsters fled the countries where their crimes took place or never lived there to begin with. In some cases, attempts to seek justice stalled out through the vagaries of international extradition. Mohammad Safdar Gohir, who lived in Dubai and London while he ran scams through Deutsche Bank, was arrested in 2014 in Las Vegas, where he had gone to attend a boxing match. He remained in a U.S. jail for more than a year as his lawyers tried to impede the process of extraditing him to Germany.

Much like the people who stole it, the money skimmed from European coffers disappeared into international webs of shell companies and bank accounts. Governments recovered only a fraction of what was stolen. Sometimes they would track down money at a bank in, say, Singapore or Hong Kong, but by the time a formal request was made the money would be long gone. Someone in the French justice system told me about a case in which investigators traced 100 million euros around the world, following it to Tel Aviv, only to arrive at a dead end: It had been withdrawn in cash from a local bank.

The Crépuscule case moved slowly. Daphne spent over a year in pretrial detention at Fresnes before he was released with an electronic bracelet, which was removed at the end of 2015. After that he was required to make regular visits to court. While he waited for the trial to begin, Daphne kept an opulent hotel room near the Champs-Élysées.

As for Zaoui, he stayed in Paris until a new investigating judge assigned to the case, believing he had more assets than originally thought, retroactively raised his bail. Zaoui decided that he couldn’t stay. He fled to Los Angeles with Chirelle, where they lived in West Hollywood. Zaoui reveled in his proximity to the movie business, with its palpable glamour. He and Chirelle finally got married; he was still wildly in love with her. When he rode his motorcycle down LA’s wide avenues, he felt like anything was possible.

Zaoui knew that his happiness couldn’t last—he’d violated his bail to go to the U.S., after all—but he still wasn’t prepared for what came next. When Chirelle’s U.S. visa expired, she returned to Paris in early 2016. There, French police arrested her on charges related to another fraud investigation. Zaoui was in Israel with their five-year-old daughter at the time. His lawyers in France told him that if he surrendered himself, Chirelle would be released. Her family put pressure on him; they were afraid of what might happen to her behind bars. So Zaoui got on a plane, went to France, and turned himself in.

A few weeks later, Chirelle came to see him in prison. He had been moved to Fresnes, which was, in Zaoui’s opinion, disgusting. It was freezing cold. It had mice. He went to give her a hug, and she pushed him away. She was angry; she blamed him for what happened. She had spent more than 40 days locked up, and Zaoui could see that the experience had left an indelible mark on her. “It wasn’t the woman I’d known,” Zaoui told me. “She had been transformed.”

France, Zaoui told me, could never put together a clear picture of the scam he’d orchestrated after El Ghazouani’s betrayal, so prosecutors pinned Crépuscule on him.

The Crépuscule trial finally began in May 2017 and lasted several weeks. When the convictions came down, El Ghazouani received seven years in prison, Daphne got nine, and both men were fined one million euros. (On appeal, Daphne’s sentence would be increased to ten years. He was also convicted of involvement in a separate carbon-fraud operation and given six years.) As for the straw managers and intermediaries, most of them got between one and four years. The court couldn’t determine who started Crépuscule; it could only confirm that the company was created in 2002.

Zaoui was sentenced to six years and fined 300,000 euros. He quickly went into hiding in Paris. He would never go back to Fresnes, he vowed, but he knew that La Santé was being renovated and would soon have more amenities, including a phone and a refrigerator in every cell. Zaoui waited until the facility reopened, and then he turned himself in.

He thought that being in the renovated prison, which had a visiting room with a bed where couples could be intimate, would help save his relationship. But when Chirelle was scheduled for her first visit, she never showed. Zaoui waited alone in the visiting room for nearly an hour. In French prisons, they have a name for that: parloir fantôme, ghost parlor.

Zaoui remained in prison another three years. Chirelle never came to see him. After getting out, he tried to move on with his life. Under the conditions of his release, he couldn’t open a new business, and he’d have to pay a portion of his income to the French state until his fine was paid off. He wrote a book and staged a one-man show about his carbon-fraud scheme. He ran for national office and lost.

Zaoui doesn’t sleep much anymore. He goes to bed around midnight and wakes up around four. His parents have passed away. He doesn’t see his children often; he’s estranged from Chirelle. There isn’t much to fill his days. He isn’t happy. But at least the specter of imprisonment isn’t lurking over his shoulder. “Freedom,” he told me, “doesn’t have a price.”

Zaoui was never prosecuted for his work with Coer2. France, he told me, could never put together a clear picture of the scam he orchestrated after El Ghazouani’s betrayal, so prosecutors pinned Crépuscule on him instead. (He was also sentenced to six years and fined 200,000 euros for his involvement in a 385-million-euro carbon scam run by Christiane Melgrani; police connected him to the crime through the SIM card that fell on the floor in his apartment when they came to detain him.) “I’ve never felt jealous of any of the other carbon scammers,” Zaoui told me. “I had a feeling of injustice. I was on trial for something that wasn’t mine. If it had been mine, intellectually I would have accepted it. I would have said, OK, I’ve done some stupid things, I’ve been caught.”

In his mind, El Ghazouani and Daphne fucked up. He suspects that they thought Israeli IP addresses would protect them from scrutiny, so they didn’t cover their tracks as well as they should have. Zaoui never would have let that happen. He didn’t with Coer2. He knew how to engineer an elegant scheme. It rankles him that he went down for what he considers other people’s bad decisions. “I don’t know how the profits were distributed. Maybe they brought in other partners, I don’t know, I wasn’t there. The profit must have been between 100 and 120 million euros,” Zaoui told me. “If I had been in charge, as I had set it up, I would have taken 500 million.”

Inside Daphne was panicking, but outwardly he gave the impression of an apoplectic rich guy refusing to be inconvenienced.

Unlike El Ghazouani and Zaoui, Daphne wasn’t in court when he was convicted in the Crépuscule case. When the authorities hinted that his sentence wouldn’t be as light as he hoped, he decided to flee France. It took five days for him to obtain a passport with a pseudonym and organize transportation out of Europe. His plan was to sail from Italy to Israel on a 150-foot yacht. But he began to suspect that a friend who was helping him, who at the time was in touch with French authorities about another matter, might sell him out. Daphne didn’t want to alarm the friend by canceling the yacht, so he quietly called a Russian acquaintance and asked him to send a private jet for him instead.

“Where do you want to go?” the Russian asked.

“I don’t know, just organize a plane and I will see,” Daphne said.

He had dinner that night with the friend he suspected might betray him and went along with the plan, confirming that they would meet on the beach the next day to board the yacht to Israel. Instead, Daphne left the hotel at 6 a.m. and spent more than an hour walking the streets, hoping to lose anyone who might be tailing him. When he finally felt safe, he hailed a taxi, which took him to a small airport for private jets. As requested, his Russian friend had delivered a plane for him.

The pilot took Daphne to Greece, where border officials had questions: Why, for example, didn’t he have any exit stamp in his passport? They told him to wait while they checked on some things. Daphne got nervous, and he realized that there was only one strategy available to him. He began acting indignant. “What do you mean?” he shouted, feigning fury. “Call the embassy! Call the embassy!” Inside Daphne was panicking, but outwardly he gave the impression of an apoplectic rich guy refusing to be inconvenienced. The Greeks relented and let him through. He could feel his legs shaking as he left the airport.

Daphne traveled to an island idyll off the Greek coast. He met a woman, a hotelkeeper, and became infatuated with her; he stayed three weeks before he got bored and called the Russian again, asking him to send a boat. The boat that arrived was a yacht with an eight-person crew. Daphne worried that it would look suspicious for a man to be alone on a boat with a large crew, so he called a friend and asked him to come along, and to bring a couple of girls who knew how to keep a low profile. They came, but the girls weren’t at all inconspicuous; they wanted to tan naked on the deck. Daphne, exasperated, sent them all back to shore.

“Just go,” he told the ship’s captain, who kept trying to stop so Daphne could experience the beauty of Mykonos or the sunsets at Santorini. “Go! Putain.”

Daphne wanted to sail straight for the island of Cyprus, where he could meet another Russian friend who might help him. When they arrived, however, the captain refused to take him to the Turkish side of the island; he insisted that he drop Daphne off in Limassol, the one place Daphne had been warned not to go, because agents and police from all over the world seemed to congregate there. No matter what Daphne offered, the captain wouldn’t change his mind. Daphne called his friend on the island and asked to be picked up discreetly at the port in Limassol. As Daphne made his way through customs, he heard a guttural revving. His friend had arrived with two Ferraris and a cadre of bodyguards. Hardly discreet.

“Take me to the Turkish side, please!” Daphne implored his friend. But the friend wanted him to see his house. He wanted them to play Ping-Pong. He said that he had a surprise for Daphne and presented four girls. Finally, days later, they made their way to the Turkish side of the island, which was full of casinos where people kept recognizing Daphne. He rented a house, hoping to go unnoticed, and had someone bring him his Israeli passport. Then he looked for an Israeli contact who would sail 170 miles to Cyprus and pick him up. The process took months.

When the guy Daphne had hired showed up in the azure waters off the Cypriot coast, he couldn’t believe his eyes. The boat was tiny, a little wooden barge. It didn’t even have a cabin. “Did you make this yourself?” Daphne asked. Yes, actually, he had. Daphne clambered aboard and they set off at a pace Daphne thought was slower than swimming. He took a nap, and when he woke up three hours later, they were still in Cyprus.

They inched toward Israel for three days and three nights. UN boats patrolled the waters constantly; the Cypriot and Lebanese coast guards, too. Even now, Daphne wishes he could find it funny, but no—it was awful. He hated it, waiting to see what fate had in store for him, whether his efforts to flee had been enough. In those long hours before his salvation, before he reached the shores of the Holy Land, before he knew his future, it was just him and a sailor in a handmade boat. The big blue world stretched out on either side of them, as though it were infinite.

Reporting for this story was supported by the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

Who Killed the Fudge King?

Who Killed the Fudge King?

How I (possibly) solved a cold case on my summer vacation.

By Tom Donaghy

The Atavist Magazine, No. 143

Tom Donaghy writes for theater, television, and film. His plays have been produced by the Atlantic Theater Company and Playwrights Horizons, among others. He created the ABC drama The Whole Truth and cocreated, with Lee Daniels, the Fox musical drama Star.

Editors: Jonah Ogles and Seyward Darby
Art Director: Ed Johnson
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checker: Kyla Jones
Illustrator: Nate Sweitzer

Published in September 2023.

The fudge sold at Copper Kettle was so creamy, so sweet, so beyond compare, that many candy shops on the Ocean City boardwalk didn’t even sell fudge, because there was no point. During summer vacations to the Jersey Shore in the 1970s, my father would take my brother and me as a treat, when we behaved. A pretty girl in a pinafore would greet us outside with a tray of free shavings. We’d load up on them until her smile strained, then proceed inside. Once we popped actual cubes of the magic stuff into our tiny mouths, we were as high as kids are allowed to be.

For decades, Copper Kettle lived in my head as a kind of childhood memory-scape: the salt air coming off the ocean, the shiny vats of molten fudge, the too much sugar all at once. Then, during the pandemic, my family decided to return to the Jersey Shore for my mother’s birthday, so everyone could gather outside. I told my brother we should make our way back to Copper Kettle, and he informed me that it had long since gone out of business. He had some more information too: about what had become of Harry Anglemyer, the man behind the fudge.

In the early 1960s, Harry had a string of Copper Kettle Fudge shops up and down the Shore. So revered were his stores that Harry was known far and wide as the Fudge King. He was even in talks to build a fudge factory—something that would’ve taken his Willy Wonka–ness to the next level—when he was savagely beaten to death on Labor Day 1964. His body was stuffed under the dashboard of his Lincoln Continental, parked at an after-hours nightclub called the Dunes. The case was never solved.

I spent the next two years sorting through a trove of whispers and accusations around the murder. At first I was just curious, but the more I learned about Harry—a figure beloved by friends and strangers alike—the more intent I was to identify his killer.

I scoured blogs, Facebook groups, newspaper archives, and thinly veiled fictional accounts of the crime. As one local put it, over the years a veritable “Jersey Shore QAnon” had blossomed around the murder, raising questions of culture, class, sexuality, and hierarches of power. I discovered a plausible myth, a trove of red herrings, and, finally, what appeared to be the truth.

Almost six decades on, I wasn’t sure anyone wanted to hear it. When I visited Ocean City while reporting this story, a shop owner I engaged about Harry Anglemyer lowered her voice and said, “You know he was murdered, don’t you?”

I admitted that I did.

She responded, by way of warning: “You sneeze in this town and everyone hears it.”

The Fudge King became one of the richest men for miles, with no qualms about flashing his wealth.

Harry Anglemyer, a stocky charmer out of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was born in 1927. His high school summers were spent in Wildwood, New Jersey, where he apprenticed at Laura’s Fudge Shop. He was told that this was a little sissy. He didn’t care.

He left high school to join the Navy, served two years at the end of World War II, then returned to the Shore to open his own fudge shop in 1947. In those days, Ocean City seemed postcard perfect. Ten blocks at its widest, situated on a barrier island about 11 miles south of Atlantic City, it was lined with boarding houses, deep porches with rattan rockers, and striped canvas awnings that softened the summer sun. It called itself—and still does—America’s Greatest Family Resort.

The author Gay Talese, who grew up there, once described Ocean City as “founded in 1879 by Methodist ministers and other Prohibitionists who wished to establish an island of abstinence and propriety.” Prohibitionists remain. To this day, you can’t buy booze within city limits. Or have a cocktail at a restaurant. Or go to a bar, since there are none. If you want to bend an elbow, you must belong to one of the few private clubs that allow it. You can also import your own adult beverages, stopping at the Circle Liquor Store in Somers Point before entering town across the Ninth Street Bridge.

You would think that such a gauntlet might encourage at least a semblance of abstinence and propriety, but a 2017 USA Today article deemed Ocean City the drunkest city in New Jersey. It was and is a place of contradictions.

Just like Harry Anglemyer was a man of contradictions. He donated generously to civic causes and charities, including religious ones. He sat on the city’s planning board at the behest of the mayor. He joined the Masons and the chamber of commerce. He befriended prominent men and their wives, whom he squired to social functions when their husbands were busy. He hobnobbed with local luminaries, including the Kelly family of Philadelphia, who kept a summer cottage in Ocean City that Grace Kelly visited—first as a child, then as a movie star, then as a princess. Harry was so well regarded that 1,500 people showed up at the Godfrey-Smith Funeral Home in September 1964 to view his body. Businesspeople, politicians, and socialites came to pay their respects, packing the place with flowers.

Many of them also knew of Harry’s other, less civic-minded side. When he wasn’t delighting families with his fudge or charming the local elite, he liked to go out. He shut down bars. He was a fixture at Atlantic City’s racetrack, where he played the horses. He spent time at the nearby Air National Guard base. During the summer of 1964, he seemed to have acquired boyfriends from both locations.

Harry was, in fact, a little sissy.

Which everyone kind of knew. He was 37 and handsome, he’d never married, and he dressed fastidiously. He had a small dog, acquired on a trip to Fort Lauderdale—which, he confided to a friend, was perhaps “too obvious.” He once had a girlfriend who wondered why they weren’t having sex. She seems to have been the only one in the dark. Men both known and strange came and went from his large suite of breezy, ocean-view rooms above Copper Kettle, right on the boardwalk, where he lived in the summer.

Harry took no pains to hide any of this, an astonishing fact given the pre-Stonewall, postwar pinko-homo panic. In the early 1960s, and especially in small towns like Ocean City, which had a population of about 7,500 during the off-season, men were expected to find a girl and put a ring on her. Especially handsome men with killer smiles, fitted jackets, and penny loafers that shined like onyx.

But something saved Harry from too much scrutiny—for a time, anyway. He was an entrepreneur, and he elevated the boardwalk’s game. He saw the future, which might have been his shield. Other local business owners looked past his sexuality. They wanted even a little piece of his magic.

Harry placed gleaming copper kettles in the windows of his boardwalk shop, poured in liquid fudge, and positioned above them teenage boys with bronzed skin and sparkling white teeth, gripping big wooden paddles, churning and churning. Outside on the boardwalk, children panted as they watched, their faces cracked from too much sun, their bare feet sandy, their eyes wet and hungry. They wanted that fudge so bad. At night, after the last box was sold and the shop had closed, the kettles remained pin-spotted from above like Ziegfeld girls.

Money surged in like the tide. Soon Harry had shops in Atlantic City, Sea Isle City, and Stone Harbor as well. The Fudge King became one of the richest men for miles, with no qualms about flashing his wealth. He purchased a two-story colonial in the Gardens, Ocean City’s fanciest neighborhood, where he lived in the off-season, and kept two cars: the Lincoln Continental where his body would later be found, and a Chrysler Imperial purchased just months before his death.

Most spectacularly, he acquired a blinding ring: five emerald-cut diamonds, approximately eight carats total, set in a band of white gold. It was valued at about $10,000, almost $100,000 in today’s dollars. Harry wore it everywhere. Which was quite a big deal. With the exception of a few families, including the famous Kellys, whose fortune came from brickmaking, Ocean City was for the most part a resort of the working class. Its tourists and year-round residents had likely never seen such jewels except on television, worn by the likes of Zsa Zsa Gabor. Or Liberace.

Harry’s success made him an object of allure and envy, though by all accounts he shared his fortune with others. He frequently bought dinners for his staff. He gave loans to friends and told them to take their time paying him back. (After his death, his family found a drawer full of IOUs.) He even had a brand-new clothes dryer delivered to a young mother burdened by a bad marriage. She wept knowing there was at least one good man in the world.

That’s what most people said about Harry: how good he was, generous and kind, fun-loving and curious. But in the summer of 1964, they noticed something else about him. The Fudge King was uncharacteristically on edge.

Harry was up against the upright citizens of America’s Greatest Family Resort who feared it would become another Atlantic City, that den of iniquity next door that was fast sinking into squalor and corruption.

Of course, the whole country was on edge. JFK had just been assassinated. Vietnam was heating up, and the draft was coming for young American men, including those stirring that fudge in Copper Kettle’s windows. The Civil Rights Act was signed into law on July 2, and now Ocean City could no longer confine people of color to the Fifth Street beach. (Before that, according to one resident, if Black beachgoers breeched the jetty that separated their beach from the other beaches, they were greeted immediately by a chorus of “Go back!”)

Meanwhile, the Mad Men era of whiskey sours and steak Diane was giving way to the Beatles, beads, and flower power. On August 30, the week before Harry’s murder, the Fab Four themselves came through Atlantic City on their first North American tour, and the young people of the state lost their minds.

The youthquake was on the horizon. The Greatest Generation was holding its breath. If Ocean City wasn’t immune from time’s great march, what was?

Certainly not Harry, who saw himself out in front of that particular parade, a fact he’d made clear two years prior by challenging Ocean City’s so-called blue laws. For decades the blue laws had handed over the seventh day almost entirely to the Lord. Most business was prohibited, unless it was church business. You attended service, then went home and kept quiet.

Abstinence and propriety were enforced, as merchants who occasionally tested the laws learned. Two arcade owners were fined for opening their doors; a grocer was arrested for selling a cantaloupe. But generally the boardwalk, both its amusements and its stores, remained shuttered. An ordinance forbade Harry from even making fudge on Sunday.

All this seemed ridiculous to him. How could a resort community be closed for business for an entire day every weekend? The weekends were the moneymakers! If it rained on Saturday, keeping beachgoers at home, it was a total bust. Harry had come to believe that “puritanical restrictions” were holding Ocean City back.

Some in town were inclined to agree. Those who owned businesses, specifically. They appointed Harry head of both the Ocean City Civic Betterment Association and the Ocean City Boardwalk Association. Harry seized the moment, gathering friends and colleagues, telling them that while it was fine for shops to be closed on Sunday mornings for church, they should be allowed to open for the remainder of the day. He further informed them that he would state his case privately to D. Allen Stretch, Ocean City’s director of public safety and the custodian of the blue laws.

Stretch did not agree with Harry. Even a little. He wasn’t about to have the so-called Fudge King tell him what to do, no matter how many business owners Harry had at his back.

Emboldened, affronted, or perhaps not quite reading the room, Harry refused to stand down. During a meeting at city hall, he decided to say aloud to everyone in town what he’d said to Stretch. All hell broke loose as an opposing faction coalesced—one that wanted to keep the laws in place. Harry was up against the upright citizens of America’s Greatest Family Resort who feared it would become another Atlantic City, that den of iniquity next door that was fast sinking into squalor and corruption.

Ocean City’s commissioners, wringing their hands, decided to put the matter of the blue laws to a referendum. When voting day arrived in May 1963, enough locals sided with Harry that the laws were relaxed, allowing certain shops to open their doors on Sunday for the first time. Newspapers reported Harry’s triumph over the pious prohibitionists, who were none too pleased.

This is where things get weird.

Three weeks after the referendum, Harry was arrested on three counts of carnal indecency, or what the press described as “homosexual behavior.” He was fingerprinted and booked at the Cape May County Courthouse. The thing that everyone had pretended to overlook was now being used to indict him. This was no misdemeanor. Sodomy laws were still on the books in New Jersey, punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

Interestingly, the accusers were all public employees: Thomas Sullivan, a bridgetender for the state highway department; James Luddy, who worked in the office of the city engineer; and a local detective, sergeant Dominick Longo, who claimed that “an incident” had occurred in Harry’s apartment above the fudge shop. An explanation for why Longo was up there in the first place came from none other than D. Allen Stretch, who announced that he had instructed Longo, an ambitious cop looking to advance his career, to “get the goods” on Harry because of complaints his office had received, although Stretch did not specify what those complaints were.

According to Longo’s New Jersey Superior Court indictment, Harry Anglemyer “unlawfully, malicious, lewdly and indecently did take the private parts of him the said Dominick Longo in the mouth.” Stretch insisted to the Philadelphia Inquirer that if Longo had permitted Harry’s “unnatural attentions,” it was only because he was “doing his duty.” (The other two alleged incidents came to light soon after Longo made his accusation—apparently, they’d gone unreported for years.)

Harry was furious. He vowed to the Philadelphia Inquirer that he would continue his campaign against the blue laws “despite this legal action which has been brought against me personally.” He then promptly filed his own complaint against Longo. He didn’t deny that there had been what the press called an “incident.” Rather he claimed that it was Longo who’d tried to force Harry into giving him a blow job.

None of this was a good look for America’s Greatest Family Resort. Yet however much the thought of homosexuality disgusted many people, some residents quietly agreed with their beloved Harry that Stretch and Longo were retaliating for his campaign against the blue laws. A grand jury, however, upheld the charges against Harry while dismissing those against Longo.

The first case—the one regarding Sullivan, the bridgetender—went to trial in early April 1964. Harry was acquitted in 18 minutes. The jury, it turned out, felt that something was amiss. Harry took the news in stride, telling a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer that he was a “sitting duck for all the nuts around here until I beat the rest of these charges.” He then vowed to permanently dismantle Ocean City’s blue laws, come hell or high water.

The town roiled, people chose sides, and a trial was scheduled to litigate the remaining charges against Harry—the ones involving Longo—two weeks after Labor Day.

This is when friends noticed Harry’s fastidious presentation begin to fray. Trouble seemed to follow him. He was the victim of several robbery attempts. Some he reported, others he only discussed with friends. Investigators would later learn that he was rolled for money by two young punks, one of whom dragged him from his car at a stoplight and gave him a black eye in the middle of the intersection.

In the weeks leading up to his death, Harry sported not one but two black eyes. He laughed them off as injuries from clumsy falls or from dancing too hard and running into a wall. Maybe he didn’t want people to be more worried about him than they already were. One of his fudge cutters suggested that he hire a bodyguard. Harry said no thanks, he could take care of himself.

Later, people would speculate that he was meeting Longo, that the latter had suggested a late-night rendezvous to lure the Fudge King to his death.

Harry loved the Dunes, an after-hours nightclub just over the bridge from Ocean City, parked on a sandbar at the edge of Egg Harbor Township, an unincorporated no-man’s land. “Dunes to dawn!” patrons liked to say. Harry said it a lot that summer. He was well-known at the Dunes, to staff and patrons alike. Some even suggested it was where he’d met Longo the night “the incident” took place.

The music at the Dunes was loud, the beer plentiful, the air sweaty. On the night Harry walked through the door for the last time, 2,500 people were crammed inside, dancing to house bands the Rooftoppers and the Carroll Brothers.

Harry had been on a bit of a bar crawl that night. First he went to the Bala Inn to arrange for Copper Kettle’s annual employees’ dinner the following night—he told proprietor Engelbert Bruenig to expect at least 80 people. Then he was off to the Jolly Roger Cocktail Lounge, before heading to Steel’s Ship Bar for some live music. Next up was Bay Shores, followed by Tony Marts, where Bill Haley and His Comets sometimes jammed. Here, Harry invited two women to come with him to the Dunes, but it was 2 a.m., too late for their blood.

He tried again at O’Byrne’s—this time inviting a former Copper Kettle worker and his girlfriend. They too said no. On the way out, Harry asked Mrs. O’Byrne herself if she wanted to come with him. She declined.

Harry continued on to the Dunes. He had to meet someone there. He seemed ambivalent about the mysterious rendezvous, but also determined to go. He mentioned this to a couple of people that night, in one of the many places where he was allegedly seen. Over the years Harry, like Elvis, was reported to have been seen in more places the night he died than would have been humanly possible.

Later, people would speculate that he was meeting Longo, that the latter had suggested a late-night rendezvous to lure the Fudge King to his death. If Longo could get Harry out of the picture, people theorized, there wouldn’t be a trial in September and Longo could get back to his ambition. (He would become Ocean City’s chief of police in 1975, and remain in that position for 20 years.) But considering the two men’s legal tango, it didn’t make sense for Longo to have initiated the encounter, much less at a place where they’d both be recognized. And even if Longo had made such a request, surely Harry wouldn’t have fallen for it.

Who, then, was Harry meeting?

Sometime between 3:30 and 4 a.m., his maroon-colored Lincoln, its whitewall tires dusted with sand, pulled up to the Dunes. The parking lot was so full, Harry had to circle the building, and two doormen would later recall him searching for a spot. He eventually found one on Ocean Drive.

Once parked, he proceeded in the side door, box of fudge in hand. (He’d brought every proprietor he saw that night their favorite kind, as an end-of-summer gift.) He settled in at the bar, where owner John McCann—a former bootlegger—bought him a drink. They shared some laughs, including one at Harry’s expense: When a man on the prowl for a date wandered over, McCann pointed to Harry and said, “Why do you need a girl when Harry’s right here?”

Harry laughed the loudest, bought people drinks, then fought off sleep while waiting for whomever he was supposed to meet. At about 5 a.m., he left.

Six hours later, as the tide went out and the mud hens squawked, one of Harry’s delivery men, making a fudge run to Atlantic City, observed his boss’s Lincoln still in the parking lot. Peering through the window, he saw Harry’s body wedged on the floor of the passenger side. Conspicuously absent was his spectacular diamond ring.

He was 37 years old.

The news hit the papers that afternoon. People in town were horrified to read that Harry had been found with “severe head injuries,” his skull fractured in at least two places. Though some were quoted as saying that Harry “practically asked for it,” or that he’d made “too many important enemies.” In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Stretch and Longo expressed their regret that the criminal charges brought against Harry never resulted in his “being ordered to accept psychiatric treatment which he badly needed.”

The rumor mill roared to life. Was this a revenge killing? A robbery gone wrong? A crime of passion? Because it wasn’t immediately clear who had killed the Fudge King or why, a fog of dread set in. The Dunes was padlocked. The grocer who’d been fined for selling the Sunday cantaloupe claimed that he’d received an anonymous phone call warning him not to drive by the Dunes ever again—as he did every day on the way to market in Atlantic City—or he too might meet his end.

The investigation ran into an immediate snag: The crime had occurred on the busiest day of the year for New Jersey state police. Potential witnesses had already scattered to the winds. With the summer season coming to a close, some 150,000 people took to the New Jersey Turnpike, migrating back to their suburban lives in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. To make matters worse, there were no fingerprints in Harry’s car, the result of what police described as a “film of dust which adhered to the dampness of the dew from the previous night.”

But within 48 hours, investigators caught a break. They identified two witnesses to the murder: a young couple, Joyce Lickfeld and Kenneth McGinley, who were sitting in a red convertible parked two car lengths behind Harry’s Lincoln. The couple reported that when Harry approached his car after leaving the Dunes, he was with another man. Lickfeld and McGinley weren’t locals, so they didn’t recognize Harry or who he was with. The two men slipped into Harry’s car, and all was quiet for several minutes.

Then Lickfeld and McGinley heard someone shout, “Get out of here, you creep!” Harry and the man burst from the car and brawled onto Ocean Drive, tangling viciously. Soon after, the couple heard a loud crack as Harry’s head hit the pavement.

According to Lickfeld and McGinley, the man told Harry to get up, but Harry lay motionless, facing up toward the crescent moon. Cars began to honk; one, parked across Ocean Drive, seemed to do so with particular urgency. Suddenly, two men appeared out of the darkness, running toward Harry. They grabbed him under each arm and dragged him, penny loafers scraping the pavement, to his car. They told the couple that they had matters in hand. The couple, shaken, went inside the Dunes.

Lickfeld and McGinley helped police make a sketch of the killer. If anyone else saw what happened, they never came forward.

Months went by. The Dunes remained padlocked. Harry’s sister, Elaine, took over the fudge shops. Then months became years. Finally, in 1967, authorities announced that they had indicted someone, but not anyone who’d been whispered about by locals. Instead, it was a man named Christopher Brendan Hughes, 27, who was in a federal prison for his part in an extortion ring that targeted gay men. But while the Kansas City Star reported that “shaking down homosexuals had been Hughes’s major source of income for several years,” he insisted to the paper that he was no killer and pleaded not guilty to murdering Harry. Still, the authorities felt sure that they had their man—not least because Hughes had been in possession of Harry’s ring.

Harry’s sister told reporters that her family was glad to see a suspect in custody, and many Shore locals agreed that Hughes must have been the culprit. Three years after the crime, they were hungry for a trial, for answers. Meanwhile, Joyce Lickfeld did her best to keep her head down. She was told she would be the prosecution’s most important witness—she, not McGinley, had gotten a look at the killer’s face.

In September 1969, the case finally went to trial. This was just two months after the Stonewall riots, and the culture was shifting. Gay people were suddenly willing to fight their oppressors. Some were beginning to think of them as a protected class. In this climate, the Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office might have felt a keener pressure to convict the killer of a well-known gay man.

Harry’s bloody penny loafers, slacks, Ban-Lon polo, and pinstriped jacket were entered into evidence. Scores of witnesses were called. Expectations ran high that there would finally be justice. But the whole thing sank like a stone. A onetime cellmate of Hughes’s named Ronnie Lee Murray, who had an uncanny ability to break out of jail—he’d managed three escapes in his career, and was even caught trying to flee his cell in the weeks just before the trial—refused to repeat under oath what he’d apparently told police during the investigation: that Hughes had confessed to the murder. Even being charged with obstruction of justice didn’t loosen Murray’s tongue. When the judge asked why he’d changed his mind, he replied, “I don’t want to get into it.”

A conviction would have to rely entirely on Lickfeld’s testimony. She took the stand and was asked to describe what she’d seen at the Dunes, and then to point out who in the courtroom resembled the man who killed Harry. Lickfeld fretted and fumbled and looked right past Hughes, who was sitting a few feet away from her. Instead, she pointed to a very surprised sheriff standing in the back. The courtroom erupted.

Hughes’s attorney, Leland Stanford III, called no witnesses. Hughes was acquitted in under an hour. His wife and sister leapt from their seats and cried, “My God!” The Ocean City Sentinel-Ledger reported that unless new suspects appeared, “law enforcement officials regard the murder case as closed.”

No suspects ever did.

The trial had been a horrible show, nothing more, she told me. She was glad someone “on the outside” was finally looking into the story.

For a long time, for a lot of people, this is how the story ended: abruptly, unceremoniously, with what seemed like more questions than answers. But a cohort of Ocean City residents insisted that the answers were right there for anyone who bothered to look. They believed that a toxic brew of prejudice, rage, and power had doomed the Fudge King.

I agreed, and thought that the story might make a great screenplay—a kind of South Jersey noir or David Lynch fantasia, where the flowers are pretty above the surface but gnarly worms lurk just below. Yet, soon I was hooked more deeply by the story of a fellow gay man living a relatively out life in the town where my family had spent our summer vacations. Someone whose reward for trying to yank Ocean City into the future was to become a target of hate and hypocrisy.

I started my research by reaching out to William Kelly, a journalist, local historian, and blogger who had written about the case on the ground in South Jersey. Initially we talked on the phone. His voice was reedy, phlegmy—I imagined him with a white beard and a fisherman’s cap. He assured me that the case could be solved entirely by the evidence from the investigation. But law enforcement didn’t have that evidence, he told me, because it had been destroyed. Which was convenient, he claimed, since law enforcement itself was involved in the crime. Ocean City power players at the highest levels.

There was someone he wanted me to talk to immediately: the young mother in a bad marriage to whom Harry had gifted that new clothes dryer. Now in her eighties, she remained angry about Harry’s murder, adamant that he’d been crushed by a cabal of powerful locals—and certain she knew who’d killed him. The trial had been a horrible show, nothing more, she told me. She was glad someone “on the outside” was finally looking into the story. She felt that it was time for “the truth to be known.” And while she insisted on remaining anonymous, she did have some information for me.

She was at the Dunes the night Harry was killed, she told me. Her father was a manager there. She saw Harry leave, and whom he left with. “Everyone knows who got away with murder,” she told me.

The killer, she claimed, was a ne’er-do-well from a prominent family. He was still very much alive, in Florida, to which he’d relocated soon after the crime. Where exactly in Florida she didn’t know. But she promised to engage his family in Ocean City, with whom she socialized on occasion. Perhaps they would tell her where he was.

For a while it seemed like this would happen, but then the balking began. “Maybe this whole thing wasn’t such a good idea,” she said. Then: “You have to promise me you won’t tell anyone.” Then: “Oh, I won’t see his family for a while.…”

When I expressed my frustration to Kelly, he advised me to forget about her, but to follow up on what she’d told me. What I needed, he said, was to get my hands on a certain affidavit that would prove her allegations. The document in question, which Kelly claimed to have seen, was dictated by a milkman named Lou Esposito who’d been out making deliveries the morning Harry’s body was found. Esposito told Kelly that he’d driven by the Dunes, seen state police examining the scene, and pulled off the road to learn what he could. At that point, he claimed, he’d heard voices behind him in the marsh. “He didn’t have to die,” one of them supposedly said. Esposito then turned around and recognized three local men, including the one the young mother told me she’d seen leave the Dunes with Harry. He was throwing a bloody shirt into the water. Esposito then sped off, believing he’d gone undetected. That night, however, he got a call demanding his silence or else. Soon after, Esposito purported, he was awarded a long sought-after job with the fire department—a reward, he believed, for keeping his mouth shut.

At the end of his life, Esposito wanted to unburden himself, so he dictated all this to his lawyer. He then gave a copy of the affidavit to Kelly, who promptly made copies for several of his friends for safekeeping. Kelly had since misplaced his copy, and most of the people he’d given the others to had died—as had Esposito and his lawyer. The only person who might still have one, Kelly said, was a local architect named Jack Snyder. But Snyder didn’t return any of my calls. Or emails. Or letters. Because he had recently died.

I felt more than a bit of skepticism about the affidavit. But at this point, I was in thrall to the local myth, however unbelievable it sounded. I was also struck by an anonymous comment in one of Kelly’s blogs that said of this story, “I believe the delivery man you refer to was my dad. He told me many of the details you mentioned [before] he died in 2003.”

If this was Esposito’s son, perhaps he would know where the affidavit was. Kelly told me that the son had the same name as his father and was “listed in the phone book.” So I called him. Lou Junior picked up on the first ring, listened to my spiel about the affidavit, and paused before responding.

It was a dirty bit of business, he finally said—a broad cover-up, he agreed. Harry was a great guy who did a lot for Ocean City, and law enforcement had most definitely been involved in his death. Lou had been ten years old when Harry was murdered, and even then he knew that Harry was gay. Everybody did. But he couldn’t help me with the affidavit, because, he told me, I was talking to the wrong Lou Esposito. See, there had been two Lou Espositos in town, and I was talking to the son of the other one.

His father had known the Lou Esposito who supposedly gave the affidavit, because they used to get each other’s mail. His father had even made payments on the other man’s car loan before the mistake was discovered. The correct Lou Esposito had some daughters, he told me. Maybe they would have their father’s affidavit? They were still around, but he didn’t know their names: “They got married and stuff,” he said.

I longed to set sail from the land of dead architects and lost affidavits. I wanted concrete information. Preferably a gun that smoked.

I decided to return to Ocean City, declare myself a child of its summers, and talk to locals and the law enforcement agencies that had handled the initial investigation. Maybe doors would open, and documents—if any were left—would be coughed up. At the very least I could hear for myself that they no longer existed.

I flew from Los Angeles to Philadelphia in May 2022, picked up my brother and our mother—who asked, “Is it wrong to be excited about a murder?”—and headed down the Shore.

The three of us stood at 11th Street and the Boardwalk, where Harry’s flagship store had been. The shop was no longer the gleaming showstopper I remembered, and it now had the affrontery to sell someone else’s fudge. Above it was the suite of rooms where Harry had lived, where Longo went “to get the goods.” Its many windows were flung open, and inside a cleaning crew busied about, readying the place for summer.

Standing in the shade of the old Copper Kettle, the full force of what I experienced as a child suddenly returned. Something had never felt quite right about Ocean City: I could never really be a part of it, however much I wanted to. There was nowhere for someone like me, with my queer desires, to go in America’s Greatest Family Resort, except under or out.

Which made me wonder: Why had Harry stayed? Why didn’t he park his talents elsewhere? In the 1960s, large communities of gay people were establishing themselves in his hometown of Philadelphia and in New York. Harry had to know about them. Why would such a charming and innovative businessman remain in Ocean City?

Just then my phone flashed: “Cape May County Prosecutor’s Office.” The very office where Harry had been booked on lewdness charges. Before my flight, I’d left a message with Lieutenant Joe Landis, its LGBTQ liaison, thinking I’d have a sympathetic ear.

Landis told me that he was not in his office, that he was still working remotely because of the pandemic, and that the records on the lewdness charges against Harry were probably long gone. He suggested I call Captain Pat Snyder at the Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office, which might have records on Harry’s murder.

I left Captain Snyder a message, then followed my mother into a bookstore, where she asked a clerk if they had any books on Copper Kettle. This was the clerk who lowered her voice and said, “You sneeze in this town and everybody hears it.” Realizing that I had a live one, I pushed the issue of Harry’s death, asking if she had any idea who might have been involved. She paused, then wrote a name on a piece of scratch paper and passed it to me.

“Longo.”

She then insinuated that Harry and Longo had been having an affair. My mother looked at me, her eyes big behind her glasses. On the same piece of paper, I wrote another name—the one given to me by the young mother in a bad marriage. The man she said had left the Dunes with Harry, the same man Lou Esposito allegedly swore was one of the men he saw in the marsh after the killing. I passed it back to the clerk.

She glanced at it. Yeah, he was involved, too.

Could she tell me more? She exchanged looks with another clerk behind her. No, she said, that’s all she had. Could she think of anyone who might tell me more? She suggested a local author who had written a book that included a chapter about Harry’s murder, albeit in fictionalized form. But the book was out of print. And its title escaped her.

I asked if I could have the author’s name so I could search for the book online. She exchanged another look with her fellow clerk. No, I could not have his name—he was a local who wrote under a pseudonym “because he knew too much.”

But he came into the store all the time, she added. I left my contact for her to convey when she saw him next. She promised she’d pass it along, to which I responded, trying to break the accumulating tension, “I’m just in it for the fudge.”

The two clerks chuckled, then fell silent as we left.

I decided to call the young mother in a bad marriage, to tell her that I was in town and that someone had just confirmed the name she’d given to me. She seemed startled that I was in Ocean City, claimed she was under the weather, and said she’d call back. I never heard from her.

Bells were ringing, locals were ghosting, and there was, I have to admit, something delectable in the Nancy Drewness of it all.

“Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office” flashed on my phone. Captain Snyder himself was now calling, intrigued by the message I’d left. His voice was serious, full, resonant. I launched into my spiel about the Fudge King’s unsolved murder.

“Was that the case where the victim was gay and romantically involved with a cop?” he asked.

He told me that he would ask around for any materials that might still exist, although after all these years it was probably a long shot.

I hung up and googled Captain Snyder. He was one of the top detectives in Atlantic County and a graduate of the FBI Academy. Not a bad person to have taken me seriously. Better still, from his online photo he looked to be somewhere in his forties—which meant that he was one or two generations away from anyone still spooked by the crime. Also, he didn’t stumble on the word “gay” like several locals had up to this point.

I circled back to William Kelly, the blogger. Could he meet? He suggested the Anchorage, one of the bars where Harry was allegedly seen the last night he was alive. I left my mother and brother on the boardwalk and drove our Kia rental to Somers Point, where the Anchorage, a candy-colored Victorian tavern, sits just a few yards from Great Egg Harbor Bay.

I immediately spotted Kelly at the bar—a big man in his seventies, ruddy, with watery eyes, his breathing loud and labored. He was sitting with his girlfriend, a Kewpie-ish redhead somewhere in her sixties, and a male friend, around Kelly’s age but smaller, taut, watchful.

Kelly told me that he’d just had a blood transfusion and wasn’t sure how long he’d last with his health problems. Every man is remembered for one thing he did on this earth, he said. Solving the Fudge King’s murder would not be his. He implied that he had bigger fish to fry, glancing around. His friends were silent.

I wondered if we shouldn’t move to a quiet corner. We were in full view of the other patrons. But he said that he wasn’t scared to discuss the crime out in the open, or to have written repeatedly about it over the decades, naming names and pointing fingers at people he’d known his entire life.

“What could they do,” he said, “kill me?”

Kelly told me not to put too much stock in Captain Snyder’s promise to help. “He had to say that,” he said. He offered more names of people who might have intel on Harry’s murder. A well-connected local who had mob connections. Another milkman who’s now a real estate agent. His friend suggested that I talk to a UPS guy who parked himself on a barstool at Gregory’s at 5 p.m. every day.

I felt myself once again drifting from the facts.

In the small talk gluing it all together, we got onto the topic of the Warren Commission. Kelly looked at me incredulously and said, “You don’t actually believe one gunman killed JFK, do you?”

I slumped, dejected and day drunk, into the parking lot—just as Captain Snyder called back. He had found something, he said, sounding a little amazed. Materials pertaining to the investigation.

What materials? I asked, astonished.

He was not permitted to say, he replied.

I said I’d be right over. He said no, I would need to file a public records request. The entire process would take some weeks, and he couldn’t guarantee that what had been found would be made available to me.

OK, I said, could he at least tell me the nature of what he’d found?

No, he could not.

Because the windshield of their convertible was covered with dew, she couldn’t see what was going on, so she peeked over it. That’s when she witnessed Harry being assaulted.

Back home in Los Angeles, I called a lawyer friend to ask her about submitting an Open Public Records application. She offered to be the Harper Lee to my Truman Capote, holding my hand as I drafted the request. She cautioned me not to get my hopes up: “Records in these cases could mean cops’ coffee receipts.” I worked with my Harper, lit votives, burned sage, sent my request, and was rewarded two weeks later with a terse email that read, “The agency possesses no responsive records.”

I called Captain Snyder with more than a little bass in my voice and said, “What gives?” He paused, reiterated that some materials had been found, and instructed me to file again—this time to a certain person’s attention. I refiled, cc’ing the good captain to let him know I meant business.

Two weeks later I received in my inbox 168 pages of investigative material pertaining to Harry Anglemyer’s murder: from the initial investigation by the New Jersey State Police, through the handoff to the Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office some years later, and up to but not including the trial. The courtroom records, I learned after filing another request, had been destroyed, which was standard procedure at the time for any trial resulting in an acquittal.

Captain Snyder had been slyly schooling me about how to get what I wanted, and now it was pouring out of my printer. Scores of typewritten interviews and reports, much of it reprinted from old-timey carbon copies, then mimeographed, then digitized into PDFs. There were redactions everywhere, and big chunks of it were out of order, as if everything had been thrown loosely together and shoved in a filing cabinet.

I stayed up all night reading, ruining my eyes. The pages filled out gaps in the news reports from the day, revealing much that had been hidden from the public. I’d expected Mayberry-level ineptitude, but this was a comprehensive investigation with almost 100 witnesses, handled by the New Jersey State Police, law enforcement agencies in several other states, and the FBI.

According to news reports, they began by looking for anyone with damaged fists, as the assault had been so brutal. Meanwhile, they talked to people who’d seen Harry in the 24 hours prior to his death: His secretary, Daniel LeRoy. His sister Elaine, who also had an apartment above the fudge shop. Dunes staff who remained local when the summer ended. All of them were eliminated as suspects. Many couldn’t recall seeing Harry at all that night, nor could two Egg Harbor Township patrolmen assigned to the area—although one had noticed Harry’s distinctive car gleaming under the parking lot’s lights.

Two bartenders who’d been swigging champagne in the parking lot said that they’d seen Harry in the hours before his death with his head on the bar. Standing next to him was a man in his late twenties, taller than Harry, who had long dark hair and was wearing a dark suit; he was “possibly Italian.” The bartenders asked the man if Harry was “bothering” him. The man said no. They asked Harry if he needed help to his car. He said what he always said, that he could take care of himself.

The police interviewed Copper Kettle staff, including a former fudge cutter who’d apparently vowed to “get Anglemyer’s ring by Labor Day.” They also spoke to a local with a “Beatles haircut” who turned out to be one of the punks behind Harry’s black eyes. The young man claimed that Harry had grabbed him “by the privates,” then admitted to being after Harry’s ring too. Both the fudge cutter and the punk had criminal records. But when they took polygraphs, they registered no reaction when questioned about the killing. Police ruled them out as suspects.

Investigators soon located Joyce Lickfeld and Kenneth McGinley, who were in their twenties and had broken up earlier in the summer, only to run into each other that fateful night at the Dunes. They weren’t up to no good, as some newspapers implied—they were discussing what had torpedoed their relationship. (Eventually, the intensity of the investigation and their role in it would bring them closer, and they would marry.)

Police asked them to recount what they’d witnessed that night. Lickfeld said that they were sitting in the car when “two fellows” approached from the rear. One of the men, presumably Harry, was “walking like a girl.” The two men entered the car in front of Lickfeld, then, after a few minutes, exited and began arguing. Because the windshield of their convertible was covered with dew, she couldn’t see what was going on, so she peeked over it. That’s when she witnessed Harry being assaulted. McGinley intervened, offering his help. Harry’s assailant replied, “That’s OK, buddy,” as if he and Harry were just a couple of drunk friends having a bad night.

Lickfeld told police that she got a good look at the killer because she was sitting against the convertible’s passenger-side door, facing the Dunes, when Harry and the man walked by. She said that the man was in his late twenties, white but with a dark complexion, and sported slicked-back hair. He was “maybe of Italian extraction,” medium build, taller than average, wearing a dark suit, white shirt, and black tie. This sounded to me a lot like the man the two drunk bouncers saw Harry talking to at the bar.

When the sketch of the killer was published in newspapers, people called investigators in droves.

It looked like a cook in a Wildwood restaurant who “beats up women and queers.”

Someone’s daughter’s piano teacher.

“That manager of Aunt Jemima Restaurant.”

“An usher at the General Motors exhibit” at the New York World’s Fair.

A man who “acted like a homosexual, spoke of hairdressing, and made remarks of being in Harry’s pad.”

People inserted themselves everywhere, throwing enemies under the bus, suggesting people who bore no resemblance whatsoever to the sketch, and offering up their opinions as they pretended to be Harry’s best friend—or distanced themselves from him when questioned about being seen with him that summer.

At one point, investigators wondered if Harry’s nephew Charles, who worked at Copper Kettle, was involved in the killing, but Charles denied it. He said that he’d always worried about his uncle. When Harry “talked openly about his homosexual problems,” Charles counseled him to “do it elsewhere,” so as not to get in trouble in Ocean City. Yes, he’d sometimes followed his uncle, but only to make sure he was safe.

Some of the more promising information came from Catherine Lee Gordon, Harry’s maid. Gordon had seen quite a bit while keeping house for Harry that summer. Men came and went via the apartment’s three entrances. Investigators asked her to provide names of everyone who’d visited the apartment that summer, especially anyone she thought was close to him. Straight away she mentioned jockey Howard Grant, whom Harry had picked up at the Atlantic City racetrack. Grant had moved into the apartment in July, bringing with him his mother and one of her girlfriends.

Gordon also told police about airman Thomas Campbell, who’d come into the picture even before Grant moved out. Gordon found him more agreeable than the jockey. Campbell liked to play the piano, so a besotted Harry had one delivered to the apartment. Next came Campbell’s friends for raucous parties; they liked to sing into the wee hours, full of whiskey. This was the kind of party that took place the weekend before Harry’s death, Gordon said. It started with dinner, after which a man who resembled the sketch stopped by. Harry showed him around the apartment, but Catherine didn’t get the man’s name.

All these tips were dead ends. There is no record of Grant ever being questioned by police, and case files show Campbell learning about Harry’s death from a mutual friend on the beach, then flying to Germany a few days later to fulfill his Air Force duties.

Longo’s name comes up three times in the entire 168 pages. The first is with regard to an anonymous letter that arrived at the offices of the state police. “Why don’t you ask Longo what happened?” it read. “A couple of the ones involved in those ‘morals charges’ would love to have Harry out of the way.” Later, a caller told police that the sketch of the suspect looked like Longo, then hung up after refusing to give her name. The third reference to Longo came courtesy of the man himself: He contacted an investigator to say that the sketch resembled a “drifter from Longport whose father has an Esso gas station.” Longo knew this man to play the horses and hang out at the Dunes, and Ocean City police had a warrant out on him for writing bad checks.

Stretch’s name appears once in the files. An anonymous caller claimed, “Stretch is the guy who put the money up to have Anglemyer killed, and three henchmen did the job.” The tipster promised to call back the following week with more information but never did.

If police followed up on these tips—including Longo’s drifter—there’s no record of it in the files made available to me. Nor is there any documentation of Longo or Stretch being questioned about Harry’s death or providing alibis for the night of the murder. Though parts of the file were redacted, nothing I read suggested that law enforcement considered either man a suspect. Lickfeld and McGinley don’t seem to have been shown their photos either. I couldn’t ask Longo, who died in 2006, or Stretch, who died in 1985.

As I was coming to the end of the files, I found something that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up: a formal mention of the 1963 lewdness charges against Harry in a two-page memo issued by an Atlantic County detective. Dated the day after the murder, it lists his three accusers: bridgetender Thomas Sullivan, engineer James Luddy—but not Longo. Instead, the memo gives the third man as someone named Bill Blevin.

That was the name of the man the young mother in a bad marriage told me she saw leaving the Dunes with Harry. One of the names supposedly in Lou Esposito’s missing affidavit. The person the bookstore clerk believed was involved in the killing.

But how had Blevin’s name wound up replacing Longo’s in the memo? It appears nowhere else in the investigation files I received. And no one else I spoke to could connect Harry to Blevin.

I attempted to locate Blevin, turning up an address at a Fort Lauderdale strip mall and one on the Gulf Coast. Letters sent to both were returned. I reached out to his cousin Robert—who as it happened had worked with Longo on the local force before succeeding him as chief of police—and also to a surviving Blevin sibling, without success.

Then I got a tip. A friend of Blevin’s had heard that I was asking around, and he was willing to talk.

I was skeptical. The friend had been described to me by one local as someone who was less than trustworthy. Maybe so, but information he gave me checked out. He knew all the places Blevin had lived since leaving Ocean City when no one else did. And he provided me with Blevin’s obituary from 2002, printed by a newspaper in Knoxville, Tennessee, establishing that he was not alive and well in Florida.

And the story he told me was this: For reasons that are unclear, Blevin had become a target of Longo’s ire and, knowing Longo’s expanding sphere of influence, set sail from the Shore forever.

This at least had a ring of truth. Longo, according to some of my local sources, had a history of personal retaliation. People started calling him King Dominick at a certain point because of the power he wielded around town. Still, this was just one man’s version of the past.

With Blevin’s obituary in hand, I was able to locate two of his children: Beth Blevin and Teri Gagliardi. My heart about stopped when they described their father as “Italian looking”—just like Lickfeld, McGinley, and the Dunes bouncers had characterized the man last seen with Harry. But the Blevin daughters also described their father as scrawny, which didn’t square with the description of the suspected killer. And neither Beth nor Teri had any recollection of the names Harry Anglemyer or Dominick Longo.

I was no closer to determining how Blevin’s name wound up in the memo instead of Longo’s. It certainly seemed odd, because everyone in town knew that it was Longo, not Blevin, who’d accused Harry of lewdness. (And Blevin’s name appears nowhere else in the investigation files.) Could Longo have replaced his own name with Blevin’s as part of his grudge against the man?

Maybe, so many years after the fact, no one could provide the answer. But I did begin to wonder if the erroneous memo naming Blevin, along with the references—or lack thereof—to Stretch and Longo in the case files, were the seeds from which a legend grew. Perhaps these mysteries made their way into Ocean City’s water, reaching people like William Kelly and the young mother in a bad marriage and the bookstore clerk—people perhaps inclined to believe that the grassy knoll was lousy with gunmen.

Just as bootlegging arose from Prohibition, so did the extortion of gay men arise from laws criminalizing queer behavior.

Over the course of the investigation, New Jersey law enforcement ruled out suspect after suspect until only Christopher Brendan Hughes’s name remained. He was the father of two small children with a common-law wife in Pennsylvania whom he hardly saw because he was busy extorting money from gay men from Baltimore to Chicago. His name was given to New Jersey state police by the FBI, after the bureau interviewed an associate of his named Thomas Rochford, aka Tommy Ryan.

The extortion ring Hughes and Rochford were in was known to police as the Chickens and the Bulls. The group’s MO was what law enforcement used to refer to as “fairy shaking,” where they would target a gay mark, then send in a “chicken” to lure the target to a hotel room. Soon after, a “bull” would bust into the room, flashing a badge and handcuffs, pretending to be a vice cop, and demand money. If the mark didn’t comply, the bull would threaten arrest, which carried the risk of being named a homosexual in the press.

The Chickens and the Bulls were an insidious success, managing to snare thousands of targets, from congressmen to military brass. It was rumored that they almost brought down Liberace, but Mr. Showmanship could afford to pay them off. Other men weren’t so lucky. They went bankrupt, got divorced, lost jobs—one Navy admiral even killed himself.

Law enforcement had long overlooked crimes against gay men, and even tacitly encouraged them. Just as bootlegging arose from Prohibition, so did the extortion of gay men arise from laws criminalizing queer behavior. But around the mid-1960s, law enforcement became interested in prosecuting the Chickens and the Bulls, in no small part because cops didn’t appreciate being impersonated by criminals. So began what the FBI referred to as Operation Homex, a coordinated effort to take down the Chickens and the Bulls.

Hughes was netted in the operation. He was a chicken—and an effective one. He was young. He was smart. He was pretty. And according to FBI files, Hughes took Harry’s ring to Chicago to fence it. The ring was later stripped of its stones. One became part of an engagement band given to the fiancée of one of the Bulls; another was placed in a tie pin for which a dirty cop held the pawn ticket.

Prosecutors couldn’t lean on other members of the Chickens and the Bulls to place Hughes at the Dunes the night of Harry’s death. Rochford was institutionalized—his lawyer said that his memory was “wiped from shock treatments.” The boss of the whole ring, Sherman Kaminsky, was in the wind. (The FBI didn’t catch him until 1978, when he was living in Denver under an assumed name and overseeing a business breeding rabbits.) Law enforcement interviewed some of Hughes’s associates from Marcus Hook, the hardscrabble Pennsylvania town where he grew up, but none of them were called to testify at trial. Instead the prosecution relied on Ronnie Lee Murray, Hughes’s old cellmate. But he ultimately refused to take the stand.

And then there was Joyce Lickfeld. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Hughes looked “a good deal like the police sketch drawn of him,” the one Lickfeld made possible. But that wasn’t true. He had fair hair, blue eyes, and a slight build. “Slender and stoop-shouldered,” the Ocean City Sentinel-Ledger wrote, “looking more like a high school teacher than a brawler.” It’s no wonder that when Lickfeld looked around the courtroom for Harry’s killer, she didn’t finger Hughes.

But then hadn’t the prosecution showed Lickfeld photos of Hughes during the investigation? Only one person could tell me for sure.

Joyce was afraid because the case remained unsolved. She was worried that people might come for her.

Joyce is now divorced from Kenneth and remarried, with a different last name. She’s in her eighties and lives in a ranch-style home in a small central New Jersey town. Inside, on practically every surface, are seashells.

“I just love the seashore,” she said.

It hadn’t been easy to find Joyce, and at first she wasn’t sure she wanted to talk. Eventually she said yes, and we scheduled a visit via text, which included a lot of emojis on her end. Now we sat at her dining table having coffee. She’d put out an array of muffins. With her were her sister and her son with Kenneth.

Joyce had startling blue eyes, almost turquoise, and she wore a blouse of the same color. Her hair was chestnut red. Her manner was shy, and there was something about her that felt like it needed protecting. Which is perhaps why her son and sister were there.

She told me that for years she kept a scrapbook of news clippings about the murder. She wasn’t eager to bring it out. I proceeded gingerly. Joyce was afraid because the case remained unsolved. She was worried that people might come for her. She also felt partly responsible for the mysteries that had accumulated over the previous 60 years, and also guilty that she couldn’t help Harry’s family find closure. Even though she knew none of it was really her fault. Still, “witness trouble” was what law enforcement officials had blamed the collapse of the case on, and she was keenly aware that she’d been the prosecution’s sole eyewitness.

Her recall was quite good, and the account she gave me of the murder matched the one she’d given the police, including the sound of Harry’s head hitting the road, that crack so sickening she can still hear it today.

She did add one thing that she hadn’t mentioned to investigators: As Harry walked past the convertible where she was sitting with Kenneth, he was holding hands with the other man. Why hadn’t she mentioned this to investigators? I asked. Because, she said, such things weren’t discussed back then. Instead she told police what I had read in the files, that Harry “walked like a girl.” This was, she said to me, the best she could do in 1964.

As for Christopher Brendan Hughes, yes, Joyce had seen mug shots of him in 1967, when he was indicted. And back then she thought, sure, this could be the man from the Dunes. But she never saw Hughes in person until the trial, because he’d been in prison. When she finally did, it seemed to her that he could only be the killer if he’d lost a lot of weight and dyed his hair. Ultimately, she didn’t believe he was the man she saw that night. So she pointed to the surprised sheriff in the back, who had dark skin and hair, because of all the men in the room he looked the most like the culprit.

“Would you like to see the scrapbook?” Joyce finally asked.

She picked it up off a credenza behind her and placed it between us. In it were not only newspaper clippings about the murder, but also souvenirs from her life: coasters from the bar where Kenneth proposed, postcards, dried flowers. There wasn’t one section for the murder and one for mementos—it was all mixed together, showing her life, the good and the terrible, as it happened.

Was there anything else she wanted me to know? Only that she’d met Harry’s mother and sister at the courthouse right after the trial, and they told her she could have a job at Copper Kettle if she wanted. That meant a lot to Joyce.

After our visit, I went to Harry’s grave at Northwood Cemetery in Philadelphia. He’s buried in a mausoleum along with his mother, though it wasn’t his initial resting place. Mrs. Anglemyer had her son disinterred at some point and commissioned the much grander resting monument for the two of them. From it you can see the house they lived in when Harry was a child.

The cemetery was ancient, in disrepair. A groundskeeper led me to the plot, explaining that Harry’s mother had paid for “perpetual care.” The mausoleum gleamed, and the grass around it was mowed, while the rest of the cemetery was gray-brown.

Tucked in the iron grate of the mausoleum’s door, through which I could see Harry’s name and that of his mother on the crypt, was a small American flag—the kind you’d wave in a parade—and a nosegay of fresh flowers. Two striking flashes of color in an otherwise monochromatic landscape.

I remarked to the groundskeeper that the flowers and the flag must have been part of “perpetual care.” But he said no. He had no idea who’d put those there.

“Are you sure they’re all dead?” Joyce had asked me about the suspects. It was a hard question to answer—the uncertainty shot through the whole story meant that there were surely names of suspects I didn’t know about. But there were plenty I did know about, based on my interviews and the investigation files. Some of them had been ruled out by law enforcement, but I wasn’t convinced—the files weren’t thorough enough for that. I started making a list: men of interest.

Longo and Stretch were on it. So were Kaminsky and Rochford. Bill Blevin, though I had serious doubts. The fudge cutter who claimed he “would get Anglemyer’s ring by Labor Day.” Arthur Marshall Brown, aka Arthur Kebabs, and Frank Ozio—the punks who rolled Harry a few weeks before he died. A Dunes bouncer named Saba “Buddy” Taweel, who looked like the sketch of the suspect and whom Lou Esposito allegedly named in his affidavit as one of the men in the marsh near the scene of the killing. Frank “Birdman” Phelan, who’d gunned down a couple in the basement of a Philadelphia restaurant. John “Chickie” Binder, a diamond-obsessed burglar who, according to an informant, had spotted Harry at the Dunes that summer and knew him to be “an important queer” he might roll. Another Dunes bouncer. A Dunes doorman. Christopher Brendan Hughes’s associates from Marcus Hook, who had rap sheets and, in interviews with police, placed themselves at the Shore the night of Harry’s death.

I couldn’t ask the Atlantic County prosecutor who worked the case—the aptly named Solomon Forman—for his opinion on any of these names. He was long dead. I assumed other key figures from the 1969 trial were gone, too. But maybe not Hughes’s attorney, whose job it had been to at least consider alternate theories of the crime. Hughes was a small-time crook who, despite his success in the Chickens and the Bulls, surely didn’t have the money for a private attorney. Which meant that he would have had a public defender. Perhaps someone precocious, eager to make a name for himself. Someone at the start of his career. Someone in his twenties in 1969 who might still be alive.

After Joyce couldn’t identify Stanford’s client in court, the only thing Atlantic County had on Hughes was Anglemyer’s ring.

“My client was innocent,” Leland Stanford III told me. Hughes was only put on trial “because of all the public pressure, because of Harry Anglemyer being so popular and well-known.”

Stanford, like Joyce, is in his eighties. Retired now, he left the Jersey Shore over a decade ago and today lives in a beach community farther down the coast. He had more to say than anyone I’d talked to, and not only about Hughes, his former client. His memory of the trial was astonishing. He attributed this to it being an indelible moment in his life, his first high-profile case, an extremely heady time.

Stanford had never seen the case files—the process of discovery back then was much more selective—so I told him what I knew. And he told me what he knew. He said that the sheriff standing in the back of the courtroom, the one Joyce had pointed to, was a buddy of his, a man named Samuel Shamy who was, incredibly, the first cousin of Dunes bouncer Saba “Buddy” Taweel. Was I once again in the land of local conspiracy? Stanford said no, Taweel’s alibi was airtight. That his cousin was in the courtroom had been merely a small-town coincidence.

What Stanford did think significant was that Shamy and his cousin were of Lebanese descent, with dark skin and hair, as Joyce and Kenneth had described the killer having. Further, both men had a unibrow, as did the suspect in the artist’s sketch. This was the first I’d heard about this detail. But when I looked closely at the sketch, I could see what Stanford was talking about: a dusting of hair above the bridge of the nose. No descriptions of Hughes mention it.

Stanford had no knowledge of the Longo and Stretch theory, nor of the name Bill Blevin. He told me to be wary of narratives built up over time. His only concern was clearing his client based on what he knew from his own pretrial investigation. And he felt certain that Hughes had not committed the crime. “The first words out of his mouth were ‘I’m innocent,’ ” he said. Hughes was a career criminal, I pointed out, and one who extorted gay men. But Hughes told Stanford that he never would have gone after Harry, that he only targeted men who didn’t want the world to know they were gay. Stanford was saying that Harry was basically too out of the closet to be extorted.

He had a point. In fact, when Harry was accused of lewd acts by Longo and the other men, he didn’t deny being gay—he only denied the specific charges against him. He didn’t have a wife to worry about, or a boss who might fire him if the truth came out. He wasn’t the kind of target the Chickens and the Bulls preferred.

Also, after Joyce couldn’t identify Stanford’s client in court, the only thing Atlantic County had on Hughes was Anglemyer’s ring. “He looked nothing like the drawing, and there was no direct evidence of any kind identifying him,” Stanford said. It wasn’t enough to prove murder. Which Stanford didn’t believe Hughes was capable of, physically or otherwise.

Did Stanford have any idea who had killed Harry Anglemyer?

He said that he did.

Could he tell me?

No, he could not.

Why?

Because the person might still be alive.

Was he afraid that this person would come after him?

No, he said. They’d be very old at this point. And the case could hardly be retried after all this time, so he wasn’t being professionally cautious.

I changed tack: Why was he convinced of the real killer’s identity?

Finally, he said: “Because of some things Christopher Hughes told me.”

When other bars closed, Hughes and his friends proceeded to the Dunes. Inside was Harry Anglemyer, diamond ring blazing.

Suspicious of lawyers, Hughes initially represented himself. Eventually Stanford came on board, and midway through the trial, Hughes trusted him enough to take him into his confidence. He admitted to Stanford that he was indeed at the Shore the night of the crime, partying with some of his boys from Marcus Hook. When other bars closed, Hughes and his friends proceeded to the Dunes. Inside was Harry Anglemyer, diamond ring blazing.

According to Hughes, it was one of the other guys from Marcus Hook who targeted Harry—a guy who looked Italian. He wasn’t known to be a member of the Chickens and the Bulls, but was extremely close to Hughes—at the very least familiar with Hughes’s line of work.

Hughes, then, may have been one of the men who came running when Harry hit the pavement, who helped the real killer stuff him in the car. Hughes admitted to Stanford that he eventually absconded with Harry’s ring, which explained why he was able to transport it to Chicago.

Hughes’s version of the story describes a crime of opportunity that happened to involve a member of the Chickens and the Bulls. While I still didn’t have the real killer’s name, I was inching closer to the truth. But one thing still rankled me: Harry had told various people that he was going to the Dunes to meet someone. Perhaps the whole thing, I pondered, was more planned than Hughes admitted to Stanford. Maybe Hughes or one of his associates identified Harry over the summer from all the press they’d been reading in connection with the lewdness charges brought by Dominick Longo, with D. Allen Stretch’s support. Maybe they arranged to meet Harry that night for what they hoped would be an easy grab-and-go robbery, only to have it end in murder.

I ran all this past Stanford, who, ever the lawyer, refused to speculate. I asked him if he’d encountered the man Hughes had identified as Harry’s killer before.

He said that he had. Several times. The man actually attended Hughes’s trial on and off—though presumably not the day Joyce testified, lest she identify him. He also showed up, unannounced, in Stanford’s office during that time. Stanford didn’t know why and sent him packing. “I wanted nothing to do with him,” he said.

Which makes it all the more notable that the day after the acquittal, Stanford received a call from this man. “He sounded like he was partying,” Stanford told me. “He just wanted to make sure, in my opinion, that he could not be charged with the murder now. I told him no, it didn’t appear he could be. He would have been charged by then if prosecutors felt they had something. The fact is, they had stopped investigating.”

Did you ever give his name to anyone else? I asked Stanford.

He said that he had. To none other than Solomon Forman, shortly after the Hughes trial.

Forman, then in his sixties, never learned how to drive, so he often got a ride to the courthouse with Stanford. It was during one of these drives that Stanford told him that they’d picked the wrong suspect to prosecute, then offered the name Hughes had provided as the real killer of Harry Anglemyer

On hearing it, Stanford said, Forman became quiet. He then admitted that he’d thought the county’s case against Hughes was lousy, and agreed that the wrong person had been tried. Furthermore, he said that he’d been assigned to the case—he was Atlantic County’s best trial attorney at the time, and after five years of the Fudge King’s murder remaining unsolved, there was considerable pressure to put the damn thing to bed.

About the name Hughes had given Stanford, Forman didn’t disagree. “You are probably correct,” he said.

But if the wrong person was indicted, I asked, why hadn’t authorities retried the case with a new suspect? Because there wasn’t enough evidence, Stanford explained. Nothing physical certainly. And because no one wanted to touch the matter at that point. Prosecutors had spent five days putting witnesses on the stand, only to end up with a drubbing acquittal in under an hour. They had lost all credibility. Without an utterly airtight case, they weren’t going to charge anyone else with Harry’s murder.

I understood that to get the suspected killer’s name from Stanford, I would need to prove that he was dead. Immediately after our call, I snail-mailed him the obituaries I’d assembled of everyone I considered to be a suspect. I would have sent them via email, but for some reason Stanford never received the other messages I sent that way. He never called me either, so after I knew the obituaries had arrived, I called him. Repeatedly. Comcast kept telling me that his cell phone was offline for “service interruptions.”

When I got through, an excruciating week later, I asked him if he was satisfied that the person he believed had killed Harry was well and truly dead.

He was, yes.

Was he now prepared to tell me his name?

He was. And he did.

The name made immediate sense. Investigators had tried to reach him as they looked into Harry’s murder, but were unable to locate him.

It was Kevin Hughes, Christopher Brendan Hughes’s younger brother.

Kevin had a longer—and more violent—rap sheet than Christopher, including a string of burglaries, two years on the lam, armed robbery, and assault and battery of a police officer. Witnesses told investigators that he was a “cop hater.” And he looked much more like the artist’s sketch of the killer than his brother did. He was taller, dark, muscled. According to Stanford, “It was like they had different parents or something.”

Although Kevin’s photograph was requested by police, there is no information that it was ever received, let alone shown to Joyce and Kenneth, or that he was ever considered a suspect. His brother was the more obvious culprit, said Stanford—the guy fencing Harry’s ring and extorting rich gay men. Kevin Hughes would live out his life without ever being implicated in the murder. He died in 2004 at Shore Memorial Hospital, the same hospital where Harry’s autopsy took place.

As I researched the Hughes brothers, a few things pulled me shockingly close to them. Things I couldn’t have imagined when my brother first told me about the Fudge King’s murder. They grew up in the same county I did—Delaware, aka Delco. They went to the same Catholic high school I briefly attended, where I, like Harry Anglemyer, was called a sissy and smacked around by tough boys like the Hugheses.

I searched my school’s online archives and found their names and class—but no photos. Some kids couldn’t afford to have their pictures taken back then. Or didn’t bother to. Or they dropped out before graduation. Kevin and Christopher Brendan Hughes’s names were accompanied by blank squares.

It’s a long shot, but maybe someday soon there will be a measure of justice for the Fudge King after all.

In the spring of 2023, I was in Philadelphia visiting my mother when I noticed a brass plaque on an old brownstone near Rittenhouse Square. It read “The Vidocq Society.” I knew this to be a consortium of private investigators, largely former law enforcement, who had banded together to help solve cold cases—most recently, Philly’s infamous “Boy in the Box” case from the 1950s. My mother, still excited by murder, wondered if we shouldn’t go in. We did, and there we met with director William Fleisher in his mahogany-paneled office, the walls filled with degrees and citations. He listened patiently to everything I’d uncovered about the death of the Fudge King.

What I told him was, of course, only a theory—hard to prove without, say, forensics. Harry’s bloody clothes or shoes, for instance. He nodded, then said he couldn’t help me. The Vidocq Society only works with police agencies, not private citizens. But he suggested I contact someone with the recently formed New Jersey State Police Cold Case Task Force. He then handed my mother his card with his cell number, in case she ever got “in trouble in the neighborhood.”

I called the task force and connected with detective Taylor Bonner. He was reluctant to look at the case, as he didn’t have any files on it, or even a file number. I had all that, of course, but after I presented it to him, there was still a bit of hesitation on his part. It was Atlantic County that had tried the case, and Bonner felt it was theirs to reopen or not. I offered Captain Snyder’s name immediately—with more than a little ta-da—and Bonner said he’d get back to me.

It took him some weeks, but he did. He had spoken with Pat Snyder—Snyder has since been promoted to chief—and after some back and forth they wanted me to know that they would work together to re-review the case. Currently, there is an Atlantic County detective assigned to it and one other high-profile cold-case murder. It’s a long shot, but maybe someday soon there will be a measure of justice for the Fudge King after all.

If this new theory turns out to be true, it will complicate the local myth surrounding Harry’s death, the one whispered and blogged about and alluded to in a hastily scribbled note from a bookstore clerk. Blogger Kelly says he’s fine with that—and continues to offer the names of people who might know more.

But Leland Stanford III, for all his help, has been impossible to reach recently, either by phone or registered mail. I even sent him a box of assorted fudge but received no reply. I can only hope that he stopped talking to me because he’s now talking to the Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office as it reinvestigates the case.

Whatever comes of the theory that Kevin Hughes was Harry’s killer, I’m not keen to let Longo and Stretch off the hook. Their fear and loathing of Harry—businessman, dandy, Good Samaritan, and the thing that dare not speak its name—may have set in motion a string of events that culminated in his death. Their open bigotry and defamation of Harry, both during his lifetime and after his murder, mark them as villains in my book.

It’s gratifying to feel that I may have moved the needle on an unsolved murder. Especially the murder of Harry Anglemyer, a man I came to see more vividly as time went on, as if he were emerging from a fog, bringing the past back to life—both his and mine. I am not a great believer in ghosts, but I can say that on more than one occasion these past two years I have felt his nudge. Sometimes quite forcefully. As if Harry wanted this solved, the truth finally revealed.

Harry, like all of us, was caught in the grip of time. Of the world changing, as it insists on doing, and too fast for some people’s liking. In Harry’s case, he found himself caught between midcentury notions and a more tolerant era approaching, firmly believing—perhaps naively so—that he could ride the seismic cultural shifts coalescing around him to wealth and happiness.

But history’s rhythms can be maddening. Advance, retreat. Waves against the shore. Ocean City was recently in the news for replacing several members of its school board with those endorsed by Moms for Liberty, a right-wing nonprofit that advocates for “parental rights” with regard to shaping what kids are taught about, among other things, LGBTQI issues. The featured speaker at one of its campaign rallies was pastor Gregory Quinlan, who believes Christ “defined sex.”

What would Harry make of this? I imagine he would have looked to the horizon while savoring everything as much as he could. Which is what he did in the summer of 1964, even with so much on his mind. He was by all accounts a good and charming and, yes, horny man who believed that in the end, if we’d only live and let live, have more sex, cheer on more jockeys, sing more songs while someone tickles the ivories, and buy fudge on Sundays, the future might be a much more delicious place.

The Pretender

THE PRETENDER

People in Blooming Prairie, Minnesota, thought Lois Riess was a nice wife and grandmother. If she had a vice, it was playing the slots. Then she committed murder.

By John Rosengren

The Atavist Magazine, No. 107

John Rosengren is a journalist based in Minneapolis who has written for more than 100 publications, including The Atlantic, Sports Illustrated, and The Washington Post Magazine. He is the author of nine books, including Hank Greenberg: The Hero of Heroes.

Editor: Seyward Darby
Designer: Ed Johnson
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checker: Nina Zweig
Illustrator: Jennifer Dionisio

Published in September 2020.

Part One

On the evening of Friday, March 23, 2018, the police department in Blooming Prairie, Minnesota, dispatched two officers to check on a man named Dave Riess. They drove up a winding dirt drive to a modest tan rambler. The house was dark. So too was the long, low-slung building, located about 50 paces from the front door, where Dave raised fishing bait at the Prairie Wax Worm Farm.

None of Dave’s employees nor his business partner had seen or talked to him for almost two weeks. He hadn’t picked up or returned their calls. They had received responses to texts, but Dave usually dictated his messages, which made the words run together. These replies used punctuation.

Stranger still, Dave was supposed to have left for a fishing tournament in Illinois on Tuesday, March 20. He would have taken his white Cadillac Escalade, which was what he typically used to pull his 20-foot-long boat. But on Thursday, two worm-farm employees saw Lois, Dave’s wife of 35 years, pull out of the driveway in the Escalade. They hadn’t seen her since.

Concern soon escalated to alarm, and the employees called the police.

Blooming Prairie is a blink of a town in southeastern Minnesota. It’s a stop along the railroad tracks that run parallel to U.S. Highway 218, surrounded by vast fields of corn and soybeans. There’s a two-block Main Street of brick buildings, with storefronts that include B-Z Hardware, Farmers & Merchants State Bank, and J & H Liquors. A neat grid of quiet streets about a mile and a half square contain mostly single-story houses. Blooming Prairie is a town of about 1,900 people who leave their front doors unlocked and know each other by their first names. It’s not a place steeped in intrigue. At least it wasn’t.

The Riesses’ home was in the country—a mile south on 218, past six massive grain bins that sat on the edge of town. The night the police visited was dark and cold, with snow still on the ground. No one answered the door. The two officers walked around the house’s perimeter and noticed light coming from an open bathroom window. One hoisted up the other to peer inside. He spotted what appeared to be a body covered with a blanket.

The cops summoned two deputies from the Dodge County Sheriff’s Office, who went inside the house. They found Dave Riess on the floor. He had been shot twice with a .22 handgun—once in the chest, once in the back. A bullet had pierced clean through his forearm, suggesting that he had raised it to protect himself. He’d been dead for ten days, maybe longer. His body had started to marble, bloat, and decompose.

Ask anyone in Blooming Prairie and they’ll tell you that Dave was a jovial guy. Quick with a tip on a fishing spot. Generous with his employees. Loved to tell stories. Made up funny songs. But his laugh left the biggest impression. The rumble in his throat built to an eruption that shook his husky frame. Soon you were laughing, too, maybe without even realizing why. Being around Dave just felt good.

“He was my best buddy,” Jerry Bissell, a Blooming Prairie resident, told me recently. “Every day I go by their house, I wonder what the hell happened up there.” To find out, law enforcement had to answer another question: What the hell happened to Lois Riess?

Blooming Prairie is a town of about 1,900 people who leave their front doors unlocked and know each other by their first names. It’s not a place steeped in intrigue. At least it wasn’t.

South Padre Island is a narrow strip of land in the Gulf of Mexico at the southernmost tip of Texas. It’s a popular vacation spot for families and retirees. On April 9, 2018, a middle-aged woman with long blond hair checked into the island’s Motel 6, a white complex with blue doors. She requested an out-of-the-way room and paid cash in advance for a week’s stay.

Two days later, in the early afternoon on Wednesday, April 11, the woman left Room 227 and walked across the parking lot to the Padre Rita Grill for lunch. The owner, Cathy Laferty, a friendly 61-year-old with blond hair herself, greeted the woman and complimented her cute outfit and matching hat. “What’s your name?” Laferty asked.

“L—,” the woman hesitated, “Donna.”

“Like Madonna?”

“Yeah. That’s why I just go by Donna.”

It became their little joke, and how the woman introduced herself around South Padre, where she decided to stay awhile. Donna returned to the grill daily, often in the evening, when there was live music. “She was happy, laughed a lot. A delightful person,” Laferty said. “I probably would’ve hired her if she’d asked for a job.” Donna liked to sit at the corner of the bar, where she could talk to people on either side of her. She was sociable, striking up conversations with waitstaff and other customers. She mentioned that she’d been in Florida previously but had found it overrun with old people. She said she was recently widowed, had come into money, and was looking to buy a condo. She asked locals like Laferty about property taxes and homeowners association fees.

She always paid in cash from a large wad, and tipped generously. The grill’s staff liked her. “I would’ve invited her to my house,” said Laura Giacchino, who waited on Donna the first time she came in. Donna flirted shamelessly with the Padre Rita bartender, Arnie, who was several years younger than she was. He flirted back, but demurred when she asked him out.

Donna made other friends around town. She met Isabel Barreiro at the Motel 6 pool. Barreiro, who was 52 and lived 75 miles away in Alamo, had come to the island by herself for a short vacation, something she frequently did. Cool, she thought when she met Donna, another woman by herself. Someone to talk to. They hit it off, had a couple of drinks, and sat “chatting and chatting,” Barreiro said later. Donna explained to Barreiro that her husband had died, tearing up as she spoke. Barreiro didn’t ask questions, to avoid being nosy.

Over the next two days they had lunch, went shopping, hung out in each other’s motel rooms, and sat on the beach. Donna posed for photos with her new friend. “She wasn’t shy with the camera,” Barreiro said. “She wanted me to take pictures of her.”

A week later, the national news sent shockwaves through the Padre Rita Grill and across South Padre Island. That’s when locals discovered Donna’s true identity. “We had no idea when she was here that she was a murderer and trying to hide,” Laferty said. “You just never know people you see on the street or who walk into your bar, who they really are.”

Part Two

Born in Rochester, Minnesota—home of the Mayo Clinic—on April 24, 1963, Dave Riess grew up southeast of the city’s downtown. He was a prankster at Mayo High School, class of 1981. The spring before graduation, he enlisted in the Navy and was stationed in San Diego, where he married Lois Witte on September 17, 1982. He was 19; she was 20.

Lois was also from Rochester, the fourth of five children. Their father was an engineer at IBM. Their mother was a hoarder, which so embarrassed Lois as a teenager that she didn’t invite friends to the house. Lois left Mayo High School after the 11th grade. Following their wedding, she and Dave had three children in four years: boy, girl, boy. “She was caring, always put herself second and us kids first,” Braden, the youngest, told a reporter after his father’s death. When Dave finished serving a Navy stint in Guam, the family moved back to Rochester.

Dave drove a forklift at Crenlo, a manufacturer of metal equipment, and eventually opened the Bait Box, a small shop where he sold live bait and fishing tackle. Lois ran a day care center out of their home, which had an aboveground swimming pool in the backyard. In 2005, they moved to Blooming Prairie, where Dave could pursue his dream of opening a wax worm farm.

Several months after they arrived, on the afternoon of February 16, 2006, a fire destroyed their house. No one was hurt, but the Riesses lost everything, including their cats. The cause may have been some faulty wiring Dave had done, which he felt terrible about. In a show of sympathy, their neighbors took up a collection. “That’s something our community does for people, whether they know them or not,” said Becky Noble, executive director of the Blooming Prairie chamber of commerce.

After they’d moved back into their rebuilt house—three bedrooms, two baths—Lois set up a day care facility there. She often had hot breakfast sandwiches ready for parents dropping off their preschoolers. Once her children had children of their own, Lois lavished her five grandkids with gifts, including cell phones and ATVs they could ride around the property. She joined the women’s bowling league at Bunkies, the four-lane alley on Blooming Prairie’s Main Street. She traveled to tournaments around the state with a group of about three dozen women, Noble among them. “She was fun-loving,” Noble said. “She had the cutest smile.”

That seemed to be the consensus around town: Lois was nice. She kept a clean house. She could be thoughtful, giving some friends who liked horses a set of tumblers frosted with equine figures. When Tess and Rod Koster invited Lois and Dave to their lake house along with another couple, Lois brought steaks for dinner and made breakfast for the group.

She was a good cook. A couple of times a week, she brought lunch over to the four or five guys working at the worm farm. They especially liked her generous servings of lasagna. After she stopped running the day care, around 2014, she helped out at the farm occasionally. It became a lucrative business. The staff made weekly deliveries to Walmart, Kwik Trip, and bait shops throughout Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa. They also shipped boxes of wax worms—excellent bait to catch pan fish—all over the country. Winter was the busiest time, with the worms in high demand among ice fishermen. “That place was a moneymaking machine,” Dave’s friend Jerry Bissell said of the farm.

Dave treated his employees well. They were mostly young guys in their late teens or early twenties who came to think of him as a second father. He put gas in their trucks, gave them money when they needed it, took them fishing. “He was kind to people he didn’t even know,” said Denny Clark, another friend of Dave’s.

In fact, that’s how they met, 30 years ago when Dave was still living in Rochester and came over to Denny’s house with a mutual friend to lay some carpet as a favor. They got to talking about fishing and became fast friends. Dave and Denny rented a trailer home on the Mississippi River as a base camp for angling expeditions. They entered competitions and did well enough to win some money and be featured on television. “There was a lot of laughter in that boat,” Denny said of their trips together. “Being out there, it didn’t take a whole lot to get him laughing. He was just a happy guy.”

Lois and Dave often ate dinner at the local Servicemen’s Club. He volunteered on the board there and looked after the books. When Dave discovered someone was embezzling funds, he put a stop to it. He also campaigned for the club to start selling pull tabs, similar to lottery tickets, to raise money. The idea met with some resistance, but Dave managed to push it through.

Dave was a decent bowler, but he preferred shooting pool at the Pizza Cellar or the back room of J & H Liquors. Many days after work, he’d go into town to have a few beers—always Miller Lite—with a half dozen other men and to bullshit around the pool table. They’d often end up back at the worm farm, hanging out in the office, which Dave had equipped with a good stereo. On Sundays, the group gathered in Kelly Njos’s man cave, a shed behind his house, to watch the Vikings on the big-screen TV. Lois usually sent along something she’d made—deviled eggs or a cake.

The last time Dave’s friends saw him was at the J & H on a Thursday evening, March 8, 2018. They drank, shot pool, talked about football—nothing out of the ordinary. Looking back, they figure Dave was killed that Sunday. That’s the last time anyone saw him, when Dave and Lois went to Wisconsin to see their grandson play in a basketball tournament.

That seemed to be the consensus around town: Lois was nice. She kept a clean house. She could be thoughtful, giving some friends who liked horses a set of tumblers frosted with equine figures.

On Monday, March 12, Lois stopped by the worm farm’s office. Instead of greeting the workers warmly and asking about their weekends like she usually did, she kept her head down. “Dave’s not feeling good,” she said. “I’ve got to take care of him.”

They didn’t see her Tuesday or Wednesday. On Thursday, she came down to the office again. Dave? Still sick, she said. She was going to take him to the doctor on Friday. It seemed odd to the employees, Dave being absent and incommunicado, but he did have a history of stomach trouble. They didn’t want to bug him if he really was ill.

Lois sat at a desk in the office staring out the window toward the house. At one point, she put her head in her hands, elbows on her knees.

“You OK?” one of the employees asked.

“Yeah, fine. I didn’t sleep good last night.”

The following week, Lois said that the doctor had cleared Dave to compete in the season opener of the Cabela’s Masters Walleye Circuit, a fishing competition on the Illinois River. That meant he’d leave on Tuesday morning, pick up Denny Clark, and make the five-hour drive down to the competition site. His employees assumed that’s what Dave did—until they saw Lois drive off the property in the Escalade, two days after her husband should have taken it to the event.

The 56-year-old grandmother turned up the next day at Diamond Jo, a farm-themed casino just across the Iowa border, off I-35, a 45-minute drive from Blooming Prairie. She went there frequently, sometimes with friends. She liked to play the slot machines in the high-rollers room. At 6:30 p.m., she bought a packaged sandwich next door at the Kum & Go. Video surveillance showed her—five-foot-five, about 165 pounds—dressed in white slacks and a black-and-white-striped cardigan, unbuttoned over a purple T-shirt. Her hair was bleached to the point of looking white.

“Say, if you want to start heading south, would you take 35 south, just to keep going on down to the next state? Is that the way to go you think?” she asked a clerk while he was making change for her.

“I think so,” he said.

“OK, well thank you,” she said, her voice girlish.

It was that night when police found Dave’s body. Lois had been in and out of the house for more than a week while he lay dead in the bathroom. By the time investigators from the Dodge County Sheriff’s Office, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation arrived at Diamond Jo the next day—having tracked Lois’s cell phone there—she was gone. Her children were distraught at the news of their father’s death and their mother’s disappearance. They had no idea where Lois was. One of her sons told an investigator that she hadn’t opened the Snapchats he’d sent her.

The Dodge County Sheriff’s Office released a statement identifying Lois as a person of interest sought by law enforcement and “known to frequent casinos.” It warned that she might be armed. (Indeed, several years earlier, her father had given her a collector’s item, his Colt Woodsman .22.) The office assigned the case to general investigator Ben Bohle, who had been with the department since 2009.

Bohle discovered that in the previous week, Lois had deposited two business checks missing from the worm farm—one for $8,684.80, the other for $1,209.60—into her husband’s personal checking account at Citizens State Bank in Glenville (now Produce State Bank), a half-hour drive from Blooming Prairie. She had then cashed three checks drawn on his account—for $2,500, $7,500, and $1,000—the last two on March 23. Bohle soon secured a warrant to arrest Lois for felony theft.

From the beginning, Lois was the only suspect in Dave’s death. “All signs pointed immediately to her,” said Brian Smith, a U.S. marshal who assisted with the investigation. But why would she kill her husband? That’s what everyone in Blooming Prairie was talking about, from impromptu musings in the aisles of Vandal’s grocery store to Mr. Pfiefer’s forensics class across town at Blooming Prairie High School, which discussed the case for several weeks.

Investigators found no evidence of Lois or Dave having an affair, nor of any domestic abuse. The fact that Lois had forged the checks and gone to the casino, along with information law enforcement had gathered about her stealing money in the past, pointed to another motive. “That was a new one on me,” Smith said. “It was hard for me to wrap my mind around someone committing a murder to feed a gambling addiction.”

Why would she kill her husband? That’s what everyone was talking about, from impromptu musings in the aisles of Vandal’s grocery store to Mr. Pfiefer’s forensics class across town at Blooming Prairie High School.

Compulsive gamblers fall into two basic categories: thrill seekers, who are usually men playing skill-based games with high stakes, wanting to win big, and escape artists, who often play slot machines, not to hit a jackpot but to enter a trancelike state. Women with a gambling habit are most likely to fall into the latter category. Electronic slot machines, “like alcohol and drugs, can be used for mood management,” according to a 2005 article about female gambling published in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction. “Many women with gambling problems are seeking a way to numb emotions, shut out the world and orchestrate a time-out.”

The article continues: “As problem gambling progresses, many women become more and more isolated. This exacerbates the feelings of loneliness, shame and guilt that women with gambling problems experience.” During the course of his investigation, Smith discovered that Lois had withdrawn from family and friends of late. “I don’t know if it was a condition of her addiction, but she’d cut ties with a lot of people, family and friends,” he said. “A lot of people we talked to said, ‘Yeah, I know Lois, but I haven’t talked to her for a while.’”

Dave occasionally went to Diamond Jo with Lois, but gambling wasn’t his thing. It was hers. And it had become a problem in the years leading up to Dave’s murder. Lois had bilked several worm-farm employees, soliciting donations for a golf cart Dave could use to shuttle back and forth from the house—a vehicle that never materialized. One family member suspected that she went to the casino with money designated for the interment of her father’s remains, because his ashes had sat in her house for many months after his death in 2014. Her son Braden told Inside Edition that Lois had gambled away a $500,000 inheritance from her father. “It was all secrecy,” he said. “Gambling’s a terrible thing where it can suck people in and destroy lives.”

The most brazen theft was from Lois’s oldest sister, Kim. In October 2010, Kim’s marriage was failing, and she had a mental breakdown. Lois and Dave let Kim live with them for a while before placing her in adult foster care. In February 2012, claiming that her sister was “unable to perform tasks for daily living” or “make decisions regarding her medical needs,” Lois applied to be Kim’s legal guardian and conservator. According to forms Lois filed with the courts, her sister suffered from bipolar disorder, as well as clinical depression, and had the cognitive capacity of a ten-year-old. In required annual filings, Lois reported that her sister’s emotional, mental, and physical states had deteriorated. She noted that Kim had schizophrenia and Parkinson’s disease. She also declared that Kim had obsessive compulsive disorder that caused her to go on shopping sprees and spend lavishly.

With access to Kim’s resources, which included a $200,000 inheritance from their father, Lois withdrew thousands of dollars at a time from an ATM at Diamond Jo. A court audit dated September 15, 2015, uncovered Lois’s fiduciary betrayals of her sister. They included payment of $14,070 on an alleged debt to their already-deceased father, supposed gifts to Lois’s three children totaling $15,000, and almost $8,500 in reimbursement for undocumented expenses purportedly paid by Lois. A social worker advocating on Kim’s behalf requested suspension of Lois’s role as guardian and conservator. Lois had explanations, but the court didn’t buy them. On October 8, 2015, her guardianship was suspended, and four months later she was officially discharged. (Kim, who remains under the state’s care, could not be reached for comment.)

The Steele County Attorney’s Office decided not to press criminal charges against Lois after a judge ordered her in December 2016 to repay $100,534 to Kim. Lois’s attorney through most of this time, Kristin Haberman, told me she was confident in her assessment of her client. “Lois is a really pleasant person to be around,” Haberman said. “She’s friendly, caring, warm.”

Dave occasionally went to Diamond Jo with Lois, but gambling wasn’t his thing. It was hers. And it had become a problem in the years leading up to Dave’s murder.

Brian Smith first heard about Dave Riess’s murder while he was fixing dinner one night in March 2018. Smitty, as friends and coworkers call him, was at the time the lead coordinator for the U.S. Marshals’ North Star Fugitive Task Force, based in Minneapolis. He knew Dodge County sheriff Scott Rose, who had helped him on cases in the past, and offered to return the favor by investigating the case. Rose welcomed the assistance.

Smith heard speculation that Lois was siphoning money from the worm farm, and that for Dave, who was well aware of his wife’s gambling habit, the last straw came when she took the couple’s savings, set aside for a new vehicle, and squandered it at the casino. “After that the husband said, ‘I’m done. I’m cutting you off. If you want money, you can work for me in the business, but I’m not giving you any more,’” Smith said.

Most people in Blooming Prairie knew Dave and Lois as a nice, normal couple. Once the press invaded the community after Dave’s murder, those who knew about things like Lois’s theft from her sister invoked the omertà typical of small towns, refusing to comment. The people closest to the Riesses were aware that all was not right and hadn’t been for several years. “Lois was likable, but you always knew she was a click off,” said Scott Carlson, one of Dave’s inner circle of friends. “She did some oddball shit.”

In July 2016, for instance, she disappeared for three days. Dave discovered some new debts she had incurred and was so concerned that he reported her missing to the sheriff’s office. When Lois returned, she said that she’d been visiting a girlfriend in Minneapolis; she acted like it was no big deal.

Friends heard Dave make an ominous comment more than once: “If I ever go missing, you come looking for Lois.”

Part Three

Pam Hutchinson arrived in Fort Myers Beach, the resort hub of Estero Island, in the Gulf of Mexico, on April 3, 2018. She was there to be with her longtime friend Donna Fetrow, whose husband had recently committed suicide. Fetrow planned to spread his ashes on nearby Sanibel Island. While Fetrow stayed with family on Sanibel, Hutchinson checked into condo 404 at the Marina Village at Snug Harbor, a time-share complex. She was staying alone.

Hutchinson, 59, with short blond hair and a wide smile, was outgoing and quick to make friends. She loved to fish for marlin, stay out late, and vacation in Mexico. She had been a successful car saleswoman in Virginia Beach before divorcing her husband about two years earlier and moving to Bradenton, Florida. The week she traveled down to Fort Myers Beach, she’d found a condo in Bradenton that she wanted to buy.

On Tuesday evening, she had dinner with Fetrow on Sanibel and then watched the sun set. On Wednesday, Fetrow made the short drive to Fort Myers Beach, and the friends ate lunch outside at a restaurant off Old San Carlos Boulevard. That evening, Hutchinson passed on Fetrow’s offer to join her for dinner on Sanibel. Instead, she spent time with another middle-aged woman she’d just met. The woman inspired Hutchinson’s sympathy with her story of being recently widowed. After the pair spent about three hours drinking together, a security camera filmed them walking toward Hutchinson’s condo.

Hutchinson had intended to leave on Thursday, April 5, but decided to stay another night. That evening she ate an early dinner with her new friend at the Smokin’ Oyster, a tropical-themed tourist dive. Surveillance footage shows the two of them sitting at the bar, Hutchinson in a pink camo baseball cap and white blouse, the other woman in a blue T-shirt and cream-colored slacks. At one point, the woman removed the sunglasses pushed above her forehead and swished her bleached hair over her shoulder. At 7:37 p.m., Hutchinson paid for a Long Island Iced Tea, a watermelon margarita, a sweet tea, a Bloody Mary, and a Bahama Mama, along with half a pound of peel and eat shrimp, a side of chard, and a small chowder.

That night, Fetrow texted Hutchinson from the beach where her family was spreading her deceased husband’s ashes, but got no reply. She didn’t think much of it at the time. Meanwhile, Hutchinson’s realtor in Bradenton, Judy Keene, sent her the application required by the homeowners association for the condo she was going to purchase. They traded texts, but Keene didn’t hear anything from Hutchinson after about 7 p.m. When her client didn’t reply to texts over the weekend, Keene figured maybe she was having buyer’s remorse.

Fetrow texted Hutchinson from the beach where her family was spreading her husband’s ashes, but got no reply. She didn’t think much of it at the time.

At 8:30 a.m. on Friday, April 6, Laurie Russell, manager at the Marina Village, received a call at the front desk from condo 404. “Oh, my gosh, I slept until 4 p.m. yesterday, and then I went out and met some great people and I’m gonna go boating today,” the woman on the line said. “Is there any way I could stay for the weekend?” Russell agreed to put an additional three days on one of Hutchinson’s credit cards.

Shortly after 11 a.m., a woman walked up to the counter of the Wells Fargo Bank in Fort Myers Beach wearing a white fedora with a black ribbon around the rim. She withdrew $5,000 from Hutchinson’s account, making small talk with the teller, saying she was staying in a nearby hotel but had bought a house in Bradenton. She left the bank, but rather than go boating, at some point that afternoon she started driving north in Hutchinson’s white Acura TL. She went past Bradenton, about 90 miles upstate. She drove all the way to Ocala, an additional 130 miles, and checked in to a Hilton that evening.

She signed Hutchinson’s name for two room-service deliveries, paid with one of her credit cards, and left the next morning. Shortly after 10:30 a.m., she used Hutchinson’s card to make three withdrawals of $500 each at a Bank of America drive-up ATM in Ocala. Then she continued north, eventually turning west and crossing the state line. She headed for the Coushatta Casino Resort off State Highway 165 in the town of Kinder, which boasts “the most slots in Louisiana!” She won a $1,500 jackpot on a $5 play.

The woman used a driver’s license and Social Security card to collect her winnings at 1:35 p.m. Both belonged to Lois Riess.

The police followed Hutchinson’s credit card trail, which led them to the surveillance videos from the Smokin’ Oyster, Wells Fargo, and Ocala Hilton. The same woman was in all the footage.

On April 9, Laurie Russell was checking units at Marina Village for a possible water leak. When she entered 404 there was a foul smell. She figured it was sewage, the source of the water problem. Still, something about the space seemed strange, so she asked two male guests outside to go back in with her.

In the bathroom, the guests found a dead woman lying on the floor. She had blond hair and was wearing a pink camo baseball cap, a white blouse, blue Levi’s shorts, and Teva flip-flops. A pillow, perforated by a bullet, was on top of her legs. The shot that killed her had sliced through the woman’s lower left lung, her heart’s right atrium and aorta, her esophagus, and her upper right lung. A .22 bullet was lodged in the right cup of her bra.

The woman had collapsed while her stomach and intestines filled with blood. As the odor emanating from the condo indicated, she had been dead several days. Her toothbrush was in the sink, where she must have dropped it when she was shot. Someone—presumably the killer—had covered her with a towel and stuffed more towels against the crack under the bathroom door. Before leaving, they turned the thermostat down to 61.

The group that found the body called 911. Upon learning that Hutchinson had been staying in 404, Lee County sheriff’s deputies called her ex-husband in Virginia Beach. They interviewed guests at the Marina Village as well as Hutchinson’s friends. They followed her credit card trail, which led them to the surveillance videos from the Smokin’ Oyster, Wells Fargo, and Ocala Hilton. The same woman was in all the footage.

She looked like Hutchinson—the right age, similar hair color, comparable complexion and build—but by then the deputies had identified the body in the bathroom. It was Hutchinson. The more surveillance video they watched, the more they saw of the other woman. It even placed her in 404 at the time of the murder. Footage stamped 7:46 p.m. showed Hutchinson and the woman approaching Hutchinson’s condo. At 8:34 p.m., a camera captured the woman walking by herself toward the building’s fourth-floor elevator. She stood in the landing area for 13 minutes, appearing distraught and upset, perhaps crying. Then she returned to Hutchinson’s condo.

Video from the next morning captured the woman in the Marina Village parking lot. She backed up Hutchinson’s Acura next to a Cadillac Escalade, then transferred luggage and other items from the SUV into the sedan.

The evening before Hutchinson was found murdered, a sergeant with the Lee County Sheriff’s Office had come across a white Cadillac Escalade with Minnesota plates at Bowditch Point, on the northern tip of Fort Myers Beach. It had been abandoned. He ran the registration and found that it belonged to Dave Riess. Investigators didn’t know what to make of it until they watched the surveillance video from the Marina Village. Tess Koster of Blooming Prairie connected the final dots.

Someone—presumably the killer—had covered Hutchinson with a towel and stuffed more towels against the crack under the bathroom door. Before leaving, they turned the thermostat down to 61.

A week before Hutchinson’s body was found, on a beautiful sunny afternoon, Tess Koster was cleaning the garage of one of the five rental units she and her husband, Rod, owned on Fort Myers Beach, where they wintered. The rest of the year they lived in Blooming Prairie, where they owned a car dealership. That day their daughter, Breauna, contacted them to say that a woman had called the dealership and identified herself as a friend. She said she was in Fort Myers Beach and wanted to visit the Kosters.

Breauna had given the woman the address where her parents were—880 Third St. She didn’t think twice about it. The Kosters were always inviting people from Blooming Prairie to visit them. Several years earlier, for instance, when they sat next to each other at a wedding, the Kosters had told the Riesses that they should come down to Florida some time.

About 1:45 p.m. on April 2, from the garage at 880 Third St., Tess saw a woman with a white ponytail at the end of the drive check a notebook in her hand, then look at the house number. Tess took a step toward her, thinking she was there to inquire about one of the rentals.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

The woman looked up. When their eyes met, Tess immediately recognized Lois. She had talked to friends back home, so she knew about the discovery of Dave’s body ten days prior. Lois also seemed to recognize Tess. She ducked her head, muttered “Wrong house,” and walked off quickly. Tess saw her drive away in a white Escalade.

She and Rod called 911. After half an hour, two deputies showed up from the Lee County Sheriff’s Office. They knew that Lois was wanted on the felony theft charge and in connection with Dave’s death, but they figured that seeing Tess had spooked her off the island, that she was long gone by then. They provided additional patrols in the Kosters’ neighborhood but didn’t stake out the bridge to the mainland or search Fort Myers Beach for Lois or the Escalade. “The police down there did a horrible job,” Breauna said. “That woman [Hutchinson] could still be alive today.”

After discovering Hutchinson’s body only two blocks from the Kosters’ house on Third Street, Lee County law enforcement eventually called Tess down to the station. They showed her three video clips and two photos of the woman making bank withdrawals in Hutchinson’s name. In all of them, Tess identified Lois Riess.

Part Four

Authorities in Florida sent out a nationwide BOLO—be on the lookout—alert. In Minnesota, investigator Ben Bohle saw it and contacted the deputies down in Lee County. They compared notes on the homicides of Dave Riess and Pam Hutchinson: Both victims were shot in a bathroom with a .22 handgun and covered with a blanket or towel. Afterward, the suspect took each victim’s vehicle and money.

If Lois was responsible for killing not only her husband but also a stranger, finding her was more urgent than Minnesota authorities had initially thought. “She looks like anybody’s mother or grandmother, yet she is a cold-blooded killer,” Carmine Marceno, then Lee County’s undersheriff, said on television. “The suspect’s resources will run out and she may become very desperate, and she could strike again.”

U.S. marshals elevated their search for Lois to a “major case.” They set up a national hotline and posted billboards in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, and Nevada that read “Wanted: Murder,” with Lois’s name and photo. They put up a $5,000 reward. Crime Stoppers of Florida offered an additional $1,000 reward.

Widespread media coverage helped bring in tips, which law enforcement sifted through, but Lois’s trail had gone cold since a remote camera spotted the white Acura along Texas Highway 77 outside Refugio, south of Houston, on April 8 at 11:16 p.m.

Authorities figured she was likely headed to Mexico. They alerted U.S. Border Patrol and Mexican authorities. They checked to see if Lois had an active passport. She didn’t. “She could be trying to get in with somebody that had the ability to get across the border,” U.S. Marshal Brian Smith said. “Find somebody with a passport and assume their identity like she did with the woman in Fort Myers Beach, or somebody with access to a boat.”

Smith logged plenty of overtime, regularly getting up early to make the 75-mile drive from Minneapolis to Blooming Prairie, executing search warrants, and spending “hours and hours and hours” with Bohle going through the Riess house, looking for anything—bills, statements, receipts, electronic devices—that might help them capture Lois before she could kill again or disappear across the border.

For Smith, the work became personal after seeing how the situation had devastated Lois’s two older children, Bill and Bria. The youngest, Braden, didn’t have much to say after his appearance on Inside Edition. Bill and Bria declined to talk to the press entirely and cut short phone calls from me. But they worked closely with investigators to locate their mother and find out what had happened to their father. “They’re really, really nice people,” Smith said. “I was highly motivated to bring this case to closure.”

“She looks like anybody’s mother or grandmother, yet she is a cold-blooded killer,” Carmine Marceno, Lee County’s undersheriff, said on television.

The widespread media attention and police alerts about Lois didn’t seem to penetrate the community in South Padre. Workers at the Padre Rita Grill and elsewhere on the island relied more on local sources for news and information. That helped Lois hide in plain sight, less than 30 miles from the Mexican border, calling herself Donna. Amanda Camacho, the Motel 6 clerk who had checked her in, later said that she transformed from looking “like an elderly lady” when she arrived into someone more provocative, wearing short shorts and tank tops. On her belly, she had what looked like a fresh tattoo, depicting a palm tree and a beachside sunset.

For more than a week, Lois traipsed around South Padre making friends. On April 17, Ron Mulholland met her at the Padre Rita. The 76-year-old, who owned several condos on the island, stopped in for dinner about 9 p.m. and sat near her at the bar. After chatting for an hour, she accepted his invitation to go to the Coral Reef, a karaoke bar just up Padre Boulevard. When Mulholland dropped her off at her motel later that night, he gave her his business card and suggested they get together again.

More often, the people Lois befriended were like Pam Hutchinson: middle-aged women, single or traveling alone. One evening she approached Bernadette Mathis, a 65-year-old court reporter, who was sitting alone at the bar of Liam’s Steak House and Oyster Bar. They struck up a conversation. After dinner the women exchanged phone numbers. Lois later texted Mathis: “Bragd about my new friend. Be good n safe. I want to hang out soon.” Mathis did not have many friends outside of work and was happy about the prospect of making a new one. The next evening the women met for dinner again at Liam’s. Mathis didn’t make it through her second drink—she could usually handle more—before she appeared to be intoxicated. The bartender wondered if someone might have slipped her something.

Later, Mathis had a fuzzy recollection of how she and Lois ended up back at her house. They sat in the hot tub, and Lois spent the night in the guest bedroom. There were security cameras throughout the residence. The next morning, Mathis took Lois out to breakfast at the Rancho Viejo Country Club. Mathis noticed that Lois took out some pills—she had a few kinds—and took one. After breakfast, Mathis drove her new friend back to the Motel 6. They made plans to meet again for dinner the following Friday, April 20. “She acted like a really nice person, and I trusted her,” Mathis later told law enforcement.

Peggy Houlihan met Lois at the Motel 6 pool one day with Isabel Barreiro. A musician planning to perform that evening at the Padre Rita’s open mic, Houlihan had her guitar with her, and the three women sang some songs together. Barreiro recorded it. Lois seemed happy to be included.

Yet something about the situation made Houlihan uncomfortable. Lois was pressuring Barreiro to stay on the island longer. Houlihan wondered if the women might be lovers, or if that’s what Barreiro’s new friend was hoping they would become. That evening, Lois arrived at the Padre Rita before Barreiro and joined Houlihan at her table. Barreiro had already relented to stay an extra night, but according to Houlihan, Lois seemed agitated, fretting that Barreiro might have departed the island without telling her. When Barreiro finally arrived, Lois took her to a separate table. The two women left without saying goodbye.

“I didn’t know till the next morning that Isabel was OK,” Houlihan later said. (Houlihan, Barreiro, and Mathis didn’t respond to requests for interviews; details of their interactions with Lois are taken from police interviews.) “Isabel came to say goodbye to me,” Houlihan continued. Barreiro left South Padre that day, not knowing how close she’d gotten with a killer.

The people Lois befriended were like Pam Hutchinson: middle-aged women, single or traveling alone.

On April 19, more than a week after she had arrived on the island, Lois drove Hutchinson’s Acura a few miles down Padre Boulevard to Dirty Al’s, which claimed to serve the “best seafood on South Padre.” She asked to look at a menu. A waiter chatted with her for a few minutes.

Across the room the manager, George Higginbotham, observed the conversation. The woman looked familiar. The long bleached hair—hadn’t he seen her somewhere? When she swished it over her shoulder, it clicked. CBS This Morning.

After she returned the menu and walked out of the restaurant—she wanted to eat at a bar, and Dirty Al’s didn’t have one available for seating—Higginbotham told his staff, “That’s her, the woman who killed the lady in Florida!”

Nah, the other employees said.

“It is,” Higginbotham insisted. He urged them to see what car she got into. It was a white sedan, the kind of vehicle the murder suspect was driving. Higginbotham called the police.

Brian Smith was one of the first people to be notified about the tip in South Texas. He was immediately in contact with the deputy U.S. marshals dispatched to South Padre. When they arrived at Dirty Al’s, Higginbotham told the marshals that Lois was wearing a yellow tank top and white shorts, and that her car had Florida plates. He had surveillance footage but didn’t know how to retrieve it.

The marshals didn’t have to look for Lois very long. She had gone to the Sea Ranch restaurant, right next door to Dirty Al’s. They spotted the white Acura parked outside.

While officers secured the restaurant’s exits, several marshals and local cops entered the Sea Ranch and quickly surrounded Lois. She was sitting at her preferred location: a corner spot at the bar. One of the marshals picked up her purse. “Lois, we’re going to take you out of here and explain what’s going on,” Marshal Shelly Sleep said. “Don’t make a scene.”

Lois complied without comment. Sleep found that strange, since fugitives usually resist arrest or feign innocence. “She didn’t have a single emotion on her face,” Sleep said.

The next day, authorities converged on South Padre Island. Sheriff’s deputies came in from Florida; an officer from the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension flew down from Minnesota. They took DNA swabs from Lois and obtained warrants to search the Acura and Room 227 at the Motel 6. They found a map, a brochure from the Lucky Eagle Casino, pill bottles, and piles of clothes, including the white fedora she was seen wearing in surveillance videos when she posed as Pam Hutchinson. They found tissues, soap, and a green and white towel taken from Marina Village. A small stash of LifeStyles Ultra Lube Plus condoms. Hutchinson’s checkbook, four credit cards, and $548 in cash. A black bag with bullets, a holster, duct tape, and rubber gloves inside. Two handguns, the Colt Woodsman .22 her father had given her, and a Smith & Wesson nine millimeter.

They also found “what appeared to be a trophy,” according to investigators: Hutchinson’s sunglasses, wrapped in a hand towel.

Part Five

The arrest of Lois Riess unnerved the people she’d met on South Padre. Isabel Barreiro, Bernadette Mathis, Cathy Laferty—all the women who’d been taken in by her friendliness—shuddered to think that they could have been her next victim. Mathis, not having heard about Lois’s arrest, showed up at Liam’s for their scheduled dinner on April 20. When she asked around, she learned that the woman she knew as Donna was someone else entirely. “I feel very betrayed, and I feel stupid that I could be so gullible,” she told a reporter. “It’s just scary—very scary to meet a stranger and think that they’re going to be your friend and they turn out to be a killer.”

Tess Koster had been so shaken by Lois’s appearance in her driveway in Fort Myers Beach that she broke out in a rash and threw up the next two mornings. Perhaps Lois had hoped she’d find one of the Kosters’ rental units empty so she could squat there. But Tess, who bears a resemblance to Lois—blond hair, about the same age—fears there was a more sinister reason for her visit. “I was afraid for my life,” she said. “She’s turned me from that small-town trusting person to having a loaded gun by my bed.”

In Blooming Prairie, the six weeks between Dave’s disappearance and Lois’s arrest rocked the community’s sense of itself. Suddenly, the previously anonymous town was in the headlines because of someone the national media dubbed “Losing Streak Lois” and “Killer Granny.” To think that a neighbor—a woman with whom people had shared meals, drinks, and laughs, someone trusted to care for local children—had done what she did was crushing. So too was the absence of any clear reason.

As a violent criminal, Lois Riess is an outlier. It’s rare for women to kill at all, and when they do it’s often an exceptional event, the result of jealous rage or the need to protect themselves from an abuser. “She doesn’t fit a profile because you don’t have enough people to make a profile,” said Tricia Aiken, a forensic psychologist in Minneapolis.

Did gambling make her do it? Despite headlines and popular theories suggesting this was the case, there are only a handful of instances worldwide during the past twenty years of problem gamblers killing other people. The most similar case might be Donna Blanton, who in 2003 shot her husband of six months, a Virginia state trooper, with his own .380 pistol after they argued about her gambling debt. It’s far more likely for problem gamblers to be violent toward themselves. One in five have seriously contemplated or attempted suicide, according to the National Council on Problem Gambling. “One reason we think there’s a higher suicide rate is that people with a gambling problem have fewer options, less help and less understanding,” said Keith Whyte, NCPG’s executive director. “We don’t want the image of the gambling addict to be a homicidal maniac. These are folks who face a lot of shame and stigma.”

Gambling addiction is complicated, messy, not the kind of disease that often develops in isolation from other problems. “A number of our patients have co-occurring disorders,” said Mike Schiks, CEO of Project Turnabout Recovery Center, in Granite Falls, Minnesota, which treats gambling addicts. “It’s not a singular-dimension illness.”

Those co-occurring conditions can include depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder. They often cluster in families, and that seems to have been the case with Lois’s. Her mother, who struggled with hoarding, was eventually committed to a state hospital for the mentally ill. In addition to Kim, Lois had another older sister, Cindee, who suffered from depression. A year after Lois killed her husband, Cindee acted out violently, too.

In March 2019, at her house about ten miles southeast of Rochester, Cindee argued with her 37-year-old son, who was drunk. He shoved her. Cindee and her husband kicked him out. Shortly after, she found him lying in the driveway and told him to get in the car so she could take him away. He refused. She got in her 2004 Ford Explorer and drove over him. He suffered a badly fractured pelvis and head injuries. When a deputy asked Cindee if she had meant to run over her son, she said, “You bet.”

She was charged with second- and third-degree assault, criminal vehicular operation, and domestic assault. The morning of August 5, 2019, she quarreled with her probation officer. That afternoon she purchased a clothesline from a hardware store in Rochester, drove to Quarry Hill Park, near where she and Lois grew up, walked through the woods to a pedestrian bridge spanning a deep ravine, and hanged herself.

In a court appearance, Lois acknowledged that she had been taking medication for “a mental condition.” When she went missing in 2016, Dave told police that Lois suffered from depression. Could she also have experienced late onset of something like bipolar disorder? According to one study, 10 percent of bipolar cases occur in people over the age of 50. “All of these pieces together give you a lot more confidence there was an acute manic psychotic episode,” said John Fabian, a forensic and clinical neuropsychologist who has examined nearly 700 murder cases.

As people close to the Riesses knew, there had been signs that something was amiss. In December 2015, a few months after Lois’s theft from her sister Kim was exposed, Dave came home from lunch at a Dairy Queen with a coworker. He asked the coworker to drop him at the house instead of the worm farm so he could use the bathroom, and when he walked inside he found Lois unconscious in a chair. She had overdosed on pain pills.

Dave called 911. First responders performed CPR. A helicopter airlifted Lois to Saint Marys Hospital in Rochester, part of the Mayo Clinic. After almost two weeks, she recovered. She stayed out of sight in Blooming Prairie for a while, and when she did start going out again, she acted as if nothing had happened. Other people did, too.

That’s how you carry on in a small town. Dave did his part to shield his wife from the cruelty of gossip and conjecture. Not one to talk about emotions, he made only passing comments to his closest friends about her gambling and his concerns about her health. Once, though, he confided in a friend about finding Lois unconscious. “That was one of the biggest mistakes of my life, going up to the house that day,” he’d said.

It’s rare for women to kill at all, and when they do it’s often an exceptional event, the result of jealous rage or the need to protect themselves from an abuser.

Lois Riess appeared in Florida district court on December 17, 2019. To avoid the death penalty, she admitted to shooting Pam Hutchinson with a firearm and pled guilty to first-degree murder. She also pled guilty to grand theft of a motor vehicle and other property and criminal use of personal identification information of a deceased individual. She did not provide a statement but simply answered the court’s questions. “Pursuant to the agreement, ma’am, I will adjudicate you guilty,” the judge said, sentencing her to life in prison without parole and ordering her to pay $38,556 in attorney fees and other expenses.

On August 11, 2020, after delays due to the coronavirus, the pretrial hearing in the case of Dave Riess’s murder took place in the auditorium of a Minnesota high school two miles down the road from the Dodge County courthouse, which can accommodate only seven spectators. Fifty people were there, including some family, several reporters, law enforcement, and plainclothes security guards. Lauri Traub, Lois’s court-appointed public defender, had worked out a deal with Matthew Frank of the Minnesota attorney general’s office. (Frank is also prosecuting Derek Chauvin and three other Minneapolis police officers in the death of George Floyd.) Lois would plead guilty to first-degree murder of her husband and receive a mandatory life sentence without parole. She would be able to serve her time in Minnesota, closer to her family, instead of Florida.

Promptly at 1:30 p.m., the cast of attorneys, bailiff, and court reporter strode onto the stage and took their places at neatly arranged tables. Lois entered stage left, clad in an orange jumpsuit and white sneakers, hands shackled at her waist. Her long hair was brushed smooth. She located her two oldest children and their spouses, seated in the auditorium’s front rows. It was the first time she had seen them in two years and five months; they had only seen her on TV screens. Her face was partially covered by a light gray protective mask, but her eyes seemed to be smiling at them.

Judge Jodi Williamson told Lois that she could remove her mask so the court could hear her responses, then established, through a volley of questions she put to the defendant, that Lois was satisfied with her defense and was thinking clearly, unaffected by medication she took for arthritis and high cholesterol. (There was no mention of antidepressants or any other medication to treat mental illness.) Williamson confirmed that Lois was pleading guilty because she was indeed guilty.

When it was Traub’s turn to ask questions, Lois recounted how she had killed Dave: On Sunday, March 11, after she and Dave had attended their grandson’s basketball game in Wisconsin, Lois wanted to stay with her family, but Dave wanted to leave. They left, and argued on the drive home. They continued to argue in their bedroom. According to Lois, Dave took a loaded handgun out of the dresser, offered it to her, and said, “Why don’t you just kill yourself? Maybe you’ll get it right this time.” Instead, she took the gun, aimed it at her husband’s chest, and fired twice.

“Did you know Dave was dead?” Traub asked.

Lois sighed. “Yes.”

“What did you do then?”

Tears pooled in her eyes. “I laid down with him.”

The judge could not hear her response and asked Lois to repeat it.

“I laid down with him. I closed his eyes.”

Lois lowered her head, obscuring her face with a curtain of hair.

The prosecutor asked, “You made the decision to shoot him?” Lois eyed him squarely. “He was right in front of me,” she said, “and I looked at him in the heart and shot him.”

The family in attendance did not react visibly to this story, but expressed their feelings clearly in the impact statements that followed. A social worker read the first on behalf of Dave’s elderly mother: “When you killed David, you took my heart. David was this family’s ray of sunshine. I will never forgive you.” Lois clenched her mouth. Dave’s sister, Cindy, said her brother died “just so a cold-blooded murderer could satisfy her gambling addiction,” and that “she left him laying dead while she partied and gambled just like before.” Lois dropped her eyes.

When Lois’s firstborn, Bill, approached the podium, Lois turned in her chair to face him. “You stole something from us we’ll never get back,” he said. “I’ll never be able to forgive you.” Lois dabbed at her eyes. Bill collected his breath. “The hurt you caused my kids, your grandkids… God, they loved you so much.”

Lois’s daughter, Bria, was the last to speak, which she did with difficulty. “Losing my dad at the hands of my mom is something I’ll never be able to process,” she said. “If I could go back in time to make sure my mom got the help she needed and never kill[ed] my dad—those are thoughts that constantly haunt me.” Lois grimaced and nodded, crying softly.

The judge issued the mandatory life sentence without possibility of release. She set aside the charge of felony theft and left open the question of restitution to be determined later. Lois put on a pair of brown plastic glasses to read her own statement. “What I did is an unpardonable crime,” she said. “Solitude is forever. I feel I deserve this. I will have no reprieve. My life without David is my sentence, my penance. Our children are loving, caring, strong people.” She paused, sniffled. “It’s because of David’s strengths they are that way. My best accomplishment was having our children.”

She apologized to Dave’s family and friends for “taking him from you,” and swiveled to regard her children. “I feel I need to say this: I didn’t know how much pain I was in until I wasn’t anymore.”

“He was right in front of me,” Lois said, “and I looked at him in the heart and shot him.”

Lois declined several requests for an interview. People who’ve followed her case or been affected by her crimes are left to speculate what she meant by “pain.” A mental illness? An unhappy marriage? The gambling addiction? Something else?

When the hearing ended, Lois stood and crossed the auditorium’s stage in her orange jumpsuit and white sneakers, flanked by Traub and a sheriff’s deputy. She gazed at her children, placed her right hand on her heart, and mouthed, “I love you.” Then she bowed her head and walked off the stage.

Afterward, outside the auditorium, I spotted Traub, who had previously talked to me about her client. The two women are about the same age, and they both have three children they enjoy bragging about. “I know she killed two people and it sounds kind of weird, but I genuinely like her,” Traub had said back then. In an otherwise empty corridor, I asked her if she believed Lois. Traub paused, shrugged her shoulders. “That’s her story,” she said. “That’s the story she’s been telling all along.”

Then she flicked my elbow with the back of her hand, as though we shared a confidence, and added, “Why would she lie to me?”

The Con Continues

The Con Continues

A special update on issue number 69, “Not Fuzz.”

By David Mark Simpson

There are some stories that a writer just can’t quit. As any obsessive journalist knows, there is always another source to call, another thread to tug. There are also stories that themselves won’t quit. For me, “Not Fuzz” became both.

If you haven’t read the story—Atavist number 69, published in July 2017—here is a quick summary, with spoilers: Steve Farzam is a luxury-hotel executive in Santa Monica, California. He is also a serial impersonator of law-enforcement and rescue professionals. Since at least the late 1990s, he has reportedly pretended to be a firefighter, a police officer, and even a federal agent. His close friend Christopher Dancel played along until, in 2014, Dancel turned on Farzam and became a federal informant. Eventually, based in part on Dancel’s cooperation, law enforcement raided Farzam’s home, a mansion where he kept police paraphernalia, high-caliber weapons, and an actual fire truck. The State of California brought 77 charges against the hotelier; all but four were felonies. Farzam pleaded no contest to three charges—all felonies—and his penalty was light. In 2015, he was sentenced to 182 days behind bars, of which he’d served 90 while awaiting sentencing, and he was credited with time served. He also got five years probation. The judge told Farzam, “You violate probation, the consequences will be very serious. Do we understand each other?” Farzam said yes. He was released from custody and continued working as the COO of the Shore Hotel.

Fast-forward to early 2020 and Farzam is again facing criminal charges. This time, The Atavist is wrapped up in the case. It appears that, when the magazine stood up to Farzam’s legal threats, it became another target of his deceptions. (Farzam did not respond to a request for comment.)

Read “Not Fuzz”

Reporting “Not Fuzz” was a strange experience to say the least. Because Farzam is a prolific impersonator, the Atavist team used a code phrase for identity-verification purposes when communicating with each other about the story. We weren’t the only ones being careful: A California Department of Justice agent whom I spoke to dozens of times refused to interact via email because he was afraid Farzam might hack my account or create one with which he’d pretend to be me. I learned this after I signed an initial email simply “Dave” and got a call moments later. “Dave who?” the DOJ official demanded in a harsh tone.

Like a paranoid character in a movie, I checked parked cars for people who might be watching me and looked over my shoulder constantly. This continued after the story was published and more details about Farzam shook loose. People who had encountered him over the years reached out to me with their stories—an ex-girlfriend, police officers, alleged victims of his cons. I learned little things that I’d missed. For instance, ChristopherDancel.com, a website that smeared Farzam’s former friend, included downloadable .docx files with properties that identified their author as “Steve Farzam.” The domain expired in February 2020. Eventually, Dancel would file a lawsuit against Farzam alleging that the hotelier created the website. “Most importantly, defendant makes the defamatory statement at the top of the page next to plaintiff’s name, ‘scam artist’, along side the copying of the ‘rip-off’ report, basically alleging that plaintiff had committed a criminal fraud against defendant or someone else, which [w]as not a truthful statement,” the suit states. The case is ongoing. (Dancel, who did not come off well in my article, has said that he never wants to speak to me again.)

Over time my anxiety ebbed. My phone wasn’t hacked. I didn’t receive harassing emails. No one seemed to be following me. One evening a few months after publication, I set off walking from my home in Los Angeles with no particular destination in mind. Six hours later, deep in thought, having covered 14 miles with stops and starts, I came to the Pacific Ocean. It was a little before midnight. I lay in the sand listening to music, then walked up to Ocean Avenue, where my eyes caught the hazy, jewel-toned lights of Farzam’s hotel. I realized I hadn’t thought about him all night.

In early 2018, an attorney representing Farzam sent The Atavist a letter via email. Her name was Isabel Ashorzadeh, and the address of her law practice was a penthouse at the Shore Hotel. Quick internet sleuthing indicated that she was Farzam’s wife. They had been married shortly after “Not Fuzz” was published. (Videos available online appear to show Farzam skydiving into the venue where the wedding was held.)

Ashorzadeh’s letter stated that a private investigator was researching my work, and it demanded that The Atavist take down my article, in part because the reporting relied on documents sealed by the California courts. Because a court opts to seal documents doesn’t mean that a reporter is barred from using or publishing them, but in this case it didn’t matter. I was sure Ashorzadeh was wrong. I had been over the docket dozens of times and never saw an order sealing any of the documents I used in the story. I checked the docket again. I also spoke with the prosecution. Both confirmed my understanding.

In February 2018, Farzam asked the courts to terminate his probation early. He explained that he was about to graduate from the Taft Law School—an online institution—and that his felony convictions were the only thing preventing him from taking the California bar exam. The state attorney general opposed the request and criticized a claim made by Farzam’s defense that he had what it called a “hero complex addiction.” A court filing from the state AG’s office reads, “A hero would not call a Supervising Deputy District Attorney … pretending to be with the FBI to get a girl he wants to impress out of a DUI. A hero would not import assault weapons into California and then sell them to his friends. Defendant has done all of this and more.” Eventually, Farzam’s bid was withdrawn.

He did get a degree that spring, but it wasn’t quite what he had represented it to be. Christine Baldwin, the registrar for the Taft Law School, told me that Farzam completed a program called juris doctor-executive track in May 2018. That granted him a law-based certification. “This is not a degree that makes you eligible for the state bar exam or to practice law in any state,” Baldwin said. “He cannot practice law with this degree. He cannot become a member or sit for a bar exam.”

A 2019 Buzzfeed News investigation revealed that executive juris doctors, degrees similar to what Farzam obtained, are exploitative. “What if you spent three years in law school, taking classes in contracts, torts, and constitutional law, and paying more than $11,000 a year, but—here’s the twist—at the end of it you weren’t a lawyer?” the article begins. “Many students find that what seems like it could be a leg up amounts to little more than an expensive education in the difference one letter makes.”

Things only got weirder.

Eugene Volokh is a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles who writes the Volokh Conspiracy blog, hosted by the magazine Reason. Around the time The Atavist was fielding correspondence from Ashorzadeh, Volokh was trawling the Lumen Database, which collects all deindexing requests made to internet companies, most of which go to Google. The tech giant has a policy that allows anyone to make the case for removing a website or online article from its search results. Let’s say that a publication runs an article accusing a person of domestic abuse. The person proves in court that the article is libelous, but for whatever reason the publication won’t take it down. The person might submit the libel ruling to Google, which could deindex the article from searches of the person’s name.

Volokh is interested in attempts to exploit this policy. He has written extensively about the issue and uncovered more than 100 fraudulent attempts to deindex content. One of the surest ways to catch a suspicious request is to scour the Lumen archives, double-checking the claims of each and every applicant. That’s how he found a complaint about The Atavist.

The request was for Google to deindex my article. As support, it included a court order that seemed to oblige the clerk to seal the entire case against Farzam from public record. Volokh wanted to understand why such a tight condition existed, so he checked the docket. Like me, he couldn’t find any indication of a sealing order. Volokh reached out to the defense attorney named on the court order provided to Google. The lawyer had never heard of Farzam.

At this point, Volokh contacted both The Atavist and Farzam—through Ashorzadeh—for clarification. He also tried searching online for the exact language on the order sent to Google. That turned up a document in an unrelated case. The specs were largely identical—same defense attorney, same judge—but the defendant and the case number were different. It appeared to Volokh that someone had used that order as a template, replacing a few key details to make the one submitted to Google look legitimate.

Volokh reached out to California state prosecutors to share what he’d found. He also informed The Atavist. By late 2019, the problems with the deindexing request would be a matter of public record.

It was a busy time for Farzam, legally speaking. In May 2019, the California Coastal Commission had fined the Shore Hotel’s developer—Sunshine Enterprises, a company managed by the Farzam family—nearly $15.6 million for building and opening the property without the necessary permits. Near the end of the year, the commission agreed to allow the hotel to remain open under certain conditions: It had to price dozens of rooms at more affordable rates and pay an additional $2.3 million in mitigation fees, among other concessions. As of this writing, the hotel’s website features a pop-up notice announcing “COASTAL AFFORDABLE RATE: With rates at $183, a waived Destination Fee, reduced Parking Rates, take advantage of this offer before it’s gone!”

Around the time that the commission and Sunshine Enterprises reached their agreement, California brought new criminal charges against Farzam. There were four in total. All of them were felonies.

The first three—one for attempting to dissuade a witness and two for identity theft—relate to a woman named Libier Hernandez. She is the former director of housekeeping at the Shore Hotel. According to the November 2019 declaration in support of Farzam’s arrest, written by Detective Kenneth Bryant of the Los Angeles Police Department, Hernandez was scheduled to be deposed in a civil matter against Farzam in March 2017. She and her husband, Ivan, got a harassing phone call that “was spoofed” to appear like it came from her old cell number; the caller disguised his voice. The declaration in support of arrest also describes how a now defunct website, LibbyHernandez.com, was populated with a “fictitious criminal background” and personal information. “Hernandez believed that Farzam assembled the website to dissuade her from providing further testimony,” the declaration states. The declaration doesn’t identify which civil matter Hernandez was supposed to testify in. After she quit her job at the Shore Hotel in 2014, she joined several former employees in suing Farzam. In that suit, Hernandez claimed that Farzam had sent her a picture of his erect penis, called her into his office to display his erections on more than one occasion, and kissed her at least once. The suit ended with the plaintiffs agreeing to a dismissal in early 2018.

The fourth felony charge against Farzam is where The Atavist comes in. The state AG’s office claims that the hotelier “did unlawfully and with intent to defraud, forge and counterfeit a Los Angeles Superior Court seal.” According to the LAPD’s declaration in support of arrest, Eugene Volokh “observed a request to remove online content to both Google and The Atavist online Magazine. Professor Volokh requested a copy of the order”—a reference to the court document provided to Google—“and discovered the order was fraudulent.” The order appeared to come from Department 48 of the Los Angeles Superior Court. Employees told the LAPD that it is “not common practice” for a seal like the one that appeared on the order submitted to Google to be stamped on documents that the department issues. What’s more, Department 48 deals with civil claims, and the case against Farzam detailed in “Not Fuzz”—the one that the court order sent to Google supposedly applied to—was a criminal one.

On January 15, 2020, Farzam entered a courtroom in downtown Los Angeles for his first appearance in the case. He wore a gray suit, and his left arm was in a sling; it wasn’t clear what was wrong with it. For reasons the state AG’s office declined to specify during my reporting, Farzam’s appearance was postponed until March.

The deindexing attempt, thwarted thanks only to Volokh’s vigilant research, speaks to a mystery that I pondered while reporting “Not Fuzz.” A wealthy, prominent businessman was arrested several times over some two decades for flamboyant impersonation offenses. But when you googled him, most of the hits for Steve Farzam were articles about the city of Santa Monica praising his sustainability efforts or giving him awards. How was that possible?

Volokh told me that he hadn’t found any other deindexing requests that might benefit Farzam. Still, it seems that threatening or attempting to negotiate with publications are among Farzam’s habits. In 2015, I wrote an article about his legal problems for a Santa Monica daily newspaper where I was then employed. Over the next several months, Farzam sent the paper letters demanding that it remove the article. (It did not.) In February 2018, at the same time Farzam was threatening to sue the magazine, The Atavist’s then editor in chief, Evan Ratliff, got a phone call and a series of text messages from the hotelier. Farzam seemed to want to propose a deal in advance of his attempt to get his probation shortened. By then, “Not Fuzz” had been online for more than six months, and The Atavist had no intention of taking it down. “Hi Evan,” the first message read. “I had an idea I wanted to bounce of [sic] you. -Steve.” Farzam sent another one two days later that read, “??” Then, more than a week later, another message arrived: “Let’s talk for 2 mins. You have nothing to lose. It would be in both of our best interests since we are business owners. Otherwise this will be my last text message and I will not contact you anymore. Either way hope you have a great weekend.” Ratliff never responded.

It’s hard not to wonder if other publications have acquiesced to Farzam’s proposals or litigiousness. They wouldn’t be the only entities Farzam has set his sights on. When reporting “Not Fuzz,” I found online that he was registered with the National Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians. After I reached out to the organization asking why it would certify a convicted felon who had been repeatedly accused of impersonating public-safety officials, his status was changed to “not registered.”

A few months after my article appeared, Farzam sued the NREMT, alleging negligent misrepresentation and breach of contract, among other things. He claimed that he had fulfilled the necessary requirements of the organization’s certification process and yet the NREMT had “willfully and maliciously” revoked his certification on three separate occasions. The suit was dismissed the following May. Six months later, the NREMT’s board approved an internal policy empowering the organization to reject an applicant for certification based on prior criminal convictions.

As of this writing, the NREMT’s website indicates that Farzam is once again registered. In California, NREMT certification is a prerequisite to the state issuing someone a paramedic’s license. California has twice denied Farzam such a license. As cause, which I reported in “Not Fuzz,” it cited violations of the state’s health and safety code: “the commission of any fraudulent, dishonest, or corrupt act” and “conviction of any crime which is substantially related to the qualifications, functions, and duties of prehospital personnel,” as well as “demonstration of irrational behavior.”

For several months after its publication, the Atavist article was the top hit on Google when you searched for “Steve Farzam.” Now it’s the seventh. The first is his Twitter page. “COO Steve Farzam, JD, NREMT-P,” it reads—highlighting a degree to practice law that he doesn’t really have and a certification that he’s apparently had to fight just to keep on the books.

Deliverance

Deliverance

A telekinetic teenager became a convicted killer. Can a group of strangers prove that Christina Boyer is really a victim of injustice?

BY LAUREN MARKHAM

The Atavist Magazine, No. 100

Lauren Markham is a fiction writer, essayist, and journalist. She’s the author of The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life and a contributing editor at Virginia Quarterly Review. She lives in Northern California.

Editor: Seyward Darby
Designer: Ed Johnson
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checker: Philip Kiefer
Collage Illustrator: Emily Haasch

Published in February 2020.

1.

Devilry of the kind necessary to kill a toddler had to be punished, and swiftly. That’s how Sue Horn remembered the public outcry about the murder that still haunted Carroll County, Georgia, nearly 30 years after it happened.

On a foggy Saturday morning in April 2019, Horn sat in the parlor of the Edwardian house that served as the office of the StarNews, one of two newspapers in a rural county wedged between Atlanta and the Alabama border. Short and trim, with dark eyebrows whose movements punctuated her speech, Horn was the newspaper’s publisher and editor in chief. Proofs of the next day’s edition were on her desk waiting to be read, but Horn was happy to take a break. On this story in particular she had some things to say.

“Nothing like this ever happens in Carroll County,” Horn explained. “This was the biggest story it had ever seen.”

One day in the spring of 1992, a three-year-old girl was brought to the local hospital, blue and bruised and dead. Her name was Amber, and she came from what many people would call a broken home. Her young mother had a checkered past. She was also new in town. Most residents of Carroll County are homegrown, and they often view outsiders with suspicion. Horn herself knew what it meant to fall into that dubious category: Though she’d lived in the county most of her adult life and spoke with a slight southern drawl, she was originally from the Northeast.

It didn’t take long for locals to blame Amber’s mother, 22-year-old Christina Boyer, for the little girl’s death. Carroll County is in the Bible Belt, and people saw Boyer as the embodiment of everything they claimed to despise: unwed, abusive, sexually promiscuous, ungodly. Boyer, who professed her innocence, went to prison for life.

The way Horn viewed it, justice wasn’t served. She had done her job as a journalist, examined the facts of the case. She had identified what she believed was a pattern of disregard, or worse. “Christina Boyer,” Horn said, looking directly into the video camera positioned in front of her, “needs to go free.”

The camera belonged to three college students who had come to Carroll County for a class project. The class, called “Making an Exoneree,” tasked Georgetown University undergraduates with reviewing the circumstances that led to a purportedly innocent person’s imprisonment, producing a short documentary about what they found, and—fingers crossed—helping to set the prisoner free. The young women researching the Boyer case jotted down observations in their notebooks, adjusted the camera, and nodded along with Horn’s insistent monologue. Horn knew just what she wanted to say; she didn’t hesitate once. This wasn’t her first rodeo on the matter of Christina Boyer.

If you zoomed out, the scene took on a kaleidoscopic aspect: I was taking notes on the students, who were taking notes on the reporter, who for years had been taking notes on Boyer. That we’d wound up in the same room together was a testament to the cultural phenomenon of journalists and amateur sleuths exposing cases in which people may have been wrongfully convicted of a crime. For Boyer, it was only the most recent chapter in the saga that followed Amber’s death. Students, reporters, lawyers, artists, a romantic suitor, paranormal enthusiasts—a parade of personalities had made themselves part of her story by offering themselves up as potential saviors. They had done so out of genuine concern for her, but in some instances they had also used Boyer as a screen to project their own desires and ambitions. Among her champions were people content to remain in the wings and others who’d crept into the limelight, where the line between egoism and altruism became thin and trembling.

Boyer, now 50, has spent more than half her life in prison. She is warm and agreeable, with brown eyes and cropped sandy-blond hair. Her voice is honeyed—when she asks how you’re doing, you can sense her sincere desire to know the answer. She also seems impressible, as though anything said to her will leave a mark. Her magnetism, I came to realize, is in part her baldness of hope—her ardent, almost guileless wish to be delivered.

Long before she was accused of killing her daughter, Boyer was susceptible to aspiring emancipators, people swooping in with promises to pluck her from her circumstances. And why not? A person in Boyer’s shoes had to take what she could get.

2.

Boyer’s first would-be savior was the state of Ohio. She was born in 1969, and her parents couldn’t keep her, so as an infant she was handed over to child services. She was placed in long-term foster care with John and Joan Resch, a couple who had taken in hundreds of children in Columbus. They eventually adopted her. Things were hard for Tina, as Boyer was called back then. The household was hectic, and the rules were severe. According to Tina, her adopted brother began molesting her when she was 12, but she was afraid to tell their parents. “Finally, I did tell them, but they didn’t believe me and slapped my face,” she later wrote in a letter to a friend.

When Tina was 14, the family noticed something peculiar and alarming about her: It seemed she could move physical objects with her mind. A plate. The curtains. Chairs around the kitchen table. Things appeared to shift uncannily when Tina became angry. The Resches were certain that this was the work of a sinister force.

Joan Resch called a local reporter she knew and asked if he could find someone to help. He was skeptical that what Resch said was true. Still, he went to the family’s house and brought a photographer along. The film Poltergeist was a recent hit; Americans were obsessed with the idea of telekinesis and haunted children. After a few hours of nothing happening, a phone receiver suddenly seemed to levitate off a side table and hurtle across the living room. The photographer captured the object’s mysterious arc across a pubescent Tina’s lap. Her mouth hung wide open as if in fearful disbelief.

The wire services picked up the story, and the photograph was reprinted in newspapers across the country. Tina was dubbed the Columbus poltergeist kid. Predictably, Tina’s story also drew of the paranormal. “The Resch house was a circus,” journalist Stassa Edwards wrote years later. “Media, magicians and psychokinetic investigators were keen to test Tina’s powers, to pay witness to the shadowy poltergeist.” Cameras and audio recorders were kept rolling nearly constantly in hopes of capturing the unexplainable.

Eventually, a reporter saw Tina knock over a lamp when she thought no one was looking. It went crashing to the floor while the teenager looked up at the adults in the room for approval. The news crews left; a hoax wasn’t intriguing. Still, Joan Resch insisted that the previous incidents had been real. Tina didn’t know what to think. Kids at school hummed the theme to The Twilight Zone when she walked by. Some of them said they were scared of her. “Did anybody stop and think that maybe I’m scared, too; that maybe I don’t know what’s going on and it’s freaking me [out] also?” Tina told a reporter.

One stranger was still drawn to Tina. His name was Bill Roll, and he believed that she was the real deal. Roll was a parapsychologist, a member of the small field of researchers who study paranormal phenomena; most mainstream academics deem their work pseudoscientific. What Tina presented was rare even by the standards of parapsychology. Roll described it as “the destructive powers of thwarted emotions.”

Roll moved into the Resches’ home so that he could interview Tina extensively. He taped her every move and sound with a camcorder and a dictation device, following her around and waiting for something interesting to happen. He made extensive notes of various “disturbances,” as well as Tina’s physical and emotional state before, during, and after they occurred. He drew up a floor plan of the house and mapped the movement of various objects. He later wrote that Tina presented “one of the most convincing cases of poltergeist activity” he’d ever seen.

By Roll’s account, the Resches were at their wits’ end. Whatever was happening with Tina was wreaking havoc on their household. “I thought I might have a solution that would appeal to everyone,” Roll wrote in his 2004 book, Unleashed. He convinced the Resches to let him take Tina to North Carolina, where he and his colleagues could run tests to determine the full extent of her abilities. Tina was overjoyed. “My adoptive father had stopped speaking to me, and my adoptive mom and I argued all the time,” she told me. “Bill was like someone who was saving me from drowning in my family.” Plus, she’d never been on a plane before.

Roll took Tina into his home and introduced her to other paranormal researchers, as well as to Jeannie Lagle, a psychiatrist with experience in hypnosis. Together, Roll and Lagle took Tina to get brain scans, see therapists, and participate in parapsychology conferences. Lagle was part babysitter and part researcher. She and Tina soon grew close. On the road, they bunked together in hotels. Lagle was tasked with drawing out Tina’s abilities through hypnosis and making sure the teenager didn’t doctor any test results. She claimed to witness remarkable events—a hairbrush that flew out of a purse and across the room from where Tina sat, a tape recorder that leaped from a dresser. “You just couldn’t believe what this little girl was capable of,” Lagle told me. The goal of the research was to figure out the source of Tina’s telekinesis, and to train her to use her power with purpose.

Tina was just glad to be treated like she mattered. She’d been dismissed as strange in school, in the Girl Scouts, at home. “I didn’t really know at that point what the future might hold for me, but I knew I was different and that it wasn’t always seen as a good thing,” she told me. With the researchers, her differences were her gifts. To them she was extraordinary.

Eventually, her family asked that Tina return to Ohio. Roll and his team wanted to continue performing tests—they didn’t know the source of the powers they still firmly believed Tina had. For the time being, though, they would have to be satisfied with analyzing the data they’d already gathered.

With the researchers, her differences were her gifts. To them she was extraordinary.

Not long after she moved back to Ohio, Tina got married. She was only 16. According to letters that Tina later wrote, her husband was abusive. He bound, gagged, and raped her. He beat her unconscious. When he burned her clothes to keep her from leaving him, she jumped from a second-story window and ran through the snow, barefoot and wearing only shorts and a T-shirt. He tracked her down and brought her home. “People say, ‘Why didn’t you leave him?’” she wrote in a letter. “I did, but he stalked me and my parents and threatened us all.”

After she managed to escape, Tina became pregnant. She had the baby and named her Amber. Tina married another man, whose last name she took, becoming Christina Boyer. He promised to be a father to Amber, but he soon became abusive toward them both. A social worker told the new Mrs. Boyer that if she didn’t leave the relationship, the state would take Amber away. After one beating, Boyer managed to have her husband arrested, and she packed her bags for Carroll County, Georgia, where Lagle and Roll had moved to be near a small university. Amber had just turned three. If Boyer started a new life, a better one, maybe her daughter wouldn’t remember the one they’d left behind.

Lagle and Roll were eager to help. They could even resume their studies with Boyer. But there was a problem, a growing rift. For years, Lagle and Roll had been a team, putting in long hours conducting tests, typing up papers, and preparing conference presentations about the young woman who moved objects with her mind. Then Lagle learned that Roll was presenting at parapsychology events without her. He’d started working with another researcher—a person who’d never met Boyer—and Lagle got wind that Roll was also writing a book. “He was a little Sneaky Pete, always,” Lagle said. “I was the one doing the heavy lifting.” (Roll died in 2012 at the age of 86.)

Lagle suggested to Boyer that they write a book together, just the two of them. Boyer agreed. “It had been my hope,” Boyer told me, “to get enough written to offer to an agent who would pay us to finish it. Then I would’ve had some breathing room financially.” A book would also allow her to tell her own story. In the meantime, Lagle offered to help Boyer get on her feet in Georgia: She paid the young woman five dollars an hour to type up research notes for their future project.

3.

Easter was just around the corner, and Amber was finally old enough to enjoy it. Boyer, who after staying with Lagle for a while had gotten an apartment in the town of Carrollton, wanted to get the three-year-old a pretty Easter basket full of treats. She also wanted to get Amber new shoes and hair ribbons to match a dress that Joan Resch had sent from Ohio. Boyer needed money to pay for the presents, which was why, on April 14, 1992, she was at Lagle’s office, doing her secretarial work.

A few days prior, Amber had hit her head on a curb after scrambling out of her car seat. She was a “really active kid,” Lagle recalled, always running and falling and bumping into things. She was hard to control, headstrong like her mom. When she developed a goose egg after the curb incident, Boyer called her adoptive mother. Just keep an eye on it, Joan Resch said. If Boyer saw any strange behavior—nausea, vomiting, that kind of thing—then she should take Amber to a doctor. A day later she was fine and back to playing in the yard as usual. Nothing to worry about. The goose egg would heal.

Boyer didn’t want to take Amber to work with her; she knew she’d get more done at Lagle’s office without her daughter along. Her boyfriend, a man named David Herrin, offered to look after Amber at his trailer just outside town. Boyer and Herrin had been dating for a few months. He had a daughter Amber’s age. Boyer’s last memory of Amber alive was watching the toddler settle into Herrin’s lap, a book in her tiny hands.

Work was uneventful. Boyer finished the assignments Lagle had given her, said goodbye to her boss, and got in her car to go home. She’d just pulled out of the driveway when, back inside the office, Lagle got a phone call from Herrin.

“I can’t get Amber up,” he said. The little girl was unconscious.

Lagle assumed that Herrin was exaggerating. “Don’t worry, Christina’s on her way home. She’ll be there soon,” Lagle told him.

When Boyer arrived, Amber was unresponsive. Boyer and Herrin loaded the little girl into the car. While Herrin drove, Boyer gave Amber CPR. She’d learned how at a parenting class in Carrollton. As she pressed against her daughter’s chest, she was terrified of breaking her. Amber didn’t wake up.

Boyer worried that the authorities might take her baby away at the hospital—she knew how quickly that could happen. She yelled at Herrin to stop the fucking car at a pay phone. She always called Lagle when she was in a bad way. Boyer was hysterical as she told Lagle what was wrong and asked what she should do and what if she hurt Amber and why wouldn’t David drive faster? Lagle told Boyer to take her daughter to the emergency room and promised to meet her there.

Amber was pronounced dead at the hospital. Boyer told me she began sobbing when she heard the news. The hospital staff noticed that Amber had bruising on her face and body, so they called the police and child services. The police arrested Herrin because he’d been at the trailer with Amber. They also took Boyer in for questioning. In the police car, her mind wouldn’t stop whirling. “I know now that I was crazy, but at the time I kept asking the officer driving if the hospital would put the covers over Amber, because she gets cold at night and the hospital was already cold,” Boyer told me.

Boyer wanted Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven” played at Amber’s wake, but she didn’t get a say. By then she was behind bars: Boyer was arrested shortly after police questioned her.

Christina Boyer’s last memory of her daughter alive was watching the toddler settle into David Herrin’s lap, a book in her tiny hands.

It appeared that Amber had died from some sort of blunt physical trauma. Law enforcement reasoned that it may have happened before Boyer went to work. Maybe it was the fall onto the curb or a beating that Boyer wouldn’t admit to; sometimes internal injuries progress slowly. Or maybe Boyer just hadn’t gotten Amber to the hospital fast enough, as a good mother should. One of the marks on the toddler was a long welt across her face. Detectives who searched Boyer’s home found a belt in a closet. They brought it in, and the medical examiner held it up next to . Someone snapped a photo, which would later be submitted into evidence.

It was the kind of detail that Jack Bell, Carroll County’s sheriff at the time, seemed to relish describing to the public. “Her little body was so bruised all over, you couldn’t tell it was the same child,” he said at one point. Bell was up for reelection, and he touted his commitment to getting Boyer convicted as evidence of his dedication to his job. (Bell died in 2004, three years after Carroll County named a detention facility in his honor.)

Boyer was dismayed. She believed that Herrin was to blame for Amber’s death. When they’d first arrived at the hospital, he kept apologizing to her. “Sorry for what?” Boyer shouted at him. Had he been abusive? Had Boyer missed the signs that her daughter was in danger? She felt responsible for that, at least. “I was the catalyst,” Boyer told me. “I brought David into our lives, and had I not done that, Amber would be alive.”

Herrin maintained his innocence. His legal team claimed that Amber’s death must have been the result of abuse by Boyer. For her part, Boyer admitted she wasn’t a perfect mother, but she maintained that she had never done anything to seriously hurt Amber, much less kill her.

Amber was buried in her pink Easter dress. The funeral was paid for with donations from the residents of Carrollton and was open to the public. Crowds of people came to say goodbye to a little girl most of them never knew. The authorities allowed Boyer a closed room at the memorial, out of the public’s view. She wasn’t permitted to go to the grave site.

When I connected with her 27 years later, Boyer had still never seen where Amber was buried. If she ever got out of prison, she told me, she’d go straight to the cemetery. All she wanted to do was put flowers on the grave.

4.

A grand jury indicted Boyer for murder, aggravated assault, and cruelty to children. She was accused of repeatedly striking Amber in the head and abdomen. Though her loved ones believed Boyer was innocent, much of Carroll County did not. Local residents were deeply shaken by Amber’s death. “My body felt numb as I tried to imagine the horror that this innocent child must have felt as her own mother allegedly participated in her cruel and violent death,” read one letter to the editor. “It offends me greatly to know that part of my tax money is going to defend and house heathens in nice, new, air-conditioned buildings as punishment for [such] heinous crimes as this.”

Many people following the story believed that Boyer had a guilty profile. It wasn’t just that she was a young, poor, unmarried outsider, or that she had been accused of abusing Amber. Police knew that one of Boyer’s neighbors made sex tapes and paid women to participate. Boyer needed money and appeared in one of them dancing topless. In another, she sat next to the neighbor on a couch while they watched porn together. Halfway through the scene, Amber toddled into the room wearing nothing but a diaper. Boyer jumped up and roughly delivered Amber into another room, where she spanked her. In the lead-up to her trial, this information made the local news. On top of all her other perceived failings, Boyer was labeled a slut.

Then there were the phone calls, more than 40 in all. Back in Ohio, before Boyer moved, child services was contacted repeatedly about Amber’s safety. Boyer insisted that her then husband was to blame: He would report her to the authorities to punish and assert his control over her. Nothing seemed to have materialized from the reports. Still, they didn’t look good—they were strikes against Boyer’s character. So was her history with telekinesis. In May 1993, just over a year after Amber’s death, while Boyer’s legal fate was still pending, Unsolved Mysteries aired a segment about her. It featured Roll saying that he was certain of Boyer’s powers.

Unsolved Mysteries attracted the attention of a man named John Riggle. He was an unmarried retiree in Texas living off social security. After learning about Boyer on TV, he took an almost pathological interest in her case. He wrote to Boyer telling her that he believed she was innocent and that he wanted to help free her. She welcomed his optimism and the correspondence.

They began trading letters, talking as much about themselves—how they spent their time, what they believed in, what they wanted for the future—as they did about her pending case. Boyer told Riggle that if she ever got out of prison, she wanted to get a college degree. “I haven’t been here in jail so long that I forgot there’s good people in the world,” she wrote. “It’s just that none of them seem to exist in Georgia.” She told him about how other women tried to beat her up and intimidate her into staying in her bunk. She wrote about how much she liked to sing; about the coconut lotion her cell mate, who had just been released, left behind for her; about how in the winter the heating system broke and all the inmates nearly froze, and in the summer there was no air-conditioning. “Seems like they want to drive me crazy in here,” Boyer said. “The papers are real good at printing lies. Boy, I wish I could write an article which they’d print telling people what this place is really like.”

Riggle packed up his things and drove in a camper van from Texas to Georgia. He parked near the county jail where Boyer was being held and stayed put. He visited her nearly every week. Boyer welcomed his help but found him strange. Riggle looked unkempt and unwell, with disconcertingly long fingernails and oily hair. But his commitment to her was stalwart, and she was lonely and bereft. “In the beginning,” Boyer said, “I really thought he would be a lot of help. He tirelessly went about trying to find all the information he could.”

When he wasn’t at the jail, Riggle began writing a book about Boyer’s case, which he tentatively called Time for the Truth. (One of the chapters was titled “Phony Autopsy Report”—the book has never been published.) Riggle acted as a shadow advocate, pursuing a parallel line of inquiry to Boyer’s attorney. He reviewed hearing transcripts and drew up time lines surrounding Amber’s death. Riggle got his hands on Amber’s autopsy and told Boyer that it said the blood found in the little girl’s brain was “fresh.” To his eye, that suggested the blow that killed her must have happened shortly before she died. “I tell you right now,” Boyer wrote to him once, “the only evidence I am aware of is there are suddenly a lot of people I never met crawling out of the woodwork to say what a terrible mother I was.”

Boyer was aware that Riggle was an amateur. “The problem is he considered himself another Perry Mason,” she told me. Sometimes she got the sense that he might be bending his understanding of the law to suit his interpretation of her case. “Please relate the facts and situation to me as closely as you can,” she wrote to him. “Don’t flower them up because if it turns out things are what they appeared, or don’t work out the way you figured, I don’t want to get my hopes up only to have them crushed.” The content of her letters vacillated from hopefulness to reverie to fatalism and back again. “I guess I’ll end this letter now,” she signed off a missive. “No sense spreading pain like peanut butter.”

Eventually, Riggle asked Boyer to marry him. He said that once she was free, she could live off his social security. Boyer didn’t think of Riggle that way. She certainly didn’t find him attractive. He’d once donned a suit to impress her on a visit, and while she was touched, “he looked like he’d just climbed out of a casket.” Still, Boyer felt so alone, and he’d done so much work on her behalf, that she considered his proposal. “I was desperate and willing to take any help I could get,” she told me.

He became pushier and pushier with the marriage question. “He would tell me if I didn’t marry him he’d take all the information he’d gathered and throw it away,” Boyer said. He tried to convince her that no one else would help her like he had, like he would. Still, she couldn’t go through with a loveless marriage. In a letter, she told him no.

In response, Riggle mailed Boyer the photos of Amber’s autopsy. She had never wanted to see them. The images were unspeakable. She took them to her counselor, who turned them over to the prison warden. Boyer barred Riggle from visiting her or sending her mail. They never spoke again. Within a few months, he was dead. Turned out, he’d been sick all along.

“I haven’t been here in jail so long that I forgot there’s good people in the world,” Boyer wrote. “It’s just that none of them seem to exist in Georgia.”

Boyer’s lawyer was a court-appointed attorney from Marietta named Jimmy Berry. “He was supposed to be this jam-up lawyer, some hot shot who really knew his stuff,” Boyer told me. She remembered him telling her that he would take her case all the way, help her prove her innocence. Boyer was grateful.

According to his invoice, Berry visited Boyer four times over the two and a half years that she awaited trial. He logged 126 hours on the case, only 17 of which were for court preparation—the rest were for time spent before a judge. He invoiced the state for a total of $6,897.30. Records show that, at the time, Berry was also working on a second high-profile death penalty case elsewhere in Georgia: He was defending an attorney accused of hiring a hitman to murder his wife, who was shot in the head in front of her two young sons. (The attorney was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. Berry did not respond to my interview requests.)

According to Boyer, Berry was hard to get ahold of. Sometimes she called and wrote him letters and didn’t hear back. She wondered why it was taking so long for her case to go to trial. Herrin, too, was still behind bars, awaiting his day in court.

Finally, her trial was scheduled for October 31, 1994. In the days leading up to it, Berry arranged for Boyer to take a polygraph test. She passed, which she thought boded well. But the next day, Berry came to see her and said that going to trial was a bad idea. As Boyer remembers the conversation, Berry emphasized that, even without clear-cut evidence, the case against her was just too strong: the photo of Amber’s face next to the belt, the prior accusations of abuse, the fact that she hadn’t taken Amber to the hospital when the toddler hit her head, Boyer’s checkered personal history. And if she was found guilty, Berry warned, Boyer would likely be executed.

Berry suggested that she consider taking something called the Alford plea. An oddity of U.S. criminal law based on a 1970 Supreme Court decision, it allows a defendant to plead guilty while maintaining their innocence, often as a means of avoiding capital punishment. The Alford plea would mean life in prison, but it would keep Boyer from being strapped into Georgia’s electric chair.

Boyer was stunned. How could she plead guilty to killing her daughter? But Berry, she recalled, was adamant: If she didn’t want to die, she should follow his advice. “The being dead didn’t scare me,” she told me, “it was dying by the electric chair that did.”

Soon after, Boyer stood before a judge and took the Alford plea. She hadn’t consulted any loved ones; no one who supported her was in the courtroom. She was also taking antipsychotics, antidepressants, and sleep aids to help her cope with her grief. Boyer pled guilty to murder by “maliciously causing … cruel and excessive physical pain” and “failing to seek proper medical attention.” She also pled guilty to aggravated assault. Berry told the judge that while he believed his client was innocent, the plea was the best choice for her.

“When I signed my name to that paper,” Boyer told me, “I was signing away my life.” She had just turned 25.

5.

Boyer was transferred to Pulaski State Prison, a newly opened detention facility for women. She was on more drugs than ever to help her cope. What would have been Amber’s fourth birthday passed, then Christmas. The milestones tore Boyer apart. Lagle wrote and came to visit, as did Roll. Boyer was also in contact with her adoptive mother. But there was little anyone could do for her. Other inmates called her a baby killer. Would this last forever?

Herrin’s trial began in late January 1995. A medical examiner testified that Amber’s cause of death was a head injury that would have produced symptoms almost as soon as it occurred. Herrin, though, testified that Amber was fine until he found her passed out and “pale as a ghost.” He ran to a neighbor’s to use a phone because the trailer didn’t have one that worked. Herrin called Lagle’s office but not 911. “It didn’t even cross my mind,” he said.

Herrin described Boyer as abusive, negligent, and selfish. The defense made a point of bringing up the belt that was photographed next to Amber’s face after her death.

“Where in Christina Boyer’s apartment did you find that?” a lawyer asked.

“It was found hanging from the doorknob of her room door,” a detective on the stand replied.

“And did you look in David Herrin’s trailer as well for a similar belt?”

“We did.”

“And you didn’t find a belt in his trailer that was in any way consistent with the bruises on the child’s face, did you?”

“No.”

Boyer, who still believed that Herrin was responsible for Amber’s death, agreed to testify against him. The defense emphasized to the jury that she had already taken the Alford plea. It also seized the opportunity to bring up her “telekinetic powers.” Boyer testified that she wasn’t sure what she could or couldn’t do with her mind when she was a teenager. “All I know is that my whole life was chaotic and it was very traumatic and I can’t explain anything that happened,” she said.

“Do those things still happen to you?” Herrin’s lawyer asked.

“No, sir,” she replied.

“So you can’t move things anymore?”

“No, things don’t happen around me anymore.”

“OK. So you can’t move the little yellow marker that I’ve put up there?” he said, referring to a highlighter.

“No, sir.”

“Well, during this cross-examination, feel if the spirit moves you, Ms. Boyer.”

It was mockery, not an invitation.

Herrin was acquitted of Amber’s murder. He was convicted on one count of cruelty to children and given 20 years in prison.

Other inmates called her a baby killer. Would this last forever?

Boyer’s adoptive mother and aunt began looking for a new lawyer, someone willing to reopen the case—a daunting prospect, given the Alford plea and the fact that no new evidence had come to light. Eventually, according to Boyer’s letters, they hired someone who seemed good enough. The lawyer familiarized himself with the case and started digging into possible legal strategies. A few months into his work, however, he was arrested and convicted of statutory rape. There went the money Boyer had for legal fees. She was back to square one.

She was denied parole in 1999, and again in 2007. Sometimes she wondered if it would’ve been better to die in the electric chair. Then, not long after her second parole denial, an attorney got in touch with her. His name was Richard Allen, and he believed that Boyer was innocent. He came to visit and told her as much. He was straightforward, which she liked. He seemed honest and committed. Most important, he would take the case —Boyer couldn’t afford his help otherwise. She felt as if God might be opening a window for her.

Allen believed that public opinion had been Boyer’s undoing. What if people could see her differently? A few days before Christmas 2007, Allen walked into Sue Horn’s office at the StarNews. Horn usually ran the paper with her husband, but he’d just taken another job. Shouldering the work alone, Horn was exhausted and looking forward to a planned vacation. Allen came in, careful not to drop the tall stack of documents he held in his arms. Horn’s face fell. What did he want?

Allen quickly went into detail about Boyer’s case—Horn knew of it, of course—recounting all the missteps that had occurred, all the ways justice had not been served. Maybe the paper could write about it, he suggested. Horn couldn’t wait for him to leave. “I’ll take a look,” she said, to placate him.

During her vacation, Horn reviewed the documents. She couldn’t believe what she was reading. Everything that could have seemed to have gone wrong for Boyer. Horn, too, became convinced of Boyer’s innocence. On January 20, 2008, she wrote a lengthy article in her paper under the headline “The Real Story of Christina Resch Boyer: Did a ‘Perfect Storm’ of Events Lead to a Life of Imprisonment?” Horn followed the article up with an op-ed. “Believe me,” she wrote, “I’m no tree hugging, Bambi loving, soft hearted woman who’s searching for a cause to make my life have meaning. I’ve got enough to do.” Horn continued, “Boyer is serving a life sentence plus twenty years for this death of her three year old daughter. Did she do it? Her lawyer told the judge no at her hearing. But, she sits in prison today. Boyer had no family and few friends, no money. But, it’s possible she can have justice. Read the story. Let me know.”

The article barely made a ripple in Carroll County. “I believe public opinion is that Boyer is where she should be, however one slices up the pie’s guilty pieces,” Horn recalled. “Murder or manslaughter? Who cares. Abuse or neglect? Doesn’t matter. Did she do it or the boyfriend? They are uninterested.” Still, Allen was preparing to petition on Boyer’s behalf, and she felt aloft at the idea of being free. Then one snowy day in March 2009, Allen had a heart attack and died. The petition for Boyer died along with him.

Boyer’s depression returned. So much hope followed by so much failure. So many people who promised to help and then, by their own fault or not, let her down.

6.

Four years after Allen’s death, Jan Banning came to Carroll County. He was a photographer from the Netherlands, and he wanted to shoot portraits of inmates in Pulaski Prison. He was documenting criminal-justice systems around the world; his photos were haunting testaments to inequities and the vast apparatuses that human beings create to punish one another. He found that while some countries he’d visited treated prisoners with a degree of dignity, America brutally dehumanized them. The country had one of the world’s highest incarceration rates, and many of the 2.2 million people behind bars had been placed there by draconian, discriminatory policies.

Boyer thought, Why not have my picture taken? She straightened her hair and did her makeup the day of the photo shoot. In the images Banning took, her eyes are soft, her complexion slightly pockmarked. Her lips shimmer, and her hair swoops stylishly across her forehead. She is clad in her khaki prison garb.

A video about the case that Jan Banning posted to YouTube.

Boyer liked Banning. He was warm and inquisitive. There was a spark between them—not romantic, something else. The more Banning learned about Boyer’s case, the more shocked and outraged he became. To his mind, she had suffered one of the worst losses a person can suffer, then been treated as if she were responsible for it. A few years after he took her photo, Banning wrote to Boyer through JPay, an email system used in many U.S. prisons. When she responded, she was forthcoming and vulnerable, as if writing in a diary. Boyer was glad to have someone to talk to, not unlike how she’d been with Riggle all those years ago. “What struck me,” Banning said, “is that she wrote back to me and expressed clear interest in how I was doing.” He’d expected someone who’d been in prison so long to be self-absorbed, and understandably so, but she wasn’t. “That somehow made it personal,” he said. “I became fascinated by her.”

Banning’s interest in Boyer’s case eventually started to take over his life. He acquired court documents and got in touch with Alicia Van Couvering, a film producer in Los Angeles who a few years before had been drawn to Boyer’s story and hoped to make a movie based on Roll’s book. There was also a German woman, Susan Weber, who’d come to Boyer’s cause after hearing about it on a podcast about paranormal activity, and a man named James Conrad, who once ran a telekinesis laboratory and who published a blog about Boyer. Banning connected with them all. He started a Dropbox folder where he organized the elements of her story. Her letters to Riggle had a file, as did the documents pertaining to Richard Allen, the reports from child services, and the autopsy of Amber’s body.

Banning felt like something of an investigator—he was positioning himself to do something about the injustice he documented. After so many years behind a camera lens, he wanted to leave a mark. “Why bother about one person?” he said, then invoked the spiritual notion that whoever saves a life saves the world. “I wish that was true,” Banning continued. “The obvious response, anyway, is: Why not?”

He hatched a plan to spend an extended period of time in Georgia to work on the case. Money was an obstacle. He got in touch with Lagle, who was happy to hear that he was interested in the case. She said that she still loved Boyer, even though they weren’t in touch like they’d once been—time had passed, life had happened. Lagle had a spare apartment in the basement of her house, in a quiet, wooded area on the outskirts of Carrollton; she told Banning he was welcome to stay as long as he liked. After connecting with Banning, Lagle felt compelled to reach out to Boyer and make amends for the lapse in their friendship. Boyer was glad to have Lagle back in her life. (By then, both of her adoptive parents had died.)

In 2018, Banning visited Georgia several times. He went through the archives at the county clerk’s office, read old newspaper articles, made lists and charts of the various people involved in Boyer’s case: the sheriff, the cops, the medical examiners, the social workers, the nurses. He met with Horn, who in turn was inspired to write a new article. It was about how a foreign photographer was helping Boyer get the justice she deserved.

Banning found Amber’s grave and posted directions to it on Dropbox, just in case they might one day be of use. He took a photo of the headstone, capturing the light such that the block appeared to be glowing, as if lit from within. He printed the photograph and sent it to Boyer, who wept when she saw it. To her it looked like God himself were illuminating the grave; having become deeply religious in prison, she thought that Banning was heaven-sent.

Banning asked Boyer if he could share her emails with him on his personal website, where he’d already posted his photos of her. “I would be VERY appreciative,” she wrote back. “Although you yourself may not be able to help me, the more people that know about my situation the better.” Banning posted the emails and included Boyer’s address, if people wished to send notes of encouragement. Letters and postcards began to arrive from around the world.

7.

Everyone interested in Boyer’s case has an origin story. In a way, mine begins in childhood. My parents are criminal defense attorneys, and when I was growing up, they had a home office. “Markham and Read,” my brother and I would answer the phone, like tiny secretaries. My brother learned how to accept a call from a federal prison (press five) by the time he was in kindergarten. I was pen pals with one of my parents’ clients, a man named Michael, who had orchestrated the largest shipment of hashish ever seized by federal authorities. In our house, even O.J. Simpson was likely innocent. I was taught to see the best in people and to root for the underdog.

I first learned about Boyer in 2017, when I was asked by a magazine to write the introduction to a photo essay of Banning’s work. In an interview, Banning evangelized about a woman in Georgia who he believed had been wrongfully convicted of killing her daughter. Maybe, he suggested, I could write about her. I told Banning that, at the very least, I was interested in learning more. He quickly followed up with details.

“It was hard to decide what to send,” he wrote in an email, “as I don’t want to inundate you with documentation. I have tons, but let me start ‘quietly.’” He attached a summary of the case that he’d put together himself, and another document containing excerpts from the transcript of Boyer’s sentencing. He included a link to the page on his website about Boyer’s story. “If you’d like to receive more,” he wrote, “I can send it to you immediately.”

I wasn’t the first person Banning had approached. He’d contacted several other journalists, as well as filmmakers, forensic and medical experts, and Georgia lawmakers, asking all of them to look into the case. “I figured that if people can be tried by media, why not try to exonerate her by media?” he said. He’d launched a Facebook group dedicated to gaining Boyer’s freedom. When some people didn’t take to the idea as enthusiastically as he did, Banning was annoyed. He told me that he’d worked in media for years. “I know a good story when I see it,” he insisted.

In December 2017, Boyer was up for parole. Her supporters, including Banning, arranged for dozens of letters of support to be submitted on her behalf. Boyer’s request was denied. Banning promised to continue agitating to get more attention focused on her case. Maybe he could even raise funds to hire her a new lawyer. “When we come to prison,” Boyer once wrote to Banning, “they drill it in our head that our behavior will play a big part in deciding if we are paroled out.” She did Bible study, she took college classes, she worked as an orderly. “I don’t just follow these rules b/c I am choosing the path of least resistance in prison, but b/c I chose to be a decent person in spite of where I am. It’s kind of a kick in the teeth to find out that it doesn’t matter to anyone though.”

Three months after Boyer’s failed parole bid, Banning was back in the Netherlands when he received word from a contact at Pulaski that Boyer had slit her own throat. She was alive and under medical watch in solitary confinement. For the time being, she was prohibited from speaking to anyone on the outside.

To Banning, the incident underlined the urgency of Boyer’s case. The wrongness of it all was like clear-burning fuel. He had big plans, including a book about Boyer’s life—the fourth such text someone had pledged to write about her. (Only Bill Roll’s has been published.) He was also raising funds, hoping they might help Boyer’s legal situation.

Some of the money raised by Boyer’s supporters went to retain Victoria Smith, a longtime parole lawyer in Georgia. She explained that the approach to Boyer’s previous requests for early release—she’d been denied again in 2018—was commendable but perhaps misguided. By Smith’s rough calculation, each parole-board member—five would hear the case—had an average of about three minutes to look through a file before making a decision. A short, compelling summary of Boyer’s case might go further than an onslaught of letters of support. The good news was that the board had agreed to reconsider the case in just one year. Shorter increments between reviews meant that the board could be getting closer to allowing for a prisoner’s release.

In our house, even O.J. Simpson was likely innocent. I was taught to see the best in people and to root for the underdog.

In January 2019, Banning wrote me an excited email with more good news: A group of Georgetown undergraduate students would be taking on Boyer’s case as part of a class. Banning had read about the course online and discovered that it was instrumental in freeing a man who had served 27 years for a murder he didn’t commit. He had contacted the professor immediately. The professor, Marc Morjé Howard, taught the course along with a childhood friend, Marty Tankleff, who himself had been wrongfully imprisoned for 18 years. In teams of three or four, Howard and Tankleff’s students would spend their spring semester in “Making an Exoneree” researching a case and shooting a short documentary about it. “Remember that they are undergraduates, not law students,” Howard wrote in a message to Banning, “and this project does not involve direct legal representation.”

A team of three young women—Sarah Jackmauh, Grace Perret, and Lizzie Porterfield—chose Boyer’s case from a pile of 70 options presented to the class. The students were fiery, optimistic, and progressive, and they were interested in the case’s feminist dimensions. Too often poor women—particularly those of color, but many white ones, too—land behind bars because of poverty. They make desperate choices under impossible conditions, or they can’t afford good legal representation. Low-income mothers are frequently cast as villains. As of 2014, some 40 percent of the women in the National Registry of Exonerations had been cleared of crimes involving children. The Georgetown students were eager to expose what they saw as a smear campaign against Boyer. They believed that she had been punished for who she was, not what she’d done.

Jackmauh, Perret, and Porterfield swiftly took to their research, treating it like a full-time job. They got themselves onto Boyer’s call list and began interviewing her weekly by phone. They divvied up tasks, spending hours poring over documents. They delved more deeply than anyone ever had into the dozens of calls about Amber’s welfare placed to child services in Ohio. Eventually, they would learn that the authorities had followed up on the reports and found nothing of concern. The students were thrilled; their findings seemed like proof that Boyer had been telling the truth about her ex using the calls to intimidate her.

In other instances, the students were disturbed by what they found. The people who looked at Amber’s body—doctors and police—seemed to have overstated any abuse she may have suffered. By the time she arrived at the ER, Amber was already dead. As happens with most corpses, her blood quickly stagnated and pooled inside her, leaving what to the poorly trained eye might look like a troubling network of bruises. Detectives initially accused Herrin of sodomizing Amber based on these natural patterns; they later retracted the claim.

Most puzzling to the Georgetown students was why Boyer’s lawyer had changed tactics so close to her trial date. They tried to reach Jimmy Berry, but he never got back to them. Had he wanted to avoid tarnishing his defense record if Boyer was found guilty and sentenced to death? Did he have other cases in Georgia that he preferred to focus on? Was there a general feeling in Carroll County, shared by people working on both sides of the case, that trying Boyer wasn’t worth the resources—significant for a rural locale—if she agreed to a plea deal instead? It seemed, too, like none of the details indicating that Boyer was a kind and competent mother made an impact on people’s perceptions of her—an audio tape from Christmas 1991, for instance, when Boyer called in to a charity radio show to ask for a doll for Amber, or the money she’d been saving to buy her daughter’s Easter basket.

After two months of research, the students scheduled a trip to Georgia during spring break. They’d be meeting with Boyer, Sue Horn, Jeannie Lagle, and others. Banning wouldn’t be there until the last day. They planned to grab a bite to eat with him at the airport.

I wanted to see Boyer’s many advocates in action, so I asked the young women if I could come report on their trip. “Yes!” they said in unison.

8.

Early on a Friday morning in March 2019, I met Jackmauh, Perret, and Porterfield at an Avis car-rental desk in the Atlanta airport. They had brought along video and audio equipment, their laptops, and copious notebooks filled with the details they’d amassed. They had several three-ring binders thick with meticulously tabbed and indexed documents. Jackmauh also had a bag stuffed with ski gear—they’d all cut spring vacation short to be here.

The students wanted to make it to Carrollton, an hour’s drive from Atlanta, before the county clerk’s office closed for the day. They had to make a pit stop at one point to talk to Banning and Smith on the phone. All three young women got into the back of their rental SUV, connected a cell phone to the vehicle’s Bluetooth audio system, and set up a video camera to film themselves while they took the call. Their class, I learned, required that they document their quest along with the details of Boyer’s case. They’d be getting B-roll of various sites—the trailer where Amber died, the hospital Boyer and Herrin took her to, Lagle’s house—and interviewing people on camera. Maybe they’d even find David Herrin, who’d been out of prison for several years.

The call from Banning and Smith came in. Smith, speaking to the students for the first time, was kind, professional, and frank. She thanked them for being Boyer’s advocates but emphasized that, as a group, they shouldn’t work at cross-purposes. Insisting that Boyer was innocent, criticizing the law-enforcement apparatus that put her behind bars, calling out lawyers in the case for being careerist at the expense of justice—all that could get back to the parole board. Smith was worried that the exoneration effort might derail Boyer’s chances for an early release. (In an interview, Smith told me more about those odds, noting that she had other clients the parole board was likely to find more sympathetic than Boyer, and with less compelling evidence against them.)

While it is possible to pursue exoneration and parole simultaneously, fighting for early release requires that a person take some degree of responsibility for their crime. Smith had already told Banning, in a message prior to the phone call, that she’d spoken to someone familiar with Boyer’s past parole bids who had “repeatedly emphasized that the sheer number of injuries, of child protective services reports, and of witness statements of firsthand observations of Christina abusing the child will make any attempt by us to assert Christina’s innocence counterproductive. Not only will the board members not buy it, we will lose credibility in our other assertions.” Boyer could not bear to say that she murdered her daughter, but perhaps she could take responsibility in a more nuanced sense—for having limitations as a young mother, say, or for making bad choices that put Amber in harm’s way.

One way or the other, Smith said, she really needed to talk to Boyer about the situation, and that was proving difficult. She still hadn’t been added to Boyer’s call list, and she seemed frustrated that Banning and the Georgetown students had. She asked that Banning prioritize the matter the next time he spoke with Boyer.

Banning had been stunned when Smith first told him about the potential conflict between parole and exoneration. To him it was another confounding aspect of the U.S. legal system. Jackmauh, Perret, and Porterfield agreed to tread lightly while interviewing people in Carroll County. They wouldn’t say that their goal was to get Boyer exonerated; they would say only that they wanted to shine a light on the case.

To that end, the students asked, could Banning please take down the information about them from his website? They didn’t want their names associated with a class called “Making an Exoneree.” What’s more, they pointed out, he called them law students, which they weren’t.

“You aren’t legal students?” Banning asked, surprised. (In the Netherlands, as in many European countries, students can earn law degrees as undergraduates.) He promised to take their names down right away.

After the call ended, the students sped down the highway toward the Carroll County clerk’s office. They made it before closing time. Inside, Perret announced the number of the file they needed.

“That the Boyer case?” the woman behind the desk asked. She knew just where to find the boxes. She wheeled them out, and the students pulled document after document, photographing any pages they didn’t already have in their binders. When it was time to go, we brought everything back to the desk.

“I guess we aren’t the first to come here looking through these boxes,” Perret said.

“Oh no,” said the clerk. People had been in and out over the years. Perret asked the woman what she thought of the case.

“You really want to know what I think?” the clerk said.

“Of course,” Perret replied.

“I think there’s not a bad enough place in hell for that woman after what she did to that little girl.”

Boyer could not bear to say that she murdered her daughter, but perhaps she could take responsibility in a more nuanced sense—for having limitations as a young mother, say.

The students had done a diligent and discerning job going through the case files, and they were cool and collected when talking to sources. I admired their fighting spirit and sometimes found myself forgetting that I wasn’t part of their team. It was also easy to lose sight of the fact that they were working on a class assignment that would come to an end that May.

Only when they went looking for David Herrin did their relative youth peek out. Their class had access to a private investigator, who had found Herrin’s address. The young women hemmed and hawed over what to do. Should they call first? Or would that spook him? Should they just go over there? But was that safe?

“I feel like if a bunch of young women showed up,” Porterfield said, pausing to look at me, a woman 15 years her senior, before continuing, “or youthful women, he wouldn’t be so intimidated.”

They decided to knock on his door. We pulled up to a sweet little cottage with a well-mowed lawn. Porterfield and I stayed in the car while Perret and Jackmauh walked up to the house. They knocked. Herrin—unmistakably him, based on the photographs and news clips we’d all seen—poked his head out the door. Perret and Jackmauh had called us and put us on speaker so that we could hear what transpired. They introduced themselves and asked if he’d be willing to talk.

“Better not,” Herrin said and closed the door.

The students were all jitters as they drove back down the dirt road that led to the highway. They hadn’t gotten anything, but they’d met him. Can you believe it? He was free, living his life in a house near a lake, while Boyer was still in jail. (My own attempts to contact Herrin later were unsuccessful.)

Jackmauh’s 22nd birthday happened to be during the trip, and we went out to dinner with Lagle at her favorite restaurant in town, a Hawaiian-themed place with an extensive pan-Asian menu and elaborate cocktails with colorful umbrellas. The waiters knew Lagle’s name, her favorite table, and her signature drink.

During the meal, Lagle admitted that she and Banning had had something of a falling out. He saw himself as Boyer’s savior, but Lagle felt that he’d just breezed into town and taken over.

“Men,” she said.

Their argument centered on the fact that Banning had taken Boyer’s personal journals to the Netherlands with him, so that he could photograph them in his studio. Lagle didn’t like that, even though Boyer had given him permission. (“It’s like nothing was ever secret in my life,” Boyer told me. “I feel like I need to be as transparent as possible for the people trying to help me.”) Still, Lagle believed it was a violation of privacy. According to her, after much back and forth, Banning exploded. He was staying at Lagle’s house when it happened, and they were downstairs in his apartment’s kitchen. He slammed a spoon he was holding into the sink. Banning said he was tired of hearing about how long Lagle had known Boyer. Lagle said she was tired of his self-importance.

“Do you know how many thousands of people will see these pictures?” Banning demanded.

Lagle wasn’t impressed by the prospect. Nor was she intimidated by that spoon. In her view, the journals were supposed to be waiting for Boyer when she got out of prison. They would help her finally write her book, the one she and Lagle had long ago planned together. At dinner, Lagle made a point of noting that she hadn’t finished the book herself. “That’s how much I respect her to make her own decisions,” she said.

The argument suggested that sometimes, somehow, helping a person whose life is on the line can become a zero-sum game. I asked her what it felt like to see people come in and out of Boyer’s life. “It’s always been that way,” Lagle said. “I’m the only person on the planet—on the planet!—who has been around all this time.”

The Georgia Department of Corrections wouldn’t grant the Georgetown students, or me, permission to visit Boyer in person, stating that she was “not eligible” to receive visitors. It provided no other details. Still, Boyer called several times a day to learn about the students’ progress, thanking them profusely each time. “Y’all are doing such a good job,” she said.

The students decided to find Amber’s grave and leave flowers on Boyer’s behalf. We loaded up in their SUV and put Boyer on Bluetooth so they could talk to her. She stayed on the line as we made our way across town. “It’s weird, in a way,” she said at one point, “because I have been here for so many years waiting for someone to care. I had friends who cared, don’t get me wrong, but they couldn’t do anything apart from care.” Now, with Banning and the Georgetown students and her parole attorney, “it’s like, things are finally moving. It’s hard to believe that there are really people out there working on my behalf.”

The final morning of the trip, before heading back to the airport, the students arranged a meeting with the former detective on the case, Mike Thomas, at his home. To their surprise, he also invited over his friend and longtime partner Detective Captain Mike Bradley, who had worked the case, too. Perret was carrying a tote that read “Fighting to End Rape Culture.” Before we went into the house, she turned it against her body so the message wouldn’t show. We settled into the living room with the two men, Thomas’s wife, and their teenage daughter.

“You all from the Innocence Project or something like that?” our host asked. No, no, the students assured him—they were just undergrads learning about the criminal-justice system and trying to shed light on Boyer’s case.

The locals talked for more than an hour. They described how they’d never get the image of that little girl’s body out of their minds. Thomas’s wife remembered the funeral, how many people were there. Wasn’t it strange, the students pointed out, that both Boyer and Herrin went to prison when it was never clear who did what—if anything—to Amber? The cause of death was never pinpointed, either. Both Thomas and Bradley said they felt like Herrin got a lesser conviction and a shorter sentence because Boyer had already submitted her Alford plea. Otherwise, they thought he probably would have been found guilty of murder.

“One of them was responsible,” Bradley said, leaning back into his chair. “The way I see it, both of them went to jail, and that’s justice.”

“I looked at her as more guilty,” Thomas said, “because she was her mother. She was the person on earth who was supposed to protect her.”

The Georgetown students on their way to visit Amber’s grave.

9.

Not long after they left Carroll County, the students got a call from Boyer. She was in tears. A parole consultant had come to see her to prep for her hearing. Boyer left the meeting with a misunderstanding: She thought that she would have to admit to hitting Amber on the head before she died. Boyer didn’t want to say that. Through sobs, she begged the students to contact Smith for her. The young women did so promptly. “We basically sat, listened, and tried to calm her down,” they wrote in an email to Smith, “reminding her that she doesn’t need to make an immediate decision right now and that it would be best to speak to you before she makes a concrete decision regarding how she’s going to approach the parole board. She wanted us to tell you that she’d like to speak with you over the phone as soon as possible.”

Smith, who was on Boyer’s call list by then, cleared up the confusion and also forwarded the email to Banning to keep him in the loop. Banning fired off an angry missive to the students. “I have a very high opinion of your activities but there is one thing I absolutely do not understand,” he wrote. “Is it really that hard to just cc me when sending those emails to Victoria? Do you have a reason not to trust me and my involvement? Maybe you can check with your professor Marc how he came to hear of her case in the first place?”

In our exchanges, Banning and I had talked at length about what informed his quest to free Boyer, why it mattered so much to him. We had talked less about what would happen if she ever won her freedom. In one conversation, he admitted that there could be a personal cost. “If she does get out, that will be very complicated for me, in the sense that, of course I will be happy,” Banning told me, “but what will I do? I’ve dedicated so much time to this, it’s become a part of my life.” In a later interview, he elaborated: “I don’t know what I can contribute if she doesn’t get out.” That scenario, Banning said, “is far worse.”

Often, while sitting in my office flipping through Bill Roll’s book about Boyer or her correspondence with John Riggles, perching on Jeannie Lagle’s couch or taking notes in Sue Horn’s parlor, I felt like I was brushing up against a sinister current of energy. True believers say it’s like that when you walk past a ghost. My stomach would go queasy. Maybe it was the grisly details of the case, or the peculiar attention Boyer attracted, or conflicted feelings about my own small role in her story, or something else entirely.

The laws of physics say it’s unlikely Tina Resch ever moved objects with her mind. Yet Christina Boyer does have the ability to draw people into her orbit and keep them there, at least for a while. They are certain they’re the ones, finally, to prove her innocence. And why not? The U.S. justice system—so unblind, so obtuse, so cruel—seems to demand intervention. Projects like Making a Murderer, true-crime podcasts, and internet forums for amateur detectives are all reactions to alarming trends, including the more than 2,500 exonerations documented since 1989, no doubt a small fraction of the total number of wrongful convictions on the books. Who doesn’t want the wheel of history to turn in the direction of what’s right? Who doesn’t want to play a role in breaking the back of a ruthless institution, to achieve a moral victory that carries a particular kind of democratic power?

So strong is this impulse, and so vast is the number of people the law has wronged, that journalists pitching stories about injustice—myself included—routinely hear some version of the same response: But what makes this case special? As a question of justice, all that should matter is whether Boyer is innocent. But if her case is “special,” it’s because so many people have decided that it is.

It’s nice, isn’t it—to believe? That a teenage girl can shatter a plate on the floor by force of sheer will. That a person’s hope can sustain them through endless disappointments. That in the end the truth will prevail. That bystanders with a conscience can set a grieving mother free. That there’s no harm, as Banning said, in trying.

What’s harder to face, and painful to believe, is that doing good can collide with the limitations of human nature, and that sometimes harsh systems just don’t yield.

All that should matter is whether Boyer is innocent. But if her case is “special,” it’s because so many people have decided that it is.

The students dressed up for the screening of their documentary about Boyer. So did Lagle, who flew in for the May 2019 event, held in a packed auditorium on the Georgetown campus. Lagle wore smart white slacks under a bright red trench coat. Banning couldn’t make it from Europe; he sent his regrets.

The plan was to patch Boyer in via one of the student’s cell phones; after the screening, Perret would carry the phone on stage and hold it up to the microphone so she could address the audience. Boyer was nearly breathless at the idea that so many people were there, eager to hear her story. She was also nervous, but Perret encouraged her. “Just speak from your heart,” she said. “Don’t worry, they just want to hear from you, no matter what you say.”

The event ran behind schedule, forcing Boyer to dial in several times. Every 15 minutes, she got disconnected—prison policy limits the time inmates get for a single call. Finally, it was her turn to speak. “This has been an incredibly humbling experience for me,” Boyer said in her remarks. “I can’t believe how many hours they worked. They worked more hours than any one of my attorneys did.” If she felt nervous, she didn’t show it. But when she talked about how much she missed Amber, she broke into tears. “Thank you all for coming tonight and for listening to my story,” she said.

Later that month, the Georgetown students took their final exams. Porterfield and Jackmauh graduated; Perret had another semester left but had already been accepted early into Georgetown Law School. Victoria Smith submitted Boyer’s latest parole application. It was summer, and then it was fall. Boyer’s parole decision was supposed to be announced in September, but the month came and went without news. October passed, then November. “I try to keep busy,” Boyer told me. She also prayed.

Finally, in early January, I heard from the Georgetown students that Boyer had been denied parole. At the time, they didn’t know why. Turns out, the parole board’s explanation was the same as before: “insufficient amount of time served to date given the nature and circumstances of your offenses(s).” Boyer would be eligible again in November 2020, but Smith was no longer on retainer. For the time being, she’d done all she could do.

Banning soldiered on, committing to several gallery exhibitions of his work on Boyer’s story. He was still planning a book, which would include Boyer’s written responses to the photos of her he’d taken. “I see her as a full collaborator,” he told me.

Meanwhile, Banning felt like the students had abandoned the case. They didn’t want him—or anyone—to think that; they talked about maybe finding an attorney to look over the files, someone who could assess Boyer’s options. They didn’t plan to share their documentary widely, not if it might conflict with Boyer’s future parole bid.

What did Boyer think? After I learned the parole news, I wrote her an email. She didn’t respond for several weeks, and I began to worry, remembering the time she’d cut her throat. When she finally replied, Boyer said that she was devastated, of course, but that she was also working hard to stay positive. “I’m trying to keep busy, keep focused on my future life outside of prison walls,” she wrote.

Plus, she’d gotten some surprising good news. “The same time I found out about the denial,” she wrote, “Jan [Banning] located my birth family!” Since then, she’d been in touch with her birth sister via phone and letters. Her mother, an addict, had died of kidney failure years before. “All I have left is a younger sister, her daughter, my niece and grand niece,” Boyer said. She was thrilled, particularly when she learned that she hadn’t been the only one searching. “It turns out my sister had been looking for me for years!” she said.

Once again, Boyer hoped that her life’s next chapter would be better than what came before. At the same time, an old, unknown chapter was opening wide. Members of her birth family joined the Free Tina Boyer Facebook group. “I just want to make a post and thank everybody for the love and support!” wrote her niece, whose name is Ashley. “My mother … has been looking for christina for years now. We are so blessed and lucky to now have her in our lives. I appreciate everything you guys have done to help her during her incarceration! I can see this page is so full of love for my aunt and it warms my heart. Me, my mother, and my daughter are excited to meet her❤❤.”

“That’s the latest twist to this crazy life of mine,” Boyer told me. Getting to know her newfound family helped her pass the time. It gave her something to look forward to. And who knew what kind of deliverance—of spirit or body—they might bring?

“Your Honor, Can I Tell the Whole Story?”

“Your Honor, Can I Tell the Whole Story?”

A murder in New Orleans, a trial that lasted less than a day, and the lives they entangled for the next three decades.

By Nick Chrastil

Published in partnership with The Lens.

The Atavist Magazine, No. 97

Nick Chrastil is a writer based in New Orleans. He has written for Slate, Roads & Kingdoms, ThinkProgress, The Lens, and other outlets.

Editor: Seyward Darby
Designer: Ed Johnson
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checker: Tekendra Parmar
Photographer: Akasha Rabut

Published in November 2019. Design updated in 2021.

The address where Greggie Jones was killed, 4639 Wilson Ave.

1. The Crime

Guns were on everyone’s mind. In January 1987, New Orleans’s Times-Picayune ran a story in its lifestyle section with a picture of a hand gripping a revolver, hovering over a map of the city. The headline posed a question: “Should You Get a Gun?”

A sense of unease overwhelmed New Orleans—journalist Nicholas Lemann, a distressed native, lamented that the city’s “supreme confidence about itself seemed to be truly shaken.” White people had left New Orleans in droves after Ruby Bridges desegregated William Frantz Elementary in 1960. Many of them went to first-ring suburbs like Metairie, where former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke would eventually win a statehouse seat. The oil bust had decimated the economy. Louisiana’s unemployment rate was the highest in the nation—one in eight people were out of work. To save money, New Orleans mayor Sidney Barthelemy laid off 1,100 municipal employees and put the rest on a four-day workweek. The war on drugs had replaced the war on poverty. Mandatory punishment for distribution of heroin was a life sentence. To relieve overcrowding at Orleans Parish Prison, the sheriff set up tents in a nearby park to serve as makeshift cells.¹ Neighbors complained that police radios were interfering with their TV signals.

[1] In 1974, the jail housed an average of 800 prisoners per day. By 1987, the number was up to 3,800.

The Times-Picayune’s gun feature offered readers advice for dealing with their existential anxiety, courtesy of the New Orleans Police Department. “Males, females, young people, the elderly, they’re all talking about guns,” an NOPD officer told the newspaper. “There are a lot of ladies who say they’re in a position they’ve never been in in their life. They’re frightened in their houses, they’re frightened in their cars.” The paper explained where people could attend weapons-training courses. A sidebar with a list of “Things to Consider” encouraged potential gun owners to ask themselves, “Are you committed to using a gun? Can you shoot someone?” If a reader wanted to buy a firearm, the police recommended any name-brand .38 revolver “because it is simplest to load and use, and gets the job done.”

Susan Wolfe, a resident of the affluent Lakeview neighborhood, had a .38 Smith & Wesson blue steel snub-nose five-shot revolver. A medical student at Louisiana State University, Wolfe came home on the afternoon of April 28, 1987, to find her back window open. Someone had climbed inside and thrown her belongings about. In addition to her JVC portable radio, the intruder had taken her gun. The police who came to the scene recovered no physical evidence left by the perpetrator. At Wolfe’s request, a crime-lab unit dusted for fingerprints. None were found.

That night, Wolfe’s stolen .38 was used to shoot a man named Greggie Jones. Police found Jones in the yard of his house at 4639 Wilson Ave. in the neighborhood of New Orleans East. He was wearing a brown checked shirt and a hat. His bicycle was lying nearby. He’d been shot twice and was gasping for breath. One bullet had entered the back side of his right wrist and shattered the tip of the radius bone. A second bullet had entered the right side of his chest. It went through his heart and into his spine. An officer bandaged Jones’s chest wound, then an ambulance drove him two and half miles to Methodist Hospital. There, Jones was pronounced dead.

Back on Wilson Avenue, police took statements from Jones’s neighbors, all potential eyewitnesses. Lester Hill said that he was sitting on his steps across the street when he heard gunshots. Hill saw a gray car, possibly a Ford Pinto, parked in front of Jones’s home, and a black man wearing a beige shirt and dark pants. The man was carrying a gun, which Hill described as “shiny in color.” The suspect walked from the yard and got into the passenger seat of the gray car. Another man was behind the wheel. The pair drove away, turning onto a dirt road that led to the Pecan Grove Apartments on Chef Menteur Highway. Hill did not know either of the men, but he told the police that he would be able to identify the one with the gun.

Jones’s brother Eddie lived next door, and he’d also heard shots. When he looked outside, he saw his brother lying on the ground. Down the street, about a block away, Eddie saw a black man heading toward the highway. Kenneth Walker, who lived at 4648 Wilson Ave., said that he heard shots but didn’t see anyone or anything of note.

The most important witness would prove to be Jones’s live-in girlfriend, Vanessa Causey. She wasn’t home when he was shot. She told police that she’d gone out to look for Jones earlier in the evening and was walking back when she heard gunfire. As she approached the house, Causey saw a black man in a dark shirt and beige hat leaving the yard. She claimed that she recognized the man: His name was Willie, and he’d gotten into an argument with Jones earlier that day. Causey didn’t provide the suspect’s full name.

She described Willie as approximately five foot six and 185 pounds, “walking toward her direction,” according to the police report. “After that, unknown.”

New Orleans Parish Prison, where Erin Hunter was held after his arrest.

2. The Cop

Donald Hoyt was the homicide detective first assigned to investigate the murder. In his supplemental report, written the day after the crime, he noted that it was obvious “that the victim had been dealing in drugs.” Inside Jones’s house, Hoyt found evidence of crack cocaine use: freebasing pipes and baking powder. Police also removed 16 joints and two syringes from Jones’s clothes when they arrived at the crime lab to be catalogued as evidence. The autopsy report noted that Jones had “old and recent venipunctures of the right arm.” When the toxicology test came back, it showed that Jones had cocaine and angel dust in his system.

A black man who did drugs had been shot, probably by another black man, possibly because of drugs—that was about as far as Hoyt got with his investigation. A month after he was assigned to the case, he retired. He hadn’t been able to locate the witnesses for follow-up interviews. The case was going cold when it was handed off to detective Jacklean Davis.

Davis was an anomaly: She was the first black female homicide detective in NOPD history.² On her first day in the division, some of her colleagues put dog shit in her desk drawer. They glued her belongings to her desk and hung up pictures of Aunt Jemima. “Everybody from the South knew who Aunt Jemima was,” Davis said in an interview. “She’s considered a house nigger.” Once, when Davis’s daughter called the office looking for her, she was advised, “Nigger, don’t call anymore. That bitch doesn’t work here.”

[2] In 1973, a black officer filed a lawsuit alleging racial discrimination in NOPD’s staffing practices. At the time, NOPD had fewer than 100 black officers on a force totaling some 1,300. After a settlement was reached, white officers filed a reverse-discrimination suit.

Davis’s life experiences up to that point may have helped her endure the cruelties of her fellow murder police. A profile in Ebony magazine recounted her difficult biography: When she was three years old, her father died in a car accident. A few years later, Davis, along with her younger brother, went to live with her great-aunt and uncle. The aunt was a sex worker who ran a boarding house for merchant marines on Baronne Street in New Orleans’s Central City, not far from the Mississippi River. The uncle was a sailor who was home only a few weeks out of the year. Starting when Davis was eight years old, he used those respites to molest her. She lived in constant fear when he was around. When she was nine or ten, Davis was also raped by one of her aunt’s boarders. She didn’t tell anyone at the time. “I enclosed all the guilt,” she told Ebony.

Jacklean Davis, as featured in *Ebony* magazine. (Via Google Books)

When she was 14, her abusive uncle died of cancer. Three years later, her aunt, a consistent source of love and support, passed away. Around the same time, Davis gave birth to her daughter.

Like opposing magnetic forces to the hardships of her life, ambition and persistence propelled Davis forward. She graduated high school and enrolled in college. She got a job as a transit clerk. She took the civil service exam and failed. She took it a second time and failed again. She took it twice more and failed. On her fifth try she passed and went to the police academy. In 1979, she started as a patrol officer. Davis worked her way up to the city’s vice squad, where her childhood observations of the habits and postures of sex workers made her valuable as an undercover operative. She claimed that a magistrate judge once said to her, “With your ass, I’d solicit you.”

From vice, Davis moved over to narcotics and eventually to rape investigations. “Each rape case was like a counseling session to me,” she told Ebony. Davis excelled—she had a 100 percent clearance rate by the time she left the division—but her record didn’t guarantee respect when she transferred to homicide at the age of 30. Once again she had something to prove. “Every case that I got, I was looked at under a microscope,” Davis told a Knight-Ridder reporter. “My biggest accomplishment, I consider, is not cracking under pressure.”

Davis was among the cops who responded to the scene of Greggie Jones’s murder, but there is no record of her speaking with witnesses that night. She officially took over the case on July 1, 1987, a few months into her homicide tenure. She reached out to the key witnesses, including Lester Hill, who’d said the night of the murder that he could identify the man he saw carrying a gun. Davis couldn’t find Hill, and he was never interviewed again. On July 9, however, Vanessa Causey finally answered her phone.

According to Davis, Causey reiterated that she knew the man she’d seen leaving the shooting, the one she’d called Willie. His actual name was Erin Hunter. “Causey stated [that on] the night of the fatal shooting incident, she was very traumatized and couldn’t remember Hunter’s name,” Davis wrote in her case report. Causey reportedly told Davis that she’d run into Hunter several days after the killing. He’d asked her where she was living because his girlfriend wanted to get in touch with her. Causey said that she gave Hunter a fake address and, fearing for her life, fled the city for a couple of months, which was why detective Hoyt hadn’t been able to reach her. According to Davis’s report, Causey had “agonized over the fact of Hunter not being arrested for the murder.” Now she was ready to talk.

Davis wrote in her report that, after her conversation with Causey, she searched for Hunter’s name in the NOPD’s computer system. She discovered that he’d been arrested that very morning for possession of stolen property. Tipped off by a man who claimed to have sold Hunter a stolen television set, cops had shown up at Hunter’s door with a search warrant. When no one answered, they entered through a front window, and the officers found Hunter in the bathroom. (Hunter told me that he willingly let the cops in.) They handcuffed him and recovered the stolen TV, along with several guns. One was a Smith and Wesson .38 revolver. Records showed that it belonged to Susan Wolfe and had been reported stolen in April.

A report from the NOPD ballistics division dated July 15—less than a week after Davis spoke to Causey—states that Wolfe’s gun fired the bullets found in Jones’s body. The next day, Davis met with Causey and showed her a photographic lineup. Causey identified Hunter as the man she’d seen at the crime scene. That evening, a judge issued an arrest warrant for Hunter, who had made bail after being detained for possessing stolen goods. The new charge was murder, and it landed him behind bars indefinitely.

Davis hadn’t interviewed Hunter. She never would. When asked why during the reporting of this article, she said that she didn’t often speak to homicide suspects. “I didn’t have to talk to him,” she said of Hunter. “The crime lab said he was found in possession of a weapon used in a homicide, so it was his obligation to tell his defense attorney how he came to have that gun.”

With an eyewitness and a ballistics match, it seemed likely that Davis would clear the case, continuing her unlikely run as one of New Orleans’s best detectives. The investigation into Jones’s murder also happened to connect to one of Davis’s earlier successes. When she was a rape detective, she helped put a man named Melvin Williams away for 50 years. Williams, for his part, maintained his innocence. The victim in the case was Vanessa Causey.

Orleans Parish Criminal District Courthouse, where Hunter was tried.

3. The Witness

The Orleans Parish Criminal District Courthouse stands on the corner of Tulane Avenue and S. Broad Avenue, its southeastern facade bearing a quote from John Adams: “This is a government of laws, not of men.” In that building, in 1987, determinations of guilt and innocence were forged in a dark furnace of history as unwieldy as it was punitive. The institutions meant to ensure due process, conferring legitimacy with badges, robes, reports, dockets, legalese, and conspicuous whiteness, were undermined by incompetence, disinterest, and contempt. Truth was replaced with convenience, investigation with expediency. Lives, particularly black ones, were often treated as expendable.

Causey entered the courthouse on September 16. She’d led a hard life. In addition to the alleged rape, she’d struggled with addiction. According to several friends and acquaintances whom investigators later interviewed—some of whom also spoke to me for this story—finding ways to procure drugs was the organizing principle of Causey’s life. She set up people for Jones to rob, including drug dealers. “She was that type of person, when she get high, she don’t give a damn,” a person close to Causey told me on condition of anonymity. “‘Get whatever I gotta get to get high, get mine the best way I can.’ And that was her motto, which was a bad concept.”

When Causey appeared before the grand jury, there were new details in her story, ones she hadn’t told Davis or the cops who’d responded to the scene of Jones’s murder. She testified, for example, that she’d seen a man in a white cap get into a gray Ford Pinto, like the one that Lester Hill, Jones’s neighbor who’d never been re-interviewed, claimed to have seen. Causey told the jury that at first she couldn’t see the man’s face, but when she did, she knew it was Hunter. His mother lived in her neighborhood, and he had previously dated her sister, who Causey claimed once heard Hunter describe himself as a hit man. (There is no record of the police interviewing Causey’s sister.)

Causey also said that Hunter sold cocaine and had once been robbed at a local hotel. That incident, Causey implied, could explain his motive for murdering her boyfriend: Jones knew who was responsible for the robbery but wouldn’t tell Hunter, because Jones didn’t think it was his place to get involved.

Causey said that she’d spoken “casually” with the police on the night of the murder but didn’t identify Hunter. “They asked me did I see who done it, and I told them no, because I didn’t see him shoot him,” she said. “I didn’t want to think he did it.” Why, then, had she given the police the name Willie? Causey said that she’d heard someone call Hunter that before. Causey also claimed that she’d contacted an investigator at the district attorney’s office, a man named Anthony Radosti, with information about the murder, then called detective Davis. Radosti’s name wasn’t in Davis’s case report; in a letter sent several years later to Hunter, Radosti would say that he had no recollection of being involved. Meanwhile, Causey’s testifying that she had called Davis contradicted the detective’s own account of initiating contact on July 9.

“Even though I didn’t see him fire the shots,” Causey told the grand jury, referring to Hunter, “it was in my heart, you know, that he did it, and I got on my knees and I asked God, I said, ‘Well, if he’s not the person who did it, remove these feelings from my heart,’ you know? And those feelings haven’t been removed, and I knew God would have answered my prayers, because I have faith and trust in Him.”

The grand jury ruled to indict.

Hunter was in lockup at Orleans Parish Prison and assigned a lawyer from the woefully underfunded and understaffed Orleans Indigent Defender Program.³ His counsel hadn’t visited him or told Hunter that Causey was the person who’d identified him as a killer. In fact, Hunter didn’t even know that it was Jones he was accused of murdering. “Hell, I don’t know if the guy was black or white, viennesse or cuban,” he wrote in a letter to his attorney four months after his arrest and two after his indictment. “Do I have a right to know what in the hell is going on?”

[3] At the time, New Orleans did not have a dedicated office of the public defender. In 1993, this was deemed to be unconstitutional. Still, an office wasn’t created until the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It has struggled with deficits and a backlog of cases ever since.

In the same letter, Hunter demanded that his lawyer leave the case. A new indigent defender named John Dolan took over. Hunter’s frustration and distrust persisted. He wrote letters begging Dolan to take his case seriously and wondering if the attorney was planning to sell him out to the DA’s office somehow.

Hunter learned the basics of the case against him at a motions hearing held in February 1988. Causey failed to show up. “We have been trying to get in touch with her, we have been unable to,” a prosecutor told the judge. When Hunter heard Causey’s name said aloud, however, he was relieved. He knew Causey through her sister and because he’d sold her cocaine a few times. He’d heard that she could be trouble, sometimes getting thrown out of her mother’s house. Still, if she was the state’s main witness, there must have been a mistake. When Causey saw that he was being charged for Jones’s murder, she would confirm that he hadn’t done it. “I thought for sure she was going to exonerate me,” Hunter told me.

The home where Jones and Vanessa Causey lived has been razed.

4. The Evidence

After the hearing, Hunter wrote to Dolan demanding to know more about the gun that had been matched to the bullets in Jones’s body. “You can’t tell me what gun was involved in the murder, or is they going to use the gun as evidence,” Hunter wrote. A few weeks later, he wrote again. “You keep telling me the gun isn’t a problem, it’s the eyewitness we have to worry about,” Hunter said. “Mr. Dolan, you don’t have to worry about anything, I’m the one who have to worry.… I told you the last time we talked (Feb. 5, 1988) I wanted to see this gun but you keep throwing in my face this gun don’t mean nothing.”

Hunter’s adamancy came from the fact that stolen property had been part of his livelihood before his arrest. In addition to selling drugs, Hunter worked as a fence—someone who moves stolen goods in exchange for cash and drugs. If he knew which one of the guns taken from his home by police had been used in the killing, maybe he could clear things up. He could say who he got it from and when. If he’d purchased the weapon after Jones’s death, wouldn’t that point to his innocence? In addition, after Hunter bailed himself out of jail following his arrest on the stolen-goods charge, he’d returned to the same house where the police had seized his guns. When the police came looking for him again, he was right where they’d found him before. “If I would have known any one of those guns was involved with a murder, I would have took off somewhere,” Hunter told me. “Went to Florida, California, somewhere.”

According to Hunter, the state gave him written information regarding the type of gun used to kill Jones about two weeks before his trial, but he couldn’t positively identify the weapon without seeing it. He later wrote in a legal filing that the “court must be mindful that Petitioner was a fencer for two years and has been in contact with well over 100 guns, especial 38s.” Hunter finally saw the gun at his trial, which took place in July 1988, a full year after his arrest. The prosecution introduced the Smith & Wesson into evidence, and Dolan asked Hunter about it on the stand. Hunter was eager to reveal what he knew.

“Could you tell the ladies and gentlemen of the jury how you became in possession of said weapon?” Dolan asked him.

When he answered, Hunter turned his attention to the judge. “Your honor,” he said, “can I tell the whole story?”

“Just listen to my question,” Dolan instructed. “How did you get the gun? Did you steal it? Did you buy it?”

“I bought all my stolen property.”

“You bought it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“This particular weapon, do you know who you bought it from?”

“Yes, I bought it from a guy named Willie.”

“A guy named Willie?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you know his last name?”

“Willie Harris.”

“Did you give Willie a bill of sale for that weapon?”

“No, sir. It’s like collateral.”

“When did you buy it?”

“I bought it sometime in June”—that is, several weeks after the murder.

Hunter denied that anyone had ever called him Willie, as Causey claimed on the stand. She’d shown up for court this time. It was Hunter’s word against hers—none of the other witnesses were asked if Willie was Hunter’s nickname.

On cross-examination, prosecutor Luke Walker returned to the matter of Willie Harris. Hunter’s use of that name in his testimony was the first time, as far as the record showed, that it had been linked to the case. Willie Harris was a real person. He was also dead. He’d been murdered in the Ninth Ward in July 1987. Whether or not Hunter knew this by the time of his trial isn’t clear. (Harris’s killing was never solved.)

“Willie Harris, this fellow you bought this gun from, do you know him?” Walker asked.

“Yeah, Willie Harris,” Hunter replied.

“Where does Willie stay?”

“He stays in the Ninth Ward, I think he stays with his parents on Almonaster Street”— which was indeed where Harris’s family lived.

“You subpoenaed him, you got him in here, don’t you, because Willie is back there, right?” Walker asked, knowing that no Willie Harris was in the courtroom.

“No, I don’t know where Willie is.”

“You didn’t subpoena him to come and testify?” Walker continued. “Even though you know that, if convicted, you will go to jail for the rest of your life, you didn’t bring Willie, the man who can clear you?”

“You never told me what gun it was,” Hunter responded. “This is my first time ever seeing the gun.”

Judge Frank Shea once held six felony trials in a single day; he claimed it was a world record.

5. The Judge

At times, the trial reached points of near incoherence. Dolan, who waived his opening statement, called the location of the murder Milton Street, not Wilson Avenue, confusing Hunter on the stand. When Causey introduced still more new information—that she’d seen a gun in Hunter’s hand at the murder scene, that her brother was with her at the time—the defense didn’t ask why her story kept changing. (Her brother was not called to testify.) When she said that neither she nor Jones had used drugs, Dolan didn’t bring up the toxicology report showing that, in the deceased’s case at least, this was demonstrably false. He didn’t press her when she said that she’d called Jacklean Davis about the case and not the other way around, as Davis recounted on the stand. Given their previous association during the rape investigation, which was noted in the trial record, could the discrepancy have pointed to something other than an error of memory?

The defense’s witnesses did little to help Hunter’s case. A man named Earl Phillips was called to testify that Hunter had been at his house watching his band practice at the time of the murder. But when he was asked about a specific date from more than a year prior, Phillips fumbled under oath: He managed to convey only that Hunter was often at his house. Stewart Mitchell, the man police claimed had tipped them off to Hunter’s possession of stolen goods, was supposed to undermine the prosecution by stating that it had offered him a deal on a charge he was facing if he testified against Hunter. On the stand, Mitchell couldn’t recall the name of the person who’d supposedly made the offer. He said he knew nothing about the murder.

The whole trial took place in a single morning. For Judge Frank Shea, the pace was a source of pride—indeed, it was the essential feature of his judicial identity. Shea had been on the bench for 25 years, and his breakneck docket had earned him a statewide reputation. In 1975, he personally presided over almost a third as many trials (113) as the rest of the judges in Louisiana’s 63 parishes combined (377). In 1983, a man named Keith Messiah was given the death penalty after a trial in Shea’s court that lasted one day, including jury selection and sentencing. (After a lengthy appeals process, Messiah’s sentence was reduced to life in prison.) In 1984, Shea set what he insisted was a world record, holding six felony trials in a single day. When asked about the feat by a reporter, Shea responded, “We have a legal phrase, res ipsa loquitur. It means, ‘The thing speaks for itself.’”⁴

[4] Calvin Duncan, George Toca, and Elvis Brooks were among the people sentenced to life without parole in Shea’s court. The Innocence Project New Orleans later brought claims challenging their guilt; the men took plea deals and were released from prison.

Admirers said that Shea’s style was efficient—the state House of Representatives even passed a resolution commending him for “conducting speedy criminal trials.” But detractors, including Shea’s 1972 election opponent Salvatore Panzeca, called it disgraceful. “When a judge boasts that he tries cases in record time, his allegiance is not to justice, but to the clock,” Panzeca told the Times-Picayune. “When the judge pressures the attorneys of poor and uneducated defendants to plead their clients guilty, so as to keep his docket clear and save himself the trouble of having to hear their cases, he assaults the Bill of Rights and profanes our heritage of law.” After polling well behind Shea in the primary, Panzeca dropped out of the race.

The speed at which cases moved through Shea’s courtroom was a product of his impatience and temperament. He chain-smoked cigarettes on the bench; news reports described him as presiding while engulfed in a cloud. He was known to berate lawyers and clerks who didn’t move fast enough. Late in his career, which lasted until 1997, Shea pulled a gun on a shackled defendant in his courtroom. He later told a reporter that there’d been nothing to worry about, because he was a terrible shot and “couldn’t hit a bull in the ass with a bass-fiddle.” (Shea died in 1998.⁵)

[5] Shea was preceded in death by members of his immediate family. In 1981, his 11-year-old son drowned in a canal, and his body washed into Lake Pontchartrain. Six years later, Shea’s house caught fire. He was rescued; his wife and daughter died. The incident report lists the cause of the fire as “careless smoking.”

At Hunter’s trial, Shea was true to form. As a news article noted, Hunter’s testimony on his own behalf lasted “at most ten minutes.” When the prosecution concluded its cross-examination, Hunter had more he wanted to say in his defense. He wished to make clear that police had first come to his home in search of stolen property, not on suspicion of murder.

“Shut up,” Shea said. “You already testified. Now be quiet.” He ordered Hunter removed from the stand.

“Why y’all misleading these people?” were the last words Hunter was able to offer before stepping down.

The jury deliberated over a lunch break. When they came back, they found Hunter guilty. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole. An account of the trial, published in the next day’s paper, told the streamlined story that Hunter had endeavored to correct—that Causey had identified Hunter as the killer, which led the police to search Hunter’s home, where they “found his second problem, the gun.”

It wasn’t the last time Hunter would face Shea. Three years later, in September 1991, he sat on the witness stand again, arguing that he’d received ineffective assistance of counsel from Dolan. It was the latest phase of an appeals process that had ricocheted around the Louisiana courts until it landed on Shea’s docket. Shea made it clear he had no interest in retrying the case. “I don’t plan on spending the day with you,” Shea said to Hunter’s new public defender.

Shea wouldn’t allow Hunter to state for the record when he’d learned which gun was used in the murder. “Your honor,” Hunter implored, “instead of cutting me off, let me talk, please. This is my life.” Shea told him that he understood, then threatened to hold Hunter in contempt of court. “You are a defendant,” Shea said. “You don’t tell me what to do.”

Shea ruled that there was no evidence that Hunter had received ineffective counsel. Hunter appealed all the way to the Louisiana Supreme Court, which denied his claim. He remained locked up at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola—the name of the slave plantation that once occupied the land where the prison sits.

The land where the Louisiana State Penitentiary sits was once a slave plantation called Angola.

6. The Inmate

The first time he was ever arrested, Hunter was not yet a teenager. He lived in the Ninth Ward, where his three elder brothers were in charge of minding him while their mother worked. “I guess you could say they did a poor job,” he once wrote in a letter to a lawyer. Hunter got in trouble with his friends, knocking over trash cans, stealing bikes and chickens, and breaking into wharf buildings to drive the lift machines. One day, the kids tipped a machine onto some train tracks. Hunter, still in elementary school, was arrested for criminal trespassing.

A few years later, when Hunter was 13, he and two friends were implicated in a purse snatching gone wrong. When the victim, a 75-year-old woman, wouldn’t give up her belongings, an assailant hit her on the head with a pistol; three weeks later, she died from her injuries. Hunter and his friends said that they were innocent, that they hadn’t even been at the scene of the crime. While awaiting trial, Hunter stayed at a juvenile detention facility known as the Youth Study Center. In court, his teacher testified that he’d been in class at the time of the killing, and produced schoolwork to prove it. The judge dismissed Hunter’s case. His two friends, however, were tried as adults. One pled guilty to manslaughter. Another was tried, convicted, and sent to prison for life without parole at the age of 17. Hunter wouldn’t see him again until he, too, was sent to Angola.⁶

[6] The friend, Barry Williams, was released on parole in 2018, after the Supreme Court declared juvenile life without parole unconstitutional.

Hunter would later trace his path into serious criminal behavior back to the boys he met at the Youth Study Center, who in his words made him “look like an angel.” After he got out, he and a friend began stealing cars from parking lots downtown by taking keys out of the booth when the parking attendant was seeing to another car. It was easy. The first vehicle they stole, in 1979, was a Ford Maverick. Hunter was 16. The boys took the cars for joyrides. They were broke, so they stole gas, too. Eventually, they traded one of the cars for a gun. It didn’t have any bullets, but they used it for holdups anyway.

Hunter’s career jacking cars and robbing people ended with a high-speed chase and his arrest. Not yet 18, he was sentenced to spend the rest of his youth in a juvenile facility, this one in Monroe, Louisiana. He got his GED and learned how to weld. He also took piano lessons. He was released at 20 and held a few odd jobs, including a stint at a factory making fish tanks. He enrolled in classes at Southern University at New Orleans. Still, he continued to have run-ins with the law. In 1985, he was charged with felony theft for using a stolen credit card to buy clothes; he spent nine months in Orleans Parish Prison.

Not long after he got out, Hunter entered the drug trade. He started out small, a few grams here and there. Then he began dealing more and enlisting other people to help him sell it. Business stopped cold when Hunter, by then in his late twenties, found himself facing the second murder charge of his life—the one that didn’t go away, no matter how hard he tried to make it. “I went on a mission to learn as much law as possible to prove my innocence,” Hunter told me in a letter.

His approach reinforced a certain irony: For people who claim to be wrongfully implicated in a crime, the same set of rules, language, and logic that they believe conspired to put them behind bars is the only thing that can get them out. At Orleans Parish Prison, back when Hunter was first awaiting trial, a fellow prisoner known as Bouncer kept a stack of attorney-filed pretrial motions that he’d collected from other prisoners. Hunter would copy them, substituting information about his own case where necessary, and then file his versions with the court. He also requested case law to read, but he didn’t understand any of it. “The courts’ legal jargon was foreign to me. I read and read and did not understand a damn thing,” he said.

He learned, though. By the time he got to Angola, Hunter had a good handle on criminal law. He even filed his own supplemental appellate brief on direct appeal, pointing out discrepancies between the trial transcript and the original police report, and arguing that he’d received poor counsel. (This brief led to the unsuccessful 1991 hearing before Judge Shea.) At Angola, Hunter took paralegal classes through Northwestern Missouri College. He had to stop when Congress repealed Pell Grants for prisoners in 1994. Undeterred, Hunter kept looking for any angle that might prove he’d been unjustly convicted. He filed public-records requests and wrote letters to anyone who could possibly shed light on his case.

Erin Hunter as a young man. (Courtesy: Hunter family)

One person Hunter wrote to was a lawyer named Laurie White. White specialized in post-conviction work and had become an outspoken critic of longtime New Orleans district attorney Harry Connick. She voiced support for civil rights lawsuits filed by prisoners against the DA’s office and criticized Connick for his unwillingness to test DNA evidence in old cases. By 1997, she’d secured new trials for six men convicted of murder in cases where prosecutors withheld exculpatory evidence. White also taught legal classes at Angola. Hunter, though, wrote White a letter in 1999 for a different reason: Before becoming a defense attorney, White had been an assistant district attorney in Connick’s office. She was one of the prosecutors on the team that convicted Hunter.

White wrote back warmly. “I thought someday I would run into persons that I had prosecuted,” she told Hunter. “I am glad to see you are doing well for yourself as an inmate counsel.” White said that she’d been under the impression that Hunter’s conviction had already been reversed due to Dolan’s poor representation. She recalled that Causey had been an unreliable witness. “She disappeared several days before your trial and our investigator located her in the wee morning hours,” White wrote. She offered to help Hunter if he was continuing his legal battle. “I would be happy to assist you with an affidavit that it was my belief that [Causey] had been a drug user, or could be a drug user, as she was an extremely unreliable ‘street person’ type who insisted that her life was in danger,” White wrote. (White declined to be interviewed on the record for this story but responded to some fact-checking queries.)

Hunter’s next move was a federal appeal, during which he enlisted the help of Chris Aberle, the first and only private attorney to take his case. In 2002, a federal court denied Hunter’s petition. The ruling stated that Hunter had failed to show that the state courts were unreasonable in their rejection of his previous claims. When I spoke to Aberle, he said that he barely remembered Hunter’s case—it was more than 15 years in the past. A letter that Aberle wrote in the immediate aftermath of the federal court’s decision suggested that, back then at least, he felt strongly about his client’s situation. “I have fought and am still fighting for a number of persons, who, like you, were tried unfairly,” Aberle told Hunter. “I never know if they are truly guilty or innocent but I do know that the system failed them or outright cheated them. What is particularly distressing in your case, however, is that it is one of the very few where I truly think that not only were you tried unfairly, but that in all probability, you are innocent of the crime.”

Hunter had been in prison for almost 15 years by that point; he was running out of options. Aberle told Hunter that he would refer the case to the Innocence Project New Orleans (IPNO). He wasn’t the only person to do so.

Investigators spoke to people in New Orleans East who suggested that Causey was a confidential informant for the police.

7. The Inquiry

“Would you please consider handling the case of Erin Hunter?” So began a March 2002 email from Laurie White to Emily Bolton, then the director of IPNO. White said that she didn’t have any direct evidence of Hunter’s innocence, but she recalled that Causey was of “dubious character” and that Hunter’s attorney was “a walk-over, to say the least.”

“I would be very interested to help free a person that was wrongfully convicted,” White wrote, “especially if I was the convictor!” She also sent a letter to Hunter informing him of her referral. “I will, as I told you before, be as honest and forthright in any testimony that is required in your case,” White said. “I am not interested in you remaining in jail if you are in fact innocent and the prosecution was improper.”

IPNO decided to look into the case, but it was just one of many in a city swimming in dubious legal outcomes. When Tom Lowenstein joined IPNO in the fall of 2008, Hunter’s file was still in the queue of cases the organization had deemed worthy of investigation but didn’t yet have the resources to take on. IPNO volunteers at a local synagogue had begun filing records requests, but there was no legal team working Hunter’s case.

Eventually, Lowenstein was assigned to it, along with another new face at IPNO, attorney Paul Killebrew. They began their investigation by visiting the crime scene with a map that Hoyt, the initial homicide detective, had drawn. The small home on Wilson Avenue that Jones and Causey had once shared was boarded up and in disrepair, the lot where it sat overgrown. (The house has since been razed.) The attorneys paced off distances noted in the police report. “We re-created it as much as we could from the ground up,” Lowenstein said.

Soon, though, it became clear that Hunter’s best innocence claim didn’t hinge on the details of the crime scene—the crux was what might have transpired between Davis and Causey. Aberle had suggested as much in his federal appellate brief. Causey’s late identification of Hunter, on the same day he happened to be arrested on a stolen-goods charge, seemed like too much of a coincidence. Aberle proposed instead that Davis had learned that the murder weapon was discovered at Hunter’s house, then reached out to Causey based on her eyewitness statement and the two women’s prior contact. “Ms. Causey revealed that she knew of Mr. Hunter, as he used to date her sister,” Aberle wrote. “Detective Davis was, at that point, sure that she has solved the murder, notwithstanding Ms. Causey’s previous story about ‘Willie.’” Davis, Aberle continued, “brought pressure to bear on Ms. Causey to claim, if not believe,” that she’d seen Hunter at the crime scene. “Detective Davis reasoned, perhaps, that even if she were wrong about Mr. Hunter, he was a criminal regardless.”

Aberle’s argument echoed a statement written by prosecutor Jack Peebles during Hunter’s first appeal: In a brief, Peebles argued that, “if there was an iota of evidence in the record before this court that the police had found and identified the murder weapon in this case and then used pressure on Vanessa Causey to identify the defendant as the perpetrator, a new trial should be granted.” Peebles had believed there was no such iota. For Aberle, suggesting that there could be was a legal exercise: He was presenting what he believed to be a plausible theory of the case, one that a competent attorney would have pursued but Dolan had not. “The balance of the evidence, including the police reports, other documentary evidence, and the testimony of uncalled witnesses, was kept from the jury through gross incompetence of appointed trial counsel,” Aberle wrote. (Dolan passed away in 2003.)

When he was working the case in the early aughts, Aberle didn’t have concrete evidence of any wrongdoing by Causey or Davis. That was now up to Lowenstein and Killebrew to find. Immediately, there was an obstacle. In the decade after Hunter’s conviction, Causey herself had been charged with a series of crimes, including drug possession, prostitution, kidnapping, and aggravated battery. She landed behind bars, and in 2002, she died from an illness.

Lowenstein and Killebrew pieced together what they could about Causey, talking to her family, friends, and acquaintances. Some believed that Causey was right about Hunter’s guilt. The IPNO investigators talked to Greggie Jones’s brother, who said that Hunter was lying when he said under oath that he’d never met Jones—the pair hung out frequently, he said, and he’d even seen Hunter at his brother’s house. Meanwhile, Causey’s brother claimed that he’d been with her when the shooting happened, as she’d testified at trial but not initially told law enforcement. He’d never been interviewed by police or come forward with information of his own volition. He “waffled a bit,” the IPNO investigators reported, when asked if he’d actually seen Hunter at the shooting. They later concluded in a report that he “may have been at the murder scene, but his recollection has been tainted by what his sister later testified to in court.”

A few sources who spoke to IPNO had a different take, reporting that Causey was a police informant. The exact nature of her purported role was murky. “She sent so many people to jail, it’s pathetic,” one IPNO source, who described Causey as being like a little sister, told me. Another source said that he’d seen Causey get picked up in a car by none other than Jacklean Davis. The women would drive around the neighborhood for a while, then Davis would drop Causey off.

When Dolan had asked Davis at trial about her prior relationship with Causey, the detective had responded that they knew each other during “another investigation.” Dolan didn’t push the matter further. Davis was asked about Causey again during Hunter’s 1991 appeal. The defense asked if she’d had “any dealings” with Causey other than the rape case in which Causey was a victim and the investigation of Jones’s murder. “No, sir,” Davis said.

Davis told IPNO, and later confirmed to me, that Causey was at one point her confidential informant, but she was adamant that their working relationship didn’t develop until after Hunter’s trial. Only during the fact-checking phase of this story did she acknowledge that Causey had been an informant on a case prior to Jones’s murder.

Davis’s star had plummeted in the years between Hunter’s conviction and the IPNO investigation. Once named officer of the year by the New Orleans Black Organization of Police, and profiled in national magazines under headlines like “From Outcast to Supercop” (Reader’s Digest), Davis was accused of perjury in 1994. She allegedly provided conflicting accounts of her surveillance of a fellow officer under the auspices of NOPD’s internal affairs division. Criminal charges were dropped, but Davis was suspended and ultimately kicked out of internal affairs. She spent several years shuttling between police forces in various districts. She often worked night shifts and supplemented her income with a security detail at Walmart.

In 2002, Davis and a fellow officer were convicted of shaking down show promoters while working security at a party affiliated with Essence Fest, a music event held annually in New Orleans. Davis claimed that the allegations were motivated by NOPD politics. At trial, her lawyer didn’t put her on the stand to testify; he didn’t want her to have to address the old perjury charge. Davis was found guilty of extortion and sentenced to 30 months in federal prison. At the time, she told a reporter that she was frustrated that law enforcement didn’t seem to want to hear her side of the story. “My secret as an interrogator was this: I listened to people,” she said. “I wanted to hear other people’s versions of what happened.”

As it happened, Laurie White was openly sympathetic to Davis’s situation at NOPD. “She is a prime example of discrimination on the police force,” White told a reporter in 2003, following Davis’s conviction. “But with everything that happened to her, she kept silent and handled herself with a lot of class.” After Davis was released from prison in 2004, White gave her a job as a receptionist in her law office. Davis remained there until White closed her practice to become a judge. “I know a lot of prominent people,” Davis told me. “Just because I went to prison, that don’t mean anything. People know me, my integrity.”

IPNO obtained Davis’s file as a homicide detective, and it was there that Lowenstein and Killebrew found what they believed was a break: a computer printout of Hunter’s arrest record dated July 14, 1987. That was the day the ballistics examiner completed the analysis linking the Smith & Wesson .38 to Jones’s murder. What Lowenstein and Killebrew didn’t find in Davis’s file was evidence of a printout from July 9, the day that she’d always claimed she first called Causey, learned that Causey had seen Hunter at the scene, searched his name in the NOPD database, and come upon the record of his arrest that morning. Also missing from the file was any record of that conversation with Causey. Was it possible that Davis was mistaken or had lied about the timeline of what she knew and how she knew it?

Another perplexing part of the file was a computer printout of the police report about the burglary at Susan Wolfe’s home. It was dated May 26, 1987, ostensibly the date Davis pulled it from the NOPD’s computer system. What cause might she have had to print the report out a month after Jones’s murder and several weeks before taking over the case? The IPNO investigators also had questions about the case’s ballistics report. How exactly the match between Wolfe’s gun and the bullets in Jones’s body came to be made wasn’t clear. As a matter of course, the NOPD ballistics team would have compared bullets from unsolved homicides with guns seized by officers, but in this instance the turnaround was unusually fast—less than a week. The report states only that “specimen 2 were fired by specimen 1.” It does not indicate whether or not the lab tested the other guns recovered from Hunter’s home, including a second .38, listed as being among his lawful property.

Davis wrote in her case report that the two NOPD detectives who seized the weapons during Hunter’s first arrest requested that all the guns be tested. She later testified that she was the one who made the ask of the ballistics division, and that she specifically requested testing on Wolfe’s .38. “Given what we know now about the tendency of forensic examiners to reach the results desired by the requesting officers or prosecutors, it’s totally plausible that the ballistics ‘match’ in this case is not a match at all,” Killebrew wrote in an email during IPNO’s consideration of Hunter’s case. “One thing we’ve discussed doing early in the litigation of this case is to request to have the gun and bullets re-examined.”

Davis has always maintained that she performed her job to the letter of the law. She repeated this to me: Any timeline discrepancy, she argued, would have been caught by the DA’s office, and if Causey gave false testimony, it would have been exposed in the appeals process. In their report, however, the IPNO investigators claimed that Davis had “withheld … information from prosecutors and lied about the sequence of events in her own police reports and at trial.” All of which, they wrote, “deeply undermines the State’s case.”

8. The Breakdown

In a perverse way, Hunter’s industriousness as a self-educated legal expert may have been his undoing. For more than a decade after his conviction, he’d done everything by himself, exhausting the avenues available at the state level for legal relief. He’d enlisted Aberle only at the end of the road, hoping to have a better shot on federal appeal.⁷ The problem, Killebrew told me, was that courts tend to look at new evidence in isolation, often ignoring its implications with regard to previously available evidence. “It was going to be hard to get the court to see the whole picture,” Killebrew said. Moreover, if a person files a habeas petition—a claim of unjust imprisonment—in federal court and it fails, the bar for the government to consider a second petition is much higher. “This is another way in which post-conviction law is, in my mind, very, very cruel,” Killebrew said.

[7] It can be difficult for prisoners filing their own petitions to convince the courts to take them seriously. In 2008, a court administrator in the New Orleans suburb of Gretna revealed in a suicide note that he was responsible for unilaterally denying petitions filed by prisoners without attorneys. Writs in lower courts are supposed to be reviewed by a three-judge panel; the appeals court had violated that rule in more than 2,500 cases, each of which added a $300 filing fee to its coffers.

IPNO takes a deliberate and cautious approach to its work. Resources are limited, and the organization litigates the cases it is most likely to win. With Hunter, there were additional considerations: For instance, were his case to go to court, it would be heard by Judge Julian Parker, whose assessment of innocence appeals was notoriously tough. In 2009, Lowenstein and Killebrew brought what they’d found to the rest of IPNO and a few outside attorneys. “The question was, OK, Tom and I have a fervent belief about what this means,” Killebrew said of their findings. “How does this play to others?”

The answer: Not great. There were a few sticking points. Even if Davis had lied or made errors in reporting the timeline of her investigation, Causey’s eyewitness statement and the gun found in Hunter’s apartment still looked bad. Some of the reviewers they presented evidence to, Killebrew said, saw “a different pathway” to the same outcome. With Causey gone, interrogating her statements and testimony was impossible. Another issue was that, while the July 14 printout proved that Davis had looked up Hunter’s record on that day, it didn’t prove that she hadn’t looked it up previously. Maybe she’d done so on July 9 but misplaced the document or thrown it away. “It was the difficulty of proving a negative,” said Richard Davis, IPNO’s legal director, who oversaw the investigation of Hunter’s case.

It was also difficult to pursue an alternative theory of Jones’s murder. Aberle had suggested that Willie Harris was the real culprit—that he got into a drug-related dispute with Jones, killed him, and then sold the gun to Hunter. With Harris dead, however, that avenue of inquiry was extremely narrow. The IPNO investigators developed another theory, based on interviews with a number of people who were close with Jones. Those sources said that Jones had ripped off some Cuban drug dealers who killed him—or had him killed—as retaliation. A few people even suggested that Causey had set Jones up. There were several variations of this story, however, and no one named a potential shooter.

Investigators decided that the one thing that might give Hunter’s case a real chance was an affidavit from Laurie White. It would need to say that, had she known back in 1988 what IPNO knew now, White would not have prosecuted the case. White, by that time, had gained an even more prominent position in New Orleans’s criminal-justice apparatus: In 2007, she’d been elected as a criminal district-court judge. Lowenstein called an affidavit from someone of that stature the “holy grail of innocence work.”

Killebrew and IPNO’s director went one day to meet with White at the courthouse. Their intention was to gauge White’s response to their findings before asking for her support. They waited in White’s courtroom as she worked through her docket; during a break in the proceedings, she invited them back to her chambers. They presented her with the evidence suggesting that Davis may have pressured a witness in order to clear a case. As Killebrew remembered the encounter, White was unimpressed. (White, for her part, said during fact-checking that she didn’t remember this meeting.) Killebrew said her concerns echoed those already raised at IPNO: There was still an eyewitness, and there was still a murder weapon. “I didn’t view it that way,” Killebrew told me, “but I can’t say that she was being unreasonable.”

Hunter spent three decades behind bars at Angola.

9. The Counsel

Lowenstein and Killebrew broke the news to Hunter that IPNO wouldn’t be filing a post-conviction petition on his behalf. Hunter had always been stoic about his case’s many turns; the same was true with the final one. Hunter took it “heartbreakingly in stride,” Killebrew remembered. Lowenstein wasn’t surprised. “Erin at that point had won three—and I think he ended up winning four—cases in federal court,” he said. “Erin understood the law way better than I did. He was the one who would talk legal theory to me.”

Indeed, by 2009, Hunter’s dealings with the legal system extended well beyond his own case. At Angola, he’d risen from cleaning the prison’s law library to serving as an inmate counsel, responsible for representing other prisoners in disciplinary proceedings and helping them with legal appeals and petitions. The prison’s librarian, who was also the coordinator of the inmate counsel program, was a man named Norris Henderson. He recalled prisoners seeking Hunter out by name and reputation. “Everyone trusted him with their litigation,” Henderson told me. “He had not only the commitment but the expertise to go along with it. I watched his complete metamorphosis from that caterpillar to the butterfly.”

Hunter with Derek Temple. (Courtesy: Derek Temple)

Lowenstein was right: Hunter had helped secure the release of four men from Angola. One of them was Derek Temple, convicted of possession with intent to distribute cocaine, who because he had a prior record was sentenced to life in prison without parole. An appeal that Hunter helped prepare on Temple’s behalf convinced the Louisiana Supreme Court that the drugs found during the arrest were obtained without probable cause, in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Temple was released in 2003, having served only six years after being told that he would die behind bars. When I met him more than 15 years later, Temple was on a break from working on an offshore oil rig. “He gave me the direction to get my freedom to be sitting here in front of you,” Temple said of Hunter. “It means a lot. It’s hard to explain it to you, you can use a lot of words, but you have to be in my body. It’s a remarkable feeling.”

For his part, Hunter reflected on his legal work as if it were a spiritual calling. “Each milestone I reached it became less about me and more about humanity,” he wrote to me in a letter. “I befriended other inmates who needed help and weren’t as fortunate as I was to learn the law. My plight became much bigger than I had anticipated.”

Hunter, though, never gave up on his own case. There was always a chance something could change—that new evidence would crop up or that a sympathetic district attorney might agree to discuss a post-conviction plea deal.⁸ In 2018, after more than 30 years behind bars, Hunter gathered dozens of letters from inmates and guards testifying to his character and advocating his release. The letters spoke to his intelligence, humility, and dedication to helping other inmates. In a place unsuited to easy favor, Hunter had earned people’s admiration.

[8] In 2014, IPNO and the DA’s office announced the Conviction Integrity and Accuracy Project, intended to identify unjust trial outcomes and rectify them. IPNO told me that Hunter’s case was referred to the joint project, which ended just one year after its launch. IPNO claimed that the DA’s office didn’t put forward the resources it promised. The DA’s office said the project was axed as part of budget cuts.

“It is my opinion that if any offender deserves another chance to be freed, it is Mr. Hunter,” wrote prison employee Linden Franklin. Antonio Whitaker, supervisor of the cell blocks known as Camp D, said that Hunter “exemplified the best of character—humbleness and trustworthiness.” Fellow inmate Ricky Javis said, “If there was a buddy system, where my chances for parole would be based upon the success of the person I elect to go home on parole, I would pick Erin.” Rickey Valentine, another prisoner, happened to be Greggie Jones’s cousin. “Whatever may or may not have happened, I don’t believe you could have hurt him,” Valentine wrote. “Even when I reveal to you who I was, you never once change from doing whatever you can for me and others. I am writing you to say thank you, thank you, thank you.”

Then there was Larry McClinton, who’d been locked up almost as long as Hunter had. “He was always whispered as one of those brothers that did not commit the crime that he was convicted of,” McClinton wrote. “I can remember many times pondering on such men. I committed my crime and it is often arduous at times coping with being away from friends and family. So I can only imagine what the innocent go through. And yet, I’ve never witnessed Hunter (as he is called) upset or angry.” McClinton concluded, in a remarkable sentiment, “He is a man that epitomizes integrity and I would willingly advocate for his freedom before my very own.”

10. The Balance

Freedom never came for Erin Hunter. On , 2019, as this story was being written, he died at Angola. He was 56 years old. The cause of death, according to friends and family, was a heart attack. An autopsy is pending.

Norris Henderson, who is now out of prison, saw Hunter a few weeks before he died. He recalled that his friend had a new project: identifying prisoners convicted in non-unanimous jury decisions. Until a ballot measure did away with it in 2018, Louisiana was one of the only states in the nation with a constitutional provision that allowed people to be found guilty by a 10-2 jury vote. The repeal did not apply retroactively, but in the fall of 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court was scheduled to hear oral arguments in a case that could change that. In anticipation of a favorable decision, Hunter was trying to determine who at Angola might benefit. (As of this writing, the Supreme Court had yet to rule on the case.)

The non-unanimous jury provision has a deeply racist history. Enacted in the late 1800s, it was intended to produce a large number of guilty verdicts in order to bolster the convict-leasing system, which extended the profits of slavery to white landowners well after the Civil War. Hunter’s case was also tied to the racial prejudices that run through Louisiana’s legal foundations. This was true regardless of his guilt or innocence, which given his untimely death seems likely to remain an open question forever.

To read the transcript of Hunter’s trial, which runs all of 81 pages and can be digested in half an hour, is to encounter a disregard for human dignity instrumental in producing the most sprawling system of incarceration in the world. Killebrew called the circumstances of Hunter’s case a “tragedy with many authors.”

“There was a failing public defenders’ system, there was a DA’s office that was not operating according to professional norms, there were state laws that were particularly cruel, there were judges who sentenced everyone to the maximum amount they could,” Killebrew said. “There was just a whole combination of factors that led to, I have no doubt, thousands and thousands of people not being served with justice.” Lowenstein put it more succinctly: “Erin Hunter got caught up in a perfect storm of New Orleans bullshit.”

The repeal of the non-unanimous jury law is part of a broader reckoning over criminal justice in Louisiana. The vast majority of reforms, however, are incomplete, and their lasting power is yet to be determined. They are also primarily forward-looking, doing little to ameliorate harm already caused or to grapple with its moral weight. “What about everyone who experienced the growth of mass incarceration, who were the victims of it?” Killebrew asked. “They deserve justice, too. Policymakers don’t have a lot of stomach for going back and fixing those types of problems.”

Lawmakers aren’t the only ones who are reticent to look back. For some people, it is too painful or risky to be asked to extend trust to a system that has ignored or actively betrayed them time and again. When IPNO interviewed Greggie Jones’s brother, he said, “Nobody ever want to talk to us back then. Now they want to have an investigation?” When I asked one source why people were hesitant to talk about the case, he told me, “A lot of people figure, man, I stay away from that. Let old wounds just die out, and wither in the wind, and stay in the wind.”

Hunter was still alive when I first interviewed Jacklean Davis. She was living in New Orleans East, the neighborhood where Jones was killed. We sat on her couch for several hours. She smoked Hat’s Off cigars and recalled growing up with Tyler Perry; she claimed that he based his Madea character on her great-aunt. She talked about the racism she encountered at the NOPD, the political forces that conspired to send her to prison, and the incompetence of her defense attorney. Davis stressed her integrity, her commitment to truth and justice, her inability to live with a guilty conscience. She was adamant that she did nothing wrong in Hunter’s case.

Sometimes, though, there was a note of dissonance in her certitude that the system was right about his guilt and wrong about hers. At one point, she said it meant something that 12 individuals had come to the conclusion that Hunter was guilty. Then, after a pause, she added that juries can be wrong, of course. She, too, had a jury trial.

I was the person who informed Davis that Hunter had died at Angola. I did it in a phone call. Soon after we hung up, Davis called back, sobbing. “It really hit home how life is not perfect. We all make mistakes. To atone for these mistakes, most of us live and get the opportunity to do it, some don’t,” she said. “I can have respect for him. That he fought the good fight. He believed—and I cannot disregard his belief—that he was innocent, and he should not have served the time. And he went to his grave doing this.”

Then, before we ended the conversation, she repeated something that she’d told me before. “I am not hostage to my past,” Davis said. “I’m gonna leave that with you.”

The Social Register was a who’s who of America’s rich and powerful—the heirs of robber barons, scions of political dynasties, and descendants of Mayflower passengers. It was also the perfect hit list for the country’s hardest-working art thief.By Jack Rodolico

The Atavist Magazine, No. 168

While stealing art is a challenge, selling it—and making a profit—is much, much harder.

Blue Book members were the richest of the rich, the oldest of old money. Their homes were almost guaranteed to be chock-full of high-value loot.

amazingly, they appeared to commit yet another burglary right under the FBI’s nose.

Over time and dozens if not hundreds of robberies, Flynn came to recognize by sight the kinds of paintings His Fence was looking for.

Finding him wasn’t easy. All I had to go on was the Boston equivalent of John Smith—indeed, shortly after Ray Flynn’s arrest in 1982, voters in the city elected a mayor by the same name.

“Maybe I was a little adventurous. Maybe it was challenging to some degree.”

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The TalentedMr. Bruseaux

The Atavist Magazine, No. 165

The Chicago Defender, the city’s leading Black newspaper, boasted that Keystone was the first detective agency to be run by “our group.”

The investigators working for Bruseaux faced danger, too—one of his deputies was stabbed in the back on his way home from work, leaving him bleeding but alive.

Emerging from nowhere, Bruseaux had fashioned himself into a Gatsby of Chicago’s ascendant Black bourgeoisie.

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A former FBI agent traveled to Louisiana to ask a hired killer about a murder that haunted him. Then they started talking about a different case altogether.By David Howard

The Atavist Magazine, No. 164

1

“I’ve been a criminal all my life,” he says, sounding almost surprised, as if the reality of it only now dawned on him. “I don’t know why. It just happened, you know?”

In fact, the bureau made Thompson so uncomfortable that he hatched a plan to shoot Fuller and a few other agents.

A former Shreveport cop said that D’Artois asked him to “take care of Jim Leslie” in exchange for money.

2

Curtis saw a white 1976 Oldsmobile Cutlass pull onto the property: Jim Leslie’s car. Moments later he heard the blast.

Murdering someone with a shotgun in the middle of a major city without being spotted seemed well beyond the Dixie Mafia’s skill set.

3

Scott almost seems impressed by the planning that went into the crime. “That has a lot of Larry Thompson in it right there,” he says.

“Imagine that. Nobody’s ever seen him. Don’t know what he looks like, don’t know what he sounds like. And nobody’s ever met him.”

Fuller and I sit, thunderstruck. This, it occurs to me, is literally how you get away with murder.

EPILOGUE

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The police couldn’t figure out how the perpetrator ripped off two banks at the same time. Until they discovered there wasn’t just one robber but a pair of them: identical twin brothers.

The Atavist Magazine, No. 158

Kay’s sudden death brought the twins closer for a while. “It sort of cemented a bond with my brother [and me] against the world,” Doug said.

“You’re mainlining on adrenaline for six or eight hours,” Peter said. “That’s the most powerful drug in the world, adrenaline. And the cheapest.”

Doug feared that the heavy bag of cash tied around his neck might drown him, but managed to reach the bank and drag himself ashore.

“He was like a bomb just waiting to go off, and the trouble is, the bomb was going to destroy my life as well,” Doug said.

Doug drove to his brother’s farm, grabbed some guns from Peter’s shed, and loaded them into his car.

The final competition between the Morgan brothers is over their legacy, as each man seeks to prove who was the better thief and who became the better man.

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Two scammers, a web of betrayal, and Europe’s fraud of the century.By Jessica Camille Aguirre

The Atavist Magazine, No. 148

No one was ever sure who was working with whom, who might be screwing someone else over, or who had started the whole thing.

By the time Zaoui was 16, he had more cash than the value of his parents’ house, and he bought himself tickets to the French Open.

Daphne’s wife asked him to exude respectability when they were scheduled to meet with the school’s director. He arrived in a stretch Hummer.

Zaoui was pissed off. Why should he be held accountable for carbon crimes committed by a company that, in his view, had been stolen out from under him?

France, Zaoui told me, could never put together a clear picture of the scam he’d orchestrated after El Ghazouani’s betrayal, so prosecutors pinned Crépuscule on him.

Inside Daphne was panicking, but outwardly he gave the impression of an apoplectic rich guy refusing to be inconvenienced.

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How I (possibly) solved a cold case on my summer vacation.

The Atavist Magazine, No. 143

The Fudge King became one of the richest men for miles, with no qualms about flashing his wealth.

Harry was up against the upright citizens of America’s Greatest Family Resort who feared it would become another Atlantic City, that den of iniquity next door that was fast sinking into squalor and corruption.

Later, people would speculate that he was meeting Longo, that the latter had suggested a late-night rendezvous to lure the Fudge King to his death.

The trial had been a horrible show, nothing more, she told me. She was glad someone “on the outside” was finally looking into the story.

Because the windshield of their convertible was covered with dew, she couldn’t see what was going on, so she peeked over it. That’s when she witnessed Harry being assaulted.

Just as bootlegging arose from Prohibition, so did the extortion of gay men arise from laws criminalizing queer behavior.

Joyce was afraid because the case remained unsolved. She was worried that people might come for her.

After Joyce couldn’t identify Stanford’s client in court, the only thing Atlantic County had on Hughes was Anglemyer’s ring.

When other bars closed, Hughes and his friends proceeded to the Dunes. Inside was Harry Anglemyer, diamond ring blazing.

It’s a long shot, but maybe someday soon there will be a measure of justice for the Fudge King after all.

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The Atavist Magazine, No. 107

Part One

Blooming Prairie is a town of about 1,900 people who leave their front doors unlocked and know each other by their first names. It’s not a place steeped in intrigue. At least it wasn’t.

Part Two

That seemed to be the consensus around town: Lois was nice. She kept a clean house. She could be thoughtful, giving some friends who liked horses a set of tumblers frosted with equine figures.

Why would she kill her husband? That’s what everyone was talking about, from impromptu musings in the aisles of Vandal’s grocery store to Mr. Pfiefer’s forensics class across town at Blooming Prairie High School.

Dave occasionally went to Diamond Jo with Lois, but gambling wasn’t his thing. It was hers. And it had become a problem in the years leading up to Dave’s murder.

Part Three

Fetrow texted Hutchinson from the beach where her family was spreading her husband’s ashes, but got no reply. She didn’t think much of it at the time.

The police followed Hutchinson’s credit card trail, which led them to the surveillance videos from the Smokin’ Oyster, Wells Fargo, and Ocala Hilton. The same woman was in all the footage.

Someone—presumably the killer—had covered Hutchinson with a towel and stuffed more towels against the crack under the bathroom door. Before leaving, they turned the thermostat down to 61.

Part Four

“She looks like anybody’s mother or grandmother, yet she is a cold-blooded killer,” Carmine Marceno, Lee County’s undersheriff, said on television.

The people Lois befriended were like Pam Hutchinson: middle-aged women, single or traveling alone.

Part Five

It’s rare for women to kill at all, and when they do it’s often an exceptional event, the result of jealous rage or the need to protect themselves from an abuser.

“He was right in front of me,” Lois said, “and I looked at him in the heart and shot him.”

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The Con Continues

The Social Register was a who’s who of America’s rich and powerful—the heirs of robber barons, scions of political dynasties, and descendants of Mayflower passengers. It was also the perfect hit list for the country’s hardest-working art thief.

_{By Jack Rodolico}

^_The
Talented
_^Mr._Bruseaux

^The Chicago Defender, _{the city’s leading Black newspaper,} boasted that Keystone was the first detective agency to be run by “our group.”

^_The^{investigators working} for Bruseaux faced danger, too—one of his deputies was stabbed in the back _{on his way} home from work, leaving him _{bleeding but alive.}

Emerging from nowhere, ^{Bruseaux had fashioned himself into a}Gatsby _of Chicago’s ascendant Black bourgeoisie.

A former FBI agent traveled to Louisiana to ask a hired killer about a murder that haunted him. Then they started talking about a different case altogether.

_{By David Howard}

Two scammers, a web of betrayal, and Europe’s fraud of the century.

By Jessica Camille Aguirre