"You Guys Will Never Take Him Alive"

An explosion in the Midwest. Drug dealers getting ripped off in Florida. A complex meth lab. This crime spree is all linked by one man — a former cop who may have been the inspiration for the Hit Man book.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I want to give a quick warning before we get started.
This episode contains graphic descriptions of violence. Listener discretion is advised.
The whole neighborhood was definitely quiet and dark. This part
of our story takes place in the late eighties in

(00:20):
a sleepy bedroom community in the Midwest. It was kind
of eerie because typically in that neighborhood there's multiple street lights,
people's lights on under front porches and so on. There
was none of that. Steve Smith was a captain of
the local police department, and that night around two am,

(00:42):
he was awoken by a call from the communications center.
Something unusual had happened out on a subdivision and he
needed to get out there quick. He was met by
now retired Sergeant Rusty James. It was really eerie because
it knocked the street lights and everything out in the
air you and everywhere you walked it crunched, and there

(01:04):
was a strong smell of the dynamite and burnt flesh
in the air. Rusty and his partner Sarah Vogelsberg had
been the first who arrived that night. As I pulled up,
uh there was still smoke in the air, and a
neighbor came over and told me that that he had
found where it occurred. It was at the swimming pool

(01:26):
for a residential area there. In the early morning hours,
someone had parked their car in the lot next to
the swimming pool and proceeded to blow themselves up. He said, so, Officer,
I think that's a head laying over on the sidewalk
over there, but I'm not going to check. I said, no,
just going back, the crime scene was bizarre and gruesome.

(01:47):
I mean, it's hard enough to hear about something like this,
let alone experience it. We were trying to figure out
where this young man was because we knew where his
head was, but there wasn't anything else, and so we
started looking around fly slights, and there was one leg
from the knee down in a tree. We probably didn't
locate more than about forty maybe fifty pounds of identifiable

(02:12):
body of hearts because they were spread out throughout the
neighborhood and the woods close by. It was pretty horrific. Essentially,
from his knees to his neck, he was just gone.
When I first started reporting the story five years ago,

(02:33):
there really wasn't a lot of information about the book
hit Man, which just led to a lot of questions,
most of all, why would this author, a woman who
claims she never owned a gun, write a how to
guide on killing people and getting away with it. I
figured there had to be a story behind this book
of nonfiction. It turns out there is, and it's stranger

(02:55):
than fiction. This is the story of who I believe
to be the real Rex Ferrell, not the woman who
apparently wrote the book, but the man who may have
inspired it or been inspired by it, a man who
left an extraordinary amount of wreckage in his wake, like
an explosion on a quiet night in a small Midwestern town.

(03:26):
From my Heart Radio and Hit Home Media, I'm Jasmine
Morris and MS is hit Map. Just the whole circumstance

(04:02):
was one of those things that bothered me for some time.
And now you know, I've gotten past that. But it
involved psychologists and many trips to them to get past that.
Where I where I would even answer a call in
that area, I wouldn't even drive there. When I first
reached out to Stephen Rusty, they were both pretty surprised.
It been twenty five years since this explosion happened. But

(04:25):
as soon as I called it kind of all came
flooding back in and I remember almost like it had
just occurred within you know, the last day or two.
First responders see a lot of trauma, But when talking
to these guys, especially Rusty, I mean, this was on
a whole other level. I asked him if he was
sure he even wanted to go through with the interview.

(04:46):
You have to understand that incident was a little traumatic
on me. This was the days before you got post
traumatic stress assistance or anything. And with me and Sarah
and we showed weakness over this, at which we did,
I don't consider weakness, but everybod what else did really
just imagine that day. It's a tight knit community. So

(05:10):
when officers arrived, they recognized the car involved immediately they
knew who the victim was, a sixteen year old named Gregory.
His car the hood was blown off of it, and
as we walked around the area we ended up finding
some of his dismembered body parts. In the front seat

(05:30):
of his car was boom box with the cassette tape
in it that Gregory would have been listening to. He
was not a bad kid, but he was just somebody
that we had our eyes on. We had a couple
of runnings with him, and but again not a bad kid,
but he was very familiar to us, out and about
in the community at odd hours for somebody his age.

(05:52):
Steve and I, you know, we had had hard heart
talks with Greg, trying to get him straightened up, you know,
and we tried to do what we could for him
and tried to keep him out of trouble, you know,
protect him from himself. Stephen Rusty both said it sort
of looked like an accident. What he did was he
touched the blasting cap on that was attached to the dynamite.

(06:13):
He didn't quite understand how dynamite works. I don't believe
he touched the blasting cap on the battery terminals of
his car and that was it. So he drove the
car out with dynamite. But what was he hoping to
do with it? You know, we really don't know, and
the only two people that really know are no longer here,
you know. So who is the other person that would

(06:35):
be the mom's boyfriend. I don't know if that was
just his name or not, but I do remember the
name Rex. Rex. I mean, when I first heard that,
you can imagine my reaction. It's probably the same one
you're having. Ultimately, the teen's death was ruled a suicide,

(06:55):
but the investigation had just begun. Well, any time somebody
blows himself up dynamite, I would call it suspicious. Steve's
first order of business was to try to figure out
where this dynamite came from. So they reached out to
local businesses and other police departments to see if any
construction sites had been robbed. Eventually, in our investigation located

(07:15):
a empty box that had some identifiers on it the
Bureau of Alcohol to back when Farms did the follow
up on that to fare out where it came from.
Whatever they found, they linked it back to a construction
site burglary and I can't remember for sure where it was,
but it didn't help us and trying to identify anything
about the story with the way it occurred, why it occurred,

(07:37):
and so on. So detectives started asking around, interviewing people
who knew Greg. That's when they discovered the boyfriend, rex Read.
And we tried to identify rex Read, but we couldn't
find any driver's license or anything that would match up
with the description as far as height weight. Agents wanted

(08:00):
this guy. Um, I thought that was kind of odd. Plus,
if I remember correctly, Rex Reid was the name of
a character in a TV show, there's a renowned American
film critic an occasional actor named Rex Reid. It was
definitely not that Rex. Read. When you can't identify somebody
and they've got some TV name, it kind of raises

(08:21):
a flag. So detectives had a name or an alias
and a lot of questions. Steve says they were discouraged
from making contact with Greg's mother until after his funeral,
but Rex was there for all of it, even when
they notified Greg's mom about what had happened to her son.
I just remember that, you know, he was close to her,

(08:43):
being supportive in those things. He didn't want to talk
to anybody, but he made it look like he was
a stand up guy at the end and was there
for the mom at the funeral and all that, and
then at right after the funeral he was gone. But eventually,
after speaking with Greg's mom and some of his friend end,
they started to learn more. You know, Greg really didn't
have a father figure, and I think Rex came into

(09:05):
the picture, and you know, he was doing the karate stuff.
This guy Rex Reid, supposedly had a black belt in karate.
He and Rex had become close. He liked being around Rex,
and I'm sure it's because just his attitude and he
was a guy that didn't take any crap off anybody.

(09:25):
And I believe that Greg was looking for anything at
that time, and and Rex certainly fit the bill. And
the fact that this guy was a little bit different
than most you know, dad's or boyfriends or whatever. I
think was attractive to him. That this guy is, you know,
out there living on the edge, and you know, he's

(09:47):
really cool. And I think that Greg may have been
trying to emulate some of those things. Detectives determined the
dynamite that Greg had used that had been stolen from
a construction site had been taken by this boyfriend. Rex
were both Rex and Greg, but other than that, they
had no idea why the dynamite was stolen, let alone

(10:07):
who this guy really was. We never identified, like, you know,
he came here for a job, or he had family
in the area or anything like that. He seemed to
be a loner. People told us that they didn't know
who he really was anyway, but they just said that
Rex Reid was a bad guy. And that if anybody
tried some mess with them that you guys will never

(10:28):
take him alive, and you know, some officers might get
hurt in the process. Greg's friends literally warned them about
this guy from the very beginning. We were aggressive. If
somebody needed to be found, we were going to find him.
And Steve Smith is a great detective. He put a
lot of time in on this case because we wanted
that guy. He was obviously good at concealing his identity.

(10:50):
He literally just kind of fell off the face of
the earth. Eventually, the hunt for Rex led them to
a boarding house where he had been staying, about thirty
minutes away. We went to the house, made contact with
the lady there, told her what was going on. She

(11:11):
told me that Rex had disappeared the day before, she said,
and we asked, you know, if he was going to
be back she knew anything. She says, no, I think
he's gone. He cleared out his room and they asked
her for her permission to search his room. In the
trash can, we located what turned out to be a
driver's license had been cut up into fifty sixty little
tiny pieces that one of the detectives, Alan Harris, very

(11:34):
methodically putting back together, and then when he had it
back together, we could get a name and a date
of birth. He entered that in the computer and we
immediately got an n C I s hit n C
i C stands for the National Crime Information Center. They
learned this guy who went by the name Rex Reid,
had several warrants out of the state of Florida for

(11:55):
a variety of serious felony crimes. And in order to
protect the identity of the woman who I believe wrote Hitman,
we're going to obscure his real name at times and
call him by one of his alias is at others, Randall,
Wayne Phelps. We did the computer work in lo and
behold there he was the federal fugitive. Sometimes we'll hear

(12:17):
Stephen Rusty called this guy Rex because that's what they
initially knew him as, and it would be thirty two
years before they finally learned the whole truth about him.
All while reporting this story, I've talked to dozens of
people who know a thing or two about a thing
or two, but no one I've talked to knows the
entire story, including Steven Rusty. They've never even heard of

(12:39):
Hitman until I called, and then I told Rusty and
Steve the book was linked to a triple murder. Did
you know that? No, I did not know that until
you had mentioned it. And then I, yeah, gone online
and started looking at things and saw it, and I thought, well, no, great, big,
giant surprise that he would author a book and somebody
would think that would be the manual to go about

(13:01):
doing bad things to good people. Even now, I keep
finding new things. Just this week, as I was writing
this episode, I stumbled onto a passage and hit man
I didn't remember seeing before, probably because it wasn't relevant
until now. Rex Ferrell says, quote dynamite is nice and
can be picked up from many building sites or roads

(13:24):
under construction, but during storage the sticks have to be
turned over regularly to prevent settling of the nitro, and
the blasting caps necessary to make it go off are
so tricky that just by walking across the carpet enough
static electricity could be created to blow you away. As
I said in the beginning, unless you know what you

(13:44):
are doing, stay away from requests for this type of
extermination or the life you take, maybe your own. We'll
be right back. I truly thought I'd reach the end

(14:13):
of the Rex Feral story. I learned it was a
woman now a grandmother in her seventies who originally wrote
a book of fiction and wanted it pulled after it
was associated with the triple murder in Maryland. But then
late one night I decided to just plug a few
names and dates I had into some archives, and there
it was the story I knew had to be there.

(14:34):
I mean, I've had some similar moments of discovery while
making this podcast, but this was where I uncovered something huge,
A part of this story that literally no one, not
even Tiffany Horn, Bob Dean, Howard Siegel, I mean, no
one knew about. And the more I read, the more
I found about this guy, Randall Wayne Phelps, the more

(14:56):
I really began to understand the genesis of this book.
Remember what the author said to Pellatan editor Virginia Thomas.
By the way, in answer to your question and that
of Mr. Land, I get my materials from books, television, movies, newspapers,
police officers, my karate instructor. Back in the early eighties,

(15:22):
right around the time Hitman was written, Phelps was training
to be a police officer in Florida, I got his
personnel records and was able to learn a little bit
more about him. Apparently, he was five ten and weighed
one forty pounds. He was a U. S citizen and
was engaged to be married. I assumed to the woman
who I've been told authored hitman, because the emergency contact

(15:43):
listed on his new higher payroll notice and the first
name listed in his personal references that same name. Anyway,
according to his application for employment, he says he got
his g e d In attended community college in the seventies,
and in his employment record he says he was a
harpet installation mechanic and converted to a carpet salesman. He

(16:04):
goes on to say, during this time, I have also
taught classes in self defense and martial arts to perfect
and maintain my skills for personal enjoyment and for additional income. Again,
our Rex Ferrell actor, he cites his fifteen years of experience,
is a fifth degree black belt karate instructor as a

(16:27):
skill or qualification that would make him fit for the role.
I hold belts in five styles, last being my own style,
American Combat Karate, which is the layman's no nonsense approach
to self defense and street fighting. As grand master of
this style, I've taught many law enforcement officers. He goes
on to list several local police departments and a narcotic squad,

(16:50):
saying law enforcement agencies have always received training from me
and no charge as a public service. A public affairs
off sir from this department told us that back then
the field training would have involved riding in a patrol
car with an officer for a few days, and so
there's a couple evaluation reports in these files. At the
time his final evaluation report was issued, he was on

(17:14):
probation and had been training for five and a half months.
This report gives him an overall performance grade of not satisfactory,
especially in the categories of public relations, knowledge of work,
work judgments, jobs, skill level, quality of work accepts, direction,
physical limitations, job attitude, etcetera. The field training officer giving

(17:36):
this evaluation elaborates in the comments section by saying, quote
two lacks in confronting suspects, traffic violation and field safety.
Example standing in traffic while issuing traffic summons, hair length
needs some attention, tends to be cold and indifferent to
people in their problems, Cold and indifferent to coworkers, does

(17:59):
not mingle into group. This comment section wasn't big enough.
The evaluation continues onto an additional sheet of paper, going
on to say things like recruit is very slow in
writing reports and has many spelling mistakes. Recruit does assigned tasks,
but acts as if he's board stiff doing them, very

(18:21):
slow to accept changes and wants a detailed explanation for
the changes. Cannot control interviews with I rate persons. Intends
to become flustered and confused as to what actions to take.
Apparently Phelps was color blind and he kept reading maps wrong,
getting confused and ending up in the wrong area. The

(18:43):
evaluation says he has quote very poor driving habits and
kept nearly getting into accidents. And then there's this comment
quote has told this FTO he is only interested in
major cases, especially drug pushers, and he has his own
definite opinion as to how they should be treated. Remember

(19:06):
that this evaluation goes on and on. There are twenty
nine different comments. Again, retired Captain Steve Smith. He didn't
last very long. I think they got suspicious of his integrity.
Helps His resignation letter dated June one reads, I find

(19:28):
that I disagree with many of the practices and techniques
advocated in my training period. Unwilling to compromise my views
on the duties of a police officer as a public servant,
I wish to be free to offer my services elsewhere.
It was a short time after that that I believe

(19:48):
him and his companions started doing the drug dealer rip offs.
So I'm going to tell you about this book I
found sounds familiar, but I'm talking about the other book.
Rex Ferrell wrote. It looks like a comic book or
a silly pulp novel, same as Hitman. The cover is

(20:08):
orange and there's a masked man bursting into the room
with a machine gun. He surprised two guys. They're jumping
up from a table covered in money and drugs and
open cans of beer. The book's title is just as ridiculous.
It's called How to Rip Off a Drug Dealer and
it was published in by Paladin. In the first chapter,

(20:30):
Ferrell rights, ripping off or stealing the merchandise of drug
dealers can be a very profitable business among the outlaws
who grow, import and manufacture these illegal substances for distribution.
There exists the law of the jungle survival of the strongest.
Any outlaw who can outthink, out maneuver, or out fox

(20:54):
any other outlaw is entitled to the bounty he appropriates.
The author pitched this book before Hitman was even released.
In her deposition, Paladin editor Virginia Thomas recounted something the
author wrote in a letter. I'm anxious that Rex Savage
established himself with Paladin readers as a top quality writer
who knows his stuff. I have ideas for additional books,

(21:17):
which we touched on briefly during our last phone conversation.
And again that's our actor reading the author's words. I
should have the first two chapters on popping drug dealers
ready to send to you soon. I think it will
be better than The hit Man. It is, in a
weird way better than Hitman. Some of the hard boiled
fantasy has been stripped away, and most of the book

(21:39):
is straightforward, practical, actionable. How to assemble a team, how
to train them, how to storm a room, how to
dispose of the merchandise. Actually it's pretty scary the level
of sophistication laid out in the book. The equipment and
tactics are all military. Great Two Way Radio's bulletproof vests
and infrared scopes. Rex Ferrell advises to use a fully

(22:01):
automatic Mac ten, which would later fall under assault weapons ban,
and votes a whole chapter to marksmanship too. Of course,
this being a rex Feral book, there are totally absurd moments,
like the long passage about why dressing up as a
woman is the perfect disguise. You will need a method

(22:21):
for very close removal of facial and maybe even leg
hair in order to effectively portray a woman. Get your
wife or girlfriend to help you. Select some inexpensive makeup,
then practice applying the makeup until you achieve a natural look.
Women's magazines tell you how you don't want to appear

(22:43):
clownish or garish. You want your target to really think
that you are female. He suggests picking up quote hard
plastic breasts with nipples and other novelty items from party
shops to complete the look, and he consoles the reader,
so why you stand in front of the mirror feeling
just a little bit queer? Keep in mind why you

(23:05):
are playing in makeup if it bothers your macho self
image so you can't sleep at night. Instead of counting sheep,
try counting stacks of hundred dollar bills. The book How
to rip Off a Drug Dealer is dedicated to this
guy and quote to men of courage everywhere who dared

(23:27):
to take a chance, and to all those outlaws. I
dare not mention by name outlaw. There's a lot of
hyperbole in these two books, but this is a detail
that is not an exaggeration, because Phelps apparently wasn't just
ripping off dealers. He was doing it while pretending to

(23:48):
be a cop. There's a whole section on how to
do this in the book. It's called the police assault.
This method of entry is probably the safest and most
profitable of all or the serious and well equipped team.
It consists of entering the location by flashing seemingly legitimate
police credentials and making the mark think he is under arrest.

(24:11):
If handled correctly, the entire procedure will go smoothly and
one job will possibly lead to future jobs without resistance
or violence. This method requires one special skill, says Rex.
At least one of the inside men should be capable
of playing the part of a seasoned, knowledgeable, hardened cop.

(24:33):
Randall Wayne Phelps, of course, had been training to be
a police officer. Maybe he was better at playing a
cop than he was at being a cop, So Phelps
resigned from the police department in three started ripping off
drug dealers the following year, and then the explosion happened
three years later. So when Rusty and Steve started investigating

(24:55):
that explosion, Phelps had already been on the run from
the Feds. An investigator for a state's attorney's office in
Florida actually hopped on a plane as soon as he
heard about the explosion Steve was investigating. The guy's name
was ed Boone. His nickname was Boomer, and he had
a very booming voice, so it was appropriate I tried

(25:16):
to reach ed Boone. Unfortunately he died in two thousand fourteen.
Ed Boone ended up telling us that this had been
involved in a number of crimes. They were ripping off
drug dealers acting like they were the police. They would
do their search warrants supposedly and confiscate the drugs and money.
They would just tell the bad guys that somebody will

(25:37):
notify you when the warrants issued and we'll be back
to pick you up on that. If you're a drug
suspect and the police never call you or show up again,
you just kind of figure you skated and nothing else
is going to go on. It's kind of a perfect crime.
I mean, it sounds like that idea could actually work.

(25:59):
But like James Harry, they messed up. They did make
a mistake and hit a house that wasn't a drug house.
I found a newspaper article from December that says three
men Phelps as co conspirators, were found guilty of imprisoning
two families and robbing their homes while posing as federal
drug agents. The unsuspecting families inquired and these people ended

(26:21):
up calling the police later to find out, you know,
the circumstances and why they got targeted, And all of
a sudden, the Florida Law Enforcement Agency started putting two
and two together that this was people out acting like
they were police ripping off drug dealers. According to that
article I found about the robbery that went wrong, police

(26:42):
found the book how to rip Off a Drug Dealer
in their possession. These men were convicted of two counts
of kidnapping, two counts of false imprisonment, two counts of
armed robbery, two counts of burglary, two counts of grant theft,
two counts of conspiracy and eight counts of carrying a
firearm during the sition of a felony. Phelps, on the

(27:02):
other hand, he had kind of just disappeared into the wind,
kind of like he did after we started looking for him.
So these three guys got arrested. Phelps was on the run.
But then I found this. Another article from March n
said a thirty six year old woman had been arrested
after providing fake Drug Enforcement Administration identification and warrants to

(27:26):
the three men who committed the robbery. According to the
arrest warrant and sworn testimony from one of those three men,
she typed these false warrants and I das in her home.
She had been charged with two counts each of conspiracy
to commit a robbery with a firearm in conspiracy to
commit a burglary of a dwelling in which an assault
or battery occurred. So while Phelps got away, his girlfriend

(27:50):
or fiance was being held accountable for her part in
this crime. This woman's name, once again the same one
I believe to be the author of hit Man. This
article even says this woman calls herself a writer. Phelps

(28:11):
went by several names, and while he was a federal fugitive.
Some of the elias is popped up over the years
and other states. At one point in August after the robbery,
he was arrested in Florida after his car broke down.
According to the booking report, the officer says, while on patrol,
he saw a tan jeep off to the side of

(28:31):
the road with the hood open. He pulled up behind
the jeep and started running the Texas tags. He said
he saw a white male approximately five nine and one
fifty pounds, leaning in the jeep on the passenger side.
He had his hands in the vehicle. He kept looking
back at the officer and back into the jeep. He

(28:53):
did this about six times. There was another man with him.
The officer says. We were on a dark road and
due to the suspicious furtive movement made, and for fear
of my safety, I took a survey look into the
vehicle to make sure there was no one else in
the jeep to do me harm. When I did, I
observed a light colored green shirt wrapped tightly around what

(29:14):
outlined a gun on the front seat, where the person
had been bent over. The officer says earlier that night
he heard over his police radio that two people had
held up a seven eleven and one of them had
a green shirt wrapped around his hand to indicate he
had a gun. The officer then discovered they had a
duffel bag filled with holsters and other guns, handcuffs, a

(29:37):
blue light, two badges, cans that look like tear gas,
clips and ammo, and two items that look like silencers.
There was also a large amount of marijuana next to
this bag. This is kind of our only moment seeing
Phelps up close, well, aside from his police evaluation Ed Boone,

(29:58):
Steve Smith, Rusty James. They were always right behind him,
but this officer actually interacts with him, even though he
has no idea who he's dealing with. Literally, as he
handed the officer his license, his real license with his
real name, the officer saw another idea underneath it for
Randall Wayne Phelps. This is where we learned of that Elias.

(30:22):
When the officer asked him why he had to Florida
I d S. Phelps said he got the driver's license
with that name so he could write a book. After
he was arrested and charged with carrying a concealed firearm
in possession of marijuana, Phelps made bail and went on

(30:42):
the run again. Do you know how long he was
actually on the run for and all? It seems like
initially six or eight years on the front end, and
then after we tried to locate him, it was another
six to nine years I think before he met his
dumb eyes. We'll be right back. There are a ton

(31:23):
of illustrations and photos and how to rip off a
drug dealer, but there are two that I keep coming
back to. There's a shot of a falsified d A
I D. The man in the photo looks big, strong,
He's wearing what's obviously a fake mustache and a wig.
But am I looking at Phelps? I still haven't been
able to locate his mug shot. And then there's another

(31:44):
which is just so disturbing. It's in the section about
interrogation techniques, about using a blade to get someone to talk.
A young woman lies on the ground, her hands bound.
A masked man kneels above her. He's got a handful
of her hair and a knife to her throat. Who
is that man? Is that Phelps? Who's the woman? Phelps

(32:12):
was like this aberration, a ghost that would cause harm
and then disappear after all these robberies, and after the explosion,
he had somehow gotten away every time. Steve eventually learned
that Phelps had returned to Florida. At some point, Ed
Boone had given us the information about his girlfriend in Florida.

(32:36):
He'd apparently gone back to his girlfriend fiance, the one
who I think wrote hit man, who at the time
had two children, including a teenage son, And Ed was
going to pursue that a little bit more when he
got back to Florida, to see if he started getting
mail at her house or showed up to her house.
And then one day Steve's phone rang, It was Ed Boone.

(32:59):
When I answered, he just said, we got him, and
I knew it was Boomer, and so I knew he
had to be talking about. He told me that they
had him, but he was in a box. And then
his girlfriend's son shot and killed. You know, he had
evidently been back there living again, and they had had
another one of their fights, and evidently when it became physical,

(33:24):
um this young man decided that this guy wasn't gonna
hurt his mom anymore and shot and killed him. That's
how I found out that we didn't need to be
looking for him. Anymore. This happened just two weeks after Millie, Trevor,
and Janice were murdered. A local newspaper article from this

(33:48):
time says the young man who shot Phelps was fifteen
years old, and that Phelps died after being shot in
the head. This all happened in the family's living room.
I was shocked, No wonder, she's never wanted to talk
about this. Her teenage son shot her fugitive boyfriend right

(34:10):
in front of her. The fifteen year old was arrested
on an open count of murder. We also reached out
to him for this podcast and got no response. Authorities
also discovered a meth lab in a shed behind the
house that they described as one of the more elaborate
labs they'd seen. Sheriff's deputies believed Phelps built and operated

(34:30):
the lab, so he'd gone from ripping off drug dealers
to becoming one. Apparently, an officer from the same police
department Phelps was kicked out of said when he learned
Phelps had been killed, he wasn't terribly surprised. He called
him extremely deadly. Rusty remembers getting the call. I just said, hey,

(34:50):
who says there's no justice? You know he was a
bad man. He's a bad guy. Do you know anything
about that girlfriend in Florida? Nothing other that here than uh.
I believe her son did the right thing. I think
the kid he had a lot of courage. And I
won't say I was happy, but I was glad that
he was not going to be a threat to anyone else.

(35:13):
I can't say that I was sad about it. It
was like, good, he's off the street. He can't hurt
anybody else or disrupting any other families lives. But there's
one more question that keeps snagging at me. We know
Phelps started ripping off drug dealers after the second book
was written, but what about the first book was Rex

(35:35):
hit Man? Now? I don't think we'll ever know, but
I'd say that there's a good probability. Of course, if
every department had a cold case squad, they could go
back and look at the things in those books and
then compared with what they have, I think they may
be able to find some things like that, but that's
the luxury. Most departments don't have. The stories I've told

(36:03):
you about in this podcast could just be the ones
we know about Hitman and how to rip off a
drug dealer, might be the so called blueprints for other
crimes committed by Phelps himself or others. I mean, the
books just a book, obviously. But what's so crazy about
all of this is that it seems like there was
a real Rex Ferrell. Maybe he was the inspiration or

(36:25):
the co writer, or Phelps somehow morphed into this character.
But that persona the macho, rogue, dangerous maverick. He was real,
and what else did Phelps do? We actually put in
a Freedom of Information Act request into the FBI to
try to get their files on Phelps, and just this
morning we got back a reply that said, please be

(36:48):
advised that quote unusual circumstances apply to the processing of
your request. Apparently, unusual circumstances could mean a couple of
different scenarios, like quote a need to search, for, collect,
and examine a voluminous amount of separate and distinct records.
I have a feeling I'll be finding more and more

(37:08):
well after this podcast ends. I mean, we started this
story talking about this book written by a so called
hitman himself and then a triple murder, and then we
discovered the author was actually a woman. But wait, there
was also a man who seemed to have embodied the book.

(37:29):
We've spent a lot of time with these wrong doers Randall,
Wayne Phelps, Lawrence Horn, James Perry for some paid or
Lund although maybe that's not fair, but anyway, we've spent
time with these guys because we've had to. But this
is where it all ends, with the people who really
propelled and compelled me to tell this story, the survivors. Hi, Hi, right,

(37:52):
how are you. I'm good? How are you doing? Oh good?
I wanted to touch base with you and see how
things are going. I kept Tiffany Horn updated on everything
I learned over the last two years or so, every
Motown interview, every lawyer I got back in touch with,
but also every strange new twist I uncovered about the
book and the story behind it. I was sort of

(38:15):
driven to get to the bottom of this, in part
for her, because she'd given me so much of her time,
and meanwhile, Tiffany had to go on her own journey
for closure, including a prison visit with her dad. There
were so many demons and so many things that I
had been battling, so much rage that I had had
that had been building inside me. It was important for
me to to let that go and to face him.

(38:37):
I wanted to really settle with him and look him
in his eye and also just see my dad again,
like I wanted to be that little girl that I
used to be and just look at him that way
instead of as this monster that's next on hit Man.

(39:00):
H Hitman is a production of I Heart Radio and
hit Home Media. It's produced and reported by me Jasmine Morris.
Our supervising producer is Michelle Lance. Mark Latto is our

(39:21):
story consultant. Executive producers are main Gesh, Hatika Door and Me.
Mixing by Michelle Lance and Josh Ferguson. Our fact checker
is not Sumi Ajisaka, voice acting by Levi Petrie and
Kelly Jane Farnsworth. Our theme song by Alice McCoy and
additional music written and produced by the students at DIME
powered by the Detroit Institute of Music Education,