"This Sh*t Can't Be Protected"

Attorneys John Marshall and Howard Siegel, along with the victims' families, go after Paladin Press in an effort to get Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors off the shelves. And a judge makes a landmark decision about whether this how-to guide can be considered an accomplice to murder. 

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
The word book is one of the most powerful words
in all of the dialogue about First Amendment. There's nothing
more sacred than a book. And we knew the defense
was going to be, you can't go after a book.

(00:23):
That's an atrocity. So that was what we had to overcome.
I made a very calculated decision when we first started
this case. I said, we're going to go on a
media blitz. I remember I was a Larry King one
night and Larry King kept calling it a book, and

(00:45):
I stopped him dead. First of all, this is not
a book. If you're going to call this a book,
it is not a book. This is no this is
not a pamphlet. This is a murder manual. This is
a set of instructions to commit murder. A seven auctions
to commit murder. This book manuol or how to Guide.

(01:06):
We keep coming back to it. You can't find Hitman
on the shelves anymore. And this week I'm going to
tell you why. On the night of September four, a
separated mother of two put her kids to bed just
like every other night. Her nearly two year old son
had just started sleeping in a toddler bed, and as
many kids do. At one point during the night, he

(01:27):
went to sleep with his mom, Bobby, and then Bobby
was woken suddenly from a deep sleep. Someone was lifting
up her head and dropping it. She didn't have her
glasses on. Everything was blurry too dark. She couldn't see
and she couldn't breathe. The man in her bedroom had
his latex gloves tied around her neck. The kids, Why

(01:49):
are you doing this to the kids, she kept trying
to say, but he was choking her. Her son woke
up and started screaming, and the hitman startled. Let go.
So my name is Don Corson. I'm an attorney in
Gina Wagon and back maybe eighteen years or so ago,
i represented a woman named Bobby who was a survivor

(02:10):
of an attempt to murder attack by a would be
hitman who had bought a book about how to do that.
Bobby declined an interview for this podcast, but gave her attorney,
Don Courson, permission to speak about the case. And out
of respect for her privacy, we're just going to refer
to Bobby by her first name. And of course he
didn't think there's gonna be witnesses after this, and so
she engaged him in some conversation. They asked basically, hey,

(02:33):
my husband put you up to this, and again, figuring
there'd be no witnesses, he said yes. Studies show the
most common motive in a hitman case is disillusion of
a relationship, followed by money. Very few hits are performed
by quote masters. Most hitman, it turns out, are actually
first time amateurs who want to resolve some form of

(02:55):
personal crisis, usually a lack of money, and most of
them are in really found through acquaintances. That's true of
Lawrence Horn, who hired a hitman to kill his ex
wife and son for a one point seven million dollar estate,
and it's true in this story too. At the time,
Bobby was discussing divorce with her husband, Robert, who, according

(03:16):
to court documents, had a history of abuse, and Bobby
had a life insurance policy. He approached a coworker and
broached the idea. The coworker had never done anything like
this before in his life, but he was familiar with
Palette and Publisher products and had bought books before from them,
So he went and ordered from Paletta a book called Hitman,

(03:37):
a Technical Manual for Independent Contractors, and learned the craft
of becoming a contract killer, and there's just a laundry
list of advice given the book. Constructions given the book
that he followed sort of you know, verbatim, in trying
to execute this would be murder. The court documents paint
an unbelievable scene. Bobby had a full on conversation with hitman.

(04:01):
She even asked how much Robert was paying him on dollars.
The hitman replied, is that all his kids are worth
to him, I'll pay twice the amount. She shouted back,
remarkable uh and horrifying scene and sued in which this
young would be killer man had a wire cerreted type

(04:21):
wire that was used to slip throats, and he went
after with that. Bobby actually got the wire between her
teeth or she held it tight. He then pulled out
a knife. She got away again. Then the hitman drew
his handgun, held it to her head, and ordered her
to remove her son from the room. After doing this,
she ran, all the while hearing a clicking sound behind her.

(04:45):
He goes to pull the trigger on the handgun, the
specific kind of handgun recommended in the book, and the
gun jammed. She fought him off in the night, and
then the violence and then the confusion. Was able to
get out of the house and she survived with scarves bleeding.
The hitman then stole the family car as part of
his plan to try and make the hit look like

(05:06):
a bungled residential robbery, just like James Perry, the hitman
who killed Millie, Trevor and Janice did. He raced to
the outskirts of town to meet his accomplice was waiting
in a getaway car. They had filled up the gas
tank just prior to attacking Bobby, another tip from the
hitman book. And then you tried to dispose of all

(05:26):
the materials using the would be killing ditching them and
ditches and bushes and rivers, and you know, he just
falling in the game plan with the book. Bobby's husband
and his coworker were arrested shortly after, and both were
sentenced to seventeen and a half years in prison. Detectives

(05:48):
had found the hitman manual in this would be Hitman's
work locker. According to court documents, the hitman actually admitted
to a detective that quote. Without the book, he would
not have considered it at all. It gave him the
confidence that he could do it. I'm Jasmine Morris from

(06:19):
My Heart Radio and Hit Home Media. This is hit Man,

(06:44):
I promised a Milli and Trevor. I will not rest
until all the players that were involved in their death
they are brought to justice. And there are people that said, oh,
you you can't take on the First Amendment. First amendment
is protected. Well, it is protected, but I mean you
can't hurt people. Maryland Farmer. Millie's sister was a social

(07:06):
studies teacher. I would have taught to my kids, let's
look at the purpose of the book. The purpose of
the book is to kill and to get away with it.
Murder is a crime in this country, so this book
is perpetuating a crime. So that's what I would have
taught to my students, and I used it as an

(07:27):
example if you don't have absolute power and rights, constitution
doesn't get that. For two years, Million Trevor's family had struggled,
knowing the pain and loss would never go away, but
wondering what more they could do. If we can get
this book off the market and we can do something
to help another family not experience this. So we talked

(07:50):
to the lawyers that had handled Trevor's case and asked
him what we're our chances? We were feeling terrible about
what had happened. John Marshall is a quiet, humble and
kind man who let me record him on a sunny
day at a small cottage that sits on a lake shore.

(08:10):
Every so often a boat would pass by. We pause
and wait for the boats and the birds to quiet down.
I saw his patients firsthand. Remember, John and his co
council Howard Siegel, helped the Horn family win a settlement
against Children's Hospital, the money that ultimately cost Milly and

(08:31):
Trevor their lives. John grew quite close to Milly. Her
sister is in Tiffany, so revisiting all of this while
on vacation probably was an ideal or easy. We're lawyers,
were not doctors, were not psychologists, we're not therapists. So
it was like, what can we do. We're not going
to right this wrong, but what can we do to

(08:51):
sort of get some kind of value out of this,
not in a monetary way, but in a legal way,
in a HAPs, in a moral way, if we could,
how can we help this family? For Howard and John,
along with Millie, Trevor and Janice families. It felt like

(09:12):
someone or something was still at large. Another accomplice of sorts.
We met in the Montgomery County Law Library in the courthouse.
I said, what do you know about the First Amendment?
And John said, I know that it comes first. And
we had a good laugh about that one. We actually
pulled out a copy of the Constitution and we read it.

(09:35):
At this point in their careers, Howard Siegel and John
Marshall were both civil litigation attorneys. There was really nothing
on their resumes that would qualify them to go after
a book publisher and argue about the limits of the
First Amendment. Something is sacred and central to the American law,
is anything in the Constitution. Nonetheless, I said, John, I

(09:56):
don't care what it says. This ship cannot be detected
by the First Amendment. Howard defined the ship. The ship
is a murder manual. This was a recipe for murder.
They were teaching people how to become hired killers. And
I said, we gotta go after these guys, meaning Paletin Pressed.

(10:23):
So Howard and John helped Millie's family file the civil
suit Rice versus Palettin Press. Rice's Vivian Elaine Rice another
one of Millie's sisters, and so we set off on
this I think most people thought very quixotic endeavor, and
we file the lawsuit against them and immediately got enormous publicity.

(10:47):
This became a huge deal because we were attacking the press.
Janice Saunders, husband Michael, and their seven year old son.
We're all so listed as plaintiffs in the lawsuit. We
haven't talked a lot about Janis in this podcast because
no one in her family was up for talking. Understandably,

(11:08):
but so often when this story is told, Janie is
simply reduced to her occupation the nurse. But she was
also the mother of a young boy. She was a sister,
a daughter, a wife, and a friend of many. She
loved horses, nature, cross stitching in life. She was thirty
eight when she was killed. I have had a few

(11:31):
phone calls with her husband, Michael. He didn't want to
be recorded, saying I declined an interview only in a
sense that I've tried to move on with my life.
But he also said I would like to speak about
some of these things you've told me, stuff that I
did not know. I didn't know Peter was dead, and
if you don't remember history, you'll repeat it. He said.

(11:52):
There's way more to the story than what people perceived.
And these stories expand as decades go by, not just
after a jury decide what is and isn't going to happen.
So I'll quote or paraphrase Michael Saunders from time to time.
He had his own attorney, who also declined an interview,
and he remembered eventually joining forces with Millie's sisters in

(12:13):
the lawsuit against Paladin Press, mostly for his son Colin,
who lost his mother at just four years old. He
told me, Peter Lund saw the carnage of war in Vietnam.
I was in Vietnam too, but I didn't come back
and publish books about baby bottle bombs. We'll be right back.

(12:34):
After the short break, I was obsessed again, Howard Siegel,
It's just all I thought about for years. I put
most of my practice on whole walk up in the

(12:55):
morning thinking about this, and went to bed at night
thinking about it. It was just all consuming. As Howard
and John were preparing their suit, they weren't looking for advice.
They eventually met Rod Smola, a law professor and first
amendent scholar. He thought we were nuts. Everybody thought we
were nuts. Brandenburg versus Ohio will kill you. Everyone warned

(13:16):
them about this case and the precedent it set. It
was a case involving a KKK rally in Ohio, and
they arrested the speakers, and the court said that that
was impermissible. They're entitled to their speech. Ruth Bader Ginsburg
talked about the Brandenburg case during her confirmation hearing, saying

(13:37):
that the N nine ruling was one of the great
milestones in Supreme Court history. Brandenburg against Ohio truly recognizes
that free speech means not freedom of thought for those
and speech for those with whom we agree, but freedom
of expression for the expression we hate. And the only
way you can arrest them is if that speech is

(14:01):
likely to produce imminent danger. This is what John and
Howard were grappling with. So that's the test. Is it
likely to produce imminent danger? How could a book that's
published in Colorado, that's sent to Detroit, that was purchased
a year before that resulted in a murder be argued

(14:23):
as likely to produce imminent danger? That was the big problem.
I talked to Tom Kelly, the press lawyer who represented
Paladin in this case. He spoke with me the week
he retired from a very long and distinguished career defending
media organizations in their First Amendment rights. You know, I
struggled with opposing people who were trying to recover for

(14:46):
the loss of love ones. Uh. I didn't enjoy that particularly,
But if you're going to do First Amendment work, it
comes with baggage like that, and one has to accept
that and the soldier through it. As we know, Paladin
publisher paider Lund genuinely believed it was his right to

(15:06):
publish this information and as customers bore the full responsibility
for what they did with it. David Dubro, the former
Paladin employee we heard from in our last episode, told
us when you attribute motivations to inanimate objects like books
and videos and firearms and edge weapons, then at that
point you're living in an animust universe where something can

(15:28):
get up and start attacking you on its own, which
is which is crazy. Paladin actually had a legal defense
fund set up so readers could help them fight this
legal battle. You have a right to know how to
make a truck bomb, use it or lose it, because
freedom is for everyone, or no one read one email blast.
Your freedom to read is under attack. Okay, Setting aside

(15:53):
the question of whether anyone has the right to make
a truck bomb, the larger consequences here are real. I mean,
the idea of limiting speech and a free press. That's scary.
The whole business was, Hey, here's information you can't get
anywhere else. This is where you can go get it.
And it's wrong to say that you can't get it.
It's wrong, like suppressing knowledge, suppressing information. It's stupid. You

(16:17):
can't do it, especially now. But it was an objective wrong.
I'm a journalist. That's the foundation of pretty much everything
I do and believe in. All these years looking into
the Hitman book have led to some seriously uncomfortable questions.
I get the implications. I'm not alone in that. My
name is Paul McMasters. I am retired now, but served

(16:40):
as a national authority on First Amendment issues as a
First Amendment on Budsman at the Freedom Forum. He was
also a newspaper editor and testified before Congress on First
Amendment issues. I talked to McMasters just last week. I
read the book more than once. I felt nothing, but
discussed it did not incite me at all to go

(17:02):
out and kill somebody, or to share with somebody else that, Hey,
if you want to kill somebody, here's here's the way
to do it. It It is the easy way out when
confronted with the sort of vile speech that this book represented.
But I see absolutely no way over time how that

(17:24):
could be separated from other kinds of speech that come
close to that or go further than that. Even because
of that exact concern, a lot of surprising allies rallied
to Peladan's defense. When we filed this case. You know,
we knew that the First Amendment community was gonna just
pound us. I mean, they were going to come after

(17:46):
us with guns blazing. The First Amendment community is probably
the most powerful lobby in the world. You're talking about
the publishing industry, the movie industry. Sixteen media organizations, including
The Washington Post, The New York Times, ABC, the National

(18:06):
Association of Broadcasters all came out in support of Paladin's position.
They jointly filed an amicust brief that said, quote allowing
this lawsuit to survive will disturb decades of First Amendment
jurisprudence and jeopardize free speech from the periphery to the core.
No expression, music, video books, even newspaper articles would be

(18:29):
safe from civil liability. You're talking about radio, you're talking
about television. Walt Disney, Mini and Mickey Mouse were just
all over my ass. There was just whostsale panic in
the First Amendment community. They were worried about the proverbial
slippery slope. If we let Sego go after this book,

(18:51):
he's going to be going after the Bible next, and fiction,
and you know, all kinds of things. Of course, I
learned afterwards that the reason slopes are slippery is that
lawyers gresome with bullshit. So on the one side you
have paladins and the heaviest heavyweights in media, and on

(19:11):
the other side you have Howard and John in the
victims families. And I'll let John tell you what happened. Next.
District court judge didn't even give us the time and day.
He said, I agree, Brandenburgh wins off you go. It
was like three minutes. So this case was closed. But
as we know, Howard wasn't gonna let one decision stand

(19:32):
in his way. And here's where I want to explain
a really important part of Howard and John's theory. And
to understand it, let's go back to something Tom Kelly,
Paladin's lawyer, said to me. The books published are very
unlikely to be the cause of criminal conduct, murder, mayhem,

(19:52):
what have you. Howard and John's theory hinged on the
word cause in terms of Brandenburg versus Ohio. They realized
that if you're arguing that the books are the cause
of the violence, you're gonna lose. But what if you
can convince people that a book aided the killer and
that the publisher intended it to be used that way.

(20:13):
Our theory was this speech aided and embedded the murder.
It was not just I hate you, or even go
kill that son of a gun. This was I'm telling
you how to kill somebody. This is people profiting off
the death of innocent people. When I did the aiding

(20:33):
and abetting research, I remember there were almost no cases.
Nobody had ever used it before. I mean you have
to go back to almost ancient England to find aiding
in abanding cases. They were very, very rare. This is
what qualifies as aiding and abetting under the law, which
is more common in criminal cases as opposed to civil

(20:55):
cases like this. But Howard said, anyone who counsels, commands, induces, cures,
or provides substantial assistance to another to commit a crime
or a civil wrong is jointly liable with the person
who commits the crime or civil wrong. I mean, the
most obvious example is the mafia boss who tells one
of his hit men to go kill Joe Banana whack them.

(21:17):
He's going to be eating at Alfonso's at eight o'clock,
and the FBI happens to have a wire tap on
the conversation with the hitman. Well, the day of trial,
if the mafia boss's lawyer stands up and says, your honor,
this is protected speech is protected by the First Amendment. Right.
The court's response, in a dignified way would be, are

(21:39):
you shooting me in order to commit murder? You're saying
is protected by the First Amendment. It's simply a method
that you're using to facilitate a criminal act. Tom Kelly, meanwhile,
was busy preparing a defense that basically boiled down to
this book is completely absurd. The book, in my view,

(22:03):
was reasonably clearly intended for entertainment. You know you have
a hitman by the name of Rex Ferrell, which literally
means king of the wild animals. The book begins with
a prologue that reads like a typical fictional account of
an assassination, like something in Tom Clancy or Vince Flynn.

(22:24):
This was gonna be their defense at the trial John Marshall,
and nobody would really take this seriously. But the answer
was James Perry did. What's weird about this argument is
that it's disproven by the book itself. Right before you
get to the table of contents in Hitman, there's a disclaimer.
It says neither the author nor the publisher assumes responsibility

(22:48):
for the use or misuse of information contained in this
book for informational purposes only exclamation point. Informational purposes, not entertainment.
Is nothing that says don't take this book seriously. And
there's a warning that tells readers making an unlicensed pistol
silencer is against the law, but it says nothing about

(23:09):
laws against murder, conspiracy to murder, or assault. Howard told
me these kinds of disclaimers never hold up in court.
And beyond that, his argument was this wasn't a case
of misuse, because he says the book was used exactly
as Paladin intended it to be used. Based on the
fact that it was written as a how to manual,
Howard likens it to a cookie recipe. If you publish

(23:32):
a recipe on cookies, you expect people to make cookies.
It's not convincing at all. That's one of the things
that always irritated me about me at coverage. It assumes
there were those twenty two specific esoteric details he followed
to the extent he followed any and, and the proof
on that is weak. There are common knowledge in the

(23:55):
criminal world and general knowledge to the general public through
popular archer. Tom Kelly to this day doesn't believe James
Perry learned much from the book, much less followed it
any plane. If who wants to recover money has to
prove causation. We'd anticipated in an argument that the book
gave Perry the confidence he needed to pull this off.

(24:18):
That's something certainly not credible in view of his long
criminal history in which he actually shot and wounded a
police officer. Clearly the murder would have occurred regardless of
what was on Perry's night stand. And we know this
because we dug into the facts and James Perry got caught,
So that's the other part of the argument, it must
not have been a very good book. Also, this book

(24:42):
was sold, you know, not through channels calculated to reach
Hitman only, but through national bookstore chains. I mean, I
don't know what a Hitman only channel would even look like.
But the point is not everybody who bought this book
or read the book out to be or turned into
a hit Man was available in lending libraries, and it

(25:04):
actually sold thirteen thousand copies before this happened in the
late nineties. It's unthinkable that thousand hitman bought this book.
It's almost unthinkable that that did. It was sold to
a general, undifferentiated audience, and with that kind of marketing,
it's hard to see how either the publishers or the

(25:26):
readers could consider this a serious technical manual for independent contractors. Now,
this is really really important. Before this lawsuit progressed, all
the parties agreed to a set of facts that would
eventually come out in trial. Paladin Press stipulated that James

(25:46):
Perry followed numerous instructions from Hitman in planning, executing, and
attempting to cover up these murders that they knew and
intended that this instructional manual would be used by criminals
to come at criminal acts. They made this admission and
what's been called quote almost taunting defiance, because they were

(26:07):
confident they had First Amendment protections, and of course, the
first time they sat before a judge, Paladin was right.
But with their aiding and abetting theory in hand, Howard
and John filed an appeal. We went up to the
federal Fourth Circuit and we drew Judge Looting, who was
pretty conservative guy, actually a very conservative guy. I think

(26:29):
he's been considered for the Supreme Court by every Republican president.
Judge Michael Ludig was appointed to the U. S. Court
of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in by former President
George Bush. Before that, he was an assistant Attorney General
at the U. S. Department of Justice. So we get
to the argument and we're up first, and Looting comes

(26:51):
in and he's got a notebook maybe three inches thick
with i'd say two colored tabs. Had no idea what
any of this meant other than we were pretty sure
he was prepared. So that argument begins and my sense was,

(27:11):
oh my god, we're getting creamed. This is how appellate
arguments go. If the judges are engaged, they love to
basically make you feel like you're a complete idiot. And
then the other side got up and lootingg just let
him have it. It was so clear that he was

(27:32):
not ruling for them. It was thirty minutes of him
tearing their case to shreds. His opinion was that the
First Amendment did not protect this speech and that our
theory of aiding and embedding was valid. So we we

(27:52):
got our victory. Judge Looting reversed lower Court's decision, saying
they misunderstood Brandenburg. He wrote a sixty page opinion that
I distilled down to one sentence, and that one sentences,
this ship isn't protected again. Paul McMasters well, I was,

(28:19):
I have to tell you a little bit surprised, as
others have noted. Also, j. Lending seemed personally offended by
the existence of the Hitman Manual, and from my perspective,
it led him to make a wrong decision. This opinion

(28:39):
is really something. Judge Ludig lists passages from the book,
saying these selections are quote but a small fraction of
the total number of instructions that appear in the page manual,
and the court has even felt it necessary to omit
portions of these few illustrative passages in order to minimize
the danger to the public from their repetition. Here in

(29:02):
I thought a lot about that when making this podcast.
You've heard us quote the book quite a bit, But
what we've shared that's a fraction of the passages this
judge even included. Anyway. He goes on to say, after
carefully and repeatedly reading Hitman in its entirety, we are
of the view that the book so overtly promotes murder

(29:23):
and concrete, non abstract terms that we regard as disturbingly disingenuous.
Both Paladin's cavalier suggestion that the book is essentially a
comic book whose fantastical promotion of murder no one could
take seriously. He's basically saying Howard and John's aiding in
a betting theory applies in this specific case. Looting also

(29:45):
outlines why and how this case is special. He says,
Paladin's astonishing stipulations, coupled with the extraordinary comprehensiveness, detail, and
clarity of Hitman's instructions for criminal activity in murder. In particular,
the boldness of its palpable exhortation to murder, the alarming
power and effectiveness of its peculiar form of instruction, the

(30:09):
notable absence from its text of the kind of ideas
for the protection of which the First Amendment exists, and
the book's evident lack of any arguably legitimate purpose beyond
the promotion and teaching of murder render this case unique
in the law. We'll be right back. Judge Ludig's opinion

(30:42):
was a big deal. This has never been done before.
A federal judge said a publisher could be held liable
for publishing this kind of content, meaning instruction manuals, allowing
the case to move forward to trial. They took it
to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court denied sure
sure are, which means they let the decision stand. The
legal precedent was set. Never before has such a lawsuit prevailed,

(31:06):
as one Washington Post article put it, going on to say,
quote never in the modern history of the First Amendment.
As a court found the printed word capable of this
kind of incitement to imminent lawlessness that would remove free
speech protection. But again, all of this was just legal
theory at this point. Establishing grounds for the Rice versus

(31:26):
Paladin civil trial. That was the next and final step.
So John and Howard began the discovery process. We decided
we wanted to take the deposition of Pader Lund, and
so we did that out in Boulder where his offices were.
And that was Howard's deal. This was his baby all

(31:47):
the way. For the first time Howard and Payder Lund
came face to face. Howard called him an imposing looking
guy who clearly looked uncomfortable and nervous as the anticipated
the traps Howard was about to set for him. They
sat across the table from each other in Paladin's conference room.
Howard asked one question after another. He said, Lund sat

(32:10):
with his arms folded and kept his answers very short.
There was no hostility, just a quiet arrogance. This lasted
eight or nine hours. It was an all day deposition,
and Lund was a formidable foe. Didn't give in a bit.
But Howard was very clever, and at one pot he

(32:34):
was going through the catalog of all of their books
and finally says to him, I see here, there's no
there's no book here about how to blow up airplanes
and London admitted that we simply don't do that. There
is a line somewhere, There is a line. A Washington

(32:54):
Post article from said Lund once wrote to the author
of a then forthcoming book, revenge Ville, Sick Humor for
the Deranged Mind, saying, quote, we're editing out some of
the more heinous acts you propose, as they are not
only illegal, but in bad taste. Illegality does not particularly
trouble me. Bad taste always does. He wouldn't publish hate

(33:20):
literature either, or books on poison too easy for children
to fool with, though information on the latter did manage
to make it into hit man. But in this context,
lund standards didn't help his case. He was dead meat.
After that, we walked out Rod and I said, you know,
g he was tough, and Howard had it all in

(33:42):
his head already. He had already had it pictured how
he was going to play portions of the deposition to
a jury to get to the point where there's a line.
And he was right. All these years later, Howard is
still unsettled by what he says he saw in that deposition.

(34:02):
I said, Mr, Lund, you know that people are going
to use your publications to commit murders and criminal acts,
don't you And he said possibly? And I said do
you care? And he said no. And that was the
end of the deposition. Michael Saunders told me that he

(34:25):
was brought in to watch this deposition at one point
and remembered lund saying this. Saunders said they were there
to make money and he didn't care that a four
year old's mother was killed because of a book he
didn't need to publish. Here's Howard, this was my experience
touching evil. I touched it twice with Lawrence Horn and

(34:48):
then paid lund. People who just don't care, people who
have no compassion for the consequences of their acts. Once again,
Paladin's lawyer, Tom Kelly has a different view. That is
not the Peter Lundon. I knew he felt strongly about
the First Amendment, but saying he didn't care, it's not
something I remember I would want to say. I doubt

(35:11):
that occurred unless someone can show me the deposition. I've
been trying to get it, actually, but I haven't been successful.
These twenty year old cases tend to disappear. It's just
the way it is. At this point, John and Howard
were confident they would win over a jury, but it

(35:31):
would never actually make it that far, in part because
this happened. Authorities in Littleton, Colorado were securing the scene
of a deadly school shooting so they can make a
final body count as the community. This is news footage
after school shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado, about
an hour south of Paladin's headquarters, searching for booby traffic

(35:52):
explosive was left behind by the Choe suspects in the
Colorado school shooting. The Columbine shooters didn't specifically was how
to manuals from Paladin, but they did use the Anarchist
Cookbook and other how to guides they found on the
internet to make homemade explosives. I had the nation in shock.
We were very concerned, and it was there was a

(36:15):
terrible environment in which to try a case like this.
It was clear that it was going to be hard
to find a jury sympathetic to Paladin's arguments. So just
days before trial, on Paladin Press's insurance company agreed to
settle the case out of court. Well, I was delighted
that I was not going to have to talk to

(36:36):
a jury and tell them I can understand all the
sympathy you feel for these people that have been through hell.
But we're going to have to ask you to follow
the oath you took and look at the facts of
this case and decide what brought this crime about, what
made it happen, how it happened, in whether this book
had any significant role in it, or whether it wasn't

(37:00):
early dwarfed by the greed, by the will and the
stealth of Lawrence Horn, Paladin's insurance carrier was calling the shots.
I went home with a combination of relief and regret.
And the question was why did we settle the case?
And the answer was simple. It was two pieces. One

(37:23):
we had won the law already. It was never going
to get better than what we had already done. And
to Janice Saunders family, I mean, she was the big
breadwinner and her family and she left a husband and
a little boy. They needed the money. So we settled
the case three days before trial. We said, you have

(37:46):
to give us all of the books, take it off
the market, and they did later. This was posted to
Paladin's website. Quote. Circumstances and changing times have caused Paladin
to scale back publishing some of the more controversial material.
It had been known for in the past. After the
settlement of the Hitman lawsuit, in the passage of legislation

(38:08):
making it legally treacherous to distribute information on explosives, the
company stopped publishing some eighty titles on explosives, demolitions, improvised
weaponry in self defense. So of course the book was
on the internet. Two weeks later. The Hitman case was
happening as the Internet was taking off, So in a way,

(38:29):
for John and Howard, the battle against Paladin was one,
but the war was lost. And nowadays this issue is
just as pressing and irresolvable, and just as we've done
with some of the hate sites recently, we should look
at trying to close down the servers and things like
that if we see that they're being used to export

(38:52):
violence of some sort or and they're being used to
fullment terrorism. Again, terrorism expert Neil Livingstone, there's no good reason.
But it's not as easy as it was when it
was printed literature. If the government had had the will,
they could have shut fatal undown and taken him into
chords and things like that, and they could have contained

(39:14):
the problem at that time, but they let it get
out of hand. All that stuff that seemed into the
public domain now and it's all been posted on the internet.
There's another irony in the timing here, when the Hitman
book was used again in the unsuccessful hit on Bobby.
The hit man in that case bought the book just

(39:35):
months before the decision in the Rice versus Paladin case.
A few months more and he wouldn't have been able
to buy the book from Paladin, but he did in
using Rice Versus Paladin as a precedent. Bobby sued Paladin
in two thousand two. They settled again. So the Rice case,
the decision, it's implications, it's either murky or crystal clear,

(39:58):
depending on who you talked to. Everyone's drawn a different
lesson from this case. I asked Tom Kelly, what's the
most important thing you'd want people to take away from
this story? That things are rarely as simple as they appear,
at least in this case. But it's reasonably clear this
book did not inform these murders, you know. I find

(40:21):
it hard to imagine a case of one human being
intentionally killing another who happened to read a book on
how to do that. I interviewed John and Howard twenty
five years after Milly, Trevor, and Janice were murdered, and
even though they prevailed in both cases, the medical malpractice
case and the hit man case, John called it very

(40:41):
bitter sweet, and maybe even more bitter than sweet. Even so,
Howard also says this it's what every young lawyer dreams,
that one day you'll have a case like this where
you can come out of the gray. Because most of
the law is practiced in the great You know, is
there a case out here that's black and white, that's

(41:04):
good versus evil, where there is no moral argument on
the other side. You know, I'm ever going to have
a case that's totally clean, and this was that case
for me. I think the other thing we do is lawyers,
is we're sort of all looking for redemption for not
having done enough right and that's what you hope for

(41:24):
and for Millie's family. Did it make me feel better? No,
it didn't take away your pain. It didn't take away
my pain. I'm sure it didn't take away Tiffany's pain.
Hopefully we've saved somebody from the pain that we've gone through.
That was the whole goal, and I think we tried
really hard to just make that impact that this was wrong.

(41:46):
This wasn't okay. I think we did, but you can't
really control this type of information. And all that fear
around whether this decision would be detrimental to the rights
of free speech and a free press, Michael Saunders told

(42:07):
me all they're ruling on is one specific case. They're
not saying you can sue over whatever you want to
and win because of this ruling. And here's Howard's take,
The slope was not slippery. There hasn't been a single
decision that has expanded No work of fiction, no movie,

(42:29):
no television show, no writer has ever been held libel
for somebody misusing his art. That brings me back to
the writer who started all of this, Rex Ferrell. Paladin
agreed to protect him as the publisher, cooperated in the
Horn Perry criminal trials and both of these lawsuits heading

(42:51):
over correspondence, phone records, payment records. The author's real name
is nowhere to be found. And so we've come back
to where I first started my curiosity around this book
and who wrote it, why they wrote it. I'm not
looking to docs anyone call them out or hold them
to some kind of reckoning, but my sense was that
there's got to be more to the story, and I'm

(43:13):
going to take you through what I've learned over the
last few years. I just wanted some answers, so I
started asking around, what do you know about the author
Rex Farrell? It's a woman, It's about all I know.
Do you ever know anything about the author of the book?
If I remember right, it was a woman who wrote
the book, and it was a woman who who was
not a hitman. I don't think she was a professional hitman.

(43:35):
I think she was a mother or divorced mother of
a couple of kids, and she was writing a book
to make enough money to make the rent. In Paladin's
effort to make it dis look all like this is
a big joke, that this really was just a comic book,
they revealed that the author of the book, with a
pseudonym of Rex Ferrell, was actually a woman and that

(43:55):
she just made all this stuff up. She may have
ultimately been involved in right things, but I can't believe
she was anything other than duped. That's next on hit Man.

(44:25):
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 Ltto is our
story consultant, executive producers, our main guest, Hatticor and Me.
Mixing by Josh Roguson, Michelle Lance and Jacopo Penzo. Our
fact checker is not sumi Ajisaka. Special thanks to Andrew Goldberg,

(44:48):
Michael Garofolo, Tory Piquette, Lucas Riley, and Bill McQuay. Our
theme song by Alice McCoy in. Additional music written and
produced by the students at DIME, powered by the Detroit
Institute of Music at UCATION,