March 6, 2025 • 57 mins
This is a rerun of the episode that originally ran on February 6, 2025 with a newly recorded introduction with new information about the traffic stop that led to Matthew Huttle's death.
Sources:
https://www.indystar.com/story/news/crime/2025/02/27/body-cam-footage-jan-6-defendants-traffic-stop-shooting-death-released-matthew-huttle-jasper-county/80731312007/
https://www.in.gov/sheriffs/jasper/files/Jasper-County-OIS-Final-Report.pdf
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. Hey Molly Conger here. I know I
left you with a bit of a cliffhanger last week,
and I'm so sorry I don't have the second half
of that story for you this week. I thought maybe
it was the subject matter of giving me a stomach
(00:22):
ache at first, but I spent half of this week
lad up with a stomach virus and there was just
no way to write that story the way I wanted
to in the time that I had left after I
finished puking. That'll have to wait until next week. So
we've got to rerun this week. But don't switch it
off just yet. I do have a little update to
the episode for you here at the top. The episode
(00:45):
originally ran a month ago, so it may still be
fresh in your mind. It's the story of Matthew Huddle,
the January sixth writer who was shot and killed during
a traffic stock just days after he received his federal pardon.
And when I wrote it was a lot of unanswered questions.
We have some of those answers. Now Here's where I
(01:06):
left things a month ago. It's unwise to speculate about
the altercation that may have occurred in the minutes before
Huddle was shot and killed by a Jasper County Sheriff's deputy.
I don't know what happened there on the side of
Indiana State Road fourteen. We don't know what was said,
or why things escalated, or where exactly the deputy saw
(01:27):
the gun. But I do know that Matthew Huddle was
due back in court next week for a status conference
on a stack of still unresolved felony cases for driving
without a license, just days after getting his federal pardon.
He was probably happy for his uncle Dale, but he'd
already done his federal time, and now he was looking
(01:49):
down the barrel at another stay in the county jail,
and when those blue lights came on behind him, he
probably knew that this would be yet another felony charge.
After the episode originally aired, I saw some listeners expressing displeasure,
discussed even that I'd framed his story as a tragic one.
(02:14):
I'm not here how to tell you how you should feel.
That's your business, But for me, his story is sad.
He wasn't an evil man. I wouldn't go as far
as to say he was a good man. He had
a slew of dyse. He had some history of domestic
violence allegations and a stint in jail for child abuse.
(02:38):
He stormed the capitol. He owed a lot of child support.
I don't think he's a person I would have liked,
but he was also a man who struggled with alcohol addiction,
and regardless of what he'd done, his death left two
children without any chance of ever reconciling with their father.
(02:58):
And for me least, there's never any peace in knowing
a person's life ended violently, particularly when the cause of
death was a bullet from a police officer's gun. I
have to believe that people can change that. Redemption and
atonement are always possible for those who sincerely strive to
(03:19):
earn that. But a dead man cannot make amends. That
possibility is gone now, and that makes it a tragedy
in my mind. But however you feel about the way
things ended for Matthew Huddle, we do at least have
some answers now that the Jasper County Sheriff's Office has
released the body camera footage of the traffic stop that
(03:41):
led to the fatal shooting, and it is, for the
most part, exactly what I thought it would be. The
deputy stopped Huddle for speeding, both his pending felony cases
for driving without a license. Getting caught doing it again
would lead to even more felony charges and even more
jail time, and he couldn't bear the thought of it.
(04:04):
The footage of the traffic stop shows it was all
things considered, going fairly well in the beginning.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
Hello, hang on, good, how are you today? Pretty well?
The reason I'm pulling yours for seventy and fifty five?
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Any reason we're going.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
That fast today?
Speaker 1 (04:20):
I'll just keeping on the traffic okay, okay, fair enough,
You got your license and registration on you?
Speaker 2 (04:25):
How can I put in par Yeah?
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Yeah, Huddle had been pulled over for speeding. The deputy
was in good spirits and he wasn't approaching the car confrontationally.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
I just want to let you know that I'm a
January sixth defendant.
Speaker 4 (04:45):
What do you mean I stormed the cap.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
I'm winning on my pardon really.
Speaker 4 (04:49):
Yeah, And I can't really afford to getting in each
trouble right now.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
Okay, I understand, Okay, I understand.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
I am driving a lot of license right now. Okay,
So why are you doing that?
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Then? And early in the interaction, as he's producing his
identification for the officer, Huddle raises the issue of his
ongoing legal problems. He told the deputy he was still
working on getting his license back, but I'm actually not
entirely sure that's true. He had filed a case back
(05:20):
in twenty twenty two seeking the reinstatement of his license,
but court records show he'd withdrawn that petition voluntarily in
early twenty twenty three, probably because he was preoccupied during
that time with his federal criminal case. I can't find
any indication he'd filed a renewed petition to have his
license reinstated after he wrapped up his federal case. But
(05:42):
the officer's demeanor doesn't really change. He's keeping things light,
chatting with Huddle about the dog in the backseat of
the van, and then he returned to the cruiser with
Huddle's documents, and at this point he knows he's going
to be making an arrest. Whatever comes back from dispatch.
Huddle has already told the officer that he's driving without
a license, so he radios for animal Control to meet
(06:05):
him on the scene to take Huddle's dog, and he
walks back to the minivan and he asks Huddle to
step out of the car, and as the two men
stand behind Huddles van, the deputy explains that he is
going to have to place him under arrest. Okay, so
today you're getting off with the verbal warning for the speed.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
However, your habitual traffic violator I know, which means.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
That you are at a felony status for driving while suspended.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
So today you are going to come with me. Well
I can't, I can't.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
You're gonna have to. Okay, you're gonna go with me today?
Speaker 2 (06:42):
All right, I can't go to jail for this. You're
going to have to come, can I get it right? No?
Speaker 1 (06:49):
And at this point Huddle looks visibly distressed. He looks
very anxious. He's picking at his cuticles, and he's trying
to find some way out of this situation. And the
officer explains that there's really nothing he can do. Maybe
if this were a misdemeanor, they could find some other resolution,
but there's no wiggle room here because it's a felony.
(07:13):
And as the officer starts to ask him to turn
around and put his hands behind his back, Huddle makes
a break for it back to the driver's door of
his van. As Huddle crawls into the vehicle. The deputy
is inches behind him, saying, don't you do it, buddy.
He's reaching for him and grabbing at his jacket, and
the officer begins to shout no, no, no, and the
(07:36):
video at this point is obscured by a large pixelated rectangle.
You don't see Huddle reach for the gun, but it
seems like it may have been in the glove compartment
or somewhere on the passenger side, maybe on the floor,
and you hear Huddle say I'm shooting myself, and the
deputy cries out again, no, no, no. It's just ten
(08:00):
seconds from the time Huddle is scrambling back into the
front seat of the van to the sound of the
five shots from the deputy's gun as he's retreating backwards
away from the door. It's just ten seconds, and you
can't see most of what's actually happening. You can't see
where Huddle pulled the gun from or where he was
pointing it once it was in his hand, and that's
(08:24):
all that was said. Huddle says he's going to shoot himself,
and the deputy shouts no over and over again, and
then it's over. The State Police investigation into the incident
has concluded, and it was presented to the Clinton County
Prosecutor's Office for independent review. They found the deputy's actions
(08:47):
were legally justifiable under Indiana state law, and no charges
will be filed. Matthew Huddle is dead. We can't know
if he would have shot himself or the officer. We
can't know if he would have appeared in court two
weeks after that traffic stop for his still pending felony cases.
(09:08):
We can't know if he would have made amends, paid
his child support, tried to be a better father, or
tried to find a place in the right wing media
ecosystem that has now made him a martyr. We'll never know,
because he died there on the side of State Road fourteen.
That's the end of his story. And here's the episode
(09:31):
where I tried to tell the beginning of it. I'll
be back next week with a new episode of Weird
Little Guys. On January twenty sixth, twenty twenty five. Matthew
Huddle died. That much we know for certain. Usually I
(09:54):
tell you a story that's old enough that the ink
is not only dry, but it's begun to fade. A little.
The reports are in, the motions have been filed, argued,
and ruled on. The official story is set in stone.
That's not the case today. As I'm writing this. There
are still questions left unanswered. There is a state police
(10:16):
investigation into an officer involved shooting still under way. But
Matthew Huddle is dead.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
That much we know.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Just days before he died, he'd gotten some long awaited
good news. His uncle Dale was coming home. Both men
were among the nearly sixteen hundred people pardoned by Donald
Trump in one of his first actions after being sworn
in his president. Matthew had already served his six month sentence,
but when the pardons came through, Dale Huddle was just
(10:47):
a few months in to a two and a half
year term at a prison in Illinois.
Speaker 3 (10:52):
On the afternoon that he.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Died, Matthew Huddle was driving somewhere in Jasper County, Indiana.
I don't know where he was going, but I do
know he wasn't supposed to be driving, and according to
the Jasper County Sheriff, he was speeding. I can only
assume that the altercation that allegedly ensued began after the
sheriff's deputy discovered that Huddle did not have a valid
(11:15):
driver's license. The deputy claims Huddle resisted when he tried
to place him under arrest, and it was during this
altercation that the sheriff says the deputy discovered that Huddle
was in possession of a firearm, which she was not
legally allowed to have, the final moments of Matthew Huddle's
life will eventually be settled in some sort of official report.
(11:36):
Maybe they'll release the deputy's body worn camera footage. Maybe
his family will file a lawsuit. The final page hasn't
been written yet. I don't have the answers. All I
have is a sad story, but a man who believed
in nothing and died on the side of Indiana State
Road fourteen. I'm Molly Conger, his weird little guys. At
(12:18):
noon on January sixth, twenty twenty one, President Donald Trump
took the stage at the Ellipse, a generally unremarkable patch
of grass between the White House and the Washington Monument.
More than fifty thousand of his supporters had been standing
out in the cold all morning waiting to hear from him.
For months, he'd stoked the fires of a growing conspiracy
(12:43):
the election had been stolen. He gave speeches, held rallies,
fired off late night tweets, and filed lawsuits for those
who wanted to believe. There seemed to be mountains of
evidence of a deep and systemic rot. But the lawsuits
were failing, the votes were counted, and time was running out.
(13:06):
Today was the day that Congress would have the final
say in the twenty twenty election, and less than two
miles away, legislators were taking their seats in the Capitol
Building to certify the election. The crowd at the Ellipse
had come from all over the country to be a
part of history, and as their president spoke, many of
them heard the permission they'd been waiting for.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
And we fight, We fight like hell.
Speaker 4 (13:34):
And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going
to have a country anymore.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
This profound corruption would have to be excised by force
before this grave injustice could be done. He'd all but
confirmed that for them, and then, in the final seconds
of his speech, before he was played off the stage
by his favorite song, The Village People's Gay anthem Ymca,
(14:01):
he gave the crowd their marching orders.
Speaker 5 (14:04):
So let's walk down Pennsylvania avenue.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
I want to thank you all.
Speaker 5 (14:09):
God bless you, and God bless America.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
Thank you all for being here.
Speaker 4 (14:14):
This is incredible.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
Thank you very much.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Some in that crowd, perhaps anticipating the instructions he would
give at the end of his hour long speech, never
even heard him say that line. They'd already started walking
the mile and a half to their final destination that day,
the Capitol Building. You almost certainly already know how that
day ended. Even if you live in a cave in
(14:42):
the woods without access to the internet, you can't possibly
have escaped this news. Thousands of Trump supporters descended on
the United States Capitol Building. They tore down police barricades.
They engaged in a pitched battle with the Capitol police
on the steps outside, them forced their way into the building.
(15:03):
People died. United States Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick passed
away on January seventh after suffering a series of strokes.
His cause of death was eventually ruled to be natural causes,
though several neurologists have argued that the events of the
prior day almost certainly contributed to his death. Cute On
(15:23):
believer Ashley Babbitt was shot as she forced her way
into the building through a broken window. Roseanne Boylen was
trampled by the stampeding crowd, though her official cause of
death was ruled to be an amphetamine overdose, and Kevin
Greeson had a heart attack on the Capitol grounds. This week,
(15:43):
as I was combing back through my own videos of
that afternoon, I discovered that I had captured the moment
that I realized I was watching a man die.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
Over the roar of the crowd.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
You can hear someone next to me, I say, they've
been giving him chess compressions for way too long.
Speaker 3 (16:06):
And then there's my own voice.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
I know it's my voice, but I don't remember saying
it from years in the past. I heard myself say
he's going to die, and a few minutes after that,
I saw his dead body being carried away. Surely other
people saw him too, but no one seemed to react
at all to the sight of a corpse making its
(16:29):
way through the crowd. Over the last four years, federal
charges were filed against nearly sixteen hundred members of that crowd.
Nearly thirteen hundred had been convicted, with another three hundred
cases still open as of the four year anniversary of
the riot. Those cases will never go to trial, though,
(16:51):
because last month, hours after being sworn in as president
for the second time, Donald Trump issued a blanket pardon,
pardoning almost every single one of them, with the small
exception of a handful of rioters who only had their
sentences commuted. There are those who would rewrite the story
(17:12):
of that day, people who would tell you that it
was a peaceful protest, that they were patriots and tourists,
that they couldn't have known that their conduct was unlawful.
I'm not sure there's anything I can do to change
anyone's mind. The evidence to the contrary is readily available,
but it's never seemed to matter.
Speaker 3 (17:33):
I could tell you that I.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Saw a man, eyes red with pepper spray and wide
with wild determination, pry a metal drain grate out of
the ground with the end of an American flagpole, before
pressing back into the fray with his newly acquired weapon.
I could tell you I saw a man with a
literal pitchfork sprinting down the Capitol lawn. I could spend
(17:59):
the next year covering a different January sixth rioterer every week,
painstakingly tracking their affiliations with militias and white supremacist street gangs.
Speaker 3 (18:10):
But I don't really want to.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
There's plenty of media about the men who were there
that day. Old books have been written about them, Whole
podcasts have dedicated themselves to that work. There are some
weird little guys who ended up there that day, But
I'll get to But I can't bear the thought of
returning to that well for too many stories, because a
(18:36):
lot of those stories are kind of the same. While
the seditious conspiracy at the heart of the violence was
cooked up by oathkeepers and proud boys, men with an
ideological commitment to violence and ties to organized groups dedicated
to carrying it out, most of the crowd was made
(18:56):
up of men far too ordinary to be concidered a
weird little guy. And maybe that in itself is a
subject worth exploring. How could an ordinary man end up
crawling over broken glass on his way to break into
a senator's office. How could a reeltor from the suburbs
(19:17):
step over a woman's dead body in his haste to
physically confront a member of Congress. How did men with
back the blue bumper stickers on their brand new Ford
pickup trucks end up fistfighting cops on the steps of
the Capitol. I don't think I'm equipped to answer that,
(19:38):
but I can try to tell you the sad story
of how one of them ended up dead. Matthew Huddle
did not vote for Donald Trump in the twenty twenty election.
Perhaps he would have, It's impossible to say, but he'd
lost his right to vote years ago first felony conviction.
(20:03):
He struggled with alcohol addiction for his entire adult life,
racking up charges for driving while intoxicated at a pretty
alarming rate, and he was back in jail for yet
another duy in November of twenty twenty when the election
took place. He was fresh off this stint in the
county jail when his uncle Dale asked him for a favor.
(20:25):
He needed a ride to.
Speaker 3 (20:26):
Washington, d c.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
The reason given in the court documents is that Dale,
at sixty nine years old, had poor eyesight and quote
should not drive, especially at night.
Speaker 3 (20:40):
But I'm not sure.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
How to square that with the knowledge that Dale was
at that time employed as a delivery driver at her
auto parts store. Nor has any explanation offered as to
why Matthew agreed to drive his uncle seven hundred miles
from Indiana to d C without a valid driver's license.
In Matthew's own words, though he had nothing better to
(21:03):
do at the time, so he agreed. According to his
defense attorney.
Speaker 5 (21:11):
Matt is not a true believer in any political movement.
He cannot legally vote, and he knows very little about
politics and does not follow it. He is somewhat distrustful
of the government in general, but he did not know
if the twenty twenty election was stolen or.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
Not, so he claims he was only there that day
as something to do a favor for his uncle, and
he thought maybe he would be a historic event that
he could document through photos and video, and he did.
He took quite a bit of video that day, recording
(21:48):
himself as he and his uncle made their way down
the National Mall after listening to Trump's speech at the Ellipse.
As the capital came into view, Matthew Huddle says, allowed
to know, and in particular, we're going to see if
we can get inside. But moments later he turns to
his uncle Dale and says he's not sure they're going
(22:09):
to be able to get close because of the police presence.
His uncle replies quote, I think we ought to bum
rush the Capitol building arrest them all. We've got enough
people to do that, and Matthew agrees they could try
to get close. By two pm, they were deep within
(22:30):
the mass of rioters at the base of the steps
at the west entrance of the Capitol. Police on the
steps were firing flash bangs and tear gas canisters, trying
to keep the crowd at bay. In his video, as
described in the court filings, Matthew was surprised by the
flashbangs and asks if the cops are shooting a cannon.
(22:52):
I didn't manage to dig up the video evidence filed
in his case, but based on the description of flash
bangs and scattered chance of you say, you say, and
it being shortly after two pm, here's my best guess
at that exact moment being described. Oh yes, that is
(23:33):
my little squeal of surprise at the sound of the flashbangs.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
I was having a weird afternoon, and it was chaotic.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
At this point, the crowd was starting to press forward
and engage with the officers. No longer a mere observer
of history, Matthew Huddle joined them. He and his uncle
Dale fought their way to the front of the crowd,
where rioters were tearing down the bike racks that had
been set up in a feeble attempt to keep people
off the stairs. As officers struggled to keep the metal
(24:06):
bike racks out of the hands of the men who
were trying to seize them as weapons, Dale Huddle lunged forward,
jabbing his wooden flagpole into an officer's stomach, knocking him
off his feet. During the battle on the stairs, Dale
is seen in an officer's body worn camera footage.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
Screaming at them.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
Saying things like, look back there, there's a million of us.
Speaker 3 (24:29):
You think you can stop.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Us, and it's going to get real ugly if you
don't let us in. Man, it's going to get real ugly.
We're coming in. And at some point he turns to
his nephew and points up at the Capitol building and
he says, we're going in the front door. But Dale
Huddle never did make it inside. The men got separated
(24:52):
on the steps. The officers who'd been trying to hold
them at bay retreated under attack, giving Matthew a Huddle
an opening to run up the stairs, but Dale stayed
behind and kept fighting Instead of taking his chance to
climb the steps and actually go inside. He followed the
retreating officers, continuing the attack. Another video shows the old
(25:15):
man red faced with tears streaming from his eyes from
pepper spray unloaded by a rioter behind him, and he's
charging toward an officer trying to rip his gas mask off,
and then he tries to wrench the baton out of
another officer's hands. With his uncle preferring to stay behind
and fight, Matthew followed the crowd through the now open
(25:37):
doors on the Upper West Terrace. In his own video,
he says, we're going in as he crosses the threshold.
And for sixteen minutes he just wandered around in there.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
He didn't hurt.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
Anyone, he didn't steal anything, he didn't break anything, was
just kind of wandering around. It's hard to square the
reality of the situation with his behavior. On one hand,
you have to assume he knew what he was doing
was wrong. He hadn't actually engaged in any of the
(26:15):
violence outside, but he knew full well he was only
standing inside that building because men like his uncle had
fought their way through a police line to clear the
path to the stairs. But once he's inside, he's trying
to chat up the cops. He sidles up to one
officer and casually asks him, has this.
Speaker 3 (26:37):
Ever happened to you guys before.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
He briefly joined in with a group of guys just
marching around chanting, you say.
Speaker 3 (26:46):
Us say.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
Another rioter asked him if he knew what floor the
legislators were on, and, oddly, considering he claimed to know
nothing about the situation he'd found himself in that day,
he answered confidently the third floor. And then he thought
for a moment and turned to a nearby police officer
(27:08):
and asked the cop if the legislators had already gone
down to the basement, and by that point, the Senate
chambers had indeed been evacuated through the underground tunnels. And
as the group piles into the elevator, leaving Huddle behind,
he turns back to his phone, which is still recording,
and he narrates into his video they went up third
(27:33):
floor to the offices. He would later tell the FBI
that when he told that group of rioters they should
head up to the third floor, he was actually trying
to divert them away from members of Congress, who he
assumed were already being evacuated through the underground tunnels either way, though,
that is a curious level of insight into the building's
(27:55):
floor plans for a man who said he was just
somebody else's ride. After getting maced again, the novelty of
being inside the building seemed to have.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
Been wearing off.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
Officers were relatively futilely trying to convince people to leave,
trying to direct them down a hallway and towards an exit,
and Huddle says into his video that he has a
bad feeling about that that might be a trap, so
he found his way to a different exit. Outside, he
found his uncle Dale again, and the two men just
(28:31):
hung around outside on the Capitol grounds for a few hours,
and then they went home. In the days after the
(28:52):
Huddles returned home to Indiana, the FBI set to work
identifying the rioters. Those who assaulted federal officers were understandably
a high priority, and the bureau released images of those suspects,
each identified by the letters AFO for assault on a
Federal Officer and given a unique number. Just three months
(29:13):
after the riot, photos of AFO two nine to nine
went up on the FBI's website. Over the next few months,
more than a dozen tips came in about AFO two
nine nine, but none of.
Speaker 3 (29:28):
Them were right.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
It sounds like it was facial recognition that got Dale Huddle.
The charging documents just say that law enforcement databases were
used to match the images to his passport photos, and
by August, FBI agents were watching dale Huddle. They surveilled
him at his home and his workplace several times in
(29:50):
late twenty twenty one. In March of twenty twenty two,
they approached his boss, who identified Dale in several photos
from the riot and provided record showing he'd taken off
work the week of January sixth, twenty twenty one. Both
Matthew and Dale Huddle were eventually charged and arrested. In
November of twenty twenty two. Dale was picked up in
(30:12):
the parking lot on his way into work one morning,
and Matthew was, for reasons not entirely clear to me,
arrested in Boise, Idaho, and both men would eventually take
plea agreements. Just like over a thousand others of the
approximately thirteen hundred January sixth defendants who'd been convicted before
those blanket pardons, Matthew pled guilty to a single misdemeanor
(30:37):
count of entering and remaining in a restricted building and
was sentenced to six months. He finished serving that sentence
in July of twenty twenty four. Dale bled guilty to
a single felony account of assaulting an officer with a
dangerous weapon, specifically for jabbing that officer with his flagpole
during the struggle on the stairs. He was sentenced to
(30:58):
thirty months in July twenty twenty four, meaning he was
one of about two hundred January sixth defendants who were
actually still in federal custody at the time of the pardons.
And like I said, almost everyone who was convicted led guilty.
Actually going to trial in a federal criminal case is
(31:18):
pretty rare, a fact we've talked about before in other episodes.
It's not really a good system. There's a lot of
pressure to take a plea deal, and that may not
always be fair. In Dale's case, though, I think the
plea was absolutely the right call. A few days after
(31:39):
his arrest, after he'd been released on bond, a CBS
News reporter from Chicago knocked on his door in a
conversation that lasted more than seven minutes, Much to his
attorney's dismay. I'm sure the reporter pulled out a printed
copy of the criminal complaint.
Speaker 4 (32:00):
They're saying that that this is you, that you know
you have a flag pole, and that you're assaulting an officer.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
Well, you know they were trying to take the pole
from me, the flag from me. As you can see,
they're bent over backwards trying to get the pole away.
That's what looks like an attack. It was not that thought. Okay.
Speaker 4 (32:20):
So you're saying in court you'd like to see video.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
Absolutely, I will see testimony and body camps as well.
Speaker 4 (32:26):
But you you agree this is you.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
Absolutely, Okay. I'm not ashamed of being there. It was
our duty as patriots.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
First of all, never admit to a crime on camera,
even if you don't think you're guilty of it. Don't
say you did it, don't talk to the reporter. And
second of all, I'm not sure they were trying to
take my flag is a great defense given the context here.
Even if this picture did show an off trying to
(33:01):
take Dale's flagpole away from him, it's not like he
was taking candy from a baby. Dale Huddle was not
the only man out there that day using his American
flag as a deeply ironic weapon. A link the criminal
complaint in the show notes, and you can see the
picture they're talking about on the second page. The officer
(33:22):
is leaning back, almost as if he could be engaging
in a sort of tug of war over the flagpole.
But Dale's right about one thing. Pictures can be deceiving.
The officer isn't leaning back, He's falling down because an
old man poked him hard on the torso with a
(33:43):
big stick. And while Matthew's lawyers had argued that their
client had no real opinion on the twenty twenty election
one way or the other, that he simply found himself there,
Dale's lawyers did have to concede that he was a
true believer. In an on camera interview right after his arrest,
he told the reporter that he still believed the election
(34:05):
had been stolen and he believed he'd been following a
lawful order from his president.
Speaker 4 (34:12):
And do you believe that Trump invited you there and
that he wanted you to overthrow He.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
Invited us to go down there. Issue seen out film,
Let your voices be heard, Okay, but do you think
he encouraged violence? Well, I just sat there or stood
there with half a million people listening to his speech,
and in that speech, both Giuliani and hisself said, we
were going to have to fight like hell to save
(34:40):
our country. Okay, Now, rather it was a figure of
speech or not, It wasn't taken.
Speaker 4 (34:49):
That way, right, You didn't take it as a figure
of speech.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
No, So they couldn't really say that he didn't mean it,
and instead they argued that he'd been tricked. He was
seventy years old in twenty twenty one. He was a
blue collar worker who didn't even own a computer. From
the defense sentencing memo, he is.
Speaker 5 (35:15):
Not knowledgeable about the Internet. He was not aware that
Facebook and other social media platforms use machine learning algorithms
to individualize ads and to dictate content based on previous cliques.
Mister Huddle believed that the news he was reading was
covering the general scope of mainstream media and that it
was a representation of current events. From his viewpoint, the
(35:38):
vast majority of the media agreed that the democratic process
had been undermined by fraud.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
And I don't doubt that he and many men just
like him have absolutely rotted their brains on Facebook clickbait, right,
wing news. I have no trouble believing that he was
trapped in a cycle of seeing nothing but memes where
a minion in a maga hat is spreading election misinformation
or links to stories on sites called patriot windnews dot
(36:11):
biz with headlines like deep state destroyed, new election lawsuit,
bombshell rocks DC swamp. I have a separate email account
where I get one hundred emails that look like that
every single day. I know exactly what his Facebook feed
looked like, so that part's probably true.
Speaker 3 (36:30):
But I wish that.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
The government, with their vast investigative resources, had dug into
a curious incident in Dale's past, because I don't think
this was the first time that Dale Huddle got worked
up about the need to go to war with the government. Now,
to be clear, dale Huddle had no criminal history.
Speaker 3 (36:53):
That's true.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
The government didn't miss something that egregious. And I'm even
willing to believe the defense memo is being truthful when
they say that at seventy years old, Dale wasn't a
member of any extremist groups.
Speaker 3 (37:07):
But I found a.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
Picture, a single photograph taken on November fourteenth, two thousand
and if I had the kinds of resources that the
government has. I would have tried to find out more
about this picture. It's just one picture in the newspaper
snap by an Associated Press photographer, and it's a picture
(37:30):
of Dale Huddle with a flag. Unlike the photo of
Dale using an American flag as a weapon on January sixth,
this photo shows a slightly younger Dale Huddle and he's
trying to figure out how to affix his Gadsden flag,
you know, the one with the snake that doesn't want
to be stepped on, and he's trying to affix it
(37:50):
to the window of a church. November fourteenth, two thousand,
was the first day of a ninety two day standoff
with US Marshalls at the Indianapolis Baptist Temple. After years
of litigation, a federal judge had finally given the order
for the church to vacate the premises. For seventeen years,
(38:13):
the Indianapolis Baptist Temple, under Pastor Greg Dixon, had not
been paying its taxes. You're probably saying, wait, I thought
churches were tax exempt, and they are. That's true. Churches
aren't generally speaking automatically exempt from federal income tax, but
(38:33):
if they have paid employees.
Speaker 3 (38:35):
They still have to withhold.
Speaker 1 (38:37):
And remit employment tax, and the Indianapolis Baptist Temple had
been refusing to do that since nineteen eighty four, and
so by the year two thousand they owed the irs
over six million dollars.
Speaker 3 (38:52):
And this was an intentional, deliberate act.
Speaker 1 (38:55):
They didn't forget that they had to do payroll tax.
They didn't make a mistake. The church had originally been
incorporated in nineteen fifty and for almost thirty four years
the church had a valid employer identification number. They filed
paperwork with the state to keep their corporate entity in
good standing. They paid employment taxes to the federal government.
Speaker 3 (39:18):
And then in.
Speaker 1 (39:19):
Nineteen eighty three, Greg Dixon, who'd been the pastor at
the church since nineteen fifty five, changed his mind. He
transferred all of the church's assets into an unincorporated religious society,
and then he changed the corporation's name, which had previously
been Indianapolis Baptist Temple, he changed it to Not a
(39:40):
Church Incorporated, and so the church itself no longer exists
on paper at all, and Dixon is using this not
a Church corporate entity to run a group called the
American Coalition for Unregistered Churches. It would later be known
as the Unregistered Baptist Fellowship.
Speaker 3 (40:01):
Greg Dixon believed that doing.
Speaker 1 (40:03):
Business with the federal government was against his religion. Having
to do things like tell the irs that your church
would like to be recognized as a five to one
C three tax exempt entity or filing paperwork with the
state actually contravenes the authority of Christ, and if you
make him do it, you're violating his religious liberty. The
(40:26):
unregistered Church movement wasn't just refusing to pay their taxes.
They wanted to avoid almost any contact with the government.
Churches shouldn't have to abide by building codes or zoning laws,
or get fire inspections. Babies shouldn't have birth certificates. A
wedding shouldn't involve a marriage license. In fact, no one
should have any kind of license. Many of the articles
(40:50):
I found about this movement make sure to add that
they do believe that they can use the United States
Postal Service, but it is a sin to use zip codes.
The almost complete overlap of guys who don't want to
pay their taxes and guys who are willing to take
up arms against the government is something else surely explore
(41:12):
in depth in an episode dedicated to some character in
the tax protester movement, but the reason for it is
probably pretty obvious, and Pastor Greg Dixon wasn't just refusing.
Speaker 3 (41:23):
To pay his taxes. He wanted war.
Speaker 1 (41:29):
In nineteen ninety two, Greg Dixon gave a speech at
an event nicknamed the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous after the siege
at Ruby Ridge, a Christian identity preacher in Colorado put
out the call the disparate elements of the radical right
needed to put their heads together and come up with
a strategy. Klansmen, Neo Nazis, anti Semitic pastors, militia leaders,
(41:53):
Neo Confederates, tax protesters, bigots, and anti government extremists of
all stripes in Colorado, and all the big names were there.
Willie Muther, Peers from National Alliance, Richard Butler from Arian Nations,
Louis Beam, Kirk Lyons, James Wickstrom. As Kathleen Blue wrote
in her book Bring the War Home, the militia movement
(42:16):
as we know it today emerged from the leaders, organizations,
and tactics of white power organization, and this meeting is
widely regarded as the birthplace of the modern American militia movement,
and so at the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous, just before Louis
Beam's speech about leaderless resistance, Pastor Greg Dixon took the
(42:40):
stage to call for the establishment of Christian militias, declaring
we are at war. And Greg Dixon was hardly new
to organized racism. In the nineteen seventies, his church had
hosted meetings of a group called Americans for America, a
KKK affiliated organization that opposed school integration. Indiana's Grand Dragon
(43:04):
Bill Cheney was a member of the congregation, but in
the early nineties he was at the bleeding edge of
a new frontier in white power. All that to say,
this old picture of dale Huddle outside of a church
might sound terribly innocuous. Maybe that's his church, and maybe
(43:25):
he didn't know why his pastor wasn't paying his taxes,
but it was not. Dale Huddle isn't even Baptist. He
grew up Lutheran but has been a member of a
non denominational megachurch called the Family Christian Center since nineteen
eighty eight. Ever since his mother died. No, dale Huddle
(43:46):
had no direct connection to this church that I can find.
But a call had been put out. In September of
two thousand. After years in court, a judge gave the
order they had until noon on November fourteenth to get
out of the building. The government was taking possession of
the property, and US Marshals were authorized to use force
(44:09):
if necessary. Michigan Militia leader Norman Olsen ordered militias around
the country to do their duty and defend the church,
telling his followers that this was going to be Waco
Part two. Charlie Puckett of the Kentucky Militia was there
on November fourteenth. As congregants waited for the US marshals
to arrive and with news crews rolling in the parking lot,
(44:33):
Pastor Dixon asked the contingent of Klansmen who showed up
to support him to maybe stay outside the church, but
he didn't ask them to leave or disavow their support,
and that's when this photo was taken. On November fourteenth,
two thousand, parking lot full of Klansmen, Militia men standing by,
(44:56):
and Dale huddles outside the Indianapolis Baptist Temple trying to
figure out how to hang a Gadsden flag on the windows.
He'd driven two hours from his home in Crown Point,
and there was no Facebook in two thousand. He didn't
see a meme that convinced him to go to Indianapolis.
(45:16):
There's no indication that he was a member of any
of the militia or clan groups that were there that day,
but it does seem quite possible that he got the
same message they did about showing up for Waco Part two.
And just so this threat isn't left hanging, the big
crowd that showed up on day one of the standoff
(45:37):
got board and went home. US marshals obviously did not
want Waco Part two, so they just kept their distance
and waited them out. It took three months, but in
February of two thousand and one they did seize the building.
No one was injured, but Greg Dixon was carried out
(45:58):
on a stretcher because he refused to walk. So that's
a rather lengthy aside just to contextualize a single twenty
(46:19):
five year old photograph that doesn't prove anything at all,
but it left me wondering if the US Marshals had
taken a heavier handed approach at the Indianapolis Baptist Temple
would I be looking at two photos twenty years apart
of Dale Huddle trying to skewer a cop with a flagpole.
(46:41):
His lawyers argued that he was just a confused old
man who didn't know how to use the internet, and
he got tricked into believing he needed to go to
DC to stop the steal. But the possibility that twenty
years earlier, some militia newsletter tricked him into thinking he
needed to stop a different theft, that of church property
by the IR, really changes the story for me. Back
(47:05):
in twenty twenty one, though, after the riote of the Capitol,
Matthew Huddle was just living his life as usual. Matthew
Huddle's life as usual involved getting charged three separate times
between July and November for driving with a suspended license
as a habitual offender whose driving privileges had been revoked
after repeated d uise. Each new offense of this kind
(47:27):
was a felony. In August of that year, his son's
mother died of a drug overdose. He filed for bankruptcy
that same week, and filing show he owed more than
thirteen thousand dollars in child support to a different woman,
the mother of his daughter. Neither of those children were
in Matthew's custody after his conviction. In his January sixth case,
(47:49):
his lawyers wrote that he had a quote great relationship
with his son. I hope that's true, and even if
it's not, my heart breaks for a teenage boy who
lost his mother to an overdose in twenty twenty one,
he saw his father go to prison in twenty twenty three,
and then he lost his father entirely just last month.
(48:11):
But great is the only word used there to describe
a relationship that I suspect may have been more complicated
than that. In two thousand and nine, Matthew Huddle flew
into a rage after his son, who was just three
years old at the time, had what court records describe
as a bathroom accident. It's a very normal thing for
(48:34):
a three year old to do at that age. You're
still sending a change of pants with them to school
just in case. What's not normal, though, is beating a
toddler so severely that he can't sit down for a week.
And the court records call it a spanking. But nothing
I could find offered me any kind of explanation for
(48:57):
how a spanking could leave bruises on a child's neck.
After Huddle died last week, several the articles I read
about his death quoted an attorney who'd been representing him
in his dui cases for nearly twenty years, and his
lawyer says that the man he'd known was not violent.
(49:19):
I don't know what else you call this, I guess
in that lawyer's defense, it does look like he'd hired
a different attorney when he was charged with beating his
son and his son's mother. After Matthew Huddle blood guilty
in twenty twenty three to that single misdemeanor charge of
entering and remaining in a restricted building on January sixth,
(49:41):
his lawyers asked for a sentence of probation with no
jail time. They cited his lack of ideological motivation for
being there, his need to be there for his children,
and his tragic backstory and struggle with alcoholism. And there
is a strange and tragic backstory here, but they don't
(50:02):
actually get into it in this court filing. This part
I pieced together from state court records, old newspapers.
Speaker 3 (50:09):
And Facebook posts.
Speaker 1 (50:12):
After serving his sentence for meeting his son, he was
released from jail in twenty thirteen, and he very quickly
took up with a new girlfriend. Based on the apparent
age of a photo of their daughter that he posted
online in twenty fifteen, she had to have been pregnant
with Huddle's child before she ended her marriage to another man.
(50:32):
I have said this before, comes up often oddly, but
I don't care about that. Her infidelity is between her,
her husband, and her boyfriend. I only mention it because
of a curious coincidence of dates. The same week her
divorce was finalized, someone shot Matthew Huddle. There's a single
(50:58):
mention in the local newspaper in Febuary twenty fifteen, just
a few days after his daughter's mother finalized her divorce,
that Huddle had been shot in what was only described
as quote an incident between family members, and the article
quotes an officer who says that no one was taken
into custody at this time, and he wouldn't say how
(51:19):
the shooter was related to the victim. I couldn't find
any court records that indicated the charges were ever filed
against anyone, but I could only check the names I
thought of his suspects. So it's a bit of a
needle in a haystack, whoever it was, though someone close
to him shot Matthew in the back of the knee
(51:39):
and left him with a lifelong injury, and three years later,
in twenty eighteen, he was asleep in his bed when
he woke up to two men beating him with baseball
bats and hammers. The local newspaper reported the attack was
motivated by a child custody dispute. One of the assailants,
(52:00):
Kurt Falkenberg, was in a relationship with the mother of
Huddle's son. The other man was Falkenberg's uncle, Jeffrey Martin,
though the two men were only a few years apart
in age, and the men focused their blows on Huddle's
left leg because they knew he had a metal rod
in there from the surgeries he'd gotten after getting shot
(52:21):
in the leg in his last domestic dispute. Much like
the story of Matthew and Dale Huddle, this story of
a very stupid crime committed by an uncle and a
nephew ends tragically. As Falkenberg and Martin fled the scene,
they crashed. Falkenberg, who had been driving, was pronounced dead
(52:42):
at the scene. Officers responding to the car accident which
put another driver in the hospital with two broken legs,
found an open bottle of whiskey in Falkenburg's car, and
they eventually found Jeffrey Martin passed out drunk in a
creek bed on the side of the road. The following year,
(53:03):
in twenty nineteen, Matthew Huddle was diagnosed with cirrhosis of
the liver. Twenty years of alcoholism had finally caught up
to him. The dui he got that summer was the
one that put him back in jail until shortly before
he drove to Washington, d C. In January of twenty
twenty one. Now I've read a lot of sentencing memos.
(53:25):
That's the document filed at the end of a case,
after a guilty plea or a guilty verdict, where each
side makes their case one last time, not about guilt
or innocence now that's settled, but about what they think
the punishment should be. And we have an adversarial court system.
Everyone is technically ethically bound to be honest, and the
(53:47):
purpose of the courts is supposed to be to seek
the truth, but really everyone is there to win, to
have their version of the truth ruled to be the
most true. So I'm really used to seeing a defense
attorney's sob story and a prosecutor's exaggeration. But I wonder
maybe if Matthew Huddle's lawyers really were telling a mostly
(54:11):
true story.
Speaker 3 (54:13):
He didn't vote, he couldn't.
Speaker 1 (54:16):
His family doesn't seem very political. No one in his
family has ever donated so much as a dollar to
any federal election. And he did have a long history
of making spectacularly bad decisions and finding himself in some
really outlandishly bad situations. I mean, he got his legs
(54:38):
broken in two unrelated domestic disputes. That doesn't even sound possible.
So maybe Matthew Huddle is the only January sixth defendant
who really did end up there by accident, with no
ideological motivation or violent intent. Plenty of them claimed that
in court and it never really rings true. But maybe
(55:01):
for Matthew Huddle, wandering into the Capitol that day was
just the same kind of criminal accident he was often
finding himself in, like driving away without paying for a
tank of gas because he was too drunk to figure
out how to operate the payment system, but somehow not
too drunk to drive when I first saw the news
(55:21):
that had recently pardoned January sixth, the defendant had been
shot and killed while resisting arrest during a traffic stop.
I can't say that I was surprised, but.
Speaker 3 (55:31):
I was wrong in my initial assumption.
Speaker 1 (55:34):
I figured a guy who found himself on that trajectory
would be I don't know, a sovereign citizen or a
guy who'd done real violence at the capitol, a guy
who had violent plans for the future. Surely those two
facts about his life being at the Capitol that day
and dying the way that he did, Surely those two
facts would be directly related.
Speaker 3 (55:56):
But I'm not sure they are.
Speaker 1 (56:00):
It's unwise to speculate about the altercation that may have
occurred in the minutes before Huddle was shot and killed
by a Jasper County Sheriff's deputy. I don't know what
happened there on the side of Indiana State Road fourteen.
We don't know what was said or why things escalated,
or where exactly the deputy saw the gun. But I
do know that Matthew Huddle was due back in court
(56:22):
next week for a status conference on a stack of
still unresolved felony cases. For driving without a license, just
days after getting his federal pardon. He was probably happy
for his uncle Dale, but he'd already done his federal time,
and now he was looking down the barrel at another
stay in the county jail, and when those blue lights
(56:43):
came on behind him, he probably knew that this would
be yet another felony charge.
Speaker 3 (56:51):
He had a long list of state charges.
Speaker 1 (56:54):
A federal pardon did nothing for him. In the end,
it didn't matter who president was. But I guess it
never really did matter to Matthew. Weird Little Guys is
(57:17):
a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written,
and recorded by me Willie Conger. Our executive producers are
Sophie Littterman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by
the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed
by Brad Dickert. You can email me at Rudlue Guys
Podcast at gmail dot com.
Speaker 3 (57:36):
I will definitely read it, but I'm not going to
answer it. It's nothing personal.
Speaker 1 (57:41):
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other
listeners on the Weird Little Guy subreddit. Just don't post
anything that's going to make you one of my weird
little guys,
Cool Zone Media. Hey Molly Conger here. I know I
left you with a bit of a cliffhanger last week,
and I'm so sorry I don't have the second half
of that story for you this week. I thought maybe
it was the subject matter of giving me a stomach
(00:22):
ache at first, but I spent half of this week
lad up with a stomach virus and there was just
no way to write that story the way I wanted
to in the time that I had left after I
finished puking. That'll have to wait until next week. So
we've got to rerun this week. But don't switch it
off just yet. I do have a little update to
the episode for you here at the top. The episode
(00:45):
originally ran a month ago, so it may still be
fresh in your mind. It's the story of Matthew Huddle,
the January sixth writer who was shot and killed during
a traffic stock just days after he received his federal pardon.
And when I wrote it was a lot of unanswered questions.
We have some of those answers. Now Here's where I
(01:06):
left things a month ago. It's unwise to speculate about
the altercation that may have occurred in the minutes before
Huddle was shot and killed by a Jasper County Sheriff's deputy.
I don't know what happened there on the side of
Indiana State Road fourteen. We don't know what was said,
or why things escalated, or where exactly the deputy saw
(01:27):
the gun. But I do know that Matthew Huddle was
due back in court next week for a status conference
on a stack of still unresolved felony cases for driving
without a license, just days after getting his federal pardon.
He was probably happy for his uncle Dale, but he'd
already done his federal time, and now he was looking
(01:49):
down the barrel at another stay in the county jail,
and when those blue lights came on behind him, he
probably knew that this would be yet another felony charge.
After the episode originally aired, I saw some listeners expressing displeasure,
discussed even that I'd framed his story as a tragic one.
(02:14):
I'm not here how to tell you how you should feel.
That's your business, But for me, his story is sad.
He wasn't an evil man. I wouldn't go as far
as to say he was a good man. He had
a slew of dyse. He had some history of domestic
violence allegations and a stint in jail for child abuse.
(02:38):
He stormed the capitol. He owed a lot of child support.
I don't think he's a person I would have liked,
but he was also a man who struggled with alcohol addiction,
and regardless of what he'd done, his death left two
children without any chance of ever reconciling with their father.
(02:58):
And for me least, there's never any peace in knowing
a person's life ended violently, particularly when the cause of
death was a bullet from a police officer's gun. I
have to believe that people can change that. Redemption and
atonement are always possible for those who sincerely strive to
(03:19):
earn that. But a dead man cannot make amends. That
possibility is gone now, and that makes it a tragedy
in my mind. But however you feel about the way
things ended for Matthew Huddle, we do at least have
some answers now that the Jasper County Sheriff's Office has
released the body camera footage of the traffic stop that
(03:41):
led to the fatal shooting, and it is, for the
most part, exactly what I thought it would be. The
deputy stopped Huddle for speeding, both his pending felony cases
for driving without a license. Getting caught doing it again
would lead to even more felony charges and even more
jail time, and he couldn't bear the thought of it.
(04:04):
The footage of the traffic stop shows it was all
things considered, going fairly well in the beginning.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
Hello, hang on, good, how are you today? Pretty well?
The reason I'm pulling yours for seventy and fifty five?
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Any reason we're going.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
That fast today?
Speaker 1 (04:20):
I'll just keeping on the traffic okay, okay, fair enough,
You got your license and registration on you?
Speaker 2 (04:25):
How can I put in par Yeah?
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Yeah, Huddle had been pulled over for speeding. The deputy
was in good spirits and he wasn't approaching the car confrontationally.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
I just want to let you know that I'm a
January sixth defendant.
Speaker 4 (04:45):
What do you mean I stormed the cap.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
I'm winning on my pardon really.
Speaker 4 (04:49):
Yeah, And I can't really afford to getting in each
trouble right now.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
Okay, I understand, Okay, I understand.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
I am driving a lot of license right now. Okay,
So why are you doing that?
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Then? And early in the interaction, as he's producing his
identification for the officer, Huddle raises the issue of his
ongoing legal problems. He told the deputy he was still
working on getting his license back, but I'm actually not
entirely sure that's true. He had filed a case back
(05:20):
in twenty twenty two seeking the reinstatement of his license,
but court records show he'd withdrawn that petition voluntarily in
early twenty twenty three, probably because he was preoccupied during
that time with his federal criminal case. I can't find
any indication he'd filed a renewed petition to have his
license reinstated after he wrapped up his federal case. But
(05:42):
the officer's demeanor doesn't really change. He's keeping things light,
chatting with Huddle about the dog in the backseat of
the van, and then he returned to the cruiser with
Huddle's documents, and at this point he knows he's going
to be making an arrest. Whatever comes back from dispatch.
Huddle has already told the officer that he's driving without
a license, so he radios for animal Control to meet
(06:05):
him on the scene to take Huddle's dog, and he
walks back to the minivan and he asks Huddle to
step out of the car, and as the two men
stand behind Huddles van, the deputy explains that he is
going to have to place him under arrest. Okay, so
today you're getting off with the verbal warning for the speed.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
However, your habitual traffic violator I know, which means.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
That you are at a felony status for driving while suspended.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
So today you are going to come with me. Well
I can't, I can't.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
You're gonna have to. Okay, you're gonna go with me today?
Speaker 2 (06:42):
All right, I can't go to jail for this. You're
going to have to come, can I get it right? No?
Speaker 1 (06:49):
And at this point Huddle looks visibly distressed. He looks
very anxious. He's picking at his cuticles, and he's trying
to find some way out of this situation. And the
officer explains that there's really nothing he can do. Maybe
if this were a misdemeanor, they could find some other resolution,
but there's no wiggle room here because it's a felony.
(07:13):
And as the officer starts to ask him to turn
around and put his hands behind his back, Huddle makes
a break for it back to the driver's door of
his van. As Huddle crawls into the vehicle. The deputy
is inches behind him, saying, don't you do it, buddy.
He's reaching for him and grabbing at his jacket, and
the officer begins to shout no, no, no, and the
(07:36):
video at this point is obscured by a large pixelated rectangle.
You don't see Huddle reach for the gun, but it
seems like it may have been in the glove compartment
or somewhere on the passenger side, maybe on the floor,
and you hear Huddle say I'm shooting myself, and the
deputy cries out again, no, no, no. It's just ten
(08:00):
seconds from the time Huddle is scrambling back into the
front seat of the van to the sound of the
five shots from the deputy's gun as he's retreating backwards
away from the door. It's just ten seconds, and you
can't see most of what's actually happening. You can't see
where Huddle pulled the gun from or where he was
pointing it once it was in his hand, and that's
(08:24):
all that was said. Huddle says he's going to shoot himself,
and the deputy shouts no over and over again, and
then it's over. The State Police investigation into the incident
has concluded, and it was presented to the Clinton County
Prosecutor's Office for independent review. They found the deputy's actions
(08:47):
were legally justifiable under Indiana state law, and no charges
will be filed. Matthew Huddle is dead. We can't know
if he would have shot himself or the officer. We
can't know if he would have appeared in court two
weeks after that traffic stop for his still pending felony cases.
(09:08):
We can't know if he would have made amends, paid
his child support, tried to be a better father, or
tried to find a place in the right wing media
ecosystem that has now made him a martyr. We'll never know,
because he died there on the side of State Road fourteen.
That's the end of his story. And here's the episode
(09:31):
where I tried to tell the beginning of it. I'll
be back next week with a new episode of Weird
Little Guys. On January twenty sixth, twenty twenty five. Matthew
Huddle died. That much we know for certain. Usually I
(09:54):
tell you a story that's old enough that the ink
is not only dry, but it's begun to fade. A little.
The reports are in, the motions have been filed, argued,
and ruled on. The official story is set in stone.
That's not the case today. As I'm writing this. There
are still questions left unanswered. There is a state police
(10:16):
investigation into an officer involved shooting still under way. But
Matthew Huddle is dead.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
That much we know.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Just days before he died, he'd gotten some long awaited
good news. His uncle Dale was coming home. Both men
were among the nearly sixteen hundred people pardoned by Donald
Trump in one of his first actions after being sworn
in his president. Matthew had already served his six month sentence,
but when the pardons came through, Dale Huddle was just
(10:47):
a few months in to a two and a half
year term at a prison in Illinois.
Speaker 3 (10:52):
On the afternoon that he.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Died, Matthew Huddle was driving somewhere in Jasper County, Indiana.
I don't know where he was going, but I do
know he wasn't supposed to be driving, and according to
the Jasper County Sheriff, he was speeding. I can only
assume that the altercation that allegedly ensued began after the
sheriff's deputy discovered that Huddle did not have a valid
(11:15):
driver's license. The deputy claims Huddle resisted when he tried
to place him under arrest, and it was during this
altercation that the sheriff says the deputy discovered that Huddle
was in possession of a firearm, which she was not
legally allowed to have, the final moments of Matthew Huddle's
life will eventually be settled in some sort of official report.
(11:36):
Maybe they'll release the deputy's body worn camera footage. Maybe
his family will file a lawsuit. The final page hasn't
been written yet. I don't have the answers. All I
have is a sad story, but a man who believed
in nothing and died on the side of Indiana State
Road fourteen. I'm Molly Conger, his weird little guys. At
(12:18):
noon on January sixth, twenty twenty one, President Donald Trump
took the stage at the Ellipse, a generally unremarkable patch
of grass between the White House and the Washington Monument.
More than fifty thousand of his supporters had been standing
out in the cold all morning waiting to hear from him.
For months, he'd stoked the fires of a growing conspiracy
(12:43):
the election had been stolen. He gave speeches, held rallies,
fired off late night tweets, and filed lawsuits for those
who wanted to believe. There seemed to be mountains of
evidence of a deep and systemic rot. But the lawsuits
were failing, the votes were counted, and time was running out.
(13:06):
Today was the day that Congress would have the final
say in the twenty twenty election, and less than two
miles away, legislators were taking their seats in the Capitol
Building to certify the election. The crowd at the Ellipse
had come from all over the country to be a
part of history, and as their president spoke, many of
them heard the permission they'd been waiting for.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
And we fight, We fight like hell.
Speaker 4 (13:34):
And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going
to have a country anymore.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
This profound corruption would have to be excised by force
before this grave injustice could be done. He'd all but
confirmed that for them, and then, in the final seconds
of his speech, before he was played off the stage
by his favorite song, The Village People's Gay anthem Ymca,
(14:01):
he gave the crowd their marching orders.
Speaker 5 (14:04):
So let's walk down Pennsylvania avenue.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
I want to thank you all.
Speaker 5 (14:09):
God bless you, and God bless America.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
Thank you all for being here.
Speaker 4 (14:14):
This is incredible.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
Thank you very much.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Some in that crowd, perhaps anticipating the instructions he would
give at the end of his hour long speech, never
even heard him say that line. They'd already started walking
the mile and a half to their final destination that day,
the Capitol Building. You almost certainly already know how that
day ended. Even if you live in a cave in
(14:42):
the woods without access to the internet, you can't possibly
have escaped this news. Thousands of Trump supporters descended on
the United States Capitol Building. They tore down police barricades.
They engaged in a pitched battle with the Capitol police
on the steps outside, them forced their way into the building.
(15:03):
People died. United States Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick passed
away on January seventh after suffering a series of strokes.
His cause of death was eventually ruled to be natural causes,
though several neurologists have argued that the events of the
prior day almost certainly contributed to his death. Cute On
(15:23):
believer Ashley Babbitt was shot as she forced her way
into the building through a broken window. Roseanne Boylen was
trampled by the stampeding crowd, though her official cause of
death was ruled to be an amphetamine overdose, and Kevin
Greeson had a heart attack on the Capitol grounds. This week,
(15:43):
as I was combing back through my own videos of
that afternoon, I discovered that I had captured the moment
that I realized I was watching a man die.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
Over the roar of the crowd.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
You can hear someone next to me, I say, they've
been giving him chess compressions for way too long.
Speaker 3 (16:06):
And then there's my own voice.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
I know it's my voice, but I don't remember saying
it from years in the past. I heard myself say
he's going to die, and a few minutes after that,
I saw his dead body being carried away. Surely other
people saw him too, but no one seemed to react
at all to the sight of a corpse making its
(16:29):
way through the crowd. Over the last four years, federal
charges were filed against nearly sixteen hundred members of that crowd.
Nearly thirteen hundred had been convicted, with another three hundred
cases still open as of the four year anniversary of
the riot. Those cases will never go to trial, though,
(16:51):
because last month, hours after being sworn in as president
for the second time, Donald Trump issued a blanket pardon,
pardoning almost every single one of them, with the small
exception of a handful of rioters who only had their
sentences commuted. There are those who would rewrite the story
(17:12):
of that day, people who would tell you that it
was a peaceful protest, that they were patriots and tourists,
that they couldn't have known that their conduct was unlawful.
I'm not sure there's anything I can do to change
anyone's mind. The evidence to the contrary is readily available,
but it's never seemed to matter.
Speaker 3 (17:33):
I could tell you that I.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Saw a man, eyes red with pepper spray and wide
with wild determination, pry a metal drain grate out of
the ground with the end of an American flagpole, before
pressing back into the fray with his newly acquired weapon.
I could tell you I saw a man with a
literal pitchfork sprinting down the Capitol lawn. I could spend
(17:59):
the next year covering a different January sixth rioterer every week,
painstakingly tracking their affiliations with militias and white supremacist street gangs.
Speaker 3 (18:10):
But I don't really want to.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
There's plenty of media about the men who were there
that day. Old books have been written about them, Whole
podcasts have dedicated themselves to that work. There are some
weird little guys who ended up there that day, But
I'll get to But I can't bear the thought of
returning to that well for too many stories, because a
(18:36):
lot of those stories are kind of the same. While
the seditious conspiracy at the heart of the violence was
cooked up by oathkeepers and proud boys, men with an
ideological commitment to violence and ties to organized groups dedicated
to carrying it out, most of the crowd was made
(18:56):
up of men far too ordinary to be concidered a
weird little guy. And maybe that in itself is a
subject worth exploring. How could an ordinary man end up
crawling over broken glass on his way to break into
a senator's office. How could a reeltor from the suburbs
(19:17):
step over a woman's dead body in his haste to
physically confront a member of Congress. How did men with
back the blue bumper stickers on their brand new Ford
pickup trucks end up fistfighting cops on the steps of
the Capitol. I don't think I'm equipped to answer that,
(19:38):
but I can try to tell you the sad story
of how one of them ended up dead. Matthew Huddle
did not vote for Donald Trump in the twenty twenty election.
Perhaps he would have, It's impossible to say, but he'd
lost his right to vote years ago first felony conviction.
(20:03):
He struggled with alcohol addiction for his entire adult life,
racking up charges for driving while intoxicated at a pretty
alarming rate, and he was back in jail for yet
another duy in November of twenty twenty when the election
took place. He was fresh off this stint in the
county jail when his uncle Dale asked him for a favor.
(20:25):
He needed a ride to.
Speaker 3 (20:26):
Washington, d c.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
The reason given in the court documents is that Dale,
at sixty nine years old, had poor eyesight and quote
should not drive, especially at night.
Speaker 3 (20:40):
But I'm not sure.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
How to square that with the knowledge that Dale was
at that time employed as a delivery driver at her
auto parts store. Nor has any explanation offered as to
why Matthew agreed to drive his uncle seven hundred miles
from Indiana to d C without a valid driver's license.
In Matthew's own words, though he had nothing better to
(21:03):
do at the time, so he agreed. According to his
defense attorney.
Speaker 5 (21:11):
Matt is not a true believer in any political movement.
He cannot legally vote, and he knows very little about
politics and does not follow it. He is somewhat distrustful
of the government in general, but he did not know
if the twenty twenty election was stolen or.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
Not, so he claims he was only there that day
as something to do a favor for his uncle, and
he thought maybe he would be a historic event that
he could document through photos and video, and he did.
He took quite a bit of video that day, recording
(21:48):
himself as he and his uncle made their way down
the National Mall after listening to Trump's speech at the Ellipse.
As the capital came into view, Matthew Huddle says, allowed
to know, and in particular, we're going to see if
we can get inside. But moments later he turns to
his uncle Dale and says he's not sure they're going
(22:09):
to be able to get close because of the police presence.
His uncle replies quote, I think we ought to bum
rush the Capitol building arrest them all. We've got enough
people to do that, and Matthew agrees they could try
to get close. By two pm, they were deep within
(22:30):
the mass of rioters at the base of the steps
at the west entrance of the Capitol. Police on the
steps were firing flash bangs and tear gas canisters, trying
to keep the crowd at bay. In his video, as
described in the court filings, Matthew was surprised by the
flashbangs and asks if the cops are shooting a cannon.
(22:52):
I didn't manage to dig up the video evidence filed
in his case, but based on the description of flash
bangs and scattered chance of you say, you say, and
it being shortly after two pm, here's my best guess
at that exact moment being described. Oh yes, that is
(23:33):
my little squeal of surprise at the sound of the flashbangs.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
I was having a weird afternoon, and it was chaotic.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
At this point, the crowd was starting to press forward
and engage with the officers. No longer a mere observer
of history, Matthew Huddle joined them. He and his uncle
Dale fought their way to the front of the crowd,
where rioters were tearing down the bike racks that had
been set up in a feeble attempt to keep people
off the stairs. As officers struggled to keep the metal
(24:06):
bike racks out of the hands of the men who
were trying to seize them as weapons, Dale Huddle lunged forward,
jabbing his wooden flagpole into an officer's stomach, knocking him
off his feet. During the battle on the stairs, Dale
is seen in an officer's body worn camera footage.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
Screaming at them.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
Saying things like, look back there, there's a million of us.
Speaker 3 (24:29):
You think you can stop.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Us, and it's going to get real ugly if you
don't let us in. Man, it's going to get real ugly.
We're coming in. And at some point he turns to
his nephew and points up at the Capitol building and
he says, we're going in the front door. But Dale
Huddle never did make it inside. The men got separated
(24:52):
on the steps. The officers who'd been trying to hold
them at bay retreated under attack, giving Matthew a Huddle
an opening to run up the stairs, but Dale stayed
behind and kept fighting Instead of taking his chance to
climb the steps and actually go inside. He followed the
retreating officers, continuing the attack. Another video shows the old
(25:15):
man red faced with tears streaming from his eyes from
pepper spray unloaded by a rioter behind him, and he's
charging toward an officer trying to rip his gas mask off,
and then he tries to wrench the baton out of
another officer's hands. With his uncle preferring to stay behind
and fight, Matthew followed the crowd through the now open
(25:37):
doors on the Upper West Terrace. In his own video,
he says, we're going in as he crosses the threshold.
And for sixteen minutes he just wandered around in there.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
He didn't hurt.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
Anyone, he didn't steal anything, he didn't break anything, was
just kind of wandering around. It's hard to square the
reality of the situation with his behavior. On one hand,
you have to assume he knew what he was doing
was wrong. He hadn't actually engaged in any of the
(26:15):
violence outside, but he knew full well he was only
standing inside that building because men like his uncle had
fought their way through a police line to clear the
path to the stairs. But once he's inside, he's trying
to chat up the cops. He sidles up to one
officer and casually asks him, has this.
Speaker 3 (26:37):
Ever happened to you guys before.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
He briefly joined in with a group of guys just
marching around chanting, you say.
Speaker 3 (26:46):
Us say.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
Another rioter asked him if he knew what floor the
legislators were on, and, oddly, considering he claimed to know
nothing about the situation he'd found himself in that day,
he answered confidently the third floor. And then he thought
for a moment and turned to a nearby police officer
(27:08):
and asked the cop if the legislators had already gone
down to the basement, and by that point, the Senate
chambers had indeed been evacuated through the underground tunnels. And
as the group piles into the elevator, leaving Huddle behind,
he turns back to his phone, which is still recording,
and he narrates into his video they went up third
(27:33):
floor to the offices. He would later tell the FBI
that when he told that group of rioters they should
head up to the third floor, he was actually trying
to divert them away from members of Congress, who he
assumed were already being evacuated through the underground tunnels either way, though,
that is a curious level of insight into the building's
(27:55):
floor plans for a man who said he was just
somebody else's ride. After getting maced again, the novelty of
being inside the building seemed to have.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
Been wearing off.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
Officers were relatively futilely trying to convince people to leave,
trying to direct them down a hallway and towards an exit,
and Huddle says into his video that he has a
bad feeling about that that might be a trap, so
he found his way to a different exit. Outside, he
found his uncle Dale again, and the two men just
(28:31):
hung around outside on the Capitol grounds for a few hours,
and then they went home. In the days after the
(28:52):
Huddles returned home to Indiana, the FBI set to work
identifying the rioters. Those who assaulted federal officers were understandably
a high priority, and the bureau released images of those suspects,
each identified by the letters AFO for assault on a
Federal Officer and given a unique number. Just three months
(29:13):
after the riot, photos of AFO two nine to nine
went up on the FBI's website. Over the next few months,
more than a dozen tips came in about AFO two
nine nine, but none of.
Speaker 3 (29:28):
Them were right.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
It sounds like it was facial recognition that got Dale Huddle.
The charging documents just say that law enforcement databases were
used to match the images to his passport photos, and
by August, FBI agents were watching dale Huddle. They surveilled
him at his home and his workplace several times in
(29:50):
late twenty twenty one. In March of twenty twenty two,
they approached his boss, who identified Dale in several photos
from the riot and provided record showing he'd taken off
work the week of January sixth, twenty twenty one. Both
Matthew and Dale Huddle were eventually charged and arrested. In
November of twenty twenty two. Dale was picked up in
(30:12):
the parking lot on his way into work one morning,
and Matthew was, for reasons not entirely clear to me,
arrested in Boise, Idaho, and both men would eventually take
plea agreements. Just like over a thousand others of the
approximately thirteen hundred January sixth defendants who'd been convicted before
those blanket pardons, Matthew pled guilty to a single misdemeanor
(30:37):
count of entering and remaining in a restricted building and
was sentenced to six months. He finished serving that sentence
in July of twenty twenty four. Dale bled guilty to
a single felony account of assaulting an officer with a
dangerous weapon, specifically for jabbing that officer with his flagpole
during the struggle on the stairs. He was sentenced to
(30:58):
thirty months in July twenty twenty four, meaning he was
one of about two hundred January sixth defendants who were
actually still in federal custody at the time of the pardons.
And like I said, almost everyone who was convicted led guilty.
Actually going to trial in a federal criminal case is
(31:18):
pretty rare, a fact we've talked about before in other episodes.
It's not really a good system. There's a lot of
pressure to take a plea deal, and that may not
always be fair. In Dale's case, though, I think the
plea was absolutely the right call. A few days after
(31:39):
his arrest, after he'd been released on bond, a CBS
News reporter from Chicago knocked on his door in a
conversation that lasted more than seven minutes, Much to his
attorney's dismay. I'm sure the reporter pulled out a printed
copy of the criminal complaint.
Speaker 4 (32:00):
They're saying that that this is you, that you know
you have a flag pole, and that you're assaulting an officer.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
Well, you know they were trying to take the pole
from me, the flag from me. As you can see,
they're bent over backwards trying to get the pole away.
That's what looks like an attack. It was not that thought. Okay.
Speaker 4 (32:20):
So you're saying in court you'd like to see video.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
Absolutely, I will see testimony and body camps as well.
Speaker 4 (32:26):
But you you agree this is you.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
Absolutely, Okay. I'm not ashamed of being there. It was
our duty as patriots.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
First of all, never admit to a crime on camera,
even if you don't think you're guilty of it. Don't
say you did it, don't talk to the reporter. And
second of all, I'm not sure they were trying to
take my flag is a great defense given the context here.
Even if this picture did show an off trying to
(33:01):
take Dale's flagpole away from him, it's not like he
was taking candy from a baby. Dale Huddle was not
the only man out there that day using his American
flag as a deeply ironic weapon. A link the criminal
complaint in the show notes, and you can see the
picture they're talking about on the second page. The officer
(33:22):
is leaning back, almost as if he could be engaging
in a sort of tug of war over the flagpole.
But Dale's right about one thing. Pictures can be deceiving.
The officer isn't leaning back, He's falling down because an
old man poked him hard on the torso with a
(33:43):
big stick. And while Matthew's lawyers had argued that their
client had no real opinion on the twenty twenty election
one way or the other, that he simply found himself there,
Dale's lawyers did have to concede that he was a
true believer. In an on camera interview right after his arrest,
he told the reporter that he still believed the election
(34:05):
had been stolen and he believed he'd been following a
lawful order from his president.
Speaker 4 (34:12):
And do you believe that Trump invited you there and
that he wanted you to overthrow He.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
Invited us to go down there. Issue seen out film,
Let your voices be heard, Okay, but do you think
he encouraged violence? Well, I just sat there or stood
there with half a million people listening to his speech,
and in that speech, both Giuliani and hisself said, we
were going to have to fight like hell to save
(34:40):
our country. Okay, Now, rather it was a figure of
speech or not, It wasn't taken.
Speaker 4 (34:49):
That way, right, You didn't take it as a figure
of speech.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
No, So they couldn't really say that he didn't mean it,
and instead they argued that he'd been tricked. He was
seventy years old in twenty twenty one. He was a
blue collar worker who didn't even own a computer. From
the defense sentencing memo, he is.
Speaker 5 (35:15):
Not knowledgeable about the Internet. He was not aware that
Facebook and other social media platforms use machine learning algorithms
to individualize ads and to dictate content based on previous cliques.
Mister Huddle believed that the news he was reading was
covering the general scope of mainstream media and that it
was a representation of current events. From his viewpoint, the
(35:38):
vast majority of the media agreed that the democratic process
had been undermined by fraud.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
And I don't doubt that he and many men just
like him have absolutely rotted their brains on Facebook clickbait, right,
wing news. I have no trouble believing that he was
trapped in a cycle of seeing nothing but memes where
a minion in a maga hat is spreading election misinformation
or links to stories on sites called patriot windnews dot
(36:11):
biz with headlines like deep state destroyed, new election lawsuit,
bombshell rocks DC swamp. I have a separate email account
where I get one hundred emails that look like that
every single day. I know exactly what his Facebook feed
looked like, so that part's probably true.
Speaker 3 (36:30):
But I wish that.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
The government, with their vast investigative resources, had dug into
a curious incident in Dale's past, because I don't think
this was the first time that Dale Huddle got worked
up about the need to go to war with the government. Now,
to be clear, dale Huddle had no criminal history.
Speaker 3 (36:53):
That's true.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
The government didn't miss something that egregious. And I'm even
willing to believe the defense memo is being truthful when
they say that at seventy years old, Dale wasn't a
member of any extremist groups.
Speaker 3 (37:07):
But I found a.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
Picture, a single photograph taken on November fourteenth, two thousand
and if I had the kinds of resources that the
government has. I would have tried to find out more
about this picture. It's just one picture in the newspaper
snap by an Associated Press photographer, and it's a picture
(37:30):
of Dale Huddle with a flag. Unlike the photo of
Dale using an American flag as a weapon on January sixth,
this photo shows a slightly younger Dale Huddle and he's
trying to figure out how to affix his Gadsden flag,
you know, the one with the snake that doesn't want
to be stepped on, and he's trying to affix it
(37:50):
to the window of a church. November fourteenth, two thousand,
was the first day of a ninety two day standoff
with US Marshalls at the Indianapolis Baptist Temple. After years
of litigation, a federal judge had finally given the order
for the church to vacate the premises. For seventeen years,
(38:13):
the Indianapolis Baptist Temple, under Pastor Greg Dixon, had not
been paying its taxes. You're probably saying, wait, I thought
churches were tax exempt, and they are. That's true. Churches
aren't generally speaking automatically exempt from federal income tax, but
(38:33):
if they have paid employees.
Speaker 3 (38:35):
They still have to withhold.
Speaker 1 (38:37):
And remit employment tax, and the Indianapolis Baptist Temple had
been refusing to do that since nineteen eighty four, and
so by the year two thousand they owed the irs
over six million dollars.
Speaker 3 (38:52):
And this was an intentional, deliberate act.
Speaker 1 (38:55):
They didn't forget that they had to do payroll tax.
They didn't make a mistake. The church had originally been
incorporated in nineteen fifty and for almost thirty four years
the church had a valid employer identification number. They filed
paperwork with the state to keep their corporate entity in
good standing. They paid employment taxes to the federal government.
Speaker 3 (39:18):
And then in.
Speaker 1 (39:19):
Nineteen eighty three, Greg Dixon, who'd been the pastor at
the church since nineteen fifty five, changed his mind. He
transferred all of the church's assets into an unincorporated religious society,
and then he changed the corporation's name, which had previously
been Indianapolis Baptist Temple, he changed it to Not a
(39:40):
Church Incorporated, and so the church itself no longer exists
on paper at all, and Dixon is using this not
a Church corporate entity to run a group called the
American Coalition for Unregistered Churches. It would later be known
as the Unregistered Baptist Fellowship.
Speaker 3 (40:01):
Greg Dixon believed that doing.
Speaker 1 (40:03):
Business with the federal government was against his religion. Having
to do things like tell the irs that your church
would like to be recognized as a five to one
C three tax exempt entity or filing paperwork with the
state actually contravenes the authority of Christ, and if you
make him do it, you're violating his religious liberty. The
(40:26):
unregistered Church movement wasn't just refusing to pay their taxes.
They wanted to avoid almost any contact with the government.
Churches shouldn't have to abide by building codes or zoning laws,
or get fire inspections. Babies shouldn't have birth certificates. A
wedding shouldn't involve a marriage license. In fact, no one
should have any kind of license. Many of the articles
(40:50):
I found about this movement make sure to add that
they do believe that they can use the United States
Postal Service, but it is a sin to use zip codes.
The almost complete overlap of guys who don't want to
pay their taxes and guys who are willing to take
up arms against the government is something else surely explore
(41:12):
in depth in an episode dedicated to some character in
the tax protester movement, but the reason for it is
probably pretty obvious, and Pastor Greg Dixon wasn't just refusing.
Speaker 3 (41:23):
To pay his taxes. He wanted war.
Speaker 1 (41:29):
In nineteen ninety two, Greg Dixon gave a speech at
an event nicknamed the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous after the siege
at Ruby Ridge, a Christian identity preacher in Colorado put
out the call the disparate elements of the radical right
needed to put their heads together and come up with
a strategy. Klansmen, Neo Nazis, anti Semitic pastors, militia leaders,
(41:53):
Neo Confederates, tax protesters, bigots, and anti government extremists of
all stripes in Colorado, and all the big names were there.
Willie Muther, Peers from National Alliance, Richard Butler from Arian Nations,
Louis Beam, Kirk Lyons, James Wickstrom. As Kathleen Blue wrote
in her book Bring the War Home, the militia movement
(42:16):
as we know it today emerged from the leaders, organizations,
and tactics of white power organization, and this meeting is
widely regarded as the birthplace of the modern American militia movement,
and so at the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous, just before Louis
Beam's speech about leaderless resistance, Pastor Greg Dixon took the
(42:40):
stage to call for the establishment of Christian militias, declaring
we are at war. And Greg Dixon was hardly new
to organized racism. In the nineteen seventies, his church had
hosted meetings of a group called Americans for America, a
KKK affiliated organization that opposed school integration. Indiana's Grand Dragon
(43:04):
Bill Cheney was a member of the congregation, but in
the early nineties he was at the bleeding edge of
a new frontier in white power. All that to say,
this old picture of dale Huddle outside of a church
might sound terribly innocuous. Maybe that's his church, and maybe
(43:25):
he didn't know why his pastor wasn't paying his taxes,
but it was not. Dale Huddle isn't even Baptist. He
grew up Lutheran but has been a member of a
non denominational megachurch called the Family Christian Center since nineteen
eighty eight. Ever since his mother died. No, dale Huddle
(43:46):
had no direct connection to this church that I can find.
But a call had been put out. In September of
two thousand. After years in court, a judge gave the
order they had until noon on November fourteenth to get
out of the building. The government was taking possession of
the property, and US Marshals were authorized to use force
(44:09):
if necessary. Michigan Militia leader Norman Olsen ordered militias around
the country to do their duty and defend the church,
telling his followers that this was going to be Waco
Part two. Charlie Puckett of the Kentucky Militia was there
on November fourteenth. As congregants waited for the US marshals
to arrive and with news crews rolling in the parking lot,
(44:33):
Pastor Dixon asked the contingent of Klansmen who showed up
to support him to maybe stay outside the church, but
he didn't ask them to leave or disavow their support,
and that's when this photo was taken. On November fourteenth,
two thousand, parking lot full of Klansmen, Militia men standing by,
(44:56):
and Dale huddles outside the Indianapolis Baptist Temple trying to
figure out how to hang a Gadsden flag on the windows.
He'd driven two hours from his home in Crown Point,
and there was no Facebook in two thousand. He didn't
see a meme that convinced him to go to Indianapolis.
(45:16):
There's no indication that he was a member of any
of the militia or clan groups that were there that day,
but it does seem quite possible that he got the
same message they did about showing up for Waco Part two.
And just so this threat isn't left hanging, the big
crowd that showed up on day one of the standoff
(45:37):
got board and went home. US marshals obviously did not
want Waco Part two, so they just kept their distance
and waited them out. It took three months, but in
February of two thousand and one they did seize the building.
No one was injured, but Greg Dixon was carried out
(45:58):
on a stretcher because he refused to walk. So that's
a rather lengthy aside just to contextualize a single twenty
(46:19):
five year old photograph that doesn't prove anything at all,
but it left me wondering if the US Marshals had
taken a heavier handed approach at the Indianapolis Baptist Temple
would I be looking at two photos twenty years apart
of Dale Huddle trying to skewer a cop with a flagpole.
(46:41):
His lawyers argued that he was just a confused old
man who didn't know how to use the internet, and
he got tricked into believing he needed to go to
DC to stop the steal. But the possibility that twenty
years earlier, some militia newsletter tricked him into thinking he
needed to stop a different theft, that of church property
by the IR, really changes the story for me. Back
(47:05):
in twenty twenty one, though, after the riote of the Capitol,
Matthew Huddle was just living his life as usual. Matthew
Huddle's life as usual involved getting charged three separate times
between July and November for driving with a suspended license
as a habitual offender whose driving privileges had been revoked
after repeated d uise. Each new offense of this kind
(47:27):
was a felony. In August of that year, his son's
mother died of a drug overdose. He filed for bankruptcy
that same week, and filing show he owed more than
thirteen thousand dollars in child support to a different woman,
the mother of his daughter. Neither of those children were
in Matthew's custody after his conviction. In his January sixth case,
(47:49):
his lawyers wrote that he had a quote great relationship
with his son. I hope that's true, and even if
it's not, my heart breaks for a teenage boy who
lost his mother to an overdose in twenty twenty one,
he saw his father go to prison in twenty twenty three,
and then he lost his father entirely just last month.
(48:11):
But great is the only word used there to describe
a relationship that I suspect may have been more complicated
than that. In two thousand and nine, Matthew Huddle flew
into a rage after his son, who was just three
years old at the time, had what court records describe
as a bathroom accident. It's a very normal thing for
(48:34):
a three year old to do at that age. You're
still sending a change of pants with them to school
just in case. What's not normal, though, is beating a
toddler so severely that he can't sit down for a week.
And the court records call it a spanking. But nothing
I could find offered me any kind of explanation for
(48:57):
how a spanking could leave bruises on a child's neck.
After Huddle died last week, several the articles I read
about his death quoted an attorney who'd been representing him
in his dui cases for nearly twenty years, and his
lawyer says that the man he'd known was not violent.
(49:19):
I don't know what else you call this, I guess
in that lawyer's defense, it does look like he'd hired
a different attorney when he was charged with beating his
son and his son's mother. After Matthew Huddle blood guilty
in twenty twenty three to that single misdemeanor charge of
entering and remaining in a restricted building on January sixth,
(49:41):
his lawyers asked for a sentence of probation with no
jail time. They cited his lack of ideological motivation for
being there, his need to be there for his children,
and his tragic backstory and struggle with alcoholism. And there
is a strange and tragic backstory here, but they don't
(50:02):
actually get into it in this court filing. This part
I pieced together from state court records, old newspapers.
Speaker 3 (50:09):
And Facebook posts.
Speaker 1 (50:12):
After serving his sentence for meeting his son, he was
released from jail in twenty thirteen, and he very quickly
took up with a new girlfriend. Based on the apparent
age of a photo of their daughter that he posted
online in twenty fifteen, she had to have been pregnant
with Huddle's child before she ended her marriage to another man.
(50:32):
I have said this before, comes up often oddly, but
I don't care about that. Her infidelity is between her,
her husband, and her boyfriend. I only mention it because
of a curious coincidence of dates. The same week her
divorce was finalized, someone shot Matthew Huddle. There's a single
(50:58):
mention in the local newspaper in Febuary twenty fifteen, just
a few days after his daughter's mother finalized her divorce,
that Huddle had been shot in what was only described
as quote an incident between family members, and the article
quotes an officer who says that no one was taken
into custody at this time, and he wouldn't say how
(51:19):
the shooter was related to the victim. I couldn't find
any court records that indicated the charges were ever filed
against anyone, but I could only check the names I
thought of his suspects. So it's a bit of a
needle in a haystack, whoever it was, though someone close
to him shot Matthew in the back of the knee
(51:39):
and left him with a lifelong injury, and three years later,
in twenty eighteen, he was asleep in his bed when
he woke up to two men beating him with baseball
bats and hammers. The local newspaper reported the attack was
motivated by a child custody dispute. One of the assailants,
(52:00):
Kurt Falkenberg, was in a relationship with the mother of
Huddle's son. The other man was Falkenberg's uncle, Jeffrey Martin,
though the two men were only a few years apart
in age, and the men focused their blows on Huddle's
left leg because they knew he had a metal rod
in there from the surgeries he'd gotten after getting shot
(52:21):
in the leg in his last domestic dispute. Much like
the story of Matthew and Dale Huddle, this story of
a very stupid crime committed by an uncle and a
nephew ends tragically. As Falkenberg and Martin fled the scene,
they crashed. Falkenberg, who had been driving, was pronounced dead
(52:42):
at the scene. Officers responding to the car accident which
put another driver in the hospital with two broken legs,
found an open bottle of whiskey in Falkenburg's car, and
they eventually found Jeffrey Martin passed out drunk in a
creek bed on the side of the road. The following year,
(53:03):
in twenty nineteen, Matthew Huddle was diagnosed with cirrhosis of
the liver. Twenty years of alcoholism had finally caught up
to him. The dui he got that summer was the
one that put him back in jail until shortly before
he drove to Washington, d C. In January of twenty
twenty one. Now I've read a lot of sentencing memos.
(53:25):
That's the document filed at the end of a case,
after a guilty plea or a guilty verdict, where each
side makes their case one last time, not about guilt
or innocence now that's settled, but about what they think
the punishment should be. And we have an adversarial court system.
Everyone is technically ethically bound to be honest, and the
(53:47):
purpose of the courts is supposed to be to seek
the truth, but really everyone is there to win, to
have their version of the truth ruled to be the
most true. So I'm really used to seeing a defense
attorney's sob story and a prosecutor's exaggeration. But I wonder
maybe if Matthew Huddle's lawyers really were telling a mostly
(54:11):
true story.
Speaker 3 (54:13):
He didn't vote, he couldn't.
Speaker 1 (54:16):
His family doesn't seem very political. No one in his
family has ever donated so much as a dollar to
any federal election. And he did have a long history
of making spectacularly bad decisions and finding himself in some
really outlandishly bad situations. I mean, he got his legs
(54:38):
broken in two unrelated domestic disputes. That doesn't even sound possible.
So maybe Matthew Huddle is the only January sixth defendant
who really did end up there by accident, with no
ideological motivation or violent intent. Plenty of them claimed that
in court and it never really rings true. But maybe
(55:01):
for Matthew Huddle, wandering into the Capitol that day was
just the same kind of criminal accident he was often
finding himself in, like driving away without paying for a
tank of gas because he was too drunk to figure
out how to operate the payment system, but somehow not
too drunk to drive when I first saw the news
(55:21):
that had recently pardoned January sixth, the defendant had been
shot and killed while resisting arrest during a traffic stop.
I can't say that I was surprised, but.
Speaker 3 (55:31):
I was wrong in my initial assumption.
Speaker 1 (55:34):
I figured a guy who found himself on that trajectory
would be I don't know, a sovereign citizen or a
guy who'd done real violence at the capitol, a guy
who had violent plans for the future. Surely those two
facts about his life being at the Capitol that day
and dying the way that he did, Surely those two
facts would be directly related.
Speaker 3 (55:56):
But I'm not sure they are.
Speaker 1 (56:00):
It's unwise to speculate about the altercation that may have
occurred in the minutes before Huddle was shot and killed
by a Jasper County Sheriff's deputy. I don't know what
happened there on the side of Indiana State Road fourteen.
We don't know what was said or why things escalated,
or where exactly the deputy saw the gun. But I
do know that Matthew Huddle was due back in court
(56:22):
next week for a status conference on a stack of
still unresolved felony cases. For driving without a license, just
days after getting his federal pardon. He was probably happy
for his uncle Dale, but he'd already done his federal time,
and now he was looking down the barrel at another
stay in the county jail, and when those blue lights
(56:43):
came on behind him, he probably knew that this would
be yet another felony charge.
Speaker 3 (56:51):
He had a long list of state charges.
Speaker 1 (56:54):
A federal pardon did nothing for him. In the end,
it didn't matter who president was. But I guess it
never really did matter to Matthew. Weird Little Guys is
(57:17):
a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written,
and recorded by me Willie Conger. Our executive producers are
Sophie Littterman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by
the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed
by Brad Dickert. You can email me at Rudlue Guys
Podcast at gmail dot com.
Speaker 3 (57:36):
I will definitely read it, but I'm not going to
answer it. It's nothing personal.
Speaker 1 (57:41):
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other
listeners on the Weird Little Guy subreddit. Just don't post
anything that's going to make you one of my weird
little guys,
Host
Molly Conger
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