May 13, 2024 • 32 mins
An assistant prosecutor in Philadelphia prepares the case to be heard by a grand jury. Is there enough evidence to make an arrest, and bring the case to trial?
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hey, it's Jake. I got a quick favorite ask.
If you've been enjoying deep Cover The Nameless Man, please
consider leading a review in Apple Podcasts. It helps new
listeners find the show, and that in turn will help
us continue making future seasons. Thank you. Previously on deep Cover.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
I think that when it comes to certain particular depths,
I think that sometimes we put on the front with
the world like we've gotten over it.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
I used to watch the unsolved Myschivy shows and I
often thought about calling How can a person get killed
and no one knows anything. She said, you have to
forgive the person they killed your brother, And I don't
even know this person.
Speaker 4 (01:18):
Is Terry, And I said, it may be that this
does not ever go to a court, even with Craig's cooperation,
that this is ever going to see the inside of
a court. This all may be just to give Aron
Wood's family some sense of understanding.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
By the summer of two thousand and six, roughly two
years into their investigation, Scott and Terry had made real progress.
The two federal agents had obtained a confession from the
alleged accomplice, Craig Peterson, and with the help of the
Philly PD. The agents had identified the man they leave
to be the victim, Aron Wood. For years, the Wood
(02:14):
family had wanted answers about Iran's death. They yearned for
closure and for justice. Now finally there was some movement,
A case was mounting against the alleged shooter, Tom Geybison.
Speaker 5 (02:28):
Was definitely a different type of case. I don't think
there's been really anything similar to it since that I've heard.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
That's Carmen Weinberger. Back in two thousand and six, she
was an assistant district attorney in Philadelphia. She worked in
the homicide unit, and she was assigned to work on
this case.
Speaker 5 (02:47):
You know, a skinhead coming to Philadelphia to kill somebody.
A cowardly act when it all boils down to it,
a cowardly act.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
By this point in her career, Carmen had been a
prosecutor for well over a decade.
Speaker 5 (03:04):
So when I graduated at high school, I knew I
wanted to be a prosecutor. When I went to to
the University of Pennsylvania, I knew I wanted to be
a prosecutor. When I went to Temple Law School, I
knew I wanted to be a prosecutor.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
It sounds like you knew you wanted to be a prosecutor,
just ad bit. Carmen's father had also been an assistant
district attorney, and Carmen says her dad raised her to
be tough.
Speaker 5 (03:31):
He said, always do the right thing, and don't take
any blank off of anybody. You can fill in the blank.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Carmen says she took this advice to heart, didn't take
blank from anybody. And this was important because she's a
woman of color, which at the time was a real
rarity in the homicide unit at the DA's office in Philly.
Carmen was helped out in part by her mentor. His
name was Roger King. He passed away in twenty and sixteen,
(04:04):
but at the time Roger was a legendary figure in
the Philadelphia DAE. It was Roger who first helped Carmen
land a spot in homicide unit back in the early
two thousands, and Roger was the lead prosecutor on this case.
After thirty five years in the courtroom. This was actually
going to be Roger's last case before he retired, and
(04:26):
he'd brought Carmen on board to help him win. Carmen
had seen many grisly murder cases, but there was something
about this one that seemed especially unsettling.
Speaker 5 (04:40):
Not that any murder isn't disturbing, but this particular murder
and the reason for it, the hate. This was a
hate crime. It's hard to fathom the depraved nature of
someone that could just kill someone in cold blood based
(05:03):
on the color of their skin. It was bad luck
for that man to be found in North Philadelphia that
night in April of nineteen eighty nine.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
The authorities believed that man was Iron Wood, and now
it was up to Roger Carmen and the DA's office
in Philly to see this through to ensure that the
Wood family got the closure and the justice that they needed.
Carmen's task was to marshal all the evidence she could.
(05:39):
She would have the help of the Philly PD and
also of Scott and Terry, the two federal agents, and
she and Roger King had one more card to play,
arguably their best. They could convene a grand jury, which
is basically like a preliminary hearing, but it's held in secret.
The defendant doesn't even know it's happening. The prosecution can
(06:02):
subpoena witnesses require them to testify so it's like a
test run the prosecution and can see how strong the
case is before making a final decision on whether to
go forward and seek an indictment. If there was an indictment,
Tom Guybison would be arrested, there'd be a trial, likely
(06:22):
a very high profile trial, and Carmen's boss, the legendary prosecutor,
Roger King, would have his final day in court in
rather dramatic fashion. But Carmen knew it all came down
to evidence. It had been almost twenty years since iron
Wood was murdered, and that's the challenge with cold cases.
(06:45):
Evidence vanishes, memories fade, witnesses slip away, which is why
the grand jury was so important, so the prosecution could
figure out was this a case they could win. I'm
(07:15):
Jake Calpern and this is Deep Cover Season four, The
Nameless Man, Episode four, the grand Jury. Throughout the summer
(07:47):
of two thousand and six, the two federal agents on
the case, Scott and Terry, were still scrambling. They were
working together with the PHILLYPD to look under every stone
and gather as much evidence as they could in preparation
for the grand jury. So far, here's what they had
They had an ex girlfriend named Patricia Miller. You heard
(08:08):
about her episode one. She's the one who claimed that
Tom had bragged about killing a black man. She said
Tom had a newspaper article covering the man's death and
boasted that this was his doing. The FEDS also had
a confession from Craig, the man claiming to be the accomplice.
(08:29):
Craig said that he and Tom had driven into Philadelphia
in the spring of eighty nine and used a thirty
eight caliber revolver to murder a black man. But what
else could the FEDS find? Was there any physical evidence
or were there any other witnesses who could help corroborate
Craig's story, witnesses who Carmen and Roger could then bring
(08:52):
before the grand jury. So Scott and Terry, they weren't
done yet. There were a few leads they were still
chasing down. I'm going to tell you about three of them.
Three leads they hoped would tip the balance in the
case and provide Carmen and the prosecution just what they needed. Okay,
(09:14):
let's start with the smoking gun. And I mean that
quite literally, because if Scott and Terry could find the
actual murder weapon, the thirty eight that Tom Guybison supposedly
used back in eighty nine. Well, that'd be huge in theory.
They could then match the gun with the bullet that
killed the victim because they had the bullet it had
(09:35):
been recovered from Iran's body. Problem was, according to Craig,
Tom said he was going to get rid of the
murder weapon, so maybe it had been destroyed. No one
knew for sure. Then one day Terry was talking with
his boss over at the ATF and Terry mentioned this
problem they were having finding the murder weapon.
Speaker 6 (09:56):
I said, I don't know how I'm gonna find this thing.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
I said.
Speaker 6 (09:58):
I said, he might even throw it in the river.
Who knows. And my boss says to me, you know
what he said? Actually he said, I was on an
audit a few months ago, and you know they have
guys evidence of out there on the first Guns case.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
The first gun case, if you recall, back in the
nineteen nineties, Tom Guybison had been arrested and imprisoned on
a gun's charge. He had since been released, but the
evidence from that case, the weapons that the FEDS had seized,
were still apparently in storage, and Terry's boss over at
the ATF knew this because, quite by chance, he'd been
(10:34):
involved in a routine audit of stockpiled evidence, kind of
like spring cleaning, like when you open that dusty room
in your basement and go through all the junk that
you haven't touched in years. The FEDS they do this too,
with all their old evidence. Anyway, Terry's boss remembered seeing
Tom's old guns. So Terry gets on the phone with
(10:56):
someone over at the ATF and.
Speaker 6 (10:58):
Asks, Hey, do you have any thirty eight Calvary volrus
flowing to Tommy and your evidence? She goes yes. I'm like, oh,
oh my goodness.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
So now all they have to do is run a
test at the ballistics lab to see if there's a match.
Terry asked for the test to be expedited then weighted
with baited breath, but when the examiner called back, he
told Terry that there was a problem with the bullet.
Speaker 6 (11:29):
It's too deformed. I can't make a definitive match. I
can't match up the lands. And they're called lands and
grooves in a barrel of a firearm that make a
unique microscopic signature where you can say, hey, tick a fingerprint.
This was the same gun because I can't do it.
It's too deformed.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
So Lead number one didn't pan out. Maybe this was
the weapon, maybe it wasn't. There was just no way
to know for sure, which meant it was of no
real use to Carmen Roger and the prosecution. Lead number
(12:07):
two involved, of all things, a high school prom. You
may remember that Craig, the alleged accomplist, said that the
murder occurred in the spring of eighty nine, the spring,
and Creig remembered this because he said it happened shortly
before prom that both he and Tom attended. Tom went
with his girlfriend at the time, another teenager named Jen.
(12:31):
We're just going to use her first name in order
to protect her identity. The agents Scott and Terry decided
they should really talk with Jen and see if she
remembered anything useful from the time. So they met Jen
briefly at a coffee shop. They explained, we want to
talk to you about Tom Guybison. Jen was visibly shaken,
(12:52):
but she agreed to have a sit down with them.
A short while later, they met up at her house,
and this is when Jen started talking about her prom
back in eighty nine. Her prom was held at the
DuPont Hotel in downtown Wilmington. This is a grand old
hotel to nineteen thirteen, with crystal chandeliers, parquet floors, gilded
(13:13):
trim the whole deal. Jen says. At some point during
the prom, Tom got in an argument with another prom goer.
Things apparently got heated. Tom readied for a fight, and
he rolled up his shirt sleeves, revealing an elaborate spider
web tattoo that he'd recently gotten. In the end, tempers cooled.
(13:36):
At some point in the night, Tom apparently boasted about
his tattoo, saying, quote, do you know what this means?
Scott and Terry, they vetted this whole prom night story.
They actually tracked down other people who had attended the
(13:57):
same prom back in nineteen eighty nine.
Speaker 6 (14:01):
We actually got in contact with more people than I
would have expected. I want to say, maybe six people,
seven people that I was I think I was pretty
surprised that we actually found them and talked to them,
and they were willing to talk to us.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
Both Scott and Terry say that to a person, everyone
they spoke with recalled Tom boasting about how and why
he'd gotten his tattoo here's Scott.
Speaker 4 (14:29):
What Terry and I liked from talking to each and
every one of them was they all told the same story.
They all told it in the same sense of shock.
They all relived that moment now feeling guilt. I think
one even said, I always had it in the back
(14:53):
of my mind that it was true, and I'm so
upset I never told somebody so they could have looked
into it.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
According to Jen, Tom had boasted about this murder on
other occasions as well. Tom allegedly showed her a newspaper
article from the Philadelphia Inquirer about a man who had
been killed, and he claimed that he was responsible. Bottom line,
Jen was another witness that the prosecution could bring before
(15:22):
the grand jury to bolster their case. Of course, what
she said didn't prove anything definitively, but the accounts from
these two ex girl friends, combined with Craig's confession, felt substantial.
This brings us to lead number three. Well, it wasn't
so much of a lead as it was a memory test,
(15:44):
a very very hard memory test. That's after the break.
Aroan Wood was killed on the thirteen hundred block of
(16:06):
North Stillman Street in Philadelphia, a block or so away
from the walled campus of Gerard College. This was a
known fact, and this got Scott and Terry thinking could
Craig somehow independently verify that this was in fact the
sight of the murder that he'd help commit, Because if
(16:27):
he could verify this, well, then that might cement the
whole thing. Up until now, Craig maintained that he could
not recall an exact location or street name where it
all went down. But it seemed like it was worth
exploring this a bit further. Maybe they could test his memory.
In other words, get him in a car, drive him
(16:48):
to Philly, and just hope that he could lead them
to the location. If this worked, it could really enhance
the value of Craig's confession and helped tie it more
directly to the murder of iron Wood.
Speaker 4 (17:04):
We say you to Craig, you were there, we weren't.
Perhaps you blocked it out. Let's just drive and unblock
your mind.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
The idea was that Craig might see something an exit ramp,
a park, a building, some landmark that would spark his memory.
It was a gamble. If it worked, it might really
help their case. But the danger was if it didn't work,
If They drove to thirteen hundred North Stillman Street and
Craig said, no, this is not the spot. What do
(17:40):
you do? Then the whole case could be at risk.
In the end, Scott and Terry felt they had to
give it a try, had to roll the dice. So
they arranged to make a road trip. They put Craig
in the car and they drove to Philly. All right,
just situate me. Where are we in the city right now?
Speaker 4 (18:03):
We are in North Philadelphia, in and around Gerard College.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
So this is me and Scott this past fall. Basically,
I asked Scott to show me where exactly they had
taken Craig. So he drove around a bit in Scott's
car in the vicinity of the murder site, just like
he'd done with Craig back in two thousand and six.
And right away I began to see the challenges that
this memory test presented. Rowhouses. I mean, the blocks are
(18:32):
kind of indistinguishable. I mean there's a few landmarks, but
a lot of these blocks look almost identical to one another.
Speaker 4 (18:38):
Oh absolutely, I mean this is this is the beauty
of Philadelphia. You just have these amazing row homes and
you could see it's very easy to get lost, but
it's also very easy to confuse one block from another.
Speaker 1 (18:59):
It was clear to me if this was a test
of Craig's memory, the difficulty level was dealed up to
expert mode. It had been nearly twenty years and it
didn't make any easier that the city scape just unfurled
like a vast, unvarying canvas. There was at least one
feature of the landscape that did really stand out, the
(19:21):
wall that surrounded the campus. It was a ten foot
high stone wall that just went on and on for
blocks and blocks. And if you recall, when Craig first confessed,
he talked about seeing a wall near the murder site,
so it seemed like this might be it the landmark
that jogged his memory. But Scott says when he drove
(19:45):
here with Craig down this very street, Craig could not
give him a definitive answer. It was all just maybe maybe.
Scott and I continued on following the wall for several blocks,
then turned right on a north Stillman Street, headed down
(20:06):
to the thirteen hundred block, and then we pulled up
to the intersection where it happened where Iron was murdered.
The mood, and the car turned somber. Neither of us
spoke for a moment. At this point, I'd spent months
looking into the story, and on the one hand, it
(20:26):
felt strangely momentous to finally be here at the spot.
Some part of me half expected to see a marker,
a sign, even some wilted flowers, anything to indicate that here,
right here, a man's life had ended suddenly. But in reality,
there was nothing. It was just another intersection, similar to
(20:48):
all the others, which apparently was exactly how it looked
to Craig.
Speaker 4 (20:54):
We did come to this intersection, and there was not
anything that I remember Craig saying without a doubt other
than this very well could be it, but I couldn't
tell you for sure.
Speaker 5 (21:08):
This is.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
So In the end, the gamble, it was sort of
a push, not really a loss, but not a win either.
And it also seemed to underscore a fundamental limitation with
this case, a limitation that exists in so many cold cases,
simply that time had passed seventeen years to be exact
time in which memories had eroded, time in which the
(21:34):
case may have weakened, and this would be the fundamental
challenge for Carmen and the Philadelphia DA's office. There was,
at the end of the day, only so much that
investigators could provide in the way of proof. Some of
it was quite compelling, mainly the first person account from Craig,
but there were holes, gaps in what was known, and
(21:56):
these gaps would become unspoken invitations, courting the doubts of
all those who might pass judgment. In preparing for the
grand jury, Carmen, the Assistant DA, was clear eyed about
the challenges they faced. I asked her what they had
(22:18):
in terms of forensic evidence, not a.
Speaker 5 (22:21):
Big CSI case, forensically from the eighties, and you got
a dead body, and you've got a bullet from the
dead body. That's it.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
The strength of the prosecution's case hinged on three witnesses.
There were the two ex girlfriends, Jen and Patricia. They
each claimed independently that Tom had boasted about committing a murder.
The third witness was Craig, the alleged accomplice. Before the
grand jury convened, Carmen spent time with each of the witnesses.
(22:58):
She found them all credible and a bit nervous too.
The girlfriends each claimed that Tom Guybison had been violent
with him in the past. What's more, Carmen believed that
by agreeing to testify, they were putting themselves at risk.
Speaker 5 (23:13):
Well, they know him better than anybody else, so they
knew what he was capable of. It's not easy to
get on the witness stand and talk about who you
used to care about and how bad they were, the
things that they did, whether you still love him or not,
not an easy thing to do.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
The most important witness by far was Craig Peterson.
Speaker 5 (23:38):
I found him to be very credible. I also think
he was remorseful, and I in a lot of ways
felt sorry for him because I thought, just from the
witnesses in general, Diabson was the bully to all of
them in different ways, and I believe he was a
(24:01):
bully to Craig Peterson.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
I wasn't expecting you to say that you felt sorry
for him.
Speaker 5 (24:08):
Yeah. I probably wasn't expecting say that either, but I
did it. There was remorse, You could feel the remorse.
You could see it in this guy, remorse to his soul,
and in a lot of ways, I think him cooperating
(24:30):
was purging what he did to him, trying to somewhat
make amends to that person that they killed and to
the person's family. And I don't feel that way about
many defendants. I really don't, especially the homicide defendants. But
(24:56):
I did feel that about him, and I still feel
it to this day.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
Craig left a lasting impression on Carmen. She can still
picture him in her mind's eye.
Speaker 5 (25:09):
I can recall Peterson because I looked at him and
felt Peterson's the skinhead. He looks like he's mixed with black.
I remember that he has an olive complexion that causes
me to believe I'm biracial, so I pay attention to
(25:32):
those things. I always thought he was mixed somewhere in there.
I don't know if he was adopted. Maybe he didn't
realize it, maybe he did, but I always thought, and
to this day I can remember and see his faith.
He looked like he could have been reletant. He was
(25:58):
very fair, but he wasn't that fair.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Carmen brought this up to me totally unprompted, though I
wasn't entirely surprised because I had heard this same thing
from Scott Duffy, the FBI agent. Quite the bombshell, or
maybe I should say potential bombshell, because I don't know
if it's true. If you recall, Craig went to federal
prison in the nineteen nineties. His prison records list his
(26:25):
race as white. But that's really all I can say.
I've been in touch with Craig. We first spoke a
few months ago on the phone. I had hoped that
he'd go on the record and share his side of
the story. I eventually sent him a letter with all
the info that we've included on him in this series
to give him a chance to respond, and this is
(26:46):
what he wrote back. Dear Jake, I give my permission
and ask to have the following herd. I've not responded
because I've been contemplating for many hours the positive and
negative things that can occur by participating in your podcast.
I'm going to decline, but would like to say my life,
my beliefs, and views are very different now. I do
(27:10):
sincerely regret any harm I've caused to everyone involved. In
the summer of two thousand and six, the grand jury convened.
(27:31):
The prosecution called its witnesses, including Craig, Peterson, the two
ex girlfriends, the two federal agents Scott and Terry and
also Louby, the detective from the Philadelphia PD. Was that
a winning hand. Well, the prosecution thought so, because in
the end they decided, yes, let's do this. They asked
(27:54):
for an indictment against Tom Geibison for the murder of
iron Wood, and the grand jury gave them the green light,
confirming that yes, there was probable cause to believe that
a crime had been committed. Charges were issued against Tom Guybison,
including murder in the first degree. When it came time
(28:15):
for the arrest, Scott and Terry were actually the ones
who planned it all out. It was an elaborate operation
involving the FBI, the ATF, and the Philadelphia Police Department.
Scott and Terry led the arrest team. They showed up
early in the morning at the house where he was
staying and just waited. Eventually Tom emerged. He was a
(28:36):
big guy with the build of a weightlifter. He walked
towards his car. Terry knew this was the moment, so like.
Speaker 6 (28:46):
Police, please get down, get down, and I'm I'm yelling.
Others are yelling tough fur lungs and he just stands
there like a deer in the headlights, just staring at it,
staring at me, staring at them, and I could see
in his mind. I can see in his face he's
deciding what to do. He's got like a half a
dozen dudes, you know, potentially going to light him up
if he does something wrong, and he's just say he's
(29:09):
he's literally thinking what am I going to do?
Speaker 1 (29:13):
Finally, Terry says, Tom put out his hands, surrendered, and
that was it. Everyone took a sigh of relief. They
read Tom his rights, handcuffed him, and informed him that
he was under arrest for the murder of Iran Wood.
He was extradited to Philadelphia, where he would eventually stand trial,
(29:35):
and it would be quite a trial, Roger King's last
case as a prosecutor, And as it turns out, King
would be up against a formidable opponent, a lawyer who
would make a tenacious defense of Tom Guybison and do
everything in his power to find the moth holes that
time had riddled into the fabric of evidence. It was
(29:57):
a trial that would hinge on the credibility of three
witnesses and a handful of crucial facts, a trial that
would find its way into the newspapers and TV news
passions about our nation's history of racist violence and about
what constitutes reasonable doubt. Tom Guybison would profess his innocence,
(30:19):
the Wood family would hope for justice, and a jury
of twelve Philadelphians would argue, agonize and decide. Next time
on Deep Cover.
Speaker 7 (30:34):
I believe Tom Guybison is innocent. They have no physical evidence,
they had no gun, They had nothing but the ear
witnesses of scorned girlfriends and Craig Peterson, who had been
made an offer he couldn't refuse to escape prosecution in
return for full community.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
Deep Cover is produced by Amy Gaines McQuaid and Jacob Smith.
It's edited by Karen Schakerji mastering by Jake Gorsky. Our
show art was designed by Sean Carney. Original scoring in
our theme was composed by Luis Gara, fact checking by
Arthur Gomperts. Our story consultant was James Foreman Jr. Special
(31:43):
thanks to Jerry Williams, Sarah Nis, Greta Cone, and Jake Flanagan.
I'm Jake Halpern
Pushkin. Hey, it's Jake. I got a quick favorite ask.
If you've been enjoying deep Cover The Nameless Man, please
consider leading a review in Apple Podcasts. It helps new
listeners find the show, and that in turn will help
us continue making future seasons. Thank you. Previously on deep Cover.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
I think that when it comes to certain particular depths,
I think that sometimes we put on the front with
the world like we've gotten over it.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
I used to watch the unsolved Myschivy shows and I
often thought about calling How can a person get killed
and no one knows anything. She said, you have to
forgive the person they killed your brother, And I don't
even know this person.
Speaker 4 (01:18):
Is Terry, And I said, it may be that this
does not ever go to a court, even with Craig's cooperation,
that this is ever going to see the inside of
a court. This all may be just to give Aron
Wood's family some sense of understanding.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
By the summer of two thousand and six, roughly two
years into their investigation, Scott and Terry had made real progress.
The two federal agents had obtained a confession from the
alleged accomplice, Craig Peterson, and with the help of the
Philly PD. The agents had identified the man they leave
to be the victim, Aron Wood. For years, the Wood
(02:14):
family had wanted answers about Iran's death. They yearned for
closure and for justice. Now finally there was some movement,
A case was mounting against the alleged shooter, Tom Geybison.
Speaker 5 (02:28):
Was definitely a different type of case. I don't think
there's been really anything similar to it since that I've heard.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
That's Carmen Weinberger. Back in two thousand and six, she
was an assistant district attorney in Philadelphia. She worked in
the homicide unit, and she was assigned to work on
this case.
Speaker 5 (02:47):
You know, a skinhead coming to Philadelphia to kill somebody.
A cowardly act when it all boils down to it,
a cowardly act.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
By this point in her career, Carmen had been a
prosecutor for well over a decade.
Speaker 5 (03:04):
So when I graduated at high school, I knew I
wanted to be a prosecutor. When I went to to
the University of Pennsylvania, I knew I wanted to be
a prosecutor. When I went to Temple Law School, I
knew I wanted to be a prosecutor.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
It sounds like you knew you wanted to be a prosecutor,
just ad bit. Carmen's father had also been an assistant
district attorney, and Carmen says her dad raised her to
be tough.
Speaker 5 (03:31):
He said, always do the right thing, and don't take
any blank off of anybody. You can fill in the blank.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Carmen says she took this advice to heart, didn't take
blank from anybody. And this was important because she's a
woman of color, which at the time was a real
rarity in the homicide unit at the DA's office in Philly.
Carmen was helped out in part by her mentor. His
name was Roger King. He passed away in twenty and sixteen,
(04:04):
but at the time Roger was a legendary figure in
the Philadelphia DAE. It was Roger who first helped Carmen
land a spot in homicide unit back in the early
two thousands, and Roger was the lead prosecutor on this case.
After thirty five years in the courtroom. This was actually
going to be Roger's last case before he retired, and
(04:26):
he'd brought Carmen on board to help him win. Carmen
had seen many grisly murder cases, but there was something
about this one that seemed especially unsettling.
Speaker 5 (04:40):
Not that any murder isn't disturbing, but this particular murder
and the reason for it, the hate. This was a
hate crime. It's hard to fathom the depraved nature of
someone that could just kill someone in cold blood based
(05:03):
on the color of their skin. It was bad luck
for that man to be found in North Philadelphia that
night in April of nineteen eighty nine.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
The authorities believed that man was Iron Wood, and now
it was up to Roger Carmen and the DA's office
in Philly to see this through to ensure that the
Wood family got the closure and the justice that they needed.
Carmen's task was to marshal all the evidence she could.
(05:39):
She would have the help of the Philly PD and
also of Scott and Terry, the two federal agents, and
she and Roger King had one more card to play,
arguably their best. They could convene a grand jury, which
is basically like a preliminary hearing, but it's held in secret.
The defendant doesn't even know it's happening. The prosecution can
(06:02):
subpoena witnesses require them to testify so it's like a
test run the prosecution and can see how strong the
case is before making a final decision on whether to
go forward and seek an indictment. If there was an indictment,
Tom Guybison would be arrested, there'd be a trial, likely
(06:22):
a very high profile trial, and Carmen's boss, the legendary prosecutor,
Roger King, would have his final day in court in
rather dramatic fashion. But Carmen knew it all came down
to evidence. It had been almost twenty years since iron
Wood was murdered, and that's the challenge with cold cases.
(06:45):
Evidence vanishes, memories fade, witnesses slip away, which is why
the grand jury was so important, so the prosecution could
figure out was this a case they could win. I'm
(07:15):
Jake Calpern and this is Deep Cover Season four, The
Nameless Man, Episode four, the grand Jury. Throughout the summer
(07:47):
of two thousand and six, the two federal agents on
the case, Scott and Terry, were still scrambling. They were
working together with the PHILLYPD to look under every stone
and gather as much evidence as they could in preparation
for the grand jury. So far, here's what they had
They had an ex girlfriend named Patricia Miller. You heard
(08:08):
about her episode one. She's the one who claimed that
Tom had bragged about killing a black man. She said
Tom had a newspaper article covering the man's death and
boasted that this was his doing. The FEDS also had
a confession from Craig, the man claiming to be the accomplice.
(08:29):
Craig said that he and Tom had driven into Philadelphia
in the spring of eighty nine and used a thirty
eight caliber revolver to murder a black man. But what
else could the FEDS find? Was there any physical evidence
or were there any other witnesses who could help corroborate
Craig's story, witnesses who Carmen and Roger could then bring
(08:52):
before the grand jury. So Scott and Terry, they weren't
done yet. There were a few leads they were still
chasing down. I'm going to tell you about three of them.
Three leads they hoped would tip the balance in the
case and provide Carmen and the prosecution just what they needed. Okay,
(09:14):
let's start with the smoking gun. And I mean that
quite literally, because if Scott and Terry could find the
actual murder weapon, the thirty eight that Tom Guybison supposedly
used back in eighty nine. Well, that'd be huge in theory.
They could then match the gun with the bullet that
killed the victim because they had the bullet it had
(09:35):
been recovered from Iran's body. Problem was, according to Craig,
Tom said he was going to get rid of the
murder weapon, so maybe it had been destroyed. No one
knew for sure. Then one day Terry was talking with
his boss over at the ATF and Terry mentioned this
problem they were having finding the murder weapon.
Speaker 6 (09:56):
I said, I don't know how I'm gonna find this thing.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
I said.
Speaker 6 (09:58):
I said, he might even throw it in the river.
Who knows. And my boss says to me, you know
what he said? Actually he said, I was on an
audit a few months ago, and you know they have
guys evidence of out there on the first Guns case.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
The first gun case, if you recall, back in the
nineteen nineties, Tom Guybison had been arrested and imprisoned on
a gun's charge. He had since been released, but the
evidence from that case, the weapons that the FEDS had seized,
were still apparently in storage, and Terry's boss over at
the ATF knew this because, quite by chance, he'd been
(10:34):
involved in a routine audit of stockpiled evidence, kind of
like spring cleaning, like when you open that dusty room
in your basement and go through all the junk that
you haven't touched in years. The FEDS they do this too,
with all their old evidence. Anyway, Terry's boss remembered seeing
Tom's old guns. So Terry gets on the phone with
(10:56):
someone over at the ATF and.
Speaker 6 (10:58):
Asks, Hey, do you have any thirty eight Calvary volrus
flowing to Tommy and your evidence? She goes yes. I'm like, oh,
oh my goodness.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
So now all they have to do is run a
test at the ballistics lab to see if there's a match.
Terry asked for the test to be expedited then weighted
with baited breath, but when the examiner called back, he
told Terry that there was a problem with the bullet.
Speaker 6 (11:29):
It's too deformed. I can't make a definitive match. I
can't match up the lands. And they're called lands and
grooves in a barrel of a firearm that make a
unique microscopic signature where you can say, hey, tick a fingerprint.
This was the same gun because I can't do it.
It's too deformed.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
So Lead number one didn't pan out. Maybe this was
the weapon, maybe it wasn't. There was just no way
to know for sure, which meant it was of no
real use to Carmen Roger and the prosecution. Lead number
(12:07):
two involved, of all things, a high school prom. You
may remember that Craig, the alleged accomplist, said that the
murder occurred in the spring of eighty nine, the spring,
and Creig remembered this because he said it happened shortly
before prom that both he and Tom attended. Tom went
with his girlfriend at the time, another teenager named Jen.
(12:31):
We're just going to use her first name in order
to protect her identity. The agents Scott and Terry decided
they should really talk with Jen and see if she
remembered anything useful from the time. So they met Jen
briefly at a coffee shop. They explained, we want to
talk to you about Tom Guybison. Jen was visibly shaken,
(12:52):
but she agreed to have a sit down with them.
A short while later, they met up at her house,
and this is when Jen started talking about her prom
back in eighty nine. Her prom was held at the
DuPont Hotel in downtown Wilmington. This is a grand old
hotel to nineteen thirteen, with crystal chandeliers, parquet floors, gilded
(13:13):
trim the whole deal. Jen says. At some point during
the prom, Tom got in an argument with another prom goer.
Things apparently got heated. Tom readied for a fight, and
he rolled up his shirt sleeves, revealing an elaborate spider
web tattoo that he'd recently gotten. In the end, tempers cooled.
(13:36):
At some point in the night, Tom apparently boasted about
his tattoo, saying, quote, do you know what this means?
Scott and Terry, they vetted this whole prom night story.
They actually tracked down other people who had attended the
(13:57):
same prom back in nineteen eighty nine.
Speaker 6 (14:01):
We actually got in contact with more people than I
would have expected. I want to say, maybe six people,
seven people that I was I think I was pretty
surprised that we actually found them and talked to them,
and they were willing to talk to us.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
Both Scott and Terry say that to a person, everyone
they spoke with recalled Tom boasting about how and why
he'd gotten his tattoo here's Scott.
Speaker 4 (14:29):
What Terry and I liked from talking to each and
every one of them was they all told the same story.
They all told it in the same sense of shock.
They all relived that moment now feeling guilt. I think
one even said, I always had it in the back
(14:53):
of my mind that it was true, and I'm so
upset I never told somebody so they could have looked
into it.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
According to Jen, Tom had boasted about this murder on
other occasions as well. Tom allegedly showed her a newspaper
article from the Philadelphia Inquirer about a man who had
been killed, and he claimed that he was responsible. Bottom line,
Jen was another witness that the prosecution could bring before
(15:22):
the grand jury to bolster their case. Of course, what
she said didn't prove anything definitively, but the accounts from
these two ex girl friends, combined with Craig's confession, felt substantial.
This brings us to lead number three. Well, it wasn't
so much of a lead as it was a memory test,
(15:44):
a very very hard memory test. That's after the break.
Aroan Wood was killed on the thirteen hundred block of
(16:06):
North Stillman Street in Philadelphia, a block or so away
from the walled campus of Gerard College. This was a
known fact, and this got Scott and Terry thinking could
Craig somehow independently verify that this was in fact the
sight of the murder that he'd help commit, Because if
(16:27):
he could verify this, well, then that might cement the
whole thing. Up until now, Craig maintained that he could
not recall an exact location or street name where it
all went down. But it seemed like it was worth
exploring this a bit further. Maybe they could test his memory.
In other words, get him in a car, drive him
(16:48):
to Philly, and just hope that he could lead them
to the location. If this worked, it could really enhance
the value of Craig's confession and helped tie it more
directly to the murder of iron Wood.
Speaker 4 (17:04):
We say you to Craig, you were there, we weren't.
Perhaps you blocked it out. Let's just drive and unblock
your mind.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
The idea was that Craig might see something an exit ramp,
a park, a building, some landmark that would spark his memory.
It was a gamble. If it worked, it might really
help their case. But the danger was if it didn't work,
If They drove to thirteen hundred North Stillman Street and
Craig said, no, this is not the spot. What do
(17:40):
you do? Then the whole case could be at risk.
In the end, Scott and Terry felt they had to
give it a try, had to roll the dice. So
they arranged to make a road trip. They put Craig
in the car and they drove to Philly. All right,
just situate me. Where are we in the city right now?
Speaker 4 (18:03):
We are in North Philadelphia, in and around Gerard College.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
So this is me and Scott this past fall. Basically,
I asked Scott to show me where exactly they had
taken Craig. So he drove around a bit in Scott's
car in the vicinity of the murder site, just like
he'd done with Craig back in two thousand and six.
And right away I began to see the challenges that
this memory test presented. Rowhouses. I mean, the blocks are
(18:32):
kind of indistinguishable. I mean there's a few landmarks, but
a lot of these blocks look almost identical to one another.
Speaker 4 (18:38):
Oh absolutely, I mean this is this is the beauty
of Philadelphia. You just have these amazing row homes and
you could see it's very easy to get lost, but
it's also very easy to confuse one block from another.
Speaker 1 (18:59):
It was clear to me if this was a test
of Craig's memory, the difficulty level was dealed up to
expert mode. It had been nearly twenty years and it
didn't make any easier that the city scape just unfurled
like a vast, unvarying canvas. There was at least one
feature of the landscape that did really stand out, the
(19:21):
wall that surrounded the campus. It was a ten foot
high stone wall that just went on and on for
blocks and blocks. And if you recall, when Craig first confessed,
he talked about seeing a wall near the murder site,
so it seemed like this might be it the landmark
that jogged his memory. But Scott says when he drove
(19:45):
here with Craig down this very street, Craig could not
give him a definitive answer. It was all just maybe maybe.
Scott and I continued on following the wall for several blocks,
then turned right on a north Stillman Street, headed down
(20:06):
to the thirteen hundred block, and then we pulled up
to the intersection where it happened where Iron was murdered.
The mood, and the car turned somber. Neither of us
spoke for a moment. At this point, I'd spent months
looking into the story, and on the one hand, it
(20:26):
felt strangely momentous to finally be here at the spot.
Some part of me half expected to see a marker,
a sign, even some wilted flowers, anything to indicate that here,
right here, a man's life had ended suddenly. But in reality,
there was nothing. It was just another intersection, similar to
(20:48):
all the others, which apparently was exactly how it looked
to Craig.
Speaker 4 (20:54):
We did come to this intersection, and there was not
anything that I remember Craig saying without a doubt other
than this very well could be it, but I couldn't
tell you for sure.
Speaker 5 (21:08):
This is.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
So In the end, the gamble, it was sort of
a push, not really a loss, but not a win either.
And it also seemed to underscore a fundamental limitation with
this case, a limitation that exists in so many cold cases,
simply that time had passed seventeen years to be exact
time in which memories had eroded, time in which the
(21:34):
case may have weakened, and this would be the fundamental
challenge for Carmen and the Philadelphia DA's office. There was,
at the end of the day, only so much that
investigators could provide in the way of proof. Some of
it was quite compelling, mainly the first person account from Craig,
but there were holes, gaps in what was known, and
(21:56):
these gaps would become unspoken invitations, courting the doubts of
all those who might pass judgment. In preparing for the
grand jury, Carmen, the Assistant DA, was clear eyed about
the challenges they faced. I asked her what they had
(22:18):
in terms of forensic evidence, not a.
Speaker 5 (22:21):
Big CSI case, forensically from the eighties, and you got
a dead body, and you've got a bullet from the
dead body. That's it.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
The strength of the prosecution's case hinged on three witnesses.
There were the two ex girlfriends, Jen and Patricia. They
each claimed independently that Tom had boasted about committing a murder.
The third witness was Craig, the alleged accomplice. Before the
grand jury convened, Carmen spent time with each of the witnesses.
(22:58):
She found them all credible and a bit nervous too.
The girlfriends each claimed that Tom Guybison had been violent
with him in the past. What's more, Carmen believed that
by agreeing to testify, they were putting themselves at risk.
Speaker 5 (23:13):
Well, they know him better than anybody else, so they
knew what he was capable of. It's not easy to
get on the witness stand and talk about who you
used to care about and how bad they were, the
things that they did, whether you still love him or not,
not an easy thing to do.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
The most important witness by far was Craig Peterson.
Speaker 5 (23:38):
I found him to be very credible. I also think
he was remorseful, and I in a lot of ways
felt sorry for him because I thought, just from the
witnesses in general, Diabson was the bully to all of
them in different ways, and I believe he was a
(24:01):
bully to Craig Peterson.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
I wasn't expecting you to say that you felt sorry
for him.
Speaker 5 (24:08):
Yeah. I probably wasn't expecting say that either, but I
did it. There was remorse, You could feel the remorse.
You could see it in this guy, remorse to his soul,
and in a lot of ways, I think him cooperating
(24:30):
was purging what he did to him, trying to somewhat
make amends to that person that they killed and to
the person's family. And I don't feel that way about
many defendants. I really don't, especially the homicide defendants. But
(24:56):
I did feel that about him, and I still feel
it to this day.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
Craig left a lasting impression on Carmen. She can still
picture him in her mind's eye.
Speaker 5 (25:09):
I can recall Peterson because I looked at him and
felt Peterson's the skinhead. He looks like he's mixed with black.
I remember that he has an olive complexion that causes
me to believe I'm biracial, so I pay attention to
(25:32):
those things. I always thought he was mixed somewhere in there.
I don't know if he was adopted. Maybe he didn't
realize it, maybe he did, but I always thought, and
to this day I can remember and see his faith.
He looked like he could have been reletant. He was
(25:58):
very fair, but he wasn't that fair.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Carmen brought this up to me totally unprompted, though I
wasn't entirely surprised because I had heard this same thing
from Scott Duffy, the FBI agent. Quite the bombshell, or
maybe I should say potential bombshell, because I don't know
if it's true. If you recall, Craig went to federal
prison in the nineteen nineties. His prison records list his
(26:25):
race as white. But that's really all I can say.
I've been in touch with Craig. We first spoke a
few months ago on the phone. I had hoped that
he'd go on the record and share his side of
the story. I eventually sent him a letter with all
the info that we've included on him in this series
to give him a chance to respond, and this is
(26:46):
what he wrote back. Dear Jake, I give my permission
and ask to have the following herd. I've not responded
because I've been contemplating for many hours the positive and
negative things that can occur by participating in your podcast.
I'm going to decline, but would like to say my life,
my beliefs, and views are very different now. I do
(27:10):
sincerely regret any harm I've caused to everyone involved. In
the summer of two thousand and six, the grand jury convened.
(27:31):
The prosecution called its witnesses, including Craig, Peterson, the two
ex girlfriends, the two federal agents Scott and Terry and
also Louby, the detective from the Philadelphia PD. Was that
a winning hand. Well, the prosecution thought so, because in
the end they decided, yes, let's do this. They asked
(27:54):
for an indictment against Tom Geibison for the murder of
iron Wood, and the grand jury gave them the green light,
confirming that yes, there was probable cause to believe that
a crime had been committed. Charges were issued against Tom Guybison,
including murder in the first degree. When it came time
(28:15):
for the arrest, Scott and Terry were actually the ones
who planned it all out. It was an elaborate operation
involving the FBI, the ATF, and the Philadelphia Police Department.
Scott and Terry led the arrest team. They showed up
early in the morning at the house where he was
staying and just waited. Eventually Tom emerged. He was a
(28:36):
big guy with the build of a weightlifter. He walked
towards his car. Terry knew this was the moment, so like.
Speaker 6 (28:46):
Police, please get down, get down, and I'm I'm yelling.
Others are yelling tough fur lungs and he just stands
there like a deer in the headlights, just staring at it,
staring at me, staring at them, and I could see
in his mind. I can see in his face he's
deciding what to do. He's got like a half a
dozen dudes, you know, potentially going to light him up
if he does something wrong, and he's just say he's
(29:09):
he's literally thinking what am I going to do?
Speaker 1 (29:13):
Finally, Terry says, Tom put out his hands, surrendered, and
that was it. Everyone took a sigh of relief. They
read Tom his rights, handcuffed him, and informed him that
he was under arrest for the murder of Iran Wood.
He was extradited to Philadelphia, where he would eventually stand trial,
(29:35):
and it would be quite a trial, Roger King's last
case as a prosecutor, And as it turns out, King
would be up against a formidable opponent, a lawyer who
would make a tenacious defense of Tom Guybison and do
everything in his power to find the moth holes that
time had riddled into the fabric of evidence. It was
(29:57):
a trial that would hinge on the credibility of three
witnesses and a handful of crucial facts, a trial that
would find its way into the newspapers and TV news
passions about our nation's history of racist violence and about
what constitutes reasonable doubt. Tom Guybison would profess his innocence,
(30:19):
the Wood family would hope for justice, and a jury
of twelve Philadelphians would argue, agonize and decide. Next time
on Deep Cover.
Speaker 7 (30:34):
I believe Tom Guybison is innocent. They have no physical evidence,
they had no gun, They had nothing but the ear
witnesses of scorned girlfriends and Craig Peterson, who had been
made an offer he couldn't refuse to escape prosecution in
return for full community.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
Deep Cover is produced by Amy Gaines McQuaid and Jacob Smith.
It's edited by Karen Schakerji mastering by Jake Gorsky. Our
show art was designed by Sean Carney. Original scoring in
our theme was composed by Luis Gara, fact checking by
Arthur Gomperts. Our story consultant was James Foreman Jr. Special
(31:43):
thanks to Jerry Williams, Sarah Nis, Greta Cone, and Jake Flanagan.
I'm Jake Halpern
Host
Jake Halpern
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