April 29, 2024 • 30 mins
The alleged accomplice confesses. Investigators try to piece together who the victim might be from the scant details he remembers.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hey it's Jake. Before we get into this episode,
I want to let you know that you can now
binge the entire season ad free. By becoming a Pushkin
Plus subscriber, You can hear all six episodes before they
are released to the public. Sign up for Pushkin Plus
on the deep Cover Apple podcast show page or visit
(00:39):
pushkin dot fm slash Plus. Your subscription also unlocks more
early and ad free content from other true crime shows
coming later this year, like new seasons of Death of
an Artist and Lost Hills, and a brand new true
investigation called Where's doa Now. Unto the episode, Hey it's
(01:02):
Jake here, I just wanted to give you a heads
up that this episode contains a detailed account of a
hate crime, a murder previously on deep Cover.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Greig Peterson, you don't know us, but we're here. I
want to talk to you federal agents. Can we approach you?
And Craig just looked at us and said, I don't
know what you're talking about.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
I think he says something like, yeah, we heard rumors
about that that someone said we did a homicide. But
man's now, that's nothing to it. We didn't do any homicides.
It's a bunch of junk.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
You could feel the tension, but you can also feel
like he's about to say something, and then he says,
I'll tell you everything.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
So there are Scott Duffy and Terry Mortimer in a
conference room at the FBI's offices in Willington, Delaware, and
they're sitting on the edge of their seats because across
the table from them is Craig Peterson, the electrician from
Vermont with the spiderweb tattoo. Now they suspect that Craig
(02:22):
was an accomplice to a murder. For months, Craig had
been playing at cool, admitting to nothing. But now in
this conference room, Craig has promised to tell them everything.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
It was a moment that I think of everything that
Terry and I had been through, had prayed through, and
this was the moment in time. This was it. It was
almost like, this is the reason why you were brought together.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Mind you, this moment, it wasn't just the result of
good luck. Two days prior, Scott and Terry had played
their best and last card. They had handed Craig a
subpoena to appear before a grand jury. They were hoping
that this would get him talking. It was a long shot.
Speaker 4 (03:13):
Really.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Truth was, the Feds had very little on Craig, but
Craig he offered to tell them everything. Before he did, however,
he made a request.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
He says, I need to have assurances, and we said
what type of assurances? Well, you have a prosecutor on board.
Can you call the prosecutor? Absolutely, we can call the prosecutor.
But Greg, you gotta I can't just call a prosecutor
over here and waste his time. You've got to tell
(03:49):
us what is it we're asking the prosecutor to come for.
And that's when he says, I'm not the shooter and
I want immunity.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Upon hearing this, Scott's partner Terry, kind of sat up
in his chair.
Speaker 3 (04:12):
Now I'm thinking myself, this dude's pretty savvy. Dude thinking
like attorneys talk about immunity, Federal agents talk about immunity.
Not the electricians from Earl and Tim Vermont get like,
where did you get that from? That's what he said,
I want immunity.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Now, Typically giving someone immunity is not a quick or
easy task, especially in a situation like this where someone's
been murdered. Getting all the higher ups to sign off
can take days or longer, but Scott knew time was
of the essence. He needed to jump on this before
Craig changed his mind. Fortunately he had a prosecutor on standby.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Prosecutor dropped everything, ran to my office. We spoke with
him briefly, saying, in so many words, he's confessed and
we don't know where to go from here. And so
he said, so what you need is immunity? Am I
(05:12):
hearing that?
Speaker 1 (05:13):
And Scott's like, yeah, that's exactly what Craig is asking for.
And the prosecutor is like, I think I can help you, guys.
But first, the prosecutor had one crucial question and he
wants to ask it directly to Craig. So he hurries
over to the conference room.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
And the first thing the prosecutor asked him very first thing,
are you the shooter if it comes back at all
in any way that you pulled the trigger? Deals off,
no immunity nothing.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Craig tells them, no, I didn't pull the trigger, wasn't me.
The prosecutor seems satisfied. He whips out a pen and
begins to write out a grant of federal immunity.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
I'm looking at Scott in one this is unbelievable, that never.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Happens, but that's exactly what happened.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
So with that, Craig tells us that he starts the
Damn breaks.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Up until now, Scott and Terry had been going on
a prayer, quite literally, chasing down rumors and nothing more.
But that was about to change. A confession was at hand,
one that would validate Scott and Terry's hope that they
were uncovering something they were destined to find. Ultimately, this
(06:40):
confession would upend many people's lives. It would transform a
whispered rumor into a full blown murder investigation, and maybe,
just maybe it could lead them to the victim. I'm
(07:06):
Jake Alpern and this is Deep Cover, Season four, The
Nameless Man, Episode two, The Confession. After the Damn Breaks,
(07:38):
Craig just starts talking, recounting what he could remember from
that night back in nineteen eighty nine when he and
tom Guybison were still in high school.
Speaker 3 (07:48):
And so he starts telling us how it went down.
That basically that he and Tommy decided one night to
go and find a black man, to kill that black
man so that they could get their spider web tattoos
as skinheads.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Craig tells them. They borrowed his mother's car, a gray Chevy.
Craig drove, Tom was in the passenger seat. They'd gotten
their hands on a gun, a thirty eight caliber Revolver,
and they started looking for a target. All of this,
by the way, and what I'm about to tell you,
is based on Scott and Terry's recollections and the report
(08:26):
that they filed at the time, and also from sworn
testimony that Scott, Terry, and Craig later provided. Anyway, Initially,
Craig and Tom drove through Wilmington, Delaware, where they lived.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
He said it was very busy. He said, there were
just so many people out and there would be no
way that they would be able to shoot somebody and
not have a witness around. So they made the decision
to leave Wilmington and travel north.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
They drove north on the Interstate until they reached Philadelphia. Here,
they got off at the Broad Street exit. By now
it was late. Craig wasn't sure exactly how late, but
the streets were mostly empty. Craig said. At one point
they stopped and stole a license plate to put on
his mom's car as an added measure of protection, just
(09:17):
in case someone witnessed what they were about to do.
At some point, they passed a large wall, and eventually
they turned onto a one way street.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
Craig's driving, and they drive down a very dark street,
and Tommy is in the passenger side, and he tells
Craig slowed down, slowed down.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Slowed down, because up ahead they saw a pedestrian, a
lone black man, as Craig recounted it, the man turned
and started walking toward them.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
Tommy pulled out a thirty eight caliber revolver, leaned out
the window and shot him and exclaimed, I got him
right between the eyes.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
The way Craig remembered is the guy hit the ground
so hard that he I had to be dead.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Craig said that even all these years later, he still
remembered the sound of that thud as the man fell
onto the pavement.
Speaker 4 (10:27):
And that was it.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
These two high school kids, with their gun and their
mom's car sped off into the night, back home to Delaware.
So far, this entire investigation had been based on a rumor,
a rumor that initially seemed like it might be impossible
(10:49):
to verify the two teenagers drove into a nearby city
to murder a complete stranger because of the color of
his skin, and that they'd commemorated this murder with a tattoo.
It was the kind of story that you didn't want
to believe in, because if it were true, what did
(11:10):
that say about us as human beings? About our capacity
for hate and cold bloodedness? In a way, the veracity
of this rumor was about more than just one murder.
It seemed like a test, a light meter that would
measure just how dark the depths of humanity could be.
It all hinged on a single question, could these kids
(11:34):
really have done this? And in a situation like this,
you almost have to hope, maybe even pray, that the
answer is no, because then the world isn't so bad, right.
But if the answer is yes, they really did this, well,
then the depths are darker than most of us would
care to admit. As Craig recounted the details of the
(12:04):
murder in that FBI conference room, Scott listened intently. If
you recall, Scott had trained to become a priest back then,
sometimes people would notice his priest's collar and just start talking,
sharing their darkest secrets. So Scott he was comfortable in
this role as the confessor. He knew how to listen,
(12:25):
how to watch, which is exactly what he did as
Craig spoke.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
And when when you watch somebody tell the story, you
can tell that they are just reliving it, that they
were there. It was just amazing to watch, because that's
all I'm doing, is watching him.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
Craig's confession raised so many questions for Scott and Terry,
like why would Craig, the steadfast sidekick, turn on his
old friend now because in the past Craig had been
very loyal, Like a few years back, Craig had tried
to protect Tom from the authorities by storing some weapons
for him, weapons that Tom wasn't supposed to have. Craig
(13:10):
paid for this, did a few years in prison in fact,
so maybe he was willing to talk now just to
avoid a repeat of that. Craig got out of federal
prison in nineteen ninety nine. A few years later he
moved north to Vermont, to that house in the mountains
with the dogs and the floodlights. Bottom line, it seemed
(13:31):
like Craig had made a decision to escape his old
life and maybe to escape Tom too, I should mention.
We reached out to both Craig and Tom for this story.
Craig declined an interview. We never heard back from Tom,
but here's what we can say about Tom. He had
a long and well documented history of violence. As a teenager,
(13:55):
he'd been convicted of reckless endangerment after he shot a
gun at a moving car full of people. Police records
from the time confirmed that Tom had an arsenal of weapons,
including a billy club, two blocks, black jacks, two sets
of brass knuckles, and a mess of knives. To put
it plainly, Tom seemed like the kind of friend that
(14:17):
you might not want to anger by turning on him.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
We believed that a real danger existed. There is a
very real potential of danger against Craig. People will go
to great lengths to protect their their self interests, but.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
At this point there was no turning back for Craig.
More after the break, Scott and Terry now had a confession,
(15:06):
which under normal circumstances would be a very big deal,
potentially a game changer, and in some ways the confession
was very promising. Craig were called some details, like the
moment of the actual shooting vividly in a way that
might be very persuasive for a jury. The problem was
the alleged murder took place more than seventeen years prior,
(15:30):
and there was so much that Craig did not remember.
For instance, he couldn't tell the FEDS where exactly this happened.
He couldn't provide the name of a street or intersection
or park, nor could he tell them exactly when this happened,
could not offer a day, or a week or even
a month. Most vexing of all, Craig had no idea
(15:51):
who the victim was. And this right here underscored the
central problem that Scott and Terry had been facing from
the very beginning. Simply put, they didn't have a body.
They were trying to solve the murder of an unknown man,
and without knowing who he was, they couldn't do much
(16:11):
of anything. But Scott remained determined, we.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
Have to do our job and we have to find
out who did they kill. If if possible, how are
we going to do that? It then felt like a mandate,
like Okay, we're we're in this.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
This sounds awfully confident, But both Scott and Terry told
me that they felt on some level like they were
trying to find a needle in a haystack. They both
use that exact phrase, which raises the question, how do
you find a needle in a haystack? Well, in theory,
you start by sorting through all the pieces of hay right.
In other words, you create a finite pool of possibilities.
(16:59):
So let's talk about the finite the things Craig knew
or claim to know with some certainty. Craig knew the
murder took place sometime around the spring of nineteen eighty nine.
He remember this in part because he recalled going to
senior prom not long after the murder took place. So
the agents had a year nineteen eighty nine, and they
(17:20):
had a city, Philadelphia, And for whatever it was worth,
Craig had mentioned a one way street and a dark
colored wall. According to police accounts, there were four hundred
and seventy three murders in Philadelphia that year. So in theory,
one of those murder victims was their nameless man. But
which one turns out, our federal agents they had an
(17:46):
ace up their sleeve. Scott knew someone, someone he believed
could really help them, a detective who worked in the
homicide unit of the Philadelphia Police Department, a veteran investigator
named Leon Lubieski went by Lubi for short. Scott gave
me a very vivid picture of what Luby looked like.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
Large physical stature, Like when you hear a bear, you
think of a bear, and you know, scary or cuddly.
I mean, bear has many different views depending on who
you ask, right, but nobody will ever deny the fact
that a bear is big.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
And you can't argue with Scott on that one.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
When you saw him, you perked up and you're like, oh,
he's not somebody to fool around with.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
But apparently Luby also had this other aspect.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
He had the face of someone who is just extremely caring.
You just looked at him, you knew immediately this is
somebody who will do anything to help you. So he
was a multifaceted bear, multifaceted cuddly, but he could turn
grizzly if he needed to. Scott's hope was that his
(19:05):
old friend Lubi, the multifaceted bear, could now help them
find the victim.
Speaker 4 (19:21):
Hello, Hey, is this Louby. It's Louby Louby. This is Jake,
is this still a good time to talk to you? Yeah,
it's scrip time.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
It took me a while to track Luby down. He's
retired now. When we spoke, he remembered the case right away.
Speaker 4 (19:39):
They had these details, but they didn't actually have a
body to go with it. How unusual is that to
have someone say, hey, we we're pretty certain there's a murder,
we have a confession. We just we got no body.
That's rather unusual.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
Scott had passed along a short list of facts to
Luby to help him with his task. They included the
following one the area where Craig remembered drive, two the
type of weapon that was used, three the nature of
the wound, a single shot to the head for the
race of the victim, and five a general timeframe for
(20:20):
when this happened, the spring of nineteen eighty nine. How
optimistic were you that you were going to be able
to get them what they needed to solve this.
Speaker 4 (20:33):
I was actually very optimistic because we keep pretty good
records on our dead bodies.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
For Scott and Terry, this was a search for a
needle in a haystack. But Louby was an insider who
knew how things worked in Philly and knew exactly where
to look. As far as the records go. The authorities
believed this murder case would have been marked as unsolved.
It happened back in nineteen eighty nine, and Luby was
(21:00):
getting this request seventeen years later in the spring of
two thousand and six.
Speaker 4 (21:07):
So what happens with a case when it goes up solved, Well,
it stays with the assigned detective, and that he gets
a chance, he goes out and works on it in
between things. If he doesn't, it just lays there, becomes cold.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
Basically, the file just sits there in a file cabinet
in the homicide department.
Speaker 5 (21:27):
Homicides just want one big room, and there's file cabinets
all along the walls, and in those file cabinets are
the open cases. And then they move from into storage.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
Luby told me that typically after a few years, the
unsolved case files are sent to the city's storage facility,
a big ten story building. The homicide files are kept
down in the basement.
Speaker 5 (21:53):
And when that happens, the assigned detective he no longer
it's a bit of a problem for him to get
to his case.
Speaker 4 (22:00):
File now, so is it kind of a little bit
out of sight, out of mind.
Speaker 5 (22:05):
And basically once it goes into storage, like the supervisor
doesn't bother you anymore to get anything done on it.
Speaker 4 (22:13):
So it's like in limbo.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
As far as I could tell, these cold cases kept
down in the basement, kind of like the messages at
the very bottom of your inbox that slowly recede from
your consciousness and eventually get moved into some folder that
you'll most likely never look at again. So when Luby
got the call from Scott and Terry, he didn't have
(22:36):
the actual case files from nineteen eighty nine right at
his fingertips. What he had was a loosely finder an
index of all the murders from the past. This index
was a collection of so called summary sheets.
Speaker 5 (22:51):
It's a single page. It's got the deceased name, cause death.
You know what the outcome is, It's still open.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Thanks to that nature, Louby searches through these summary sheets
and narrows the possibilities down to unsolve murders that occurred
around the spring anywhere from January through May. There were
thirty seven of them. Then he weeded out all the
ones that didn't match up with the details that Scott
had given him. In the end, Luby was left with
(23:23):
just one case, an unsolved murder from April sixteenth, nineteen
eighty nine, of a thirty three year old black man.
He was killed by a single thirty eight caliber bullet
to the head. This happened in North Philadelphia on a
one way street, just one block away from an imposing
(23:44):
stone wall. Louby made arrangements to get the entire case
file pulled out of storage unearthed from that basement, and
then he reached back out to Scott Louby facts the
summary sheet directly over to the FBI's offices in Wilmington, Delaware.
It was an efficient bit of detective work. He'd done
(24:06):
all of this in roughly twenty four hours. So you
can imagine Scott's reaction when, just a day after getting
Craig's confession of facts arrives from Luby and Scott. He
just holds it in his hands and stares at it.
Speaker 4 (24:24):
It was.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Unbelievable feeling that this is it. Seeing the name and
seeing the the specifics of the crime, having a location
a street, I don't even think I put it down.
(24:50):
It was this is it.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
Wait, how could you be so certain?
Speaker 2 (24:58):
I don't know. I just felt like everything that Craig
told us fit this very crime.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
And so much of it did seem to fit, including
the time frame, the one way street, the proximity of
the wall, the caliber of the bullet, the single shot
to the head. The motive noted on the facts was
one word drugs. Objectively, at this point you could not
say it was a slam dunk. There was no DNA match.
(25:35):
No one had found a murder weapon and matched it
to a bullet from the scene of the crime. None
of that. But even so, Scott remembers turning to his
partner Terry, and saying.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
We have a name. We have a victim. Terry, I
think this is This is why we're here. We believe
this is this is who we've been pursuing. That was
pretty powerful to us.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
At long last, they had a name. It was right
there on the facts plane to see, printed out in
smudgy letters, Aron Would. They strongly believed that he was
the victim. This was a huge moment in their investigation,
and yet it could still amount to nothing. Identifying a
(26:29):
potential victim did not guarantee a conviction or even guarantee
that there'd be a trial. Now, the question was would
there be enough evidence to bring a case and convince
a jury that this is what happened all those years ago.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Terry and I said, it may be that this does
not ever go to a court. There may be nothing
that we can do, or Philadelphia can do, even with
Craig's cooperation, that this is ever going to see the
inside of a court, and letting Craig know that this
(27:06):
all may be just to give Iran Wood's family some
sense of some sense of.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
Understanding, but a kind of terrible understanding, right.
Speaker 2 (27:30):
Yeah, definitely. I just believe having no name, having no
understanding of how your loved one's life came to an end,
who did it and for what purpose? I think, can
drive you mad.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
As investigators would soon learn, Iran Wood had a family,
including a mother and two younger brothers. For seventeen years,
they'd been searching for answers about how and why he died.
The last chapter of Iran's life was like a story
that stopped abruptly mid page. No explanation, no closure. There
(28:16):
have been very little to hold on to. But all
of that was about to change. Next time on Deep Cover.
Speaker 4 (28:27):
Everybody liked him.
Speaker 6 (28:29):
That's why we was baffled, like, Oh, somebody shot a run,
shot a run. You can't na no way, And I
guess that's what pleases the most in the beginning, couldn't
figure it out.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
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 Gomberts. Our story consultant was James Foreman Jr. Special
(29:31):
thanks to Jerry Williams, Sarah Nix, Greta Cone, and Jake Flanagan.
I'm Jake alber
Speaker 4 (30:11):
The po
Pushkin. Hey it's Jake. Before we get into this episode,
I want to let you know that you can now
binge the entire season ad free. By becoming a Pushkin
Plus subscriber, You can hear all six episodes before they
are released to the public. Sign up for Pushkin Plus
on the deep Cover Apple podcast show page or visit
(00:39):
pushkin dot fm slash Plus. Your subscription also unlocks more
early and ad free content from other true crime shows
coming later this year, like new seasons of Death of
an Artist and Lost Hills, and a brand new true
investigation called Where's doa Now. Unto the episode, Hey it's
(01:02):
Jake here, I just wanted to give you a heads
up that this episode contains a detailed account of a
hate crime, a murder previously on deep Cover.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Greig Peterson, you don't know us, but we're here. I
want to talk to you federal agents. Can we approach you?
And Craig just looked at us and said, I don't
know what you're talking about.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
I think he says something like, yeah, we heard rumors
about that that someone said we did a homicide. But
man's now, that's nothing to it. We didn't do any homicides.
It's a bunch of junk.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
You could feel the tension, but you can also feel
like he's about to say something, and then he says,
I'll tell you everything.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
So there are Scott Duffy and Terry Mortimer in a
conference room at the FBI's offices in Willington, Delaware, and
they're sitting on the edge of their seats because across
the table from them is Craig Peterson, the electrician from
Vermont with the spiderweb tattoo. Now they suspect that Craig
(02:22):
was an accomplice to a murder. For months, Craig had
been playing at cool, admitting to nothing. But now in
this conference room, Craig has promised to tell them everything.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
It was a moment that I think of everything that
Terry and I had been through, had prayed through, and
this was the moment in time. This was it. It was
almost like, this is the reason why you were brought together.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Mind you, this moment, it wasn't just the result of
good luck. Two days prior, Scott and Terry had played
their best and last card. They had handed Craig a
subpoena to appear before a grand jury. They were hoping
that this would get him talking. It was a long shot.
Speaker 4 (03:13):
Really.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Truth was, the Feds had very little on Craig, but
Craig he offered to tell them everything. Before he did, however,
he made a request.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
He says, I need to have assurances, and we said
what type of assurances? Well, you have a prosecutor on board.
Can you call the prosecutor? Absolutely, we can call the prosecutor.
But Greg, you gotta I can't just call a prosecutor
over here and waste his time. You've got to tell
(03:49):
us what is it we're asking the prosecutor to come for.
And that's when he says, I'm not the shooter and
I want immunity.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Upon hearing this, Scott's partner Terry, kind of sat up
in his chair.
Speaker 3 (04:12):
Now I'm thinking myself, this dude's pretty savvy. Dude thinking
like attorneys talk about immunity, Federal agents talk about immunity.
Not the electricians from Earl and Tim Vermont get like,
where did you get that from? That's what he said,
I want immunity.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Now, Typically giving someone immunity is not a quick or
easy task, especially in a situation like this where someone's
been murdered. Getting all the higher ups to sign off
can take days or longer, but Scott knew time was
of the essence. He needed to jump on this before
Craig changed his mind. Fortunately he had a prosecutor on standby.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Prosecutor dropped everything, ran to my office. We spoke with
him briefly, saying, in so many words, he's confessed and
we don't know where to go from here. And so
he said, so what you need is immunity? Am I
(05:12):
hearing that?
Speaker 1 (05:13):
And Scott's like, yeah, that's exactly what Craig is asking for.
And the prosecutor is like, I think I can help you, guys.
But first, the prosecutor had one crucial question and he
wants to ask it directly to Craig. So he hurries
over to the conference room.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
And the first thing the prosecutor asked him very first thing,
are you the shooter if it comes back at all
in any way that you pulled the trigger? Deals off,
no immunity nothing.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Craig tells them, no, I didn't pull the trigger, wasn't me.
The prosecutor seems satisfied. He whips out a pen and
begins to write out a grant of federal immunity.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
I'm looking at Scott in one this is unbelievable, that never.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Happens, but that's exactly what happened.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
So with that, Craig tells us that he starts the
Damn breaks.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Up until now, Scott and Terry had been going on
a prayer, quite literally, chasing down rumors and nothing more.
But that was about to change. A confession was at hand,
one that would validate Scott and Terry's hope that they
were uncovering something they were destined to find. Ultimately, this
(06:40):
confession would upend many people's lives. It would transform a
whispered rumor into a full blown murder investigation, and maybe,
just maybe it could lead them to the victim. I'm
(07:06):
Jake Alpern and this is Deep Cover, Season four, The
Nameless Man, Episode two, The Confession. After the Damn Breaks,
(07:38):
Craig just starts talking, recounting what he could remember from
that night back in nineteen eighty nine when he and
tom Guybison were still in high school.
Speaker 3 (07:48):
And so he starts telling us how it went down.
That basically that he and Tommy decided one night to
go and find a black man, to kill that black
man so that they could get their spider web tattoos
as skinheads.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Craig tells them. They borrowed his mother's car, a gray Chevy.
Craig drove, Tom was in the passenger seat. They'd gotten
their hands on a gun, a thirty eight caliber Revolver,
and they started looking for a target. All of this,
by the way, and what I'm about to tell you,
is based on Scott and Terry's recollections and the report
(08:26):
that they filed at the time, and also from sworn
testimony that Scott, Terry, and Craig later provided. Anyway, Initially,
Craig and Tom drove through Wilmington, Delaware, where they lived.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
He said it was very busy. He said, there were
just so many people out and there would be no
way that they would be able to shoot somebody and
not have a witness around. So they made the decision
to leave Wilmington and travel north.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
They drove north on the Interstate until they reached Philadelphia. Here,
they got off at the Broad Street exit. By now
it was late. Craig wasn't sure exactly how late, but
the streets were mostly empty. Craig said. At one point
they stopped and stole a license plate to put on
his mom's car as an added measure of protection, just
(09:17):
in case someone witnessed what they were about to do.
At some point, they passed a large wall, and eventually
they turned onto a one way street.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
Craig's driving, and they drive down a very dark street,
and Tommy is in the passenger side, and he tells
Craig slowed down, slowed down.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Slowed down, because up ahead they saw a pedestrian, a
lone black man, as Craig recounted it, the man turned
and started walking toward them.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
Tommy pulled out a thirty eight caliber revolver, leaned out
the window and shot him and exclaimed, I got him
right between the eyes.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
The way Craig remembered is the guy hit the ground
so hard that he I had to be dead.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Craig said that even all these years later, he still
remembered the sound of that thud as the man fell
onto the pavement.
Speaker 4 (10:27):
And that was it.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
These two high school kids, with their gun and their
mom's car sped off into the night, back home to Delaware.
So far, this entire investigation had been based on a rumor,
a rumor that initially seemed like it might be impossible
(10:49):
to verify the two teenagers drove into a nearby city
to murder a complete stranger because of the color of
his skin, and that they'd commemorated this murder with a tattoo.
It was the kind of story that you didn't want
to believe in, because if it were true, what did
(11:10):
that say about us as human beings? About our capacity
for hate and cold bloodedness? In a way, the veracity
of this rumor was about more than just one murder.
It seemed like a test, a light meter that would
measure just how dark the depths of humanity could be.
It all hinged on a single question, could these kids
(11:34):
really have done this? And in a situation like this,
you almost have to hope, maybe even pray, that the
answer is no, because then the world isn't so bad, right.
But if the answer is yes, they really did this, well,
then the depths are darker than most of us would
care to admit. As Craig recounted the details of the
(12:04):
murder in that FBI conference room, Scott listened intently. If
you recall, Scott had trained to become a priest back then,
sometimes people would notice his priest's collar and just start talking,
sharing their darkest secrets. So Scott he was comfortable in
this role as the confessor. He knew how to listen,
(12:25):
how to watch, which is exactly what he did as
Craig spoke.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
And when when you watch somebody tell the story, you
can tell that they are just reliving it, that they
were there. It was just amazing to watch, because that's
all I'm doing, is watching him.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
Craig's confession raised so many questions for Scott and Terry,
like why would Craig, the steadfast sidekick, turn on his
old friend now because in the past Craig had been
very loyal, Like a few years back, Craig had tried
to protect Tom from the authorities by storing some weapons
for him, weapons that Tom wasn't supposed to have. Craig
(13:10):
paid for this, did a few years in prison in fact,
so maybe he was willing to talk now just to
avoid a repeat of that. Craig got out of federal
prison in nineteen ninety nine. A few years later he
moved north to Vermont, to that house in the mountains
with the dogs and the floodlights. Bottom line, it seemed
(13:31):
like Craig had made a decision to escape his old
life and maybe to escape Tom too, I should mention.
We reached out to both Craig and Tom for this story.
Craig declined an interview. We never heard back from Tom,
but here's what we can say about Tom. He had
a long and well documented history of violence. As a teenager,
(13:55):
he'd been convicted of reckless endangerment after he shot a
gun at a moving car full of people. Police records
from the time confirmed that Tom had an arsenal of weapons,
including a billy club, two blocks, black jacks, two sets
of brass knuckles, and a mess of knives. To put
it plainly, Tom seemed like the kind of friend that
(14:17):
you might not want to anger by turning on him.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
We believed that a real danger existed. There is a
very real potential of danger against Craig. People will go
to great lengths to protect their their self interests, but.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
At this point there was no turning back for Craig.
More after the break, Scott and Terry now had a confession,
(15:06):
which under normal circumstances would be a very big deal,
potentially a game changer, and in some ways the confession
was very promising. Craig were called some details, like the
moment of the actual shooting vividly in a way that
might be very persuasive for a jury. The problem was
the alleged murder took place more than seventeen years prior,
(15:30):
and there was so much that Craig did not remember.
For instance, he couldn't tell the FEDS where exactly this happened.
He couldn't provide the name of a street or intersection
or park, nor could he tell them exactly when this happened,
could not offer a day, or a week or even
a month. Most vexing of all, Craig had no idea
(15:51):
who the victim was. And this right here underscored the
central problem that Scott and Terry had been facing from
the very beginning. Simply put, they didn't have a body.
They were trying to solve the murder of an unknown man,
and without knowing who he was, they couldn't do much
(16:11):
of anything. But Scott remained determined, we.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
Have to do our job and we have to find
out who did they kill. If if possible, how are
we going to do that? It then felt like a mandate,
like Okay, we're we're in this.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
This sounds awfully confident, But both Scott and Terry told
me that they felt on some level like they were
trying to find a needle in a haystack. They both
use that exact phrase, which raises the question, how do
you find a needle in a haystack? Well, in theory,
you start by sorting through all the pieces of hay right.
In other words, you create a finite pool of possibilities.
(16:59):
So let's talk about the finite the things Craig knew
or claim to know with some certainty. Craig knew the
murder took place sometime around the spring of nineteen eighty nine.
He remember this in part because he recalled going to
senior prom not long after the murder took place. So
the agents had a year nineteen eighty nine, and they
(17:20):
had a city, Philadelphia, And for whatever it was worth,
Craig had mentioned a one way street and a dark
colored wall. According to police accounts, there were four hundred
and seventy three murders in Philadelphia that year. So in theory,
one of those murder victims was their nameless man. But
which one turns out, our federal agents they had an
(17:46):
ace up their sleeve. Scott knew someone, someone he believed
could really help them, a detective who worked in the
homicide unit of the Philadelphia Police Department, a veteran investigator
named Leon Lubieski went by Lubi for short. Scott gave
me a very vivid picture of what Luby looked like.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
Large physical stature, Like when you hear a bear, you
think of a bear, and you know, scary or cuddly.
I mean, bear has many different views depending on who
you ask, right, but nobody will ever deny the fact
that a bear is big.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
And you can't argue with Scott on that one.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
When you saw him, you perked up and you're like, oh,
he's not somebody to fool around with.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
But apparently Luby also had this other aspect.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
He had the face of someone who is just extremely caring.
You just looked at him, you knew immediately this is
somebody who will do anything to help you. So he
was a multifaceted bear, multifaceted cuddly, but he could turn
grizzly if he needed to. Scott's hope was that his
(19:05):
old friend Lubi, the multifaceted bear, could now help them
find the victim.
Speaker 4 (19:21):
Hello, Hey, is this Louby. It's Louby Louby. This is Jake,
is this still a good time to talk to you? Yeah,
it's scrip time.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
It took me a while to track Luby down. He's
retired now. When we spoke, he remembered the case right away.
Speaker 4 (19:39):
They had these details, but they didn't actually have a
body to go with it. How unusual is that to
have someone say, hey, we we're pretty certain there's a murder,
we have a confession. We just we got no body.
That's rather unusual.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
Scott had passed along a short list of facts to
Luby to help him with his task. They included the
following one the area where Craig remembered drive, two the
type of weapon that was used, three the nature of
the wound, a single shot to the head for the
race of the victim, and five a general timeframe for
(20:20):
when this happened, the spring of nineteen eighty nine. How
optimistic were you that you were going to be able
to get them what they needed to solve this.
Speaker 4 (20:33):
I was actually very optimistic because we keep pretty good
records on our dead bodies.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
For Scott and Terry, this was a search for a
needle in a haystack. But Louby was an insider who
knew how things worked in Philly and knew exactly where
to look. As far as the records go. The authorities
believed this murder case would have been marked as unsolved.
It happened back in nineteen eighty nine, and Luby was
(21:00):
getting this request seventeen years later in the spring of
two thousand and six.
Speaker 4 (21:07):
So what happens with a case when it goes up solved, Well,
it stays with the assigned detective, and that he gets
a chance, he goes out and works on it in
between things. If he doesn't, it just lays there, becomes cold.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
Basically, the file just sits there in a file cabinet
in the homicide department.
Speaker 5 (21:27):
Homicides just want one big room, and there's file cabinets
all along the walls, and in those file cabinets are
the open cases. And then they move from into storage.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
Luby told me that typically after a few years, the
unsolved case files are sent to the city's storage facility,
a big ten story building. The homicide files are kept
down in the basement.
Speaker 5 (21:53):
And when that happens, the assigned detective he no longer
it's a bit of a problem for him to get
to his case.
Speaker 4 (22:00):
File now, so is it kind of a little bit
out of sight, out of mind.
Speaker 5 (22:05):
And basically once it goes into storage, like the supervisor
doesn't bother you anymore to get anything done on it.
Speaker 4 (22:13):
So it's like in limbo.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
As far as I could tell, these cold cases kept
down in the basement, kind of like the messages at
the very bottom of your inbox that slowly recede from
your consciousness and eventually get moved into some folder that
you'll most likely never look at again. So when Luby
got the call from Scott and Terry, he didn't have
(22:36):
the actual case files from nineteen eighty nine right at
his fingertips. What he had was a loosely finder an
index of all the murders from the past. This index
was a collection of so called summary sheets.
Speaker 5 (22:51):
It's a single page. It's got the deceased name, cause death.
You know what the outcome is, It's still open.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Thanks to that nature, Louby searches through these summary sheets
and narrows the possibilities down to unsolve murders that occurred
around the spring anywhere from January through May. There were
thirty seven of them. Then he weeded out all the
ones that didn't match up with the details that Scott
had given him. In the end, Luby was left with
(23:23):
just one case, an unsolved murder from April sixteenth, nineteen
eighty nine, of a thirty three year old black man.
He was killed by a single thirty eight caliber bullet
to the head. This happened in North Philadelphia on a
one way street, just one block away from an imposing
(23:44):
stone wall. Louby made arrangements to get the entire case
file pulled out of storage unearthed from that basement, and
then he reached back out to Scott Louby facts the
summary sheet directly over to the FBI's offices in Wilmington, Delaware.
It was an efficient bit of detective work. He'd done
(24:06):
all of this in roughly twenty four hours. So you
can imagine Scott's reaction when, just a day after getting
Craig's confession of facts arrives from Luby and Scott. He
just holds it in his hands and stares at it.
Speaker 4 (24:24):
It was.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Unbelievable feeling that this is it. Seeing the name and
seeing the the specifics of the crime, having a location
a street, I don't even think I put it down.
(24:50):
It was this is it.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
Wait, how could you be so certain?
Speaker 2 (24:58):
I don't know. I just felt like everything that Craig
told us fit this very crime.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
And so much of it did seem to fit, including
the time frame, the one way street, the proximity of
the wall, the caliber of the bullet, the single shot
to the head. The motive noted on the facts was
one word drugs. Objectively, at this point you could not
say it was a slam dunk. There was no DNA match.
(25:35):
No one had found a murder weapon and matched it
to a bullet from the scene of the crime. None
of that. But even so, Scott remembers turning to his
partner Terry, and saying.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
We have a name. We have a victim. Terry, I
think this is This is why we're here. We believe
this is this is who we've been pursuing. That was
pretty powerful to us.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
At long last, they had a name. It was right
there on the facts plane to see, printed out in
smudgy letters, Aron Would. They strongly believed that he was
the victim. This was a huge moment in their investigation,
and yet it could still amount to nothing. Identifying a
(26:29):
potential victim did not guarantee a conviction or even guarantee
that there'd be a trial. Now, the question was would
there be enough evidence to bring a case and convince
a jury that this is what happened all those years ago.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Terry and I said, it may be that this does
not ever go to a court. There may be nothing
that we can do, or Philadelphia can do, even with
Craig's cooperation, that this is ever going to see the
inside of a court, and letting Craig know that this
(27:06):
all may be just to give Iran Wood's family some
sense of some sense of.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
Understanding, but a kind of terrible understanding, right.
Speaker 2 (27:30):
Yeah, definitely. I just believe having no name, having no
understanding of how your loved one's life came to an end,
who did it and for what purpose? I think, can
drive you mad.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
As investigators would soon learn, Iran Wood had a family,
including a mother and two younger brothers. For seventeen years,
they'd been searching for answers about how and why he died.
The last chapter of Iran's life was like a story
that stopped abruptly mid page. No explanation, no closure. There
(28:16):
have been very little to hold on to. But all
of that was about to change. Next time on Deep Cover.
Speaker 4 (28:27):
Everybody liked him.
Speaker 6 (28:29):
That's why we was baffled, like, Oh, somebody shot a run,
shot a run. You can't na no way, And I
guess that's what pleases the most in the beginning, couldn't
figure it out.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
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 Gomberts. Our story consultant was James Foreman Jr. Special
(29:31):
thanks to Jerry Williams, Sarah Nix, Greta Cone, and Jake Flanagan.
I'm Jake alber
Speaker 4 (30:11):
The po
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