Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey, it's Jake here. I just wanted to give
Speaker 1: you a heads up that this episode contains a detailed
Speaker 1: account of a hate crime, a murder previously on Deep Cover.
Speaker 2: Craig Peterson, you don't know us, but we're here. I
Speaker 2: want to talk to you. Federal agents. Can we approach you?
Speaker 2: And Craig just looked at us and said, I don't
Speaker 2: know what you're talking about.
Speaker 3: I think he said something like, yeah, we heard rumors
Speaker 3: about that, that someone said we did a homicide. But man,
Speaker 3: now that's nothing to it. We didn't do any homicide.
Speaker 3: It's a bunch of junk.
Speaker 2: You could feel the tension, but you can also feel
Speaker 2: like he's about to say something, and then he says,
Speaker 2: I'll tell you everything.
Speaker 1: So there are Scott Duffy and Terry Mortimer in a
Speaker 1: conference room at the FBI's offices in Wilmington, Delaware, and
Speaker 1: they're sitting on the edge of their seats because across
Speaker 1: the table from them is Craig Peterson, the electrician from
Speaker 1: Vermont with the spiderweb tattoo. Now they suspect that Craig
Speaker 1: was an accomplice to a murder. For months, Craig had
Speaker 1: been playing at cool admitting to nothing. But now in
Speaker 1: this conference room, Craig has promised to tell them everything.
Speaker 2: It was a moment that I think of everything that
Speaker 2: Terry and I had been through, had prayed through, and
Speaker 2: this was the moment in time. This was it. It
Speaker 2: was almost like, this is the reason why you were
Speaker 2: brought together.
Speaker 1: Mind you, this moment, it wasn't just the result of
Speaker 1: good luck. Two days prior, Scott and Terry had played
Speaker 1: their best and last card. They had handed Craig a
Speaker 1: subpoena to appear before a grand jury. They were hoping
Speaker 1: that this would get him talking. It was a long shot, really.
Speaker 1: Truth was, the Feds had very little on Craig, but
Speaker 1: Craig he offered to tell them everything. Before he did, however,
Speaker 1: he made a request.
Speaker 2: He says, I need to have assurances, and we said
Speaker 2: what type of assurances? Well, you have a prosecutor on board.
Speaker 2: Can you call the prosecutor? Absolutely, we can call the prosecutor.
Speaker 2: But Greg, you gotta I can't just call a prosecutor
Speaker 2: over here and waste his time. You gotta tell us
Speaker 2: what is it we're asking the prosecutor to come for
Speaker 2: And that's when he says I'm not the shooter, and
Speaker 2: I want immunity.
Speaker 1: Upon hearing this, Scott's partner, Terry, kind of sat up
Speaker 1: in his chair.
Speaker 3: Now, I'm thinking myself, this dude is pretty savvy. Dude
Speaker 3: thinking like attorneys talk about immunity, Federal agents talk about immunity,
Speaker 3: not electricians from Earl and Tim Vermont get like, where
Speaker 3: did you get that from? That's what he said, I
Speaker 3: want immunity.
Speaker 1: Now, Typically, giving someone immunity is not a quick or
Speaker 1: easy task, especially in a situation like this where someone's
Speaker 1: been murdered. Getting all the higher ups to sign off
Speaker 1: can take days or longer. But Scott knew time was
Speaker 1: of the essence. He needed to jump on this before
Speaker 1: Craig changed his mind. Fortunately, he had a prosecutor on
Speaker 1: st stand by.
Speaker 2: Prosecutor dropped everything, ran to my office. We spoke with
Speaker 2: him briefly saying it's so many words, he's confessed and
Speaker 2: we don't know where to go from here. And so
Speaker 2: he said, so what you need is immunity?
Speaker 4: Am I hearing that?
Speaker 1: And Scott's like, yeah, that's exactly what Craig is asking for.
Speaker 1: And the prosecutor is like, I think I can help
Speaker 1: you guys. But first, the prosecutor had one crucial question
Speaker 1: and he wants to ask it directly to Craig. So
Speaker 1: he hurries over to the conference room.
Speaker 2: And the first thing the prosecutor asked him very first thing,
Speaker 2: are you the shooter if it comes back at all
Speaker 2: in any way that you pulled the trigger? Deals off
Speaker 2: no immunity, nothing.
Speaker 1: Craig tells them, no, I didn't pull the trigger, wasn't me.
Speaker 1: The prosecutor seemed satisfied. He whips out a pen and
Speaker 1: begins to write out a grant of federal immunity.
Speaker 3: I'm looking at Scott in one this is unbelievable.
Speaker 1: That never happens, but that's exactly what happened.
Speaker 3: So with that, Craig tells us that he starts the
Speaker 3: damn breaks up.
Speaker 1: Until now, Scott and Terry have been going on a prayer,
Speaker 1: quite literally, chasing down rumors and nothing more. But that
Speaker 1: was about to change. A confession was at hand, one
Speaker 1: that would validate Scott and Terry's hope that they were
Speaker 1: uncovering something they were destined to find. Ultimately, this confession
Speaker 1: would upend many people's lives. It would transform a whispered
Speaker 1: rumor into a full blown murder investigation and maybe, just
Speaker 1: maybe it could lead them to the victim. I'm Jake
Speaker 1: Calpern and this is a deep cover Season four The
Speaker 1: Nameless Man, Episode two, The Confession. After the damn breaks,
Speaker 1: Craig just starts talking, recounting what he could remember from
Speaker 1: that night back in nineteen eighty nine when he and
Speaker 1: Tom Guybison were still in high school.
Speaker 3: And so he starts telling us how it went down.
Speaker 3: That basically that he and Tommy decided one night to
Speaker 3: go and find a black man, to kill that black
Speaker 3: man so that they could get their spider web tattoos
Speaker 3: as skinheads.
Speaker 1: Craig tells them they borrowed his mother's car, a gray
Speaker 1: Chevy Bretta. Craig drove, Tom was in the passenger seat.
Speaker 1: They'd gotten their hands on a gun, a thirty eight
Speaker 1: caliber Revolver, and they started looking for a target. All
Speaker 1: of this, by the way, and what I'm about to
Speaker 1: tell you is based on Scott and Terry's recollections and
Speaker 1: the report that they filed at the time, and also
Speaker 1: from sworn testimony that Scott, Terry, and Craig later provided. Anyway, initially,
Speaker 1: Craig and Tom drove through Wilmington, Delaware, where they lived.
Speaker 4: He said it was very busy.
Speaker 2: He said, there were just so many people out and
Speaker 2: there would be no way that they would be able
Speaker 2: to shoot somebody and not have a witness around. So
Speaker 2: they made the decision to leave Wilmington and traveled north.
Speaker 1: They drove north on the Interstate until they reached Philadelphia.
Speaker 1: Here they got off at the Broad Street exit. By
Speaker 1: now it was late. Craig wasn't sure exactly how late,
Speaker 1: but the streets were mostly empty. Craig said at one
Speaker 1: point they stopped and stole a license plate to put
Speaker 1: on his mom's car as an added measure of protection,
Speaker 1: just in case someone witnessed what they were about to do.
Speaker 1: At some point, they passed a large wall and eventually
Speaker 1: they turned onto a one way street.
Speaker 3: Craig's driving, and they drive down a very dark street,
Speaker 3: and Tommy is in the passenger side, and he tells
Speaker 3: Craig slowed down, slowed down.
Speaker 1: Slow down, because up ahead they saw a pedestrian, a
Speaker 1: lone black man, as Craig recounted it, the man turned
Speaker 1: and started walking toward them.
Speaker 3: Tommy pulled out a thirty eight caliber, leaned out the
Speaker 3: window and shot him and exclaimed I got him right
Speaker 3: between the eyes.
Speaker 2: The way Craig remembered is the guy hit the ground
Speaker 2: so hard.
Speaker 4: That he had to be dead.
Speaker 1: Craig said that even all these years later, he still
Speaker 1: remembered the sound of that thud as the man fell
Speaker 1: onto the pavement, and that was it. These two high
Speaker 1: school kids, with their gun and their mom's car, sped
Speaker 1: off into the night, back home to Delaware. So far,
Speaker 1: this entire investigation had been based on a rumor, a
Speaker 1: rumor that initially seemed like it might be impossible to
Speaker 1: verify that two teenagers drove into a nearby city to
Speaker 1: murder a complete stranger because of the color of his skin,
Speaker 1: and that they commemorated this murder with a tattoo. It
Speaker 1: was the kind of story that you didn't want to
Speaker 1: believe in, because if it were true, what did that
Speaker 1: say about us as human beings? About our capacity for
Speaker 1: hate and cold bloodedness. In a way, the veracity of
Speaker 1: this rumor was about more than just one murder. It
Speaker 1: seemed like a test, a light meter that would measure
Speaker 1: just how dark the depths of humanity could be. It
Speaker 1: all hinged on a single question. Could these kids really
Speaker 1: have done this, And in a situation like this, you
Speaker 1: almost have to hope, maybe even pray, that the answer
Speaker 1: is no, because then the world isn't so bad, right.
Speaker 1: But if the answer is yes, they really did this, well,
Speaker 1: then the depths are darker than most of us would
Speaker 1: care to admit. As Craig recounted the details of the
Speaker 1: murder in that FBI conference room, Scott listened intently. If
Speaker 1: you recall, Scott had trained to become a priest back then,
Speaker 1: sometimes people would notice his priest's collar and just start talking,
Speaker 1: sharing their darkest secrets.
Speaker 4: So Scott he.
Speaker 1: Was comfortable in this role as the confessor. He knew
Speaker 1: how to listen, how to watch, which is exactly what
Speaker 1: he did as Craig spoke.
Speaker 2: And when when you watch somebody tell the story, you
Speaker 2: can tell that they are just reliving it, that they
Speaker 2: were there. It was just amazing to watch, because that's
Speaker 2: all I'm doing, is watching him.
Speaker 1: Craig's confession raised so many questions for Scott and Terry,
Speaker 1: like why would Craig, the steadfast sidekick, turn on his
Speaker 1: old friend now, because in the past Craig had been
Speaker 1: very loyal, Like a few years back, Craig had tried
Speaker 1: to protect Tom from the authorities by storing some weapons
Speaker 1: for him, weapons that Tom wasn't supposed to have. Craig
Speaker 1: paid for this, did a few years in prison in fact,
Speaker 1: so maybe he was willing to talk now just to
Speaker 1: avoid a repeat of that. Craig got out of federal
Speaker 1: prison in nineteen ninety nine. A few years later he
Speaker 1: moved north to Vermont, to that house in the mountains
Speaker 1: with the dogs and the floodlights. Bottom line, it seemed
Speaker 1: like Craig had made a decision to escape his old
Speaker 1: life and maybe to escape Tom too, I should mention.
Speaker 1: We reached out to both Craig and Tom for this story.
Speaker 1: Craig declined an interview. We never heard back from Tom.
Speaker 1: But here's what we can say about Tom. He had
Speaker 1: a long and well documented history of violence. As a teenager,
Speaker 1: he'd been convicted of reckless endangerment after he shot a
Speaker 1: gun at a moving car full of people. Police records
Speaker 1: from the time confirmed that Tom had an arsenal of weapons,
Speaker 1: including a billy club, two blackjacks, two sets of brass knuckles,
Speaker 1: and a mess of knives. To put it plainly, Tom
Speaker 1: seemed like the kind of friend that you might not
Speaker 1: want to anger by turning on him.
Speaker 2: We believed that a real danger existed. There is a
Speaker 2: very real potential of danger against Craig. People will go
Speaker 2: to great lengths to protect their self interests, but.
Speaker 1: At this point there was no turning back for Craig. More,
Speaker 1: after the break, Scott and Terry now had a confession,
Speaker 1: which under normal circumstances would be a very big deal,
Speaker 1: potentially a game changer, and in some ways the confession
Speaker 1: was very promising. Craig were called some details, like the
Speaker 1: moment of the actual shooting, vividly in a way that
Speaker 1: might be very persuasive for a jury. The problem was
Speaker 1: the alleged murder took place more than seventeen years prior,
Speaker 1: and there was so much that Craig did not remember.
Speaker 1: For instance, he couldn't tell the FEDS where exactly this happened.
Speaker 1: He couldn't provide the name of a street or intersection
Speaker 1: or park, nor could he tell them exactly when this happened.
Speaker 1: Could not offer a day, or a week or even
Speaker 1: a month. Most vexing of all, Craig had no idea
Speaker 1: who the victim was, and this right here underscored the
Speaker 1: central problem that Scott and Terry had been facing from
Speaker 1: the very beginning. Simply put, they didn't have a body.
Speaker 1: They were trying to solve the murder of an unknown man,
Speaker 1: and without knowing who he was, they couldn't do much
Speaker 1: of anything. But Scott remained determined.
Speaker 2: We have to do our job, and we have to
Speaker 2: find out who did they kill. If if possible, how
Speaker 2: are we gonna do that? It then felt like a mandate,
Speaker 2: like Okay, we're We're in this.
Speaker 1: This sounds awfully confident. But both Scott and Terry told
Speaker 1: me that they felt on some level like they were
Speaker 1: trying to find a needle in a haystack. They both
Speaker 1: used that exact phrase, which raises the question, how do
Speaker 1: you find a needle in a haystack? Well, in theory,
Speaker 1: you start by sorting through all the pieces of hay right.
Speaker 1: In other words, you create a finite pool of possibilities.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about the finite the things Craig knew
Speaker 1: or claimed to know with some certainty. Craig knew the
Speaker 1: murder took place sometime around the spring of nineteen eighty nine.
Speaker 1: He remembered this in part because he recalled going to
Speaker 1: senior prom not long after the murder took place. So
Speaker 1: the agents had a year nineteen eighty nine, and they
Speaker 1: had a city, Philadelphia, and for whatever it was worth,
Speaker 1: Craig had mentioned a one way street and a dark
Speaker 1: colored wall. According to police accounts, there were four hundred
Speaker 1: and seventy three murders in Philadelphia that year. So in theory,
Speaker 1: one of those murder victims was their nameless man.
Speaker 4: But which one.
Speaker 1: Turns out, our federal agents they had an ace up
Speaker 1: their sleeve. Scott knew someone, someone he believed could really
Speaker 1: help them, a detective who worked in the homicide unit
Speaker 1: of the Philadelphia Police Department, a veteran investigator named Leon
Speaker 1: Lubiski went by LUBI for short. Scott, give me a
Speaker 1: very vivid picture of what Luby looked like.
Speaker 4: He's a large physical stature.
Speaker 2: Like when you hear a bear, you think of a bear,
Speaker 2: and you know scary or cuddly.
Speaker 4: I mean, bear has many different.
Speaker 2: Views depending on who you ask, right, but nobody will
Speaker 2: ever deny the fact that a bear is big.
Speaker 1: And you can't argue with Scott on that one.
Speaker 2: When you saw him, you perked up and you're like, oh,
Speaker 2: he's not somebody to fool around with.
Speaker 1: But apparently Luby also had this other aspect.
Speaker 2: He had the face of someone who is just extremely caring.
Speaker 2: Just you just looked at him, you knew immediately this
Speaker 2: is somebody who will do anything to help you. So
Speaker 2: he was a multifaceted bear, multifaceted cuddly, but he could
Speaker 2: turn grizzly if he needed to. Scott's hope was that
Speaker 2: his old friend, Luby, the multifaceted Bear, could now help
Speaker 2: them find the victim.
Speaker 5: Hello, Hey, is this Louby. It's Louby, Louby.
Speaker 6: This is Jake. Is this still a good time to
Speaker 6: talk to you?
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's good time.
Speaker 1: It took me a while to track Luby down. He's
Speaker 1: retired now. When we spoke, he remembered the case right away.
Speaker 5: They had these details, but they didn't actually have a
Speaker 5: body to go with it.
Speaker 6: How unusual is that to have someone say, hey, we
Speaker 6: we we're pretty certain there's a murder. We have a confession.
Speaker 6: We just we got no body.
Speaker 5: That's rather unusual.
Speaker 1: Scott had passed along a short list of facts to
Speaker 1: Luby to help him with his task. They included the
Speaker 1: following one. The area where Craig remembered driving, two the
Speaker 1: type of weapon that was used, Three the nature of
Speaker 1: the wound a single shot to the head for the
Speaker 1: race of the victim, and five a general timeframe for
Speaker 1: when this happened, the spring of nineteen eighty nine.
Speaker 6: How optimistic were you that you were going to be
Speaker 6: able to get them what they needed to solve this.
Speaker 5: I was actually very optimistic because we keep pretty good
Speaker 5: records on our dead bodies.
Speaker 1: For Scott and Terry, this was a search for a
Speaker 1: needle in a haystack. But Louby was an insider who
Speaker 1: knew how things worked in Philly and knew exactly where
Speaker 1: to look. As far as the records go. The authorities
Speaker 1: believed this murder case would have been marked as unsolved
Speaker 1: it happened back in nineteen eighty nine, and Luby was
Speaker 1: getting this request seventeen years later in the spring of
Speaker 1: two thousand and six.
Speaker 6: So what happens with a case when it goes unsolved.
Speaker 5: Well, it's space with the assigned detective and if he
Speaker 5: gets a chance, he goes out and works on it
Speaker 5: in between things. If he doesn't, it just lays there
Speaker 5: becomes cold.
Speaker 1: Basically, the file just sits there in a file cabinet
Speaker 1: in the homicide department.
Speaker 5: Homicides just want one big room, and there's file cabinets
Speaker 5: all along the walls, and in those file cabinets already
Speaker 5: open cases and then they move from in the storage.
Speaker 1: Luby told me that typically after a few years, the
Speaker 1: unsolved case files are sent to the city's storage facility,
Speaker 1: a big ten story building. The homicide files are kept
Speaker 1: down in the basement.
Speaker 5: And when that happens, he assigned detectives. He no longer
Speaker 5: it's it's a bit of a problem for him to
Speaker 5: get to his case file now.
Speaker 6: So is it kind of a little bit of out
Speaker 6: of sight, out of mind.
Speaker 5: And basically once it goes into storage, like the supervisor
Speaker 5: doesn't bother anymore to get anything done on it.
Speaker 1: So it's like in limbo, as far as I could tell,
Speaker 1: these cold cases kept down in the basement, kind of
Speaker 1: like the messages at the very bottom of your inbox
Speaker 1: that slowly received from your consciousness and eventually get moved
Speaker 1: into some folder that you'll most likely never look at again.
Speaker 1: So when Lubi got the call from Scott and Terry,
Speaker 1: he didn't have the actual case files from nineteen eighty nine.
Speaker 1: Right at his fingertips. What he had was a loosely
Speaker 1: finder an index of all the murders from the past.
Speaker 1: This index was a collection of so called summary that's.
Speaker 5: A single page. It's got the deceased name, cause death.
Speaker 5: You know what the outcome is, it's still open.
Speaker 1: Thanks to that nature, Louby searches through these summary sheets
Speaker 1: and narrows the possibilities down to unsolved murders that occurred
Speaker 1: around the spring anywhere from January through May. There were
Speaker 1: thirty seven of them. Then he weeded out all the
Speaker 1: ones that didn't match up with the details that Scott
Speaker 1: had given him. In the end, Louby was left with
Speaker 1: just one case, an unsolved murder from April sixteenth, nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty nine, of a thirty three year old black man.
Speaker 1: He was killed by a single thirty eight caliber bullet
Speaker 1: to the head. This happened in North Philadelphia on a
Speaker 1: one way street, just one block away from an imposing
Speaker 1: stone wall. Louby made arrangements to get the entire case
Speaker 1: file pulled out of storage unearthed from that basement, and
Speaker 1: then he reached back out to Scott. Louby facts the
Speaker 1: summary sheet directly over to the FBI's offices in Wilmington, Delaware.
Speaker 1: It was an efficient bit of detective work. He'd done
Speaker 1: all of this and roughly twenty four hours. So you
Speaker 1: can imagine Scott's reaction when, just a day after getting
Speaker 1: Craig's confession of facts arrives from Louby and Scott, he
Speaker 1: just holds it in his hands and stares at it.
Speaker 5: It was.
Speaker 2: Unbelievable, feeling that this is it, seeing the name and
Speaker 2: seeing the the specifics of the crime, having a location,
Speaker 2: a street. I don't even think I put it down.
Speaker 4: It was this is it?
Speaker 5: Wait?
Speaker 1: How could you be so certain?
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 2: I just felt like everything that Craig told us fit
Speaker 2: this very crime.
Speaker 1: And so much of it did seem to fit, including
Speaker 1: the time frame, the one way street, the proximity of
Speaker 1: the wall, the caliber of the bullet, the single shot
Speaker 1: to the head. The motive noted on the facts was
Speaker 1: one word, drugs. Objectively, at this point you could not
Speaker 1: say it was a slam dunk. There was no DNA match.
Speaker 1: No one had found a murder weapon and matched it
Speaker 1: to a bullet from the scene of the crime. None
Speaker 1: of that. But even so, Scott remembers turning to his
Speaker 1: partner Terry and saying.
Speaker 2: We have a name. We have a fic. Terry, I
Speaker 2: think this is why we're here. We believe this is
Speaker 2: this is who we've been pursuing. That was pretty powerful
Speaker 2: to us.
Speaker 1: At long last they had a name. It was right
Speaker 1: there on the facts plane to see, printed out in
Speaker 1: smudgy letters, Aron Would. They strongly believed that he was
Speaker 1: the victim. This was a huge moment in their investigation,
Speaker 1: and yet it could still amount to nothing. Identifying a
Speaker 1: potential victim did not guarantee a conviction or even guarantee
Speaker 1: that there'd be a trial. Now, the question was would
Speaker 1: there be enough evidence to bring a case and convince
Speaker 1: a jury that this is what happened all those years ago.
Speaker 2: Terry and I said, it may be that this does
Speaker 2: not ever go to a court. There may be nothing
Speaker 2: that we can do or Philadelphia can do, even with
Speaker 2: Craig's cooperation, that this is ever going to see the
Speaker 2: inside of a court, and letting Craig know that this
Speaker 2: all may be.
Speaker 4: Just to give.
Speaker 2: Aron Wood's family some sense of some sense of.
Speaker 1: Understanding, but a kind of terrible understanding.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, definitely I just believe having no name, having
Speaker 2: no understanding of how your loved one's life came to
Speaker 2: an end, who did it and for what purpose? I
Speaker 2: think can drive you mad.
Speaker 1: As investigators would soon learn, Iran Wood had a family,
Speaker 1: including a mother and two younger brothers. For seventeen years,
Speaker 1: they'd been searching for answers about how and why he died.
Speaker 1: The last chapter of Iran's life was like a story
Speaker 1: that stopped abruptly mid page. No explanation, no closure. There
Speaker 1: have been very little to hold on to, but all
Speaker 1: of that was about to change.
Speaker 4: Next time. On Deep Cover. Everybody liked him.
Speaker 7: That's why we was baffled, like, Oh, somebody shot a run,
Speaker 7: shot a run. You can't nah, no way, And I
Speaker 7: guess that's what pluthers the most in the beginning couldn't
Speaker 7: figure it out.
Speaker 1: Deep Cover is produced by Amy Gaines McQuaid and Jacob Smith.
Speaker 1: It's edited by Karen SCHAKERJI mastering by Jake Gorsky. Our
Speaker 1: show art was designed by Sean Carney. Original scoring in
Speaker 1: our theme was composed by Luis Gara, fact checking by
Speaker 1: Arthur Gomberts. Our story consultant was James Foreman Jr. Special
Speaker 1: Thanks to Jerry Williams, Sarah Nix, Greta Cone, and Jake Flanagan.
Speaker 4: I'm Jake Halpern