Paul: [00:00:01] Hey, Small Town Fam, this is Paul Holes. Make sure you subscribe to The Briefing Room with Detectives Dan and Dave. Season 2 is out now. Subscribe now, and thanks.

[Small Town Dicks theme]

Don: [00:00:15] So we have his name. We know who he is. We know his background. Absolutely certain, he’s going to run when confronted or fight, and either one is going to be to the extreme.

Yeardley: [00:00:29] I’m Yeardley.

Zibby: [00:00:30] And I’m Zibby, and we’re fascinated by true crime.

Yeardley: [00:00:34] So we invited our friends, Detectives Dan and Dave.

Zibby: [00:00:37] To sit down with us and share their most interesting cases.

Dan: [00:00:41] I’m Dan.

Dave: [00:00:42] And I’m Dave.

Dan: [00:00:43] We’re identical twins.

Dave: [00:00:44] And we’re detectives in Small Town, USA.

Dan: [00:00:47] Dave investigates sex crimes and child abuse.

Dave: [00:00:49] Dan investigates violent crimes. And together, we’ve worked on hundreds of cases including assaults, robberies, murders, burglaries, sex abuse, and child abuse.

Dan: [00:00:59] Names, places, and certain details, including relationships, have been altered to protect the privacy of the victims and their families. Though we realize that some of our listeners may be familiar with these cases, we hope you’ll join us in continuing to protect the true identities of those involved out of respect for what they’ve been through. Thank you.

[music]

Yeardley: [00:01:32] Today on Small Town Dicks, we have all the usual suspects. We have Zibby.

Zibby: [00:01:38] Hey.

Yeardley: [00:01:39] We have Detective Dave.

Dave: [00:01:41] Good morning.

Yeardley: [00:01:42] We have Detective Dan.

Dan: [00:01:43] My pleasure.

Yeardley: [00:01:44] We are so pleased to welcome back one of our very favorite guests, Retired Detective Don.

Don: [00:01:49] Hello.

Yeardley: [00:01:49] Hello, sir. So happy to have you back.

Don: [00:01:52] Thank you.

Yeardley: [00:01:53] So Don, you have an interesting case that Dan and Dave, both were a part of. Tell us how this case came to you.

Don: [00:02:03] This came to us early one morning, probably just after daybreak, we had a call of shots fired, and the detectives responded to the scene. What we had was a deceased female that had been shot in the side. A bullet had gone through the door of her car. She was the driver, and struck her in the side and killed her. There was another person on scene, an individual by the name of Matt, and he was a passenger in the car at the time, and an eyewitness to this shooting, which was somewhat described as a drive by shooting with two individuals, we later learned, and it had been looking for Matt, found him as he was getting into this car driven by Sharon, and they were out for him because of a drug deal gone bad a couple days earlier. So they drove up, as he’s getting in the passenger side and a hail of bullets are fired from this car, none of which strike Matt, and one of which goes through the door and strikes the driver, Sharon, who’s pronounced dead at the scene.

Yeardley: [00:03:14] Oh, God.

Zibby: [00:03:15] And how old are Sharon and Matt?

Don: [00:03:17] Sharon is in her late 20s and Matt is roughly the same. He’s a little bit older. I knew Matt from a previous occasion. He was near 30 when this happened. But when he was a teenager on Thanksgiving Day, he shot and killed his mother.

Yeardley: [00:03:34] Oh!

Zibby: [00:03:35] What?

Don: [00:03:35] Yes. It was a dysfunctional family, to say the least. He had asked her to go to the store and get him a turkey TV dinner for Thanksgiving. Because due to their lifestyle, they weren’t really celebrating Thanksgiving. She refused. So he went and got a gun he had stashed in his bedroom from a burglary he had committed, walked up behind her, and shot her in the head, and killed her.

Yeardley: [00:04:01] Oh, my God.

Zibby: [00:04:02] Why wasn’t he in prison?

Don: [00:04:03] Well, he was a juvenile at the time, and he did go into juvenile custody until he was of a certain age when he was released. So he had been released from prison sometime earlier after murdering his mother.

Zibby: [00:04:17] Unreal.

Dave: [00:04:19] Gets released, resumes his lifestyle.

Don: [00:04:20] Yeah. So I know Matt from that case. So we have, I guess, you could say, somewhat of a rapport. He hates cops and doesn’t want to deal with us, but I’m able to talk to him and get some details of the incident.

Dan: [00:04:37] Yeah, Detective Don has this special skill of getting people to actually talk to him.

Yeardley: [00:04:41] We do know that about him. So what does Matt actually tell you?

Don: [00:04:46] How it starts up is two days earlier, he had helped another guy, I’m talking about Matt now, with a drug deal issue where they had met up with an individual who Matt identified as one of the guys in the drive by car. He said what they were trying to do a couple days ago is the guy he was with was trying to return some meth that was bad. It wasn’t good meth and he wanted his money back.

Dan: [00:05:12] Is there a return policy on meth?

Don: [00:05:14] Yes, it’s similar to the one at Walmart-

[laughter]

Don: [00:05:17] -but in this particular case, the people that had sold the meth didn’t really want to give the money back. So they got into beef and then an argument. And then as the car is leaving with the subject, who’s later identified as one of the shooters, Jack, they bump into Matt’s car and dent it. Well, it’s not really Matt’s car. It’s Sharon’s car. So Matt gets upset, and he and this other guy start chasing the car that hit them through our city. And eventually, people are exchanging gunshots at each other. And this is during the day in the middle of our town, and we never even hear about it.

Zibby: [00:06:03] What?

Yeardley: [00:06:03] Wow.

Don: [00:06:04] No, it just happens, and they go about their business, they miss each other. One loses the other, and they go their separate ways. The first we hear about this is when we’re talking to Matt at the scene of the homicide.

Zibby: [00:06:18] It’s a story like that where I’m reminded that we can have all these laws in place and buildings up, but we also are essentially in the Wild Wild West[?], because people can just do that. It’s crazy to me that no one would have called the police and said, “Hey, there are cars chasing one another and shooting up each other.”

Dave: [00:06:35] Right. And all these guys are convicted felons, I believe.

Don: [00:06:38] Oh, yeah. This is Tweaker Nation. They even admit that this is all about their Tweaker lifestyle and the world they live in, and it’s like, it doesn’t include the cops. Anyway, Matt continues to share some of the information of what happened. We’ve pretty well figured out this guy named Jack, and at least one other person is in this car that drives by, they’re probably shooting at Matt, but they end up hitting Sharon, who’s sitting in the car trying to get him to get in. The reason they even know about these people is Sharon and Matt live in a house nearby.

Zibby: [00:07:12] Are they a couple?

Don: [00:07:14] They are a couple, boyfriend, girlfriend. And all of a sudden, before dawn, their power goes out.

Yeardley: [00:07:21] Because they didn’t pay the bill, or there’s a high wind, or–?

Don: [00:07:24] No, because Jack and his buddy have found out where Matt lives and they’re going to take him out. So they sneak into the garage, and turn the power off at the panel, and then wait in the garage to execute him when he comes out to check the power.

Zibby: [00:07:44] That’s so disturbing.

Yeardley: [00:07:45] And this is all because of a bad meth deal.

Don: [00:07:48] Correct. Something has to be done, obviously. So they wait in the garage. Well, Matt, he doesn’t come out. I think he assumes, the power is out and we just got to go back to sleep. So they wait for a while. He doesn’t come out. They’re a little bit afraid of Matt, so they don’t want to go into the house. So they retreat back to their car, and then they wait out down the block for them to leave at some point.

[00:08:13] Well, when Matt finally does get up and start investigating this power outage, he goes out in the garage and realizes the breaker has been switched. So he goes back in and he tells Sharon, “Hey, something’s up. We’ve got a problem. There’s all kinds of issues. My parole officer may be coming over today, so I’m just going to beat it out the back door. Go, wait for a few minutes, and then get in the car, come around, pick me up a couple blocks away, so that we can get out of here. I don’t feel good about this.”

[00:08:43] So he takes off. Well, Jack and his buddy are down the street, and then they watch Sharon back out of the driveway in the car, so they start to follow Sharon, hoping to get to Matt, and she notices him behind her. So she accelerates down the road around the block. She sees Matt walking down the sidewalk. She pulls over and says, “There’s a car behind us. I think it’s the one that’s been looking for you. Get in.” As he’s trying the passenger door, they accelerate, and there’s one shotgun blast come out the passenger side of the car that hits the front of a house, and then a series of gunshots from a handgun. One of those rounds went through the door of the car and struck Sharon inside and killed her.

Yeardley: [00:09:29] Jesus.

Zibby: [00:09:30] That is brutal.

Don: [00:09:32] This all happens 06:00 AM, 07:00 AM on a weekday in our town.

Dan: [00:09:37] I was working graveyard that night on patrol. I think I was taking a late lunch. So I was at my residence having lunch before I would head back to the station, drop my car off, get changed, and come home. I think I stepped foot outside my car to go unlock my front door, and I heard on my radio, “Shots fired call with a wounded female,” and immediately get into my patrol car, and respond to the location. You try to think like a criminal in this situation and say, “Where would the bad guy go?”

[00:10:08] So my first priority is to get to the victim, but in the meantime, I’m actually going to be looking for this suspect vehicle leaving the area. Unfortunately, I did not see it. Usually, our intel and the information that we’re getting from dispatch is a little bit old. 30 seconds is a long time when you’re driving, so they were probably out of the area by the time I entered the area. So as I get there, I run up and we pull Sharon out of the car, lay her down. She is unresponsive. She’s not breathing. She’s in really bad shape at this point.

Zibby: [00:10:43] But not fully dead.

Dan: [00:10:45] You’ve felt your pulse before. You know what a good, solid, healthy pulse is. I was getting just maybe a sign of a pulse. I knew she was in trouble. I was able to locate the wound. It was on her left side, just below her armpit, about even with her breasts. There was a bullet hole there. There really wasn’t that much blood. There was only a little spot of blood just barely trickling out of that wound. But I knew that, if you get hit there, that’s a really bad spot to get hit by a bullet. So we started working on her. I cut her shirt off, and what I noticed before I even started doing CPR on her was, on her right shoulder, I could see the bullet just under her skin.

Yeardley: [00:11:26] Oh.

Zibby: [00:11:27] Whoa.

Dan: [00:11:27] It was noticeable. It was just on her right shoulder. It had gone through her whole chest cavity and stopped just before leaving her skin on the other side.

Zibby: [00:11:36] So it entered from the left, and you were seeing the bullet just under the skin on the whole right side?

Dan: [00:11:42] Yeah, her right shoulder.

Zibby: [00:11:43] Wow.

Dan: [00:11:43] I knew that, if it had traversed that whole part of her body, she was going to be in trouble. So we did CPR on her. At one point, I actually thought that we were going to be successful, we were not. I don’t know what that is. Maybe it was her last breath. I can’t explain it medically. I just know what I saw, and it looked like she was coming back around, but she immediately closed her eyes again, and she was gone.

Yeardley: [00:12:08] Oh. So she died right there?

Dan: [00:12:10] She died there on the street while.

Yeardley: [00:12:12] While you’re working on her?

Dan: [00:12:13] Yeah.

Zibby: [00:12:13] And where was Matt during this whole process?

Don: [00:12:17] Matt is in the house directly south of the car where the shooting happened, and he’s hiding.

Yeardley: [00:12:23] Really?

Dan: [00:12:23] Yeah.

Yeardley: [00:12:25] Were there people home in that house?

Dan: [00:12:27] There was an elderly male who was there.

Yeardley: [00:12:28] Oh, my God. He’s like, “What the hell are you doing in my house?”

Dan: [00:12:32] Yeah, that was probably an odd moment for him first thing in the morning.

Dave: [00:12:35] But just leaves his girlfriend to fend for herself.

Yeardley: [00:12:38] So he won’t tell you anything about the shooters.

Don: [00:12:42] Well, we do figure out that the one guy’s name is Jack. The car they’re in is believed to be the car these guys had a confrontation in two days earlier, and there was at least one other person in the car.

Dan: [00:12:56] And that’s all he’s saying about the guys who shot and killed his own girlfriend. Pathetic. So how do you drum up more intel if Matt’s not talking?

Don: [00:13:05] So we start calling our hotline of folks that live that lifestyle. Not too much time goes by before we identify who Jack is and get his full name. He has a car or he has access to a car that matches the description. So we’re pretty certain. And then we bounce some of these things off of Matt, and he’s confirming who Jack is. So we believe we have at least one of the suspects ID.

Zibby: [00:13:37] And when you say, it doesn’t take very long, is that because it’s a small town anyway? And then that community of drug users, they’re all frequent flyers and they all talk about one another. And so you were getting this intel really quickly from these kids who you’ve run into often?

Don: [00:13:53] Correct.

Zibby: [00:13:54] Okay.

Don: [00:13:54] Some of them are informants. We have guys that work specifically drug investigations. So they have their go to people that they can call. If those people hadn’t heard about it yet, they get on their hotline and they’ll find out everything within a short amount of time.

Zibby: [00:14:10] How come they’re so easy to give you that information?

Don: [00:14:13] Either you build up a rapport with them and they feel good about helping out as long as it doesn’t drag them into a criminal issue, or they think, “This may help me down the road when I get in a jam if I have a favor to play with the police.” So there’s all kinds of motivations for helping out.

Yeardley: [00:14:32] As an informant, are these people–? They’re not dealing drugs, they’re just taking drugs, because dealing drugs seems like a pretty serious crime and that you wouldn’t want to sanction that just to get information out of somebody.

Don: [00:14:47] I think in the real world, if you’re a user, you’re somewhat of a dealer too. Usually, you have to deal a little bit just to make enough money to support your own habits. So there’s a mixture. The high-level dealers, of course, we don’t get much info from them. They end up in jail and in prison, when we deal with them. It’s always the idea of working up the chain to get to the top. So yeah, more than likely, these are your street users. People that have been around our small town for years, their parents were users. By the time I retired, I was interviewing the grandson of guys I’ve dealt with and put in prison for drug dealing and drug use. That happened more than once, many times.

Dan: [00:15:35] You think about the small world of this. So I learn of Jack’s identity, and it automatically rings a bell with me. Like, 10 days before this incident, I had arrested Jack for a DUI. He was higher than kite on meth driving and he was all over the road. That was my first dealing with him. I think he may have been new to the area or new to the drug world. Like, he’d just been introduced and hit the ground running really. There was a sense that, I know I’m going to deal with this guy again because he’s going to be a problem.

Don: [00:16:06] Well, Jack had stolen a car previous to this incident because he had been arrested for it and was pending trial. But it turns out that the car that Jack and his buddy used for the drive by, although it matched the description of the car Jack had access to, they had stolen this car also.

Zibby: [00:16:26] Oh

Yeardley: [00:16:26] Oh, wow.

Don: [00:16:27] But Jack’s not being very successful here. He steals a car that matches the description of his own car. So when we’re trying to figure out who Jack is, and then the car matches his car, it just overwhelmingly starts pointing the finger at him. When it’s all said and done, his girlfriend had that car all night. He didn’t have it. They had gone out and stolen another car, but he felt comfortable hotwiring it because he had one very similar. So it just was extra info, we had that turned out not to be accurate that just kept pointing the finger at Jack. It didn’t take us that long to track him down and take him into custody.

Yeardley: [00:17:06] And how about how old is he’s? In his 20s also?

Don: [00:17:08] He’s in his 20s. Although in this few months’ time he had gotten in trouble, he had stolen a car, he got arrested for drunk driving. He’s obviously in a running gun battle a couple of days earlier on a drug issue. Before all of that, he had really never been in a lot of trouble. This kid was like new to all this, but he hit the ground running and was hardcore right from the get go. Sometimes you see that with meth. You see some people that you see their pictures every six months, and they just slowly drop off into drug induced lifestyle. But then there’s others. I’ve seen it before with several other businessmen and stuff. They try meth, and within two months, they’re freaked out of their minds, their lifestyles completely changed, they’ve blown all their money, they’ve left their family. It can happen that quickly. I think that’s more of what happened in Jack’s case.

Yeardley: [00:18:07] That’s so sad.

Zibby: [00:18:08] What a scary, scary substance.

Zibby: [00:18:22] And so you know about Jack, but have you yet identified the second person in the car with Jack?

Don: [00:18:28] No. We identified the people that were associated with this running gun battle, a couple days before. Ironically, the other guy that was with Matt in that trying to return the dope, he’s also a frequent flyer, but a friend of ours. And so we get a hold of him and he’s like, “Yeah, this is what happened, you know? What we did was bad, but this ain’t right about Sharon getting killed. So I’ll tell you everything you want to know.” So he really helped out a great deal. He was a hardcore druggie, but there’s these plateaus that they all live on.

Yeardley: [00:19:05] There’s kind of a code.

Don: [00:19:06] Yeah, there’s a code. At least, they say there’s a code. [Yeardley laughs] Code changes daily. Anyway, he gave us a lot of information. We do get Jack, and he tells us what happens. He really runs it down, like, we knew that there was this running issue with his friend and Matt a couple days earlier. He was just helping his friend return the drugs. He didn’t really have a horse in that race. But then when the guy hit his car, which was Sharon’s car, then he got pissed, and so they chest bumped each other in the parking lot. He wanted the guy’s insurance information. They were trying to return $200 worth of bad dope in a parking lot, they’re all armed, and yet there’s a fender bender and so–

Zibby: [00:19:46] He wants to exchange insurance info.

Yeardley: [00:19:48] That’s crazy. Ha-ha.

Zibby: [00:19:49] [laughs].

Don: [00:19:50] Which then leads to, of course, the running gun battle in our Small Town. So Jack’s filling us in on all that, but he won’t tell us who the other guy is in the car. As a matter of fact, he’s implying that he was the driver, and then there’s two other people in the car, and those two were the ones that fired the guns. Well, that makes sense. We know there’s two different caliber weapons, and he doesn’t want to be shooting any of them. So he’s nominated himself as the driver. And then there’s these two other guys, but he’s not going to identify him because of Conpride.

Zibby: [00:20:25] Did you say Conpride?

Don: [00:20:27] Yeah, that’s what we call it. They all act like they have con pride [?]. 90% of them don’t, but there’s a few that do, and it’s like, no matter what–

Yeardley: [00:20:37] I’m not a snitch.

Don: [00:20:38] I’m not a snitch, and I’ll take my medicine. That truly is the Conpride, but most of them misrepresent that.

Dave: [00:20:45] It’s pretty entertaining when you approach some of these guys asking for information, and you can see the conflict or they’re like, “I want to help because this could help me, but it’s really bad to be known as a snitch.” You let them know, “Hey, like Don says, almost all of them talk. Everybody talks. It’s just what is it that is big enough to make you talk?” And so the conflict that they have, the inner conflict, is sometimes entertaining, and watching them overcome it while they’re talking to themselves and they keep talking and they’re like, “All right, I’ll tell you.” And you’re like, “Well, I had to work on you for eight minutes.”

Yeardley: [00:21:21] [laughs]

Zibby: [00:21:22] The con-flict.

Dave: [00:21:24] [laughs] Funny.

Zibby: [00:21:26] So did you buy his story that there were two shooters in the car while he was driving?

Don: [00:21:31] Well, we didn’t know at the time, but then he quickly helped us find and recover the stolen car. We finally learned, “Hey, you’re not using your car. It is stolen.” He admits to that, and he took us out to where they dropped it off. When we get to it, it’s a smaller compact car, and there’s two car seats in the back seat.

Yeardley: [00:21:55] Like, baby seats.

Don: [00:21:56] Yeah, two baby car seats, the victims. It’s like, one, two. There is no way unless the guy in the backseat was sitting in a baby car seat, there could have been three adults in that car. So we confronted him with that, saying, “Come on, look.” We drove him up to the car, and there’s the car seats, and he said, “All right, there’s only two of us, but I’m still the driver, and I shot one time and it didn’t hit anybody, I’m sure, because I shot the shotgun. And the other guy is the one that used the pistol. I’m sure that’s the one that hit the woman.”

[00:22:35] So we said, “Okay, well, now we’re getting somewhere. Now, who is that?” “Well, I’m not going to tell you. I can’t do that.” Okay, well, that’s a dilemma. So we go back to department, we talk to him for a little while longer, and we’re starting to make inroads with him, give him something to eat, and then we get back to the subject of who’s the other guy, because from the hotline, we’re not hearing who the other guy is. We’ve ruled out it being the other participant in the instant two days earlier. We know it wasn’t that guy who would be the most likely person, because he had an alibi or whatever. So then Jack agrees, “I won’t tell you, but I’ll write it down.”

Yeardley: [00:23:19] [laughs]

Zibby: [00:23:20] What?

Yeardley: [00:23:21] Okay.

Zibby: [00:23:22] [laughs]

Don: [00:23:23] So we’re like, “Boy, you drive a hard bargain, but okay.”

[laughter]

Zibby: [00:23:28] Where is that going to get him, because then he can say with integrity, he didn’t say it?

Don: [00:23:33] He can sit in prison and go, “I never told on my partner.”

Yeardley: [00:23:38] Wow.

Zibby: [00:23:38] [laughs]

Don: [00:23:39] He goes, “But I don’t want you using what I write down as evidence.”

Yeardley: [00:23:43] You mean like, literally hold it up in court?

Don: [00:23:45] Yeah. He doesn’t want us to have it. And so we broker this deal like, “Dude, you just write it down, we’ll read it, and you can do with it what you want, okay?” So he writes down the name of the other person and then eats the note.

[laughter]

Zibby: [00:24:03] What? No. Wait, hold on.

Dan: [00:24:09] This message will self-destruct in 10 seconds.

[laughter]

Yeardley: [00:24:13] He literally ate the piece of paper.

Don: [00:24:15] He ate the note.

[laughter]

Don: [00:24:18] It was like a scene out of a spy movie. But we didn’t care because, now we had the name of a guy named Trey. The reason we didn’t really hear anything from anybody about why this Trey was involved is because this was just a spur of the moment thing with Trey. He had no stake in this issue at all, but had talked to Jack at a third party’s house literally the day before and said, “Yeah, I’ll help you. You’re right. He can’t get away with doing that.” So it was pretty much a spur of the moment thing.

Yeardley: [00:24:53] When Jack ropes Trey into this scheme, is the intention to actually kill Matt with the bullet or to scare him or wound him? Like, what do you think the ultimate end game was?

Don: [00:25:06] I think they were going to kill him. It would seem that Jack was roping Trey into this, but Jack was a weak guy and he was just throwing out thoughts at this third-party house the night before. It was really Trey who said, “Dude, you can’t let this guy get away with it.” And it’s like, “Well, you don’t think so?” “No, you have to do something about this.” So Trey is a much more hardened criminal type, and he really in the true scheme of things, encouraged Jack to take care of business and I’ll help you. So that’s how it transpired. And then they went and got the car, they knew where he lived, they had this scheme. That’s why I think they were going to kill him, because they cut the power and waited in the garage with their firearms to kill him.

[00:25:56] Then when that didn’t happen, they saw Sharon drive away and they thought, surely, she would lead them to Matt. So they followed, and there he was on the sidewalk, and they accelerated. Like I said, Jack said he was driving, and he laid the shotgun across the passenger front seat and shot out the window at the same time as this, Trey was shooting the pistol.

Zibby: [00:26:19] Now when Jack writes Trey’s name on the paper and then eats it–

[laughter]

Dan: [00:26:27] Its so great.

Zibby: [00:26:28] It’s the best. Did you go, “Trey. Oh, we know who Trey is.”

Don: [00:26:32] Oh, yes, we knew Trey. I’d had an encounter with Trey. He is one of these individuals that has this extreme fight or flight sense. We all have that to some degree, but there’s people in our profession that we run into that are either really quick to fight or really quick to run. When they run, I’ve had people, not Trey’s situation, but another individual that we ran in the front of his house and he dove through a plate glass window in the back of his house, and ran through the backyard bleeding like crazy down the street because he thought he had a warrant and he didn’t.

Yeardley: [00:27:14] Oh, wow.

Don: [00:27:15] I had talked to him a great deal about that, and he says, “There’s something that overcomes me and I cannot stop myself from running and I will run through glass window. I would try and jump the Grand Canyon. I can’t help myself.” You see that in our profession, these guys that have that really heightened sense of that. Trey is one of those people. We had a time, my partner was trying to track him down on a warrant, and he had been seen in an even smaller community than ours about 15 miles away visiting a house. The neighbor was asked to call us if they saw him. Well, they saw him. We went out there. We ended up surrounding the house. He went from the first floor to the second floor to up in the attic. Wouldn’t come down, threatening that he had a gun.

[00:28:04] We had a K-9 there. We had him cornered. We were going to put the dog up to get him. He had nowhere to go. He went to the far eaves of the attic and kicked out the vent and was going to jump out of a two-story house when officers finally, literally, got their hands on him up in this attic and fought him and subdued him.

Zibby and Yeardley: [00:28:29] Wow.

Don: [00:28:30] That’s the flight issues that guy has, and it certainly plays into when he’s captured later on in this incident.

Yeardley: [00:28:39] So tell us what happens when you do catch up to Trey.

Don: [00:28:42] So we have his name, we know who he is, we know his background. Absolutely certain, he’s going to run when confronted or fight, and either one is going to be to the extreme. But we have at least three very good locations where he might be, and not any location is better than the other. So we have to split our folks up into three groups to watch these different places. They’re not right near each other. One of them is in a community about 15 miles south, and the other two are in our city limits, but in different areas.

[00:29:21] So we’ve had to split our teams up. So we don’t have a lot of folks at any one place. I’m trying to go back and forth between locations because we have people at two of these places that say, “I think he’s coming here. I know him. I’ll try and let you know when he’s here. But there’s no guarantee, he’ll probably just show up.”

Dan: [00:29:45] And with us being such a small agency, that puts a lot of stress on our personnel to be able to spread out, especially given the response that we’re expecting from Trey.

Don: [00:29:55] Correct. So we don’t have enough manpower at any one location. And of course, he shows up at one of the locations we’re watching, and we have a limited amount of people to help capture the guy. They try, and he pulls into the driveway. Our three vehicles, two detective cars in a marked unit, pull into the driveway behind him. One, the patrol car right behind him, pinning him into this driveway we think. As he starts to get out, he realizes the cops are there. He slams it into reverse, starts ramming the patrol car forward, reverse, reverse, trying to get angle to where he can work his way around the driveway, so he can then back up.

[00:30:41] As he’s backing up, one of our officers, who’s on the passenger side of the patrol car with the door open, standing behind it with his firearm out, with the door as his protection, Trey’s vehicle comes directly back and hits the passenger door as fast as he can go in reverse. The officer, luckily, steps back on the running board, and the door gets slammed back, and it hits the officer in the chest. But there’s a little more movement in the higher part of the door, so it flexes somewhat. If he had been standing on the ground, it would have perhaps severed his lower legs or at least crushed both of them.

Zibby: [00:31:26] Oh, my God.

Don: [00:31:27] So Trey’s doing that backing up, gunfire starting to try and stop him from killing officers. This isn’t early in the morning, but it’s like school times. There’s people up and about, and he is just out of his mind. He’s accelerating through the yard, going through a hedge onto the side street. People on the other side of the street are running back away from their cars. They’re getting ready to leave, and people are virtually running for their lives. And the whole time, our officers are trying to stop him and firing numerous rounds into his vehicle.

Yeardley: [00:32:04] But you have civilians everywhere. Like, it’s such an incredibly high-risk situation.

Don: [00:32:10] Extremely high risk. And at the end, I don’t remember how many rounds, if they ever figured it out that were fired, but there were many, and all of them hit the vehicle or hit in a direction where there were no people. So even though this was a dynamic situation with a guy that’s totally out of control, our officers were able to place the rounds to stop him and the threat, and no one else, not only got hit, but no other houses got hit, no other cars got hit, and no one had a, “Hey, I heard a bullet whiz by my head.”

Yeardley: [00:32:46] Did Trey also have a weapon? Was he firing at you, guys?

Don: [00:32:49] No, he did not have a firearm. He was using his car as a weapon. He injured the officer that got hit in the chest by the door, had some significant injuries, but luckily bounced back from it. Trey takes off down the road, and one of the rounds that had gone through the back of his vehicle severed his spine. And as he’s driving, he now can’t feel his legs, so he can’t push the accelerator, and the car is like doing a slow motion as it decelerates on its own, and it wears off the road and hits this sign.

Yeardley: [00:33:28] So Dave, where do you come into this investigation?

Dave: [00:33:32] So I was off the days of the running gun battle and the day that Sharon was shot. I remember actually watching the news and I see Dan on the news. So of course, the way Dan and I are, he lets me know how his day went. And so I went to work after the shooting is my Monday. So we’re all aware that we should be looking for certain people. There’s a little bit of tension around the city because we know we’ve got a couple of guys out there at the time that they’ll just drive by and shoot and kill somebody. So the way police are, I want to be the person that finds them. It’s like the ultimate game of hide and seek. So we’re all supercharged, let’s go turn over some rocks and find these guys.

Yeardley: [00:34:12] And just to be clear, you already have Jack in custody.

Dan: [00:34:15] Correct. Now it’s just about tracking down Trey, the second shooter.

Dave: [00:34:19] We actually get information about a vehicle he might be driving and a neighborhood general area where he might show up.

Zibby: [00:34:27] Where do you get that info?

Dave: [00:34:28] The Tweaker hotline, people talk. I got sent to a call as a disputed a hotel where people were trashing the inside of their room and wouldn’t leave. I remember being on that call, and then I hear detectives over the radio coordinating, “Hey, I saw vehicle matching suspects, vehicle description, just rolling down this street. Let’s all clock in, get ready.” And then I hear, “Shots fired. We’re in pursuit,” and they’re heading towards where I’m coming from, and then there’s just silence.

[00:35:00] So I was in my patrol car waiting several blocks to the west of where they had called out with this vehicle pursuit. And so I’m like, “They’re coming right to me. This is great. I’m going to be the only marked patrol unit in this, so I know I’m going to be number one in this pursuit.” I was excited.

Yeardley: [00:35:15] So the marked patrol car always goes ahead of the unmarked?

Dave: [00:35:18] Right. Just to let the public know, and it’s one of our policies that if you’re in an unmarked car, you’re not supposed to be in the pursuit. You can follow in parallel, but you just don’t have the visibility. You don’t have the same light set up in our unmarked cars. So the alert to the public isn’t there like it is with a marked patrol unit. But there’s radio silence and I never hear anything. So then I hear, “Okay, we’re stopped at this intersection.” It’s a few blocks east of where I was at. So I just roll into the area.

[00:35:45] As I’m rounding the corner and coming up to where this incident ended, I see suspect vehicle angled into a nice brick entryway gate area at the mouth of this nice neighborhood. He knows straight into it. I see holes all over the back window of this truck he’s driving, and I see Detective Don and Detective George are pulling Trey out of the vehicle.

Zibby: [00:36:09] Oh, God.

Dave: [00:36:10] And so I just parked right there and set up and blocked traffic because I knew that that area of our city is going to be shut down for probably four hours or five hours.

Don: [00:36:17] Yeah. So we pull Trey out. He has multiple gunshot wounds. I don’t know how many times he was hit, but multiple times. It really looked like to me that he was going to die. He was bleeding profusely and he was in a really sad state.

Zibby: [00:36:34] Was he conscious though when you pulled him out? Did you get the sense he was aware of what was happening and who you were?

Don: [00:36:41] Oh, yes, he knew, and he knew that we were cops. I have had experience with people that are in those circumstances where it appears that they’re going to die. And at least to them, they believe they’re going to die. You have some success with asking them questions right then and there, “Hey, why did you do that? Why did you shoot that girl?” I started asking questions as I advised him of his rights because they call it a dying declaration. Sometimes people decide they want to answer up to these things before they die. And so when I asked him those questions in this traumatic situation, he just looked at me and said, “Fuck you, I want an attorney.”

Zibby: [00:37:22] No.

Yeardley: [00:37:22] [laughs]

Don: [00:37:25] He’s hardcore and it was like, “All right.”

Dave: [00:37:28] And then they go to getting medics there for him to get him treated. You think of all the roles that in the last two minutes these cops have gone through and now they’re summoning medics to save his life.

Don: [00:37:40] Yeah.

Dan: [00:37:41] In the meantime, they’re providing care. You plug holes with fingers, gauze, whatever you can to help stop the bleeding to keep him alive, and that’s what they were doing.

Yeardley: [00:37:50] And were you able to save his life?

Don: [00:37:53] Yes. The paramedics got there, and they rendered aid, they got him to the hospital, and he survived. He was paralyzed from the chest down, but he survived those gunshot wounds. One of the things I remember him describing, not to us, because talk about Conpride or hardcore, this guy was an example of that. But one of the jail tapes where he’s talking to a friend and we monitor their conversations, he talks about that incident and remembering seeing a bullet come out of his chest and strike the dashboard of his car.

Yeardley: [00:38:30] Oh, my God.

Don: [00:38:32] Sometimes things speed up, sometimes slow down. I think that incident, there were parts that were sped way up to him, but this particular moment, he remembers actually seeing a bullet come through his chest and shatter the dash.

Yeardley: [00:38:46] Holy shit.

Yeardley: [00:38:58] So Trey is getting treatment, and you, guys, are off putting this case together with the DA. Did the case actually go to trial?

Don: [00:39:07] The case progressed. We had some problems because Matt would never identify initially Trey as the other guy.

Zibby: [00:39:19] Why?

Don: [00:39:20] He later told us, because he did subsequently identify him in his testimony at trial. But he said the reason he wouldn’t ID him to us earlier is because he thought, “Okay, I helped identify Jack because they had him in custody, he was going to prison. They didn’t really know who Trey was. And then when they showed me a picture of Trey, I told him I didn’t believe it was him because I wanted him left on the outside, so I could kill him.”

Yeardley: [00:39:53] Oh, wow.

Don: [00:39:54] Matt said, “It would be easier to track Trey down if he wasn’t in custody. So I didn’t want to cooperate with the police because I need to kill him,” was his thought process.

Zibby: [00:40:04] And let’s not forget, Matt killed his mom. So he’s also a murderer.

Don: [00:40:08] Yeah. He says, “Eventually I’ll get Jack in prison because I’ll end up back in prison. And then when I run into Jack in prison, I’ll kill him in prison.” So that was his thought process. Later, it became an issue in trial. It’s like, “Well, you’re identifying him now almost a year later. Why didn’t you identify him at the time?” So he had to go into this big story. I’m sure he related very well with the jurors-

[laughter]

Don: [00:40:33] -as a victim because, “Well, I’m going to kill him and then kill him because they killed her.” So yes, he went to trial. He was convicted.

Yeardley: [00:40:42] What about Jack, the other shooter?

Don: [00:40:44] Well, the thing that really caused us problems is Jack is completely cooperating with us. He has an attorney. He’s going to testify against Trey. We believe Trey’s, the gunman, because of Jack’s story because Trey ain’t telling us anything.

Yeardley: [00:41:02] Never tells anything.

Don: [00:41:04] Right. We’re going on what Jack says, and it’s all very believable, and we’re going with that. But the DA decides, “Well, before we throw everything into this, let’s have Jack take a polygraph to just confirm that he was driving, and he had the shotgun that fired off in the distance, and all that’s true, and then boom. 100%, we’ll go after this, because Jack wanted to plead guilty to murder. He was willing to do all that. He’d testify against Trey, but let’s just get this polygraph out of the way.” So we get it scheduled, and the day before the polygraph, his attorney calls us and says, “My client won’t be able to pass the polygraph.” [chuckles]

Yeardley and Zibby: [00:41:46] What?

Don: [00:41:47] And it’s like, “Are you kidding?” “No, he’s not going to be able to pass the polygraph about the part where he’s driving and he shot the shotgun.”

Yeardley: [00:41:55] What?

Zibby: [00:41:56] Oh.

Don: [00:41:57] So we find out, he’s the passenger, and he has the handgun, and he’s the one that still inadvertently, but– [crosstalk]

Yeardley: [00:42:04] Inadvertently hit Sharon?

Don: [00:42:06] Yeah.

Yeardley: [00:42:06] Right. Because he was aiming for Matt.

Don: [00:42:08] But it doesn’t really matter. When you’re committing a felony crime like that and you’re trying to kill one person, but another person gets killed by you.

Yeardley: [00:42:15] They’re both wrong.

Don: [00:42:16] Yeah. So we still were able to go to trial because in the commission of a felony, if you aid in that felony– If you guys go in and rob a bank and this guy shoots the teller and you’re just in there to help rob the bank, you’re as guilty of that murder as the person that pulled the trigger.

Zibby: [00:42:34] So the sentencing doesn’t really change that much.

Don: [00:42:37] Correct. Yeah. In the aid and abetting part of the statute, you’re just as guilty.

Yeardley: [00:42:43] If you just drove, and[?] if you pulled the actual trigger that sent the bullet into the woman’s body.

Don: [00:42:50] Correct. But there’s been some changes in the law since that trial. Our state law started to change, and now there’s some interpretation that, if you participate in a felony and someone gets killed, you can be charged with murder but you have to have some sense or knowledge that that was going to happen. So the reason they changed it is, bank robbery, if you’re the getaway driver and you think the dudes are just going in to pull a robbery and come out and they do kill somebody in there, and you didn’t really have any freaking idea that was going to happen and you weren’t right there holding the guy that gets shot, then you may not be found guilty of the homicide.

[00:43:33] So we had trouble after the trial because the law had started to shift and the guy that killed her didn’t commit an intentional act. The law had changed. If it was an intentional act, you were still guilty of murder. But the intentional act was trying to kill Matt. It was accidental act that killed Sharon. So by legal definition, there was some real question on whether Trey was guilty of murder.

Dave: [00:44:09] Which is absolutely absurd.

Zibby: [00:44:11] Yeah. I’m guessing what your opinions are from a law enforcement standpoint.

Dave: [00:44:16] It’s really frustrating for the layperson. I’m looking across the table and you guys are rolling your eyes like, “What?” And for law enforcement and people, I would say with a degree of common sense, it just doesn’t seem right for someone to get that kind of a pass when you show up, drive by, and “Oops, shot the wrong person. That was an accident. I was actually trying to kill the person behind him.” To me, it’s an extreme indifference to the value of human life. You should go away forever. You don’t get to walk the planet with the rest of us.

Yeardley: [00:44:48] The intention was still murder.

Dave: [00:44:50] Right.

Yeardley: [00:44:50] The fact that your aim isn’t any good is not relevant.

Dave: [00:44:54] Right.

Zibby: [00:44:55] What was their original sentencing?

Don: [00:44:58] Jack pled guilty to murder and got a 25-year sentence. Trey was found guilty of murder and was sentenced initially to 30 years, probably a longer time because of his prior criminal activity that comes into effect. There were appeals by Trey on the identification in court by Matt, because Matt had originally told us, “No, that’s not the guy,” because Matt wants to take care of business. So then in trial, he testifies, “Oh, yeah, that’s him. Oh, yeah, I identified him then, but I didn’t tell the cops because I don’t like the cops, and I want to take care of this.”

[00:45:40] So, they allow that identification into the jury. Well, they appeal that saying, “That’s improper. The judge shouldn’t have allowed that because it’s so questionable.” So the appeal court said, “You have to send this back to trial again and have a hearing, at least, where the judge inquires more about this identification and how accurate is because we don’t think the trial judge really considered all the facts.” So it’s remanded back to the court for reconsideration.

[00:46:16] Sharon’s family didn’t want to go through another trial. Trey had been in prison 10 years, paralyzed from the chest down. The decision was made to shorten his sentence. And although, we did have the hearing, we didn’t go back to a trial. One of the determining factors, not only was the family not prepared to try and go through another trial, but the shift in the state law of whether or not you’re even guilty of murder, if it’s a reckless act, and we’ve already proven in our case that it is a reckless act, because we all agree. Everyone agrees. They weren’t trying to hit Sharon. They were trying to hit Matt. And so as ridiculous as that sounds, that’s points of law that could shift against us. So considering all those things, his sentence was shortened.

Dan: [00:47:09] So Don, even though Sharon and Matt are together, are they running in the same circles, or is he leading a separate life and then he comes home back to her and she’s not really aware of what’s going on?

Don: [00:47:20] Well, Sharon had a tough childhood, and she gravitated to these bad boy guys. She had a young son from a relationship that fell through, but she had then gone back to school, and I think became a hairdresser, got licensed. And so she was always trying to make good with her life, but somehow, these guys kept crossing paths with her. She was one of these loving souls who either thought she could change these guys or she was just easily manipulated. So that was a really sorry story, because she in no way deserved this, had not been involved in anything like this, and was really trying to influence Matt to change his ways.

[00:48:05] They fire all these rounds at him who he’s literally standing right there in front of him. And then as they pass, one bullet goes through a car door with double metal, hits her, and she’s dead within minutes. So just a tragic incident.

Zibby: [00:48:21] Real tragic.

Dan: [00:48:22] You think about it. She got shot one time. How many times did Trey get shot? She’s the one that passes away, and Trey’s alive to this day.

Zibby: [00:48:31] And where did her son go?

Don: [00:48:33] With her parents.

Yeardley: [00:48:34] I have a question. If you’re paralyzed from the chest down, does prison provide extra care for you?

Don: [00:48:42] Yeah. They provide extra care, and they also have inmates that volunteer to stay with and help handicap inmates.

Dan: [00:48:50] Like, caregivers.

Yeardley: [00:48:51] Interesting.

Zibby: [00:48:52] And is Jack still in prison?

Don: [00:48:54] Yes, I’m sure he is.

Yeardley: [00:48:55] And what about Trey?

Dan: [00:48:58] As far as we know, he’s out and about. He’s free.

Yeardley: [00:49:01] Oh. So even though Matt was technically just a victim in this particular case, he’s not exactly a law-abiding citizen. He did murder his mother as a juvenile, and he did swear revenge on Jack. What happened to him?

Don: [00:49:15] Well, ironically, when this hearing came up that we had after the appeal, Matt was in federal prison in another state for another issue. So I had to drive down and pick him up at the federal prison to bring him up here to testify. He, at the time, had thought a lot about this and decided that he wasn’t going to try and hunt these guys down and kill them that he had planned that for a long, long time, but he had thought that Sharon probably wouldn’t have wanted him to do that. So we had long talk on the 10-hour, 12-hour drive up here, and he testified. He testified truthfully, and he seemed to have changed a lot of his thought process, probably because he had been off methamphetamine for quite some time.

Yeardley: [00:50:05]-Hmm.

Zibby: [00:50:05] Yeah Did you guys’ bond on that 10-hour drive? [Yeardley laughs]

Don: [00:50:09] Well, I had someone with me on both trips, another detective. I think with him sitting there and listening to us just bullshit and converse, he may have realized for the first time in his life that cops aren’t all that bad, because he would start exchanging jokes back and forth. So yeah, I think in a way, in Matt’s way, he did bond a little bit, or at least see the other side of things that he had never seen before. In fact, on our way back down there, I called the prison before we left to tell him, “Hey, we’ll be back down there, blah, blah, blah, in about 12 hours and we have so and so just want to check in to let you know he’s coming.” And they said, “Oh, fine, but by the way, if you’re not here by 06:00 PM, we won’t accept him till the next morning.”

Yeardley: [00:50:59] What?

Zibby: [00:50:59] Oh.

Don: [00:51:00] I was like, “Where’d that come from?”

Dan: [00:51:02] They don’t have late check in?

Don: [00:51:03] They did not have late check in.

[laughter]

Don: [00:51:06] If we’d have got down there a minute late in the federal prison, they’re serious when they tell you something like that, we would have had to go to some local police department, try and check him into their holding facility, or I don’t know, stand guard over him all night at a Best Western. I don’t know, what we would have done.

Dave: [00:51:25] You go Airbnb. [Yeardly laughs]

Don: [00:51:27] So we haul ass-

Zibby: [00:51:29] Yeah.

Don: [00:51:30] -this 12 hours, because we have to get there. So we have a marked police car, and he’s in the back, and we’re going probably 15 miles over the speed limit the whole way. Well, halfway or so down there, I keep noticing the same car behind us, and I would pull into the other lane, and it would pull in behind us. I would go back in the fast lane, it would pull out. It literally was tracking us for miles. I’m thinking, as bizarre as this case has been, “Are these hit guys from Jack and Trey that are finally going to get revenge on Matt? Is this some of Matt’s buddies that are going to try to break him out?” We don’t know, but part of this is Matt’s watching them too going, “Oh man, we might have to shoot it out with these guys.” He’s getting into this too. He says, “I don’t know who it is, but maybe they are after me.” So we’re joking back and forth, but it is sort of troubling.

Yeardley: [00:52:29] Who was it?

Don: [00:52:30] It’s some citizen who sees our patrol car go by violating the speed limit.

Yeardley: [00:52:37] Unbelievable.

Don: [00:52:38] They see the name of the city on the patrol car, and they call our agency to file a complaint that we’re speeding [Yeardley laughs] on the freeway.

Zibby: [00:52:50] Oh, my God.

Don: [00:52:52] And he’s videotaping with his phone, and that’s why he’s driving up by us and then behind us to get the license plate. We’re literally trying to get a federal prisoner back to a federal facility before the deadline.

Dave: [00:53:07] It’s amazing when as a police officer, you get an in progress call, and you pull up, and we have exempt vehicles that are exempt from the vehicle code. We can speed, we got lights and sirens, we can clear intersections, hit the lights, go through a redlight and–

Dan: [00:53:24] Drive with your lights off at night in a neighborhood.

Dave: [00:53:27] Right. And this is all because we’re doing public safety type stuff, and we’re going to in progress calls where could be a situation like Dan was going to with this shooting where we’re going to try to save somebody’s life. But some people will lose their minds over little things like parking. We park strategically, tactically, so we’re not right in front of a residence that we’re going to. So we park down the street. I might park facing the wrong way, so it gives me a little advantage, so I’m not having to cross the street under a streetlight. We do all these things for a purpose, and people will come up and they will complain while you’re walking up to a call and they say, “Hey, hey, you can’t park there, or you left your vehicle on. Why am I paying for your gas?”

[00:54:11] I remember going to a bank robbery, and I stepped out of my car, and actually I had saliva, so I spit on the ground, and this lady started screaming at me, “You’re a police officer. You shouldn’t be spitting in public.” And I said, “Lady, I got some other things going on right now. I apologize.” “But really?” I mean, “Come on.”

Zibby: [00:54:29] I love that you said, I apologize with anger.

Yeardley: [00:54:31] [laughs]

Zibby: [00:54:43] I want to go back to this car ride really quick, because I’m always fascinated by these moments in time where you’re traveling, whether it’s on an airplane, which we’ve heard in the interstate case, or this long car ride with a criminal. I’m always curious about how you negotiate little things like eating. When someone has to go to the bathroom, do you keep them in cuffs and go into the restroom with them? I love the idea of there being this harmless human to human small talk or you’re driving through, I don’t know, Arby’s and being like, “Do you want to coke with that?” I like to picture it. When in any other world, would the two of you be together traveling and relying on each other to negotiate little things like toilets–

Yeardley: [00:55:26] And drive throughs.

Dan: [00:55:27] What music do you listen to?

Zibby: [00:55:28] Yeah. [Yeardley laughs] Do you listen to music?

Don: [00:55:31] No. In those kind of trips, you just try and make the best of them and you’re polite with the guy. And like with Matt, we were joking around with him. This know is a scary dude, and he was joking back. I could tell he was seeing a whole different side of society that he had ever seen and certainly never imagined that we acted or talk like we did or stuff like that. We would go to restaurants. It was all fast food. We would generally let him out in the parking lot handcuffed, and so he could stretch, and then set on the edge of the seat with the back door open, and he would eat right there in handcuffs. If he had to go to the bathroom, of course, there was two of us, so we would escort him into the bathroom, unhandcuff him and let him do his business.

[00:56:16] We’re armed. He’s not. There’s two of us. I’m sure that even if he wanted to do something or it was somebody else, like, maybe Trey, they would think, “Oh, there’s odds aren’t there.“ So, you want to minimize their opportunities. Even though they’re acting jovial and you guys are buddy, buddy, in the back of my mind, it’s always like, “This motherfucker’s dangerous. Let him think we’re having a great time, but don’t give him any opportunities.”

Yeardley: [00:56:44] Never drop your guard.

Don: [00:56:46] No. And if you do, you’ll pay. I guarantee it, you’ll pay every single time.

Yeardley: [00:56:50] Was Matt wearing an orange jumpsuit? It seems like, if you let him out in the parking lot, if he’s wearing something like that, it’s pretty conspicuous.

Don: [00:56:57] Yeah, and I believe he was wearing whatever color it was.

Dan: [00:57:01] They’re in a patrol car too. So they’re already conspicuous.

Don: [00:57:04] Yeah, people knew.

Zibby: [00:57:06] And who pays for the burgers? Is there a budget for that in your agency, or is that coming out of your pocket?

Don: [00:57:13] Oh, our agency would reimburse us for that kind of stuff.

Zibby: [00:57:16] Okay,

Don: [00:57:16] That wasn’t a problem. I wonder how much money we probably all think about how much money we’ve spent on these people buying cigarettes and stuff like that that we just shrug it off as part of doing business.

[00:57:28] My first extradition, I had a guy in custody in Alaska, and we had a warrant for him, a burglary warrant, and I wanted to talk to him on the trip back because I hadn’t had a chance to talk to him. I was trying to get a confession. Well, our sheriff’s department generally does the extraditions. When it’s Alaska, their deputies really want to go to see the sights and maybe take in some fishing or whatever. And so it was a popular place for them to want to go, yet I needed to, so they said, “Fine, but we’re pissy about it. You’re getting to go, so you take care of all the paperwork, we’re not going to help you, etc.”

[00:58:05] So I thought I had all the paperwork together, and this includes a governor’s warrant. There has to be a warrant from the governor of our state. There’s this whole big formality, and I’m carrying a stack of paperwork, multiple copies, and I’ve got to give them the original. It’s my first extradition. I get up there, I get a rental car from the airport, I go to the prison, and this place is like a castle out of the 18th century. I knock on the door. It’s like one of these slaza, “What do you want?” And I said, “I’m a cop from another state, and I’m here to get so and so.” “Hold on.” So, I’m waiting, and the next thing you know, the door opens, and the dude comes out.

Zibby: [00:58:48] What?

Don: [00:58:48] He’s only in a T-shirt. We’re in Alaska. It’s like 10 degrees, and he’s got pants, some tennis shoes, and a T-shirt on.

Zibby [00:58:56]Yeah.

Don: [00:58:56] He comes out and they slam the door, and he looks at me and he knew me, and it’s like, “Are you ready to go?” And he goes, “Yeah, get me out of this fucking place.”

[laughter]

Don: [00:59:06] And I said, “Well, I’ve got all this paperwork.” So I knock on the door again, and they like, “Yeah.” And I said, “What paperwork do you need?” “Nothing.” Boom. They shut the door, and I said, “Well, okay. Hey, let’s go.” He went and got in the passenger seat. We drove the airport. I never showed my ID.

Zibby: [00:59:23] I was going to say, not even an ID?

Don: [00:59:24] I didn’t show ID. I had all this governor original warrants and all this paperwork. They never asked for it. I brought every freaking thing I had back with me.

Dan: [00:59:33] Maybe they were tired of your inmate too.

Don: [00:59:35] It was crazy.

Zibby: [00:59:36] Yeah.

Don: [00:59:36] Never heard another thing. I don’t even know who I talked. I could have been talking to an inmate on the other side, [Yeardley laughs] but they sent him out. It was the right guy, and off we went.

Yeardley: [00:59:46] This was great. Don, thank you so much. We’re so pleased to have had you back.

Don: [00:59:51] Thank you.

[music]

Yeardley: [00:59:56] Small Town Dicks is produced by Zibby Allen and Yeardley Smith, and coproduced by Detectives Dan and Dave.

Zibby: [01:00:03] This episode was edited by Logan Heftel, Yeardley Smith, and Zibby Allen.

Yeardley: [01:00:08] Music for the show was composed by John Forrest. Our associate producer is Aaron Gaynor, and our books are cooked and cats wrangled by Ben Cornwell.

Zibby: [01:00:18] If you like what you hear and want to stay up to date with the show, head on over to smalltowndicks.com, and become our pal on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter @smalltowndicks. We love hearing from our Small Town Fam. So hit us up.

Yeardley: [01:00:31] Yeah. And also we have a YouTube channel where you can see trailers for past and forthcoming episodes.

Zibby: [01:00:37] That’s right. If you choose to subscribe, you’ll be supporting our podcast. That way, we can keep going to small towns across the country and bringing you the finest in rare true crime cases, told, as always, by the detectives who investigated them. Thanks for listening, Small Town Fam.

Yeardley: [01:00:54] Nobody’s better than.

[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]