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Season Six: Holiday Episode 23 (2025)
14 Plays11 minutes ago
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Transcript
Content Warning and Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
The content you're about to hear may be graphic in nature. Listener discretion is advised.
Exploring True Crime and Episode Themes
00:00:50
Speaker
This is True Crime XS.
00:00:59
Speaker
funny like it takes so much to get here but then i look at it and i like look back at the year even though like we took some breaks here and there we got way into this holiday thing and then suddenly you know we're twenty some episodes in so i wanted to choose something that did have like rabbit holes people could go down for this one and Technically, this kind of ties to the death of Michael Jordan's father, which is kind of weird.
Focus on Robeson County's Socioeconomic Challenges
00:01:31
Speaker
It's the area and some of the people that are involved for this particular hostage taking. I pulled it up, and I guess I have to tell you something about the area, which I've i've talked about this area a little bit in the past, but this comes out of Robeson County, North Carolina,
00:01:50
Speaker
Do you know much about that area? know some of the things we've covered, and I know a little bit of about it sort of adjacently for like random reasons, but I don't know a whole lot. I do know it's ah a rather rural part of North Carolina. Yeah. It's largely been one of the poorest areas for a very long time. I think it may be the poorest county in North Carolina. Yeah.
00:02:14
Speaker
It definitely was when this was Okay, and so that comes up for different reasons for other news stories that aren't necessarily true crime, right? Right. But there has been, like, in this area, like, there was a suspected serial killer in the 90s. There was another one that ah happened to couple years ago.
00:02:37
Speaker
Point being, it's an interesting area. It's kind of small. I think it's bigger today than it was like at the time we're looking at today because we're we are going back a little bit, but like I didn't see a huge jump.
00:02:53
Speaker
During the time period we're talking about, according to U.S. Census data, there's about 100,000 And when I looked at the the most recent one I could find was 2020.
00:03:05
Speaker
I didn't see anything since then. And it said there was 117,000 give take. unique about is of the 100,000 people, 26% them were black. 37% of them were Native American. is of the hundred thousand people twenty six percent of them were black thirty seven percent of them were native american And 37% of them were white, which that's an interesting demographic.
Narcotics Distribution and Law Enforcement Issues
00:03:30
Speaker
And I think people recognize that, but but it's that's sort of strange that it's split into thirds like that. It is. It's also, this is probably what i was thinking of, the largest county by land area in North Carolina.
00:03:43
Speaker
Oh, I did not. I don't think I realized that. Yeah, North Carolina has 100 counties. So that's another thing that would come up because, I don't know, sometimes I and want to say like meteorologists, but I'm not entirely sure that's who would be doing it. But, you know, sometimes when you've got like...
00:04:02
Speaker
weather phenomenons occurring or whatever they will give tidbits of information about different places that are affected by it but i know based on sort of an overarching glance at robeson county so it is the largest but by area not by population but you know it has the most square footage square mileage right Of all the counties in North Carolina. And it also faced, if I recall correctly, it wasn't, it's not like malleable economically. And a lot of the things like tobacco firming and textile, like as those things like went out of business, they were not replaced.
00:04:43
Speaker
And so it was thriving at different points, but then there was severe economic downturn, which is always interesting because a lot of times that's where you end up with a heavy, like, drug population, a lot of crimes related to that type of thing, right?
Corruption and Misconduct in Local Law Enforcement
00:05:01
Speaker
Yes. And it's it's interesting that you said it the way you just said it. i will say, over time, I noticed that the demographics have changed, and...
00:05:14
Speaker
I don't have like a good hallmark for that in my head where I can like look at it and go, this is different because of the other counties doing this or anything like that. But I did notice that the population is in people.
00:05:34
Speaker
forty percent native american people And that shocked me because the portion of the population that went down there was white people.
00:05:44
Speaker
It went all the way down to 20%. That's a big jump to have been 37% in the 80s when we're talking about it, to have dropped 17% on the white people side and only gone up 3% for decades.
00:05:56
Speaker
for the Native American side. It goes up... like There's other groups that have sort of started to who have burgeoning populations there. Well, and sort of adjacent to all of that is, you know, Lumberton, which is in Robeson County, is home to a population of Lumbee tribe members.
00:06:19
Speaker
Right. The Tuscarora and the Lumbee tribe have a lot of members in this area. The Lumbee people have made a home there, and so... I don't know how that... You you just said i think the population had increased, maybe, or no?
00:06:33
Speaker
A little bit. the The population has increased, and the number of like indigenous peoples that are in this area has increased. Okay, and so it's it's an interesting area, right? It is. And so one of the weird things about it is that it falls as kind of a halfway point between Miami and New York. On I-95s.
00:06:55
Speaker
Right. So that proximity to I-95 being a halfway point, in my opinion, has turned it into a little bit of a distribution and sort point for various narcotics over the years.
00:07:12
Speaker
At the time we're talking about, that big narcotic is cocaine. And they have a lot of charges that come out of this area, like almost too many for the population we just talked about during this time. And I've mentioned these people before. i'm going to mention them again.
00:07:32
Speaker
They can almost come up in the Dirty Badges series that we do. They're interesting, but Joe Freeman Britt is there. He's the district attorney during this time.
00:07:43
Speaker
And he has pursued a ton of death penalty convictions over the years. He is a very, very obnoxious prosecutor. I think he passed away in 2016. came up in a different case that we talked about. He's a big guy. He's like 6'5", 6'6". He got 47 death row convictions to his name at one point. And that earned him a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records, which I don't think I would brag about.
00:08:13
Speaker
ah The sheriff that is involved during this time is a man named Hubert Stone. And the two of them working together just brought an asinine amount of prosecutions related to various narcotics offenses and and the things that happen when you have narcotics offenses.
00:08:34
Speaker
Now, the time period we're talking about is a hotbed of sort of political activity. It's in 1986. By August of 1986, questions were beginning to be asked about the Robeson County Sheriff's Department.
00:08:52
Speaker
Cocaine had been taken from an evidence locker. They had a deputy who was openly accused of theft, but it sort of got... ah He was acquitted, but it was sort of like he was acquitted from the outset. like he was They picked a jury to let him go. Sheriff Stone, Hebert Stone, he is directly criticized by a lot of local community, and he has investigated numerous times over the years for not only corruption, but the potential that he was involved in narcotics trafficking himself.
00:09:24
Speaker
Now, the reason for that is in 1985, he appears as a character witness in a trial for a man who had been accused of large-scale cocaine trafficking. he also ah writes a letter asking for the release of another inmate, not just a person on trial, but an inmate who was known to have purchased large amounts of marijuana from DEA agents
00:09:56
Speaker
Now Joseph Shapiro and Ronald Taylor, they did a pretty cool series in the US News and World Report back in May of 1988 sort of covering a lot of this and talking about the relationship between the law
Community Response to Law Enforcement Corruption
00:10:08
Speaker
enforcement there. The title of it was Racial Tensions, Drugs, and Poverty, and they called the the subtitle was An Explosive Mix in Rural North Carolina, and they were directly talking about some of what ah we're going to talk about today.
00:10:20
Speaker
On November 1st of 1986, A man named Kevin Stone, who is the son of the sheriff and also a sheriff's deputy, he shoots and kills a man named Jimmy Earl Cummings.
00:10:38
Speaker
And Jimmy Earl Cummings is a Lumbee man who is unarmed during a traffic stop. So this is a huge deal. But it's not one of those things that ever really gets resolved.
00:10:54
Speaker
Three days after this, November 4th, 1986, elections are held and Hubert Sohn is reelected to be sheriff. So after he's reelected, a jury is put together for a coroner's inquest into Jimmy Earl Cummings' death.
00:11:13
Speaker
and they rule that the shooting was accidental and in self-defense. The local paper there is known as the Robesonian. The Robesonian loses it. They accuse the sheriff's department of whitewashing what's happened here. They said that the way that Hubert Stone was treating the office was wrong.
00:11:35
Speaker
He said that he had erred in promoting his son to the position of the head of the department's narcotics division when he was very young and inexperienced.
00:11:49
Speaker
After this happens, he gets, like Hubert Stone, to be clear, because i don't want to mix the two of them up, he gets in a pretty bad position with like the local Lumbee community.
00:12:03
Speaker
And... A group rises out of all of this, and they're called Concerned Citizens for Better Government. They start raising money for the legal fees for the family of Jimmy Earl Cummings so that they can go after the sheriff.
00:12:21
Speaker
And they're also like starting to put together pieces of a much more interesting puzzle where the police are involved in a lot of murders for to be as small an area as it is. Because keep in mind, those numbers I was telling you, they weren't like Lumberton.
00:12:38
Speaker
They were the whole county, which as you so aptly described, is massive land-wise. In January 1988, man named a man named Eddie Hatcher. So Eddie Hatcher, he is a member of this group Concerned Citizens for Better Government. He is also a local member of the Tuscarora He comes into possession of this map, this mysterious map.
00:13:06
Speaker
The map has been drawn by a guy named John Hunt. Some people in in talking about this story say John just had it in his possession. It actually belonged to someone else.
00:13:19
Speaker
But this map becomes an important part of the story we're telling today. John Hunt is a drug dealer. He's not quite on the level of being like a drug trafficker, if if that makes sense, like in the distinction.
00:13:33
Speaker
And that makes him very attractive to North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation. And it is alleged at many times throughout this story and throughout the years that...
00:13:46
Speaker
John Hunt is an informant working for the The reason it's attractive is because when you get a drug dealer as opposed to a trafficker, they are able to sort of put the, know, pinch on the dealer to get higher ups, right?
00:14:02
Speaker
Right. Yeah, they they're going to roll upwards on an investigation with someone like him who is connected. So Eddie Hatcher starts to get a little paranoid. This map that he has, it apparently has a lot of names on it related to some of the drug trafficking networks.
00:14:21
Speaker
And it appears that this map potentially would show connections that are previously unknown to the SBI, including within the sheriff's department. to a lot of those dealers and traffickers in the area.
00:14:36
Speaker
Now, unfortunately, the paranoia that Eddie Hatcher is feeling is that potentially John Hunt has gone to someone in the sheriff's department, either the sheriff, maybe his son, maybe someone else, and said, Eddie Hatcher has my map.
00:14:54
Speaker
So Eddie starts to believe he's going to potentially be arrested for possessing this document. He goes to an attorney, And the attorney tells him, look, whatever you have here might be something, but like you can't use it for anything.
00:15:12
Speaker
There's not enough information on here that stands alone without further investigation. there's like It's not sufficient to prove that there's law enforcement misconduct.
00:15:23
Speaker
And honestly, you can't even use it for a get-out-of-jail-free card. So... Real quick, I'm sorry. ah he It says that he came into the possession of the of John Hunt's map, right?
00:15:36
Speaker
I believe he stole it. He stole it. Okay. And then I'm just trying to sort of wrap my head around the narrative here. Hunt told the sheriff's department that Eddie Hatcher had the map because he thought it was going to cause problems.
00:15:50
Speaker
Yeah, like, i the idea is he told them that Hatcher had stolen the map from him, and it could be trouble for them because their are names, some of the names of their people are on this map. Okay, that's what I was wondering. And so this is something that, like, I think...
00:16:08
Speaker
Oh, it's the 80s, right? 1988. Yeah. Okay. Oh, yeah. And so this is the 80s, and you know this is like probably, i don't know, the heyday of like the crack epidemic, right? I mean, if i don't know for sure, but I think it was a big deal, right, happening. Yeah.
00:16:27
Speaker
This would definitely be, okay so this at this time, you're going to have a lot of those sort of early operations where cocaine is being bought and then you're adding all the ingredients and making crack and that's going up into Maryland, D.C., a lot of the... Right, that's what I meant that's what i meant by that.
00:16:47
Speaker
i i do realize there's a difference, but it's it all fits together. And you know the the whole crack ah epidemic was a manufactured situation in the United States, yeah without question. Yes, it was. And it seems like it would take somebody who was probably sampling and paranoid... To be like, oh, this map is going to bring us all down. Because I just don't like the attorney saying, I don't think that it would have been enough without more. Right?
00:17:16
Speaker
Yeah, it's something that's like kind of going to open the door. But it's not it's not the thing. Right, and the source of the information being Eddie Hatcher... who Now, he is a Tuscarora tribe member and a member of this Concerned Citizens for Better Government, right?
00:17:37
Speaker
Correct. He would have been like using this to say, hey, these officials are involved.
Hostage Crisis at the Robesonian Newspaper
00:17:44
Speaker
Right. That's yeah. Yeah. yeah The bottom, the bottom line is there, there were deaths happening that I don't want to make a lot of implications about Eddie Hatcher that are negative. This is his community. These are his people. Some of the people that get arrested regularly in Robeson County are directly tied to not just the community itself, but some of this network that's going on.
00:18:09
Speaker
And even if they aren't, some of their family members are. Like I said, this is a small population. it's split kind of equally at this time. And there's going to be pressure from a racism perspective from groups like this where they genuinely wonder, why are so many black people in jail? Why are so many of these indigenous populations in jail? What's happening that the police department people and sheriff's department people that are involved in this they never go down for anything and these people that do they're also dying they're being right so it's just this gigantic controversy and this sort of situation is just a very good illustration of sort of in a snapshot of what's happening right so a drug dealer alleged informant loses a map and ends up in the possession of somebody who's like at in the Concerned Citizens for Better Government and happens to be a member of one of the local tribes. And so this is what's forming.
00:19:09
Speaker
Correct. So he goes at some point, and I think it's with the lawyer or at the lawyer's advice, to speak with the police chief of this little town called Pembroke. Pembroke is so small. It has about 2,000 people now. I don't know what the numbers were then, but...
00:19:26
Speaker
At the time, it was the official state seat location for the Lumbee tribe. And I believe that's still the case today. when he talks to the police chief of this little town, that person tells him, look, you're going to want to drop this matter because all you're really going to be able to do with the information that you have right now is provoke some dangerous people that you don't want looking at you. So because he was paranoid and he believed that the sheriff knew he had it and the police chief has already said, there's nothing I can do about this.
00:20:00
Speaker
ah You're just going to make it worse. They get Eddie Hatcher out of town for a few days. But he cannot stop thinking about how to do something about what's happening in this community.
00:20:15
Speaker
Now, I can't tell you if Eddie Hatcher was doing this from a pure place or not. I can tell you that something happened 1988 that really bothered him. And that was this black kid named Billy McKellar dies in the Robeson County Jail. And ultimately, his death is ruled to be from an asthma attack. and he dies because no one in the jail helps him.
00:20:42
Speaker
Now, I want to say that Eddie Hatcher is coming from a pure place. But what he does next is so dumb, I can't tell where he's coming from. So he gets this other guy involved who is also Tuscarora Tron member. His name is Timothy Jacobs.
00:20:58
Speaker
They had met through doing this like sort of low-level activist work. And I personally believe that Eddie wanted to make a name for himself in the activist work so that he could continue to do it and potentially make it his job.
00:21:13
Speaker
So just keep that in mind as I keep talking. Jacobs and Hatcher, so Timothy Jacobs, he's new to the situation here, Eddie Hatcher, they decide that they're going to put a plan together to raise publicity about what's happening here.
00:21:30
Speaker
And... They think if they do something really drastic that it will protect Eddie Hatcher from what they believe is going to be retribution for him being able to provide law enforcement or other authority figures some insight into the local drug trafficking operations.
00:21:57
Speaker
But what they decided is to take the staff of the Robesonian newspaper hostage. So at the time, the Robesonian newspaper is Robeson County's afternoon daily paper.
00:22:12
Speaker
It's in Lumberton. It's circulating 15,000 copies. It's been around for over 100 years. It is the representation for mainstream white opinion in Robeson County.
00:22:25
Speaker
So they regularly butt heads with the editors of the Carolina Indian Voice of Pembroke.
00:22:35
Speaker
So that's the name of another magazine, the Carolina Indian Voice. And in Pembroke, they have this office. This is Robeson County's baby paper. like It's led by local tribe members. It is a weekly paper. It's small. So the Robesonian and the Carolina Indian voice, they clash, but they sort of provide like the overall perspective of what's going on in the county.
00:23:04
Speaker
Now... According to a statement by Timothy Jacobs that's passed along, and it would be hearsay in court, Eddie Hatcher did not like the editorial direction of the Robesonian.
00:23:17
Speaker
He apparently even wrote an op-ed in the Carolina Indian Voice that it was currently controlled by, quote, political trash. So the two of them felt that where the Robesonian was located, like the physical brick and mortar location of the paper,
00:23:37
Speaker
and the mirrored office windows that sort of protect the people inside. It would give them a strategic advantage if they were to be able to successfully take it over.
00:23:48
Speaker
It would prevent onlookers from seeing what they were doing inside. Eddie Hatcher knows this might not go well, so he writes his will and on the last day of January 1988. Timothy Jacobs, who is a student at Pembroke State University, he tells his professors he can't be there on February 1st because he has in a he has an emergency to attend to.
00:24:15
Speaker
So at 9 a.m. on the morning of February 1st, Eddie Hatcher and Timothy Jacobs purchased two shotguns and some ammunition for a.38 pistol from a little hardware store over in Pembroke.
00:24:29
Speaker
They saw off the shotgun barrels, and about an hour later, around 10, they enter the offices of the Robesonian in downtown Lumberton. As soon as they come in,
00:24:40
Speaker
The secretary who's sitting behind the main desk panics. She tries to give them the money and the cash drawer. But Eddie Hatcher tells her this isn't a robbery.
00:24:54
Speaker
He then chains shut the front doors of the offices. There are, depending on which source you believe, there's either 17 19 people.
00:25:07
Speaker
One of the people that's standing in the offices at this time is just trying to purchase an advertisement in the paper. The sports editor, a man named Donnie Douglas, he flees out the back door.
00:25:19
Speaker
One of the reporters, Raymond Godfrey, he's able to lock himself in an office sort of out of the view of everyone in the central area of the Robersonian. He telephones his wife.
00:25:30
Speaker
He calls emergency services. And then he directly calls into the Lumberton Police Department. And he gives the operator that he speaks to there the men's appearance and the weapons that they have on them.
00:25:44
Speaker
He will also, later in this hostage-taking, call to talk to an agent in Raleigh at the State Bureau of Investigation, and he will provide them with more information, sort of in real time.
00:25:59
Speaker
So this guy's taking his job as a reporter very, very seriously, and he has now moved on to... Sort of putting his own life on the line to a degree.
00:26:11
Speaker
I mean, sort of. I don't know that he knew he was acting without being seen, right? Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, it's a risk, but it's also, that's exactly what I would expect any reporter to do, right? Kind of simultaneously trying to get help for the situation while reporting the events. It's interesting that he went through all those different places that he was calling, right?
00:26:36
Speaker
Right. I mean, he he's he's doing it he' doing good investigative work to, like, get the word out. I mean, that's fast. I'm curious. um Honestly, I'm curious.
00:26:48
Speaker
and I'm sorry. What was he thinking? I'm curious as to why, like, it went. I know why he called his wife first, but then, like, 911, and then he had to call Lumberton Police Department directly. Like, did 911 tell him, like, we don't believe you? or i don't know.
00:27:04
Speaker
I don't know how that unfolds. I just find it fascinating that he had the wherewithal to do all of that because it does, it has the response that you would expect it to have. Right, exactly. And see, the very first thing is without his information going out pretty much immediately because he had the ah foresight to, I guess, imagine what was about to happen with the doors being chained with the guys with the sold-off shotguns and get out of sight. Right. And so without him immediately acting to get out of sight and make those phone calls, like when do we find out about this? Right.
00:27:43
Speaker
Right. Exactly. and And so law enforcement floods the area. Now, some of the accounts that I've read, ah including one account, which I want to read the headline to this. This is the actual citizen covering this the following morning with a two page story on so February 2nd, 1988.
00:28:01
Speaker
The headline is Indians take paper hostage. So we were talking about like, how do you address folks in this day and age? That's apparently how the actual citizen addressed it. The headline was Indians take paper hostage in that article. They say that a hundred law enforcement officers immediately responded to the hostage crisis.
00:28:21
Speaker
I don't know if I agree with that number. That sounds like a lot for all of Robeson County. It could That sounds like a lot for like, that part of North carolina Carolina. I mean, it really does. But I mean, it is possible because just like I imagined, it would be a big deal.
00:28:40
Speaker
I mean, I could definitely see like if Pembroke and Lumberton, their police forces show up immediately and they call in everybody, the sheriff shows up and calls in everybody, including his reserve deputies. I could see 60 people standing out there. Whatever it is, they decide the number is around 100 law enforcement officials. And that is fascinating to me.
00:28:59
Speaker
But what's so interesting about this one that's so different than all of the other hostage takings we talked about is the place that would normally be covering the hostage taking would be the Robesone. Right, which I think was like the strategic point, right? Right.
00:29:14
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of brilliant. It's it's definitely, it's a bold move. walking that line, right? Between genius and insanity. but Yeah, I think that it is.
00:29:27
Speaker
So police like essentially evacuate about two blocks around this office building in downtown Lumberton, North Carolina. And what actually happens next is fascinating to me.
00:29:41
Speaker
Everyone you can think of responding to and wanting to assist with a hostage situation starts calling the Robesonians. And Eddie Hatcher, Timothy Jacobs, and all the trapped staff start answering the phones.
00:29:55
Speaker
So you have state, national, international, news organizations. I'm sure that representatives are calling. They're answering the phones, but they're also giving them a rundown of what's unfolding.
00:30:07
Speaker
According to one interview that pops up, which is ah Timothy Jacobs talking directly to a couple different people, the source on this is it's a book that's published like out of an academic press in 2018 by Melinda Lowry called The Lumbee Indians and American Struggle. and A lot of today's material comes from this book, just so you guys are aware of that. a Good book. Totally recommend it. It's a small book. You can find it online, and you can find a PDF of it online, but I recommend purchasing it.
00:30:38
Speaker
The quote that is in this book is that Timothy Jacobs tells a journalist, the Indian people are tired of the fact that so many people are getting killed, and the lawmen are just covering it up.
00:30:49
Speaker
According to Eddie Hatcher, he suggests that the police should not get involved, saying, it's not up to me whether these people get killed or not. Their lives, meaning the hostages that have been taken to the Robesonia, the staff,
00:31:02
Speaker
is in the hands of law enforcement. So he's saying their lives rest in the hands of the people outside coordinating office area. So while this is going on the office of U.S. Rep Charlie Rose, they don't know what's happening right then.
00:31:18
Speaker
They call into the Robesonian because they want to talk about a news story, a different news story. So the journalist who answers the phone tells the congressional office, hey, there's hostage takers here. Oh, and by the way, they want to talk to you.
00:31:34
Speaker
So Rose's office calls the Lumberton Police Department. They consult. And Charlie Rose ends up calling and speaking with Eddie Hatcher. And Eddie Hatcher asks Charlie Rose to open a federal investigation.
00:31:48
Speaker
into local corruption. They also demand to speak to James Martin. So James Martin at this time is he's the 70th governor of North Carolina. He's been governor since 1985. He will remain governor until 1993.
00:32:06
Speaker
He does not want to speak to them because he doesn't want to set a precedent where people can take violent action and get political attention. Right, which is kind of a catch twenty two Well, it is, but it's also, i mean, if I were on the hostage side of it, I wouldn't like it, but it's really the right thing to do because you really don't want to give hostage takers what they want like that because it encourage it encourages hostage taking.
00:32:33
Speaker
Yeah, I do think, i don't agree with what the hostage takers did here, but I do agree with what they wanted, which was an investigation into what's happening. Correct, and I have more to say after we talk about the rest of the narrative here about that yeah okay so instead of talking to them like the governor his office arranges for the chief of staff like basically negotiating on the governor's office um that's kind of what uh chief of staffs do by the way like in case you ever hear that there a lot of times they're kind of in charge right and it completely undermines exactly what the governor just said he couldn't do but whatever
00:33:18
Speaker
Right. So it's a guy named Phil Kirk. Phil Kirk gets on with the State Highway Patrol Office, the top of the chain of command in Raleigh, North Carolina, which, you know, he would have access to them directly as the governor's chief of staff.
00:33:32
Speaker
And... James Martin, he has to sort of come on board to direct what the state resources towards this takeover are going to be and to respond to the situation at large. Because now that the governor knows that it's going on because of Charlie Rose, like you're going to end up having the SBI coming in and you're going to have the highway patrol coming in. And when that happens, I definitely believe there's 100 cops showing up. Because it's a newspaper and because it's in this town.
00:34:01
Speaker
So there's four or five phone calls that go back and forth. Phil Kirk and the hostage takers agree that the hostage takers have four demands. They want the death of the man that I mentioned earlier, which he dies in custody, Billy McKellar.
00:34:17
Speaker
They want that investigated. They want it investigated by an outside party. They want the potential corruption in the sheriff's department to be investigated. They want John Hunt to be removed from the sheriff's department's custody. So John Hunt is the guy with the map, and they want a surrender to happen. But they want the surrender not to happen to state or local authorities.
00:34:40
Speaker
They want the FBI to come get involved. And they will surrender. So Timothy Jacobs and Eddie Hatcher will surrender, but only directly to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. So this ends up lasting 10 hours.
00:34:53
Speaker
About halfway through the situation, one of the executive editors for the newspaper, the Robesonium, his name is George Horn. He starts taking photos. Hatcher and Jacobs, the hostage takers, they begin to release hostages as the standoff progresses. And it's going to get down to seven people being left in the building. They basically negotiate with the immediate officials. So not the phone calls they're having that are the big important things, but like with the people right outside. They negotiate for them to get food and cigarettes for themselves and the hostages.
00:35:28
Speaker
So in preparation for their surrender, the Lumberton police chief, he drives around the office block, like the block immediately surrounding this office building.
00:35:41
Speaker
And he does it three times. He's got a bullhorn and he announces that the governor has ordered all law enforcement to stand down and hold their fire.
00:35:52
Speaker
So There's some concern that Eddie Hatcher and Timothy Jacobs are still going to be shot. So George Horn, the guy who's taking the pictures, he's listened to what they have to say. And he's a smart newspaper guy.
00:36:08
Speaker
He decides he is going to go out of the building with them and act rightfully. as a human shield. As everybody goes out and they're told to turn around and back up towards the police, but it's clear that like it's now being documented and it's out in the open. And I don't know how this all comes about like name-wise, but apparently Eddie Hatcher, he turns to George Horn, and I guess, I don't know much about George, I guess he has maybe another name, but he says, Bob, please don't do us too bad in the paper.
00:36:42
Speaker
I don't know why he calls him Bob. I saw it and I was like, I was trying to like figure out what they meant there. um the sort The source for that, like in case like people want to read about those, it's actually a PhD thesis that's pretty cool. It's done by a woman named Lorena Heron in 2016. It's called The Narrative Paths of Native American Resistance.
00:37:04
Speaker
And it's got a long subtitle, but it ends in, like, the paper ends around this time. And it is very interesting to me that that quote is in there for Eddie Hatcher.
00:37:17
Speaker
So the hostage situation is over at this point. And in theory, there's going to be investigations that are going to open up. But what really happens is the news reports.
Investigations and Legal Fallout
00:37:29
Speaker
This floods Lumberton, North Carolina. There are at least 200 journalists that come into the local area. There are 50 interviews in the next 24 hours of just the people in the Robesonian staff, whether they were there or not that day. Now, the Robesonian was not able to put out a paper for February first of 1988.
00:37:51
Speaker
So they put out an afternoon Tuesday edition that covers the events of what just happened to them. And aside from the normal 15,000, they bump it up. And some reports say that they put out 20,000 copies that day. Some reports say that they ah put out 18,000. But they pretty much immediately sell out.
00:38:12
Speaker
So... The relationship between the Robesonian and the Carolina Indian voice, they start to talk, like the papers start to talk about potentially putting aside their their differences like politically and to agree that they should do something for Eddie Hatcher and Timothy Janko. It does end up ending a little later on where ah George hor Horn, the who becomes the i think he's the full executive editor at one point in here, he can't stand a woman named Connie Brayboy, who is the editor over at the Carolina Indian Voice. like When she starts campaigning to raise money for Eddie Hatcher and Timothy Jacob, he feels like she's violating professional rules of journalism.
00:38:57
Speaker
People locally are divided. Some people think that it was a necessary act to get you know this out there. Others think that it was dangerous and stupid and unproductive. Whatever it does, the U.S. Department of Justice ends up sending people down to at least pretend to be listening to what's happening. Now, to comply with the demands that were met, which is so weird to me that they do this, Governor Martin is going to put together a three-man task force to investigate what's going on.
00:39:23
Speaker
That task force is going to be made up of General Counsel Jim Trotter and the Secretary of Crime Control and Public Safety Joe Dean.
00:39:33
Speaker
He also puts Phil Kirk on there, who's his chief of staff. Now, they lodge the corruption allegations that were presented by the hostage takers against the Robeson County Sheriff's Office. Sheriff Stone says, no, it's not real.
00:39:47
Speaker
We run a clean department. He welcomed the state probe as an opportunity for them to vindicate themselves. Eddie Hatcher and Timothy Jacobs, they meet once with this task force on February the 8th, and then they refuse to meet with them again because the officials refuse to grant them immunity from prosecution for the siege.
00:40:04
Speaker
According to Phil Kirk, nothing... of note was discussed I think the exact quote in the paper was he said nothing substantive was discussed. ah John Hunt refused to be transferred to a different jail. At Eddie Hatcher's request, the task force ended up meeting with John Hunt on February the 9th.
00:40:23
Speaker
They get some information, and that information is supposedly forwarded on to a U.S. attorney. The task force ultimately finds no evidence of wrongdoing in the Sheriff's Department. Johnson Britt, who is going to be eventually elected the Robeson County District Attorney, he said, i don't want to call the inquiry a joke. I just don't think it was very thorough.
00:40:47
Speaker
Also, at Governor Martin's request, the task force ended up investigating the death of Mr. McKellar in the Robeson County Jail. The state secretary of human resources, David ah Flaherty, state health director Ron Levine, and John Butch, is a well-known North Carolina medical examiner, they all go down to ah conduct interviews and compile report.
00:41:09
Speaker
But they were very critical of the county jailer's response to what was happening with Mr. McKellar's ah medical condition, meaning his asthma attack. But ultimately, they find that no laws were violated. On February 18th, the North Carolina Commission of Indian Affairs releases a report on Robeson County's criminal justice system.
00:41:29
Speaker
The report was initially going to be about the 1986 shooting of Cummings, which we started Our conversation about this was that the hostage crisis had sparked public public interest in the report and they present it in Pembroke. And when they present 500 local residents show up. The report concluded that Indians were arrested and incarcerated at more frequent rates than white people.
00:41:54
Speaker
It stated that many interviewees said that they lacked trust in county and local law enforcement. There was a murder in March of an Indian judicial candidate named Julian Pierce.
00:42:06
Speaker
And that further caused a pretty massive racial divide in this area. So Eddie Hatcher and Timothy Jacobs, they each end up being charged with federal crimes.
00:42:18
Speaker
So the federal crimes are conspiring to take hostages, taking hostages, using firearms in a crime of violence, which is the taking of hostages, two counts of making an illegal firearm for the two sold-off shotguns, possession of the illegal firearm, which is, again, the sold-off shotgun, and spreading false information about having explosives on them.
00:42:36
Speaker
They are the first two people that are ever charged under the 1984 Act to Combat International Terrorism, They end up with William Kunstler and Ron Kuby as defense attorneys. One of the hostages, Mike Mangiamelli, he ends up, like even though he is part of this, he ends up covering the federal proceedings.
00:42:58
Speaker
So the reason he ends up there is because he did not have a particularly favorable view of what Eddie Hatcher and Timothy Jacobs did. After the initial bond hearing,
00:43:10
Speaker
He tells the presiding judge that if he's giving bond to Eddie Hatcher, he would like a pistol permit. So because he says this in open court, this is a violation of federal procedure, by the way, um it allows the defense attorneys to reopen the bond hearing. So at that point, the Robesonian realized they probably needed to kick Mike off this case and put somebody new.
00:43:37
Speaker
Mike's actually going to end up resigning and going over to The Voice. He was upset that the press was reporting on unfounded rumors and gossip on the part of opponents of the judicial system and that he could no longer be objective.
00:43:50
Speaker
The truth is, Mike like just was too blind to the corruption that was being put out there. but Because even if only 50% of what Eddie and Timothy are worried about is true, it was definitely happening at the time. It just would take years to come out. well He was also a hostage.
00:44:07
Speaker
Yes. okay and to you are ah thinking He yes. He should not have been objective if he wanted to. It's a conflict of interest, like even for the best journalist to try and report on like literally something you were the victim of.
00:44:22
Speaker
if Right. And so it's crazy that he, I mean, I don't know that, I don't think his allegations like that, you know, there were these rumors and speculation, they seem like they might've been on point and it's not personal against him. He really shouldn't have, he should have given it to somebody who wasn't involved. Right.
00:44:42
Speaker
Oh, I'm sure he like he wanted the story, wanted the clout that came with it, and and he thought he could do it. He just realized like he was the wrong dude. It wasn't what he thought he was. And that is very upsetting to people when they finally have that moment they discover they are not who they think they are.
00:44:58
Speaker
he definitely had that happen. So at this point time, the Robesonian sort of splits, but people start to leave. The Carolina ah Indian Voice, they get 4,000 signatures on a petition that calls for them to be granted bond. They're finally granted bail in July to await trial. The The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit gets involved because of the states and U.S. attorneys' motions. They order the two to return to prison while it reconsiders their bond on August the 30th. Timothy Jacobs surrenders himself to U.S. Marshals the following day. Eddie Hatcher actually went into Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and he asked a bookstore owner there, of this little bookstore in Carrboro, actually, called the Internationalist Books and Community Center,
00:45:46
Speaker
The guy who owns it is Bob Sheldon, and he asked him for help. So Bob Sheldon arranges for friends to drive Eddie Hatcher out of state. And so because he doesn't surrender and the court has ordered him to appear and turn himself in, the U.S. Marshal Service put out a warrant. You can still find ah these wanted posters for Eddie Hatcher today.
00:46:07
Speaker
He gets all the way to New York City. He calls his lawyers when he gets there, and they're like, dude, what are you doing? Get back here. So he ends up flying back to North Carolina and surrendering to the marshals.
00:46:19
Speaker
Their trial begins September 26th.
Trial and Community Reaction
00:46:22
Speaker
Judge Terrence Boyle ah refuses to allow one of the attorneys, Cunstler, to attend because he's on another case during this time period. Eddie Hatcher refused to work with the other two attorneys, and he basically abstains from participating in his own defense.
00:46:38
Speaker
The prosecution calls in all the people that had this hostage-taking experience from the Robesonian, all the staff members come in the defense begins its argument, and the testimony is suddenly limited to the events of February the 1st.
00:46:52
Speaker
He does give them the days immediately preceding because some testimonies come in about, like, when the plan was put together, but he prevents them from calling dozens of witnesses who were going to talk about other things and kind of the why of what Hatcher and Jacobs did as opposed to the what and how what Eddie Hatcher and Timothy Jacobs did.
00:47:13
Speaker
He dismisses one of the hostage taking charges. He dismisses one of the firearms violations. The trial kind of goes on, and the Carolina Indian Voice reports weekly updates, which seem favorable to Hatcher and Jacobs.
00:47:26
Speaker
The Robesonian instead elected to print wire reports on the proceedings, meaning they're printing stories that are going out for the AP, so it's popping up all over the country.
00:47:37
Speaker
And it's more factual than of and then subjective rape. Right. Because his lawyer wasn't there, Eddie Hatcher ends up delivering his own closing argument. He maintains that the takeover was necessary because his life was in danger. Right, which obviously, except for what ends up happening...
00:47:55
Speaker
The judge, like, he doesn't have representation, right? Right. And so that would be a blatant violation of a defendant's constitutional right to counsel, but it doesn't end up mattering. So much of this is...
00:48:10
Speaker
It's insanity. But October 14th, the jury hearing all of this, they find Eddie Hatcher and Timothy Jacobs not guilty on all the charges.
00:48:21
Speaker
And everybody gets mad. So the acquittal literally surprises the entire staff of the Robesonian. Horn writes an editorial that the verdict thoroughly violated the hostages' rights, and he's wrong.
00:48:37
Speaker
And the you can read it online. Newspapers.com has it. The PhD dissertation that I mentioned earlier has it. He's just wrong. He has no idea what he's talking about because this is exactly how the federal government system is supposed to work in relation to things like this.
00:48:54
Speaker
Now, Robeson County District Attorney's Office does not take that news well. On his last day in office as District Attorney, I mentioned him early on because it's important for me to people to know that Joe Freeman Britt is the one doing this because he has his own problems later on.
00:49:15
Speaker
He decides his last day of office is going to be spent convincing Robeson County Grand Jury. So December 6, 1988, he
00:49:24
Speaker
They indict Eddie Hatcher and Timothy Jacobs on 14 charges each of second-degree kidnapping. At this point in time, Timothy Jacobs says, nope, not doing that again. He flees, and he goes up to the Onondaga Reservation in New York.
00:49:42
Speaker
So this is in, I guess it would be just south of Syracuse, very small area. It's actually Onondaga County, so... Eventually, he's going to be identified by local police during a traffic stop, and he's going to get a governor's warrant on him um going both ways, so they end up extraditing him. He initially contests the extradition, but he ends up returning to North Carolina during that process, and he surrenders to authorities. He pleads guilty, and he gets six years in prison. Eddie Hatcher fled all the way across the country to San Francisco.
00:50:18
Speaker
When he gets to San Francisco, he does one of the weirdest things I've ever seen. He actually goes to the Soviet Union's consulate and he files an application for political asylum.
00:50:34
Speaker
They're like, no, we don't want you either. And he is shortly thereafter arrested and he is sentenced, he's the extra guy back to North Carolina. He is going to plead guilty to all the state counts of kidnapping and be sentenced to 18 years imprisonment.
00:50:50
Speaker
So Jacob serves 14 months and he gets released. He goes back to Robeson County and becomes a known activist for Tuscarora related causes.
00:51:01
Speaker
Now, Eddie Hatch remains in prison, but the media will not let Eddie Hatcher go. They interview him constantly. In February of 1994, Timothy Jacobs ends up denouncing Eddie Hatcher and says, that's not the same guy from 1988.
00:51:18
Speaker
And he even criticizes some of the claims that Eddie Hatcher is making about local...
Continued Activism and Community Dynamics
00:51:23
Speaker
um Indian service organizations and groups. He says that Eddie Hatcher is exaggerating what he's saying to get ah media attention.
00:51:33
Speaker
He also asserts that Eddie Hatcher's words are making things worse. They are discouraging regional economic development and investment. They are hurting the race relations in a county that already has hurt race relations, and they're making it harder for him, Timothy Jacobs, personally, to find any kind of employment.
00:51:54
Speaker
So Eddie Hatcher, while in prison, contracts HIV and then AIDS. So he ends up being paroled in May of 1995.
00:52:07
Speaker
But it doesn't end In 1999, he is arrested for shooting into a home and killing a man. The Robesonian had denounced him at some point as an ego-driven publicity hound,
00:52:24
Speaker
But political activists, particularly those involved with Lumbia and Tuscarora activities across the state, they thought that like he was an opportunity. He was someone worth campaigning for and using as sort of the spearhead of multiple campaigns because they felt like he was a victim of political repression.
00:52:44
Speaker
He ends up being convicted of murder in 2001. He gets put back in prison and then he dies in prison in 2009.
00:52:54
Speaker
I think that's a good synopsis of all this. i I didn't mention the whole, um there's a couple other things that come out of the story that like, I'm going to save those for a later today. But like one of them is that like, this is the area, like when people hear about the murder of James Jordan Sr., who is the father of Michael Jordan.
00:53:13
Speaker
This is the area. This is where that was happening. His body's found in South Carolina, but this is the area where he was allegedly murdered. Right. And so, you know, this is an interesting ah case, hostage-taking case.
00:53:28
Speaker
And there's a lot that is really bass-ackwards, in my opinion. Now, Hatcher, the normal approach to this would be to, as somebody who is wanting to take on an activism role...
00:53:52
Speaker
Hatcher and Jacobs would cultivate, nourish, and develop relationships with local media. that would in turn find what they had to say credible, do the normal journalism thing, and print the stories, right?
00:54:10
Speaker
Yeah. Okay, well, they just skip all that, right? They do, yeah. Okay, and, you know, I don't know that they're coming from a good place. One of the scariest things about state action is sort of illustrated here, and that is in the young man who died while in police custody from an apparent asthma attack. Billy McKellar. That's one of the things. Now, we don't get into anything about like why he was in police custody or whatever in this particular episode about the hostage taking. But that was one of the motivating factors, right? If Billy McKellar wasn't in state custody, would he have died? would Could he have been of his own free will as opposed to waiting for some corrections officers or whatever to get him help?
00:55:01
Speaker
You know, would he have survived the asthma attack? Was it really an asthma attack? A young man, actually, I don't know how old he was, but he was young, right? yes A young man dying from an asthma attack in the 80s is a little bit ridiculous. There probably were ethical violations. I don't know. They say that there were no legal violations, but it's one of those things that is always hanging when you think about state action, right? I don't know how many people can actually...
00:55:33
Speaker
appreciate how little control you have over your own autonomy when you are in the hands of the state, correct you can literally be dying and they do nothing. And that's wrong, right? And we don't know what happened here, but the idea that this young man died from an asthma attack, I think that people are rightly pissed off about it because you shouldn't die from an asthma attack. If there was something more sinister, nobody comes out and directly says it, but the treatment of Most people who are under the thumb of the state is bad, at least from, and I'm not saying it from a point of view where they're
Analyzing Systemic Issues and Community Response
00:56:12
Speaker
beating people. Just in this case, he's having an an asthma attack and instead of, you know, getting an inhaler or a nebulizer whatever and recovering, he like literally chokes to death on his asthma attack.
00:56:23
Speaker
Right. Right. And so that's what I mean when I say like, that's awful. It's more of non-action than like overt bad action against him. Right.
00:56:33
Speaker
Right. And so i get that and it's wrong, but it's ironic that couple of parts of this are ironic to me. One is that having taken the newspaper hostage, they got sort of the reaction they wanted, right? Right.
00:56:53
Speaker
Right. They wanted the exposure. However, they then say that they want immunity for doing it. And then they don't talk. Now, I don't know how much of that was like their legal team, but that was dumb.
00:57:05
Speaker
They were already going to jail, which ultimately they end up going to jail. But to do this like defying act. and then not talk.
00:57:16
Speaker
Now granted, they end up being found not guilty, which I'm just going to kind of, this is my opinion. Them being found not guilty of something they clearly did is just as bad as any corruption that is occurring that they're trying to fight against.
00:57:34
Speaker
And so we go full circle here because we don't know the level of corruption that was happening. and It accomplished absolutely nothing except it probably ended the career of several Robesonian journalists, right? Because they were probably like, it's not worth it to do that.
00:57:54
Speaker
But in 2023, journalist named Sarah Najam, she said... What people think about that day depends on who you ask.
00:58:06
Speaker
Then and now, Robeson ranks among the poorest and most violent counties in the state. Did it shed a light on corruption and racism? Undoubtedly.
00:58:17
Speaker
Was it an unnecessary display of force? Probably that too. Now, I'm not so sure. nobody got hurt, right? Right.
00:58:30
Speaker
Not in the... The hostage taking, right. yeah Okay, so nobody got hurt. I don't know how much difference the guns versus the not guns would have made. Maybe it would have been huge. It seems like the point of no return was locking the doors, right? Yes. haven't read like the transcripts of the trial or anything like that, but I don't know if they pointed their guns at people are what. So I don't know that it was not an unnecessary display of force because in the 80s, I mean, there's a lot of people in North Carolina have shotguns, maybe not sold off one. But I don't know that that's necessarily accurate. They they shouldn't have done what they did.
00:59:14
Speaker
But this was sort of like a poor man's way of trying and to make a point when they feel like they weren't being heard. What I don't understand is why they went to the chief of police in Pembroke or whatever, instead of going to the SBI. Right. Yeah.
00:59:34
Speaker
Like, why did they do certain things? Another thing is we have no idea if any of that stuff was accurate. Like,
00:59:45
Speaker
If you think about Billy McKellar dying from an asthma attack, why did he die? Was it because they didn't like young Black people in custody? Was it because the corrections officers hadn't been trained in what to do in that situation? What was...
01:00:02
Speaker
the driving force there. Because if it's a lack of training and it's incompetence overall, that's not a racial thing. That's a humanitarian thing where they need to train people better. And so we just never know what was driving that. But also...
01:00:19
Speaker
We went over the statistics of the population, and it's not surprising that in this county, there's going to be more non-white arrest because the white population is the smallest percentage in the county. And I'm not sure how that is rectified in the thinking that is laid out there.
01:00:47
Speaker
Well, I don't know how it correlates. I don't know either. He began by saying in November 1st, 1986, Kevin Stone, who was a sheriff's deputy and the son of the sheriff. Yeah. you heard so Yeah. The sheriff Hubert Stone. He shot and killed Jimmy Earl Cummings. Right. And he was an unarmed Lumby man. And I immediately thought of the different cases I've seen over the years since social media has become a thing where a frightened cop was.
01:01:15
Speaker
has a trigger happy moment that kills somebody during a routine traffic stop. It's happened. We've seen it. And it's because of the personality of the person and being afraid. The cop kills. So it's not acceptable. It's just, it's not necessarily from a place of like racial hatred. It's from ignorance and from just not really being up to par on the training for the job. And I don't know. I don't know what happened there. And I don't even know that that even is investigated further.
01:01:45
Speaker
But you think that you're raising the issue to a higher power, but all of these people are just humans. And it's highly unlikely that you're going to be able to get anything solved this way.
01:02:00
Speaker
The bullying that takes place, it does nothing to counteract the bullying that they're accusing law enforcement of. putting out there, I guess, is a way to put it. And so it's just, it's very, very misdirected. And it is fortunate nobody died during the hostage taking. I don't think that that was ever even, i don't think they were ever going to hurt anybody.
01:02:25
Speaker
Now, being found not guilty in federal court and then having it turned around and they go to state trial and they go to prison, right? That, to me, it actually kind of illustrates the initial point, does it not? There's some corruption happening here.
01:02:42
Speaker
Well, so i don't i don't i got really concerned with ah Billy and all of this, by the way, and I didn't get... to the point of like a Dirty Badges type episode because that's going to come later. and it's weirdly It's kind of a cause of this hostage taking that it happens, but it's not the people that you think it is.
01:03:00
Speaker
I will say this. I looked him up. so You asked about Billy McKellar. Billy McKellar was born in 1961.
01:03:09
Speaker
Because of his birthday, he would have been 26 turning 27. He would have turned 27 on March 28, 1988. So he's 26 when it happened to him. Here's what I found interesting about that. He has a crappy criminal record, but it's nonsense. Like, his criminal record goes back about five years, and it's largely speeding, ah worthless checks, a couple of DUIs.
01:03:33
Speaker
But everything through 1987... is a misdemeanor or an infraction. So he gets some pretty harsh punishments for these misdemeanors and infractions.
01:03:45
Speaker
That means, since everyone is labeled as Robeson County, he would have been regular. Make sense? Yeah. He doesn't get his felony until January of 1987, so about a year before all of this is happening.
01:04:04
Speaker
He gets a felony for having received a stolen vehicle, which means someone gave him a car that they did not own. So he gets a felony for that. He pleads guilty to 8th 1987.
01:04:20
Speaker
He is sentenced to a maximum term of two years with the idea being he would be paroled in May or June of 1988. Why he is in the Robeson County Jail, I do not know.
01:04:34
Speaker
He should not have been there, but they're considered a correction center at this time. And he's there. He's doing his time. he has just become a felon, and he finally has this asthma attack. My guess on how this happens that he dies is the guards think that he's faking i guess that could have underlying hatred type motives did it make a difference that he was black no i don't think of that i don't think it it's just my opinion i don't think it's racist unless you like understand something i don't and i'm not saying you but if if i were to be brought something where people like explained it to me
01:05:16
Speaker
I might look at it and and change my opinion on whether or not it's racist. Well, my guess is that it wouldn't have mattered if Billy was black or our Lumbee Tuscarora or whatever. I think that they would have treated them all the same.
01:05:35
Speaker
Well, I just wanted to say that I think that the problem here was you have criminals with badges, taking care of criminals who really are just kind of doing petty shit.
01:05:48
Speaker
And in my mind, the criminals with the badges are the worst ones. And we're not going to find that out in Roveson County until ah about 2005. And then we're going to find out that like all of this shit was true
Reflections and Future Implications
01:06:01
Speaker
the whole time. I would say that the county doesn't have, so when I say the county, I mean like the sheriff and the police chiefs and the powers that be, to so to speak. They don't realize the disservice they're doing to their community by promoting this cycle of
01:06:22
Speaker
It's a cycle of abuse and a cycle of poverty. And you're going to go to jail for what now? That's what it seems like to me. It doesn't sound like Billy McKellar had violent ah crimes charged against him. All of it was stolen property ed and speeding or something like that. he He didn't have any violent crimes that he had committed.
01:06:42
Speaker
No, it's mostly driving offenses and worthless checks. Okay, and so that is literally what people do when they are trying to survive. Typically, you don't write worthless checks for fun. You're literally trying to pay your bills and you can't. That is a cycle that I don't see why it hasn't been broken. Now, I do i don't know if it's racial, but I do know it can be. he's If you're writing bad checks and you're lumped in with murderers, that's not how the justice system is supposed to be working, right?
01:07:18
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. Those are two completely different things. And throughout history, all the different things that we look at. We happen to be looking at hostage situations and Billy McKellar's death in custody. It just happens to be one of the contributing factors that causes this hostage situation. Right.
01:07:37
Speaker
But correct if you look into cases sort of from an angle, I guess, is how I would say we're looking at. especially Billy mc McKellar's part of this, there was no reason for his death to happen. He was not, i mean, he was a criminal. He committed crimes, but he did things that are the result of abject poverty for generations, I think. just me personally, i think that the drug problem stems from the poverty in the community. And I think that typically when there's nothing else to do, a lot of times it is young black men, but they don't have to be black. It could just be young men trying to find a way to make it in the world. They end up on the receiving end of the stolen property and you know selling stolen property and And that is how they're trying to survive. It's not a hobby.
01:08:33
Speaker
And yeah I fought the community for some of that because drugs in the community are never going to be the way to go. And shame on them if that's what they were doing. You said that it came out later.
01:08:45
Speaker
i don't know. I haven't looked into that, but if that is, if the police, if the sheriff's department was on the take and that's what they were doing, shame on them. But otherwise, nothing was accomplished here at all. Like, it was just a big, bumbled mess. I do think it did severely traumatize the people who were taken hostage because... They were taken hostage. Yeah.
01:09:11
Speaker
Yeah, it was an unexpected thing. And, you know, it was the journalist who said, if he's going to get bond, i want a pistol permit. That kind of summed up the situation. Because now, where they were la la la living their lives... Now it's a moment in time that never, like it's before and after, before I was taken hostage, after I was taken hostage. Because even though it ended up ironing itself out, that is a traumatic thing to experience.
01:09:42
Speaker
Yeah, it is It is. And I will say, i don't think Verbison County has fixed itself. I think that some of the trash has been taken out, but not all of it. This is one of the less dark, in some ways, hostage takings. But underneath it, the local sort of tenor of everything, i think it's kind of darker than some of the other stuff we covered.
01:10:03
Speaker
You know what? I feel like a lot of people should leave. So here's what will end up happening in that area. and It hasn't happened yet, but it will. Eventually, someone will see the need for something along that corridor and in that location, and they will build a big, nice, new, shiny thing that needs engineers and needs computer programmers, and some developer will start getting a hold of a lot of the cheap land in that area, and they will essentially gentrify the area.
01:10:34
Speaker
So that's good and bad. It's good because like the area itself will turn. It's bad because the populace of that area will continue to suffer. They'll just be suffering on the fringes of that. um It's very difficult to break a cycle like that.
01:10:53
Speaker
And it it happens in industrial towns from time to time. But this is a unique like space that i think I think it would be hard to get the drug trafficking out of this area because of the location.
01:11:04
Speaker
Well, but it that leads me to believe there is law enforcement corruption because they could get it out of the area unless you law enforcement's on the table.
01:11:16
Speaker
Yeah, so this area, and this will be the last thing I have to say about this today because I'm going to come back around to this. This area has like proximity to some military bases, and those military bases over the years have had major corruption issues related back to here.
01:11:34
Speaker
Right. It's just that the area proximity wise is the perfect storm for just disastrous consequences for the community that the people that are in charge or the powers that be, they're not thinking it all the way through because it's not, I mean, it is directly affecting them, but not in the worst way, like some of the citizens, right? Right. Yeah.
01:11:55
Speaker
So the next round of like district attorney, the movement, there's still Brits, by the way, which is so weird to me when like you and your children are all the district attorneys for 50 years. I don't understand that. Well, not to mention it's not working.
01:12:09
Speaker
Right. So the next round that comes in in the 90s, he's ah there for a long time. He does change things, but I am not going to comment positively or negatively on the level of corruption in the district attorney's office.
01:12:30
Speaker
But what I am going to say is that something does shift. It takes it about 15 years from the timing of the siege for something to shift.
01:12:44
Speaker
But when it shifts, I got the distinct impression that a couple of people in some level of power, in whatever agency or department you would like to assign them in your head, whatever office they might hold in this county, had found themselves in a position where they had done the wrong thing to the wrong people and ended up very much like Eddie Hatcher. But instead of taking the Robesonian...
01:13:08
Speaker
and sieging something locally and taking hostages, they decided that the best thing they could do was to give a shit ton of information about the local drug problem to other authorities.
01:13:23
Speaker
And that's going to change some things. But ultimately, I think it was kind of a situation where And again, this is speculation. Terrible way to end the episode, but whatever. People can go down the rabbit hole here. There's a lot to go down.
01:13:37
Speaker
um I think it was almost like a drug trafficking territory situation, like two opposing factions caught and and someone's caught in the middle. And usually they get their bribe from this side, but this side is offered a bigger bribe. and when the bigger bribe didn't work, they offered a threat and the threat seemed legit.
01:13:57
Speaker
So you have to do something. So you like turn in some of the people. And like when you do that, you realize that you're also turning in some of the law enforcement. so Right. Or it could have been somebody actually like taking a stance that they were unwilling to back down from. it could it could be that. I think it's probably... i don't know what combination of it. yeah There's some massive court documents that we'll get into at some point in the future, probably on a Dirty Badges show. Because... Ironically, all of this was done under the header of the name Operation Tarnished Badge.
01:14:34
Speaker
Oh, wow. Yeah. So that um that is something massive that happens. And honestly, the press on that last year, I think it, from what I can tell, it's something that sort of kicks in 2002, 2003 is when the problem starts and they start, and then there's this massive report and the district attorney gets involved. And then some of the other law enforcement gets involved. It's a new sheriff by then.
01:14:58
Speaker
So it's not the same sheriff, but like what ends up being uncovered, like it literally rolls for about 10 or 11 years. and there is, there's some pivotal stuff that happens there that like, you look at it and you go, how are these people cops?
01:15:16
Speaker
And it's a lot of them. It's like 40 people. Yeah, well, bad cops train bad cops, typically. Yeah, yeah. So I don't have anything else on the on this hostage taking, do you?
01:15:28
Speaker
yeah I find this one to be like a really fascinating one. um It's kind of strange to do all of this during the holiday time. So I know people are like about to go have dinner with family and stuff. But but I thought this would still be a good It is. It's a multi-layer type situation. It's very interesting. And it was it is actually one of the better ah endings to a hostage situation because nobody died during the actual hostage taking.
01:15:54
Speaker
Yeah.
01:15:58
Speaker
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01:16:10
Speaker
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01:18:14
Speaker
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01:18:32
Speaker
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