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