I want to give a quick warning before we get started.

This episode contains graphic descriptions of violence.

Listener discretion is advised.

The whole neighborhood was definitely quiet and dark.

This part of our story takes place in the late eighties in a sleepy bedroom community in the Midwest.

It was kind of eerie because typically in that neighborhood there's multiple street lights, people's lights on under front porches and so on.

There was none of that.

Steve Smith was a captain of the local police department, and that night around two am, he was awoken by a call from the communications center.

Something unusual had happened out on a subdivision and he needed to get out there quick.

He was met by now retired Sergeant Rusty James.

It was really eerie because it knocked the street lights and everything out in the air you and everywhere you walked it crunched, and there was a strong smell of the dynamite and burnt flesh in the air.

Rusty and his partner Sarah Vogelsberg had been the first who arrived that night.

As I pulled up, uh there was still smoke in the air, and a neighbor came over and told me that that he had found where it occurred.

It was at the swimming pool for a residential area there.

In the early morning hours, someone had parked their car in the lot next to the swimming pool and proceeded to blow themselves up.

He said, so, Officer, I think that's a head laying over on the sidewalk over there, but I'm not going to check.

I said, no, just going back, the crime scene was bizarre and gruesome.

I mean, it's hard enough to hear about something like this, let alone experience it.

We were trying to figure out where this young man was because we knew where his head was, but there wasn't anything else, and so we started looking around fly slights, and there was one leg from the knee down in a tree.

We probably didn't locate more than about forty maybe fifty pounds of identifiable body of hearts because they were spread out throughout the neighborhood and the woods close by.

It was pretty horrific.

Essentially, from his knees to his neck, he was just gone.

When I first started reporting the story five years ago, there really wasn't a lot of information about the book hit Man, which just led to a lot of questions, most of all, why would this author, a woman who claims she never owned a gun, write a how to guide on killing people and getting away with it.

I figured there had to be a story behind this book of nonfiction.

It turns out there is, and it's stranger than fiction.

This is the story of who I believe to be the real Rex Ferrell, not the woman who apparently wrote the book, but the man who may have inspired it or been inspired by it, a man who left an extraordinary amount of wreckage in his wake, like an explosion on a quiet night in a small Midwestern town.

From my Heart Radio and Hit Home Media, I'm Jasmine Morris and MS is hit Map.

Just the whole circumstance was one of those things that bothered me for some time.

And now you know, I've gotten past that.

But it involved psychologists and many trips to them to get past that.

Where I where I would even answer a call in that area, I wouldn't even drive there.

When I first reached out to Stephen Rusty, they were both pretty surprised.

It been twenty five years since this explosion happened.

But as soon as I called it kind of all came flooding back in and I remember almost like it had just occurred within you know, the last day or two.

First responders see a lot of trauma, But when talking to these guys, especially Rusty, I mean, this was on a whole other level.

I asked him if he was sure he even wanted to go through with the interview.

You have to understand that incident was a little traumatic on me.

This was the days before you got post traumatic stress assistance or anything.

And with me and Sarah and we showed weakness over this, at which we did, I don't consider weakness, but everybod what else did really just imagine that day.

It's a tight knit community.

So when officers arrived, they recognized the car involved immediately they knew who the victim was, a sixteen year old named Gregory.

His car the hood was blown off of it, and as we walked around the area we ended up finding some of his dismembered body parts.

In the front seat of his car was boom box with the cassette tape in it that Gregory would have been listening to.

He was not a bad kid, but he was just somebody that we had our eyes on.

We had a couple of runnings with him, and but again not a bad kid, but he was very familiar to us, out and about in the community at odd hours for somebody his age.

Steve and I, you know, we had had hard heart talks with Greg, trying to get him straightened up, you know, and we tried to do what we could for him and tried to keep him out of trouble, you know, protect him from himself.

Stephen Rusty both said it sort of looked like an accident.

What he did was he touched the blasting cap on that was attached to the dynamite.

He didn't quite understand how dynamite works.

I don't believe he touched the blasting cap on the battery terminals of his car and that was it.

So he drove the car out with dynamite.

But what was he hoping to do with it?

You know, we really don't know, and the only two people that really know are no longer here, you know.

So who is the other person that would be the mom's boyfriend.

I don't know if that was just his name or not, but I do remember the name Rex.

Rex.

I mean, when I first heard that, you can imagine my reaction.

It's probably the same one you're having.

Ultimately, the teen's death was ruled a suicide, but the investigation had just begun.

Well, any time somebody blows himself up dynamite, I would call it suspicious.

Steve's first order of business was to try to figure out where this dynamite came from.

So they reached out to local businesses and other police departments to see if any construction sites had been robbed.

Eventually, in our investigation located a empty box that had some identifiers on it the Bureau of Alcohol to back when Farms did the follow up on that to fare out where it came from.

Whatever they found, they linked it back to a construction site burglary and I can't remember for sure where it was, but it didn't help us and trying to identify anything about the story with the way it occurred, why it occurred, and so on.

So detectives started asking around, interviewing people who knew Greg.

That's when they discovered the boyfriend, rex Read.

And we tried to identify rex Read, but we couldn't find any driver's license or anything that would match up with the description as far as height weight.

Agents wanted this guy.

Um, I thought that was kind of odd.

Plus, if I remember correctly, Rex Reid was the name of a character in a TV show, there's a renowned American film critic an occasional actor named Rex Reid.

It was definitely not that Rex.

Read.

When you can't identify somebody and they've got some TV name, it kind of raises a flag.

So detectives had a name or an alias and a lot of questions.

Steve says they were discouraged from making contact with Greg's mother until after his funeral, but Rex was there for all of it, even when they notified Greg's mom about what had happened to her son.

I just remember that, you know, he was close to her, being supportive in those things.

He didn't want to talk to anybody, but he made it look like he was a stand up guy at the end and was there for the mom at the funeral and all that, and then at right after the funeral he was gone.

But eventually, after speaking with Greg's mom and some of his friend end, they started to learn more.

You know, Greg really didn't have a father figure, and I think Rex came into the picture, and you know, he was doing the karate stuff.

This guy Rex Reid, supposedly had a black belt in karate.

He and Rex had become close.

He liked being around Rex, and I'm sure it's because just his attitude and he was a guy that didn't take any crap off anybody.

And I believe that Greg was looking for anything at that time, and and Rex certainly fit the bill.

And the fact that this guy was a little bit different than most you know, dad's or boyfriends or whatever.

I think was attractive to him.

That this guy is, you know, out there living on the edge, and you know, he's really cool.

And I think that Greg may have been trying to emulate some of those things.

Detectives determined the dynamite that Greg had used that had been stolen from a construction site had been taken by this boyfriend.

Rex were both Rex and Greg, but other than that, they had no idea why the dynamite was stolen, let alone who this guy really was.

We never identified, like, you know, he came here for a job, or he had family in the area or anything like that.

He seemed to be a loner.

People told us that they didn't know who he really was anyway, but they just said that Rex Reid was a bad guy.

And that if anybody tried some mess with them that you guys will never take him alive, and you know, some officers might get hurt in the process.

Greg's friends literally warned them about this guy from the very beginning.

We were aggressive.

If somebody needed to be found, we were going to find him.

And Steve Smith is a great detective.

He put a lot of time in on this case because we wanted that guy.

He was obviously good at concealing his identity.

He literally just kind of fell off the face of the earth.

Eventually, the hunt for Rex led them to a boarding house where he had been staying, about thirty minutes away.

We went to the house, made contact with the lady there, told her what was going on.

She told me that Rex had disappeared the day before, she said, and we asked, you know, if he was going to be back she knew anything.

She says, no, I think he's gone.

He cleared out his room and they asked her for her permission to search his room.

In the trash can, we located what turned out to be a driver's license had been cut up into fifty sixty little tiny pieces that one of the detectives, Alan Harris, very methodically putting back together, and then when he had it back together, we could get a name and a date of birth.

He entered that in the computer and we immediately got an n C I s hit n C i C stands for the National Crime Information Center.

They learned this guy who went by the name Rex Reid, had several warrants out of the state of Florida for a variety of serious felony crimes.

And in order to protect the identity of the woman who I believe wrote Hitman, we're going to obscure his real name at times and call him by one of his alias is at others, Randall, Wayne Phelps.

We did the computer work in lo and behold there he was the federal fugitive.

Sometimes we'll hear Stephen Rusty called this guy Rex because that's what they initially knew him as, and it would be thirty two years before they finally learned the whole truth about him.

All while reporting this story, I've talked to dozens of people who know a thing or two about a thing or two, but no one I've talked to knows the entire story, including Steven Rusty.

They've never even heard of Hitman until I called, and then I told Rusty and Steve the book was linked to a triple murder.

Did you know that?

No, I did not know that until you had mentioned it.

And then I, yeah, gone online and started looking at things and saw it, and I thought, well, no, great, big, giant surprise that he would author a book and somebody would think that would be the manual to go about doing bad things to good people.

Even now, I keep finding new things.

Just this week, as I was writing this episode, I stumbled onto a passage and hit man I didn't remember seeing before, probably because it wasn't relevant until now.

Rex Ferrell says, quote dynamite is nice and can be picked up from many building sites or roads under construction, but during storage the sticks have to be turned over regularly to prevent settling of the nitro, and the blasting caps necessary to make it go off are so tricky that just by walking across the carpet enough static electricity could be created to blow you away.

As I said in the beginning, unless you know what you are doing, stay away from requests for this type of extermination or the life you take, maybe your own.

We'll be right back.

I truly thought I'd reach the end of the Rex Feral story.

I learned it was a woman now a grandmother in her seventies who originally wrote a book of fiction and wanted it pulled after it was associated with the triple murder in Maryland.

But then late one night I decided to just plug a few names and dates I had into some archives, and there it was the story I knew had to be there.

I mean, I've had some similar moments of discovery while making this podcast, but this was where I uncovered something huge, A part of this story that literally no one, not even Tiffany Horn, Bob Dean, Howard Siegel, I mean, no one knew about.

And the more I read, the more I found about this guy, Randall Wayne Phelps, the more I really began to understand the genesis of this book.

Remember what the author said to Pellatan editor Virginia Thomas.

By the way, in answer to your question and that of Mr.

Land, I get my materials from books, television, movies, newspapers, police officers, my karate instructor.

Back in the early eighties, right around the time Hitman was written, Phelps was training to be a police officer in Florida, I got his personnel records and was able to learn a little bit more about him.

Apparently, he was five ten and weighed one forty pounds.

He was a U.

S citizen and was engaged to be married.

I assumed to the woman who I've been told authored hitman, because the emergency contact listed on his new higher payroll notice and the first name listed in his personal references that same name.

Anyway, according to his application for employment, he says he got his g e d In attended community college in the seventies, and in his employment record he says he was a harpet installation mechanic and converted to a carpet salesman.

He goes on to say, during this time, I have also taught classes in self defense and martial arts to perfect and maintain my skills for personal enjoyment and for additional income.

Again, our Rex Ferrell actor, he cites his fifteen years of experience, is a fifth degree black belt karate instructor as a skill or qualification that would make him fit for the role.

I hold belts in five styles, last being my own style, American Combat Karate, which is the layman's no nonsense approach to self defense and street fighting.

As grand master of this style, I've taught many law enforcement officers.

He goes on to list several local police departments and a narcotic squad, saying law enforcement agencies have always received training from me and no charge as a public service.

A public affairs off sir from this department told us that back then the field training would have involved riding in a patrol car with an officer for a few days, and so there's a couple evaluation reports in these files.

At the time his final evaluation report was issued, he was on probation and had been training for five and a half months.

This report gives him an overall performance grade of not satisfactory, especially in the categories of public relations, knowledge of work, work judgments, jobs, skill level, quality of work accepts, direction, physical limitations, job attitude, etcetera.

The field training officer giving this evaluation elaborates in the comments section by saying, quote two lacks in confronting suspects, traffic violation and field safety.

Example standing in traffic while issuing traffic summons, hair length needs some attention, tends to be cold and indifferent to people in their problems, Cold and indifferent to coworkers, does not mingle into group.

This comment section wasn't big enough.

The evaluation continues onto an additional sheet of paper, going on to say things like recruit is very slow in writing reports and has many spelling mistakes.

Recruit does assigned tasks, but acts as if he's board stiff doing them, very slow to accept changes and wants a detailed explanation for the changes.

Cannot control interviews with I rate persons.

Intends to become flustered and confused as to what actions to take.

Apparently Phelps was color blind and he kept reading maps wrong, getting confused and ending up in the wrong area.

The evaluation says he has quote very poor driving habits and kept nearly getting into accidents.

And then there's this comment quote has told this FTO he is only interested in major cases, especially drug pushers, and he has his own definite opinion as to how they should be treated.

Remember that this evaluation goes on and on.

There are twenty nine different comments.

Again, retired Captain Steve Smith.

He didn't last very long.

I think they got suspicious of his integrity.

Helps His resignation letter dated June one reads, I find that I disagree with many of the practices and techniques advocated in my training period.

Unwilling to compromise my views on the duties of a police officer as a public servant, I wish to be free to offer my services elsewhere.

It was a short time after that that I believe him and his companions started doing the drug dealer rip offs.

So I'm going to tell you about this book I found sounds familiar, but I'm talking about the other book.

Rex Ferrell wrote.

It looks like a comic book or a silly pulp novel, same as Hitman.

The cover is orange and there's a masked man bursting into the room with a machine gun.

He surprised two guys.

They're jumping up from a table covered in money and drugs and open cans of beer.

The book's title is just as ridiculous.

It's called How to Rip Off a Drug Dealer and it was published in by Paladin.

In the first chapter, Ferrell rights, ripping off or stealing the merchandise of drug dealers can be a very profitable business among the outlaws who grow, import and manufacture these illegal substances for distribution.

There exists the law of the jungle survival of the strongest.

Any outlaw who can outthink, out maneuver, or out fox any other outlaw is entitled to the bounty he appropriates.

The author pitched this book before Hitman was even released.

In her deposition, Paladin editor Virginia Thomas recounted something the author wrote in a letter.

I'm anxious that Rex Savage established himself with Paladin readers as a top quality writer who knows his stuff.

I have ideas for additional books, which we touched on briefly during our last phone conversation.

And again that's our actor reading the author's words.

I should have the first two chapters on popping drug dealers ready to send to you soon.

I think it will be better than The hit Man.

It is, in a weird way better than Hitman.

Some of the hard boiled fantasy has been stripped away, and most of the book is straightforward, practical, actionable.

How to assemble a team, how to train them, how to storm a room, how to dispose of the merchandise.

Actually it's pretty scary the level of sophistication laid out in the book.

The equipment and tactics are all military.

Great Two Way Radio's bulletproof vests and infrared scopes.

Rex Ferrell advises to use a fully automatic Mac ten, which would later fall under assault weapons ban, and votes a whole chapter to marksmanship too.

Of course, this being a rex Feral book, there are totally absurd moments, like the long passage about why dressing up as a woman is the perfect disguise.

You will need a method for very close removal of facial and maybe even leg hair in order to effectively portray a woman.

Get your wife or girlfriend to help you.

Select some inexpensive makeup, then practice applying the makeup until you achieve a natural look.

Women's magazines tell you how you don't want to appear clownish or garish.

You want your target to really think that you are female.

He suggests picking up quote hard plastic breasts with nipples and other novelty items from party shops to complete the look, and he consoles the reader, so why you stand in front of the mirror feeling just a little bit queer?

Keep in mind why you are playing in makeup if it bothers your macho self image so you can't sleep at night.

Instead of counting sheep, try counting stacks of hundred dollar bills.

The book How to rip Off a Drug Dealer is dedicated to this guy and quote to men of courage everywhere who dared to take a chance, and to all those outlaws.

I dare not mention by name outlaw.

There's a lot of hyperbole in these two books, but this is a detail that is not an exaggeration, because Phelps apparently wasn't just ripping off dealers.

He was doing it while pretending to be a cop.

There's a whole section on how to do this in the book.

It's called the police assault.

This method of entry is probably the safest and most profitable of all or the serious and well equipped team.

It consists of entering the location by flashing seemingly legitimate police credentials and making the mark think he is under arrest.

If handled correctly, the entire procedure will go smoothly and one job will possibly lead to future jobs without resistance or violence.

This method requires one special skill, says Rex.

At least one of the inside men should be capable of playing the part of a seasoned, knowledgeable, hardened cop.

Randall Wayne Phelps, of course, had been training to be a police officer.

Maybe he was better at playing a cop than he was at being a cop, So Phelps resigned from the police department in three started ripping off drug dealers the following year, and then the explosion happened three years later.

So when Rusty and Steve started investigating that explosion, Phelps had already been on the run from the Feds.

An investigator for a state's attorney's office in Florida actually hopped on a plane as soon as he heard about the explosion Steve was investigating.

The guy's name was ed Boone.

His nickname was Boomer, and he had a very booming voice, so it was appropriate I tried to reach ed Boone.

Unfortunately he died in two thousand fourteen.

Ed Boone ended up telling us that this had been involved in a number of crimes.

They were ripping off drug dealers acting like they were the police.

They would do their search warrants supposedly and confiscate the drugs and money.

They would just tell the bad guys that somebody will notify you when the warrants issued and we'll be back to pick you up on that.

If you're a drug suspect and the police never call you or show up again, you just kind of figure you skated and nothing else is going to go on.

It's kind of a perfect crime.

I mean, it sounds like that idea could actually work.

But like James Harry, they messed up.

They did make a mistake and hit a house that wasn't a drug house.

I found a newspaper article from December that says three men Phelps as co conspirators, were found guilty of imprisoning two families and robbing their homes while posing as federal drug agents.

The unsuspecting families inquired and these people ended up calling the police later to find out, you know, the circumstances and why they got targeted, And all of a sudden, the Florida Law Enforcement Agency started putting two and two together that this was people out acting like they were police ripping off drug dealers.

According to that article I found about the robbery that went wrong, police found the book how to rip Off a Drug Dealer in their possession.

These men were convicted of two counts of kidnapping, two counts of false imprisonment, two counts of armed robbery, two counts of burglary, two counts of grant theft, two counts of conspiracy and eight counts of carrying a firearm during the sition of a felony.

Phelps, on the other hand, he had kind of just disappeared into the wind, kind of like he did after we started looking for him.

So these three guys got arrested.

Phelps was on the run.

But then I found this.

Another article from March n said a thirty six year old woman had been arrested after providing fake Drug Enforcement Administration identification and warrants to the three men who committed the robbery.

According to the arrest warrant and sworn testimony from one of those three men, she typed these false warrants and I das in her home.

She had been charged with two counts each of conspiracy to commit a robbery with a firearm in conspiracy to commit a burglary of a dwelling in which an assault or battery occurred.

So while Phelps got away, his girlfriend or fiance was being held accountable for her part in this crime.

This woman's name, once again the same one I believe to be the author of hit Man.

This article even says this woman calls herself a writer.

Phelps went by several names, and while he was a federal fugitive.

Some of the elias is popped up over the years and other states.

At one point in August after the robbery, he was arrested in Florida after his car broke down.

According to the booking report, the officer says, while on patrol, he saw a tan jeep off to the side of the road with the hood open.

He pulled up behind the jeep and started running the Texas tags.

He said he saw a white male approximately five nine and one fifty pounds, leaning in the jeep on the passenger side.

He had his hands in the vehicle.

He kept looking back at the officer and back into the jeep.

He did this about six times.

There was another man with him.

The officer says.

We were on a dark road and due to the suspicious furtive movement made, and for fear of my safety, I took a survey look into the vehicle to make sure there was no one else in the jeep to do me harm.

When I did, I observed a light colored green shirt wrapped tightly around what outlined a gun on the front seat, where the person had been bent over.

The officer says earlier that night he heard over his police radio that two people had held up a seven eleven and one of them had a green shirt wrapped around his hand to indicate he had a gun.

The officer then discovered they had a duffel bag filled with holsters and other guns, handcuffs, a blue light, two badges, cans that look like tear gas, clips and ammo, and two items that look like silencers.

There was also a large amount of marijuana next to this bag.

This is kind of our only moment seeing Phelps up close, well, aside from his police evaluation Ed Boone, Steve Smith, Rusty James.

They were always right behind him, but this officer actually interacts with him, even though he has no idea who he's dealing with.

Literally, as he handed the officer his license, his real license with his real name, the officer saw another idea underneath it for Randall Wayne Phelps.

This is where we learned of that Elias.

When the officer asked him why he had to Florida I d S.

Phelps said he got the driver's license with that name so he could write a book.

After he was arrested and charged with carrying a concealed firearm in possession of marijuana, Phelps made bail and went on the run again.

Do you know how long he was actually on the run for and all?

It seems like initially six or eight years on the front end, and then after we tried to locate him, it was another six to nine years I think before he met his dumb eyes.

We'll be right back.

There are a ton of illustrations and photos and how to rip off a drug dealer, but there are two that I keep coming back to.

There's a shot of a falsified d A I D.

The man in the photo looks big, strong, He's wearing what's obviously a fake mustache and a wig.

But am I looking at Phelps?

I still haven't been able to locate his mug shot.

And then there's another which is just so disturbing.

It's in the section about interrogation techniques, about using a blade to get someone to talk.

A young woman lies on the ground, her hands bound.

A masked man kneels above her.

He's got a handful of her hair and a knife to her throat.

Who is that man?

Is that Phelps?

Who's the woman?

Phelps was like this aberration, a ghost that would cause harm and then disappear after all these robberies, and after the explosion, he had somehow gotten away every time.

Steve eventually learned that Phelps had returned to Florida.

At some point, Ed Boone had given us the information about his girlfriend in Florida.

He'd apparently gone back to his girlfriend fiance, the one who I think wrote hit man, who at the time had two children, including a teenage son, And Ed was going to pursue that a little bit more when he got back to Florida, to see if he started getting mail at her house or showed up to her house.

And then one day Steve's phone rang, It was Ed Boone.

When I answered, he just said, we got him, and I knew it was Boomer, and so I knew he had to be talking about.

He told me that they had him, but he was in a box.

And then his girlfriend's son shot and killed.

You know, he had evidently been back there living again, and they had had another one of their fights, and evidently when it became physical, um this young man decided that this guy wasn't gonna hurt his mom anymore and shot and killed him.

That's how I found out that we didn't need to be looking for him.

Anymore.

This happened just two weeks after Millie, Trevor, and Janice were murdered.

A local newspaper article from this time says the young man who shot Phelps was fifteen years old, and that Phelps died after being shot in the head.

This all happened in the family's living room.

I was shocked, No wonder, she's never wanted to talk about this.

Her teenage son shot her fugitive boyfriend right in front of her.

The fifteen year old was arrested on an open count of murder.

We also reached out to him for this podcast and got no response.

Authorities also discovered a meth lab in a shed behind the house that they described as one of the more elaborate labs they'd seen.

Sheriff's deputies believed Phelps built and operated the lab, so he'd gone from ripping off drug dealers to becoming one.

Apparently, an officer from the same police department Phelps was kicked out of said when he learned Phelps had been killed, he wasn't terribly surprised.

He called him extremely deadly.

Rusty remembers getting the call.

I just said, hey, who says there's no justice?

You know he was a bad man.

He's a bad guy.

Do you know anything about that girlfriend in Florida?

Nothing other that here than uh.

I believe her son did the right thing.

I think the kid he had a lot of courage.

And I won't say I was happy, but I was glad that he was not going to be a threat to anyone else.

I can't say that I was sad about it.

It was like, good, he's off the street.

He can't hurt anybody else or disrupting any other families lives.

But there's one more question that keeps snagging at me.

We know Phelps started ripping off drug dealers after the second book was written, but what about the first book was Rex hit Man?

Now?

I don't think we'll ever know, but I'd say that there's a good probability.

Of course, if every department had a cold case squad, they could go back and look at the things in those books and then compared with what they have, I think they may be able to find some things like that, but that's the luxury.

Most departments don't have.

The stories I've told you about in this podcast could just be the ones we know about Hitman and how to rip off a drug dealer, might be the so called blueprints for other crimes committed by Phelps himself or others.

I mean, the books just a book, obviously.

But what's so crazy about all of this is that it seems like there was a real Rex Ferrell.

Maybe he was the inspiration or the co writer, or Phelps somehow morphed into this character.

But that persona the macho, rogue, dangerous maverick.

He was real, and what else did Phelps do?

We actually put in a Freedom of Information Act request into the FBI to try to get their files on Phelps, and just this morning we got back a reply that said, please be advised that quote unusual circumstances apply to the processing of your request.

Apparently, unusual circumstances could mean a couple of different scenarios, like quote a need to search, for, collect, and examine a voluminous amount of separate and distinct records.

I have a feeling I'll be finding more and more well after this podcast ends.

I mean, we started this story talking about this book written by a so called hitman himself and then a triple murder, and then we discovered the author was actually a woman.

But wait, there was also a man who seemed to have embodied the book.

We've spent a lot of time with these wrong doers Randall, Wayne Phelps, Lawrence Horn, James Perry for some paid or Lund although maybe that's not fair, but anyway, we've spent time with these guys because we've had to.

But this is where it all ends, with the people who really propelled and compelled me to tell this story, the survivors.

Hi, Hi, right, how are you.

I'm good?

How are you doing?

Oh good?

I wanted to touch base with you and see how things are going.

I kept Tiffany Horn updated on everything I learned over the last two years or so, every Motown interview, every lawyer I got back in touch with, but also every strange new twist I uncovered about the book and the story behind it.

I was sort of driven to get to the bottom of this, in part for her, because she'd given me so much of her time, and meanwhile, Tiffany had to go on her own journey for closure, including a prison visit with her dad.

There were so many demons and so many things that I had been battling, so much rage that I had had that had been building inside me.

It was important for me to to let that go and to face him.

I wanted to really settle with him and look him in his eye and also just see my dad again, like I wanted to be that little girl that I used to be and just look at him that way instead of as this monster that's next on hit Man.

H Hitman is a production of I Heart Radio and hit Home Media.

It's produced and reported by me Jasmine Morris.

Our supervising producer is Michelle Lance.

Mark Latto is our story consultant.

Executive producers are main Gesh, Hatika Door and Me.

Mixing by Michelle Lance and Josh Ferguson.

Our fact checker is not Sumi Ajisaka, voice acting by Levi Petrie and Kelly Jane Farnsworth.

Our theme song by Alice McCoy and additional music written and produced by the students at DIME powered by the Detroit Institute of Music Education,