Hey, Jasmine Morris here.

It's been six years since I released this podcast, So before I tell you why I'm back in your feed, let's recap a little.

In nineteen eighty three, Palatin Press, a fringe publisher, released a book called hit Man, a technical manual for independent contractors.

The author, who went by the pen name Rex Farrell, offered very specific tips for the aspiring contract killer, where to find employment, how much to charge, how to get away with murder, and how to feel okay about it.

Ten years later, Tiffany Horn's mother, eight year old brother, and a close family friend were killed.

The exhaustive investigation involved multi state surveillance and wire taps, but it wasn't until detectives stumbled upon the book Hitman, that they suddenly had what they called a blueprint for the murders.

Over the last nine episodes of this podcast, we dug into all of that, plus the wild, untold story behind the book and it's elusive author, which brings me to why I'm back with an update.

I recently got a phone call.

It was Tiffany Horn.

Hi, a Kathleen.

She was calling to let me know she'd just heard from a reporter.

There is a journalist doing an article for Vanity Fair regarding the woman that wrote the book hit Man.

I know she wrote it under a pseudonym, but she's coming out now revealing her identity.

My first thought was, I've been waiting for a call like this.

If you listened to this podcast, you know I kept Rex Ferrell's identity hidden for multiple reasons.

One, I was ninety nine point nine percent sure I had the correct name, but she never confirmed it.

I also knew this day would come when she'd be ready to talk, and that maybe if we're on her terms, it'd be worth it.

My second thought was, who's the reporter?

It was nearly impossible to find the actual name of who authored Hitman.

I mean, I spent years digging, and I got it kind of by accident.

So who could possibly have found her?

The journalist actually reached out to me for me to give a statement, or you know, if one of my family members wanted to give her a statement.

So I did.

I had a conversation with her.

Her name is Abbot, and she told me that she had a personal relationship with this woman.

I was relieved, actually, because this is the only other person who's ever been able to find the real Rex Ferrell.

Abbot was the very first person I talked to about all of this, literally a decade ago, years before I even made this podcast.

Back in twenty fifteen, I went to Abbot's apartment in New York City, walking to Abbots, here we are, and we spent an hour or so talking about her friend, the author of Hitman.

Abbot told me about how smart and kind the author was, how she'd been in an abusive relationship, even how this woman's father was a deacon.

So many details, except for Rex Ferrell's actual name, or really any identifying information.

I actually mentioned Abbot briefly in episode seven, claimed to be a friend of Rex Ferrell's, an author herself, Karen Abbott.

She once quoted an email from Rex publicly, I don't want to be a hero, tragic or otherwise, Rex supposedly wrote, I just want to sit in my rocker on my front porch and tell my grandson's stories.

There certain are fantastic lies.

Ultimately, Abbot didn't want to talk to me without Rex's permission, which she never got as far as I know, so she declined to participate in this podcast.

Well, I guess she finally got permission.

So here we are six years later.

It's time to reveal the true identity of Rex Ferrell from iHeartRadio and Hit Home Media.

I'm Jasmine Morris and this is hit Man.

After this podcast came out in twenty nineteen, we heard from so many of you who thought you figured it out.

One listener sent me a Facebook profile for some woman named Patsy in Kansas.

Some said it was Nancy Gelber, a crime writer who put a hit on her estranged husband.

Many of you thought it was a romance novelist who wrote about how to murder a husband and then did just that.

When listener actually commented, Nancy Crampton Brophy is the woman supposedly behind the book.

A simple Internet searched can find her real identity in mugshots.

If it had been that easy, well this would be a very different podcast.

I'm going to play a few more clips.

This one is from the very first episode, when I hadn't yet revealed that Rex Ferrell was actually a woman.

One day, buried in something like five hundred pages of court documents that a lawyer emailed me, I finally came across some correspondence between Paladin and professional killer Rex Ferrell, the editorial director of Paladin, was writing with good news.

Enclosed, you will find two copies of the contract for Hitman, a technical manual for independent contractors.

Signed two copies with a witness, and return both to us.

I was about to get my first glimpse of the person behind the book.

Here's what he wrote back to Paladin.

My main concern in offering this type of material for publication is the possibility of litigation from people who might misuse the materials in my books.

So the real res Ferrell might have had a conscience.

After all, it's easy to speculate what Ferrell's intentions were in writing Hitman.

To some it's not a question.

I mean he wrote a murder manual.

To others it reads his entertainment or a joke, a joke that James Perry might have used to murder three people.

But after reading through this exchange, at least one thing becomes clear about Ferrell.

Again, he writes, by the way, an answer to your question and that of mister Lunde, I get my materials from books, television, movies, newspapers, police officers, my karate instructor, and a good friend who is an attorney.

No I am not a hit man.

I don't even own a gun, but don't tell anybody.

So, yeah, we knew the author was not a hit man.

We knew she was a woman.

But that's about it.

Here's another clip from episode seven.

How do you find someone who wrote under a pen name, someone who might not want to be found?

I scoured message boards, Amazon reviews, comments sections, hoping for some kind of breadcrumb that would lead me to this person.

Nothing.

I asked the same question over and over.

Yeah, I was gonna ask you about this author?

What do you know about the anonymous author?

You just mentioned the author?

What did you know about the author of the book?

So who was the actual author?

Do you ever know anything about the author of the book?

But finally you'll remember, I had a breakthrough.

I got her name again.

Another clip.

Rex Ferrell won't confirm her identity.

Paladin's closed now and their press lawyer won't confirm it.

But my best available information tells me I'm right, And as far as I can tell, the real Rex Ferrell is now a grandmother in her seventies.

She has a social media presence and some of her posts are public.

I shouldn't be surprised by anything anymore.

But she's not at all what I pictured, not from what you'd imagine from everything we've heard about the typical Paladin writer.

She's shared liberal memes about immigration, privilege in women's rights, and she's really funny.

I came across a few videos of her.

Her hair is white for the most part, she has green eyes, and she's beautiful.

In one of these videos, she's singing, laughing, and wearing a sweater that says Grandma on it.

She has a slight Southern accent, and yet it's hard to imagine this is the same person who told their readers.

The kill is the easiest part of the job.

People kill one another every day.

It takes no great effort to pull a trigger or plunge a knife.

It is being able to do so in a manner that will not link yourself or your employer to the crime that makes you a professional, and the acceptance of the valuelessness of life has given your own life value.

I didn't divulge any of this in the podcast, initially because I didn't want to leave a trail.

But after I'd found her name, I discovered the details of her life through newspaper clippings and interviews I did with law enforcement.

I'll never forget sitting at my computer at one am, pouring over old newspapers.

When I found the clipping about the crooked cop boyfriend.

It was like I unlocked a door and stepped into an entire new world.

After I got all the case files, his arrest records, copies of Warren's, his personnel files from the police department where he resigned in disgrace, her name comes up over and over.

She's listed as this emergency contact.

Both of their names come up together in news articles and arrest records tied to armed robbery.

Then I went back to my conversation with Abbot all those years ago, at the time she went by Karen Abbot and I cross referenced everything I'd found with some of the stories she told me.

I just plugged the real names in.

It all lined up that and Abbot had gone on to write a few books of her own.

I flipped through the pages of one, and there it was, in the acknowledgment section, plain as day.

She thanked the author of Hitman.

Abbott wrote an article for Vanity Fair published this morning.

At the same time I'm publishing this episode.

It confirms it all everything I spent years piecing together, I was right.

So I figured it's time to share with you listeners, with the lawyers and prosecutors from the criminal and civil cases tied to this story, law enforcement, everyone I talked to in my several years of reporting on this, even Tiffany the author of hit Man, a technical manual for independent contractors.

The real Rex Ferrell is a woman in her late seventies named Gail McCool.

In the article published today, her story unfolds exactly as I told it in this podcast.

It's all confirmed.

The boyfriend, the drug buss, the explode, everything I've talked to Abbott, I've asked for an interview with her and the author.

But again, as I've done through this entire podcast, I go back to Tiffany Horn.

Because of her family, her loved ones hadn't been brutally murdered by a hitman who followed all the tips in this manual, no one would know or care about this book or this author.

I mean, that's just always going to be the story.

Like this wasn't fiction, This was how to manual to actually murder people.

This is you know, and I know even with True crime, which honestly I do watch, and I told you that there's something about it that I like to watch because I like to see people caught for what they did.

I like to see people go down for what they did.

And she, to me, is like an accessory but never really felt the consequences of that and could kind of pass that off as like, oh, this is something I did to make money.

I was an abusive relationship.

Whatever the reasons were, it doesn't matter.

You still did something that hurt people, and you should still be held accountable.

When it comes to accountability in this story, there has been justice.

Tiffany's father, Lawrence Horn, and the hit man he hired, James Perry, went to prison.

Palettein pressed, the publisher of Hitman, settled a lawsuit requiring them to pull the book from shelves, but the author of Hitman, Gail, has remained in the shadows, something Tiffany wasn't afforded.

I don't even go by my married name, just because I don't want people to just be able to google.

Me like someone you're dating, or someone a coworker even or.

Yes, you would not believe how people still figure it out and they still find out.

And meanwhile, this author has been able to live in obscurity for the last forty years.

Yes, I mean, I don't think she's probably run away from it herself, and we'll probably hear about that, So that may be interesting to care about how it's affected her mentally.

Yeah, because if you're a human being, I can't see it not affecting you mentally if you've had this type of catastrophic effect that you've had like that rever brates.

When Tiffany got the call from Abbott letting her know about this article she was writing, this is how it went.

She basically was like she you know, really wanted to come out and that she was, you know, very sorry, and you know, then I kind of said, you know, well that's interesting because I've never heard from her.

And she said, well, you know, she just assumed that people obviously wouldn't want to, you know, hear an apology, you know.

And I'm like, well, that's weird that she would make that assumption without even trying.

And I found that ridiculous.

And I thought that was kind of like a you know, basically bs and there's you know a lot of people including my sister Janis's son that have been hurt by this woman, So that's a cop out.

And I didn't like that, and I basically said that she could take all of that and shove it up her, you know what, because she made the choice that she made and she has to live with it.

And yeah, I guess this is her opportunity to tell her, you know, perspective.

But when it comes to my family and I did, you know, talk to my aunts, and you know, they just really were feeling the same way that I felt like for her to act like an apology would have been too little, too late is ridiculous and that just shows the type of person that she is.

Would you guys even be open to that at this point if that's something that she did want.

To do, I mean, if she really took it seriously.

But I feel like she would have done that if she did.

I mean, we all make choices, and she made a choice to dance with the devil, because that's what I feel like.

This is, you know, no matter what her situation was, for her to write something so disgusting and that was used to murder people like I, Yeah, I couldn't even imagine being that type of person.

So I don't really know what her mindset is like, but yeah, I guess we'll see.

Like Tiffany said, we'll see what happens next.

If I've learned anything from this story is that just when you think it's over, it's not.

This podcast is a production of iHeartRadio and Hit Home Media.

Our theme song is by Alise McCoy.

An additional music written and produced by the students at DINE powered by the Detroit Institute of Music Education.

Special thanks to Michelle Lance.

I'm Jasmine wiss in This is hit Man.