Warning. This episode contains details that some listeners may find disturbing. March 22nd, 1997. Tucson, Arizona. Charles C Morgan, a 39 year old escrow agent, left his home in the morning to go about his usual day. But Charles never came home. His family was left worried. Then on March 25th, three days later, at two in the morning at the Morgan household, the dog began barking. Someone was at the door and it was Charles. And he looked like he was in distress. He was missing a shoe.
His hands were handcuffed and he motioned to his throat, but he didn't say a word. His wife got him a notepad and a pen, And Charles wrote that he had been given a hallucinogenic drug that could kill him if he talked. If I told you that this was the strangest part of the story, I'd be lying. This is a study of strange. If you like strange mysteries, if you like true crime, if you love to speculate about these kind of unsolved tales, this one is one you have to listen to.
I covered this story as a guest on another podcast called A Study of Crime. Go check out that podcast. It's really great and it's one of the most interesting true crime cases I've ever come across, and I wanted to share it with my own listeners here on a study of strange. And if I forgot to introduce myself, I'm Michael May. Before we go any further. If you're new to the show, take a quick second and hit that subscribe or follow button.
And if you get a chance, leave a rating or review on Apple or Spotify. If you use those apps, it goes a very long way to helping others find our show. All right, so who is Charles C Morgan, aka Chuck? He was 39 years old at the time of this story. In 1977, he worked as an escrow agent. Some newspapers from the time refer to him as an insurance executive. And for those that don't know what an escrow agent is, you've probably heard the term before at least.
But it's a neutral party that holds on to funds related to a transaction. So you typically hear this in real estate transactions. And our story today takes place in Tucson Arizona. Now let me fill you in on some details here about Arizona in 1977. Because this is really important to the story. At that time there was a lot of organized crime in Arizona. You're near the southern border. There's a lot of narcotics flowing across the border. And related to that, there's money laundering.
And what made Arizona attractive to crime syndicates and organized crime was that there was a state law which allowed anyone to buy up land through a numbered blind trust account. And this meant, essentially, that you can just launder money and it can never be traced. It is completely private. So here's this peaceful conservative state. But it has a problem with dangerous organized crime because of the nature of these laws.
And if you're already sort of hip to the connection here, an escrow agent or an insurance executive like Charles C Morgan, you're in a prime position in that job to come across people buying land and or looking to money launder. And so that brings us to March 22nd, 1977. Charles took his daughters to school. He had four daughters. He dropped them off and then went to work. But he never made it to his office and he never made it back home.
that evening, when he didn't return home, his family began to worry. But there's not really much they could do besides call and ask around, and they can't find him. at 2 a.m. March 25th, the dog starts barking. There's a knock at the door. Ruth, his wife goes to the door, opens it and there's Chuck. He had come home, but he was hurt. He was disheveled. He was missing a shoe. He had plastic cuffs on his ankles. Some accounts say he had one cuff on one ankle.
Some accounts say he just had cuffs on both ankles. And his hands were tied with a zip tie, and he wouldn't talk. And Ruth is asking him relentlessly, where were you? What's wrong? Oh my God, what's happened to you? But he's he's not talking. And here's a quote from his wife, Ruth, from Unsolved Mysteries. When he motioned to his throat and didn't say a word, I asked him, can you talk? He couldn't. Can you write? He shook his head. Yes, so I went. Got a tablet and a pen.
He wrote that his throat had been painted with a hallucinogenic drug, and that the drug could drive him irrevocably insane, or destroy his nervous system and kill him. I wanted to call a doctor in the police, but he was adamant that that would be signing a death warrant for the entire family. so as I imagine this scene, what this looks like to me is that Chuck had escaped or was let go from someone that had obviously kidnaped him. Assaulted him, tied him up.
And that someone is likely very dangerous. Especially if this drug saying he talked about on his throat is real. So Ruth is very worried she wants to call the cops. But again he reiterates, you know, don't do that. That's like signing a death warrant. That's too dangerous. So they're scared. There's not really anything they can do except for nursing him back to health. And that's what Ruth did. So here's where things get even stranger.
I'm probably going to say that 3 or 4 times today, Chuck claimed that he was a secret agent for the Treasury Department. He claims his ID, which sort of proof that had been stolen, He didn't really talk about this much with his family outside of those details, because allegedly, that could put them in danger. And, you know, ignorance is bliss, so to speak.
Also, it is worth noting the Treasury Department, the Secret Service is part of the Treasury Department, and we think of the secret Service as protecting the president. But part of the Secret Service mandate is they do investigate counterfeiting, fraud, money laundering. So theoretically, whether you believe Charles was abducted or not, it does connect to some dots about where they live, type of business he is in and that sort of thing. In the meantime, Chuck got back to his normal routine.
But there was one big difference. He wore a bulletproof vest everywhere he went. He was also adamant that he take the kids to and from school himself. He also kept being somewhat elusive about the details of what's going on in his background with his wife. And allegedly, he told his father that he hid a letter in the house that explained everything, and he didn't want Ruth to find this letter while he was still alive. That letter, by the way, has never been found.
So two months later, things, they're starting to feel more normal, with the exception of the bulletproof vest. Every day and it's June 7th and Chuck didn't come home again. In this time, two days, three days pass. Still nothing. He doesn't come back home. He doesn't knock on the door looking all disheveled. It's nine full days later when a call comes in to the Morgan household, and Ruth answered the phone and a woman was on the other line and the woman said, Ruthie.
And Ruth responded, yes, this is her. and the woman on line said, Chuck is all right. Ecclesiastics 12 one through eight. And then she hung up. So that is in reference, obviously, to a Bible verse. And the passage reads in part, and I am not a Bible scholar. I actually don't know much about the Bible. I did go to Sunday school growing up, but when I researched this and I was looking up with this passage, actually is and read it, it depends on the translation.
So I'm just going to give you a couple little bits here depending on the translation. But essentially it's referring to remember your creator. and it also says meaningless meaningless. Everything is meaningless. Or if you look at a different translation, vanity of vanities, says the preacher, all his vanity. if you listeners know more about the reasons ecclesiastics 12 one through 8th May have been mentioned in this story, I would love to hear it. Send me a message.
A study of strange at gmail.com. Again, I'm not a Bible scholar, so I could use your help trying to put some meaning to what this meant. So anyway, a few days later, Chuck's dead body is found It was near San Juan Springs, about 40 miles west of Tucson. He had been dead for about 12 hours. The most interesting part of this is that he was still wearing his bulletproof vest, but he was killed from a bullet wound in the back of the head.
Now, there's a lot of strange details about where they found his body. The scene, so to speak. And I'm going to list them out in really? In no particular order, because there's not really an appropriate order to go through. But all these details could be important clues. So here it goes. He was shot by his own gun, and his gun was nearby. But on the gun, there were no fingerprints. The car was nearby. He drove a mercury. Cougar was right there by his body. On his person, he wore a belt.
And in the belt there was a sort of a hidden blade. In the car, sunglasses were found that apparently did not belong to Charles. There was a box of ammo there was a CB radio show. And probably the most interesting, weird aspect of this is there was a handkerchief in the backseat, I believe, and it had a partial tooth in it. This is one of Charles teeth. So a partial tooth and a handkerchief.
And then comes what the investigators found is they dressed the body as they do with a dead body, and go through that process. They found a $2 bill clipped inside his underwear. And on that $2 bill was written seven names, seven Spanish names. And at the top was written Ecclesiastes, with little lines or arrows, kind of pointing to a one and a eight on the bill. So it's a reference to that same Bible verse that the woman who called Ruth left.
And then on the back of this bill, there was more there was a weird map, and the map suggested an area between Tucson and Mexico, in between the towns of Robles Junction in Silver City or Lake City. I don't know how to pronounce that. Both of these areas were known at the time for smuggling, and then where it has, like the signers of the declaration and stuff, were the numbers one through seven.
Here we are, 40 some odd years later, and there is still a ton of debate about what any of this means. But even with all these strange things, this weird dollar bill, a tooth and a handkerchief, etc. etc. investigators suggest that Charles Morgan committed suicide. two days after the Pima County Sheriff's Department had found his body, a woman called authorities an anonymous woman, and she referred to herself as green eyes and it was the same woman that called Ruth.
she told the authorities that Chuck had been hiding out in a motel, and she had been visiting him. And with him he had a suitcase that was full of of cash, thousands of dollars of cash. And he supposedly told Green Eyes that this was to pay off an assassin who was coming after him. He was going to meet with this hitman and buy back his life. if we are to believe this anonymous woman.
This gives us a pretty solid theory where an assassin was coming after Charles Morgan, probably due to him working with organized crime, money laundering, or potentially even working for the government like he suggested. And, you know, bad guys found out that he was undercover and they wanted to kill him. And Charles knew this somehow and and wanted to pay off this assassin. No one, to this day knows who Green Eyes is.
After Charles's death, Ruth Morgan, his wife, was visited by two men that claimed to be from the FBI. She claims that they showed up. They flashed their identifications really quickly, went inside and sort of rummaged through the house and tore things apart looking for something. She was never told what they were looking for. She even also mentioned that she was a little too rattled to even ask to see their identifications more closely. And then they left, and she never heard from them again.
And some even ask if these men were really from the FBI. So years later, this case goes unsolved and it's about 13 years later. This story runs on Unsolved Mysteries, and some tips are called in that, as far as I can tell, didn't lead to anything super specific. But around the same time, investigative journalist Don Devereaux starts investigating this case And Don Devereaux contacted the FBI to get more information. And this is a quote from Don Devereaux.
When I made a Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI. They had never heard of Mr. Morgan, despite the fact that they obviously opened an investigation, despite the fact that the FBI interviewed Mr. Morgan's attorney. They were all over this thing like a blanket for a while, but now they've never heard of the guy. He never existed. No card, no file, no nothing. End of quote. All of that is really suspicious. Maybe they threw the file away. Maybe it's missing.
Things weren't digitized back then. Or maybe he his involvement with the government was being actually kept secret. Maybe he really had been undercover and it was still important for the government to kind of keep that secret. But I don't know, maybe that would still come out partially redacted in a Freedom of Information Act. I'm not sure.
So if Chuck Morgan was doing undercover work for the government, Don Devereaux believes that the clues he wrote on the $2 bill might have been an attempt to pass some sort of coded message on to the authorities. But we're missing the key to that code. We don't know, actually what the code under the dollar bill leads to. There is some more information that we do know now that I don't think they knew back then when the story first ran in the early 90s.
Chuck did real estate escrow work for at least one Mafia family, and it's suspected that he helped with the purchase of gold bullion and platinum, which these are sort of easy ways, convenient ways to launder money. And after Devereaux had been digging into the case, after Unsolved Mysteries ran the story, it came out that Chuck had been a secret witness in a fraud investigation, a land fraud investigation, and he had been interviewed about it just a handful of months before he died.
It's also worth mentioning that Chuck had been seen at several restaurants and motels in the west side of Tucson after his disappearance, but right before his death. Now, there's a few footnotes here to this case. A man named Doug Johnson was shot and killed in his car, and his office is parking lot. This is also in the early 90s. Doug Johnson is not a name you should remember. For me, blabbering on about this story at all. This is a random person, an innocent man, a terrible situation.
the person who killed him was never caught. And in fact, it was made to look like a suicide. But it wasn't. Now why am I bringing Doug Johnson up? Well, it's so happened that he worked right across the street from Don Devereaux, and they drove station wagons. so there is a theory here. Just a theory. It's unproven, but a lot of people suspect that Devereaux was the target. Since he was digging into this case. And the killer got the cars mixed up. tied into that.
A CIA agent had mentioned to Devereaux that he was an intended target because of his work on this story. One final little footnote here. That's interesting. A gentleman named Danny Castellano who was an investigative reporter. He died under mysterious circumstances that we think is related to an entirely different case. There's a documentary about him on Netflix right now that I started watching, which is really good.
He was looking into some other corruption type things and was found dead in mysterious ways. But because he died after contacting Devereaux. Because he wanted to know more about the Charles Martin case that is also, in and of itself, another strange spider web. So there's the story as best as I can sort of tell it.
Just going through my notes here of The Strange case of Charles C Morgan, The Prime series in this case I already mentioned one is that he was caught up in some sort of fraud, money laundering situation and the criminals he was dealing with wanted to kill him for either. They either they were afraid he was going to say something, or they found out he was working for the government and they had him killed. Another theory is that he committed suicide, just like the authorities first suspected.
I don't buy much into the suicide theory because of all of these strange things in this case, no coincidences could just be coincidences. I did read. These are not. I hate using something like Reddit and comments on YouTube and stuff as sources. That is not what you should do to confirm or validate anything when you're researching.
But some people on places like that brought up that this is the behavior of someone that might be dealing with schizophrenia, and he almost was creating this kind of fake world. And it could have been in a way, too. He didn't want to admit that he wanted to kill himself to his family. So this is kind of a way to hide that, even though he was probably dealing with, you know, money troubles and strange people and decided to end his life.
To me, there's just almost too many coincidences for it to be a suicide. but it is a valid theory and, and one of the main prominent theories that are out there, We do not know if Charles C Morgan did work for the Treasury Department, but we do know that he had these peripheral connections to money laundering and organized crime in Tucson. This strange case of Charles C Morgan is so interesting, so intriguing. And every turn you make, there's another connection to something mysterious.
And it very much feels like a real version of a 1970s political thriller movie where a conspiracy is unfolding. You know, the low sort of normal man is unfolding, this conspiracy, and there's so many parts to the web that you just get overwhelmed. And to this day, no one is certain why Morgan died. And on that note, that'll do it for today's episode of A Study of Strange. Thank you for listening to one of my favorite true crime stories.
and again, if you're new to the show, make sure to hit that subscribe or follow button. Coming up on the future of study of Strange. I'm not sure which order these episodes will come out, because it depends on on some schedules with some potential guests, but I am going to cover some legends around Nazis in Los Angeles around the time of of World War two. I've got some UFO stories coming up, some true crime, a lot of good stuff. It's already been a great year so far for the podcast.
Thank you for listening. and good night.