Episode 6 - The Hitman

January seventeenth, twenty twenty four, phone conversation with Hey, Danny Smith from meremr PDI catch it at that time? Are you good?

No?

I'm good. This case is.

Has got a life of its own. And I've learned that two boxes became three, that became six, and I'm like, you know what, I'm just gonna set up in my garage and work from here from now on.

Well, I think I can close some circles for you.

I don't know who you know and what you don't, Daniel, but I could kind of put if you think of it as terms of that is silent, I can kind of put all the voices in the perspective behind it, people and each and every one of these people that died, and each and every one of these people.

I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff, and this is cold blooded. The Apollo Jim murders. In January of twenty twenty four, Miramar Police Department held a press conference to announce that it had sufficient evidence to officially reopen a nearly forty year old cold case, our case, the unsolid homicide of twenty eight year old Billy Halper.

Good morning, I want on behalf of the Miramar Police Department and the Helping family. We want to thank all of you for coming out.

With Billy's sister Laurie at his side. Detective Danny Smith addressed members of the South Florida.

Press October twenty first, nineteen eighty six. Billy Helper was killed in his Miarmore count home. Billy was bound, beaten, and ultimately killed. This was done in broad daylight.

The story of murder, muscles and the mob played like breaking news and.

Also new at noon Miramar Police announcing a major break in a cold case and involves.

The brutal murder of a firefighter in his home back in nineteen eighty six, and dominated the front page of the next morning's Miami Herald. But of course, Danny and I had been at this for more than a year, knocking on doors, interviewing witnesses, testing DNA, and generally trying to untangle the web of facts, lies, and legend surrounding the Apollo Gym, which we believed was at the center of a string of unsolved murders.

Billy's murder has been tied to numerous other murders throughout the Daytenbrower area back in the nineteen eighties. Central to those murders was a former Miami Day police officer, Gil Fernandez, and his partner Burt Christie, who both worked and owned or ran Apollo Gym out of Hollywood.

The goal first to raise awareness among the general public that Billy's case was still unsolved and that Billy, like any victim, was still entitled to his share of justice.

We believe that Billy heard something he shouldn't have heard, and he saw something he shouldn't have seen, and we believed that Billy was killed to keep him quiet and for nothing else.

Danny also wanted to appeal to any potential witnesses who might know something about Billy's murder to come forward and share that information with police, someone who may have been too afraid or too involved to come forward before.

So we're asking the public to come forward and even give us a name of someone who they believe was there that we can potentially get their DNA and compare that to what we have.

A DNA match could help Danny finally close the case on Billy's murder, but more importantly, it would give Billy's family the closure they so deeply deserved.

As a possibility that someone out there knows something, knows who may be.

Responsible for this. If there was a message that you.

Had for then what would it be.

Come forward, Call Danny, call them, call Mirrama, mirror mar and thank you for coming and being brave. Don't be afraid, come and tell them what you know. I'd be grateful, My family would be grateful.

Less than four hours after the press conference ended and was televised on local news channels in South Florida, Danny received a phone call from someone whose name who's nowhere to be found in the original case file or ours. The caller claimed he had information not just about Billy's murder, but also about Gil Fernandez, Harry Collier, and even a couple of new names of people he believed were responsible for Billy's murder.

There were other people that were, at least, let me say, like part of the read from the gym that no one has ever mentioned.

And like anyone who was in the South Florida bodybuilding scene. He was also a regular at the Apollo Gym. For reasons that will become apparent, this witness would only reveal his identity to law enforcement, requesting that information not be released.

I became very close to Burke, and I would be at the gym all the time, all the time, so I'd be listening to things that I should have been listened to, and then I would always walk out, and I guess they appreciated the fact that I didn't want to know anything that was going.

On and what was going on. According to the original investigation, drug dealing, shakedowns and deadly ripoffs all directed by former Mister Florida Burt Christie and carried out by Gil Fernandez and his crew. But according to this new witness, Bert Christy was not always the one calling the shots. He mentioned a name that neither Danny or I had heard mentioned in this investigation, a name that for now is being redacted.

Have you ever heard the name?

Not a name I've come across now, No, I.

Don't think anyone knows him. In working at the gym was a guy from New York and he would come down once a month or it would go outside and would not park. They would be pulling into the porking lot, but Bert would be nervous that take.

He would go get in the car and be gone for whatever time, half hour, hour, hour, and a half.

Whatever, I'm sorry you said he was Gills boss, or Bert's boss was Gills boss.

And was Burt's.

It was the first time Danny had heard mention of Christie's boss, someone who potentially was not just aware of Christie's criminal enterprise, but behind it.

Was one of those shady guys. When his name was mentioned, everyone said, don't ever save that name. Don't ever save that name. And I guess in retrospect he was giving bird orders and what would happen was.

Burt would come back and he would be nervous as shit.

But there was one visit in particular that always stuck in his memory. It was nineteen eighty five. Business at the Hollow was booming, and with each new score, Burtngill's crew was getting more brazen.

Are don't work, Gil and Tommy all went out and bought beautiful cars, and all of their wives got implants. It's everything you told someone not to do after committing a crime and making money.

Not only that, but according to Mark Lopez, drug use among the Apollos in a circle, particularly the injection of anabolic steroids, was getting out of control.

You got to realize when you start loading your body up with lots of artificial distosterone that can make it super aggressive, and it can kind of distort your thoughts, so it could make you excessively violent if you don't know how to rail yourself in.

Eventually, their rising profile started to attract the attention of law enforcement, including the South Florida Field Office the FBI. Obviously, with law enforcement sniffing around the Apollo, the larger enterprise was at risk, even with Gill's connection within the police force, because as we know, where there are detectives, there are potential informants, maybe even a whole gym full of them. So on one of his boss's visits, Christy was given strict instructions, get your house in order.

I mean when he came down with the last times and you could see it in his mind if something concerned him so much that he just had to go home. Now, whether he got orders, I don't know. Whether the orders were so over the top that there were people that just had to be cleaned up, I don't know.

Thanks to the information presented in gil and Bert's later trial, we know that both local and federal law enforcement had been surveilling the Apollo gym and looking for for any Apollo employees who may have been willing to offer incriminating testimony against their bosses. In fact, when we first talked to Mark Lopez, he described what it was like to live under the eye of both the cops and Gil Fernandez.

At that time, we knew that law enforcement was out there poking around about Gil and I know when it happened. I told Gil about it. I specifically told him that BSO is trying to call me in and call my girl in with me.

These particular detectives were looking for information on the nineteen eighty three murders on Danger Road.

We met them for the first time in the Broward maw two detectives. I said, you guys, honestly think that me or anybody else like me is going to cooperate with you, because if I ever agreed to do something like that, I said, you know, my fate is sealed.

Gil had become the top suspect in the still unsolved triple homicide out on Danger Road, and by nineteen eighty five he was beginning to feel the heat.

As time went on, you could see that there was some type of underlying issue, and you can just see it in someone. Then when they're carrying something heavy right, or they're worried about something. He was easily agitated, you know, when he was agitated, like you could see it on his face. And I would always when I saw that look, I would give him a wide berth.

Everyone at the Apollo was unnoticed. With law enforcement closing in. Gil was on a tear and according to the investigation, anyone that could potentially inform on him was seen as collateral damage. And according to this new witness, that meant Billy Halburn could have found himself squarely in Bert and Gill's crosshairs.

He got a little sloppy Burton gulp, and I saw things I probably shouldn't have seen, and a greody guess because of the fact that Billy was there alive, he probably saw things he shouldn't have seen. And I think that's the reason Harry was called down, well, whatever reason, because I recalled vividly that went towards the end when Bibe came down.

The caller is again referring to the man he believed to be Bert Christie's boss.

Bert not that he was nervous that he would come down normally, but he would when he was visibly upset when he learned that Harry came down.

Harry as in Harry Collier, the same Harry Collier whose fingerprint would later be found at Mitch Hall's murder.

And that's when this thing started getting out of control. Anybody who do anything. They just started going after him and silencing everybody.

One thing you learned from talking with witnesses with more than a passing understanding of the criminal world. They have a particular fondness for understatement.

Okay, Harry was gone. Harry was not a friendly guy.

Also, according to this new witness, Harry Collier had a very particular skill set.

I don't know how I came out of this a lot, but to make a long story short, it would be.

Talking about knives and shit. I so know that he was really into knives.

The medical examiner determined that the official manner of Billy Helpern's murder was trangulation, but someone had also likely used a large knife to cut Billy's throat, leaving a wound so jagged and deep it appeared that they were trying to remove his head. Six months later, Mitch Hall and his girlfriend char Linda would be killed the very same way it was an opening that Danny couldn't pass up.

So actually, I'd like to stay on Harry for a minute, and I'm going to be very upfront with you. I am more than ninety percent sure that Harry Collier was at Billy's and took part in his in his murder.

I know Harry was down for an extended period of time, and it seemed like everything was happening during that span of time when Harry was down here.

That's what he was down for. If you asked me, I guess.

As they were backtracking over their people, anyone met new anything.

Our witnesses theory Billy, like a lot of other guys at the gym, had learned too much about Bert and Gill's criminal activity, specifically the triple homicide on Danger Road, and according to Dave Fasano, Bert and Gill's involvement was an open secret.

Everybody knew about it, everybody had talked about everyone knew about it, especially the guys that were worked out there.

Now, Danny and I checked and there was no record anywhere that Billy had ever contacted either local or federal law enforcement. But perhaps because of his clean record or a refusal to be part of Gill's gang. Billy was a threat, and threats had to be eliminated. Here's Dave Fasano again, this time recalling that fateful morning in October of nineteen eighty six.

I went to work.

And when I was pulling into the parking lot, you could see Billy's block from the swimming pool, and I saw the ambulances and stuff, and I'm like wow. And I got out of the car and people were coming up to me, Hey, somebody was murdered. Somebody was murdered. And I walked down the street and I see that it's Billy's house and I realized it's Billy. I kind of went back to the pool by myself, and I was going over and over in my head. You know that Bert must be involved.

Mitch Hall and Charlnda Drought were killed less than six months later.

So Mitch Hall and Charlinda his girlfriend, who appeared to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, we were killed with a very similar mo.

That Billy was.

And you let just see this points the atmosphere of the one was looking over the shoulder towards the egg.

Who's next.

Because of a short spend period of time, all of a sudden all his people died, so.

Who was ultimately responsible who was calling the shots? Harry Collier was rumored to be a hit man from up North with a thing for large knives, the kind of weapon used to nearly decapitate Billy, Mitch and Charlnda. Collier also happened to leave a fingerprint on a piece of electrical tape at the Mitch Hall crime scene, even without his DNA. This is strong circumstantial evidence that he was at least one of the men behind all three murders. But if it was Collier, who was with him who

The theory is that Billy would not have opened the door for Harry. He didn't know Harry. He wouldn't open the door for Harry, but he knew Jimmy hin Note action and he grew up with Jimmy high Note. And my theory is that Harry and Jimmy high Note with one other person, whether it's Gill or someone else.

Once again, it appears all signs seem to point to Gil Fernandez, but without any physical evidence linking him to the crime scene, it might be impossible to know for sure if he was there, perhaps helping high Note and call your tie Billy up, giving the orders to kill, or even doing it himself. And while he may not have any proof that Gil Fernandez killed Billy Halpurn, what about the murders of Jimmy high Note and Harry Collier?

Not to mention the fact that shortly thereafter, I don't know if you remember Gil had to go to the hospital with lead in his eye.

I remember, that's right. The day after high Note and Collier were shot dead. Police reports show that Gil was admitted to the emergency room with a very telling injury. Somehow a small piece of lead had lacerated his eye. According to the report, it was a shard of iron from a weightlifting accident. But our witness had an opinion about that too.

What do you feel about that? That excuse that it was a dumbbell that broke, or of.

Course, of course you know better than that, and I know better than that.

Of course, now in retrospect, it's hideous that I believed what I believe. You know, it was obviously a freight mint from lead from a gunshot.

In October of nineteen eighty six, Harry Collier was summoned to the Apollo Gym in Hollywood Beach, Florida. Burton Gill's operations had gotten sloppy. People were talking, and according to the investigation, it was Collier's job to help clean things up.

Every day you'd go in, they're wondering who's going to be dead next. That was the atmosphere in the gym at the time.

It reminded me of something Billy's friend Dave Fasano told us about a particularly ominous conversation with Burt Christy just a few days before Billy was killed.

I was at the gym one day and I was working out, and Bert came up to me, So your friends would Biblity to help hert right? And I said yeah, He says, how good a friend? He says, well, I don't want you hanging out with him anymore. I don't want you to go to his house. I don't want you to get in a car with him. I don't want you to go out with him to a club. I don't want you to do nothing with him. If he calls you, you make an excuse, but don't go anywhere near him.

Later that week, Billy Helperan was murdered.

And I'm thinking, holy shit, Bert had to know something, because why did he tell me to stay away from Billy? So Bert in a way protected me at the same time, was involvable killing one of my closest friends.

It may have been a warning, a mentor and coach looking out for his bodybuilding protegee, but it also clearly was a threat. And you know what, it worked.

When the cops came to me, they asked me to speak, asked to speak to me. They came in the gym and they said, it's David Fasano win here and they pointed me out. They came over and they pulled me out of the gym and the frock in the parking lot and started questioning me. The first question was that you know, there's all these murders and your name is in all the phone books that we've recovered.

Why why is that one?

And I said, well, because we all worked out here to pollow gym. And we're friends from this gym. I remember just being nervous as hell because Gil was looking out the window.

And I was terrified.

I was afraid I was going to get killed because and so I kept my mouth shut. And I felt guilty for keeping my mouth shut at that time because I thought I could help Billy, but I was terrified that they were going to kill me.

He had reason to be afraid. Supposedly, Bitch Hall had heard the same rumors about Bert and Ill that Billy had, and when Billy was killed, he made the decision to come forward and share what he knew with law enforcement. It's still painful for his sister Kim to recount what happened next.

Charlette was pulled from the shower. My brother was not home yet, and they cut her throat. And then my brother, he Messa, went to the store because they have had a six pack of beer on the kitchen counter, and then I guess he went to the room and he tried to get to his gun, which was in the closet, and I guess they cut his throat.

The truth was no one was safe, as high note in Collier's murders proved when it's time to clean house. Even the hitman gets hit.

My brother died May sixth. When I went to the funeral, of course, he had like five hundred people at the funeral. He was very pop. My brother and Jimmy High Note was there and he came up to me and he was sweating. He it seemed like he was like just got out of the shower and never dried off. He was sweating and sweating, and he hugged me. I'm sorry about Mitch. I'll never forget it. He said, I'm going to be next. And I said, Jimmy, you need to go to the police. You have to go talk to somebody.

He was shot alongside the same man who most likely killed her brother, Harry Collier. The realization hit her like a ton of bricks. She had known Jimmy high Note her whole life, she just never knew what he was allegedly capable of.

I believe in my heart he was there, and I just have this feeling and I'm thinking, oh my god, I if Jimmy he was there and he killed my brother. I actually hugged his murderer.

During this investigation, Detective Danny Smith made efforts to learn more about both Jimmy high Note and Harry Collier, and while plenty of people had memories of high Note, who was a South Florida local, Collier had fewer Florida ties, and until his arrival at the Apollo, he was relatively unknown. But in the fall of twenty twenty three, we were

Our hom side was October twenty first of eighty six, and then seven months later, about May of eighty seven, a guy the name of Mitch Hall and Charlon de Drought were killed, and then eight days later, Jimmy and Harry were killed, and that was in Pines.

Harry Collier's wife agreed to cooperate with Detective Smith's investigation because, like so many people affected by these crimes, she's been left with too many unanswered questions for too long.

I think the common denominator here is everyone involved in all these homsides somehow had a connection with Gil Fernandez. Now maybe ninety five percent of the people that I've spoken to have all said, why are you doing this? This case is solved, will be already told gil did it, Bert did it. It's a done deal. And I've explained to them that actually it's not.

It's clear from her body language there is no love lost for Gil Fernandez, and no matter how painful it was to revisit her husband's murder, she knew it was important to finally confront the truth.

She essentially said that she's a mom, you know, as a wife, she would want to know and find out exactly what happened and who did what, and if there's still someone struggling with finding out what happened, I think she would like to assist with that.

We will paraphrase her answers here because quite honestly, what she told Danny Smith sheds all new light on many of the details of this case. Now. Webby explained that she and Harry had relocated from the Northeast to Coral Springs, Florida, in the early eighties. She got a job teaching in the Broward County Public school system, and Harry, she told us, worked as a counselor at the Broward Juvenile Detention Center,

She mentioned Gil and Bert and Harry. They were always together. They did everything together. They basically woke up and their daily routine was they would call each other, they would hang out with each other, and they would do everything together.

And it wasn't long before she noticed a disturbing change in her husband's demeanor and appearance.

She said that she saw the change in Harry, that she saw that he got more aggressive. He put on a lot of size, and his entire personality changed a bit in an aggressive manner. She at various times would see him with vials of something some kind of a liquid inside the house.

Thanks to a new regimen of intravenous steroids, Harry was constantly sweaty, irritable, and was quickly bulking up.

It was almost a situation where even when he was home or she was around him, she didn't recognize him as the same Harry that she knew, or the same Harry that she married.

But hysteroic aduse was not the only thing about her husband that was raising her suspicions. According to Harry, he had a new job with Gil. They were doing what he called private investigations, a job that often kept him out all night, armed and flushed with cash.

And he even asked her to hold on to a gun, which was completely out of character and not anything that Harry had asked his wife to do. So she was immediately suspicious. Didn't know exactly what was going on, but definitely knew that there was something the faarius that was happening.

But one night in particular stuck out in her memory. Then on me was seven months pregnant and back in the Northeast at her mother's house on bed rest. Harry called her to let her know that he had to do one last job for Gil and he would come join her at her moms as soon as it was done.

And he said that Miami, we're going to go do a job tonight and just pray for me that everything works out.

According to Harry, this particular job was going to be dangerous but potentially very profitable.

And as you can imagine a wife hearing that from her husband, you would be worried. But at the same time, she's got to be thinking, what exactly is going on that I have to pray for my husband on a job where he's doing PI work.

A week later, Harry informed Nuami that he was finally leaving Florida and heading back north in a hurry. But when he never arrived, never called, Noomi had a feeling something had gone terribly wrong. Noemmi made some calls. Gil's wife told her that Harry had come over for dinner Gil before they left together.

And Gil's ex wife said, Harry came over, hung out with Gil for a short period of time. I believe they had dinner together, and then that was all she knew.

But according to Noami, when she reached out to Gil, he denied it, claiming he hadn't seen Harry in days.

In Noemi's words, he was yelling at her. He was saying, I don't know why you keep calling me. Stop calling me. He's out somewhere. There's no reason for you to call me anymore about this.

The next day, she reported her husband missing. Four days after that, his body was discovered in an empty townhouse in Pembroke Pines, a single gunshot wound to the back of the head.

And ultimately the police get with her and they say that Harry never left Florida. He was supposed to go up north. He never left. He was with Gil, and from there Gil and Harry went somewhere together, and then Harry never came back.

Miami said that for nearly four decades, she's been convinced that Gil Fernandez pulled the trigger.

Noemi knew that Gil had something to do with Harry's murder because he was the last person he was with and was never heard from again.

It's been harder to come to terms with the idea that her husband may have also been a killer.

I had a very lengthy conversation regarding Harry's fingerprint being.

At the hall Draft murder.

Scene and Noemi's I guess the impression of it is that Harry would never do anything like that on his own, and if his fingerprint was there, he was forced to do it, and the fact that he was there or even took part in a double murder was strictly as a result of Gil forcing him, probably by a threat of death.

The one problem with that theory, of course, was that Danny's investigation still had no proof Gil was there at all.

Right now, there's no information that shows that Gil was at that house. There's no forensics, there's no witnesses that.

Put him there, even with the fingerprints to prove it. Jemmy was still convinced that the Harry Collier she married was no killer, But it turns out that she might just have the proof that he was. Toward the end of the conversation with don't let me mention something that caught him off guard. Months after her husband's murder, she found something amongst her husband's things that did not match anything they had at home.

Naami mentioned that her mom, know Me's mom came across a towel that appeared to be bloodstained, and it was shortly after the Helper murder.

The towel had been washed, but the dark stains were unmistakable and the implications unforgivable.

And she opted to keep that towel, hold it and basically keep it as safe keeping. And I don't think she knew exactly what she was going to do with it, but she felt it was important enough to hold on to.

After her husband, Harry's murder, she moved back to the Northeast, taking the bloody towel with her, but eventually Noemmi contacted investigators in Florida to tell them what she had.

She reached out to the Broward Sheriff's office and she said that I've got this towel. She gave the circumstances around the towel, and she said, if you guys want it, come on up and get it.

I'll give it to you.

Noemi gave the towel to Browid County investigators and it was filed as evidence. But according to our records, the towel had never been tested, the mysterious stains never identified, and most importantly, any potential DNA never collected, so whose blood was it? Could it be Mitch Hall's Shrulinda Droughts