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