Pushkin previously on Deep Cover.
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.
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. We have a name, we have a victim.
Last November, I traveled to Philadelphia to meet some of Iron Wood's relatives.
Hello, my name is Michelle Wood, and Ron Wood is my uncle.
It struck me right away that Michelle used the present tense iroan is her uncle, as if on some level he's still alive for her, and he kind of is. He still looms in her memories, even though Michelle was just three years old back in nineteen eighty nine when he was murdered.
I always get this vision, but I don't know if it was like me just thinking about what happened, or if I actually remembered, but I always have this vision of on my grandmom's living room and everybody like in a circle. Hugging each other and crying.
For Michelle, this vision, this memory is from the time that her uncle died, when they all gathered at her grandmother's house in North Philadelphia to mourn. And you heard her say, she can't even be sure if it's a real memory or something that she's just been told about so many times that it has slowly leached into her consciousness and become a memory. That vision of her family was something that she recalled and felt every time she
walked into her grandmother's living room. Growing up, Michelle says she was very close with her grandmother, Dorothy Wood, Iran's mother. Michelle often wanted to ask her grandmother to talk about the past, to share some stories about her uncle Aran, but Michelle didn't ask because she'd been warned not to.
My dad will always say like, if you have any questions about your uncle, asks me. You know, don't really try to talk to your grandma aboudy. So I would just listen when someone says something, but I didn't ask because I just felt like it was like a short topic.
Occasionally Dorothy would talk about Iran. Michelle says back then, even as a child, she could sense her grandmother's pain, and she also sensed that her grandmother was trying to make sense of what had happened, of why Iran had been killed, because no one had ever been able to offer the family any explanation, not the police, or the neighbors, or even Iran's friends, and then not knowing seemed to eat away at Dorothy.
I think that when it comes to certain particular deaths, I think that sometimes we put on a front with the world like we've gotten over it, because maybe people feel like they might be taught to hearing about it, or it's been so long you should be over it.
Michelle remembers that her grandmother often recalled things that Iran said before he died. Apparently there were certain Bible verses to paraphrase, like when Jesus said, put your sword back into its place, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword. Dorothy wondered aloud, Why had Iron quoted this particular verse? What was he trying to tell us?
Dorothy puzzled over this and other things that Iran said, as if these memories or these cryptic bits somehow held the secret to her son's fate.
I think she was trying to get answers. I feel like she was still heartbroken a body.
In some ways, Michelle was also looking for answers. She too wanted to know more about her uncle Iran, But there was perhaps quite understandably, a sense among some family members that the past was the past. It was painful, so best to let it be, best to move on. For Dorothy, this brokenheartedness, this yearning for an answer, It continued for a very long time, but there was no movement, no news, nothing. It seemed possible she'd never know who
murdered her son or why. But then, seventeen years later, in two thousand and six, the Phillip d showed up at her house and knocked on her door. These cops were acting on intel from Scott and Terry's investigation. This door knock, it would set off a chain of events that would upend the Wood family and its understanding of the past, and it would instill in the family another yearning,
entirely a yearning for justice. I'm Jay Calburn and this is Deep Cover, Season four, The Nameless Man, Episode three, The Yearning. When I started working on this story, one of the first things I did was reach out to the Wood family. I wrote letters, emails, sent a few texts. Initially I got no response, and then finally I heard back from Michelle right away. She became my ambassador to the Wood family. She told me that I really needed to speak with her father and her uncle, Iran's brothers.
They were in their twenties when Iron died. Michelle suggested that I come down to Philadelphia and that we all get together. The Wood family had never really spoken publicly about Iran's death, not in any depth or detail anyhow, so I was surprised by this invitation, but I can't take any credit for it. It was all Michelle. She made it happen, and I got the sense it wasn't even that she wanted to speak so much as she wanted to listen to hear what her dad and her
uncle had to say. All these years later, Michelle still yearned to know more about her own family and her uncle Aran, the man who'd been murdered under mysterious circumstances when she was just three years old. We all met up in an apartment that I rented in the Fairmount neighborhood of Philly. It was me, a producer, Amy, and three members of the Wood family. Michelle, her dad Michael, and her uncle Tyrone. The five of us crammed into
a tiny shoe box of a living room. I mean the chairs were jammed in so tight our feet were practically touching. Dorothy passed away a few years ago, so sadly she wasn't there are we rolling on both?
Okay, so let's talk about names.
We're gonna pause for a second. That's my names, names, because the first thing you got to know about the Wood family is everyone has a nickname. Tyrone he's the youngest child, the baby. He was almost eight years younger than Iran. His nickname is the Golden Child because as a kid he got away with everything. But was that uh was that like a name that you embraced or were you like, Oh.
I embraced it. I embraced it because I knew it was true.
And then there's Michael, the middle child. He's Michelle's dad. He was six years younger than Iran, and he has a nickname too.
Just go erin from the seventies like that, because when I started DJing in eighty two, that was still to discover the air was still coming. So that's why a lot of people, some people I grew up with. They know me as they'll call me DJ Mike, They'll call me Disco Mike.
Disco. Yeah.
It was clear to me from the start, just a few minutes into our conversation that this is a family that likes to laugh. They told me they've always enjoyed each other's company. Tyrone the Golden Child remembers Thanksgivings when he would cook dinner and then cuddle up with his knees on the couch where he'd fall asleep instantly.
Yes, we had a you know, football game one because I cooked and not all the time, not all the time. But are you gonna talk about that?
Okay, okay, that's how I was at my grandma host to a couch, always fell asleep on couch.
Oh yeah, that was a sleeping film.
Yeah.
Well, you guys said something.
You guys have a close family.
Yeah. Yeah.
At this point, there was a pause in our conversation. No one spoke for a moment. You could almost feel a muted sadness creep into the room like cold air through a crack in the wall. And then, totally unprompted, Michelle said, uh.
You know, I often wonder how it would have been if my uncle was still up, you know, getting to know him more.
Where does that thought leave you when you go down that road?
Oh I guess now, I feel like this would be a good time to start, you know, bridging the gifts and stuff with our.
Family, bridging the gaps. Michelle was referring to other relatives in the family who knew Iran that they'd lost touch with. But as I saw it, there seemed to be other gaps too, gaps in memory, things that Michelle couldn't remember or never knew about her uncle Iran. And that's really while we were here to talk about the one brother who was absent. Iran, of course, had a nickname of his own, Cat. Apparently it came from the animated cartoon Top Cat. It was popular back in the sixties.
The top Cat.
Top Cat was the leader of a gang of alley cats from Manhattan who were always hustling with get rich quick schemes. Their plans usually backfired comically. So Iran was a big fan of the show, and apparently he was also a smooth operator.
Oh yeah, he was. He's a smooth, smooth dude. I mean, you know, he, like I said, he wasn't the biggest guy. But everybody respected him. I mean they just and they listened to him. You know, old cat said, this cat said that he loved he loved cats. Soon he loved cads.
I remember I was funny, right because I remember he would when he would kiss the cats, he would kiss him in the name off and my mom was, I'll tell his girlfriend, I don't know.
Why you kiss.
On the line, he'd be kissing them cats in the.
In the neighborhood. Iran seemed to embrace the role of topcat, a little guy with a lot of bluster. He was a good basketball player and a ladies man too, a real sharp dresser. In fact, as he got older and could afford it, Iran had his clothing custom made by a local tailor. Iran very much played the role of the big brother, looking out for his siblings, keeping them safe. When Michael or Tyrone played basketball or hung out at the park, they never had to worry about people messing
with them. Everyone knew they were cats, younger brothers, and according to Tyrone, this allowed them to remain just kids much longer than they otherwise would have, even though there was crime in their neighborhood. The Woods House never got burglarized. This was Aron's doing. The brother told me, this was his reputation, keeping them safe like a shield, or so
it seemed. In the late seventies and early eighties, when the Wood brothers were coming of age, Philadelphia was grappling with an uptick in homicides, and at times the threat of danger felt very real to the Wood family. There was one occasion when Iran was in his twenties, Aram was at the park. Someone shot off a gun and the bullet grazed at Iran's body. He had to go to the hospital to get patched up. What was a close call and reminder that no one was entirely safe.
The brothers say that Iran was the type of young man who was always testing boundaries, pushing it a little bit, which sometimes caused tension with their mom, Dorothy. Even so Iran helped out. Whatever money he made, he always shared it with their mom. Here's Michael, I.
Do not even give him money.
You know, whatever various jobs or whatever he did out on the STREETL like that.
He wasn't no choir boy, you.
Know, because he was evolving different things. You know, he was, I mean, I know he was in this you know, selling drugs and stuff like that.
Michael and Tyrone didn't know all the details, but they understood their older brother was quote no choir boy. By the time that he was in his late twenties, Iran ran a local speakeasy and he also sold drugs. But to his brothers he was top cat, the lovable rascal who was always there for them. When it came time for Disco Mike to go to the prom, it was Iran who took him to get a snazzy suit at a men's shop called Today's Man. Later, when Michael wanted to find work as a DJ, Iran had him spin
records at his speakeasy. Tyrone, the youngest the Golden Child, remembers fondly being in his twenties and going to Cats speakeasy when Disco Mike would spend his records.
He would DJ and my brother would you know, run the place, and you know, at the at the end of the night we would go up there. He'd count the money or whatever, give Michael whatever, And that was like a really fun time for me because it was a time I got to spend time with both my brothers at the same time with no no, no drama or no nothing wrong, if just a happy time.
Tyrone smiled when he told this story. You could see him doing that thing where for a moment, you kind of step away from yourself and go back in time. It was sweet to watch, but also painful because I knew what came next. We're gonna take a quick break. There are single moments in time when fate takes a jagged turn, like a dog like intersection that dumps you into a dead end. For the Wood family, this moment occurred in April of nineteen eighty nine. The Wood brothers
were adults. They had families of their own. Iran was thirty three, Michael was twenty eight, and Tyrone, the baby, the Golden Child, was twenty six. It was Tyrone who got the call from their mother telling him that something terrible had happened. Their oldest brother had been shot in the head and left for dead. The police didn't have a shooter. They didn't even have any leads either. Tyrone and Michael were at a loss. Sure, maybe Ron was no choir boy, but as far as they knew, he
didn't have any enemies either. As Tyrone recalled.
Everybody liked him.
That's why We was baffled, like, oh, somebody shot a Ron shot Aron. You can't nah, no way, And I guess that's what Pussimos beginning.
Couldn't figure that out.
Still in a state of shock, the brothers rushed over to be with their mom. How did your mom? What state was your mom?
And at that point, I know she was really out of it. She was really destroyed. She was really destroyed. She was in kind of a bad way. So we tried to just be there for her. I don't know what can we say. You know, that's her oldest son. You know, I didn't know how to react, especially to a violent crime like that. I was kind of mad at God. I was like, how can you do this to me? I was thinking, well, what do we wanna do now? You know that sort of thing, you know,
how do we how do we go on? And then cause you know, that was the first real violence in my life, and that at that time, it took me. I went to a tailspind. I wasn't myself, you know, cause I was just in self destruct mode. I guess day before his funeral, I disappeared. I was drinking and and you know, as a matter of fact, I came to my mother's house the day before the funeral, uh in the middle of the night, and they made me go upstairs and go to bed.
They took away his keys. They didn't want him driving. They just wanted to keep him safe. A few days later, Tyrone went to the spot where his brother was killed on the thirteen hundred block of Stillman Street.
I actually want to see, oh, where it happened. When was the last place he was at? Yeah, I also want to see the last place he was at.
Basically, did he give you any peace or anything?
No.
I wept a lot. I don't even I don't even know who was with me. I don't know if I was by myself. I don't know. I just know I drove there and I just cried and cried and just you know, but I had to see. I had to see the last place my brother was here was on earth.
Meanwhile, Michael, the middle brother, he was also struggling. The night before the service, he went to the funeral home to see his brother in a coffin, and in this quiet moment, he kissed around on the forehead. What Michael remembers next is the wake. Everyone gathered at their mom's house to grieve and pay their respects. Michael was still grasping for answers. There was still no new information on who murdered Iran, just rumors speculation about who might have
a motive, but it was all chatter. At some point, Michael recalls, one of his aunts sat him down because there was something important that you wanted to tell him.
She said, you have to forgive the person they killed your brother. And I don't even know this person is. I know he's somewhere around, I don't know. It could be somebody that came in in Allowance where I worked at DJ and stuff like that. I don't even know who this person is. Because it was like all kinds of rumors or I think so and so did it was he had an incident with this person. He had an incidant with that person, you know, so we don't even know who the enemy is.
Michael had no idea who'd killed his brother, not at all, but his aunt was insistent that he needed to embrace the Lord's Prayer one verse especially.
Which it says, particularly in the Lord's Prayer that in order for God to forgive you for your sin, you have to forgive your enemies like that.
But this raises his question of like, how do you forgive someone that you don't even know who that person is?
You don't know because you don't. I mean, it's hard, it's hard. I'm told this, and technically did I forgive that person at the time? My aunt is telling me this, and it's in my mind, but I don't think, be honest with you, I don't think right then, and I'm not forgiving that person.
And how could he? How can you forgive a person you don't know, someone you can't picture, someone who has no face and no name. And this underscores a central irony and tragedy of this entire story. For the investigators who were trying to solve this case, the federal agents, their nameless man was the victim. Until they found him, they had nothing, no case, and no closure. But for the Woods, their nameless man was the perpetrator, the murderer, and until they found out who he was, there could
be no forgiveness nor any peace either. In the aftermath of Iran's death, everyone in the Wood family struggled in their own way. Tyrone, the youngest, the golden child, struggled with alcoholism.
Basically lost I lost a lot my first marriage. I lost that, so I had to basically just built myself back up again.
Tyrone went to rehab, got sober, and leaned into his faith.
I started reading the book again and that's basically what got me back on track. I've realized that what am I gaining by being mad at God? It I mean, it wasn't God that pulled the trigger.
Tyrone says, it's not like he found all the answers. He still struggled with the how and why of his brother's death. Both brothers, Tyrone and Michael, did everything they could to be there for their mom.
We all just made sure that she.
Didn't feel like she was alone, you know, so we never let her be, and I think in time she I can't say she completely.
Got over it, but she kind of being sided. She was a Christian, she kind of.
Accepted it and for what it was, and she just gravitated towards us.
She kind of accepted it. Tyrone said, I was reminded of what Michelle had said from the beginning about her grandmother, how sometimes it seemed she put up a front to the whole world like she'd moved on, because that's what people wanted her to do. But within the immediate family, they all kind of knew that Dorothy still agonized over her son's death, in part because she blamed herself for not doing more to keep her on safe. Here's Michael, the middle brother again.
I remember she was always saying that I wish I could have really talked to him, or try to spend more time with him, or try to reach him. She kind of felt that she failed as a mother.
As far as Tyrone, the youngest, remembers this too, how their mom kept blaming herself.
She wished she could have did things a little different. But you can't.
You can't. And I told it all. I said, you can't. You can't say that because you did the best you could what you have. I got told her to say, you didn't slack on him, you did the best you could understand circumstances. And then you raised three boys three men. You've made three boys into men. That's not easy. So I'd say you the best, mom.
Even so, the question remained who was responsible for her son's death. In truth, they all still wondered about Iran and what had happened. Late at night, Tyrone found himself at home on the couch watching true crime TV shows.
I used to watch.
The unsolved mischievey shows and I often thought about calling because I was like, this is not right. How can a person get killed and no one knows anything.
It wasn't until one day in two thousand and six, nearly two decades after Iran's death, that the family thought they might finally learn the truth.
A police officer came to my mother's house.
He said that we have a new lead about what happened with your son in nineteen eighty nine. And you know, she don't open the door for anybody, so she automatically just told them.
She said, look, give me your card. My son's going to call you.
So she's talking about me because she said she wasn't able to deal with it.
Tyrone told his mother not to worry about it. He would call the detectives. So I'm kind of nervous, and then I just called.
The detective said we were still investigating, but then we found out who killed your brother.
And at first that's really all the police tell the Wood family, but it was enough to kindle some hope, to make them believe that maybe, after all these years of guessing and speculation, that they might finally learn what happened to Iran.
We didn't like the speculation the family, and I thought that this would be good good if we found at least what happened to them. Can't do nothing about it, can't bring them back, but if we'll find out the truth, and the truth will probably help us help everybody in the family.
That was the hope that the truth would help them, heal them, bring them some closure. But it would be many, many months before they would learn the full extent of what the authorities at pieced together. And during this time, Scott Duffy and Terry Mortimer, along with the PHILLYPD, they were hard at work scrambling to gather evidence with the hope that they might build a strong enough case to make an arrest and go to trial next time. On deep cover, it was definitely a different type of case.
You know, a skinhead coming.
To Philadelphi to kill somebody, a cowardly act.
We'd say it to Craig. You were there, we weren't. Perhaps you blocked it out. Let's just drive and unlock your mind.
So we're like, police, please get down, get down, And I'm yelling. Others are yelling tough for our lungs. And he just stands there like a deer in the headlights, just staring at it, staring at me, staring at them. And I could see in his mind, I can see in his face he's deciding what to do.
Deep Cover is produced by Amy Gaines McQuaid and Jacob Smith. It's edited by Karen Shakergee mastering by Jake Gorski. 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 Junior. Special thanks to Jerry Williams, Sarah Nis, Greta Cone and Jake Flanagan. I'm Jake Calpert.
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