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You are now listening to True Murder, The Most Shocking Killers in True Crime History and the authors that have written about them Gaesy, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every week, another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host, journalist and author Dan Zupansky.
Good evening. This is your host Dan Zupanski for the program True Murder, The most Shocking Killers in True Crime History and the authors that have written about them. On January twenty third, two thousand, already battered by an ice storm, the rural Obama resort town A mentone was about to be struck by an even more terrifying freak catastrophe. Hurtling down the highway in a Lincoln Town car was Heyward Bissele,
a four hundred pound madman on a murder rampage. Ramming the pickup truck of Don and Rhea Perch, Bistle lured Don Perch onto the road, running him down with his car. Bissiles next targeted the home of James and Sue Pumphrey. After stabbing James Pumfrey in the stomach, Bissele was thwarted by two family dogs who gave their lives to protect their owners. Their sacrifice bought the Pumphreys enough time to get a gun and scare off Bissele, who didn't know
the weapon was actually inoperable. When Bessel was finally stopped, police discovered that he wasn't alone. Occupying the passenger seat beside him was the mutilated, partially dismembered body of his pregnant girlfriend, Patricia Ann Booher. In February two thousand and two, Missile pled guilty but in sine and was sent to prison for life. Was he really crazy? Or was he crazy like a fox turning it on and off to
try to beat a death sentence for Boor's murder. The subject of our program this evening is a book called Blood Highway. With my guest, a journalist and author Sheila Johnson. Welcome back to the program, and thank you to agreeing to this interview. Sheila Johnson, Well, thank you.
It's a pleasure to be back with you again.
Well, it's a pleasure for our audience. And this is one wild, wild story, if I must admit, of many wild stories, this one really is really up there. I'm telling you this is a great one. Anyway, Let's talk a little bit about the resort town and Mentone and
Alabama really set the stage for this incredible story. Tell us a little bit about Mentone, pardon me, where it's located geographically to the big center that we might be more familiar with, and tell us what it is that uh makes it a resort town as well.
Well. It's up in the far northeast corner of this state, and it's a little mountain resort town. It's in the on the highest point in that area, and it's pretty close to Chattanooga, Tennessee, and it's also close to fairly close to Atlanta, you know, Birmingham. It's sort of centrally located there. But it's been a resort town since way back in the eighteen hundreds and trains would come and bring people down for the summer to spend the summer
in the mountains up there. And it's it's very quaint. It has all sorts of really neat cabins and little stores and it's just a super place. It's got a huge, big, old fashioned hotel, the Menton Springs Hotel is up there, and and several other which is really nice things, and uh, no one in that area was prepared for anything like this to ever happen. The police, that very small police
force up there. There's three small towns kind of clustered together menton, Hammondville and Valley Head, and they're all extremely small, and the police forces from those three towns all, you know, kind of more or less work together and they depend on the County Alabama police to help them, to the county sheriff and people like that when they need help. They're very seldom need help though, because things like this
just don't happen in places like that. But on that particular night, it happened wide open and nobody was ready for it.
Now, tell us a little bit about this other storm that we talked about, this free catastrophe. Tell us about the storm itself and what it actually entailed in terms of the difficulty for the citizens. What what all was involved in this storm.
Well, it was an ice storm, which we have down in this part of the country every so often, and there was a layer of ice all over everything, on the trees, on the power lines, on the on the roadways, and it made travel just extremely difficult. There were people off on the sides of the road that had spun out and gone off into the ditch. All over the county.
Power lines were down everywhere, and trees were across the the highways, and in one of those little towns they had a tree on top of a patrol car, so that that left them a car short that night. And it's it's the kind of thing that just you know, totally snarls services and travel everything makes it very dangerous.
And I've not figured out to this day how Hayward Best will manage to drive all the way down from Ohio into this part of the country where the ice storm caught up with him and not have a wreck somewhere along the way. But in that huge Lincoln, he managed to just barrel on through and didn't ever run out of the road. He finally got stopped, but he never had a wreck, and I still don't understand how he managed to avoid.
That right now, unlike your book, which I really like the way you set it up, and many books are written different ways in terms of contacts, in terms of when things occur and when do you reveal them in the book, so fund it very interesting. But unlike that, let's try to create some character, put a face on the characters here before we get to the incredible rampage that this Hayward Bistle went on this one day, Let's
talk about first Patricia Anne Boer. Maybe you can even describe her size, because we're going to be talking about Hayward Bissel and at the time, on January twenty thirty, two thousand, he was a four hundred pound, huge hulk of a man. And tell us about Patricia Anne Boer a little bit about her background and who she was. Did she have any history of mental illness? Tell us a little bit what really what Patricia Anne Bour was like and where she came from.
Well, Patricia was a tiny, tiny little girl. She was well, she was a grown woman, but she was just, you know, slightly over five feet tall, which made it really ironic that she ended up as the girlfriend of somebody like Hayward Vessel, because the size of difference was just incredible, you know when you saw pictures of them to get there. And she had had a pretty rough upbring and she was a very well liked girl, but her family situation had not been good, and she she was not mentally
ill herself, but she was a special education student. I think she was more slow than anything else. But she always did her best, and she tried to you know, work and do anything she could find to do, and tried to please everybody around her. And I think a lot of the time she felt like that was all she really did, was try to please other people, and
that nobody cared much for her. So whenever Bissel came along and showed her just a little bit of attention that it was terribly flattering to her, and she fell right for him, you know, right away. But I think by the time they left up there on the trip down here, which was to see his parents in Florida supposedly, but they never got that far. But I think by that time she was beginning to pull away from him
just a little bit. And ironically, she had learned that she was pregnant just a few days before this happened. And nobody has ever known whether she got around to telling him about it or not. We don't really know, and I would suspect that she might not have told him yet.
Now it's an interesting story about Patricia Anne. Like you say, we can't really you know, some of these terms aren't so good anymore. But say, for a better lack of better term, she was kind of slow, she was kind of naive. It was a small woman that looked very very young, very young despite her age, and I guess it seemed that she was fairly inexperience at least, not a very confident woman that successful in life, will say. But anyway, at the time that she met bissel Or
shortly after, she was making relationships. She was making some progress. She was with sort of a friendship club through the church. So that's important. Later when you say that she became to a realization, it would seem by the time she was pregnant and the supposed trip. So tell us a little bit about what she was doing at this church and what she was getting from that sort of new community and new sort of new people in her life.
Well, she had started making friends and the name of the club was the Friendship Club, and she was well liked there, and she wasn't there to chance she could. She enjoyed the church suppers and things like that in particular, and the pastor commented at her funeral on how much she enjoyed that and how she could really put the
food away. Tiny little girl her size, but she was just beginning to make friends, and I think she was beginning to get some support from the people at the church and the other people around her that was given her maybe enough confidence to feel like she might be able to break things off with him. I think she was really dependent on him for so much, and she was beginning to maybe work her way past that and
feel a little more worthwhile and self confident. But I don't think that really had anything to do with what eventually happened to her. But that may be, you know, that might account for my belief that she had not yet told him that she was pregnant.
Right now, tell us about Whistle. Tell us about his life. You did a great job of uncovering a lot of information about Heyward. He was in the military, So tell us go back as far as you can to paint a picture of this because it's very very important to this story, as people listeners will attest to once they heard this whole story, and essential to the book. So tell us about Hayward Bistle in his early life, and just continue with giving us a background on Heyward Bistile.
Well, like Patricia, he he had a rough time sometimes in his youth. His father, I think was really strict, and he had a head injury when he was young, and then I think he claimed that he had seen
visions a time or two after that. But uh, the military was really a good thing for him that he really cared a lot about because like a lot of people that have paranoid schizophrenic tendencies, he was extremely neat and tidy, and that military way of life just agreed with him right to the his degree, and he enjoyed the work that he did in the military. He I think was a truck driver, vehicle maintenance, something of that nature.
It's been a long time and I remember a lot of thanks about him that there's a lot more impressive than that. But after he got out of the military, he began having some mental and emotional issues and started seeking treatment at the different VA clinics and just ended up going from one to the other to the other, and none of the doctors appeared to have ever compared notes.
And I think that a lot of over medication part of the time, and then having his medication taken away from him later is what tipped him on over the edge. But uh, his life, you know, never really was very successful after he left the military, so that was kind of the height of his accomplishment.
Now you talk about because I think this is important to the defense of insanity that we talked about in the introduction. You say that there was a concussion or head injury when he was young, and then you talk about visions. So was he properly and officially diagnosed with say hallucinations or that he had a head injury that might produce some sort of side effects or symptoms. Was that or was this later that they talked about this
was this confirmed? And what exactly was the diagnosis at that time from that head injury.
Well, I don't think he really had much medical treatment at the time from the head injury. I think they just looked at it as a childhood accident and didn't seek treatment of any kind. And I don't know if that contributed to his condition later on or not, But I don't believe that he really started getting worse until,
you know, a few years before this murder. I think he gradually worked up to it and didn't show that many symptoms of anything as long as he was in the military, and then afterward, you know, he he just increasingly got gradually worse, and because he was seeing so many different doctors and going to so many different clinics. I think, you know, like I said that it was it's more a case of mental illness developing and then slipping through the cracks as far as being correctly treated.
Right, well, well, you know that is a source of debate, and that's the debate that goes on in the book and and the trial itself too, is whether he really wasn't saying was he faking insanity? Did he have mental illness? And and learned the ropes as so that when he went on his rampage he could then fall back on like certainly he had some form of mental illness, but the question will be was he mentally ill during the commission of this crime spree here?
So I think that I think that he learned to tell the psychiatrist what they wanted to hear, to the point that he would get whatever medication he wanted. But he very much learned to tell them what they wanted to hear. But then he was also going downhill pretty fast at the same time. So you know, fiction may have turned into truth right right now?
Tell us what the relationship between Patricia and Bour and Hayward Bistle was like. I mean we talked about that maybe a couple of years later. But tell us what it was characterized by. What was Hayward bistile like in a relationship with a woman, in this case Patricia anboer Well.
I think he wanted somebody that he could just totally control and dominate, and he would very often make her think that she wasn't good enough, for smart enough, for pretty enough. And it was just pretty much a case of of him wanting somebody that would, I I guess, feed his ego and make him feel superior. He had been married, and he and his wife had broken up because he was just so dissatisfied with her housekeeping and things like that. He wanted everything just so all the time.
And and I think his wife was a very normal person who was was not a hundred percent perfect all the time. And then he wanted Patricia to you know, sort.
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Be there to give him somebody that he could criticize, and somebody that would do what he said, and somebody he could control.
In other words, Okay, so he's a controlling person. Was he a violent person? Is there any confirmed cases of violence against his girlfriend?
Well, there's nothing that was definitely confirmed, but some of her church friends had strongly suspected that he might have been slapping her around a little bit occasionally, to the point that they tried to talk to her about it and she was acted really fearful to say much of anything to them, but they believed that he was maybe abusing or some.
Now during this period of time that he has a relationship with her, does he is he on uh prescription from a a psychiatrist and what kind of I if he is, what kind of drugs is he being prescribed? And for what I we talked about paranoid schizophrenia depression? Is is that uh? Was he being treated in that two two year in that relationship W for with those medications?
Yeah, he was. He was under several different courses of treatment during that time because he was going from clinic to clinic and getting different medications, and they were never sure exactly how many different things that he had taken, but he he had a whole raft of of medication, different types, and his behavior would sort of depend on what he was having and whether it was what he really needed or what he had just made somebody believe that he might benefit from and the the thing that
tipped everything off was a trip to the doctor and he got pronounced well enough that she took him off his medication and it was like a week later that things went wrong.
Well, there was something that I read, it's a little bit later in the trial. It talked about that he was dealing with an outpatient doctor treatment and they discontinued or recommended he could discontinue his antipsychotic medication. But he was receiving antidepressants prozac and another one or maybe anti anxiety and depression, which is much different than an antipsychotic drug.
I would say, Well, it was an antipsychotic drug being discontinued that tripped him over.
Yeah, that's what happened, right, It.
Was his outpatient clinic doctor.
Right. So, so really to add something to your your argument and belief, he really was. He successfully went through the military, was honorably discharged. He had really fit well with him. They had nothing but good reports for him about him. He really had no history of violence up to this point. Well, there was certainly no serious violence.
Right right, Yeah, Yeah, he had not really ever done anything until this point. And after he got taken off that antipsychotic medication. He started hearing voices and all sorts of things that would make him suspicious paranoid, and the voices would tell him to do the things that he ended up doing. And it's just I think that he was genuinely mentally ill at the time he committed the crime,
and apparently he still is to this day. He may have gotten some better, But I looked up a picture of him on the Georgia Board of Corrections website, which any of the listeners can can do that if they'd like to see, and and he had that same old stare right into the camera that he had the first time I ever saw him. So he looks very much like he has, you know, in the past.
Now we'll get into your participation in this one, which I had set to you in our correspondence. I said, what I found very interesting and I always find interesting, is when the journalist enters into the story, he just adds that more personal personal touch to it, and a little more even more interesting too, when the author enters in and has a role in this. So we'll talk
about that as well. But let's talk about the actual January twenty third, two thousand, Like you say, you find it hard to believe that this guy could even drive down these icy street because the trees were falling, and the police and everyone else was just working overtime just to help stranded people on these roads. Even though they were experienced residents of this area, they still were stranded
and in need of help. And this Hayward Abistle like you say, is hurtling down the highway in the Lincoln Town car. Tell us what start at the beginning of the day, if we can, or when we know about the very beginning of this journey and who he encounters. We talk about Down and reapperch and James and Sue Pumphrey. So give us the order of events and take us back to that fateful day January twenty third, two.
Thousand, Okay, into Mintown started whenever he crossed over the Georgia line, and at that point no one really realized what was going on with him. They couldn't see Patricia in the car when he came in contact there first with Don and reapproached because she was so far down in the car. They thought there might have been someone
in there. They couldn't really tell. But they were coming home and trying to get home up there on the mountain on those icy roads, and they saw him come up behind him, and then he bumped into the back of their pickup truck, and they thought he had slid into him. And when Don got out to check and see about things, he leaned back over and told Ria to get the insurance paperwork out of the glove compartment and hand to him, and he was going to walk
back there. And as he came around the truck, thisstl just gunned it and ran him down, or tried to run him down. Don ended up on the hood of the car going for quite some distance down the highway there before he managed to fall off, and he was he was fairly seriously hurt. He didn't have any any you know, like life threatening injuries, but but he was hurt.
Mistle threw him off end of the ditch, and then he kept going on down the road to James and Sue Humphrey's house and they saw him at the pond uh inside the gate across the road from their trailer, and then he started walking up the road and up the driveway towards their house and the dogs started barking at at him. Those two dogs were they were great dogs. They were just just really wonderful dogs that never had bitten anybody, never had really barked at anybody, you know,
in anything but a friendly manner. And they'd always go out and greet people that were walking up and down the road. And Vittel came walking up the driveway and the demeanor of those dogs just completely changed. They they went into defensive mode and started barking at him, and
I believe they smelled blood on him. It's I think that's what started the dogs, right, And he was coming up on the porch of the trailer and the dogs were trying to bite him, and he was stabbing that the dogs with a big knife, and James came out and Bissell stabbed him, and James managed to get back
in because the dogs were still attacking. If those dogs hadn't been there, James and Sue both would have just been murdered right where they were, right But if they managed to get back in and shut the door, then they went and got their shotgun down off the wall, and James was having to hold his intern organ's in with his hand because he had been stabbed in the stomach.
And they were literally coming out and Sue helped him hold up the shotgun Wow and Biscile came around to the back door and they attempted to fire, and the gun was jammed, but Bistle didn't know that he saw the shotgun and took back off, had got in his car and left. And then as soon as that happened, James and Sue got in their pick up and they drove down the road to where a group of people
had come there. Rescue personnel and police were down there sitting about donning rear perch and they drove up and the ambulances ended up having to transport a lot more than they expected to, and they realized that the the same person had done this, because Biscle had turned around and come back down the road road and rammed the tractor there close to where the rescue people were and
went on about his business. And he was headed down the hill on a very very steep mountain there at Mentown, towards the valley below, and he got stopped at the foot of the mountain. They compared notes enough to know they needed to stop that town car. When they did that, that's the first time they really discovered Patricia in the car, and it It was a total shock to everyone.
Right now, what was this state? I mean it, it is a gory state that the police officers of the unfortunate task of finding this woman. But tell us the state of this woman because it is important and it is an incredible crime scene.
Well it was. It was really about as bad as anybody on the scene had ever come up against. She had been stabbed repeatedly, her throat was cut, her eyes at first they thought had been gouged out. That couple days later we learned that they had just been pushed back into her head so far.
Wow.
And she had several internal organs that had been taken out, and one of her hands and one of her legs had been cut off and tossed over into the back seat, and she was sitting strapped in the passenger's seat, all seat belted in in that condition. And he had been riding with her in the passenger seat all the way from just on the other side of the Georgia Line, all the way over through mentone and that in blood, yeah, covered in blood, the whole inside of the car, blood
all over him. It was it was just an absolute scene of float. And at first they thought that she was a child. She was so little and tiny. They thought that he had done that to a probably twelve thirteen year old because of the size that she was, right, And then you know later that her id was there in the car and they discovered who she was and what age she was, and everybody was really shocked because of her size.
Now the police are shocked, and this is, like you said, this a little police force. They and they're not accustomed to homicide, and this is in the big city, and who could ever be prepared for what they did find with his dismembered, mutilated bride beside him in the car. Now this, now, what we didn't mention was is that the James really got to see James Pumphrey, Oh no,
pardon me, don Perch, pardon me. Really, and James and Sue Pumphrey, they really got to see the eyes of this killer, the what he really looked like, the rage that was seemed to be evident in his face, but he was. What you captured in the book is that James was on top of that car before he threw him off, and he was hanging on for dear life, and Thistle gave him the finger and they were staring eye to eye, and James Humphrey and Sue obviously saw them.
And now the police officers see this person, and this man is such a hulk of a man that he can't even fit regulation size handcuffs, so they're using lay garns. So tell us about the capture and also and really the radios are going, and you are a journalist reporter, tell us about what your role is in this in terms of what you were doing at that time and your and your occupation and how you came to hear about this information and what you saw this information and this story as well.
At that time, I was working as a reporter for the major little newspaper there, the only one in the county seat, and it was my job to cover all of the county police activity and all the towns other than the county seat, and and the sheriff and anything that went on of that sort. And this happened in the late afternoon and early evening of that day when the ice storm was hitting and I was stuck at my house. I stand on a hill with one of my trees had fallen over a power line and our
power went out. But right before that happened, I was in the back room working on some riding, and at that time we we lived with my mother and she was sitting in the front room there with a scanner going, and she called me and she said, I think something's happening. And I said, well, what do you mean, And she said, well, I keep hearing among here talking about a car and trying to stop it. And she said, uh, I heard one guy saying how many body parts did you find
in the car? And I'd had just set me on fire, and nothing I could do about it. I was stuck. And it pretty soon the battery ran out on the scanner and I couldn't find out anything else till the
next morning, and that was terribly frustrating. But a friend of mine, as it turned out, who worked for one of the Huntsville, Alabama television stations, had managed to get down the mountain from the opposite side of the county and he made his way up the interstated four wheel drive and he actually got up there to the scene, and he saw everything that went on, and and saw Bissel and and pretty much you know, talked to the people on the scene and I I managed to get
a lot from him. But then the next day, I was back up at work again, and I went up to the Sheriff's office, and the sheriff pulled me aside just as soon as I went in. The place was just jam packed with television reporters and cameramen from I guess five or six TV stations in Chattanooga and Huntsville, and he was ushering them all into his office. He
was gonna have a news conference. He was getting everybody in there, and when I came in, he kind of took me aside by the elbow and he said, hurry up, go back and get your camera. They're fixing to bring him downstairs. He said, I'll I'll tell you everything afterwards, but you need to get a picture. And I was so grateful for that. He my sheriff, always took care of me. He was a fabulous person to work with.
And I ran and got my camera and got in the stairwell kind of backed up out of the way where nobody would see me, and I heard people coming downstairs from the detective's offices, and I looked and there were the two most enormous deputies that worked for the county. They were just huge guys, and Bissell dwarfed all them. He just totally dwarfed 'em. He was such a a
big guy. And I felled up my camera and before I could get a picture, he looked down toward me, and then he looked away, and I took my picture and the flash got his attention and he turned back around. He looked at me and he said, who is that? And the chief investigator said, they's just a reporter go on and kind of gave them a little nudge, and they were coming straight down the stairs toward me. So there was a back door right opposite from where I was standing, and I got out of dodge and hurry.
Uh yeah, I got out that back door, and I had not heard the end of that.
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Every details say, every deputy up there has ragged me to death about that. Oh he ran and you saw him. I may have run, but I got the first picture of it that anybody got, thanks to the sheriff, and the associated press picked it up and it went all over the country, and I was I was very proud of dance. It was my first time to accomplish anything like that.
Yeah, it's great too that a lot of books that don't have the the uh, the ability to have a good photo of the perpetrator, and some don't have a photo of them at all, even even inside. Really great. But this is good because the photo of Thistles right on the cover, along with the car and with the victim to shan Bor. But it's see, he's a menacing he looks like a menacing figure. He's quite big, Yeah he was.
And that picture on the cover was when he was coming back from his stretch down at the statemental facility getting evacuated, and he came back in a lot better condition than he left in.
Yeah he was.
He was bad off when they took him down there. And he came back a lot better off. He'd been medicated properly while he was down there, and that that helped him quite a bit. But he was a he was something else while they had him up here in jail.
Now, let's talk about the arrest itself. Like I've spoken, he's put legard on the guy and and they do some makeshift handcuffs so that they can actually bring this guy in. There's a lot of media attention. What about the police interview. Tell us about the police interview. What he says to police. He doesn't lawyer up right away, doesn't ask for an attorney right away, but this is an unusual interview with police. Tell us some details of that interview.
Well, on his way into the station, they discovered that he had right an esophagus in his shirt pocket, which they thought at first belonged to Patricia, but they did later determine that it probably had belonged to one of the two dogs. And he was cuffed at the time, was zippytized. That's all they had that they could do his handcuffed with, because you know, or if his feet, you know, had zip ties and he had the leg
irons on his hands. Sorry, about that, and he was leaning over kind of knowledge towards his shirt pocket, like he was trying to pull that out, and I think he did get hold of it an attempt to chew on it before they took it away from him, and of course that flipped everybody out. And then when they got him to the station, he claimed that he was a Secret Service agent that was on a mission. And he was so insistent that he was a part of the Secret Service that they actually called in two Secret
Service agents to interview him. And he was claiming during these times when they were talking to him, that he was receiving transmissions from what he called a secret source that were coming into a device that had been implanted behind his ear, and they had told him that Patricia was a witch and that he had to kill her, and that's what he claimed, you know, there's his reason for killing her was because he had received instructions behind
his ear from his secret source to do that. And the interview that he had with those two Secret Service agents was pretty you know, it's about the same as what he had been telling the officers. You know, he was claiming all sorts of things, and and they talked about his military service and how he was. He was there on a mission, and he was getting all these
instructions on his transmissions. And then they when they went to have him in court for his arraignment, they couldn't take him out of his cell because he had proceeded to take off all his clothes. I had to go buy special clothes for him, big enough to fit him, but he had taken all of them off. He was naked in his jail cell. He had d torn up all his plumbing, ripped it off the walls, and used the bathroom all over the cell and screamed and yelled
and banged and just demolished the place. And that was disturbing all the other inmates pretty much, And so they decided it was unsafe to try to take him upstairs to the court room for a hearing. So the judge said, well, you know, we'll just go down and have his hearing there in the hallway in front of his cell. His arraignment here, Well, Judge Clyde Traylor, who was just totally
the most unflappable person I've ever met. He took all his court personnel and several law inforcement officers and a couple of other newspaper reporters downstairs for the arraignment, and Bissell was waiting for him. He screamed and he cursed and he I guess the most polite way to put it would be to say he stood in front of him and stimulated himself while the judge was I was sh reading his charges to him. Judge Traylor never blinked, he never moved a muscle. I mean, nothing disturbed him.
Everybody else was was totally flipped out. I had I had missed that little episode because I was off on another assignment and by the time I got back it was over with. But my friend who worked for another paper, told me that, uh, if she never saw another four hundred pound naked man, it'd be too soon. Yeah, and uh, she was so appalled. She got around the corner where she didn't have to look anymore. But he he did that for a couple of days, just totally kept the jail.
In an uproar.
The sheriff had to cancel visitation and I can tell you that we'll put everybody in and uproar right there. They depend on those visits. And when nobody could come into the jail at all, they all got upset then.
So what was the So how did the county, uh, the calb County proceed with this? Now that he's ripped out the plumbing, they have to do a hearing down there, and he of course performs for everyone so clearly trying, clearly showing his mental illness. So how does they how do they proceed with a uh A psychiatric evaluation of him.
Well, they got the judge to just as quickly as possible write up in order to send him for evaluation, and they had to borrow a vehicle and a couple of guys in a shock shield from the joint adjacent
county to transport him in. And when he was due to be leaving for Tuscaloosa, which is where the mental facility is in the state, they went down to get him out of the sale and he decided he wasn't going to cooperate, but the officers had the shock shield bumped him a time or two and he he got a little more cooperative mood, and they they shackled him up again and and led him out, And I believe there's a picture of of that as they came out of the building with him, and he just looked on
his face, and that picture tells an awful lot about his state of mind at that time.
Sure, but he was.
He was not. I was there at that time too, that he was. He was not uncooperative. But when they got him in this special transport vehicle, he just sort of flopped over on his back and laid there staring up at the ceiling of this vehicle. And everybody was looking at in the windows at him, like you know, for somebody looking in at the goldfish bowl. And at
that time he was ignoring everybody. But when they pulled out with him and started out of the sheriff's parking lot, one of the jailers that had had to deal with him during all that chaos was standing there and he said, good riddance. He was happy to see him go.
Now, what was the evaluation by psychiatrists at that time? And this is for those that may not know. Most of this is first to determine whether the person can stand trial, he can understand the charges and is confident to stand trial. Tell us what their evaluation was in terms of diagnosis. What did they think after seeing him and interviewing him in the hospital.
Well after they had kept him there for a while and regulated his medication. Uh, the doctor in charge of his case said that he believed he would be able to assist his attorney in his defense, so they were, you know, they were backing him to be sufficiently in control.
Told himself that he would have any more episodes like that, but it took him a while to get him that way, because when he first got down there, he was imagining that Patricia was coming to him in his cell there at the institution and seeing him, and he was still having trouble like that, and they had to keep him medicated for a while before he straightened out enough to come back. And they were, you know, pretty much in
line with the paranoid schizophrenia. But they they thought that he was able to assist his lawyer in his defense, which is the term that they you know, it's kind of the standard judgment on whether somebody can stand trial or not around here is whether they're able to assist in their defense. And when he came back, he could tell a tremendous difference in his demeanor and his looks and everything about him. But uh, he's still uh, go.
Ahead, Sorry, he had lost some weight because there's an we'll talk about the other evaluation, because in the end he by the second evaluation, the one in Georgia, he ends up being one hundred and sixty pounds loss from his four hundred pounds frame. So that's quite a dramatic weight loss. And there's changes in his appearance as well,
and obviously as demeanor. Did the psychiatrists during that evaluation make any kind of allusions to or conclusions regarding because they saw him reinstated with medication and it seemed to be such a dramatic change to his behavior, did they make Did they document any of that in their evaluation?
Yeah, they documented quite a bit of it. And I think that the doctor that he had down there in Tuscalosa was interested in him as a case study as much as anything else, because you know, he was looking to him as an example of what had happened from his getting improperly treated medically before. And at that time, there were a lot of people up there in the county, you know, our county that suspected that he wasn't nearly
as crazy as as he appeared to be. But I think a lot of that was because of the things that he would tell them were just so incredibly far fetched that they would feel like he was making up some of the things he claimed he was hearing and seeing, And I must admit I did too at first, until I started digging into the fact that he had bounced around from clinic to clinic and then got taken off of the medication that he obviously needed to the extreme, and I I reached the point where I didn't feel
like he was faking anything, you know, at the time that happened. I think that he really was in that bad metal condition.
Okay, well, we're going to talk about that real soon, because you know that he's going to get to trial eventually. But we got to make this one. We have to clarify this one thing. The police took a little bit of time to determine in their minds where the actual crime occurred. He ended up in Alabama, but they believed that the murder actually occurred in Georgia. So as a result, in Alabama he had assault and attempted was attempted robbery charges only, And in Georgia they took a little while,
but they finally did lad murder charges. And the reason why is because they wanted to see how Alabama was handling this case. In terms of the insanity defense. Is that is that why they waited so long to file charges for murder? What was well? Right?
I think they were trying to determine just exactly where it was that he had actually committed the murder, because it was so close to the Alabama state line. And it took him a while to a lot of some really good police work in Georgia and they're in Alabama to finally determine exactly where this had happened. There was a long time there they didn't know because it was
so close to the state line. But then they finally decided that since it they had determined that it happened in Georgia, that he would have to be tried for
the murder in Georgia. And it he had killed her at a little convenience store close to Somerville, Georgia, and it was during the ice storm and there were very few people out, and he managed to sit parked in front of that convenience store, which was you know, just barely over been under emergency conditions, and he sat there and evidently just butchered her right there and then drove off. But they didn't know for sure where it had happened,
and that's why he was tried in Georgia. And it could not have worked out better because there was a chance in Alabama that he might have possibly been able to get an insanity play. That doesn't happen very often, but he might have been able to, and then, according to the loss, he would have been in a treatment facility for a short time, and then he would have just eventually walked free as soon as some academic type decided he was well enough, he would have just been released.
But in Georgia there's this charge over there. It's called guilty but insane, And in that situation, you are found guilty, but instead of being just sent immediately to a prison, you stay in a secure mental facility as long as you're in need of that, and if you do improve enough, you're not just let go. You're sent to a regular prison.
Yes, I see, that's a huge difference.
It's an enormous difference, and it's one that worked out a lot better for him to have been tried over there. And when I checked on him the other day and saw his picture and saw he had that old look back in his eyes again, I noticed that he is still being held in the secure mental facility. So apparently he has not made any drastic improvements to the point that they feel like they can put him in with a general prison population.
Yeah, that's see, that's interesting because, like I said, here in Canada, we clearly have quite a few cases. Like in America, I don't see the insanity defense working very often, and the definition in most states is well he knew right from wrong regardless, and so but here there is quite a bit of there's quite a few insanity pleas here and that are accepted, and defense of insanity works,
and they're not criminally responsible. They go to a mental hospital, they go to a mental facility, but they can be let out whenever, you know, a team of psychiatrists says, yeah, I think they can let this person out. We have an incredible case of a beheading and a cannibalism on on board a greyhound bus. It's very controversial, very very controversial.
And this, uh, the psychiatrist in this case is telling the mother of the victim that you know, he's this perpetrator is really responding to medication and he could be walking the streets in as little as five years. So I understand what you're saying and that, but in America, really to be fair for the audience to know that people usually aren't let out very soon from something like this,
given all the publicity and maybe even attention. And of course, when we talk about Don and Rhea Perch and James and Sue Humphrey, they did get the attention of their either congressman I believe, or someone a politician that went to bat for them and got them kind of compensation for their injuries. And so they did have the ear of some people because they were very, very sympathetic victims.
So true, and both of them have both families have left the area now, and I'm not sure where James and Sue were living at this time, but Don and Rhea went back to I think they were originally from Colorado, and the last I heard from them, they were running just a really nice bed and breaks there and enjoying themselves, and they managed to get away from the disaster that overtook their lives here right now.
Did they both the couples attend the trial in Alabama, and and did they attend in Georgia or just Alabama?
Well, they didn't really even attend the trial in Alabama. They just you know, the charges I believed were dropped. I can't I can't really recall. It's been so long, but out of there was never a real trial anywhere, you know, there was just the pleas and plea entries and sentence.
And now the trial was in Georgia because of the more serious charge of murder. Yes, and he did, Heyward Bissell did get a pretty decent and hard working defense lawyer named Baal, That's how I pronounce it. But the prosecutor was real tough guy named Mike O'Dell. And what I found very very interesting, and the readers will find this when they read the book, just incredible how they take apart the insanity defense from Hayward Bissel. Like you,
the author, you a journalist that was there. You were there and you were privy to all this information. You really do believe that this person was insane. But the prosecutor really was trying to counter that defense with maybe you can explain some of the ways that he tried to dispel that notion. We talk about a young man who was in prison at the same time and was a trustee, So tell us a little bit about that.
Because they just don't go to trial with they do some real legwork here and try to And that's why it's very for anyone who's going to read this book. It's really up in the air. It really is a decision of somebody that reads the book whether you believe this person really wasn't saying or were they faking it.
Yes, he was at when he was brought back from
his evaluation, Bissell was a lot different. You know, he was able to talk to some of the other inmates, and he he made friends with this one guy that was the trustee there in the jail, and he brought his meals around to him and they talked and Bisil talked to him about knives that he had had, and and wondered about where his car was and and set of you know a lot of things that that led them to believe that he was a lot more aware of what he had done than than what he had
first appeared to be, and that what he had claimed to be and uh, things like that happening pretty much convinced the process the Keuters that, you know, that he had faked some of it and that he knew what he was doing. But looking back, I'm beginning to think that one reason they pushed as hard as they did and thought they were going to have a trial there and were prepared for a trial just in case Georgia
didn't end up with it. I think some of that was their efforts to make sure that he didn't get out on the insanity play, because they were so much in fear of him, you know, being found not guilty for that reason and then being able to get back out on the streets in maybe five or six years.
Right. Yeah. The what I found was that they I think, I think you're absolutely right that obviously with Georgia, because they they really didn't need to fight that insanity defense. They just really needed to, you know, they had that as they had guilty, but in so it didn't matter to them. But Alabama, really, without that provision, really had to dispel this notion that the Hayward bistole was insane.
And what they tried to do, through a couple of these inmates at the prison was to say he was a lot more alert, but also his lawyer was going to go to court was prepared to say that now somehow Bistle didn't quite remember things and it was blocked out.
And there was some of that that was part of his defense and Odell, Michae Odell tried to dispel that with certain things that he did, Like for example, when he attacked James and Sue Pumphrey and they ran after he had stabbed James and they grabbed a gun he was he said to them, oh, please don't shoot me. I'm leaving.
Yeah, after he had already practically good at Jenames, please don't.
Shoot me, right, And so this whole thing that he was under orders to kill, Michael Dell said, well, if you were on orders to kill and the threat of being killed yourself if you didn't fulfill your orders, seems kind of a little weak when these people with a gun pointed at you and you go, hey, listen, I'm leaving the take it easy, and he goes.
I've always felt like it was a tremendous relief to all of the Decab County people when they determined beyond any doubt that Patricia was killed in Georgia, because they leave then that you know the right kind of justice could prevail in that particular case.
Absolutely yes. And like you say, tell us a little bit about don and reapproach and James and Sue Pumphrey it's sort of we didn't go into their character too much, but they were definitely negatively affected, but they're very strong willed people. So tell us a little bit about the fate of Don and reapproach and James and Sue Pumphrey.
Well, James and Sue had a had a pretty rough time for a long time. James was injured to the extent that he had to have a lot of very complicated surgery and he couldn't work after that. He tried and couldn't last but just a few days, and you know, he saw that he was just not gonna be able to work anymore. So that put them in a lot of hardship for quite some time, and they were very
you know, psychologically traumatized because of what had happened. Sure, and Don and Rehea, they were a a younger couple. James and Sue were later middle aged, and Don and Rea were in there, i'd say in their thirties. And they went to the hospital and got Don treated, and then he got discharged from the emergency room and had to go home, and he was, you know, he was
in a pretty bad shape. He was in a lot of past and they couldn't get home because of the ice storm, and they finally got one of the deputies to get 'em up there in an emergency vehicle. They got home, they had no power. Their yard was just totally full of trees l it. I saw it, and
it looked like a tornado had struck up there. And Don had to stay there by himself, and for several days, Rhea had to go back to work because she couldn't afford to miss work, and Don would be there by himself all day in an unheeded house and you know that kind of pain, barely able to get around, and that was really rough on them. They they both couples, had a had a hard time and had a lot of things that they had to deal with for a long time.
Yeah, it was interesting the financial stress and trauma to these people too, because it it wasn't just the physical true a psychological trauma was it was it was down to dollars and cents. These people really suffered financially because of Hayward Bissel and his crimes. Free that day.
Well, both men were left unable to work for for a long time. And Sue Humphrey had been working as a cook at a restaurant that had burned down just a few days before, so she was out of work from that. And Ria was working at Walmart and had to had to stay working as many hours as possible because don you know, he done had had a good job and then he was unable to work, and that just left everybody in really bad shape.
Yeah, it's just it's a very very sad story. And what I thought was very very interesting too, right out of a Hollywood movie, is that he said this, you know, it's not it's not out of the extreme ordinary that a storm would happen in the in the mountains of Alabama here, but it still was very unusual and quite
a dramatic storm. And they said, what are the odds that almost the same storm that they had originally during his crime spree occurred when they were transporting him out to the Georgia murder trial.
Mm hmm. That was that was ironic. Yeah, that was that was really that was something that you wouldn't expect to happen like that in a million years. But the difference in him after after they tried him in Georgia, they brought him back to Alabama for a while until all the paperwork, I guess was completed, and then they transferred him back to Georgia to start serving his sentence.
And when he came out at that point, I was waiting when he came out from jail, and he had lost more than half of his body weight or right at you know, half of his total body weight. And he was very pale. His skin looked very dry, and his hair had gone real dry and and brittle, and it was a much much lighter color than it had been before. And now when you look at his picture on the website, his hair is dark again, and he's got that that stare that just looks right through you.
And I hope the listeners will go to the Georgia Department of Correction's website. You can find it on Google real easily and you can see a full screen size mugshot of him. That's will just tell you everything you would ever wanna know about Hayward Bissell just by looking in his eyes.
Now you s you said uh, or you do say that you believe that he was mentally ill, now in in your mind despite that, should he ever get out of a mental facility.
Well, if he does get out of the mental facility, he'll just be getting transferred straight to the regular prison, so he will be incarcerated for the rest of his life, one place or the other.
And you think, and you're fine with that because in this country, in Canada, we believe, because the person didn't have the intent to kill, because they weren't of their right state of mind, right frame of mind, that they are not the same as a killer, despite the actions being the then result being the same. So you just believe that this person deserves to be in an insane asylum because he really is insane. But we can't let this person out, well.
I believe I studied him pretty closely for a long time, and I don't believe that he could be let out without always there being some risks that he might possibly come off as mention again and just flip right back over to this same mode of hearing the instructions from his secret source again. I don't think there's any way to guarantee the safety of the public under those circumstances.
I just don't believe he can ever be because if he was going to improve that much, and it's been so long since this happened, he wouldn't still be in that facility, and he wouldn't be staring down the camera like that if he had improved any at all.
I see, And I just.
Think that I don't believe he can ever be, you know, guaranteed not to revert back to that incredibly dangerous state.
Yes, oh, I tend to agree with you. I think that we can't as a society, and I think the authorities cannot take a chance. I mean, once you've committed atrocities like this, I just think that it's too much of a risk.
Well that's what I think.
Yeah, absolutely. Now, well, what are there any interesting projects you're working on for a new book that might tell our audience? Because I know how many officially how many true crime books do you? Are you the author of?
By the way, well, I have written for I finished another book for a gentleman who got too ill to complete it. It's called At the Hands of a Stranger, and it's coming out I think in May. I believe people will enjoy that quite a bit. It's the Gary Hilton story and the woman that he beheaded. And I finished that book, and I'm in the process of preparing an update for an old Pinnacle book called Slow Death. It was by Jim Fielder, right, and it's the darker
Ray story. And there's been so many recent developments in that. I'm going to have about a third two page update in the back of the book when they reissue that coming out.
Wow, that's a great book that's been been a bestseller for years. And Jim was good enough to come on the program and talk about that book. That was one of the one of the first guests that I had and was a It's an incredible story. I mean, wow, what a what a guy. David Parker, you know, David A. Parker, And that Gary Hilton. We had Fred Rosen come on Trails of Death talk about Gary Hilton, another fascinating killer. Yeah, so good work. I'll be please contact me about that.
We'll have to have you back on and talk about those incredible stories.
Okay, I'd be glad that there have been so many developments just since this past October in the David Parker Ray story that I think people are going to be amazed that that has continued on like it has. And there have been several little side stories that have come up off that are just incredible.
Wow. Yeah, I can't even imagine. Don't don't give it away because I won't, oh man, because that's for our audience. That's one story that that's why it's consistent, consistently sold for years. It is an incredible This guy's an incredible, fascinating, blow your mind killer and he has accomplices, so it's incredible.
That's the first true crime book of Pinnacles that I ever read. Now I'm getting to updated.
Wow, that's very interesting. Yeah, the first the first Pinnacle book that I had read was Killer Clown about John Wayne Gacy. Yeah, quite a while ago. And and I've seen Pinnacle over the last bunch of years really rise in prominence in the true crime business to be basically I think the number one. I mean, I can't see any competition. They handle all the great stories, they have all the great authors so well.
They've certainly been good to me.
Oh, it's good. MICHAELA. Hamilton is help me gain access to a lot of authors, because what are the authors are kind of somewhat hard to gain access to. So she's been very, very cooperative. And again, Pinnacle is just the leading source for true crime stories. It's just and they really don't hold anything back. Pinnacle doesn't shy away from certain types of stories. I mean, you really want
to get a story like this one, Blood Highway. Most other companies are not so interested, you know, and Pinnacle goes, yes, yes, we can handle that. So good work. Well, I want to thank you Sheila for coming on the program and talking about Blood Highway. That's an amazing book, and thank you for a great interview.
Well, I appreciate it. I'm always glad to talk about these books and Bissell there's one character that's going to be with me forever because that wasn't really an experience working in that case.
Yes, absolutely, I can imagine. I can imagine. Well, anyway, tell our audience. I've been listening to Sheila Johnson. She is the author of Blood Highway, A twisted killer on a rampage makes a country road, a highway to Hell, and look for other titles why Sheila Johnson on Kensington Press, which is Pinnacle is the true crime imprint. Thank you very much, Sheila, have yourself a good night.
Thank you so much.
Talk to you again soon, I hope, hope.
So bye bye bye bye