MURF-Terrance Ryerson Neal

chumbacasino dot com. No, we're not necessarily dapoi where everybody lost et terms Conditions eighteen plus.

story that Murph swore was true. This dramatic narrative events, reconstructed from several sources, including never before released FBI files, takes the reader on a wild ride of adventure, missteps, and several surprise endings. You may think you know the truth,

but you haven't read this story. The book that we're featuring this evening is Murph, based on a true story, the true story of the nineteen sixty four Museum robberies and Hendersonville triple murders, with my special guests Terrence Ryerson Neil, journalist and author. Welcome back to the program, and thank you very much for this interview. Terrence Ryerson Neil.

is true. But at certain points during the story where I didn't have an FBI file to recreate dialogue, or I wasn't the fly on the wall in the poker game, I took the liberty of creating what I felt was the appropriate dialogue for each of the characters who I had gotten to know very personally, and so in order to represent that, I created that story and the dialogue. And I just wanted to be honest with the readers that they would know that they are hearing or they

are reading a true story. But some of the words that I use in telling the story may not have been exactly what they said.

Agent Bean's notes. There were a couple of other agents who wrote some files also for this project, but a special Agent Bean was the leader of the Miami FBI office in nineteen sixty four when the three as they call them surfer boys or certain beach bums or whatever they were called, Murph Alan, Kuhne and Roger Clark left New York City after robbing the museum and fled to Miami, and he was called upon to pretty much organize the

effort because they had essentially taken the jewels across state lines, which made it an FBI case. So Special Agent Bean actually is the one who, of all of the characters in these stories would have touched on all of the different law lives of each of the people involved in this, or if he didn't, he would have had knowledge of or have known about them. So I kind of use him as my neive narrator for the story because because of that perspective that he has.

was screaming when he was there in the hospital. I took them straight from newspaper accounts, so I didn't make any of this up. Agent Bean was on a mission to try to find out what happened to the gyms that had not been recovered from the Museum of the Natural History in nineteen sixty four when it was robbed

in October twenty ninth. And they had recovered the star Sapphire of India, and they had recovered the DeLong Rupie in a pretty elaborate ransom scheme in nineteen sixty five, but the remaining gems had never been discovered, and it had always been bothering him that they had not been able to find those other gems, and he had been led to believe that mister Gordon would know where they were. And so the opening scene is Herman Gordon in the

hospital in Atlanta. Agent Bean is there and he's watching. I don't want to give the story away, but he's watching as Herman Gordon protests that people are trying to get information from him and they're trying to give him truth serum. And that's how it opens. And it actually happened and Herman Goon and Agent Bean is hoping that he can find out what happened to the raining gyms before mister Gordon perhaps dies or passes away. And so that's how the story opens, is with that.

also a fence. He was probably the number one, if not the He was in the top ten of all defences in the United States, perhaps the world, passing goods the criminals had stolen through different hands and collecting money and commissions and all this sort of thing. And so he had gotten word that a person who said he had organized the crime in nineteen sixty four with the robbery of the museum wanted to wanted to talk and he was going to name names and tell everybody who

was involved. And Hermon Gordon, who had who had now been arrested and was serving a sentence in the same place where this other person, his name was Richard Dunkan Pearson, where Agent Bean was coming to meet with. Mister Pearson had heard about this, and so mister Gordon said he wanted to talk to and so Agent Bean sat down with Herman Gordon, and he heard a tale that completely just blew him away about what really happened and why

the story happened. Now, I might add that I got this information, the original story about how this crime actually occurred, in my twenty fifteen interview with Murph the Search, But I decided not to have Mrph tell this story because he only knew parts of it, and he was actually not the major player that everyone thought he was, And as time went by, as he claimed to be he was,

he was not as important, as he let on. And so that's how this begins, is Herman Gordon giving Agent Being this fantastic tale about how the crime actually occurred and why.

isn't enough. There's got to be corroboration from other people. So Being gets very, very frustrated. He believes that he finally is on the trail of finding these gyms that he's been looking for for six years, and now all of a sudden, after somebody's told him where they might be and who might have them, the FBI is telling him it's not good enough. You're going to have to go get more information and find somebody who can corroborate

this story that Herman Gordon's told you. Otherwise, you know, we can't let the public know about this.

it was where it was discovered, which is in Wisconsin. Diamonds, as you know, are quite rare and they only occur in very specific places in the world, particularly in an area where something called a kimber light forms, and millions and millions of years ago, a kimber lights had formed on the western coast of Canada, and during the Glacial Age, when the ice was pushing everything south, it pushed a bunch of kimber lights down into the city of Wisconsin.

And then in the eighteen hundreds, when a man was digging a well, he pulled out this particular stone, which he thought was topaz, and he took it to a jeweler who paid him like a dollar. It was very minimal. I don't recall the exact amount. And then later on he found out that he had been taken, that the jeweler actually knew what he had but he didn't want to tell him. So it's a very rare, unusual diamond.

And Gordon everybody knew after the gym was stolen that this diamond would be the hardest one to find because most likely it would be cut because of the fact that it was still in a raw state, so it could be cut and refined and actually put into different settings and nobody would ever be able to trace it.

And that's one of the reasons he was particularly interested in Herman Gordon because Herman Gordon has spent quite a few years of his life learning everything he could about diamonds, including how to polish them and cut them and set

them in stones. So Gordon not only had an obsession with diamonds, but Bean really, of all the gems that could be found out of that collection that was stolen and sixty four being just really had an obsession with finding this particular stone, or at least finding out what happened to it.

Actually it was actually the idea of myo landscape to do this as a favor to help out John D. MacArthur, who was in a buying I don't know if how much your readers know about John D. MacArthur, except maybe the fact that his foundation sponsors a lot of shows on PBS. But he was a pretty cheap, nasty old man, and he was actually the second richest man in the United States when he died in nineteen seventy eight. He made his money a very unscrupulous way with mail order insurance.

A lot of people sent in dollar bills for John D. MacArthur, and he became very wealthy with that He was a skin flint and his brother, Charles MacArthur was an author, a playwright. He wrote a play called The Front Page, and he was an journalist in Chicago. He married Helen Hayes in the nineteen fifties. They had a daughter who died, and then they adopted a young man who became James MacArthur,

who was actually on Hawaii five. Oh. So the implication was that Helen Hayes was a patron for this museum in New York City, the Museum of Natural History, and it was not doing very well. The museum was not doing very well. It was in all the newspapers in fact, that they needed money, they needed patrons. And then the World's Fair was there in nineteen sixty four and they were changing over from DC Current to AC Current and

the alarm we're disconnected. Well, Helen Hayes needed some money to give to the museum because she was a patron of this museum, and she asked her brother in law, John Dy MacArthur if he would donate some money, and he really did not want to do the donation, so he said, I can get publicity cheaper than what she wants from me. So if you guys, anybody helped me out and figure out why in the world I have to give her money and how I can get that

museums some publicity so that they can get donors. And Mayernansky just comes up with this plan. Let's let's steal steal some steal something and then we'll play a little game and ransom it back and it'll be in all the newspaper and John, you can you can pretend like you're this big hero and come in and ransom something for twenty thousand dollars and you'll be off the hook and they'll have donors and wants the publicity. And you know, John D. MacArthur at that point is not really involved.

He just kind of asked for some help. And then meyer Lansky asked Herman Gordon and Richard Duncan Pearson to get involved and figure out if that museum can actually be robbed and if so, can they do it? And he said he'll put the bill and help out with expenses. And so they Richard Duncan Pearson and Herman Gordon go and case the place and find out that Helen Hayes

was right. The museum alarms have been disconnected. The place is just a mess needs to be it's just right for robbing, and sounds like a good idea, and so that's how it all gets started. It's just a kind of a fluke An idea that it was not three beach boys who just happened to be in New York City in October nineteen sixty four. They there was much more to it. There was much more reason behind it than these guys just showing up there one night.

It was all the rich people were going there. They were building magnificent homes and spending the winters there, and you could find celebrities and wealthy people and they were just flaunting their jewels and going to parties and socials, and it was a right climate for jewel thiefs, and I have to tell you it was just amazing when you go back and read some of the newspaper articles of what was occurring there everywhere, from aviagable or being

robbed at gunpoint while she's in one of the resort hotels, to people putting diamonds in their cars to in their trunks when they go to dinner after whether going into the restaurant or something or coming back out, or some voater going down one of the waterways in Miami and suddenly a bag flies over the bridge and it turns

out to hold a bunch of jewels and guns. It was just a wild, wild place, and so there was there were a lot of jewel thieves in southeast Florida along what was called the Gold Coast, and they were robbing people constantly, which is why Herman Gordon was there as a fantasy. Was the one who was taking a lot of this stuff and selling it or keeping some for himself, breaking it up. And so one of the things that happened is that Richard Duncan Pearson actually was

he needed money, he wanted he was. He was a spoiled rich brat. His great aunt actually was Isidora Duncan, the famous dancer who, if you'll recall, was killed when her scarf wound around the axle of a car in France and it Geork Trevac and broke her neck and killed her at a fairly young age. He was also from a family of actors, and his father was a wealthy stockbroker, and they had retired early and gone down

to Florida. And well, Pearson he was. He was a trust fund kid, as they would refer to him today, but he was constantly getting into trouble. He had no mind for managing money, and he was constantly broke. He was a philandering guy who just was constantly having affairs despite being married. And he got involved with a guy

named Alan Cohn. Alan Cohn actually was one of these jewel thieves in Miami who was going up and down the waterways and when people weren't home, pulling his boat up behind their dock and going in and robbing them and making a pretty good money. He was living in a very expensive high rise Condomini, a complex on Brickell Avenue in Miami. Pearson found out about Kuhn, and it turned out that Dicky Pearson actually had a pretty good

mind for planning and being devious. So it kind of worked out pretty well that Kuhn, who had a boat and was very sneaky and small and could do that, worked pretty well with Dicky, who seemed to have a really good mind for logistics. His only problem was that he was he really liked drugs, and he really liked women, and he really liked money, and he also liked alcohol a lot, and he just never knew when to stop. So as successful as he could have been at many things,

he was always doing something that tripped himself up. Nevertheless, he was called upon to put together a team to go in and rob the museum in New York City, and so he was actually the mastermind. It was not Murph Jack Murphy. It was it was Dicky Pearson, who is the one who planned everything for this robbery.

we can do that. But Dicky decides his greed again I guess the best of him. He decides that no, we're going to tell them that we're going to steal one thing. But he tells his boys who are with him that are probably going to do this while you're there. And as long as you're stealing the star Sapphire, let's pick up a few other things. Let's make it worth our while. So fill your bags up, boys when you get there, and nobody will be the wiser, but we'll be a lot richer for it.

at a natural history museum in South Kensington. And Mayer Lansky says, well, if you think that it'll be helpful at least, and Herman Gordon says, oh, yes, this would be good practice for them. They the museums are very similar. They go over there there, we can practice on that museum. The alarms are working there, so if they can get past those alarms, then they can obviously do the New York City robbery. And it'll help me out too, and we'll get these industrial diamonds that I would really need

to have. I really would like to have. But there's only there's one other thing that Herman Gorton hasn't told by Landscape, which is he wants to actually hit a lot of other places in London the next day after they planned the robbery for the museum there. So the museum in London is a diversion for a major heist of multiple gym houses in Pattan Gardens, which is the diamond center of London. And I know that people are going to say, oh, this didn't happen, This couldn't possibly

be real. I guarantee you that all of these things that I'm telling you actually did happen. The museum in London was robbed. They sent a message to New York City. Scotland Yard did they send a message to New York City after the robbery in October. The robbery in London occurred at that museum in July. Know that they had no idea who did it. It was amazing because they had these fancy alarms. The thieves got in and out

in such a quick amount of time. But the strange thing was that they didn't really take anything that was that valuable, just a bunch of industrial diamonds and nobody could figure out why they did that. But then the next day there was these multiple robberies, all unsolved in

July nineteen sixty four. Then the robbery in New York occurs in October of nineteen sixty four, and Scotland Yard immediately reads the articles about this robbery in the newspapers and they send a message to the FBI and say, listen, the way this robbery is described, the one that coded there in New York, the one that you guys are right now working on trying to solve. It sounds an awful lot like the robbery that occurred here in London in July. Could you work with us and tell us

who you find and maybe we could work together. Well, anyway, they ignore London, nobody answers, nobody ever gets back with them. So this incredible robbery takes place in London multiple places, and it was it was done by the same game as a practice for the one in New York City. And the only problem is the one in London went really really well, and the one in New York is.

As most people who have read about this story know, well, they got away with it, but they got caught pretty quickly because of carelessness and just you know, getting Maybe they got really cocky about their abilities to do things, and so the New York robbery was not quite as success as what happened in London. But nobody ever knew that these guys were actually involved in what I've heard in London too, So that's what happens.

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dollars off your first month. That's one hundred dollars off at talkspace dot com promo code true murder. Now, Terrence, we talked about that Scotland Yard contacts New York authorities and tells them about the similarities between the London heist, Museum heist and the New York heist. But you say it doesn't take long before some of these criminals get arrested for other things.

the jewels never seen again. But it's not long before the New York City Police Department is contacting the FBI in Miami and saying, we have these characters here in a hotel for over for like nearly a month, and we think they're the ones who were involved in this robbery. And we hear that they're in Miami now and would you help this? And it wasn't long. They were arrested

within days. They were arrested within days, but there were no gems, so they were actually arrested, but they were not held right away for a while.

And then in July when they come back, there actually is an encounter between the inspector and Pearson again at the hotel, but the inspector still doesn't quite make the connection. There's a robbery about to occur and so but luckily he does remember these guys and he does have he does document what occurs in nineteen sixty four. So he has done a pretty good job of documenting Richard Duncan Pearson being in London at that time in nineteen sixty four.

of the criminals in Miami. His name was Harvey Saint Jean. Now, so when the guys were caught in Miami, the robbers for the museum in New York City, when the guys were caught, Harvey Saint Jean represented both of them when they were brought back to New York City and during their trial in New York City. And he also represented Herman Gordon, and he represented pretty much everybody who had

a criminal record. And the discovery of how London occurred was first confessed to Agent Bean by Herman Gordon in nineteen seventy and then being had to get this corroboration. They knew that two people were still in jail, Murph the Surf and Alan Kuhn, and because Gordon had implicated Kuhn in the London case, they decided that they would interview both of them, and so Being goes to Kuhn and asks him if he would like to get out

of jail. Would he be willing to corroborate Gordon's story by telling Being what happened, how it happened, who was involved, everything that he knows. But would he do it without his lawyer, Harvey Saint Jean because Being suspects that Saint Gean is much more embedded in these crimes and he has ever let on, And so that's what happens. Being goes and talks to Alan Dale Kuhn, who corroborates pretty

much the story that Herman Gordon has told him. And he does this primarily because he needs that corroboration to know before he goes in to talk to Pearson, who is sitting there waiting for him with Harvey Saint Jean. So he needs that coroboration, He needs the true story.

He needs to know that everything is accurate before he goes in and listens to Richard Duncan Pearson, who was the original person who started all this about confessing everything, to know whether he's really going to be telling him the truth, especially with Harvey Saint gen President.

He's not going to tell being anything about his true involvement in these crimes. He just wants out of jail.

And so being is able to pull in some information that Kuhn and Gordon have given him in order to determine that Saint Jean is actually not acting in the best interests of Richard Duncan Pearson, who's the client that he's sitting there representing, And in fact, he is able to finally determine that Saint Jean was in fact helping to set up Richard Duncan Pearson all along so that he would be convicted of several other robberies, although not

implicated in the museum robberies, and one of those robberies in particular is when after the Museum robberies occur, Richard Duncan Pearson is arrested in Making Georgia and Robert and Jewel Store, and he has ransom money that was paid by John D. MacArthur for the DeLong ruby in his satchel, and he claims he knows he doesn't know a thing about how that money got there because he did not

have He claims he did not have that ransom money. Well, in fact, as we as we find out, the being is able to pull Harvey's involvement in these crimes into the open, so that Richard Duncan Peerson finally becomes aware of the fact that Harvey's is actually as bad for him as he is for all these other clients, and that he has been two timing him in many other ways, including helping the stash that ransom money in the satchel that's found by the police, and so Saint Gene is

actually set up Richard Duncan Pearson to be arrested in Making Georgia by having Richard Duncan Pearson's wife put the money into the satchel before he goes off to do the robbery. So it's and I'm sorry, I don't think that as a speaker, I'm the greatest. I think I did a much better job of writing this particular interview with Pearson in a very dramatic way so that all

of these little pieces fall into place. But I think it's actually one of the one of the best things I've ever written, to tell you the truth, this interview with Pearson and the way that being is able to drive this wedge between these two guys, and essentially Richard Duncan Pearson fires Harvey Saint Jean honest up and sets go away. And that's actually the only time that Pearson

shows any backbone. And finally he is able to at least come clean on a few things with Agent Bean, who in the end does not give him what he wants, which is I get a car at jail card, but he does teach him I think a fairly decent lesson about how you do things and you can't trust anybody.

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he's had a wild life. But it's discovered that Saint Jean had the diamond, had some of the gems, and it went it went to Harry Sittner, and Harry Sittner was actually going to give it to Herman Gordon, and Gordon did not tell being what happened to the diamond, but Herman had left a booklet that also pointed towards Sidner. And finally, by looking through this booklet and realizing that

Sittner was also this guy named Sinamore. Because they had various a leases, they're able to determine that the diamond had gone to had been split and put into several rings, and then it was stolen and one of the pieces was stolen, one of the rings was stolen and it went to Harry in a little place called Hendersonville, North Carolina. He had given the ring to a woman that he was dating. He had been coming to the mountains here for decades and he had given this ring to the woman.

He had also used some of the jewels to set up a major counterfeiting ring in the mountains. When he was arrested here in the town, he was found with tens of thousands of dollars worth of gyms in a hotel room. And when the gyms were all collected, nobody knew where anything came from. So but there was one man in particular, and his name was Lawton Gay, and he had been given instructions to try to find this ring, and he came to town. And well that's that brings

us into the murders, now the triple murders. As to why they happened, everyone always suspected that organized crime was involved, and in a way it was because the ring had actually been intended to go to meyer Land, but instead Harry had taken it and given it to his girlfriend.

When it was discovered that this girlfriend had the ring, well, she was able to pass it off to her mother, who was dying of cancer, and when the ring was discovered, it was discovered on the finger of this woman's mother, and she was murdered along with two other guys by lat Gate who was trying to find the ring. It's just an unbelievable story of people being in the wrong place at the wrong time and having the wrong things and they lose their life because of it.

mother's purse. Let let us Lawton Gay think that he's actually gotten Christina not Louise who is the mother, And

that's exactly what happens, and haul's the mother. Christina actually gives her her mother a huge dose of morphine, which is sitting right there on the bed, and so her mother's near death anyway, when Lawton Gay hauls her out and takes her to an open field on a hillside over a lake, can't get the ring off her finger her and so after murdering her with a shotgun because can't get the ring off, he cuts the finger off

and gets the ring that way. And the sad part about this whole story is that everyone thought it was because this woman was hanging around with two gay guys and they were into voodoo. They nobody ever realized that this was all about a ring and a diamond that had been cut and stolen from a museum in New

York City. But that's exactly what happened. And for thirty years, forty years, a man in town carried around the woman's finger as a reminder to people who did know the story to keep your mouth shut and don't tell anybody the truth. That's he died last year.

But the long and the short of this is that the organized crime people were in charge, and they had gotten a free ride for helping out the government with the Beya Pigs, and this particular story would have implicated meyer Lanski and a crime, and he had been given assurances that he would never ever be hauled in to jail because he was in his golden years and he had done what he was post to and he had

gotten the promises. And so Jay Coouper Hoover just says, well, I'm sorry, but this crime is going into the vault and nobody's going to talk about it. And you guys, you want to keep your jobs, you're not going to talk about it either, And so it was, it was hushed up, and so the legend of Merph the Serf was born. That's what happened.

that is how the story ends. And that's and so I don't want to actually give that part of ways that actually what happens, but Being does find out what happened to the Ego Diamond and be satisfied now that he has done his job.