NORCO '80-Peter Houlahan

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free at our web address. ZipRecruiter dot com slash murder that's ZipRecruiter dot com slash m r d er ZipRecruiter dot com slash murder. Zip recruiter The Smartest way to hire. Norko eighty tells the story of how five heavily armed young men led by an apocalyptic born again Christian attempted a bank robbery to turn into one of the most violent criminal events in US history, forever changing the face

of American law enforcement. Part action thriller and part courtroom drama, Norko eighty transports the reader back to the southern California of the seventies, an era of predatory evangelical gurus, doomsday predictions, megachurches, and soaring crime rates, with the threat of nuclear obliteration blooming over it all. In this riveting true story, a group of landscapers transformed into a murderous gang of bank robbers, armed to the teeth with military great weapons. Their desperate

getaway turned the surrounding towns into war zones. When was over, three were dead and close to twenty wounded. A police held helicopter was forced down from the sky, and thirty two police vehicles were destroyed by thousands of rounds of AMMO.

The resulting trials shook the community to the core, raising many issues that continue to plague society today, from the epidemic of post traumatic stress disorder with within law enforcement, to religious extremism and the militarization of local police forces. The book that we're featuring the seating is Narcot eighty, The true story of the most spectacular bank robbery in American history, with my special guest, journalists and author Peter Hulhan.

Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for agreeing to this interview.

Besides joining George Wayne Smith and Christopher Harvin. But what other people saw for people born in the fifties, as you write, tell us about the violent crime rates, tell us take us back to southern California, the nineteen seventies and up to this date in nineteen eighty what do these people see.

him towards this bank robbery. One was the very aggressively evangelical born again Christian movement that began in Orange County, California in the seventies and then swept throughout the country. It was known as the Jesus Movement, and it was these were youth ministries that were revolved around the Book of Revelation and End Times theology. And at an early age George became involved in Cavalry Chapel and at that time cavalry was really based on based on the rapture

and you know, the second Coming. So George at an early age believed that the apocalypse and the cataclysmic events and the collapse of society that would lead up to it was imminent. And Cavalry Chapel really pressed the uh pressed the idea that the rapture could come at any moment, and that was certainly for George to have been in Orange County as a the young man in the nineteen

seventies was really really brought that about. The other was that you know, if you if you're in that front mind frame and then you're on the lookout for current events that you can match up with revelation prophecy, Southern California of the nineteen seventies and most everywhere in the nineteen seventies was a place to sure could find it. There were a lot of doomsday scenarios that were banded around in the seventies, whether it be asteroid strikes or

massive earthquakes or population bombs. And also there were, as you say, you know, crime rates that would be almost unimaginable today, and a lot of the ideologies of the of the nineteen sixties really turned ugly in the seventies, recreational drug use became drug abuse. You know, free love became unwanted pregnancies. There was some really startling events like

the Jonestown mass suicide, the Symbionese Liberation Army. There was a lot of revolutionary groups, especially in the early seventies that were bombing things and trying to bring down society. So when George looked out at the world, he could see a lot of events in the United States that looked like social collapse, Babylonian style social breakdown, and also internationally towards the end of the at the end of the seventies and into the yearly eighties, there was the

Iran hostage situation. There was war in the Middle East, and as you say, the thing, the existential threat hanging over all of it is really nuclear war. And right out of high school, George Wayne Smith went into the army and he was trained as an artillery man and stationed in Germany, and he was trained on tactical battlefield nuclear weapons. And that was what really made the nineteen seventies dangerous, especially for the possibility of nuclear war, was

this proliferation of battlefield nuclear weapons. You know, once you once you use one of those, it's not hard to imagine escalating into the intercontinental ballistics missiles that would bring along obliteration. So when George looked out at the world, a lot of things matched up, and as in terms of how it all might end, nuclear war was something that was not hard for him to imagine and frankly

not hard for others to imagine. And I'll just briefly talk about George's George was the one who really planned

this bank robbery and recruited the others. He had a roommate, they owned a house together, Christopher Harvin and Christopher Harbin was a bit of a survivalist, and his idea of how the how the end might come for the and the collapse of social order and lawlessness was those doomsday scenarios I had meant and earlier, but of a kind of natural disaster or man made rather than something that

would come from God. And also included a nuclear war, but you know, asteroid strikes and particularly and things like that, population bombs. But really he believed in something called the Jupiter Effect, and the Jupiter Effect was a book that was about a alignment of planets that was going to come in nineteen eighty two did come than which the planets would be aligned all on the opposite side of the Sun, and it would affect gravitational pulls, it would

trigger volcanoes, earthquakes and things like that. And both George and Chris their dates and George's was the apocalypse or the rapture would come before the end of nineteen eighty and for Chris, as I say, it was looming ahead,

just a year and a half ahead. So sorry, it's a rather long answer, but it's certainly all those different factors fed into George Wayne Smith and Christopher Harvin kind of looking that they needed to prepare for lawlessness, social breakdown in which only the well armed and well funded and well prepared which survived.

George is George had this kind of psychological makeup that may have destined him to, you know, be involved in some sort of event in which people would hurt or die. And that was he had this grandiosity about him, this idea that what he wanted and what he needed was more important than everyone else. He wasn't the guy who set out to kill people. In fact, George had kind of channeled this grandiosity and this idea that he could

save everybody around him for the good. Up until then, everyone around him would say that he's a great guy. I mean, and he was, I mean up until then. He's a guy to help you out do anything, lend you money, save your soul. He was pretty aggressively evangelical himself, and so when he looked at his life and saw what you and I might think of as a a downturn in a temporary downturn in fortune, he looked at

as a absolute disaster. It was a cognitive dissonance between the person he thought he was destined always to become the great person and a guy who was pretty much down on his luck, had lost his family, was about to lose his home and everything else. And these guys are in there. You know, they're twenty seven and twenty eight years old, so that's their age when they start to take this on him, when they commit this crime. Chris Harvin's just kind of a troublemaker, you know, the

guy kid would do anything on a dare. He was always getting trouble at school. Nothing horrendously malicious, nothing violent. Neither of them had any criminal record, those two. And then they had this downturn in fortune and in their personal lives, combined with this idea that, you know, you could have a cataclysmic events looming in the future, and they thought they needed some money to address that and prepare themselves.

Is a semi rural, a gritty neighborhood of it was unincorporated area, so that the uh, the zoning laws weren't great. Kind of a some ramshackle houses out there, but mostly a relatively quiet, uh you know, suburban neighborhood. Again you call it probably lower working class, blue collar. And they had bought a house there and uh together and uh it was a modest stucco ranch with a just as they say, a small compound, because it was really just

just a little over a quarter acre. And uh, but as they as they prepare not just for the bank robbery, but again to uh to put them in a position to survive the apocalypse. They they began to put barbed wire up around the perimeter, uh walls of their backyard and uh put nailing carpet tacks so if anybody tried to come over that perimeter, they tear their hands up.

And they built they dug a pit and a tuddle that went from their backyard underneath their garage so they could either escape the house or use it as a bunker. And they also they'd always they were guys who liked guns, but they really began to ramp up and kind of put together an arsenal at that point.

Chris to do this, to rob a bank. And I mentioned George's grandiosity, well that extended to his plan to rob the bank. Chris also mentioned that, you know, he wasn't going to do it unless they were unless they were well armed when they went in. But George put together a rather elaborate plan in which he would address every contingency and that included being armed to the teeth with civilian versions of military grade weapons. These are you know,

AR fifteen's Heckler HK ninety ones, HK ninety threes. These are two twenty three caliber weapons, and George was back in a three oh eight, which is an absolute cannon, and thousands of rounds of ammunition, high powered high capacity magazines, forty round magazines that they take together jungle style, So there was three of them take together. You could pop out, flip over put it back in. So they started to

put together this grand plan. But you know, you get a grandiose plan like this, an elaborate plan, and also almost guarantees that something will go wrong, and it did. They needed decided they needed five people to pull this bank robbery off, and so Chris Harvin recruited his younger brother, Russell Harvin, and Russell was just he's going nowhere in his life. He was diabetic, but he was just kind of hanging out at home working odd jobs, smoking a

lot of weed. And when his brother asked him if he wanted to do it, or told him he should do it, Russ just kind of went along with it. Russ didn't really think things through. Russell's about twenty six years old at the time, twenty seven years old at the time. Then George also recruits Many Delgado. Manny Delgatto was only twenty one years old, and they knew each other from again working as landscapers at the Parks Department. And then Manny recruited his little brother, seventeen year old

Billy Delgado to be the getaway driver. And Manny and Many and Billy were from very different backgrounds. They were really from the barrio in Orange County, from really tough neighborhoods, and they all had their kind of different reasons for wanting to do it. Manny had one child and another one on the way, his wife was nine months pregnant. He felt he needed money. Billy had kind of a

hopelessness about him. He had rheumatwied arthritis and believed that he wouldn't be able to walk past the age of twenty five. And Russell Harvin somehow got in his head that his diabetics, his diabetes would would doom him to death before the age of thirty five. So they all kind of felt like they had nothing to lose, kind of a bit of a desperation about them.

and so that marriage also fell apart. Uh, just months before the bank robbery. And again George had this view of himself as he was going to save everyone around him, that he was a really good and responsible guy, and up until then he was and and couldn't understand why this had happened. Christopher Harvin's married at age eighteen, and by age twenty seven, he was his his marriage was falling apart. He was not being able to see his

kid as much as he wanted to. Russell Harvin married at age eighteen, and that wife ran off with another woman several years later. You know, she was actually married to another man and had had a had another a child, and but russ still wore their wedding ring, and so you know they were these guys were definitely kind of broken hearted and and a lot of other bad things happening in their lives.

very incredible cinematic scene in here. But tell us about them going to get weapons and what is their idea about spending the last bit of their money to get these weapons.

single shop. The weapons that they began to buy as they moved closer to this were the again the military grade weapons, civilian version, meaning they are semi automatic rather than fully automatic. But they were just the all of these weapons were legally purchased. They were not nearly as prevalent back then as they are now. These semi automatic which commonly referred to as assault rifles, and they were around. They were legal, but they weren't, but they were not

nearly as prevalent. And Dave's gun Shop was just one of the places they purchased it, and they would go to different gun stores. But in the course of a week, George Smith walked into Dave's I think it went three times, and purchased two semi automatic weapons two twenty three and AR fifteen and a Heckler in coch HK ninety one, which, as I say, is a three eight and three eight is around that three times as big as a as

a two twenty three. Not an animal in the world that can't be brought down with one single shot from a three to eight from a half mile away. And yeah, the guy at Dave's was starting to wonder kind of what was going on, and he joked to a semi joked to George Smith, Gee, what do you need all these for? Are you going to start a war? Rob a bank? And George just laughed.

duct tape. And they had fashioned these with some of them on dowels so that you could launch them out of the barrel of a shotgun up to one hundred yards, So you light the fuse and you can launch it out of a shotgun, or you can just you know, toss them. They had a couple dozen of these. They had molotov cocktails, wine bottles filled with leaded gasoline. So once they had all these weapons, and again all of them were had one of these rifles on them. All

of them had one or more handguns on them. And the plan was this and this is this is indeed what they executed the day of the bank robbery, which was Friday, May ninth, nineteen eighty uh and in the morning, three of them, the Delgado brothers and Russell Harvin, went to a shopping mall twenty miles away, the Braham Mall, and they stole a van at gunpoint, and they taped up the owner, Gary Hackela, and put him in the back of the van so he could not report it stolen.

They then Chris, Chris and George and met up with them, and they still had Gary Hackeler taped up in the back, and they went and put a diversion bomb underneath a gas mane a mile away, and this was six beer bottles filled with gasoline with a detonation device in it. And they put that underneath a gas maine at a behind a strip mall, and it did indeed go off, but it did not ignite the gas maine. A passer

by put it out with a fire extinguisher. But the plan was that, obviously that once that went off in this massive explosion, every first responder, including every cop, would be on their way to that and then they would hit the bank. And the bank that George eventually chose was the security Pacific Bank in Norco, California, which borders Miura Loma. Again, we're talking just about the center of a riverside county or near a riverside city. And he George chose his own bank, so the bank that they

robbed was George's bank. And they put on a ski masks, military ponchos, and they waited for that that in Sandia, for the diversion bomb to go off, expecting to see all the first responders head down Hamner Avenue towards there. And when that didn't happen at about they waited till about three thirty in the afternoon, and then they decided to go ahead and hit the bank.

had after words. But you know, the bank robbery itself, and this is George Russ, Chris and Manny Delgado crashing into this bank and ski masks and camouflage and Billy Delgado is to get away drivers sitting outside in this van. That actually is a lot of drama that goes on in that bank, as as goes on with pretty much any takeover robbery where they put everybody down on the floor. But you know, there's a lot of drama that unfolded

inside there. But for the most part, they got in that bank and they got out in two and a half minutes. However, when they were going in the bank and their camouflage and their ski masks and rifles. They were spotted by a bank teller at a bank across the street. And it is that bank teller who called the Riverside County Sheriffs to report a robbery at the

bank across the street. So it took about two minutes before the dispatcher sent out the two to eleven robbery in progress tone for the Security Pacific Bank, Fourth and Hamner in Norco. And at that time, Glen Balaski, Deputy Glen Blaski just happened to be sitting at that intersection looking straight at that bank. So if you talk about some bad luck mixed in with some rather unfortunate planning, that that's where it came in, was the fact that

Glen Blaski was right outside that bank. And and so Glen Balaski, you can hear him on the radio traffic. He reports himself on scene in less than two seconds after that, after that dispatch, and and these are this is right as the bank robbers are coming out of the bank. So Deputy Glen Balaski begins to take fire almost immediately as he takes the turn, just to cruise

into the bank and to see what's going on. And Blaski had so little time to really think through what he was getting himself into, that he'd not processed that this was a two to eleven in progress as opposed to a two to eleven silent and most silent alarms are you know, or you know alarms are false alarms nine out of ten of them are. But this was a confirmed robbery in progress. And that's when when Glenn Belaski came head to head with these bank robbers.

a whole different police jurisdiction. The golden rule of robbing banks in Los Angeles is rob a bank near a freeway. And again George decided to rob his own bank, and it was seven miles away from the from the nearest freeway. But nineteen eighty was really the sheer number of bank robberies. So Los Angeles had already established self as the bank robbery capital of the world. But the sheer number of bank robberies was beginning to skyrocket, and most of that

was because of drug abuse and the cocaine era. When people got addicted, they needed money to feed that habit, and robbing a bank in Los Angeles was not all that difficult. The vast majority are one on one robberies. That's one one bank robber going to one teller telling them, you know, slipping them a note this is give me all your money, and then leaving the bank with two thousand and three thousand dollars something like that. Clearly, George and Chris, we're not driven.

on it. So banks carried a lot of cash. But as the day went on, the bank was also emptying itself out of cash, and they robbed this bank at three thirty in the afternoon. The bank itself did not even have cameras in it. Most did, but this branch did not have any security cameras in it. One teller did manage to trigger the silent alarm, but the bank had been wired incorrectly, and that alarm went to the

Corona Police Department, that's the neighboring town. The Corona Police Department dispatched a robbery in progress to the Corona branch of the Security Pacific Bank. So there was certainly a delay there, and if it had not been for that bank teller across the street who had seen them go in and called the uh, the riverside sheriffs and gave them the correct location. You know, none of what followed may have happened at all, and that might have been

for the better for all involved as well. But uh, yeah, that that first alarm went to the wrong city.

calm and cool and filtering through so much information. But here's uh, here's one of the problems that really plagued law enforcement at the time and still does to a

certain extent. But and that's that. Uh, this this pursuit, it started with a pitched firefight in front of the bank between three sheriff's deputies and uh five bank robbers in which you know, people were wounded and one bank robber killed, and then became a running gun battle through the suburban streets of Riverside County onto a major highway that went into a San Bernardino County and then up

into the mountains. So the the law enforcement agencies involved heavily were the Riverside County Sheriffs, Sam Bernardino County Sheriffs, and the California Highway Patrol. Not to mention some other city agencies that were that were came in were involved, and none of these guys could talk to each other

the different agencies there was. There's an interagency system called clay Mars which was just beginning to be implemented, and there was only one in which you could go to a different frequency and all talk to each other, but that was did not really come into play until later on. And even in a very limited sense. Some patrol units had scanners so they could pick up different frequencies, but they could not talk to those other those other agencies.

So when this became a pursuit with up to thirty sometimes forty law enforcement vehicles involved, you know, these guys could not talk to each other, nor could some of them talk to the helicopter above which was pursuing the that was pursuing the bank robbers, and that would prove to be fatal later on in the at the end of the pursuit, inability for the lead patrol unit to be able to talk directly to the helicopter and receive reports from that helicopter as to where the truck was

that was with the bank robbers in front of it.

a direction, but they have their ideas. And it's interesting all these sheriffs again and deputies pardon me, that are involved in this pursuit. Let's first talk about how outgunned the police were at that time, because that's a big contributing factor to not only Jim Evans' death, but this entire thing that could have turned much, much worse.

And this this confrontation between law enforcement and bank robbers, as I noticed, started immediately in front of the bank when Glenn Bulaski came head to head with them, and then soon Chuck Hill and Andy Delgado, the other two deputies who were patrolling Norcobe, came un scene and there was a pitched firefight in a crowded southern California intersection at three point thirty in the afternoon on a Friday, and there were over five hundred rounds fired. Blaski's vehicle

was hit forty six times. Blasky was wounded in by bullet fragments or flying glass in five different places, including a shot to the elbow that severed an artery. But Blaski did manage to get off four shotgun rounds and Andy Delgado managed to discharge his shotgun with ten rounds and they did inflict some damage. The getaway driver, Billy Delgado, was shot in the back of the head with a shotgun pellet that paralyzed him and the van veered off

course and crashed into a fence. So the police were effective, was what they had. But once the pursuit got going after that, they really didn't stand a chance because when Billy Delgado was killed, the van kind of rolled off to the side and they couldn't get Billy out of the seat. So they abandoned the van and spread out

into the intersection. They brought there they left their twenty thousand dollars that they'd gotten from the bank robbery, which was a terrible take, and they they offloaded their double bags full of bombs and UH and UH ammunition and brought their rifles with them and began to fan out into this intersection while laying down heavy fire. The entire time on on the three deputies there and as they say, wounding a significantly wounding Blaski. But in general, yeah, there

was a uh there. The police were completely outgunned, especially because the bank robbers then commandeered a Ford F two fifty pickup truck that was used that had been modified for as a service vehicle, a heavy heavy uh heavy equipment uh maintenance trucks. So had they fabricated a cabinets on the sides of it, and they were filled with

equipment in tools and UH. And then they they'd mounted a settling and oxygen tanks on the back, back on against the cab, those big tall tanks, and there's nothing nothing the police were shooting it would ever penetrate those. So this was you had. You then had h You had Russ Harvin and George Smith in the back. Both

have been wounded. George has been wounded pretty significantly. You had Manny Delgado sitting out the passenger window, he literally had his torso completely out the passenger window, and Chris Harvin driving, and all of the three guys had again these semi automatic high powered rifles. So for all intents and purposes, this was like a military military vehicle in terms of its its armor and sell it's it's firepower.

and over five hundred rounds have been fired. People are running for their lives when they commandeer this at gunpoint, this truck I just mentioned, and they first begin heading back to their home that they've you know, their compound as you put, at their fortified home in miro Loma, which is about nine or ten miles away, And they head up Hamner Avenue, which is the busiest boulevard in that area in Norco, and heads up towards miro Loma. And as they head north, it starts to become more

and more kind of rural. There's kind of there's vineyards out there, there's bean fields, there's sheep grazing meadows and things like that. But it's still a very populated area. And as they begin to head towards their house, they're really weaving through side streets and they turn almost every block, and so it's almost impossible for these pursuing units to predict where they're going to come out the radio traffic, they're saying, Okay, they're they're you know, they're headed this

way on this street. Then now they're headed this way on this street. Now they're headed this way on another street, and you know, trying to intercept them or set up a roadblock became almost impossible. There is not a helicopter on them at that point. Riverside County Sheriff did not have a helicopter. They had requested one from a from a nearby city, Riverside City PD, and that had not that was not yet on the that had not yet

engaged the pursuit. So what was happening is these police officers were flooding into the area and the California Highway Patrol had begun to self dispatch off the freeways and we're involved now, and but they would suddenly come upon this truck with almost no warning, and these you know, again you have three guys firing high powered rifle and they were immediately being hit with gunfire. There were numerous vehicles struck by gunfire, including civilian vehicles. They also rammed

a few civilian vehicles. They pushed one out into an intersection, so they took that truck and just rammed them out of the intersection so they could get through the light. The next intersection they rammed it, hit another car sideways, they t boned it, sent it spinning, and then they

started weaving through these streets. And in the matter of you know, about ten minutes, there was an additional five five people hit by gunfire, four deputies and a civilian by the time they got up to Mira Loma, and then by the time and then the helicopter engaged them in Mira Loma. So when they did finally get to their house, they really had no ability to stop there.

I mean, they had a helicopter on them, and they still had one California Highway Patrol unit and three deputies right following through these through these streets with.

When uh when, by the time they now now in the truck By the time they got up to the cold cars, they had to they had police officers, they were already encountering them. They've been spotted. So Chris Harvin decided not to stop at the cold cars, and that's when they were headed towards their house. And the advantage, of course, was weaving through those streets was that nobody could get a beat on them or set up a

roadblock or otherwise prepared to encounter them. And uh, you know they are and that at that point headed in the direction inadvertently headed in the direction of a of a freeway. But yeah, the second destination was the house itself.

another vehicle, which which failed. But at that point they had reached had reached the freeway, the Pomona Freeway, and the strategy at that point was to head up into the mountains above Los Angeles and to then try to use the fact that they had this truck to lose the patrol vehicles which are really you know, sit ans and on the rough dirt roads and eventually disappear into

the canyons. So the first thing they did is they got on the Pomona Freeway and then onto Interstate fifteen and headed east into the mountains above Los Angeles and Los Angeles and Riverside San Bernardino, and they crossed into the San Bernardino County line, so they've passed into the jurisdiction of the Riverside County Sheriffs and onto the freeway,

which is the turf of the California Highway Patrol. So now you had Riverside still pursuing California Highway Patrol descending from all different directions and then the San Bernardino County Sheriffs starting to flood onto the freeway at that point, and that's where they are hitting patrol vehicles from about a half a mile away. And soon the patrol units, the deputies, and the CHP units start to turn off their lights, their light bars because they were they realized

they were being targeted. They could see the light bars. Chris Harvin also begins to slow down to at points to try to ambush these these pursuing vehicles, draw them in close, hit the brakes and have those guys fire on them from close range. They throw out three fragmentation grenades on Interstate fifteen that pepper the pursuing police officers with shrapnel. This whole time, they're hitting civilian cars as well semi trucks, shooting them at close range, some of

the inadvertently some inexplicably turning their guns on civilians. So people are bailing off the freeway into the breakdown lane. Trucks are swerving to get out of the way. It is absolute chaos on this freeway and it's at this point that they turn their guns on a San Bernardino County Sheriff's helicopter that's about eight hundred feet above them and George Smith. It's a round from a three to eight right through the belly of this helicopter and it

immediately the electrical system in the radios catches fire. And luckily it's a Vietnam chopper pilot with tons of combat experience behind the stick in that helicopter, and he manages to get it down to the ground before it before it crashes, and they are and then a second helicopter quickly comes in and resumes the pursuit. But the way they're headed is to the mountains of above Los Angeles, and they get off after about eight miles. They get off at Sierra Road and start to head up Lytle Creek.

And Lytle Creek is a place where they were familiar. It is a it's a place where you can fire guns anywhere you want at that time, and that's where they had gone to practice with their new weapons. Even threw a hand grenade down in the cannon to make canyon to make sure they work. That was a week before, so they're very familiar with this area. And you know, if you know the little if you know the San Gabriel National Forest and Mount Baldy in that area. These

are very rugged mountains. You know, they can jut up to over ten thousand feet very rapidly. So these are very rough canyons. And when that pursuit and it's you know, this is a two lane road that starts his asphalt and then turns into turns into a dirt road and again a rough dirt road. So a lot of these cars are breaking down as you say, ones that were hit with gunfire are bailing out and the police officers and summer jumping out of one vehicle and getting into

another one. So now there's you know, some of them have two and even three officers in there. And you mentioned Jim Evans, and this is where on the on the I fifteen's where Jim Evans, Deputy Riverside Deputy. Jim Evans joins the pursuit. And I'll give you a little bit of background on Jim Evans. He's older, he's about thirty eight years old. He's a career military. He is Green Beret, highly decorated in Vietnam UH combat mission. So he's a he's a senior guy. He joined the joined

the river. He's only joined the Sheriff's department and about five years before. But he was certainly destined to move up the ranks. Just a wonderful human being. Quiet, He's a Texan, so he's got that Texas drawl, really looked up to by the bias fellow deputies. And and so Jim Evans is in uh in one of the front cars in the pursuit as it heads up into this very ominous landscape of the mountains.

rough life and she was a very tough woman. And when these two found each other, they had they had really found the love of their lives. They were a perfect couple couple together. They both loved to ride horses, owned horses, and uh, it's kind of one of these things where long last both of them had found the perfect person. And they'd been married about two years and had a uh, had a son that was about six, about eight weeks old at the time. And Mary was

a municipal bus driver. And again you know the times in which these things take place. Excuse if you didn't have the radio on, and even then, you might not have even known this was going on unless you encountered this crazy pursuit that was unfolding. And she was on a bus route at the time, so she did not know her husband, Jim Evans, was involved in anything because she didn't know this was going on.

get out there. And then another deputy, Jim McPherrin, is out in the field and he hears the helicopter be grounded and he radios back to the to the station. He says, uh, get the ar And what he meant was there was the Uh. There was a M sixteen, a you know, a military M sixteen rifle that they had confiscated from a drug dealer in a pursuit. Drug

dealer throw it out the window on the freeway. And that was the only high powered rifle that either of those departments had was this one confiscated M sixteen rifle and the military didn't want it back, so it was sitting around in a sergeant's trunk of their car and DJ McCarty runs out. He grabs that weapon, and this is a fully automatic M sixteen, you know, rifle that they use in Vietnam, and four magazines full of ammunition.

And he jumps in with McPherrin and they start to try to make their way up to the front of the pursuit line, and they are radioing to other vehicles, you know, get out of our way. We have a you know, we have a rifle here. And so they are starting to move up the pursuit line when this pursuit then goes onto a fire road, a very narrow fire road that is clean to the side of this mountain, and Jim Evans is then in the lead, and by then DJ McCarty has gotten to number two in the

pursuit line behind Evans. But Evans, again because of the radio situation, does not know that there is a there's a vehicle behind him that has that high powered rifle that they're trying to bring the bear on the pursuit. There are about forty police cars still there, winding still in the pursuit line as they head up this very treacherous fire road. And what happens is when they get around a curve, the uh, the truck encounters wash out in the road and they have to they have to

bring the pursuit to a hall pen. They can't go any farther. They jump out and they ambush the pursuing police officers and and deputies. And I won't give away that that's a very dramatic scene. It is again another ferocious firefight, this time seven thousand feet up a mountain side. And and when it's over again, Evans is dead and the remaining four bank robbers disappear into the canons of Mount Baldy. They run up the fire road, they climb over the the washout, and they uh, they they disappear

in the canyons. By that time, it's it's it's uh, you know, it's it's coming on five o'clock in the evening. There's a it's cold up there. The helicopter's a cloud covered descending, so that they're gonna lose their helicopters soon. It's starting to get dark, and the law enforcement decides they're just gonna hunker down and start a massive man hunt.

The next day to UH to round up these four escaped bank robbers and at this point cop killers ad no, I'm sorry yeah, And this this leads to UH your question about putting together this man hunt, which turns into the largest man hunt in UH California law enforcement history. And they start to bring in specialized teams. There's UH, there's UH there's dog, there's a search dogs, you know, sniffer dogs and uh uh uh uh deputies on horseback and uh search search and rescue teams. They start to

bring in helicopters. The military brings in uh Arctic parkas that some of the deputies put on. It gets very cold that night, and it does. There's a dusting of snow and freezing rain. And when they set off the next day there they have SWAT teams up there. They have these tracker teams and what they brought in from a Los Angeles county where what's known as the hunt and kill teams, and a hunt and kill team is is two two swap members, one with a shotgun and

one with a high powered rifle. And they are then accompanied by one UH one deputy and and one UH tracking team. And you can tell by the name that their their job is uh, you know, they're they're not officially called the hunt and kill team, but they're they're meant to, you know, to to be able to bring to locate suspects and if necessary, have the firepower to as they say, neutralize that suspect. So there are the

hunt and kill teams up there as well. When they start this massive man hunt the next.

He went about two hundred yards down the mountain side, kind of hid behind a bush, sat there through the night, and it was just a miserable night. They were soaked through with freezing rain. He'd thrown away his rifle at this point. He just had a couple of handguns on him. And George was kind of done by the time, as as you mentioned, he was waking up during the night and kind of looking up and certain times thought he was actually dead, you know, kind of am I alive?

Am I dead? And the first the first person law enforcement encounters as George Smith and the other two, as I said, Chris Harvin, Russ Harvin Manny Delgado, had all individually at some point gone over the as they go over the side off the fire road and down down into the mountains and the canyons, but they've gone separately. So George next morning, George Smith is the first to

be found and he really gives himself up. But he's a few hundred yards down this very treacherous mountain side and it's gonna in his condition, it's gonna take him a while to walk him down to where a helicopter can take him out, and uh Sam Bernadino uh sends a homicide detective up the mountain side with a tape recorder to interrogate George Smith as they're bringing him down, and it's it's very dramatic audio. You can hear the helicopter in the back and uh rosta Ork homicide detective

roster of Orick is interviewing George Smith. And the first thing he tells him is, George, you realize you have a bullet in you You you realize you may die, right George? And George says yeah. And then and so basically what roster of Orick has got him into is sort of a deathbed confessional. And roster Worick honestly thought he might die before he gets him down this mountain side. He can only go about, you know, fifteen feet before

they need to have him rest. He keeps saying he wants to go to sleep, and but he gets a rather stunning confession and full accounting of the bank robbery and the names of the other bank robbers, and George admits that he'd put the whole thing together his idea as they're as they're going down that mountain side, and in the end George survives, and a lot of that is is used against them all in the in the coming trial. So George is the first to give up.

At about nine eight thirty in the morning, Russ had found his brother Chris. During the night, Chris had had been had been shot in the back during the ambush up on the fire road. He he had he had about had it midway through the through the night and ahead and started a fire just kind of, you know, the heck with it? If I if I get seen and caught, you know, I'm not getting out of this anyways.

Russell sees the fire and uh and goes down the hillside and and meets up with his brother and as it becomes light, and they just decide they're going to start walking out of the canyon. And if they walk out of the canyon, great, but they fully expected that they would be captured at some point down the way. So Chris has got the bullet in his back and

he is coughing of blood. Russell Harvin is diabetic and he has no insulin or food on him, and he had also taken a shotgun pellet underneath his scalp in the intersection in front of the bank. It had not penetrated the skull, but it was still underneath his underneath his scalp. And they are spotted and picked up. They had actually quite made it quite a ways out of Lytle Creek canyon, and but they were spotted and picked up and gave up about ten thirty in the morning,

and that led Manny Delgado. Manny Delgado was the only one who had not been wounded during the firefight, but he had seen his seventeen year old little brother die in front of him, or you know, badly wounded and honest clearly on his way to death. He was paralyzed at the time by the round and you know, may the thinking was Manny was probably not going to give himself up at this point. Is is generally considered his

state of mind. And he ran the farthest up the fire road and then began during the night making his way over mountaintops, you know, ridge lines and things like that, and when daylight came, he was under it. He was kind of at the crest of a ridge line. Then we're talking seven thousand feet up in the mountains. Eight thousand feet I think is around where he was under some very thick brush, so thick you'd have to crawl on your to really to be able to penetrate it.

And he is a hunker down there. Of course, he's got no food whatever, water, he's just squeezing out of his clothes to drink. He is armed. He also has thrown away as a rifle, and he's armed with a thirty eight revolver. The hunt and kill teams and the SWAT teams up there assume he has a high powered rifle,

but at that point he didn't. And Manny Delgado gets just by almost sheer luck, gets spotted by a helicopter when they see just a flash of blue from some some gloves Manny was wearing for warmth that he'd used during the robbery, and they signal to a hunt and kill team in La County Sheriff's Hunt and Kill team where he is. They hover down below him to to you know, to cause such a racket. You know, they're

they're using the rotor blades to part the brush. Of course, it's a huge amount of noise and spraying dirt all over him and everything that kind of just packed him while this hunt and killed team sneaks up and when they get about fifteen feet away, they yell for Manny to freeze. Manny looks over, kind of leans up, and you know, these guys are not trained to give a to give a fugitive, especially one who's already killed a

police officer anytime. They don't give them any breaks, and they immediately, you know, they open fire on him and they they kill Manny Delgado.

and they fire on him. But the autopsy later on shows that Manny Delgado was killed from around from his own gun, shot straight through his heart. And there is kind of a poetry if you will about that. You know, he'd just seen his little brother get killed, his little brother who he talked into, talked into becoming part of this,

and you know, sure he was broken hearted. And there was some rumors that went around that maybe he had, you know, just just killed himself, but it's more likely that he had fallen on the gun when the first round went through and the gun been discharged. But it was the cause of death in the end, was a self inflicted gunshot wound through the heart.

attitude with investigators once he's arrested. Tell us about those people being questioned, but first tell us what both of their thoughts are, but especially George, once they are arrested and concerning this whole revelation idea end times.

a he's reluctant to he's trying to hedge it. He's he keeps saying he forgets things, but he does keep talking. You know, Rest is a guy who's easily talked into things, and he was not much of a challenge for these interrogators. Plus they've been pretty much caught red handed.

He's he's his usual very soft spoken, intelligent self, and uh he also you know, he just says, I put it all together. I did this. I told these guys to do this. I told them where to go. I picked the bank and everything. So they all confess, and at that point they don't really neither of them mention anything about their beliefs out of what propelled them to

do it. It's only later when they go to trial that they begin to to bring it up and almost use it as a strategy, you know if, rather than just it just being a you know, a greedy bank robbery, they kind of assign it a higher purpose, you know, that that they believed that the end of the world has come and one of the just and that they were doing it because they needed to save those who they loved, so it was almost a you know, a higher purpose to it. One of the most unusual things

is that two weeks after they are captured. Is when Mount Saint Helen's volcano blows up in Washington State and both George and Chris see that, you know, that catastrophic event. You know, a lot of people, a lot of people die, but mostly just a natural, natural phenomena natural disaster event. You know, they think, well, here we go. You know, George is thinking it's the first son. Chris Harvin, you know, Okay,

the Jupiter effect isn't there at that time. But Chris had always thought it would be volcanic activity and seismic earthquakes and things along the Pacific rim that would that would throw California into chaos and destruction. So it's it's kind of an unusual, unusual coincidence.

it's it's a death penalty trial. And it's not a matter of whether these guys are going to be found not guilty, it's whether they're going to be sentenced to death. But it is still a very dramatic trial and it starts to go off the rails almost immediately with a jury selection and that lasted six months, which is absolutely unheard of. But this trial just becomes a fascinating you know, probably the most unusual development comes about twelve months into

this trial. One of the more unusual when Chris Harvin's defense attorney, Chris Harvin and his defense attorney to try suddenly throw a hail Mary defense into this in which they say that Chris was never even there for the

bank robbery. In fact, Chris had tried to talk everybody out out of doing this the morning of, and that there was a mysterious character named Jerry Cohen who was actually the guy mistaken for Chris Harvin in the bank, and it was Jerry Cohen, who had forced them all to do this, and Chris had bailed out at the last second, he claimed and testifies to, and was running up Hamner Avenue to just to get back home when all of a sudden, the yellow truck came and Manny

do and he says, Manny Delgado and Jerry Cohen pointed a gun at me and forced me to drive the truck and I didn't want to do it, but that's why I'm up on the mountain. But I wasn't part of this. So this Jerry Cone, who of course has never been found, is is the one they blame. And the other is that they start to put the blame on Manny Delgado. Manny's not there to defend himself. Manny, by all accounts, was he and Russell Harvin probably the

most prolific shooters in the entire pursuit. So they've been spotted. Many has been sitting outside the cab for most of

the pursuit out the passenger window. And the real, uh, the the what was going to get them the death penalty was the death of Jim Evans, Deputy Jim Evans, and uh and so then there then there becomes another person who they start to blame on all this when it comes to the death of Jim Evans, and that is they claim they put on a friendly fire defense, and they claimed that DJ McCarty, the Sambernandino deputy, who had the M sixteen rifle that he had never used

before in his life and did bring it to bear during that ambush and was in the vehicle right behind Jim Evans. So when they all jumped out of their out of their vehicles, they say that DJ McCarty opened fire with a gun he'd never used before and shot Jim Evans, who was ten feet in front of him. And so they so DJ McCarty not only has the uh, you know, the traumatic experience of watching another deputy killed in front of him, the terror of almost being killed himself.

I mean, he had been shot once and he was taking heavy gunfire before he was able to figure out how to use this gun properly. Now he has the you know, the whispers and everything of other cops saying, well, you know, you know, they say that DJ McCarty kill killed Jim Evans. So it was a really terrible experience all around for for DJ McCarty, who was a really young, young deputy at the time. So yeah, the blame goes to this mysterious character Jerry Cone.

another fascinating twist to this story. We don't want to go too far into it, but what happens with this investigator named Painter.

investigator from the Public Defender's office named Jeanie Painter. And Jeanie Painter is thirty three years old. She's a veteran investigator. She has done hundreds of felonies before. She's considered extremely good, also very Harry's heavy workloads. And investigators are you know, needless to say, they're just absolutely critical to a trial. They're they're out there gathering evidence, they're out there interviewing people, they're orchestrating all everything in the courtroom for the for

the defense attorney. And Jennie Painter is say thirty three years old, and she's she's very attractive. There's a bond hair and uh you know, a real head turner around the courthouse which is mostly men in that era, and uh uh. As this trial moves ahead, and the trial was moved out of a Riverside County down to San Diego County, there begins this relationship that develops between Jeanie

Painter and George Wayne Smith. And a lot of it had to do with a you know, where Jeanie Painter was in her life, and she was she was still as much of a veteran as she was, she was still a young woman. She was now transferred away from her family and under incredible stress and incredible workload. And George Smith is a very compelling, it's very compelling, articulate guy.

And and so this relationship, and that's a kind word for it, begins to develop between the two of them, and and then soon turns into a lot of misconduct on the part of Genie Painter, and she sort of falls under the h the spell of George Smith. And there's accusations of jail house sexual misconduct and smuggling drugs into the prison or into the jail, bringing in naked

photographs of herself for George. And so Genie Painter really takes a beating in this and it really suffers under kind of a from this relationship that that she's developed with George Smith.

a mistrial in this at this late stage. But the judge is just desperate not to have this trial end after twelve months or fourteen months, so he manages to keep it, to keep Genie Painter involved and keep the keep the trial moving.

to that point because it implicated the others. You can implicate yourself in a confession. But they were being tried together, all three of these, Russ, Chris, and George were being tried together. And yeah, so in the in the prosecutor Jay Hanks just completely tears apart Chris Harvin on the on the stand because it's just a it's a preposterous story.

And Chris is trying to act like he's just this innocent victim and never shot a gun, tried to stop this from happening, and but he but he Chris has opened up the door. So Jay Hanks just dismantles him, and in the process, Chris implicates Russ. He effectively puts a gun in Russ's hands at the as well as George at the ambush site during his testimony because his

confession he had mentioned it. And so you know, these are guys are trying to trying to blame it on Manny or on DJ McCarty, and you know some of them were even George saying I was too weak. I couldn't even fire. Others say I didn't even have a gun. Chris is saying I was shot in the back, and

true enough. But so he didn't do it. But it was a very big deal when when Chris Harvin for throwing this hail Mary defense, this crazy defense, and then ends up implicating, as they say, his best buddy George Smith and his little brother putting a gun in their hand that might have gotten them the death penalty.

into the penalty phase. And one of the more unusual things in the penalty phase is Clayton Adams had George Smith named a co council in it, and it allowed George Smith to actually question some of his some of his witnesses, or at least one of them during the

penalty phase. But it also allowed George Smith to give a closing argument, but only if George would would refer to himself from the third person, and so that made it a kind of a creepy aspect to it, with George Smith's standing up there, and this is the first time anybody, any of the jurors had heard George Smith. And what it did is allowed George Smith to kind of make a statement about himself without being cross examined.

So it's a bit of a legal trick, and it's it's quite a speech George gives, and it is overflowing with very with religious prophecy and very scholarly interpretations of the Bible, which frankly lose a lot of the juries dur along the way. But George is basically saying, George Smith would never kill another human being. George Smith believes in the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, George Smith would never do this. And it's a very odd moment.

And in the end they are sentenced to life without parole rather than the death penalty, and a reporter comments who had covered the entire trial, comments that he thought it was sort of like Stockholm syndrome. You know, when you spend that amount of time in a room as the we had in the same room with three human beings, no matter what they've done, you're just simply not going to be sentencing them to death. So they did get found, they were sentenced to life without parole, and that's that

is where they remain today. Just a quick thing, Dan, I'm sure people have commented before, well, you're telling so much of the story, you know, how do you Why do you tell so much of the book? And I got to tell you, and I hope you'll agree, is there is so much detail that goes into these just fascinating details, and so much more that happened during that

pursuit that I haven't mentioned that. Uh, No one has ever felt like I gave away the book by by even by kind of telling what the major events are in it.

The pursuit is incredible, these brave officers, the citizens running a mock, the effect of this trial, so all of these things, and we hadn't even touched on just one little thing that again, it was interesting about George Smith's father being dismissed from or quitting the police force after he encountered resistance when he was being an honest cop and found a corruption and again just another little thing that added to George Smith's it seemed in conflict with

his character that George Smith would end up where he did end up. So it's very, very fascinating how the background and everything that you brought into the story factors into this incredible, this incredible tale.

certainly didn't hate them, but they didn't trust them. And George had that uh yeah, that experience in his family where his father, uh was at Casper, Wyoming and arrested two police officers who he caught in the middle of the night robbing a store on Main Street. And uh, when he brought him back to the department, the he's the one who gotta you know, they let him go and said, what the hell are you doing arresting these guys? And he found really kind of deep corruption and it

was very disillusioning. His father had always wanted to be a cop, so that that was kind of circulating in the family, this this idea that you can't trust policemen, which made George and Chris even want to arm up more because they felt their attitude was, well, cops kill people if they find them. You know, if they catch us,

they're going to try to kill us. So uh, you know they set out to kill any cops, but they certainly certainly tried once they uh once they had these uh once once the firefight began.