This story contains adult content and language, along with references to sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.
This book is about second shots and second chances. Never give up in life.
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career, research for my many audio and book projects has taken me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers, and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the unpublished details behind their stories. In nineteen seventy one, James Tappenhall was gunned down in Maryland as the deputy sheriff patrolled the grounds of a country club. The police searched for suspects, which included a gang of teens known for breaking into Coca Cola machines, but the case went cold for half a century until it finally broke But did
they catch the real killer? Author Michael Weisberg tells me the story from his book A Second Shot, The Pursuit of Justice in Maryland's oldest cold case murder. You know, I've had people bring me cases before about their relatives. It's a lot of weight on the writer, I think, because you're telling a very very personal story that you're invested in but for a finite amount of time, and you know you care very much about these people, or
you grow to care about them. But in Carolyn's case, this is, you know, a a massive part of her life. So was it difficult for you to wrap your head around that. Were you intimidated in any way? Because I get intimidated by stuff like that.
I think I was intimidated by it. Just what you're saying is true. But I also found tremendous support from Carolyn and her husband and their daughter Carrie that they wanted this to be done and anything that they could do to help me. They were there and they wanted to give me all the information that I needed. They wanted to have their family cooperate, They wanted to have
anybody that had anything to do with it. Ow Sweat, who was the original investigator on the story fifty two years ago, in the case fifty two years before anybody
who had anything to do with it. They wanted them to help me, and I felt that, although it was something I'd never done before, that initially I got into it thinking it was going to be open and shut as I talked about it in the book, But even as I got further into it and realized that it was going to take a while and take several years to go through and write, I felt like with the fa family behind me, I felt more support than I did intimidation.
Okay, that's great. Well, where should we start with this story? Do we want to get into James Tappenhall's background? How far back do we want to go?
Okay, well, let's just start with the fact that here's a man who was married and had two children and doing anything he could to earn a living for the children. They'd originally had a home in Silver Spring, Maryland that they'd been kicked out of because they couldn't pay the bills, So he obviously he'd grown up extremely poor. He had a fifth grade education, and he never wanted something like that to ever happen again to his family. So he had a job where he worked on transmissions for buses.
That's for his job. He learned how to do it and he was excellent. He became the union steward for his company and he was very good at doing that. But he also was always looking for other ways to make money. For example, he bought a store that had ice creaming made ice cream, and he would spend hours when he wasn't working on the transmissions in that store making the ice cream for sale that was called Shirley's
ice Cream. He decided to work also at the amusement park that was near where they lived, and his job was to put people into the roller coaster and make sure that their seats were secure and that the things were over them so that they couldn't fall out of the roller coaster. They needed more security at this amusement park, and so they told him, Okay, we're going to make you security, but you're going to be a deputy sheriff. And so that's how he became a deputy sheriff. There
was no training, no tests to take, nothing. He had a little bit of background who's in the military short time, but then was discharged because they had flat feet. So here he is now a deputy sheriff and also as part of the deputy sheriff's duties, they were security guards at the Manor Country Club. This was a beautiful country club in Rockville, Maryland, and they had a lot of breakings and burglaries in that area. They thought mainly commuted
by teenagers who lived there. They're breaking into the coke machines of breaking into the houses, and so they felt like they needed a security guard to work there. So JT. Hall was on the regular shift of working security. On the night of October twenty third, nineteen seventy one, he wasn't supposed to work, his family was over. The ship started at seven o'clock pm. He got a call at six thirty pm and it was a rainy, dark night,
just terrible rainstorm. A man who was supposed to work, Jim Young, said he had a family matter come up and couldn't work and could JT work for him. JT said sure, He's always willing to do things to make extra money to provide for his family, and so he drove to the country club and that started to shift at seven o'clock.
How many years had JT been a deputy sheriff in Maryland before what happens happens.
He'd been a deputy sheriff for approximately five years before this had happened.
Well, we know that he is, you know, somebody who's committed to getting security for his family and he's doing everything he possibly can. What do you think about him as a personality, as a person, you know, I mean, what does Carolyn say about what her dad was like as far as.
His work approach and things like that. He was very hard working, always dill legent about doing his job, whatever type of work he was involved with. But he was a very loving family man. He loved to spend time with his children and his grandchildren. He would do anything he could for them, and he would go out of his way. Like Carolyn related the story when she was
six years old, her father took her. They were out and her father took her out on the dance floor to dance, and she said, I don't know how to dance, and he just put her feet on top of his and moved her around to dance floor. And that's something that almost seventy five years later, she still remembered. Well.
She also remembered how much he used to love to play croquet and other games with the kids, and how he hated to have his son beat him so that he would a cheat it croquet by kicking his ball along. He was a devoted man. He only drank alcohol when they would go out to go dancing and things like that. He was not a religious man in the formal sense, but he was certainly a god fearing man in the sense that he treated other people the way he would want to be treated.
Tell me about the area a little bit more. Montgomery County in general in nineteen seventy one put us in time also with the United States. You know, what is the general feeling we have about America in this time, and then about this area as far as crime or politics or anything like that. So we know what we're dealing with here.
This area is about thirty minutes outside of Washington, d C. It's a very democratic voting areas, but in that time too, about seventy seventy five percent in presidential elections. Just to give you an idea near that area. And Prince George Maryland is where George Wallace was shot when he was running for president. And as a matter of fact, Frank Hall, who was the nephew of JT. Hall, served after he
was shot in the hospital. He was in charge of security for George Wallace's wife, So that's in the area. There was a lot going on in the area, a lot of racial things in the sixties and seventies. The amusement park that I talked about where JT. Hawd worked, was burned down in a riot at that time. So there was a lot of things going on as far as politically in that the Rockville and that whole area at all. At the time. JT and his family weren't
involved in politics. His brother was the fire chief for the area for Montgomery County, and JT, as I said, was just worked as a deputy sheriffs. But mainly what it was was more of a just a glorified security guard, both at the amusement park and at the Manor Country Club. The Montgomery County is one of the wealthiest counties in Maryland. It's now the largest, its largest county. It's now become a tech quarter. It wasn't, of course at that time.
When I think about that time and look back into the seventies, I see a lot of youth unrest in that area. I see a lot of the teenagers getting together, and there are places churches that had their churches open just to keep the kids off the streets, not realizing that what they were doing in a lot of cases was allowing these young men to get together, get to know each other, in form gangs, to perform mischief, robberies,
and things like that. So I think that there was a lot of unrest, a lot of the teenagers were out and about on the town. I think it was an environment that was ripe for having things like burglary and other types of criminal activities occur.
So on this night in nineteen seventy one, Jim Young says, can you take over this shift for me? And you said it was a rainy night, dark night, and now let's pick it up from there. What ends up happening?
So he goes to the country club and there's always on Saturday nights, high stake poker games going on. That was another reason to have security there. So he would make his way around the parking lot where he parked his car, and then go in and out into the country club itself and check out and make sure that everything was okay there. He used his flashlight because it was so dark, and he would make multiple trips around the parking lot, which was large to make sure that
everything was okay. The parking lot on one end about the country club itself, and then on one side was the golf course, so you could see from the parking lot into the golf course. And on the golf course were a lot of huge trees, and then on all around the golf course were built these mansions that people had built with large windows looking out on the golf course.
He does his shift. He's about four and a half hours into it, and one of the things he'd loved to do while he was in his car loaning away from the house was smoke his pipe. He would smoke his pipe intermittently. He had just gotten his pipe out at ten thirty and all of a sudden, out of the corner of his eye, he sees something going on in the area of the golf course. Some things moved. So he gets out of his car and starts walking over there. It's pouring rain, it's dark, there's almost no
lighting out in the parking lot. He uses his flashlight and sees something move and says, what's going on there? What are you doing? Flashes this flashlight and he's able to see that in the area between the country club and the parking lot, there's built up almost a pyramid of household items, things like step stools and jack lanterns and sheets and all these things are just in a
big pyramid, big piles right there. And the next thing you hear a gun shot, and he's holding his flashlight and the shot hits the flashlight and knocks it out of his hand. Everything goes dark. He realizes that he's being shot at, so he turns around to get out of the way and reaches for his gun. Unfortunately, he reached got his pipe out, and at the same moment that he got his pipe out, he was shot in the back of his head. It was one shot that entered in the lower left hand inside of his head
and lodged behind his right eye. He fell to the ground, the pipe went skittering away, ended up near a drain pipe here where he was lying, and he was left there to die. He was found by a couple who had been out on a date, Robert Tristgrad and his girlfriend, and they were walking by and they saw him, probably within about five to ten minutes of it taking place, and they went into the country club and had the receptionists there call the police and called for an ambulance.
A few minutes later, a group of boys drove into the parking lot. These boys, who are now known as the Coke Machine Gang, at the same time as all this was going on, had been attempting to break into the coke machines on the Manor Country Club to steal the quarters from the coke machines. They saw what looked like a big bag of garbage in the middle of the parking lot, but stopped there. They'd come back to
the parking lot. They had left because they'd heard sirens, which had turned out to be were fire engines going elsewhere. Then they'd come back because they realized that they'd left one of the tools that they'd used to break into the coke machines on the Coke Machines. So they came back and saw this big piece of garbage bag in the middle of the parking lot, got out and realized
that it was a Deputy Sheriff JT. Hall. One of them, Robert Canavery, turned his head to the side so he could breathe, and the rest went in and also contacted the receptionist, and they waited until the ambulance came to take him to the hospital. He was still breathing but unresponsive.
Nice gang of petty criminals. I guess, well, that's risky for them.
These were boys fifteen to sixteen years old, the leader of whom his father was a police officer. His name was Shoemaker. He had been in trouble with the law multiple times, and he was actually his father had told him afterwards not to talk to the police, and as it turns out, he turned out to be the suspect that the detectives initially centered on and felt for years that he was the one who had shot the deputy sheriff.
The Coke Machine boys had been driving around. The Coke Machine gang had been driving around that night smoking marijuana, and previously they'd gone into a laundry place where there was laundry machines and they'd broken into those installed the quarters from those. Norman Shoemaker was their leader, and he drove them over. He was sixteen, so he drove the car.
He drove them over to the country club and then, like I said, they saw the deputy sheriff lying there and they called in and one of them, Robert Cannaveri, stayed behind to help him breathe.
Now, remind me who is the son of the cop? Which one of those boys, the.
Son of the cop is Norman Shoemaker. Okay, he'd been involved in other activities, criminal activities in the past, but the law states said, you cannot interview a juvenile unless they're caught in the act of committing a crime or their parent gives consent. And his father would never give consent. So he had a very bad reputation among law enforcement
in Montgomery County. And with this episode, he was initially interviewed, but when his father found out what was going on, he refused to be interviewed anymore, and so he became the prime suspect.
So you know, at this moment, you've got the Coke Machine Gang who were waiting for the ambulance, and you've got JT. Who is still alive and Robert turned his head so he could breathe. What else does the Coke Machine gang say about this situation, I mean from their point of view?
Interestingly enough, after JT. Hall was taken to the hospital and then had to be intubated right away because he had agonal respirations and he had a neuros urgent come in to see him, examined him, looked at the X rays that had been dying, told Robert Filo in Melvin Hall that there was no hope for him. After he died.
On the twenty six, they went back and reinterviewed the Coke Machine Boys and the only one who admitted to breaking into the Coke machines was Robert Cannavery and he's actually the only one that served time in jail for that. The rest of them went off scott free. They never admitted that they had been there doing that also, so
Robert Cannavery was put in jail. Shoemaker refused to talk any further to the police officers, and the rest of the Coke Machine Boys alibied each other out so that the police interviewed them multiple times but did not feel that they were involved with the murder.
So Robert Cannavery was he in jail for the break in of the Coke Machine correct?
Okay, it's a short period of time for you know, trespassing and for vandalism. But he's the only one that had anything come from that episode.
I know you're not a neurosurgeon, but I'm just curious. Did you read through the notes from the neurosurgeon who looked at JT. I mean, could he have been saved today? I always wonder about stuff like that.
I think that today there's much more advanced technology to determine exactly what's going on, including MRIs machines, CT scans. When they said an X ray was done, then it was probably just a plain the brain of the head skull that showed where the bullet had gone. He probably had an exam. You know, I can't tell you for sure, because no, I did not have the notes. I actually went to the hospital now the Montgomery General Hospital. Now it's another iteration from the hospital then that was in
Actually it's two iterations. There was another hospital that took its place in the early two thousands, and now there's another hospital, much newer, that's been there for about the last seven years. And I went there and I called the medical records department and I explained to them what I wanted, because no one I first tried to get
into medical records, no one will let me in. Finally got the number there, and the man who answered listened to me talking what I wanted, and he says, we don't know anything about that, and don't you ever call this line again? Black click? So I did not have any records to look at. You know, there are certain things that when you look at certain like for instance, someone has a blown pupil, you know, midline shift in
the brain. There's certain things that you can look at just on exam to tell whether or not someone's gonna make it or not if they've already had herdiation of the brain. I don't know what was done at that time, but you do wonder if something like that happened now with what we have now. For example, my hospital that I work in is a Level one trauma center and we have ninety two neuro intensive carrying of beds. We're
the largest one in the country. This is in Plano, Texas, and they have twenty four hour on site neurosurgeons as well as neurological radiologists, and they specialize in things like this and taking care of patients like this, and they're brought from a two hundred mile radius to our hospital to take care of So with modern technology, I wonder if he could have been saved, if something could have been done.
So is he declared brain dead or how does his life actually end?
At the hospital, he's declared brain dead. He's on the ventilator for three days, and then they basically say there's no hope. So Melvin Hall, who's his son, who's also a police officer and later works for the CIA, and actually the night that his dad was shot, Melvin was the chief officer for the CIA headquarters at that time. He actually worked at the White House under five different presidents. Also,
this is JT's son. Don't forget. JT only had a fifth grade education and his son went on to get his college education and work for the policeman and then for the CIA. But Melvin Hall and Robert Filo, the son in law, popped the doctor and came in and said there's no hope. The doctor suggest we take them off the bed. Later they did so, and thirty minutes later he stopped breathing and was dead.
Tell me a little bit more about I don't know much about his wife. I won't even ask what her reaction was. I know what her reaction was. I'm sure it was just devastating for her. But did you get a sense from Carolyn what the stages of grief were, because I know they can be very different from when you've lost somebody in a violent way to an unknown assailant. What was it like for this family?
I think that for Anna, they had been married for about thirty three thirty four years, and who was worked for the NIH Nationalis Suits of Health as a technician and was educated, very smart woman. I think that she never got beyond the stage of anger because she couldn't understand why Moore wasn't done to find out who killed
her husband. There was one incident in nineteen seventy eight, proxibly years after the murder where since the very beginning of the Filo family, instead of taking any money or any contributions for flowers and things like that, they'd ask people to just donate to a fund to try to find the killer. They raised one thousand dollars by doing that, and it was matched by a thousand dollars raised by
the man Or Country Club two thousand dollars. They asked the chief of police at that time to advertise that there was a reward being offered, but it was never done, It was never publicized, it was never done, and about two or three weeks later, two dogs were found poisoned and murdered in the Potomac River, and the Police of Chief said okay, and there was a fifty dollars reward
being offered, and that was widely publicized. So nineteen seventy eight there was a really incredible newspaper front page article in the Montgomery County paper where they interviewed Robert Filo. He basically said how he was now an attorney and one of the things that had really upset him about police war about what had happened was that they valued dogs' lives over human life. Anna had tremendous anger towards what
had happened. I will say that later in life that she did later remarry, and then when he died, she moved to Texas to be with Carolyn and Bob living with them. She was always a big baseball fan. She became a Texas Rangers fan, and she fell in love with Pud Rodriguez, the catcher for the Rangers, and had a life sized poster of him and the closet the
door to her closet. So I think she resigned herself somewhat, but I think when it came to her husband to j T, she never got over the anger what had happened.
What is the explanation for the lack of action from Montgomery County. Is it because he was just some low level you had said, you know, a security guard, not really what we would think of as a deputy sheriff. What do you think happened.
I don't think that's what it was. No. I think that a couple of things happened. First of all, I think that they assigned the case to their top detective. His name was O. W. Sweat. I actually interviewed him. Of course, this is fifty some years after the crime, and he really was a lot of confused about a lot of details that came out. But talking to him, he had handled between forty and fifty murder cases in his career. He was a go to guy, and this
was the only one that he didn't. What they call clothes close means that you have a resolution, and it bothered him tremendously because he worked in the same station as Robert Filo, Bob Filo, the son in law, and he felt that if any case could have been he wanted to close. He did everything he could to get this one closed. Now, I think that having said that, I think he made the mistake of what we call
tunnel vision. It has referred to in my book in a couple instances, but basically, I let one of the nephews of JT. Hall, Frank Hall Junior, whose father was a fire chief. He basically talks about policemen will find one suspect that they think has got to be the one who did it, though narrow they're focus on that one suspect and kind of exclude the other things that
are going on. In this case, the suspect was Norman Shoemaker, the young man who was there that night, who was driving the car, and who the police felt was just a bad apple, And so I think he focused on him to the exclusion of other people. When I talked to him, he said he interviewed over one hundred people involved living in the area, this and that, But I think that he never got beyond that initial impression, and there was never any physical evidence because of the rain
and things like that. And also at that time they closed off the area where the murder occurred, but they really didn't most of the collecting of evidence till the next day. The next morning, so a lot of the things had washed away. I mean, they found the pipe, they found the bullet, that had gone through the flashlight flashlight, but they didn't really start to collection until the next day. They did an aerial view of the whole area the next day with the plane flying over taking pictures that
they showed at the trial. But I think the fact that there was absolutely no physical evidence, no eyewitnesses, which it kind of blows your mind. You think about this a busy country club, all these poker games going on, boys breaking into the soda machines, and no one hears or sees anything, no eyewitnesses, no physical evidence. And then even later when DNA evidence came, which is the main way that cold cases are solved now is with DNA evidence,
there was absolutely no DNA evidence to look at. So I think that the same thing that we have in medicine tunnel vision, where you initially you get called by the emergency room. We've got one lab abnormal. This is what the patient has, ay pancread titis, and you, as a physician go in and treat them for pancreaditis, when actually when you talk to them and find out more about them, they're complaining of this incredible headache and it turns out they're having a bleed into their brain. That
all they had was just one abnormal blood tests. So what I'm saying to you is that it happens in all different fields. Yeah, you can't just center in on one diagnosis on one suspect, and I think that's what happened here.
Well, let's talk about the evidence again. Now you had said that JT would have seen. Was it like a pile of stuff? You said it was Halloween decorations? Was that part of a theft? Is that what the suspect was doing?
We think yes.
Did they find out where those were stolen from? I mean, were they able to go into the house.
Absolutely? And I actually spent the day with that couple. Roger and Diane Schmidt had just moved into a house on Manor Country Club one month before the murder took place. That day, they'd gone to the mountains. They had a newborn daughter, and when they came back, they realized their garage open. It didn't work, but she'd left the window to the second floor of her daughter's bedroom open because she'd painted it that day. So she borrowed the lighters.
Dark now after ten o'clock at night, and she borrowed a lighter from a neighbor and climbed in through the second floor window and found that the entire house had
been ransacked. Drawers opened things on the floor, so they realized that their house had been broken into, and they called the police department immediately, and this was approximately ten forty for about five to ten minutes after the murder had taken place, and the Montgomery County Police Department said, we'd love to come out there, but we can't do it now. We've got a murder going on. We've got someone that was shot, and we've got to go take
care of that first. So maybe a while within five minutes, five patrol cars showed up in their driveway. Because they realized there could be a connection between what was found all these items and stuff, they took the Schmid's in one of the patrol cars over to where the golf course met the parking lot, and all the eye that were found there this huge pile were from their house. Missing was her wedding ring, which was never recovered. Her
engagement ring was never recovered. However, they did recover most of their other things, including their Stirling silver and as I said, Jack, a ceramic jack lantern which they still have in which they showed me when I spent time with them, the steps to which they still have a
break in had occurred that same night. They were moving the different things from the break in across the golf course which was dark a tree covered to an area where a parking lot was where they had a car parked so they could put in the car and take it away. And appears as though Sheriff Hall w Sheriff Hall came upon this at the wrong time.
So at the moment you know JT has died, you have the you know ow Sweat, that's his name, right, correct. O W.
Sweat was lieutenant. The man in charge of the crime scene was named Jerry Boone, but O. W. Sweat was the one who was at a to who was given to.
So Sweat is on the case. And I know Jerry Boone also. And they think that Norman Shoemaker, because he's a bad seed essentially and was there of course, should be their main suspect. Tell me how the investigation goes until it stops going, because it does at some point.
Yeah, it sounds like it was actually worked for at least six months. But another thing that happens in police work is that these police officers get promoted, to get moved to different places, things like that. And that's another definition of a cold case is when the case is no longer being worked by the people that are familiar with it and that know what's going on. And so within the next two years he was moved to a different position, and so he was no longer working that case.
Other people that were working the case really couldn't find anything out. Again, interviews talking, they have this burglary, they have this coke machine breaking, but other than that, they can't put anything together. No one saw anything, They have no other evidence. A couple of theories start making the rounds. One is that it was a mafia hit gone bad.
Possibly someone was trying to hit the man who was supposed to be working that night, Jim Young, Apparently his son had been involved in some malfeasans mafia hit theory was first. One of the relatives of the Philo Hall family had been told that and been told that they were there was actually something gone wrong. The hit man was going to kill Deputy Sheriff Young ended up killing j T. And because, interestingly enough, there was a mafia
member who was in the Hall Filo family. His name was tutsy because there was a hall Filo family member who was in the mafia. It was said that the killer was actually murdered himself and his body dumped at the bottom of a bridge, so the whole thing had ended there. So that was one theory that had gone around.
The other thing was theory that gone around was he had all these incredibly wealthy people living in that area, the Manor country Club area, who had all these teenagers, a lot of whom were involved in mishift and in crimes and things like that. And so the other theory was that the murder had been done by one of these teenagers we don't know who what, and that their parents had paid for there to be silence, that nothing further was done, that the investigation basically round to a halt.
Both of those seemed far fetched to me, but those were the two other theories, alternative theories that were going on as to why a murder of this caliber. And you said before by the Deputy sheriff, believe me, after going to several of these yearly Montgomery County Memorial weeks that they have and going to the ceremonies, the candlelying ceremonies, I have the way they honor each of these men and women that were killed in the line of duty.
It's of utmost importance that they solved this. They considered these people anyone that's died in the line of duty. It's just been a terrible tragedy and there has to be resolution.
But you know, Sweat and Boone run into a brick wall. They can't make a case against Norman Shoemaker, and you know, after six months, it goes cold, it just gets put away in a file. And that is that for fifty years.
Well, I'm not going to say for fifty years, because what I'm going to say is that in nineteen seventy five was the other major case of Montgomery County that's known for the abduction, rape, and murder of the Lion's Sisters, Lyo and Sisters. Yeah, these were two girls ten or twelve years old who were went to the Wheaton Plaza Mall, which was a open mall at that time in Montgomery County, and both of them were seen there. It was Sheila
and Kate Lyon. They were abducted, apparently in plain sight, and they were then raped repeatedly, apparently murdered Audies burned and thought to have been taken and buried in Virginia in that case had been called for forty years, but in twenty twelve that case was reopened and it's the subject of the book by Mark Bowden, who also wrote
Black Hawk Down. He wrote a book about this entitled The Last Stone, and in Balden's excellent book, he talks about how this group of cold case detectives is put
together to solve this case. It was done by a man named Chris Homrock HM Rck and home Rock, and these detectives are basically go back through the case figure out the things that had been missed and were able to after a couple of years of working, were able to get a confession from the man who has tried and convicted of the rape and murder of these two girls. So I think that was on the fortieth anniversary twenty fifteen.
So I think because of that there was some impetus when the fiftieth anniversary of this case came up to say, hey, if we're going to find anything, we got to do it now before everybody who's involved in the case is dead. And so they turned again to Chris Homrock to form a Cold Case Team and on the original team that sawved the Lion murder case. Blincester's murder case was Katie Leggett, and Katie had been in the Child Primes program. That's where she made her bones, was dealing with people who
had abuse children, sexual abuse and things like that. And for the next ten years that's all she did was she was on the cold case detective team. So she was selected to be part of the cold case team to try to solve this case. At the time that this was going on, there were a lot of active
murder investigations that were shorthanded. But a patrol officer who had been doing plain clothes patrol, Lisa Killing, had asked for transfer to cold case team because she was interested in knowing what it was like to work a cold case. So they put her. She was an excellent outstanding officer in the outstanding record. They put her on this case.
And then they picked a woman from the Homicide Division, Sarah White, and she made out that three of them made the cold case team to solve this and so that was in twenty twenty one and they got to.
Work what do they have to work with? Because didn't you say the things they collected didn't have DNA, that's correct.
Everything they had to work with was in one cardboard box and that cardboard box was plunked down on Lisa's Lisa Killen's desk, and she was told by Katy Leggett, go through it. Put it into a way that you can interpret it and you can work with it. And so she went started going through all the evidence particulously and really nothing was showing up. There are some things that they investigated, but nothing was shown up until she came to a real to real tape that was labeled
interview with Richard Hobart hoba Rt. Richard had been a young man who also had involved in some different things around that area. And it was interesting because his name and the license plate number of his parents' car was found in the notebook that JT. Hall always carried with him when he was on patrol.
Oh, so he saw the car, so he saw.
The So he saw a car and had that in him. So Lisa Killen decided she needed to get that first. She didn't even know what a real real tape was, but when she finally got figured it out, she needed to get it digitalized into a form that she and her co detectives could look at and so they spent quite a time doing that, and then finally it had to be done by the FBI. They were the only
ones that had the technology to do that. And when they got the tape and sat and listened down listened to it, it was about a three hour interview with a man named Larry Becker. And Larry Becker in that interview had been put in jail in nineteen seventy two for robbie a townhouse in Glenmont, which is a community
near Rockville, Maryland. And he had been put in jail in seventy two and then, while serving time in kind of a lower level prison, had escaped from jail, and then when he was caught and brought back, they added extra time to a sentence. So he came in in nineteen seventy two and said, Okay, I have information about the murder that occurred of Deputy Sheriff JT. Hall, and I'm willing to give you that information exchange for leniency or reduction in my sentences.
That's interesting, Okay, keep going.
Yeah, he just showed up and said that. So he shows up and they interviewed him for three hours and the men that interview him had nothing to do with the original case and really didn't have a really good idea of what had happened. But what he did in that interview, he said that he was an eyewitness to what had happened. He was the first person that was a witness, and he said he had seen seven to eight boys on the coke machines and they were trying
to break into the coke machines. He had identified the four of them that he knew, and he said that it was a clear, beautiful night. Visibility was great, but he was in an area where they couldn't see him, but he could see them. And then he saw someone come out who was dressed in normal sheriff's clothing, not the yellow raincoat that JT. Hall was wearing that night in which he was founding. When he was found down on the park lot, bat Man said to the boys, hey,
what are you doing. One of the boys, who identified as someone named Greg schwar crouched down and shot twice. There were two shots, and he also said that the policeman had shined a flashlight directly at them, and so he identified both there being a flashlight and the fact that there were two shots. He then said after the
shots were fired, he ran away. He ran to a place called Maggie's, which was the Church of Mary Magdalene, which is where they had a youth center for these teenage boys and girls to gather, and that later on the murderer, Greg Swar had shown up there. Also, Larry said that he hadn't come forward sooner because he was afraid of the consequences of it, because everybody would know that he was a snitch and that some of these boys had older brothers that would get him and could
possibly hurt him. But now he felt like he was going to serve his time in jail, leave Maryland and never come back to Maryland again. So he was willing to talk to them and lay out the whole scene that night.
And so, I mean, I was just looking down. I don't have a note about Greg. Out of all of these boys you were talking about, I mean, I see Robert, I see Norman, I see a couple of other folks. What are the cold case detectives thinking about that when they hear that reel to reel? Are they're now looking for Greg's information? I'm assuming so Greg was very easily.
He quickly alibied out, Oh okay, so he was not there that night, had nothing, and he had alibi the show. And none of the four boys that he mentioned out of the seven or eight that he said were there, were there. They were all alibied out.
How old was Larry when this happened? I just am trying to set.
That Larry at this time was in his early twenties. He was twenty when the deputy sheriff of shots, and we would have been about twenty one twenty two. He was thirty when he left finished his sentence, because the three policemen talked to him, looked at the evidence, looked at where he said the body was, where he was shot, where the confrontation had taken place, looked at the weather that night which was different from what he said, looked at what the policeman was wearing, which was when he
said yeah. And they basically said, this gentleman is lying to try to gain reduction of a sentence. They disregarded it. They kept the tape, mislabeled the tape and put it back in the box.
Now you've got this group of cold case detectives and they're listening to that interview, and I'm wondering if they pick up on anything that had a grain of truth, or why they would even be interested in Larry if he was a big liar.
In police work, with these cases, there's very often the hold back. In the Lion's Sister murder case, the hold back was to clothes the girls were wearing. It was never identify what they were wearing. And when they finally got Lloyd Welch to talk, he was able to identify exactly what they were wearing. The hole back in the Deputy Sheriff JT. Hall case, there were two whole backs. One no one ever said what the number of shots were, and there were two shots that were fired, and he
identified two shots. And then number two, no one ever said anything about a flashlight, and he identified the flashlight as being there and being shot so by table shot out of his hands, but did identify that the flashlight was there. So that by saying those two things, and he actually put himself at the scene of the murder, the detectives felt that he was someone worthwhile pursuing.
Well, and I mean, and he's fingering a boy who you say has a very clear alibi. So somebody's lying, it's obviously him if he's saying the kid's there, and the police can prove that he wasn't there.
The two things he said were right, but he got wrong. So many things he got wrong. What the policeman was wearing, what the weather was that night, where the policeman was found. He said that he'd been shot twice from the front. Well, he had this gunshot wound was in the back of the head. The kill shot was from the back of the head. And he said he was facing Greg's squire when he was shot. So he'd gotten so many things wrong that they did not feel he was there, and
they did. They disregarded sets money, and they made him sort of his entire eight years.
Okay, Well, what happens when you know, we flashed forward and this group of women, these cold case detectives, realize that he got a couple things right, and that whoever initially interviewed him had dismissed him far too quickly.
They couldn't find him. He was gone, he was lost. They looked everywhere for Larry Becker, nowhere. So he had a brother named Leslie Becker, And they looked back and they saw that back in nineteen seventy two that Leslie Becker had made a statement of the police saying that his brother Larry might know something about the murder of
the deputy sheriff. So they decided. Lisa decided to look for Leslie Becker, but he was dead, but in his obituary it said that he had a surviving brother, Larry Smith, and so she went on a deep dive into Larry Smith. Larry Becker was originally born Larry Smith, as was Leslie Becker. They were born in Little Falls, New York, the second
smallest city in the state of New York. There were four children and they had a father who was never home he was a truck driver, and a mother who he was an alcoholic, so that they were taken from that household, four children put into foster homes until when Larry was seven, mister Becker came by and his wife. They had just adopted a little boy and they wanted a sister to go with him. They couldn't have their
own children. Larry had an older sister and they wanted to adopt just the older sister, but Larry's birth mother said, no, if you're going to adopt anybody, you have to adopt all four kids. So these people, the Beckers, adopted all four kids and eventually moved them to Rockville, Maryland, where he was working at an excellent job. And so Larry, what he had done in the interim was just as
he'd said. He'd left Maryland after serving his time, changed his name back to his original name, Larry Smith, and moved to Little Falls, New York, where he started a new life. Never been in trouble with the law. He got married, he had three children. Interesting enough, he had several jobs, including a job as a security guard, which was the last job that he held. He had to stop working and get on disability in his fifties due to medical conditions. At different times in his life. He'd
smoked up to three packs a day. It was an incredibly heavy smoker, had heart disease, had heart attacks, had constructive pulmonary disease. But he'd been living quietly in Little Falls, New York for forty years. Wow.
So they finally find him, and you know, this is not enough evidence. Obviously, they need to talk to him and they need to see what if there's any kind of physical evidence or anything that ties him to this. So I assume that the cold case detectives approach him and say, we need to interview you.
First of all they did was they made two control calls using someone named John Rizzo. When Larry had said that night that he was an eye witness, he said that he'd originally been with John Rizzo and then he'd left John Rizzo and walked down to the country club. John Rizzo at the time was in the military in California, so there's no way he could have been with him. But what they did was they got John Rizzo to call him.
Can I pause for a second. I mean, that's ridiculous. He is awful. He's not picking the right you know, alibis, he's not picking the right weather. It's just silly mistakes. I don't know. I can't never understand criminals sometimes.
Well, this is a gentleman who when he was tested IQ both when he was with the Becker family down in Maryland, he was sent away to a boys institute placed like almost like a military school to try to get him straightened out, and they tested his IQ then in IQ of eighty seven. When it was retested later on in life, when he was in his seventies, was
eighty three. He's a street wise person because at the age of sixteen, the Becker family, the father threw him out of the house onto the streets, and for the next four years Larry lived on the streets of Montgomery County in Rockville, Maryland. He did not have a home. He either slept at Maggie's or there was a pet cemetery where people would bury their pets right next to Maggie's, which had open places where he could lie down and sleep. So that's where this gentleman slept. So I think that
you're right in some ways. He's not real sharp, but like I said, street wise and survival wise, he seems to you know, he did a pretty good job.
Okay. So John Rizzo calls him and what's that? What are these control calls?
Like? So control call means that the police are listening in on the entire situation, and John says to him, the police are after me because they say that you name me. You and I both were there night the deputy sheriff was killed. Now they've come after me, saying that I'm the killer, and they don't know anything about you because he changed your name. It took me so long to find you this and that, and he said,
you better. You need to give me something that I can tell the police so that they will get off my back and leave me alone. In the first call, Larry becker Smith denies being that person, denies ever living there, denies knowing this person, and they eventually hangs up on him.
He then does Larry does things where he gets on the internet and does different things to find out about what's going on, tries to and he actually makes two further calls back to John Rizzo, which John's instructed by the police not to answer so that they can do another control call. The second control call, Larry becker Smith admits that he was that teenager who grew up in that area. He denies having anything to do with the murder of police officer. Can't even imagine why he's being
called about it. All he talks about is that he was arrested for the burglary that was done in Glenmont and the townhouse. And he said that he thinks that the police are just pulling Brizil's leg not don't have really anything on him, and that he can tell him
whatever he wants, it's not going to affect him. But to just leave him alone, and they kind of leave it in an adversarial way, but he at least they got him to admit that he had lived in that area and that Larry Smith or Larry Becker who they were searching for, was now actually Larry Smith.
Wow, what happens next?
So the two police main people on the cold case team, Katie Leggett and Lisa Killen, go up to that area, take a trip up to that area and could do some reconnaissance and they find that Larry Smith is now living in a home for seniors. He's on the eighth floor in this apartment and he has his own apartment,
and they kind of figure out. They make contact with the police force in that area and they tell them, you know what's going on, and then they decide a couple months later, they've tapped they haven't tapped his phone, but they've been able to see on his phone who he's called. For instance, they saw he had called back to Rizzo that side, make calls to his daughter who was taking care of him and who lived in the area.
And so they go back a couple months later with the intention of interviewing him to find out what he really knew about the crime. They had no other leads, nothing else had turned up. Because he'd identified himself as being there that night, and because he'd gotten two of the holebacks wrecked, they decided to go up there and to interview him. So they go to the police station, get two officers with them, go to this place where he's living, which has someone sitting there in the entrance
and has to let you in. They go up to his apartment and he basically says, you know, I thought you'd becoming because of what he talked to about Rizzo and stuff. And they just say, hey, we're here to talk to you. We want more information, and he agrees to go with them to the police headquarters in great Fall and to be interviewed.
What ends up happening, Does he confess and he goes on trial.
It's the most amazing thing. It's a three and a half hour discussion and you see Katie Leggett use her incredible interrogation methods minimalization which she learned when she took care of when people were child abusing, pedophiles and things like that. You have to minimize the crime that they've done.
So will say, it's really not that bad. She also said some things, you know, how built this gentleman up, how great he was, how he turned his life around this that the bottom line is he ends up confessing wow, not only to them, but then within the next two days, he calls his daughter and his son, who are separately and tells each of them that, you know, he didn't want to tell them this, but he'd murdered someone fifty years before and he's now going to be going to jail for it.
Oh my gosh, did he say that this is just something that he's been thinking about? It was he racked with guilt? It sounds like it. If he confessed quickly.
It was an incredible thing to watch. You have to see them, and they're in a tiny room that's closed in, no windows, one door, and he's sitting within a couple of feet of each of these women detectives, and so it's an incredible thing to watch. But they had said to him that planted the idea. They had said to him that this is you know, you're getting this. You feel better now getting this off your chest, And he said yes, And he kind of used that same phraseology when he talked to his children.
Oh okay, So does he take a plea deal while not a plea deal.
What happens, so he's why his extradition. He's guilty, and he's taken back to Maryland to stay in trial, and then on the way there, once he gets there, he changes his mind. He refused to ever talk to me, but talking to his lawyers and other people and all, he just basically decided that he didn't actually do it.
He'd been talked into doing it and instead of he was initially assigned the public defender, but when they realized the resources that would be needed to try this case and defend this man, they turned it over to Comington and Berlin, which is one of the largest law firms in the world and has an incredible reputation. It's top for pro bonal work. It's been ten times top law firm in the country. And they assigned a lawyer, one of their top lawyers, Kevin Collins, and a team of
three younger lawyers to defend him. I went up for the trial. The first trial, it lasted five days. The verdict came back that they were able. They were trying him for a first murder, which is premeditated murder, and the jury came back not guilty on that or they said it was not guilty but on the charges of felony murder, which is murder while you're committing a felony, which would be the robbery, and also in the charges
of felony burglary. They were deadlocked. It was either eleven to one or or tend to two to convict, so it was called a hung jury. They said they were hopelessly deadlocked. The judge said, We're going to retry this case because I'm not happy with this. I feel like it has to have a resolution, So they retried it. That was in January. They retried it in July. Between then, I'd had my heart surgery and all the different things were involved with that, so I couldn't go back up
for the case. I heard everything through the filos, and things had changed. The defense now had focused in on looking at each part of the confession and whether or not it was his own words, or whether or not it had been fed to him by the detectives. They had wanted to introduce two false confession experts to the trial, but the judge just allowed that. They said that twenty two percent of people who had been convicted on the basis that their confession turned out to have DNA was
and everything else that exonerated them. But just on the basis of their confession, they were convicted. That's how powerful confession is. Jurrys hold that even higher than they do evidence.
So the defense took each part of his confession and showed how prior to him saying something, it had been fed to him by Katie Leggett, that the things that he said were not his original ideas, and that when he was talking out during the confession was mainly the robbery that a KI had done at Glenmont, where no weapons were no one was killed, and they were able to convince the jury that he was innocent and that
had been fed to him. The prosecution changed in that they presented things in a more cohesive fashion, and they also, instead of just the charges of that I mentioned previously, they also introduced the charges of conspiracy murder first degree and conspiracy burgerer first degree, saying that there was someone else who was nicknamed the Raven, and this was Billy Ray Edwards, and this was his best friend, that he had also been there that night because in the confession,
when he had confessed to the detectives up in Little Falls. He brought in the name of the raven that he had been there also and originally said he had shot him, that it wasn't him. But the raven was six feet tall. Larry was five foot three, and when they asked him about told him about the directory of the bullet, how it gone from the back of the head, lodged behind the right eye. They said it couldn't have been some of the size of the raven, so he took that back.
But anyway, because of them having those charges against the raven at the conspiracy, the raven did not appear as a witness in the second trial, and the first trial is his best friend, he said he knew Larry, he knew nothing about the murder. Larry knew nothing about the murder, and so he was taken out of this whole second trial. And after the second trial the jury came back not guilty on all charges, and Larry Becker Smith was a free man.
Oh my gosh, at what age? How old was he?
Seventy two? Carolyn Filo was eighty two, Bob's eighty two. They were crushed. So when I talked earlier about my relationship with them after that, and I, as I said, was writing the whole time. I had three hundred and thirty pages of this book written before the second trial, you know, because I was needed something to do to recover and get my mind off my recovery. But when I looked at everything and went back, I looked back
and at the second trial. The one piece of evidence that came out that wasn't at the first trial was when he went in in nineteen seventy two to try to gain a lesser sentence. The second day that he was there interviewed with them, they introduced brought to a police officer named ow Sweat. This was nowhere introduced nowhere in the first trial, but ow Sweat actually took him out to the Manor Country Club parking lot and had him explain everything that he saw and what had happened.
And ow Sweat said, this man didn't have eyeballs on it. So the man who had the most to gain, who had a spotless record of solving murders, and who knew the most about the crime. It was within a year, about eighteen months after the murder had occurred, didn't come out till the second trial that he actually on the second day in a not recorded portion, just none of that was recorded, but he had actually been there and
said he did not have eyeballs on that. So when I wrote the book and I got that information when it came to the very end, rather than leaving everybody say well, I don't know what happened to I basically said, there's both sides presenting tremendous cases. There's evidence for evidence against. But the thing that makes me feel that he was innocent was that the original detective ow Sweat did have the opportunity to go back with him through everything and
said he wasn't there. So the Philo Hall family wasn't real happy. I think that I'd reached a different conclusion for anything even started a trial. We had been talking about how this guy had murdered her father and how he had confessed, and how the case was now wrapped up and the family had resolution and things like that.
And so I look back and Robert Filo, who's an excellent writer, he's in the attorney, he asked me if he could write a chapter giving the family's feelings as to what had happened and include that in the book, and I said yes. He sent me the chapter and what he'd written and with his wife and daughter, and so I included that as the last chapter in the book. And they still feel that Larry was the murderer, and they feel that ultimately God will be the one to judge.
Is Larry still alive.
Larry is still alive. He's back to living his quiet life in Little Falls in New York. The Pilos have since moved to Houston to be near their daughter and grandchildren and son who all live in Houston. But I've seen them since then. I'm still her doctor, and so I've seen her and I still talk to them, and
they're doing well. I think. I think that the fact the fact that they've been able to talk to people about the book, have neighbors and people come up to them and sign the book, and I think that they feel I think, does she if you talk to her and ask her, I think that she does. She says she doesn't really know what you know closure is. You know, you want closure for people, You want a family to have closure. She doesn't know what closure is, but I think she feels like she has closure.
Is Melvin still alive.
Melvin is still alive. He's not in good health at all. He still lives in Virginia. His son Brian is retired police officer from Virginia and he lives close to him. His wife Judy is still alive. Incredible life story from Melvin and what he's done and what he's accomplished in his life.
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the audio versions of my books The Sinners, All About the Ghost Club, All that Is Wicked, and American Sherlock, and Don't Forget. There are twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, tenfold More Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and give them a listen if you haven't already. This has been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis M. Morosi. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain.
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