Todd Bookman (33:49)
A store and he called somebody a jerk, he'd be down to supreme roast beef. Oh, yeah, I saw this guy and I called him a jerk and da, da, da. He was a loudmouth. He was just somebody who liked to insert himself in things to make himself feel bigger, larger than life. But as you can maybe tell from Debbie's voice, Tony's desire to be respected didn't always pan out. In the police reports. People called Tony weird. One high school senior told police Tony was, quote, heavily into ninja stuff. A few people told police this one story about how one night Tony was humiliated during a fight on the street in downtown Manchester. According to one person who said they saw it, the other guy was making Tony kiss his shoes. But when Tony would try to, the guy would kick him in the face. A crowd of 20 or 30 kids watched. Later, a friend of Tony's turned over to the police two letters that Tony wrote when he was 19. They're addressed only to quote whom it may concern. The letters are a window onto Tony's anguish. Maybe they were cries for help that Tony didn't know who to send to. In the letters, Tony is reeling from teenage heartbreak, substance abuse and ongoing problems with the law. He writes, I guess it's hard for me to understand and I want to, but I don't know how to ask for help. Why? Because every time I let someone get close, they end up hurting me. Sometimes I feel like blowing my brains out. One day I will get fucked up enough to do it. I feel sorrow all of the time. And I'm tired of feeling it all the time. And also getting into trouble too. Well, that's it for now. Thank you for listening. Yours truly, Tony Puff. So this is the 19 year old detective Lammy has brought with him to Rhode island. Who keeps quoting Scarface at them and grabbing the police radio. Once they arrive, they set up shop at a motel in Warwick, Rhode Island. Here's Lammy's plan. Tony will call Ken and try to set up a meeting. And Tony has a script. Lammy wants him to tell Ken that police have found Tony's fingerprints on Sharon's car. That's not true. But Lammy wants to see if Ken will react and maybe incriminate himself on the phone. Tony dials the number. Detectives listen in on another line. But things get off to a bad start. Lisa answers, not Ken. Lisa is not happy with Tony. They argue about the child support Tony owes. Lisa hangs up. Tony calls several more times over two days, and a few times he does manage to get Ken on the phone. But again, things don't go the way detectives hope. I don't have audio of these calls, but I do have the transcript. Here's an excerpt of one of the conversations between Tony and Ken. It starts with Tony. Hey, Ken. Hey. What? I've got to talk to you. About what? About a car. About what? About the car. About what? About the car. What car? About the car that you asked me to move. Who's this? It's Tony. What car? I asked you to move Sharon's car. What are you talking about? What am I talking about? Yeah. Okay, look, you and I both know exactly what I'm talking about. They got my prints on the car. Excuse me? They have my fingerprints on the car. Yeah, yeah. And I want to know, you know, what to do. I just drove all the way down here to talk to you about it. I don't understand what you're talking about. You don't understand? No, I don't. I have no idea. Well, on Friday night, I believe you asked me to move the car for you. I don't. I don't have the slightest idea of what you're talking about. The car is sitting right here. It goes on like this for a while. Ken gets mad, tells Tony to stop calling, threatens to get a restraining order against him. Tony, who, remember, is 19 years old, sitting in a motel room with cops all around him, keeps pushing. And eventually he gets Ken to agree to meet him in a motel parking lot. Ken shows up and Tony meets him outside. Detectives hiding in cars nearby are filming. But the conversation goes the same as before. Ken says he has no idea what Tony is talking about. After the meeting with Tony, Ken goes home and calls the New Hampshire State Police. He tells them what just happened. As in, this 19 year old who had a baby with my daughter just showed up in Rhode island and is telling me he moved to Sharon's car. You guys should look into this. Detective Lammy's sting operation with Tony Puff is a total bust. Lammy goes back to New Hampshire and Tony eventually goes back to North Carolina. And the two don't speak again for months until eventually Detective Lammy has a thought. Was Ken Johnson really so clever and disciplined as to not incriminate himself when Tony called to not react at all? Or was he tipped off? Detective Lammy thought he'd been using Tony to fool Ken. But now he wondered what if the whole time Tony had been playing him? Lammy thought Tony must have slipped word to Ken before they drove down to Rhode Island. The whole thing was a farce. The call from the motel room, the meeting in the parking lot. Tony and Ken were both acting to Detective Lammy. It was the only explanation. As far as I can tell, Lammy never entertained the possibility that Ken was simply telling the truth on the phone. Remember that quote Lammy wrote on the chalkboard? He escapes who is not pursued. Lammy wasn't about to stop pursuing Ken. But the thing about that quote is just like the evidence in this case, there are different ways to interpret it. The line comes from the play Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. Written more than 2,400 years ago, the play is a kind of ancient Greek murder mystery. The king Oedipus sets out to discover who who killed the previous king whose murder has unleashed a plague on the kingdom. Oedipus gets some advice passed to him from the oracle. And this is where the line comes. Here's another translation of it. Search reveals things that escape an inattentive man in the story. It's a subtle bit of foreshadowing. By the end, Oedipus discovers he was the murderer all along. Oedipus was looking for a suspect when he should have been looking at himself. But I'm going to go out on a limb and say Detective Lammy was probably not thinking about the overtones of Oedipus Rex when he wrote that quote on the board. I could see how this line, which is also used in some law enforcement agencies, wanted posters, by the way, seemed pretty straightforward to him. I asked Lammy to tape an interview to tell his own story about what happened here. And there were times when he told me he would. But in the end he didn't. He didn't want to be recorded or talk about the details of the Sharon Johnson case on the record. And after I left a message for Sergeant Neil Scott, Lammy called me back, saying he heard I was trying to reach his old partner. Still, we ended up talking a lot over the last year or so, in phone calls and in person over breakfast at a diner he frequents, enough to get an impression Lammy is in his 80s. Now, he wears a state police baseball cap. That Kojak y attitude everyone told me about, that's still there. He told me other detectives were too cautious, too concerned about covering their asses, as he put it. He still carries a big chip on his shoulder about that. Lammy told me, you have to know how to walk up to the line without crossing it. For Lammy, it wasn't about being reckless. It was about really caring. He said if a detective arrives at a murder scene and isn't moved by what he sees, he should be out on the highway catching speeders. Sometimes he would gently poke my hands to emphasize a point like that. It all fit with the detective Lammy I'd gotten to know in the police reports. A guy who led with his intuition, who wasn't concerned about stepping on toes. A guy who hates to let a case go. In 1989, Lammy had hit a roadblock. But he trusted his gut. Ken Johnson had motive and opportunity. And now to Lammy, it seemed he had a co conspirator, Tony Puff. In the fall of that year, Lammy sets about trying to find Tony again. But it's been months since their sting operation. Tony is in the wind. Still, Lammy keeps pursuing, and eventually he finds what he's looking for.
