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The Megyn Kelly Show
Unabomber Look Back, Karen Read Trial, Zodiac Killer Deep Dive - Megyn's "True Crime" Mega-Episode
04:11:09
Megyn Kelly looks back at past "true crime" episodes including a look back at the Unabomber case, the Karen Read trial that captivated the nation, and a deep dive on the Zodiac Killer.
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- [00:00]
Megyn Kelly
If you, your parent or spouse served in the military, you could join our family. Our members saved an average of $70
- [00:07]
Terry Turchi
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- [00:09]
Megyn Kelly
Tap the banner or visit usaa.com join today to check your eligibility restrictions apply.
- [00:15]
Tom Colbert
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- [00:21]
Terry Turchi
Suddenly you're overwhelmed.
- [00:23]
Tom Colbert
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- [00:46]
Megyn Kelly
Welcome to the MEGYN Kelly SHOW live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at noon East. Hey, everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to the Megyn Kelly show and today's true crime mega EP episode. We've got some wild ones for you today, including a deep dive into the Unabomber story. I love, love, love, love this behind the scenes look at it. Also deep dive into the Karen Reed case that captivated the nation. And one of our first true crime shows ever on the Zodiac killer. Enjoy this and we'll see you Monday. Today's show focuses on a twisted genius who terrorized this country for nearly 22 decades, building and sending bombs so untraceable our best law enforcement agents could not figure out who was behind the carnage. The targets, universities, airlines, and sometimes random other places to throw off the investigators. Three people ultimately were murdered, nearly two dozen others injured in many cases severely. That is, until the feds finally got a break in what would become known as the Unabomber investigation. The man behind the Bombings sent a 35,000 word manifesto to multiple newspapers and TV stations across the country, claiming to explain his motives and vowing to stop the attacks if they would publish it. They did, and it caught the eye of someone very unexpected who ultimately flagged him to the FBI. On April 3, 1996, Ted Kaczynski's reign of terror came to an end. Investigators arrested him in Montana at a primitive cabin with no electricity or plumbing. And there they found a wealth of bomb components, 40,000 handwritten journal pages and one live bomb ready to be sent. Today, Ted Kaczynski spends his time in a federal Prison in Colorado put there in large part thanks to my next guest. Terry Turchi has been described as the heart and spirit of the investigation. Between 1994 and 1998, Terry directed the Unabomb task force, as it was known, that helped identify and then arrest Kaczynski. He retired from the FBI in April 2001, having served as the first deputy assistant director of the newly created counterterrorism division. His book is how the FBI Broke its own rules to capture the terrorist Ted Kaczynski. Terry, thank you so much for being here.
- [03:32]
Terry Turchi
Megan, thank you very much for having me.
- [03:34]
Megyn Kelly
It's a riveting story. I've read your book cover to cover. I've watched a bunch of movies now and TV series on the Unabomber, so I feel like I have a decent handle on how it all went down. But my biggest takeaway in reading your book was how it was a meticulous, painstaking teaspoons in the ocean effort, bit by bit, day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year, to put together the evidence that cumulatively would ultimately be used to take this guy down.
- [04:10]
Terry Turchi
Well, that's a really good description, Megan. And I think that description also matches the team that eventually came together to make all of this happen. And we often joke, and of course back then, we weren't joking too much. We were really serious and usually stressed out. But we really look back on this and think that we were very fortunate that all of the people who were in all of these places at the right time really played an important role in making this all happen. And when I say that, I'm thinking of Jim Freeman, the special agent in charge of our office in San Francisco, who was in charge of all the investigations that San Francisco did in the FBI there. Max Null, who was just a tremendous, awesome criminal agent who never wanted to be assigned a unabomb and was pulled off of his organized crime work to go work there. Joel Moss and Kathy Puckett, both of whom work with me on counterintelligence in San Francisco, they volunteered to come over from counterintelligence and work on this case. And then, of course, Director Freeh and Janet Reno, who was the attorney general at the time, and someone named Molly Flynn, who was an FBI agent who played a major and key role in our Washington metropolitan field division. So all of this came together, a number of agencies, the Postal Inspection Service, the FBI, the atf. And I was really proud to be able to serve with that team and on that team and be a part of that. And it's because of so many people, and certainly those people I mentioned that so much of this came together.
- [05:43]
Megyn Kelly
I love this character, Max Noel. I mean, I realize he's a real person, but in the book, I love him as a character because he is the constant naysayer. He's the one saying, this is BS you can't put together a criminal profile based on comparing words of one thing to words that sound similar in another thing. You need hardcore criminal evidence. That's how you make a case. And almost to the end, he had real doubts about whether this was the guy. But the kind of evidence Max wanted was. It was so hard to get in the Unabomb investigation. The guy, I mean, we now know as Ted Kaczynski, he was so clever. He was brutal, brilliant in hiding his identity. He was at least a couple of steps ahead of you guys on how you might detect identity and even actively taking steps to plant evidence in his bombs that he knew you'd run down to make it look like it was accidentally placed there, but it was, in fact, an attempt to mislead you.
- [06:43]
Terry Turchi
He actually spent just as much time doing that, Megan, just as you laid out as he did building the bombs. For example, at one point, and of course, we confirmed all this later, we found this out when we searched his cabin. But at one point, he was in the men's room in the bus station at the. In Missoula, Montana, and he found a couple of hairs on the floor. And later, he would put those two human hairs between layers of electrical tape and one of his bombs. What was he thinking about? Well, he was thinking that when we found the debris in this terrible crime scene, he would actually. We would actually think that it was someone's DNA, probably the bomber, when, in fact, it would have nothing to do with this case. He would use wood and metals in putting these bombs together. At one point, the FBI lab referred to him as the junkyard bomber. And so he would file down the metal so he could eliminate fingerprints if he thought there were any there. He would sand the wood. I mean, he thought of everything. He thought of disguises when he would go purchase and acquire everything from junk at a junkyard to something he might buy at a hardware store. He would take the jackets off of batteries so that we couldn't trace the batch of batteries. So he was doing. Doing everything he could think of to try and deceive and lead us in another direction and confuse. And I think that certainly worked to his advantage for those years.
- [08:09]
Megyn Kelly
Right, because it's not in Reading your book and so on. It's not like the FBI was full of a bunch of fools who just didn't know what they were doing. Though there was a lack of appetite for a period of years to really devote all the resources necessary toward this case because he went quiet for about six years. And so the FBI kind of, well, you know, maybe died, whatever. It wasn't that the FBI was a bunch of dunderheads. It was that this guy was clever in a really disturbing, criminal way. When I heard your description of the bombs, the one just now and the ones you give in your book, it occurred to me, weirdly, there was love put into them. Like, the guy loved the bomb itself, though he hated anybody involved in sort of the university or industrial complex and so on. We'll get into the reasons he was doing it, but he loved his bombs.
- [09:00]
Terry Turchi
He was very, very careful, very meticulous in putting those bombs together and would really take it hard when he would later read, as he was doing his research, that the bomb didn't function properly. And you see that in a number of these bombings, he would later write something to the effect that, damn, I messed this up or I didn't do this right? Really bothering me, really making me angry. I've got to build a lethal bomb. And that's the way he was thinking. And to kind of add to one of the points you. We also didn't understand at that period of time as much as we thought we did about the lone wolf serial bomber. We simply hadn't had many cases like that, and we hadn't really shared information or been trained in that kind of thing. So we had to almost put together our own training, our own educational process, not only for us who were responsible for the case, but for everyone who was touching it. And so we actually built that into this case so that we could all be thinking of and learning as we went along. And also we wanted to make sure we could pass all of this along if, in fact, it all came out as it ended up, so that other people would be able to use some of this and some of the things we did later on.
- [10:14]
Megyn Kelly
Yes, I definitely want to get into that, like what was learned. Because what's fascinating about the story is you spent all this time trying to figure out who this was. What is the profile of this person, Kathy Puckett, you mentioned, who tried to come up with a psychological profile of what he was and what you could expect, and then, you know, nuggets of information. And I wonder, because one thing you don't get to in the book is, once you find him, how did it match up? You know, like, how'd you do? I want. That needs to be part two. But we can. We can just try to handle it live. Okay, so let's just start before we get to all that. Let's go through that a little bit chronologically, Because I think that's probably the easiest way of understanding his crimes. The re Start with this. Why. Why was it called the. The unabomb investigation, and why was he dubbed the Unabomber, certainly?
- [11:03]
Terry Turchi
Well, in the first few years, the targets of his bombs seem to be university campuses, university professors, and airlines, and especially the first four bombs. The FBI, particularly on major cases like this, finds that it's helpful to add some title, such as we added to this. They call this case unabomb for una Universities and airlines bombing. So unabomb became the name of this investigation, Major case that it was. And then at some point, someone, I think, back east started referring to him as the Unabomber. So unabomb and unabomber not only became how we identify with the case, but it also really stuck with the public when they finally started learning about the Unabomber and what was going on. So that's how unabomb came into existence.
- [11:59]
Megyn Kelly
I never knew that until I started studying up for this interview. I always thought it was like uni, as in one guy, uni, bomber, you know, And I guess I just never paid attention to the spelling or thought much about it. It's universities and airlines. That's how it started.
- [12:13]
Terry Turchi
Exactly. Yes.
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Megyn Kelly
Fascinating. Okay, so first he starts off. The first couple of bombs were at universities in Chicago.
- [12:22]
Terry Turchi
Yes. In fact, the first bomb. And we'll go back and do this however you would like, but later on, when we assembled as the ultimate team that took this to the finish line, we went back and reinvestigated all of these crimes. So we learned so much. But the first bombing was at the university of Illinois, Chicago circle campus. And essentially, a passerby, a lady named Mary Gutierrez, was walking by there one day. It's the science and technology parking lot of the campus. And she saw a package between two cars, two parked cars. She picked it up, she looked at it, and she took it home. And it sat there with her children on the floor for a day or two. She saw that there was a return address, and there was also a recipient. The return address was a professor named Buckley Crist at Northwestern university. And the intended recipient was a professor at RPI in Troy, New York. So she eventually called the police the police come and get the package. They took it to Buckley Criss, because his address was on there as the return address. He said, I don't know anything about that. So it was opened at the school by a police officer named Terry Marker. And he suffered some injuries because it turned out to be a bomb. So that was the first device the Unabomber actually sent. But at that point in time, it was not looked upon as anything other than another bomb. Back in those days, as you well know, the Weather Underground and all kinds of other organizations were committing bombings. They were attacking police. They were active on universities. So there was a lot of activity. So since this didn't hurt anyone and there wasn't much to go on, it just kind of got lost in the shuffle. Other than recorded at the ATF lab and the evidence tucked away.
- [14:13]
Megyn Kelly
And, you know, there are quotes from the Unabomber throughout the book. And I know a lot comes from that 35,000 word manifesto. But he was writing letters from time to time, was he not, during the course of the bombings?
- [14:28]
Terry Turchi
Actually, he only wrote two letters. The first letter, during the course of the first 14 bombings. The first letter was actually to Percy Wood, who was the president at the time of United Airlines. And In June of 1980, he received a letter from an individual who identified himself as Enoch Fisher. And Enoch Fisher said, look, I'm going to be sending you a book. And the book is called Ice Brothers by Sloan Wilson. And this is a book that you should pay great attention to because you make decisions regarding the social welfare of people. And so when you get the book, think about that. So Percy Wood subsequently got the book. He went to open the package and then open the wrapping, but essentially the book was hollowed out. And it was a bomb. It was an explosive device. And so this was the fourth Unabomb device, by the way. And that letter was interesting, but there wasn't much they could do with that either. So that became later on something that actually first got us into the words of the Unabomber. And we'll talk about that probably later. But. So that was the first letter. During one of the Unabomber events, as we started calling them of 1985, he sent his second letter. And that letter was to an individual named James McConnell. James McConnell was a professor at the University of Michigan. And what the Unabomber sent him was a letter saying, I'm a student. I'm doing a thesis on something called the history of science, and I'd like you to consider being my thesis advisor. And that letter was Signed Ralph C. Kloppenberg. And of course, this was in a three ring binder, like it would be some sort of student's essay maybe. And when Professor McConnell's assistant went to open that package, it exploded just very similar to the book that Percy Wood received. Again, we were fortunate that they suffered injuries, but certainly they did not suffer something critical or die from those explosions. Those were the two letters that the Unabomber wrote between 1978 and around 1993. In 1993, all that changed when the Unabomber started corresponding with the New York Times and eventually with the New York Times and several other entities and people. People. So that that is kind of how his letters would evolve over the years between 78 and 93 and then subsequently through 96.
- [17:06]
Megyn Kelly
And then later, when you finally started to figure out who it was, you managed to get a treasure trove of letters between the Unabomber and his family members, which would prove really helpful and useful eventually. But so he's, he's, he's bombing universities, he attempts to bomb an airplane. And this is still back in the late 70s, I gather. But it didn't work, thank God. It went off, but it kind of fizzled and it didn't bring down the airplane, although it did cause a lot of injuries to the people on board the plane.
- [17:37]
Terry Turchi
You were so right, Megan. In 1979, an American Airlines Flight 444 was leaving from Chicago, headed for National Airport, and the plane got up in the air. Suddenly the pilot and the passengers felt this jolt. The plane started having some problems, and it turns out that there was a package on board that plane put in the mail stream. The US Postal Service was actually able subsequently to determine the path that mail package had taken when the bomber put it in the mail in Chicago. So they were able to trace a package that a witness had touch and eventually got on board this flight 444. And it turns out the bomb that he designed had some deficiencies with respect to the explosives. When it detonated, instead of blowing up, it started smoldering and it started burning in the cargo hold. So as the plane was getting closer and of course declaring May Day, wanting an emergency landing, it was diverted to Dulles Airport, where they had the equipment to deal with this. When the plane landed, the pilots were actually prepared to testify many years later when we were ready to start the Unabomber's trial, that had they not landed the plane on the tarmac, when they did, they were literally minutes or seconds maybe away of the fire in the cargo hold. Burning through the main hydraulic system. They said if that had happened, the plane would have fallen out of the sky and everybody would have been killed. So this is one of the reasons, certainly, that in 1979, this became a significant major case. It was a crime aboard aircraft. It was an explosive device. And so we knew from that point on, we had a real problem. But it wasn't until Chris Ronet, who was a laboratory supervisor and explosives examiner, started looking at this, and he felt that this is the first time I've seen this kind of craftsmanship in putting together a bomb, because all bombers do their bombs differently. No two bombers build their bombs the same. And that goes, whether it's an international terrorist or a domestic terrorist, they all do something a little differently. He had not noticed this before, but he thought that the bomber had to have put together other bombs because it was done so well. So he sent out a bulletin to other law enforcement agencies. This is all back in 1979. And the ATF, which had handled the first two Unabomb devices again in that era that we talked about, actually responded and said, you need to see these other two devices, because they kind of sound like what you're describing. And Chris Ro was then able to say, we have a serial bomber at large. So it was on the third bombing, the attack on the airplane, that we knew we now have a serial bomber. And shortly after that, in 1980, we would have the fourth device, the attack on Percy Wood, the president of United Airlines.
- [20:42]
Megyn Kelly
Later in the investigation, as the Unabomber gets better and more efficient at making deadly bombs, he will threaten to take down another aircraft. And you can see from, you know, Terry's description why they took that so seriously and were so concerned he could. He could do it and had the will to do it as well. There's so much more to go over. The profile of the Unabomber. What. What drove Ted Kaczynski to do this? How? How? And how did the ultimate the FBI ultimately nab him? Don't go away. More with former FBI agent Terry Turchi on the Unabomber investigation. Okay, so, Terry, let's fast forward. So he tried with the airplane. He continued bombing. But it wasn't until 1985 that he had his first kill. He managed to kill the first person out of all those he attempted to kill, though he had wounded many. So who was that? And what happened with Hugh Scretton?
- [21:44]
Terry Turchi
Yes. In December of 1985, the Unabomber finally got what he wanted. He wanted to kill someone. And Hugh Scrutton Was a businessman. He ran a very successful computer store in a outside type mall, outdoor mall in sacramento, California. And he walked out into the back of the store one day and saw what looked to him like a road hazard. Megan. And it was essentially two by fours nailed together with nails protruding out the. Out of the wood. And so his thought process was, this could hurt somebody. Somebody could pull up here with a car and have some problems. So he leaned over to remove the road hazard and to put it in a nearby dumpster. And at that point, this was what we call the passive device. As he broke the connection between the ground and that device, the two by fours were actually hollowed out. And the unabomber had built a lethal bomb inside the wood. And Mr. Scrutton just simply took the full impact of that explosion and died outside in the back of his store from that device. And it would be two years before we would hear from the unabomber again. But in 1987, using the same model, the same plan, with the two by fours even cut from the same pieces of wood, he made another similar bomb and was involved in placing it outside of a computer store called CAMS on February 20, 1987, in Salt Lake city. This time, as he knelt down to finish up preparing the bomb so that it detonate, One of the employees of cams, named Tammy flewy, was looking out a back window, and she started yelling, someone is out here doing something in the parking lot. What happened within minutes is the son of the owner of cams, Gary wright, pulled up, he saw this, and he thought the same thing, because he would tell us later. I thought it was a road hazard. I thought it was something that would hurt someone. So I went to move it. But instead of kind of leaning over the two by fours, when he went to pick them up, he kind of knelt and then kind of brushed against it before he actually picked it up or moved it. And the bomb exploded, but he was spared the full blunt of that explosion. And so this is when the unabomber was seen with the gray hooded sweatshirt and the aviator sunglasses. So after all of these years between 1978, 1987, and all these stops and starts on this investigation, Someone had finally witnessed this individual, who up until then, was a major mystery. And this is when everyone kind of got involved. I mean, reader's digest did a big story on the composite. They did a big story on what he looked like with the hooded sweatshirt and the aviator sunglasses that you're showing there. And so they also became very familiar with that word unabomb. Later, as we reinvestigated all of this, something else significant happened. And so I think this is a good time to tell you the story. During the investigation in 1987, that witness was interviewed by the police, by the FBI. She had a really good recollection of what she saw and what she was hearing. So someone told her along the way, we thank the police officer to take notes and make sure those notes were with her and kept fresh in her mind and somebody would stop by later and pick them up. Well, no one ever stopped by to pick up those notes. And even in subsequent interviews, no one asked about those notes. And so in Fast forward to 1994, Max Noll had reinvestigated those two of a couple of those events that were related the, the CAMS bombing and the rentech bombing. And Max was interviewing Tammy and she mentioned the notes, and he said, wait a minute, what notes? She went and retrieved them. She said, these notes. What appeared to us is that she was never comfortable with the initial composite. About that time in San Francisco, in the Bay Area, there was another very, very significant investigation, and that was the disappearance and subsequent murder of Polly Klass. And we ended up having a major break in that case because, again, Jim Freeman, who was the special agent in charge of the FBI in San Francisco, ran that as well. And Jim ended up bringing in a artist named Jeanne Boylan to do a composite of who somebody had seen in the vicinity when Polyclast was. When Polyclass disappeared. It turned out that that composite was almost a spitting image of Richard Allen Davis, who was eventually convicted of murder, kidnapping, and murdering Polly Klaas. So Jeanne Boylan was contacted by Max. We said, max, go find Jeannie. See if she can do a composite this many years later and sit down with Tammy and see if Tammy would be more happy and more satisfied with whatever Jeanne Boylan comes up with based on Tammy Floy's description. So lo and behold, she came up with a composite composite. You just showed it. And it was a. A composite that Tammy Floyd really, really liked. She said, that is the person I saw on February 20, 1987. So eventually we ended up taking the. The other composite, getting rid of that and showing this. It was introduced by Jim Freeman at a press conference with the media back in, around the end of 1980, 1994. And it was a major step for us and a major break for us because we had a witness now satisfied with what she was trying to articulate, and we had a composite which we really believed in.
- [27:54]
Megyn Kelly
And, you know, now, now of Course, we know what Ted Kaczynski looked like. And I have to say, it's pretty striking. This. Tammy did a damn good job. You think about eyewitness testimony and how notoriously unreliable it is, but her, if you pictured, you know, we'll show Ted Kaczynski in the YouTube version of this. That guy was very scruffy in sort of the perp walk we saw him in. But you picture him years earlier with a, with a hoodie and the, the aviator glasses. And you could see how accurate she was. And she went on saying, he's a white male. I think he had strawberry blonde hair. He had a mustache. He was on 5 10, about 165 pounds, a reddish complexion, gray hooded sweatshirt, aviator style, sun. I mean, this is a eyewitness. That's a dream, right? It's like you don't get a lot of these.
- [28:38]
Terry Turchi
It was wonderful. And as you can imagine, we were really void at that time, because when you're years later trying to put all this and you get a break like that and a witness like that, it really is important. One funny story, though. Earlier we were talking about Max Noll, and you mentioned the word brusque. Well, Max took Jeanne out to Salt Lake and sat down with Tammy Floy. But while Tammy Floy was articulating this to Jeanne Boylan, she had a daughter. So Max was there entertaining the daughter by showing her the Lion King. So he was crawling around on the floor showing Lion King while the business was taking place in the other room. So, you know, we do a lot of different things, but that was the call of duty for Max at that particular couple of hours.
- [29:24]
Megyn Kelly
That's amazing. The senior respected FBI agent trying to solve a serial bomber case out there. But this would have been right up Max's alley because he was like hardcore evidence, not BS word comparisons, eyewitness pictures. Like, that's up his alley. Okay, so, so, so while you're getting the eyewitness ID shorn up and so on, the FBI is trying to, to gather data like, what. What can we figure out about this guy? We've had bombings in Chicago, we've had bombings in California, we've had bombings in Utah. And you're trying, I mean, it sounds like so simple in retrospect, once you know who he is, but it's. It truly is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Because, yes, you can come up with a profile of somebody who lived here and then there and then this third place and this fourth place, but you don't know when the person was born, you. You figured out he was probably a college educated guy, right? So, like, how do you begin? And you talk about this in book to create systems that will siphon down the enormous pool of people who would fit into those descriptions.
- [30:26]
Terry Turchi
So when I first came over, Jim Freeman said, here's what I want you to do. This is the first thing I want you to do. Give me a proposed strategy for how we're going to address exactly what you said, Megan. So I went out and I met with Max. I met with everybody on the UTF and started reading files and then sat down with everyone. The entire UTF at that point in time, which was about 25, 30 people from those agencies, we talked about and said, here's what I think and here's what I've learned and I'm going to articulate this to the sac. First of all, we need to reinvestigate all of these UNABOMB crimes one more time. Only this time we're going to do it different. We're not going to use the FBI system of lead offices and auxiliary offices and office of origin. What we're going to do is send send UNABOMB task force teams back to these offices where all these police departments or the FBI and the other agencies, ATF and postal, had already done investigation. And we're going to have these teams that are currently on unabomb take a good clean look at all of these crimes again. So, secondly, I want everybody to partner up, find a partner. Because it's going to be a long, hard show. And so I want you to get somebody that you like being around. You're going to be basically living with these people or with each other. So they all chose upsides. It didn't matter if you were an ATF and FBI agent. It didn't matter to me what it was. Just choose a partner that if you're going to go work out in the morning before you start the day, fine, but the rest of the day you're going to be. You're going to be together and maybe, maybe late into the evening even. So that's what we did, and we started the reinvestigation. But then as we started having tons of new information come in, we've talked about the example of the composite. Well, there was tons of new information that we had missed the first time around and in subsequent tries at this. So we had to have a way to sort it out. And we realized at a certain point as we were together, as the kind of modern day UTF in the 199496 timeframe that there was a lot of unabomb myth, there was a lot of fiction, there were a lot of theories, and sometimes those had crossed the boundaries and unabomb myth or fiction had become unabomb fact. So we realized this is toxic, and we're going to have to separate all this. So we created something called unabomb fact, fiction and theory. And everyone on the unabomb task force, when we had the first draft of this document, received a copy. And every single week, when we brought everything together, and we brought everything together by separate types of meetings that went on all week, every week, we had to be familiar with. I mean, it was your responsibility. I mean, almost your solemn obligation, be familiar with the most updated version of unabomb fact, fiction and theory. Another thing, since you know how the FBI works, Megan, we did something that we hadn't done before either, and that is whether you were an FBI agent or you were an FBI analyst or you were an FBI support employee that did something in connection with logistics or the hotline, everybody was expecting, expected to be at UNABOM meetings. Everybody had a seat at the table. Everybody's opinion and eyes and ears was important, and everybody was encouraged to speak up because we needed every voice and every brain we could get. So that was our guide to those discussions. The Unabomb fact, Fiction and theory document. Finally, to really get to your question and the point here, over all those years of investigation, all kinds of agencies assembled this information through all kinds of databases. None of them were compatible. So we brought in an outsider. The bureau approved this. They brought in an outside consultant who for one year from 1994 to the, I'd say early summer of 1995, took this massive amount of literally millions of bits of data, put it all together in one system, and prepared it it so that we could do one thing. And that was to suddenly turn unabom into a proactive search for unabomb suspects, who we could tie even when we first opened the case up to specific geographical areas. And we'd never been able to do that before. And that was the entire purpose of doing this major computer project. And by the time that the Unabomber actually started getting more active and corresponding with the U.S. we were ready to actually flip the switch. Got approval from FBI headquarters for 247 operation to then send analysts to work in San Francisco during around the clock. And what was really ironic is when we asked for terrorism analysts, the bureau said, well, we don't have terrorism analysts, but we'll send you all the analysts that we can send you so that you can get this job done and staff a 247 operation. And that's exactly what they did. So shortly after the. That and after the attacks in 1995, we began the 247 operation of developing proactive Unabomb suspects, which would eventually teach us so much that when the right person came along, it was almost miraculous. It just all started to fall together.
- [36:02]
Megyn Kelly
Well, it was fascinating because, first of all, it's very interesting that this is during the Clinton administration and preceding as well, we had no. No counterterrorism force going in the FBI. And, of course, we all know what happened at the end of Bill Clinton's presidency and the beginning of George W. Bush's with 9 11, 2001. We learned a lot in the ensuing decade about the need for that kind of analysis, proactive analysis. But one of the things I wondered in sort of watching all this unfold was at what point did it become clear to the public that there was a Unabomber? Because one thing you think about is, is why was anybody opening a package that they weren't certain was safe and from someone they knew, you know, past bomb number three, right? Like, did it need more publicity? Were we not. Were we not publicizing it enough? Like, how could people still be confused into opening unknown packages?
- [36:57]
Terry Turchi
I think one of the big problems was that as these investigations were proceed right after a bombing, people became very familiar with something, particularly after Hugh Scrutton was killed, was murdered by the Unabomber. And then after 1987, when the composite came out and places like Reader's Digest ran these big articles, people were tuning into that. But then as the leads in the investigation would run out, the contacts with the press would kind of stop, and the FBI would become distracted by other things. And same for the Postal Inspection Service, same for the atf. We always had one agent. His name was John Conway, and he's an amazing guy because, dear, during all this time, he was still assigned as the case agent for unabom. And at one point in time, you earlier had mentioned that break in unabomb activity from 87 to 93, and that's
- [37:53]
Megyn Kelly
after he was spotted. After he was spotted by the eyewitness Terry.
- [37:58]
Terry Turchi
Exactly. And so during that time, someone at FBI headquarters actually told John he should close the Unabomb case because Unabomber was probably dead, since we hadn't heard from him first years. And John Conway single, you know, singularly working that case with no big authority helping him at all. Said, look, that's just a bad idea. You cannot close this just because we haven't heard from this guy.
- [38:28]
Megyn Kelly
He cannot be presumed dead. And indeed he was not dead because. Come along. June of 1993, there were two more bombings within 48 hours, hours and 3,000 miles of one another. And I want to go back to Kathy Puckett for a minute, the behavioral assessment person. And she had concluded that, and I'm quoting here from your book, safety, security and secrecy are of paramount importance to the Unabomber. He has a strong sense of self protection. He would have no direct connection to either of the individuals targeted. Saying that would have risked exposure. His careful and cautious nature, she believed, is what drove him underground after having been spotted by Terry. So in a way, that eyewitness moment with Terry could have saved a lot of lives. I mean, who knows, he might have been above ground bombing for all that time, but it took seven years before he regained his confidence. And what was the nature of the bombings in June of 1993?
- [39:32]
Terry Turchi
In June of 1993, after not hearing from the Unabomber, we heard from him, as you said, simultaneous bombings. The first one was directed at a geneticist, Dr. Charles Epstein, who lived in Tiburon, California. And he received a bomb one day in his home. And the device went off. When he went to open it. It was a much smaller compact bomb. It was about the size of a video cassette as far as a package. And later we would see the Unabomber write that I took the time off, or while I was taking the time off, I perfected or we. He always referred to, to Unabomber as we, the terror group fc. And I should make sure I say that here. And we perfected a smaller, more lethal bomb that we can put in the mail stream. And that's exactly what Professor Epstein went to open and was very, very seriously injured. Two days later, on the entire opposite coast at Yale University, a computer scientist, Dr. David Galer, received a bomb in the mail. He was at his office at Yale. And when he went to open his package, the thing. And right after that, the New York Times has a letter postmarked before it and before those events. And they get a letter from the Unabomber, the terror group FC as he calls them. And it says, look, our group is providing you with a number. This is our own secret identification number. The FBI knows of us. We're the terror group fc. Now, the reason he said that is on some of the bombs, on the plugs of the pipes, and on debris in the bomb crime Scenes we had found embedded on the metals, the letters fc. So not on all the bombs, but on some of them. So we knew that the Unabomber was also going by the letters fc. So he told the New York Times this. And of course, the New York Times turned the letter over to. To us. And now we know. And this was significant, and it certainly was significant to the then AG Janet Reno and FBI Director Freeh. Both of them were relatively new on the job. They knew that the Unabomber now has come back to life in a big, big way. We hadn't heard from him for all those years. Now he's back. Now he's killed two or almost killed two people on each coast. And so we have to really get after this. And so they ordered that a task force be established, that it be set up in the San Francisco division of the FBI. And they sent FBI officials out from FBI headquarters to run that task force. So between June of 1993 and around April of 1994, eight or nine FBI officials were running the Unabomb investigation. Investigation from San Francisco.
- [42:29]
Megyn Kelly
And this is when, according to your book, Max Noll pulls aside some top FBI officials. I believe it was at a meeting where the Director Freeh was present and says the truth, which is we're not getting the resources we need. The loops are not being closed. This needs to be taken more seriously. I want my evidence. And he gets taken very seriously. The FBI does start to throw resources at this after these double bombings. But two more people were about to die. That's where we're going to pick it up with Terry on the Unabomber investigation right after this quick break. The book intersperses bits of Ted Kaczynski's manifesto, the Unabomber Manifesto, in between the crimes and helps us get to know him and understand him to the extent one can. There are quotes like this quote. Since committing the crimes reported elsewhere in my notes. I feel better. You can see him working something. I starting to feel better now that he's starting to hurt more people and kill more people. And Kathy's assessment of him was that this is a guy who wanted to present himself as a rational revolutionary attacking the industrial technological system that he opposes for the good of the public. She said he's simply seeking attention for himself. She believed he had obsessive compulsive personality. Personality that his devices are meticulous, a real pride in its workmanship. She says people like this are very organized, perfectionists, can be very polite, may seem very cold to others. I would later find this interesting, Terry myself, because he probably was obsessive compulsive and a perfectionist. But when you guys found him, he was totally unkempt and disgusting and smelled bad and hadn't showered. And I just. That was one of the things that sort of jumped out at me is like, oh, oh, how. How weird you think of that. You know, obsessive. You think it'd be, you know, rigidly clean. But anyway, so to. To jump back, you're trying to figure out a psychological profile. And now you've got the full team on it. Now Director Free has stepped in. Janet Reno has stepped in. They're. They're listening to you guys, finally giving you the resources, and yet two more people are about to die, and that's within six months of you guys really sort of lighting a fire under the powers that be. Take us to December 10, 1990.
- [44:40]
Terry Turchi
Yes, it was a terrible day. Jim was. It was a weekend. I got a call from the east coast, and there had been a bombing in North Caldwell, New Jersey. And it turned out to be at the home of Thomas Moser, who was a major ad executive at the firm Burson Marsteller. And he had been traveling out of the country. This was near Christmas, so the family was getting ready to go and find a Christmas tree. So he was in the kitchen going through, and one of the things he picked up was this package that looked like a video cassette. And the kids had just left the kitchen when he went to open this. And this was such a terrible, lethal bomb that killed Mr. Moser just about instantly. And it. The shrapnel from this bomb filled. You know, how people will have their frying pans over their stoves, those kind of presentations. So some of these nails have actually. The force of the blast drove them through these cast iron skillets. And so there was debris everywhere. I called Jim Freeman, told him what had happened, told him what we were thinking might be going on. We couldn't exactly say or declare it was a Unabomb crime scene at that time. But I called Tom and all in Washington, D.C. now, at the time, Tom was our main laboratory examiner. And Tom was this fabulous bomb explosives person who not only knew Unabomb, but he could just about talk with his eyes closed about bombs and explosives. And so we asked him to go.
- [46:18]
Megyn Kelly
I'm sorry, was he the postal service guy?
- [46:20]
Terry Turchi
No, he was at the FBI lab.
- [46:22]
Megyn Kelly
Okay.
- [46:23]
Terry Turchi
And was our FBI lab examiner who actually had the ticket on Unabomb as far as forensics. Now, because all of the lab examinations that had Been done all those years. We folded into just the FBI lab. So he was kind of in the hot seat when there was an explosion. So Tom went to New Jersey. He called when he got there. They got him to the house at North Caldwell. Well, he called before he went in. We had to wait a while because after an explosion, there are significant gases in the house. There are a lot of things going on. You have to be really careful, of course. And so when Tom went in there, he almost came out immediately. Megan. And he got on the phone, he said. He called me back. He said, terry, this is Unabomb. I saw the fragments on the floor, some of the switches that were fragments of switches from this bomb. All of this has Unabomb written all over it. So called Jim. Jim came into the office, called, and dispatched some of our. A couple of our agents and a postal inspector to New Jersey. They would work on the ground there and help coordinate the actual investigation. And then by Monday morning, that was on the weekend. By Monday morning, we were having conferences with FBI hq. Of course, this now really raised the temperature. And during one of those conferences, someone at FBI HQ said, well, Tertia, you need to be back in New Jersey. Jim Freeman basically put his finger on the mute part of the phone. He goes, I'll answer that question. And said, no, you're not going back to New Jersey. Told them, I'm not coming back to New Jersey. And about this time, Max said, in another thing, you people don't even know this case. You don't even understand. Some of the leads were working in the case. And so that started us down the road. Road of what you mentioned at the break. Before we knew it, a couple weeks later, director Freeh was on his way to see us all at the FBI in San Francisco. And of particular concern, and kind of to show you how things can work in the bureau, he put out the word and he told the sac, you don't need to be at this meeting. I want to talk to the unabomb agents and the people working Unabomb and Turchi. So, of course, you can imagine how Jim is feeling about all this. So Jim met him at the office, airport. They had a cordial meeting. And then we had a meeting of all the brass from the other agencies. And then I found myself. It was like all of a sudden, okay, Terry and I are going to go down and address the unabomb task force. And I found myself alone in the hallway with the FBI director. And walking down the hall, and I referred to him as director Free and he immediately turns and says, call me Louie. And so we walk into the. And I couldn't do that. It was just hard to say that. Anyway, we walk into the office and the UTF is there. And you can imagine, or probably, maybe you can't imagine or maybe many people, but how you feel when the case is now dramatically different. You've been working to identify and get this person off the street, but now on your watch, someone else is murdered and this now is happening to us. It was our absolute most worst nightmare. And that's how everyone felt. I mean, everyone was. Was absolutely depressed. I mean, I think people look at FBI agents as well. They're the professionals. They're going to get this done one way or the other. We were absolutely devastated. And so this is the backdrop as Director Freeh walked in to address all of us. So during this conversation, and he was very gracious and very nice and we had a very good talk. But at some point, point Max said, look, I have to tell you, there's a lot of things that are not getting done. I've sent 62 questions off to the FBI lab about previous bombings. They've still never been answered. Terry's been on the phone, but they're still not answering our questions. We are trying to do certain things with leads and with investigation, and many of the special agents in charge aren't prioritizing exactly.
- [50:33]
Megyn Kelly
So. So let me just pause you there. Let me pause you there because there's so much to pick up on because Max, you know, I won't say lit a bomb, but lit a fire, as did the your small group. And finally, they listened how they caught the Unabomber right after this break.
- [50:52]
Terry Turchi
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Megyn Kelly
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Megyn Kelly
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Terry Turchi
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Megyn Kelly
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Megyn Kelly
So by the time Terry, of that meeting with FBI Director Freeh and Max going off and you and Jim Freeman just trying to jump up and down and say, you know, we need resources, come on, like this is inexcusable. And he listened, and you got him. The Unabomber had already just killed another man. He would go on to kill yet another man, Gilbert Murray, in Sacramento, and then he would threaten to bring down an aircraft in flight, which you took very seriously for the reasons we discussed earlier.
- [52:26]
Terry Turchi
So.
- [52:26]
Megyn Kelly
But the biggest and most important break in the case was about to come. When did you first get word of the quote manifesto?
- [52:38]
Terry Turchi
So Mr. Murray, as you mentioned, had been murdered in Sacramento, California in April of 1995 and just several days after the Oklahoma City bombing. So a number of people were concerned that maybe the bombing in Oklahoma City is connected to the Unabomber. Well, Kathy was very significant there as well, because she provided the opinion that, look, our guy is a very meticulous killer of individual people. I mean, he's sending singular bombs to people and he's very careful in doing it. The person who wreaked havoc in Oklahoma is a mass murderer. They're two separate kind of people. And I worked with Kathy for a long time, so whenever she had an opinion like that, to me, it was as close to gospel as you were going to get. The FBI agreed with that, so we were able to maneuver through that because you can get distracted very easily in something like this. So now the bureau has two major things going on, because within days of the Oklahoma City bombing, we have the death of Gilbert Murray at the hands of the Unabomber. Another terrible crime scene. Tom Manal came out. He actually went to Oklahoma City to gather evidence and get things back to the lab. Then he came to San Francisco, went up to Sacramento and helped us with that as well. And so all of this is going on, and in the wake of this, the Unabomber starts firing off more letters. And they went to the New York Times. Eventually they would go to Bob Guccioni at Penthouse magazine. They would go to a couple of Nobel Prize winning scientists, to a University of California professor named Tom Tyler, and they all had a little different theme. But by and large, the Unabomber wanted the world to to know that the terrorist group FC has a manifesto and we want it published. And if it's published, we will desist from committing acts of terror, but we will reserve the right to commit Espionage. And that always was interesting, Megan, but I have to tell you here very quickly that a number of years ago you did a interview of William Ayers, a radical Weather Underground terrorist. And he said something very similar. He reminded you that, look, we only went after people and or after property. We didn't go after people. Well, that is exactly what the Unabomber, the lone serial terrorist, was telling us years later. And I found the mindset interesting. And of course, the question that is begging there is that, look, you can't guarantee that you're only going to damage property, you're going to kill, kill people. And so you must not care. And so that was where we were at with the Unabomber. And again, Kathy weighed in and she said something very, very interesting that would factor into our deliberations eventually on what to recommend about publication. And that is that the Unabomber will probably not be able to stop himself from sending other bombs, even if he says he wanted to. This is something that he does. This is who he is. So getting a promise or a pledge from him is almost as useless, useless as it can be. So this is the situation we found ourselves in as we were trying to determine what to do and as we then received, you know, the call from the Bureau. What is going to be your recommendation? What are you going to ask about the demand from fc, from the terror group FC to actually publish this manifesto?
- [56:16]
Megyn Kelly
I mean, it's so much responsibility. If you don't publish it and he bombs again, there'll be second guessing. If you do publish it and he bombs again, they'll be second guessing. It's like you've got people's lives in your hands here. Before I forget, Terry, just quickly, what, what did FC wind up standing for?
- [56:35]
Terry Turchi
We're never really going to be sure. We, we never, of course, were able to talk to Theodore Kaczynski about it. And there are some suggestions that it stood for Freedom Club, something like that, but nothing certainly that helped us on the trail of trying to identify who the terror group FC was.
- [56:55]
Megyn Kelly
Okay, so you ultimately decide publish it, tell him to do it. And the you really thought, in the end there will be somebody out there in reading a 35,000 word manifesto who will recognize phrases, words, ideas, philosophies that this guy holds so strongly. There's no way he hasn't expressed them to us others. And you did it. The Washington Post printed the manifesto. You had FBI agents staked out at the various locations in the relevant location where you thought the Unabomber could possibly be. California Watching, no luck. But there was luck in one particular person who read that manifesto. Can we jump to that part of the story?
- [57:42]
Terry Turchi
Sure, we can. So between the time of the publication of the manifesto on September 20th or 19th in the middle of February, we received probably close to 55,000 phone calls and tips with people turning in, you know, wives turning in their husbands for the reward, girlfriends turning in boyfriends and all that kind of thing. But by this time, we really knew a lot about the Unabomber. In fact, the behavioral science unit said, look, you basically solved the case. You just don't know the guy's name. And we're all looking at each other like, well, that would be hopeful, wouldn't it? So when we got the manifesto and we recommended eventually publication, it was based on the idea that we had a lot of meetings, as I mentioned to you, and I mentioned in one of the meetings that I had a high school teacher, his name was Larry Lawson, and he taught creative writing. And ironically, I stayed away from math and tried to stay into stuff like creative writing in high school. And he told us, no two people write alike. And so we talked about that. And so we said, look, we know so much about unabomb, we need to recommend, now that there's one piece we're lacking, this manifesto could now be. Be the thing that gives us that piece. And so we need to recommend publication. And so off we went, Jim Freeman and Kathy Puckett and myself to Louis Free. We had a meeting with all the bureau. Brad asked there, briefed the case, and said, we recommend publication of the unabomb manifesto in the Washington Post. We went across the street to the ag, did the same thing. They approved it, and it was published on the 19th. And by February 14th, we got the call we needed. And it was essentially like all things unabom, it came. It didn't come easy. It was a. On the overhead speaker system, there was a paging. Anybody from the unabom task force, can you pick up such and such a line? Well, Joel Moss, who was the supervisor of the suspect squad, listened to this paging for about three tries. And finally he puts down what he's doing. He picks it up because he obviously hopes somebody else would answer it. He's up to his eyeballs in alligators with thousands of unabomb suspects. And he gets on the phone with another agent, Molly Flynn, in Washington metropolitan field office. She has received a 23 page essay. Essay from an individual, an attorney named Anthony Basigli in Washington. Anthony Basagli had dealt with the FBI before he had a client approach him who gave him this. And they were worried that someone close to them could be the Unabomber. But they wanted to find out a little bit before they volunteered who they were. So Molly Flynn sent the essay to the Bureau, and the Bureau lab looked at it, and they came back and said, this isn't typed on the Unabomber's typewriter. And that was it. Well, she didn't stop there. She thought, wait a minute, you know, this is what we're all about. So she called the San Francisco utf. She ends up getting a hold of Joel Moss. She starts explaining this. Joel listens for a while. He said, get it to me right away. He immediately understood the significance or potential significance of what some of the passages she read. So he came to my office after he had a fax copy of this, and after he and Kathy had talked, they said, let's go to lunch. I said, I can. I'm committed to going to lunch with Jim and Joel.
- [61:17]
Megyn Kelly
Literally, your boss, Jim Freeman.
- [61:18]
Terry Turchi
The three of us had worked together a lot. He grabs him by the arm, we go to lunch, and I cancel out on Jim. Well, we end up sitting there. When Jim Freeman comes into the same place, we're eating and so you stood me up for your friends here, huh? Well, we had the talk about the 23 page essay, started reading it, that that night, and our world had changed forever. You could not read the 23 page essay, believe in the strategy we were following, and not believe that this was the golden ticket.
- [61:50]
Megyn Kelly
There were phrases that he used in both what turned out to be letters to his brother and in the manifesto that were just too identifiable and yet unique to him. Ted Kaczynski.
- [62:07]
Terry Turchi
It was chilling. I took it home that night to hold my copy, and my wife was watching television, and I was laying on the couch in the family room, and I just jumped out of the couch and headed into the den to get my copy of the manifesto. Because in the 23 page essay, there was a phrase, the sphere of human freedom. Well, that exact phrase was in the manifesto. And I went and I started looking at other things. At that point in time, I called Joel, I called Kathy, and I went back in, and I just told my wife, I'm gonna. I'm gonna go on in and work some. And. And I just said, I think we might have found the Unabomber. And that's all I said to her. And the next morning, of course, our entire discussion now turns to the 23
- [62:51]
Megyn Kelly
page essay and the manifesto as it turned Out. David Kaczynski, Ted's brother, was married to a woman named Linda. And she would later describe the genesis of her suspicion as between the two of them, she apparently was the first to suspect that it was Ted, David's brother. You write in your book. She was in Paris in August 1995 when she read an article about the Unabomber in an international edition of a newspaper. Her anxiety grew as the Unabomber was described as a loner, probably from Chicago. Check, check. Who had likely lived in Utah and Northern California. Check, check. Linda had never met Ted, but this was consistent with her knowledge of him. And it goes on from there. And then it had excerpts of the manifesto, which seemed a lot like Ted's letters to her husband. You go on to say that one of the things she realized was that she and David had been asked by Ted Kaczynski, David's brother, for money a couple of. Of times. And he'd been living like a hermit in the middle of Montana in some cabin. So they were a little puzzled by why he would need money anyway, but they deduced that he used their money to make bombs. They were mortified.
- [64:07]
Terry Turchi
Exactly. And especially the last two bombings, in November of 94, he'd asked for $1,000. And in December of 94, he asked for $2,000. And so of course, we had the December 94 event involving Mr. Moser and then the follow up, Mr. Murray in 95. So it was just frightening to think that they were absolutely right. And we felt really badly that that could be the case. But in fact, that's what it turned out to be. He was getting money from them to finance those last two bombings.
- [64:40]
Megyn Kelly
Another phrase in the writings that matched, there was a comparison between. He would write, you can't eat your cake and have. Have it too. Which is a reversal of the saying. The saying is, you can't have your cake and eat it too. And he reversed it and. And what? Like, where did you see that? How did that come together?
- [64:59]
Terry Turchi
Yes, eventually we would see that in, in several places. But that showed up in the, the Manifest, the. The 22 page essay. And it showed up when we went to visit Wanda and his mom. And she had information and all kinds of things in a steamer trunk that Theodore owned. And he had left it with and said, I don't want it anymore. Do whatever you want. Well, she kept it all these years, so it was essentially abandoned property. And we went into the steamer trunk and found, written on a draft of the essay, you can't eat your cake. And have it too. And so all of these things start coming together and they're just too many of these coincidences, I guess you could call them. But it was all about words. It was all about language. And. And so earlier when you and I spoke and we talked about those two early letters, the Ralph Kloppenberg letter and the history of Science, and then the Enoch Fisher letter that had prompted us to do a project, and we had a number of investigative projects that we worked on. And one of those projects had to do with interviewing professors at universities. So we had become, in fact, Joel had become our expert on the history of science. And we found that there were 44American universities and colleges across the country that enrolled 400 people in the discipline. History of Science. None of us had ever heard of it. And we just wanted to mark this territory, not to forget it. So he actually went, Joel actually went to a History of Science convention one year in New Orleans. And I guess that was a big splash. They loved having the FBI there. It was very exciting. But he was there to learn about what history of science means. So all of this is fresh on our mind when Theodore Kaczynski shows up as a suspect. And lo and behold, when we go to start doing all the basics that we always did with any suspect and one of them was to get all their school transcripts, lo and behold, there's a course that Theodore took early on in Harvard or University of Michigan called History of Science, the Introduction to History of Science. So he had a creative side and he would pull on that when he was putting together these bombs are putting together ideas. So this is how all of this, these things, whether they were phrases or those kinds of things from the investigation or passages from the manifesto, or passages from the 23 page essay that matched the manifesto, all of this started falling together. And these pieces became the foundation, the building block of this search warrant. The thing is, this was not DNA. This was not fingerprints, this was not eyewitness stuff. This was words. And so DOJ said knock yourself out, but this is a probable cause. And of course, our response was, wait a minute, this is as good as any of the things you just mentioned almost, because first of all, this is all we have. But knowing all of this and seeing every day more stuff was coming together. I mean, there was no question more and more of these pieces were coming together. We always would do a of ton timeline. And one of the things David was able to do eventually is he gave us well over 100 envelopes with postmarks on them. They represented the envelopes that the letters between he and Ted that he had received from Ted had. Had received over 30 years. He kept all of that. And we had thus a timeline during the entirety of the UNABOM series of events. And we only ended up finding one contradiction in that entire 16 years using all these postmar them, all the other things we use. So it was all falling together. And we kept going back and saying, no, we're close to having what we need to get into that cabin and we need to do it. And DOJ was not sold. And eventually it took the FBI Director, Louis Freeh and the Attorney General to simply bypass all the advisors and committees set up to give us advice about this. It took the two of them to say, look, we trust the utf. We trust the people on it. We've been following this case. We know this case like the back of our hand. I mean, Janet Reno would carry around her copy of fact, fiction and theory. And you had to be careful if you were talking to her because she listened and then she go, wait a minute, isn't this part of theory for her? And so she was that into this case. And of course, Director Free was. Was really into it from day one. But so that was the kind of relationship we now, I mean, we're almost. It may be that there are high level government officials, but everybody, as we said at the beginning, everybody was at the right for us, was the right person in the right spot at the right time. And, you know, the egos had been tossed to the floor. The emotion you could. You could show your emotion. I mean, it was amazing. I mean, I look back on it now and as I'm talking you, I almost have chills because it wasn't like people might think. The attorney general, the director of the FBI, the SAC of San Francisco, the agents, we were all equal in this boat. And if we didn't help each other, we were all going to drown in it. And I think that at some point that became the reason that we were successful in bringing all this together.
- [70:31]
Megyn Kelly
Hence the piece of the title about breaking the rules. They got the search warrant, this group, not the arrest warrant. They got the search warrant, which wasn't all they wanted, but it was good enough, as it would turn out. And wound up in the snowy mountains of Montana, tons of agents waiting for Ted Kaczynski. There was a whole ruse, as you can imagine, had to be executed very carefully so that no one got hurt. Understanding this is a bomb maker inside of this cabin suspected, but for very good reason. And eventually, they would have to affect that arrest under circumstances they knew never foresaw. We pick it up there right after this. So now you go out to the mountains of Montana, the middle of nowhere, and you've got to start putting the. The pieces in place for, you know, what you hope will be an eventual arrest. And what I. The question I had in reading your book, were you talking about, you know, now you got to start interviewing the locals. You get some important locals on your side. You. You start interviewing bus drivers because Ted Kaczynski only has a bicycle. So how is he getting from the middle of nowhere down to Sacramento into Utah? Wherever he's going, there's got to be a way. So you got to find bus drivers, you got to figure out routes taken, you got to see, where did he stay. What are the. Do we have any receipts? Let's get the bank accounts. Let's build a case, a case that Max would love to show actual proof that this guy has been in the places we suspect he's been during the relevant timeframes. And what I kept thinking, reading how you guys had to do this, was A, just arrest the damn guy. You know, it's him. Him, right? Like, you can't do it that way. And B, weren't you worried someone was going to leak either, you know, outside, you know, to random people who might spread it, but. Or B, to. To Ted Kaczynski? Like, how could you assure yourself that people weren't friends with him? Or maybe they just blabbed to somebody. Some random person, like, the FBI contacted me. They asked me all these fun questions. They think that there's some guy in the woods, and then word would get out. You know, how you do you control that.
- [72:33]
Terry Turchi
Megan, everything you said was so right on. We were worried about so many things that. That was the most stressful time of this entire investigation. There could be leaks. He could have something in the cabin that eventually is going to hurt somebody. He could get on a bus and place another bomb or mail another bomb. All these things are going on in our minds, and so we had to try to deal with each of these contingencies. So what we did is that around, I don't know, it was probably around the third week of February, called Max. Max was on leave at the time. I said, we're sending you to Montana. I know you don't think much of Theodore Kaczynski as the Unabomber, but you're the guy that has to be in Montana all the time to take care of and manage the Small team we're going to send with you, and we need you to go to those hotels, motels, try to somehow place this guy out of that cabin, start interviewing people. And of course, all this has to be done discreetly. And we can't even mention the word Unabomb. So Max, of course, being Max, he came right back. He goes into Montana, buys all his winter clothes, and sets about doing what he has to do. And he and I talked several times every day, every day. And he directed a team of about three people, which would start to grow almost every day after we first got started. But in that time, a lot of things happened, and we needed all these things for our search warrant. Max was able to go pay a visit to Butch Gehring. It was on the Butch Gehring Lumber Mill property that Theodore Kaczynski and his brother David had actually purchased the house or the land for the cabin that Kaczynski built in 1971. So Max. Max went and had a talk with Gary to learn about the Unabomber or learn about Kaczynski. And Gary was where, as we said, wearing the team jersey. After that, he was willing and ready to help and provide whatever kind of information or help to us we needed. So that was kind of secured. So then Max was able to develop Jerry Burns. Jerry Burns became just vitally important. Everybody's heard of the U.S. forest Service. Very few people know that the U.S. forest Service has their own special agents and law enforcement. And I work with so many of these people over the years, and they're really, really good. Well, Jerry Burns was absolutely amazing. And so we befriended him and kind of put the team jersey on him. His supervisor agreed that he didn't need to know what Jerry was doing on behalf of the FBI. But Jerry was briefed on everything. He was brought into the whole Unabomb picture of this. And so he was able to be a goldmine of information about Kaczynski because he was always running into them out into. Because it's out in the forest that was important. The ssra, the Senior Supervisory Resident Agent in Helena, Montana, was an individual named Tom McDaniel. He was amazing and was there every step of the way with us. And then finally, Bernie Hubley. Bernie was the Assistant U.S. attorney in the district there. And lo and behold, our luck again. Bernie Hubley was a former former FBI agent. So he was brought into this and almost fell over on a bar stool one day when Max briefed him and said, here's why we're here, and we're Here, because in your territory.
- [76:02]
Megyn Kelly
So crazy. It's crazy to think about like, these guys being like, wait, what? The Unabomber? Like, the most notorious criminal in the country right now at large. So, okay, eventually I got to skip ahead because I. There's so much more important things to get to. So you do get your search warrant. It wasn't even easy. But, but just long story short on that, so much of that painstaking FBI work went into it, and it wasn't a guarantee that you were going to get it. But all those years and hours of, of collective effort paid off. You got the warrant. You go to execute the search warrant. Jerry, who you mentioned, the local, who Ted knew he was important. He was the front man. And then there are two other guys who went to knock on the door with a ruse about, we need to check your property line. And it's. It was something Ted Kaczynski had to see Jerry's face, otherwise he wouldn't have opened that door. He would have been suspicious. So he was critical and lo and behold, he was home. Ted Kaczynski. And you got him, you grabbed him. He said he was going to go back in, he would show you the property lines. He's just going to go back in and grab his coat and. No, he was not going to grab the coat. The FBI grabbed him, pulled out a Sig Sour. That was the end of his attempt to go back in the house. And he was not placed under arrest, but taken. Taken to another cabin where questioning began. And I have to ask you, you know, after all this effort, right, he's in this cabin, you've got him, you and your team. And like, what are you thinking at this point? You know, because the pictures do show this disheveled, crazy looking mountain man who looks just like he hasn't seen a brush or a shower in 20 years. Like, what? What are you thinking?
- [77:39]
Terry Turchi
Well, Max couldn't wait to take a bath. I mean, he already felt really dirty. He wanted to get away from here and take a shower as soon as he could. But he would end up being with Kaczynski just about the rest of the day and into the night. At about one o', clock, I was thinking more of what we had to do next. I mean, it was almost like, okay, that part of this is over and now we can breathe a little easier. But not really because we've got a lot of work to do. So now we start bringing in everybody else, all these evidence response teams, and then we call the bureau, but now the bureau is saying well, you don't have anything but a search warrant. What are you doing? Well, we're taking him out and putting him into another cabin to be on ice here for a while while we decide what to do. And of course, our plan was to take him up the mountain and over to Helena. And of course, DOJ said, you can't do that. You can't arrest this man. Well, we're not going to let him go back in the cabin. And so by late that night, after hours of debating that occurred back east, we'd already taken Theodore Kaczynski into Helena. He was in the car with Max and Tom and Paul Wilhelmus, a postal inspector. They took him into Helena to get him booked at the jail eventually. And Jim and I were following them up the mountain and into Helena, and we were eventually on the phone with the director. And he's getting kind of a lot of information that I'll call it what it was. It was fiction from dealing with people that. That had no. No, they had no clue of what they were talking about. And so people were a little concerned. Are you making an arrest that you can't make? But by about midnight, Howard Shapiro, the FBI chief legal counsel, got on the phone with me. I said, just let me go through everything that's going on in the other room. And lo and behold, he said, I don't need to hear anything else. I'll brief the director. Do what you're doing and get this person locked up, and we'll. We'll deal with the rest of this tomorrow. And that's good. A. Exactly what happened.
- [79:38]
Megyn Kelly
You eventually, after sort of de. Rigging the house and making sure it was safe to enter, and there were all sorts of things you gotta. You gotta read Terry's book to. To hear, like, the painstaking efforts to make sure that it was safe. But you. You get into his cabin, and this, to me, is where it all comes together. 20 years of clue gathering would make. Match up with what you found in that cabin, forget enough to make an arrest. Now we're talking. We need enough to put this man away for the rest of his life. And it was all there. You know, I think about. Let me just give you one. I think about Terry. The. The. Right. The eyewitness. Tammy. Tammy. Sorry. Tammy. The eyewitness had given us the aviator sunglasses and all that back at the one bombing years ago. Now, nobody ever made an eyewitness. Nobody ever matched that picture up with Ted Kaczynski and said, I know that guy. So, okay. Did she really make a difference 100%. Because tell us about some of the things she described that you found in Ted Kaczynski's cabin.
- [80:47]
Terry Turchi
Well, of course, the infamous portrait of the aviator sunglasses and the guy wearing the gray hooded sweatshirt. And lo and behold, there in the cabin were aviator sunglasses and gray hooded sweatshirt hanging up on a, on a hook over in the corner to the left as you were facing from the outside. We found a live bomb on the second day of the search, wrapped and ready to mail. Ironically, it had a return address of the Seattle FBI office. And so he was getting ready to taunt us again. We saw across the cabin, remember the cabin, 9 by 12 in size. And then it had a loft. So across from where we were looking through the only door door of the cabin were all kinds of containers, cartons and bottles. Some were labeled, they were labeled with explosive or ingredients that you could use to make explosives. And in fact, the Unabomber's early bombs had some of these combinations like potassium chlorate and sodium chlorate and things like that. We found a oatmeal container, Quaker Oats oatmeal container, with pre made switches that he had already made ahead of time so it could literally reach onto the shelf and pull off a switch that he might use in a bomb he wants to construct. We found thousands of pages of typed or handwritten notes and we found a autobiography of him. He had literally laid out his entire life in all of these notes. And we also found admissions and or confessions to all 16 Unabomb devices. Now what in fact we did find with about 500 pages of those admissions is that he had taught himself Spanish and he wrote those admissions and confessions in Spanish. So now we had to get on the phone and start assembling every FBI Spanish speaker we had so that we could get those translated and stop any bombs that might now still be in the maelstrom. So we have all these things still going on because of this guy's nature, nature and personality.
- [82:57]
Megyn Kelly
One question I wanted to ask you, having read the book, was you one of the queries, one of the, one of the oddities was the FBI agents analyzing the case before you knew who. It was believed that the forensic experts, they said the Unabomber is melting scrap aluminum for his more recent bombs. He would need an electric powered kiln to do that. And he, Ted Kaczynski, only had like a wood bur stove in there. He had no electricity. And so did we ever solve the mystery of how he melted scrap aluminum with just a wood burning stove, which the forensic experts said he could not do.
- [83:39]
Terry Turchi
Well, they may have said he could not do it, but we've all, all learned about experts and the experts were simply wrong. And he had the potbelly stove and he had a big fire pit dug in front of the cabin, and he melted his, his own aluminum the hard way. And that's how he was meticulously making these bombs.
- [83:58]
Megyn Kelly
And I know we knew this from the manifesto, but we haven't really gotten into it in this interview, but from the manifesto and the materials he found in his cabin and the interviews with his brother David and so on, because Ted was not talking, he clammed right up. What do we know about why, about the reason for his terror campaign over 20, 20 years?
- [84:20]
Terry Turchi
Yes, he actually goes into that and he says, people are going to give a number of motives to what I'm doing, but I'm doing this because I'm getting personal revenge. I'm doing this because I'm angry. There was really no rationality to all of these things that look so organized, like he might have had an anti technology beef. Of course he kind of did, but it was all, when you get down to it, when you think of airlines, he was mad because the planes flying over the wilderness area where he lived made too much noise. So then he'd write, I'm embarking on a plan to get even. And this is kind of how he was thinking. And as Kathy had said early on, this is about anger. It's about what a person like this, a serial killer, a serial criminal, has welled up inside them. They are angry. And certainly Theodore Kaczynski was angry. And so he wrote about his anger. He wrote about personal revenge as a motive, and he gave other motives, of course. But this is what it all came down to for him. Anger and revenge at what he thought were slights against him.
- [85:36]
Megyn Kelly
We'll get into, you know, more about his past in one second. But before we get to that, he. There's a reason why he was not facing the death penalty by the time you got your hands on him and he would have to face justice. Can you explain just with the criminal trial, what happened? You didn't have to try him, and there was a reason why death was not on the table.
- [85:58]
Terry Turchi
In the lead up to this, David had requested that we have some sort of deal where he will help us, but there will be no death penalty. Well, of course we had to say no to that. We couldn't talk like that with anybody before for any kind of trial. So ultimately there was death penalty attached to the indictments, that or the trial process in both Sacramento and had we gone there in New Jersey on the main cases that we were indicting him on. But at some point in time, right before the trial jury was to come in and we were going to start the trial, he just kind of threw it in. You know, he didn't want to plead guilty at all to anything. They tried to have a condition where we would, you know, kind of take his plea, but he could appeal things all his life. We said no. And finally they said, well, look, if you. If you take the death penalty off the table, you know, we'll plead guilty unconditionally to all of these crimes. And that's exactly what happened. And that happened literally. I mean, the beginning of that happened literally minutes before the judge had kind of read his final words and told the courtroom, okay, I'm going to bring in the jury. And all of a sudd know Kaczynski basically threw something or made some noise. They were done. The attorneys got up. The whole thing was over that day. And within an hour, we were told he's. He wants to plead guilty.
- [87:27]
Megyn Kelly
I mean, so terrified about the thought of having his own life taken from him, and of course, not a shred of concern or care for the lives he took and. And the people he maimed. And, you know, I think about those poor children. Children and that wife of poor Thomas Mosser who had to run into that kitchen after they heard a bomb go off and see the remains of their loved ones. I mean, like. And Ted Kaczynski's worried, of course, to the end, about himself and what he might have to go through. Has he ever spoken, Terry? Has he ever given an interview or, you know, done anything other than the manifesto to help people understand. Understand?
- [88:09]
Terry Turchi
No, not really. He's. He's turned down most interviews. I think he eventually might have spoken with someone briefly. I. But I'm not sure. I. I remember vaguely at some point he might have, but he certainly is not talking to us. He. He has developed, or he had developed, I think, a relationship of some sort with Timothy McVeigh before he was executed. And of course, he's on. He's at the supermax, and I think right down the row from him is Eric Robert Rudolph, another loner serial bomber from the Olympic bombing of 1996. So he's really never talked. He's really never said much, and I don't think he plans to say anything. He's never talked at all since then to his brother and of Course, he hadn't talked to his brother for years before that.
- [88:58]
Megyn Kelly
Right. He would. He cut off his brother and his mom, and I think his dad was alive for some of that. Unclear why. The brother married a college professor. There's a question about whether he was upset about that. He didn't like universities, as we covered earlier. And yet the brother loved him. David Kaczynski loved his brother Ted and really seemed to wrestle with that phone call he made after reading the manifesto. And again, he tried to bargain for his brother's life, but knew he had to do the right thing. I mean, he's. He's really kind of an unsung hero in the whole thing, because even though we have so many FBI agents working tirelessly around the clock for years to catch the guy, boy, oh, boy, you know, a lot of people would say, I wouldn't. I wouldn't do it. Wouldn't turn my own brother in. I'd do something else. But he did the right thing, and he. And in large part, you know, he. He played a major role in. In apprehending the brother. Okay, the profile of Ted Kaczynski is where I want to pick it up next, because I read some crazy stuff about this guy, and I would love to go through some of it with you. It wasn't in your book, but I want to understand Ted Kaczynski a bit better and lessons learned. Now that you can look back on your investigation and know who it is, what would you have done differently? Okay, we're going to pick it up there with Terry Churchy on the Unabomber investigation next. So an important piece of the story is, who was this guy, like, what turns, you know, some normal American who by all accounts didn't have an extraordinarily odd childhood into a serial killer? That's what Ted Kaczynski is, a serial killer. So let's just start with what do we know about his, you know, 1 through 20, about that period of his life?
- [90:44]
Terry Turchi
Sure. Well, his brother kind of sums that up the best, I think, because he thought a lot about that, and he would constantly remind us we came from the same family, we were raised in the same way by the same people. I don't even understand how he can attach certain meaning and value to some of the things he was taught in the way he was raised, that he talks about. That's what he would say about Ted. I don't understand how we could come from the same family, because my recollections and memories of growing up are nothing at all like his. I have no idea how he got these memories, notions. And therein, I think, lies the problem for us in future cases and in trying to identify or prevent some of these types of things. I think it's very difficult to figure out how to see these people ahead of time, how to figure out how one person is going to be fine and how another person becomes a serial terrorist. I don't know if we're even close to that kind of assessment right now. I know we've tried to articulate things that were missed, and yet they're only on the surface. Like someone acted a certain way in school or didn't get along with anybody or was constantly angry. Kathy says that, and she did a major study. One of the things we did to try to answer your question is when I went back to the Bureau at the end of my career, we got the money and we brought Kathy back to do a study on lone serial bombers. And she concluded that these are people who are trying to make a mark in society. They want to be known. They fail at being known. They fail at group identity. They cannot become part of a group. They simply cannot socialize to where they can become part of any kind of group. So what they start to do is create their own group. Thus the Unabomber created Theodore Kaczynski, created the terror group fc. And then they seek this major type of. Of event, like a bombing, a terrible tragedy, to get traction and be known. And so that's about as close as we can get. But she based that on a number of serial killers and a number of people, because we don't have many serial bombers, of course, but there are certainly very similar patterns going on there. So we passed that study along to the Bureau. I mean, it was Bureau property. We passed it along to use in the future. And in fact, it was used initially when they were trying to deal with the anthrax case. Because, if you recall, there was a real wave, a very strong wave initially, that the anthrax attacks on the east coast had to be committed by an international terrorist. It just had to be. And Kathy and I at the time were in the Lawrence Livermore lab. We'd retired. We were working there, and the Bureau actually called and they said, we have a meeting coming up, and we're trying to be the voice of in the wilderness, telling the entirety of the rest of the government that the FBI thinks the anthrax attacks are domestic terrorism, and we would hate to see them go off in a different direction and, you know, end up attacking Iraq. Or something based on this. And so that's the kind of thing that can happen in the kind of discussion that we were literally having after that study and, and after we had left.
- [94:08]
Megyn Kelly
So just a couple of items. He was brilliant. He what I read that he scaled, skipped two grades. He went off to Harvard at age 16. He graduated with a PhD in mathematics in 1967. He would go on to teach mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley. Of course, we would see, you know, bombings in California and the universities there abruptly returned to Chicago to live with his parents. And then he wound up purchasing this land in Montana and living in this cabin. Now, I also read online that he was, at one point he considered himself trans and actually went to seek the operation, or at least psychiatric affirmation of that. Is that true?
- [94:55]
Terry Turchi
I think there's some discussion in his journals of something like that. To be honest, I don't. I didn't pay a lot of attention to that at that time. But I think he wrote something very similar to. To that. Yes.
- [95:11]
Megyn Kelly
And there was never a woman in the picture. From what I never hear anything about this girlfriend, that girl? No. Ex wife? Like, no women.
- [95:20]
Terry Turchi
There weren't. And he was very disappointed and bothered by that. And in fact, so disappointed that he put an ad in a newspaper in the San Francisco Bay area, in the Oakland, Berkeley area. And the ad is probably the reason he never got what he wanted. He said he was individual, secret seeking a squaw, someone who could live a wilderness life and essentially be told what to do. And he said he was shocked. He was shocked in his journal because then he wrote it and I'm shocked no one responded. So I. I mean, maybe I'm so
- [95:58]
Megyn Kelly
smart in some ways and not so smart in other ways. Now, what about. There was some reporting that was when he went to Harvard. They did this experiment. It was voluntary to take part in it. But he was a young kid when he started. I mean, 16 is very young to be at university. He participated in. It was some sort of an experiment to see how well you handled stress and criticism given to you, like on a loop about you, about your writings. And some theorized this may have been a turning point, you know, like somehow it drove him crazy. What do we know about that?
- [96:30]
Terry Turchi
Well, Megan, we know that's a theory. He never says much about it. There's another kind of companion thing that he was involved in, unbeknownst to him, some secret experimental testing that the CIA was doing in some places using students. But he doesn't really look at any of that as the reason that these things happen. He himself says people are going to ascribe all kinds of motives and all of these things, things to me as the reason I'm doing this. They're all wrong. I'm doing this because I'm angry and I'm revengeful, and this is how I'm going to get even. And that's really the strongest thing we have to go by. Everything else pretty much falls back into the old fact, fiction and theory. But there's so many people out there now because, you know, they have access to a lot of his library of journals and documents and things. And so now everybody is going to weigh in on what Theodore Kaczynski must be thinking. But as you mentioned, does he take questions and does he get involved in discussions? And sadly, in some ways, the answer is no. We'll never know for sure what he's thinking.
- [97:38]
Megyn Kelly
He hated technology. He hated advancement. He wanted rural caveman type living and really hated anybody or anything that pushed for, I would say now, 21st century type advancements. And I can't imagine what the Ted Kaczynski of the bombing years, you know, 1998, minus 20, would have thought of Twitter and Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and all of it. I mean, I'm sure. I know. But so, final point, looking back now at the investigation and then comparing it against the real killer, what do you think were the biggest lessons learned?
- [98:17]
Terry Turchi
I think the biggest lessons learned are kind of almost contrast with each other. First of all, you have to follow the basics. You can't overlook things that you would do in any case, whether it's a bank robbery case or anything. You have to follow the basics and get them recorded and then remember what is important as you're doing that. And at the same time, you can't be tied to a system which doesn't move fast enough to keep up with what you're trying to do. And in this case, when you've got a bombing and then you could have another bombing and another bombing, you've got to be getting that information out and distributed and then assessing it for a long time in all of kinds, kinds of cases. The biggest criticism of the FBI is that it has all this information. Its biggest weakness is doesn't really know what it, what it has. And because it has so much. And so that is what we try to overcome. And so you have to be doing that. But then the, the other significant thing that I think you see all through this, and I think today it is true, it will Always be true. And it was true before I ever believe became an FBI agent. We are nothing without the public, without the help of the public, without the trust and support of the public. And if we lose that and we can debate how people may feel today, if we lose that, we're in trouble. And that ought to be at the forefront of every mind who runs the FBI, works in the FBI at any level. That if you lose that trust with the public and you don't trust them to help support you and help you with these people cases, then you've got some big problems. Law enforcement in a constitutional republic, in a free country is about the people and it's about teaming up with those people. The FBI used to have an old pamphlet, it was called cooperation, the backbone of law enforcement. And by golly, that was the basis of all of our media, of everything we did. And if I had it to do over, I would have done it faster in God greater quantity. And by golly, I would be educating everybody who ever walked into law enforcement that it's about you and the public and they've got to trust you and you've got to depend upon them. And that's the kind of relationship we have with David and that's where we are today.
- [100:35]
Megyn Kelly
Boy oh boy, have things changed since you were solving this case and have things and how they need to change back. The FBI seen very differently now. And you know what, Reading how the media worked with you guys on the leaks and trying to protect the public made me think about how the media has changed too and not for the better. So appreciate your hard work. You're telling the story. It's an honor to know you, Terry. I hope you can come back too.
- [100:59]
Terry Turchi
Thank you Megan. You too. Thank you very much on behalf of everybody that worked this case.
- [101:04]
Megyn Kelly
All the best to you. Thanks for joining us today. Download the Megyn Kelly show on your podcast you YouTube.commegankelly to watch it. Thanks.
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Tom Colbert
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Terry Turchi
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Tom Colbert
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Terry Turchi
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Tom Colbert
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Megyn Kelly
Sniffle season happens. And when it does, your skin deserves comfort. That's why Kleenex lotion tissues are made with moisturizing Ingredients and offer 3 in 1 skin loving benefits helping protect, soothe and moisturize your skin. So whether you're at home, on the go or just living life, keep Kleenex lotion close for a little extra care that makes a big difference. For whatever happens next, grab Kleenex. Karen Reid's courtroom drama has sparked intense debate, raised questions about police conduct, and fueled fierce divisions online. And the legal saga is far from over. In fact, there's new development. There is a new development just this month. Not just one, actually more. Peter Tragos, attorney and host of the lawyer, you know, on YouTube, he's so good on this. He's covered every twist and turn of this case. You will love listening to this conversation. And he joins me right now. So let's just start back at the beginning. For people who may not be as up to speed on this case as you are, Karen Reed was who she was. She's living her private life in Massachusetts. Who was she before all this happened to her?
- [102:54]
Peter Tragos
She was a single woman dating a law enforcement officer, had a great job in finance and her family was a close knit family, loved each other for all intents and purposes. When she reconnected with this boyfriend who was an officer and they go out for a night on the town, they had a bit of a tumultuous relationship. And then that night, after some drinking at the bar, hanging out with a bunch of friends, everything changed forever.
- [103:22]
Megyn Kelly
So the problem, prosecution, which would ultimately be charging her, alleges that they left this bar, they drove over to a friend's house, another cop, and that her boyfriend got out of the car, that he then walked up to the, the front door of the friend's house and went, sorry, this is what she alleges. She, she alleges he went to the front door of the house, he went inside and something terrible happened to him. The prosecution said, no, he got out of your car. He never made it inside because you ran him over. You backed up into him at something like 24 miles an hour, hurting him, casting him into the snowbank where he then later died from blunt trauma and hypothermia. Is that the basics?
- [104:16]
Peter Tragos
Yeah, I mean, the, it turns on what happened after they got to 34 Fairview. Everybody's basically on the same page. They went to a couple bars, they were hanging out together, they were drinking together. Karen Reed is driving her Lexus. Nobody disputes that. John o', Keefe, who is her boyfriend and the victim in this case, sitting in the front seat. They drive to 34 Fairview to hang out with the McCabes and the Alberts, who are all connected to law enforcement and connected to people in Canton. She drops him off, he gets out of the car. There also seems to be third party witness testimony that he gets out of the car after that. That's where the stories kind of turn. If you believe the prosecution and the witnesses inside 34 Fairview. He never makes it inside the house. She backs up, hits him with her Lexus because she's angry at him about, you know, a multitude of things, and they're fighting and she wanted to end his life. I guess is is their point of view. If you believe Karen Reed, she said he walked in towards the house. She didn't see John o' Keefe again. He stayed inside. He was supposed to come back out, kind of tell her what's going on. She gets pissed off. Dr. Drives back to his house, calls him, leaves him all these angry text messages, and he never comes home. That's Karen Reid's story.
- [105:20]
Megyn Kelly
Mm. And it wasn't until the wee hours of the next morning, you know, like five, six in the morning, that she and another then start searching for him. Like, what happened to him? Where's John? And oh, wow, he's dead in the snowbank. How'd that happen? Now, there are two competing facts that I want to ask you about. As I was just listening to this, I didn't follow this guy case as closely as you did at all. But as I was listening to it, the best fact. Well, there's two that I think the prosecution has are as follows. Number one, that she allegedly said, I hit him, I hit him, I hit him. And that an emergency worker, like a paramedic, heard that. And now she denies that. But you've got a third party witness saying she said that. So that's a very good fact for the prosecution. And they also have tailgate plastic in his clothing, like from where her tailgate of her Lexus hit him. So it doesn't look like he got beaten up inside. It looks like he got hit by her car. Not just any car, but her car. So those are very good facts for the prosecution. On the other side, for Karen Reed, the best fact I saw for her defense, because her. Again, her defense is, no, he walked into the house. I didn't run him over. He went into the house. And then there was some cop on cop violence. Some old score got settled, and they beat him. They beat him to death and then threw him in the snowbank and tried to say that I ran him over. And the best evidence I saw for Karen Reid's theory was that someone inside that house allegedly Googled something to the effect of how long can you be out in the snow before. Before you die? Before they found the body. Before they found the body, you know, before she even had allegedly hit him. And that would certainly suggest the people inside the house were up to no good. Now, at trial they disputed that piece of testimony. So can you walk us through that evidence? Those, those. Do I have like the best facts on both sides or have I missed something critical?
- [107:25]
Peter Tragos
Yeah, honestly, there's just so much. So we'll go with what you are asking because it's really fascinating for somebody who's kind of followed it from a cursory point of view and maybe, you know, you've heard some of the highlights or seen some of the shows reporting on it because it was fascinating and it's really a case unlike any other I've tried personally, myself or followed even, you know, since I've been following these cases in the media. And you've brought up some big points of contention and the prosecution absolutely pushed the I hit him comments as a confession. That's what they continue to call it, a confession. She confessed to law enforcement, to ems, right there on the scene. Karen Reed's team cross examined those witnesses and said if you had somebody that confessed, why didn't she get arrested? Why, why wasn't that immediately the investigation and they knew exactly what happened. Why was there any unknown? Why wasn't the investigation and the crime scene taken as they knew exactly what happened, that she hit him with her Lexus? And Karen Reed's team responds with it was, did I hit him? Could I have hit him? Which there are some other people that say could have been.
- [108:24]
Megyn Kelly
Stand by. Let me just play that. Cuz she, she spoke to Dateline. She didn't testify at her trials, but she did speak to Dateline. Here's Karen Reed trying to clarify that point in SOT 51. I said, could I have hit him? Did I hit him?
- [108:38]
Terry Turchi
How could that have been? I mean, you dropped him off.
- [108:40]
Megyn Kelly
What else could have been? It was howling wind. I had YouTube blasting on the stereo and. And I thought, did he somehow try to flag me down? Which was the reaction I was hoping to garner as I slowly pulled away from the house. Did he come out and maybe trip or bend over to pick up his cell phone? And I ran over his foot and then he passed out drunk. I mean I didn't think I hit him, hit him, but could I have Clipped him. Could I have tagged him in the knee and incapacitated him? He. He didn't look mortally wounded as far as I could see. But could I have done something that knocked him out and in his drunkenness and in the cold, didn't come to again, and just to be clear, Peter, this was after. So the night goes on. She allegedly hit him around, right. Just after midnight. But according to her testimony, she didn't hit him. She waited for him to come back out of the party. He didn't. She got mad. She went back back over to his house. And then by the next morning, by like 5 or 6am she and this other gal were like looking for him. And lo and behold, there he was, dead in the snowbank at the location of the party. So go ahead.
- [109:47]
Peter Tragos
Right. And, and that, that is one of the big points of contention and as you know, one of the big things now that there's competing civil lawsuits that we may talk about later when we're talking about the criminal case and you're saying here's the best evidence for one side and here's the best evidence for the other. The prosecution in this case has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt what happened that night. And that was one of the big difficulties when you have maybe some ems. And some people said, she said, I hit him. Some people said, did I hit him? Based on her conversations and a lot of what else happened that night. Maybe it wasn't as clear of a confession. And nobody seemed to think that at the time that it was a clear confession. And then when you flip to his injuries, which you mentioned them as kind of good evidence for both sides that her taillight pieces were, you know, on him, in his sweater, kind of attached to him. How would they get there? Unless she hit him with her Lexus? And then she says his injuries match a fight getting beat up by cops inside. You know, as he had raccoon eyes, he died from hitting the back of his head. And, you know, the, the evidence shows maybe it was on a ledge and not a flat ground. You know, that was a little. Who was actually going to prove what injury was the cause of death and how he got it. So that was a big point of contention throughout. And if you looked at a lot of the medical evidence and the accident reconstructionists, to me that's really where Karen that was.
- [111:02]
Megyn Kelly
That was a. Yes, that was a good fact for her. The fact that the Lexus, like expert at, at trial that said there was nothing recorded on this car of hitting somebody, of going 24 miles an hour or whatever it was, and running over another person like that, that he would have expected something to register in the car's brain, and nothing did.
- [111:24]
Peter Tragos
Yeah, and that's one of the problems with so many facts in this case, is there was kind of competing theories on that, where if you hit a man that's £200, maybe that's not going to be enough to register an event when you have, you know, a very heavy Lexus like that. And then there were some people that said, well, maybe it should have. And there's nothing on here that actually did register it. But even more so, Karen Reed had accident reconstructionists that were actually hired by the FBI while they were investigating this investigation, which we'll get into the shady stuff happening there as to why the FBI would even get involved. But Karen Reid ends up hiring those guys as her experts, and they do all sorts of different testing, and they can never create the same action where something hitting that tail light would explode out into the yard and on John o' Keefe the way that the prosecution said it happened in that case, it just wouldn't happen. Especially with some of the videos and pictures where the tail lights are still working without busting those little actual light bulbs inside. It was really fascinating.
- [112:22]
Megyn Kelly
Which was the case here.
- [112:23]
Peter Tragos
Correct. The lights were still working.
- [112:28]
Megyn Kelly
So in other words, this was faked. In other words, the point is those guys killed him inside, they brought him out, and then they were the ones who hit her car to make it look like it had bumped into him.
- [112:41]
Peter Tragos
So partially, they somewhat point the finger at the guys inside, inside the house for beating John o' Keefe to death and leaving him on the lawn. But they allege that law enforcement actually cracked the tail light, placed the pieces there, mixed everything together so it would look like that tail light hit John o'. Keefe. And they went so far as to. Alan Jackson, one of the defense lawyers in this case, had a chart of all the glass that was found at the scene. And there was a cocktail glass that was found on Karen Reed's car that was found nowhere else else at the scene. So how really would it have gotten there but for somebody placing it on the bumper of Karen Reid's car, which was driven away from the scene, driven around the next morning, put on a tow truck, driven back. And we're supposed to believe that some of this cocktail glass stayed on there. And there was one hair that stayed on there that they said was John o' Keefe's hair. Things that just were really hard to believe that the Commonwealth was trying to explain to a jury in this case.
- [113:35]
Megyn Kelly
Hmm. Okay. So what the theory of the prosecution is easy to understand, that she and John hadn't really been getting along. He had talked about possibly breaking up with her. She was very angry that night. She was drunk, and in her drunken anger, she ran him over. And there was some debate about whether they overcharged the case. Should they have just charged it as a manslaughter? They went for murder too, which definitely raised the stakes for. For this jury. Like, it was intentional. She wanted to kill him. As opposed to just like heat of passion. She did something crazy.
- [114:09]
Terry Turchi
But the.
- [114:10]
Megyn Kelly
The defense had a totally different version of events. And so for the clueless juror just walking into this case, why would John Okeefe's fellow cops want him dead?
- [114:23]
Peter Tragos
It's a great question. And if you look at the two criminal trials, because this went to trial twice. The first one was a hung juice jury. The second one was a not guilty verdict on all of the charges dealing with ending John o' Keefe's life. She was convicted of oui. Operating under the influence. But the big difference in the theme and theory of the defense case from trial one to trial two was this was a big conspiracy. In trial one, everybody was involved. The people inside the house ended his life. The cops covered it up, and there was a hung jury in the second trial. It's. You can't prove anything. This investigation was so bad. These cops didn't do the interviews properly. They didn't record them. They didn't secure the scene properly. This evidence doesn't make sense. It looks like it could have been planted. These guys have been terminated. These text messages are disgusting, how they talk about Karen Reed and other people. And that was a not guilty verdict that they couldn't prove the case. So two very different theories. But when they were trying to prove that somebody inside the house killed John o', Keefe, it was based on jealousy because somebody inside the house had been texting, flirtatious text text with Karen Reed, had kissed Karen Reed. And the defense was trying to use some videos in one of the bars as if these two guys were grappling and, you know, play fighting. But they were kind of getting in the mood to fight. I guess some of it was, you know, a little bit of a reach. But they were trying to say that they looked over across the bar and pointed at John O' Keefe and told John O' Keefe to come to 34 Fairview because basically they wanted to fight. And that was kind of their theme and theory of why somebody was what the motivation for somebody being wanting to kill John o' Keefe inside that house.
- [115:55]
Megyn Kelly
When. When would the defense have posited, if they did, that law enforcement broke her tail light to make it look like it was Karen Reed? Because under this scenario, he goes inside the house, he gets murdered. But we've already talked about how she took off. She was there for a short time, then she left with that suv. Did they posit that her taillight was broken later, when she drove back in the morning and found the body?
- [116:20]
Peter Tragos
So this tail light. There was so much litigation about this taillight. First, the defense says there was a video that shows she backed up very slowly into John o' Keefe's car at John o' Keefe's house. And that's how she cracked her taillight. And there was just a little crack in it, not when she hit John o'. Keefe. The prosecution says no, it was totally damaged, destroyed. And they had in 46 different pieces. But what made the taillight so interesting is it was towed to the sally port, where law enforcement is. And when they tried to show when the. The SUV was dropped off, they showed an inverted video, a flipped video. And they were like, hey, nobody even went near this tail light. But then when you realize it's a flipped video, which they did in the middle of trial, then you realize there are people that walk by that taillight. And when you look closer at the entire time it was in the sally port, there are blips and cuts in and out and huge chunks of time missing where you don't see what they. What's going on with that Lexus. And the defense said, well, where are those chunks? And the commonwealth says, well, you know, it's motion activated, so it might not be there. And then when they secured the crime scene the first day, they found a couple pieces of taillight in the yard right where John o' Keefe's body was found. But days and weeks and months went by, and they continued to find tail light piece after tail light piece after tail light piece in this front yard that they didn't find the first time they went. The second time they went, they went. The third time they went, they just happened to be driving by, and they'd find another piece of tail light, very sketchy, unlike just about every investigation you've probably ever seen.
- [117:49]
Megyn Kelly
So what does that imply?
- [117:50]
Peter Tragos
So they're implying that they would go back to the yard, put the pieces in the yard after they busted it at the sally port, and they would Find it every day. More and more pieces of taillight that they didn't find the first day, the first week. And they just kept planning pieces of tail light and going and getting it to make sure there are texts message that said we're going to pin it on the girl and we're going to make sure that nobody in the house catches any crap. We're going to make sure he's a Boston cop so we're not even going to look into him. So there were all kinds of text messages that the defense made look like they were trying to protect the people in the house and make sure Karen Reed caught charges for this.
- [118:24]
Megyn Kelly
Oh, well, that sounds really bad. I actually hadn't realized that there were explicit text messages saying we're going to pin it on the girl. That's from cops.
- [118:30]
Peter Tragos
That's from the people. People inside the house. From people inside the house. Inside 34 Fairview. Some of them are cops or related to cops. And they said they would make comments like she did such a good job explaining this. Or make sure they're getting all their testimony straight to say, make sure we all say the guy never came in the house. You know, they were making sure they were all staying consistent there. They weren't necessarily being forthcoming with who was actually in the house that night. It was just what happened. I don't think we'll ever know. Because the investigation was so bad and the lead investigator ended up getting terminated because he was found to have shown bias in this case. Sending some of the most disgusting text messages you would ever think about a defendant that you are doing an investigation on. Supposed to be protecting and serving and being an unbiased party. Just doing your investigation and going where the evidence leads you. I mean these text messages were so horrible. He had supervisors thumbs up in those text messages. It was just a good old boys club that looked really, really horrible, I think to this.
- [119:30]
Megyn Kelly
How bad were they? The ones I heard about were he was saying like I'm looking for nudes now on her phone. That was about as racy as I heard. But I was listening to Dateline. They, they don't tend to go to the fully R rated place.
- [119:42]
Peter Tragos
Yeah, I mean they were talking about there are certain things that, you know, we would probably both condemn but that were not necessarily as bad as some of the biased ones. Where is she hot? Yeah, she's of kind. Kind of hot, but no ass. She has, you know, this Boston accent or whatever. They were objectifying her, which is one thing. Doesn't necessarily mean they're Going to pin some crime on her. But then they started to say that we're going to make sure the owner of the house doesn't catch any shit. He's a Boston cop. That's. That's a quote from the text messages. And they would talk about how she had a balloon knot because she had some, you know, surgery or issues. Gastro. No, internal issues. They would talk about how she had leaky poo. They would talk about how she, you know, some of the text messages with the person that she was having the affair with were back and forth and racy and talking about John and how we need to hide this from John. And then that person went to the police station that night at 2am and said he was moving cars around, but was instead moving bags back and forth between. Between different cars, going inside the police station with his hood up and just sketchy thing on top of sketchy thing from all these law enforcement officers involved.
- [120:52]
Megyn Kelly
Wow. So listening to you, Peter, I feel like you. You may believe that Karen Reed is actually innocent. Factually innocent. Not just found not guilty, which she was, but may in fact truly not have done this.
- [121:05]
Peter Tragos
You know, it's really hard for me to say, like, beyond a reasonable doubt. I don't think either side. Side would ever be able to prove this. And because of that, and because the investigation was so horrible, and I just don't feel like I can trust anything the cops say or did in this case. You'd never get a conviction. This is a case I would never want to try. I prosecuted cases. I would never prosecute this case. This is just not one you can. I would have felt ethically comfortable with putting in front of a jury on the civil side. Will they be able to get enough to prove to a jury by the greater weight of the evidence, 51%, I think it's possible. But it's just so hard to know what happened inside that house of 34 Fairview. So while I, if I had to choose is she factually innocent or is she factually guilty, I would choose that she's factually innocent. I'm just not overly confident of that. I don't think I would be able to say that beyond a reasonable doubt because I really don't think anybody's ever going to be able to prove what happened that night.
- [122:00]
Megyn Kelly
Okay, let's talk about the civil suit. So she was found not guilty. First there was a hung jury. Then I guess we'll play it. Because there was an extraordinary moment on June 18, 2025, when she was found not Guilty. And you could hear the crowd cheering outside. She had quite a groundswell of support that had begun in the beginning of the first trial. Here's that moment in South 53.
- [122:21]
Terry Turchi
003, what say is the defendant at
- [122:23]
Tom Colbert
the bar leaving the scene after accident resulting in deaths? Defendant not kill.
- [122:28]
Terry Turchi
Guilty or guilty. So say you, Mr. Foreman.
- [122:31]
Tom Colbert
So say you all. Juris harking your verdict as the court
- [122:34]
Terry Turchi
records that you, upon your oath, say
- [122:36]
Tom Colbert
the defendant on 001 is not guilty.
- [122:39]
Terry Turchi
On 002 is guilty of operating the influence of liquor, and 003, not guilty. Thank you.
- [122:47]
Megyn Kelly
All right, jurors, everybody please be seated. Jurors, we thank you for your service and the crowd support for her. Peter would be relevant because the prosecution witnesses and the family of the victim really objected and felt this colored their right to a fair trial.
- [123:11]
Peter Tragos
Yeah, it's brutal to think about the victim's family in this, the o' Keeffe's and all of this, regardless of what happened and who did what. Inside 34 Fairviewer Law Enforcement, they lost John O'. Keefe. And that family has gone through, I don't know if, you know, any of the backstory of that family. They have gone through more loss than most people would in their entire lives. And, you know, to continue to feel that way and not get justice. They clearly believe Karen Reed is guilty. They clearly believe the witnesses in inside 34 Fairview. They've all gotten a lot closer as this litigation has continued. So I feel horribly for them. But I think that the fault lies with law enforcement. The fault lies with the prosecutors in how this case was prepared, how this case was investigated, how this case was litigated. Some of the other text messages with the cops were basically guaranteeing that Karen Reid is guilty the next morning before an investigation had even taken place. And then, you know, you have just that confirmation bias where you want you. You want to be correct and you're going to do everything you can to make sure you're correct. That's what it felt like more to me than maybe a big conspiracy to cover it up and protect it, people inside the house. But I mean, we've seen cases where law enforcement gets locked in on somebody and they're going to make sure that's the right person and they start, you know, getting to know the victims. And it's so sad. And you want to bring justice and you think you're crossing a line for the right reason. And it just blew up in their face. In this case.
- [124:33]
Megyn Kelly
That item that I asked you about before, so when she went back and she was looking for John's body or John and then stumbled upon his body, this is around 6:00am and there, there was her friend, last name McCabe and that person googled hose, meaning how she, she used an S instead of a W in typing how long to die in cold. And that to me seems like it should have been known very clearly what time she googled that. Because if she got googled that before she knew like her, like basically they were saying, well I only did that her defense to Karen saying that the people inside the house had killed him. And look, here's evidence. You knew he was dead, you googled that before I even came back. But her, her defense was I didn't google that when I was alone inside the house before you came back. I googled that with you once we realized that you had hit him and he was in the snow and we were trying to figure out whether he was dead or alive. Right. Is that basically how this McCabe defended that? But like why isn't that just totally knowable what time she googled that? That the whole case should rise or fall around that Google?
- [125:56]
Peter Tragos
Yeah. The way you explained it is exactly how kind of the arguments went on both sides. Was it at 2 o' clock in the morning or 6 o' clock in the morning? Because that makes all the difference in the world because nobody knew he was dead at 2 o' clock in the morning. So how are you possibly searching that? Unless you're the person that put him out in the cold and you're wondering how long it would take. And yeah, it was again unlike any other case I've seen. Celebrate said one time and actually everybody agreed at one point that it showed that it was at 2:27 or something in the morning. And then they got Celebrate involved. Celebrates like well that's not actually correct. That's when the tab was open.
- [126:28]
Megyn Kelly
But Sell. Celebrate.
- [126:29]
Peter Tragos
Sorry, what?
- [126:31]
Megyn Kelly
Sell.
- [126:31]
Peter Tragos
So Celebrate is like the program that they download the phone and it tells you here's all the Google searches, here's the time each Google search was made and that report said 2:27am and then there's another different program called Axiom that does basically the same thing that said 2:27am as well. But then Celebrate had. Well maybe it was at 6:04 is. It is 227 the time she opened the tab and she was searching some sports team Hawkemak sports. And when she was in bed at night, going to bed at 2 o' clock in the morning and that tab was left open. And then when she searched at 6am it was showing the time she originally opened the tab. So there were competing experts saying the search was at 6 o', clock, the search was at 2 o'.
- [127:12]
Tom Colbert
Clock.
- [127:12]
Peter Tragos
And once again, like so many other facts in this case, it felt impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, which once again should be held against the prosecutor and not the defendant.
- [127:24]
Megyn Kelly
That's so frustrating. As soon as I heard that piece of it that somebody was googling how long to. To die in cold and it happened at 2 in the morning before they found the body, I was like, oh, the people inside the house definitely did it. Karen Reid did not do this. That's. That's as good as evidence as you're ever going to get. And then I read that thing you just said about how they were like, well, it might have been the time to 2am I might have been the time she opened the Internet for a search that came many hours later. And as somebody who always has tons of tabs open on my phone, I can understand that happening very easily that you just use a tab that's already open to search something many hours later. So unfortunately that's not as clear as we would like.
- [128:01]
Peter Tragos
Yeah, absolutely. And it's like you, I've handled trials that have Celebrate reports. I'm sure you've seen other trials with Celebrate reports. I've never seen them attacked like this as just a report that they put out as a time that seems, seems very simple is just absolutely, completely wrong. And this is something I'm going to keep an eye out now is this, are more defense attorneys going to attack this? And how often does Axiom and Cellebrite give completely different reports like they did in this case? Because Axiom, if you run a report right now on her phone, still says the search was at 2:27am wow.
- [128:32]
Megyn Kelly
The other question about we spent some time in the taillight. There was a question about whether this Lexus, it was an suv, right.
- [128:38]
Peter Tragos
It was like the.
- [128:39]
Megyn Kelly
I think it's okay. Whether this, well, anyway, whether this Lexus SUV, even at whatever it was, 24 miles an hour, let's say whether it would. Whether the taillight would break upon hitting a man and that, that this was. They couldn't replicate this. The defense as they tried over and over and over to recreate the scene of this alleged incident that the prosecution said happened here to take his life. That makes some sense to me too. I don't know know like that a man made of flesh and bone might not be enough force to. To Take out the tail light on an SUV backing up into him. What was. What was the back and forth around that?
- [129:18]
Peter Tragos
Yeah. And you know, Megan, it's impossible to really fully dig into each one of these individual aspects in just an hour or six hours. But if I showed you his body, so. So I'm a personal injury lawyer now. I handle a lot of truck accidents, car accident cases, pedestrian accident case. So a person that gets hit by a car, and we all kind of know what that looks like, especially if somebody gets hit at 24 miles an hour. I have had clients die at 24 miles an hour getting hit by a car. But do you know what they look like? They have broken bones, they've got internal bleeding, they've got serious head injuries, they've got injuries below the waist. John o' Keefe had none of that. No broken bones, no bruising anywhere on his body. The back of his head hitting the ground, basically, or hitting a ledge was the cause of his death. And one of the fatal flaws of the prosecutor's case, the second time around is their expert showed an example of another pedestrian getting hit by a car and they passed away. And they're saying, see, look, this can happen. The problem is the report on that person had broken bones, internal damage, exactly what you would expect for somebody that got hit by a car. And the ME who was not hired by either side, could not determine that he died as a result of a car accident or that it was a homicide. It was undetermined. And she did not see evidence that this was a result of a car accident. No, experts did.
- [130:38]
Terry Turchi
Really?
- [130:40]
Megyn Kelly
Gosh, that's so tricky. We did pull some sound from a couple of the jurors after the not guilty verdict. It's always fascinating to listen to them. If they'll talk. In this one, you're going to hear first. It's the jury foreman, Charlie Deloach. Take a listen to stop.55.
- [130:56]
Terry Turchi
It was intense because before I got to the last not guilty, the crowd erupted. It was already cheering like it was
- [131:06]
Tom Colbert
a basketball stadium outside.
- [131:08]
Terry Turchi
I didn't take one note. I didn't have to. After the first witness, it was just
- [131:12]
Tom Colbert
like, oh, okay, I see where this is going.
- [131:16]
Terry Turchi
During the trial, I just was waiting
- [131:18]
Tom Colbert
and just looking for that aha moment.
- [131:21]
Terry Turchi
And there was none to.
- [131:25]
Tom Colbert
To make her guilty at all. It was just always like, oh, that wouldn't have sucked.
- [131:31]
Terry Turchi
I was open minded.
- [131:32]
Tom Colbert
I was willing to listen to both
- [131:34]
Terry Turchi
sides if she hit him or if there is corruption, and then the corruption
- [131:41]
Tom Colbert
outweighs her getting hit. Her Hitting him with the car.
- [131:45]
Terry Turchi
The case was. It was leaning one way, and it kept on leaning one way up until the very end.
- [131:53]
Megyn Kelly
One more to play for you. This is juror number four speaking up.
- [131:59]
Tom Colbert
Jason. The jury found Karen Reid not guilty on murder and manslaughter. Was it because they had reasons, reasonable doubt, or because they thought she was innocent?
- [132:15]
Terry Turchi
So I think for the jurors, there's a mix of. Some people thinks that she was definitely innocent, and the other people, there was a lot of reasonable doubt, at least to where you can't. We didn't want to convict her. I can only speak for myself. I think that she was innocent. It's hard to tell exactly what people think. Deep down. There was a lot of things. Things thrown at us. Do I think it was a corrupt police investigation? I don't know. There's no way for me to know. I can't. I wasn't there. There was just. There was holes in the case that left for reasonable doubt. I think they could have checked some boxes or. Or, you know, done some things differently. But do I know that they were corrupt? Absolutely not. I don't know that there was any corruption going on. But do I know that there wasn't enough proof or evidence secured by the police to convict Karen Reid? Absolutely not.
- [133:14]
Megyn Kelly
There was.
- [133:15]
Terry Turchi
No, there was not.
- [133:18]
Megyn Kelly
Very interesting, Peter, that he's saying that we were between actual innocence and just not guilty, but did not speak of any holdouts saying, no, I think she did it.
- [133:27]
Terry Turchi
Yeah.
- [133:27]
Peter Tragos
And I think that really goes. Goes to the investigation and the way that this case was presented. There was holes everywhere. No matter where you want to look, if you want to compare the experts, if you want to compare the medicine, if you want to compare the car data, if you want to compare the credibility of witnesses, because that was a really big thing, if you noticed. Juror number one, the four person said, after the first witness, I was like, oh, wow. And he still kept an open mind. But so much of these trials is the jury looking at each individual witness and judging, judging their credibility. Are they telling the truth? Are they being honest? Do they have something to gain or lose by this testimony? Does it make sense in the context of the rest of the testimony? And I just think that their credibility was hurt throughout the trial by the cross examination and the other evidence presented by the defense.
- [134:11]
Megyn Kelly
Do we know who the first witness was? It would have been for the prosecution, since they go first. And my understanding is when they. When they went back for the second trial, after the first jury was hung, they. They Eliminated some of their more problematic cops, like the guy who was like, let's see the nudes. And referring to Karen Reid in those disgusting terms you mentioned, he did not get called by the prosecution second time. So they learned. So I'd imagine they would have. You know, you always want to start with your best foot forward, your best witness.
- [134:38]
Peter Tragos
Yeah, I think they started with an EMS person who I actually like. I thought he was a good witness. I thought he was trying his best. He made a mistake, I believe. Believe it's him. That said John o' Keefe had, like a really big jacket on, and he didn't. He just had like a short sleeve or a long sleeve thin shirt that you probably wouldn't be wearing out in the snow. But I don't know, Boston guys are probably tougher than me in the snow. But I think that's what the defense was trying. I was in Colorado, almost died from the snow there. But so, you know, so they were trying to say, you know, you didn't even remember those details. So. And they were trying to say that that shirt would be more likely something that he had on inside versus outside, and they dragged him outside and threw it. So there were all these little details, but I didn't think the first witness was that bad, honestly. And the way that the prosecution pared down the case from trial one to trial two was amazing. They got a special prosecutor who's a big criminal defense lawyer there that they brought in specifically just to hire this case. Nobody from within their office. Much better at his presentation. But I think he missed the boat a lot with the way he presented the case. And one thing he did did was he did not call Proctor, who was. Who you were referencing before, who was the lead investigator in the case. They tried to pretend like he didn't exist. And you can imagine the defense did not like that. And they did not let that go quietly. And they highlighted his name and said his name and besmirched his name as much as they possibly could. And they didn't call him either. So he was kind of like the boogeyman. Why wouldn't they call the lead investigator? You really want to side with them? You can really trust this investigation. They don't even trust their own guy. It was not a good look.
- [136:05]
Megyn Kelly
That's not the way to do it. No one would think you'd call him. You'd just front it all. You'd have him do a full mea culpa. I was a douchebag. I've been fired. So humiliated. My Wife, you know, she's forgiven me, but I just was acting like an ass. But it doesn't mean I was corrupt. I certainly wouldn't corrupt a murder investigation. But like, to not call him. I mean, hindsight's 20 20, obviously, I'm sitting here in this comfort, my studio, not like the prosecutor who actually had to get this done. Okay, so now let's talk about, about the civil suits, because this is pretty extraordinary. It's not extraordinary to me that John o' Keefe's family is now filing a wrongful death lawsuit against Karen Reed. That happens, you know, not infrequently. It's like what Ron Goldman did to O.J. after he was acquitted. You do have to testify as the defendant in this posture once you've already been acquitted and you get sued in civilly. So, like, he is going to have to. She is going to have to testify in this case. But what's extraordinary is there's. There's lawsuits going the other way against her. By whom? Exactly.
- [137:13]
Peter Tragos
So there are lawsuits against her and the bars by the o' Keefe family for wrongful death. Like you said, that's normal. Different burden. Civil court versus criminal. You can be found.
- [137:23]
Megyn Kelly
Yeah, sorry, I meant to say the opposite. Lawsuit by her. Her. Against us.
- [137:26]
Peter Tragos
Yes. So she has also filed a lawsuit against the aforementioned Michael Proctor, who is the lead investigator on the case. Yuri Buchanak, who is another trooper, who was Proctor's supervisor. And then everybody's supervisor, Brian Tully, another law enforcement officer. And then the five people in the house that she basically thinks are responsible for John O' Keefe's death. Brian Albert, Nicole Albert, Jennifer McCabe, Matthew McCabe, and Brian Higgins. Higgins is who she had the affair with. The Albert are who owned the house, McCabe is who searched. How's long to die in the cold. So those are the people that she's suing for, basically conspiring to pin this on her, violating her rights, civil conspiracy, trying to pin it on her and literally ruining her life.
- [138:08]
Megyn Kelly
That's crazy. You never see that. Never. Because let's face it, nine times out of ten, more than that, the defendant actually is guilty, maybe got off and technicality like OJ or jury nullification in OJ's case. And the last thing they want to do is go back into court with anybody. You know, I was like, they know. They kind of got away with it. It's like, okay, I'm out of here. But she is not in that posture. She's like, let's go. Now. She also appears to need money. Because I'll tell you, we invited her to come in this show and she wanted tens of thousands of dollars. And we told her, goodbye, madam, we're news people. We don't pay for news. Which does make me question how she wound up talking to Dateline and others, because NBC is also not supposed to pay for news. In any event, she clearly is hard up for cash. So maybe it's just a money grab. I don't know. What do you make of it?
- [139:01]
Peter Tragos
There was a lot there. There was a lot there. First, I disagree with some of your percentages, but we don't need to get into that. How many of them are actually not guilty? But I do agree with you that most of the time, once it's over, they want it to be done and they don't want to keep rehashing this. Also, millions, millions of dollars in attorneys fees and costs. She sold her house. She's lost everything. She was unhirable for all of these years. So I'm sure she is in need of money and I think she's entitled to get whatever money she deserves in the civil process. It doesn't bother me one bit. I don't know her personally. I've never spoken to her. So, you know, this is nothing like I know what kind of person she is or anything like that. But. But if this is true, what she's alleging, then she does deserve to be compensated for it, in my opinion. And I agree with you, that she is standing on business basically at this point, saying, I have the truth because she's been threatened and is going to be sued if it hasn't happened already, for defamation, saying that she's defaming all of these people, lying about them, creating this false narrative, which was one of the allegations in the o' Keefe complaint, in the wrongful death complaint, they also sued her for intentional infliction of emotional distress, saying she created this false narrative and pushed it out there in the media and that they were injured because of that and she caused them damages. So truth is an ultimate defense to defamation, and that's what she's standing on, that she has the truth, she can prove it. You know, she's got some gumption. She's not afraid. Her lawyers are not afraid. They're sticking with her and pushing forward on this case. And sometimes it's a money grab either way. Right. Like when you have a criminal case that you lost as a victim, I know you're not technically a party, but. And you still go forward on a civil litigation, you can still get a settlement. Often that's what would happen. You wouldn't even go to trial. And from her perspective too, if she just needed money and she's going to file this lawsuit and just give. Get some money out of it, fine. It doesn't seem like that's what it is. And if this ends in a settlement, I'm going to assume it was a huge amount of money.
- [140:55]
Megyn Kelly
Hmm. So have, have those parties that she's now suing Cross filed against her for defamation yet?
- [141:02]
Terry Turchi
Because.
- [141:03]
Megyn Kelly
So. Right, because right now I thought the only lawsuit she was actively facing was John Okeefe's family suing her for wrongful death. But have those other parties that she's now messing with Cross filed against her for defamation yet they have come out
- [141:15]
Peter Tragos
and said publicly that they are going to file defamation cases. But the way it works in these civil courts is she files a complaint, they file their motions to dismiss first, and then if they can't dis dismiss her lawsuit, then they would file their answer and their counterclaims. So that's coming in due time. I would expect that it is going to come, though.
- [141:33]
Megyn Kelly
It's so interesting because the burden of proof is so much lower in civil court, as you point out, 51% more likely than not. And now it's really on. You know, in a way, we heard from the, the jurors, it was kind of easy for them because they were like, my God, no. They haven't come anywhere near this very high standard of behind beyond a reasonable doubt. But the prosecution may have come near 51% more likely, 49% less likely that she did it or the other way could go the other way. I don't know. Like, how do you see this going?
- [142:05]
Peter Tragos
What's really interesting is, you know, you mentioned what you would do if you were a proctor. You put them on the stand, you just eat it. Right? They did that the first trial. They also had a much more boring prosecutor, but just kind of a normal prosecutor who put every. Everybody up there and was like, tell us what happened. They repeated the same facts a million times. And while reports from that jury room where they were all not guilty on second degree murder, there was a split and the majority thought that she was guilty of manslaughter or at least taking his life in some sort of way with the car in that first round of trial. But it ended up being a split verdict and a hung jury and everybody changed their way. And I think the defense was much more successful. Round two, I think they were, would have won regardless Round two, because they didn't try to prove the conspiracy within that criminal trial, which can be very difficult. It can kind of burden shift and confuse the jury. But just like you're saying, there were some jurors that thought that she did hit him with her car throughout the first trial. So there's obviously the possibility that that could be true, proven in a civil court. But you would be amazed and appalled at the discovery that was not turned over in the first trial, that was turned over before the second trial at the discovery they're going to be able to get in this civil litigation that they did not get their hands on in the criminal case. I think there are going to be so many added factors and facts during this civil process that I'm not sure we know exactly what it's going to look like yet.
- [143:33]
Megyn Kelly
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Terry Turchi
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Tom Colbert
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Terry Turchi
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Tom Colbert
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Terry Turchi
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Megyn Kelly
Charmin Ultra soft smooth hair has the same softness you love now with wavy edges that tear better than the leading one fly brand. Enjoy the go with Charman. We mentioned a couple of these witnesses who were inside that house. The alberts and the McCabes. They spoke out after the not guilty verdict in June. Let's take a listen to what they sounded like then. Stop.
- [144:39]
Terry Turchi
56 people turn this thing into a tailgate party. It looked like some days.
- [144:44]
Tom Colbert
Board games, cornhole cookouts. This is a guy that was murdered and it's atrocious for that family.
- [144:51]
Peter Tragos
What they've done is they dehumanized us to the sense where we're not real people. We're almost like caricatures. We're just.
- [145:00]
Terry Turchi
We're pawns.
- [145:01]
Peter Tragos
Have each of you been called murderers? Like actual murders?
- [145:04]
Tom Colbert
Yeah, on a daily basis.
- [145:06]
Terry Turchi
Anybody who's touched this case has been called a murderer at some point or.
- [145:09]
Megyn Kelly
And anyone who's friends with us Support cop killers. They. The name Turtle Boy comes up a lot when you talk about what was happening outside, outside the courthouse and the generation of a groundswell of opposition to the people you just saw on camera there, the people who are inside the house, including cops and their wives and so on. Who's Turtle Boy?
- [145:35]
Peter Tragos
So first, just to comment on what they're saying, I think it's horrible that people's lives get ruined and people get accused of things like this with very little evidence and, you know, go after their kids and their livelihoods and things like that. I also think that there are some fair questions, criticisms. Like the Alberts, who lived in the house, never came outside the entire morning when there were all these EMS people and witnesses and everything outside, and their friend is dead on their front lawn. They never come outside to try to help. They both have emergency or. I know he has emergency training. Was former law enforcement. That stuff is really strange to me and hard for me to get over. And the way they spoke about John o', Keefe, somebody that was supposed to be their friend. It is. There's just so much strange stuff going on. Turtle Boy is a journalist who looked into this case, found witnesses nobody knew about, like a tow truck plow driver that potentially had evidence that could help Karen Reed, that held everybody's feet to the fire that was very loud with a megaphone about it, that had his specific, crass way of doing things. And, you know, he's almost like a caricature where he says the most hyperbolic thing he possibly can. He calls everybody every name in the book. He uses language that, you know, would make sense. Sailors probably turn red. And he does it a certain way and a lot of people don't like it. And he has caught some witness intimidation charges because the statute is really kind of weird there in Massachusetts with that. But he has uncovered so much evidence that people did not know about, and people know about Karen Reed's case and exponentially more because of Turtle Boy. So it's kind of like a little love him or hate him, he is who he is type of scenario for him.
- [147:12]
Megyn Kelly
What you're saying is, God forbid I ever get accused of a crime. I want Turtle Boy on my side.
- [147:18]
Peter Tragos
I would say he's a pretty good ally to have until he's not.
- [147:22]
Megyn Kelly
Okay. Okay. And he was at both trials?
- [147:24]
Peter Tragos
Yeah. I think he's been at everything, you know, and his whole case, people are now following as well his criminal charges that are going on. I've actually gotten to know his. His lawyer one of his lawyers a little bit. Mark Better, who's an amazing lawyer, awesome guy. I've talked about this Karen Reed case a lot with him, so I know he's got great representation. And they've already won. A couple of the criminal cases have been dropped because the DA and the law enforcement there just can't get out of their own way. They have all these prosecutors that. That are conflicted off cases. Nobody could end up prosecuting one of Turtle Boy's cases, so they just had to drop it. So it's a whole other separate saga himself.
- [147:57]
Megyn Kelly
So if you're teaching this class in a law school, Peter, what would you say this case is about
- [148:05]
Peter Tragos
how not to investigate and prosecute a case? I think I could do a lot of sessions on the appropriate way. What ethics look like. Even if you think somebody is guilty, if you can't put the lead investigator on and you can't put half your evidence on because you don't trust it yourself, maybe you shouldn't be prosecuting this case and not staking your career and risking it all on one case and realizing mistakes will be made in the life and we just have to let the chips fall where they may. As a criminal defense attorney, you learn to fight, to dig, even if the judge sometimes can be very difficult, even when it seems like everything is stacked against you. It's also a lesson in pr, like the way the defense attorneys have done their interviews and set up Karen Reed to do interviews in ways that I disagree with. I would never have had Karen Reed do any interviews. They have. They said they welcomed them being played at trial so he could be. Some lessons on that. Some great lessons on cross examination, Some great lessons on civil litigation, how to try to get federal documents where you request them from the federal government and then try to show them as unbiased third party. Bringing experts into the case, investigating an investigation. So many interesting nuances to this case that law students could learn from. But you don't always want to learn from the exception, right?
- [149:17]
Megyn Kelly
Well, you know, what you said about the exception, the star witness reminded me of something. When I was a young lawyer, I tried a civil case in upstate New York, and we were so clearly in the right on this civil case. It was just so obvious that our guy was telling the truth and the other party wasn't. Because we knew. We knew our star witness very, very well, and we knew his entire employment history and all this stuff. But the judge, the judge has always tried to push a settlement in a civil case and in a criminal case, too. They try to push you to take a plea if you're at all open minded so they don't have to try it to verdict. It's much better resolution where it's agreed to. And he was looking at the other side, pointing out like all the evidence that they were in the wrong. And then I said, what's he going to say when he looks at us? Because we're, we're in the catbird seat here. And he said, how do you like your lead witness? And the judge was exactly right. Because even though the facts were totally on our side, our star witness was not likable. And the judge, judge knew it. And we stuck by him. Of course we were like, oh, he's good, he's fine. He wasn't. The jury didn't like him and they found against us. We got it reversed on appeal, but he wasn't wrong. Like having a bad chief witness can make or break your case. And in this case, the prosecution had it sounds like a terrible chief witness. Whether it was just juvenile denial talk on those texts or not, the reason he got fired is because he cost them this investigation.
- [150:46]
Peter Tragos
Yeah. And it wasn't just the text message. There's just so much more than that. But you know, the number one thing is probably the roles of each job of a lawyer. Because you just described the civil situation and as a criminal defense lawyer, the way you want to look at it and what your duty is and how you try a case, how you handle a case. All of those roles are incredibly different. Different than a prosecutor who is only there to find truth and justice. And sometimes that's making hard decisions and letting people you think might be guilty go and not prosecuting those cases because you have all the leverage, all the power to ruin people's lives. There's very little repercussion when you lose. And that's a very big responsibility and power that you have as a prosecutor that makes that job very different than a criminal defense lawyer or any type of civil lawyer. And that takes me, was where this case could have been handled more appropriately.
- [151:36]
Megyn Kelly
It's crazy to me that there was no ring camera on anybody's door. You know, like everything's on cam these days.
- [151:43]
Peter Tragos
Yeah. I mean, there was some talk that there was a ring camera and then there wasn't. And maybe somebody accessed the ring camera and maybe they didn't and somebody across the street had a ring camera.
- [151:51]
Megyn Kelly
Or even on your car, doesn't your car have one of those things like, there's a camera on my car now that Shows me what's happening behind you.
- [151:56]
Peter Tragos
Yeah, absolutely. There's, there's cameras, cameras all over the place. But somehow during that period of time, there was no camera on any house in that neighborhood that could have caught it. Or even back at John o' Keefe's house, there was some ring, ring, camera, but not that could show anything that we needed to show to prove the accident.
- [152:15]
Megyn Kelly
This case is a mystery. I'd love to know the truth. You know, I was like, usually I hear these stories and I'm like, I have a pretty good idea what happened. This one I remain uncertain, really don't know. And I, I mean, I don't think I haven't been persuaded by anything I've heard that she intentionally killed him. I am open minded to the theory that in her anger, she backed up too quickly and ran him over and either didn't realize it or did and didn't care. But yeah, I haven't heard anything that would lead me to believe she, she's an intentional murderer. Would just take out her, her anger by killing some.
- [152:47]
Peter Tragos
That was just a mistake. For them to even go for that was such a mistake. They were never going to be able to prove anything like that. And I'll tell you the number one thing, and again, it's probably based on my experience, experience what I do so much of seeing injuries in these pedestrian accidents. It is just so far from anything I think is remotely, scientifically or physically possible for that Lexus to just break on the tail light, not have any other dents and damages on it. And then the injuries that corresponded to John o' Keefe and we didn't even get into the bite marks versus scratch marks or any of that.
- [153:15]
Megyn Kelly
But the injuries, just an animal may
- [153:17]
Peter Tragos
have attacked him, they just don't line up to me, the injuries for it to be a car accident the way that the prosecution described, and that's so hard for me to get over.
- [153:26]
Megyn Kelly
Wow. All right, thank you so much. Peter Dragos. So good to see you again. This has been the most clear, easy to understand explanation of a very complex case I think I've ever heard. It makes me miss you all the more. Thanks for being back with us.
- [153:40]
Peter Tragos
Thanks for having me.
- [153:43]
Tom Colbert
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Megyn Kelly
Sniffle season happens. And when it does, your skin deserves comfort. That's why Kleenex lotion tissues are made with moisturizing Ingredients and offer 3 in 1 skin loving benefits, helping protect, soothe and moisturize your skin. So whether you're at home, on the go or just living life, keep Kleenex lotion close. For a little extra care that makes a big difference. For whatever happens next, grab Kleenex. The Zodiac was a serial killer who terrorized the Bay Area. After in California in the late 1960s, he committed a series of murders across California. In acts of pure violence and evil, he taunted the press and the authorities, calling by payphone on more than one occasion to take responsibility for the murders. He sent letters to major newspapers detailing the killings and mocking the police. Some of those letters included ciphers which he demanded be printed on the front pages of the papers. In a chilling 1969 letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, the killer stated, school children make nice targets. Think about that. Sick. Sick. Causing increased safety concerns across the region. This went on for years as he claimed more and more victims. Now there are five confirmed Zodiac killings, but the real number is believed to be much higher. And after years of of investigating our case here remains technically unsolved. But our guest today, Tom Colbert, is an investigative journalist and author and founder of a group called the Case breakers that deals in cold cases. And his team of highly trained experts has spent years investigating the Zodiac. They think they know who it is. Before we get to Tom, I want to tell you that you're going to hear hear during this show who Tom and his team believe the Zodiac Killer was. We're going to discuss his theory at length, and he is convincing. But I also want to point out to you that we do not know who the Zodiac Killer was. And there are so many theories on this, I could have put on a different expert with a different theory today. In fact, on my NBC Show Back in February 2018, I had two guests on who were convinced they knew who the Zodiac Killer was. Listen to that. So there's a question about how extensive his murder spree was. The Zodiac killings. The truth is, it may be up to 20 plus 30 plus people who were killed by the Zodiac Killer.
- [156:44]
Tom Colbert
Well, he claimed 34. In a letter in 1974, he.
- [156:48]
Megyn Kelly
The Zodiac Killer, yes, whoever that may be.
- [156:50]
Tom Colbert
Right from the time he started killing in 1945 until the time he got caught in 2009, it was unbelievable how
- [156:58]
Terry Turchi
many he killed just in the eight
- [156:59]
Tom Colbert
months, month, period he was with Wayne's grandma. He killed eight. And two of them in my hometown on a lover's lane. And so that was.
- [157:08]
Megyn Kelly
Well, you're. You're conflating Ed Edwards plus the Zodiac Killer, and I know you believe Ed Edwards was the Zodiac Killer, right?
- [157:15]
Tom Colbert
Yes.
- [157:15]
Megyn Kelly
What is your best evidence that Ed Edwards was the Zodiac killer?
- [157:19]
Tom Colbert
There were two cryptograms sent in by the Zodiac killer. One in 60, what is that? One in 70? They were like puzzles. And he basically said, if you solve these puzzles, you'll have my name. And in 2010, when we confronted Edwards about being a Zodiac killer, after we solved the 13 character cipher, Edward Edwards name is 13 characters. And what he had done is taken the letters in his name and reversed, imaged the letters as hieroglyphics. So you could never solve the Zodiac case without knowing the name Edward Edwards. And. And once we did, we confronted him. He sent us a letter saying, it's me. You don't know the whole story. I have a lot to tell you. And that he framed people his whole life.
- [158:02]
Megyn Kelly
Later in the interview with Tom, I ask him about this guy Ed Edwards and that theory. You'll hear what he has to say. And then at the end of today's show, we're going to bring you a sound bite from a longtime cold case investigator who we really know and trust, and he, too, has looked into this Zodiac case and has a word of caution for everyone. So you will make up your own minds, but I think you're going to enjoy the exchange. Now my interview with Tom Colbert. Welcome to the show, Tom.
- [158:32]
Tom Colbert
Thanks so much for the invitation, Megan.
- [158:35]
Megyn Kelly
Of course. All right, so let's go back. As near as I can tell from what I've read, the murders that we know the Zodiac was responsible for took place began in the night the late 1960s, and then went on to, like, the early 1970s. 5. That we. How do. Like, how do we know that those are his?
- [158:58]
Tom Colbert
It was defined by the San Francisco and Vallejo police departments who were in charge of all these murder cases strictly around the San Francisco Bay area. But I will tell you, and I may be jumping the gun, but our team is really believes it's now closer to 10 victims around the country, from San Diego to Lake Tahoe.
- [159:21]
Megyn Kelly
During what time frame?
- [159:24]
Tom Colbert
Time frame starts from 62. A couple killed on the beach, and all the way up to 1970 in Lake Tahoe. And that victim is still missing. We have a very good idea where she is.
- [159:39]
Megyn Kelly
What do you mean?
- [159:41]
Tom Colbert
She is the one. Only one never found. And through, as you mentioned, the letters and the codes, we have an incredible source that brought this case to us a couple years ago. And he deciphered the codes according to our team. And that led us to a burial spot. And that's tba.
- [160:07]
Megyn Kelly
Okay, you're working on something that you want to keep confidential?
- [160:10]
Tom Colbert
Well, we. We not only are planning to go there, we have several other places to go. We know also where we believe he buried his murder weapons at 6,500ft in the high Sierra. That will be another trip.
- [160:28]
Megyn Kelly
So you think you know who it is. And are you prepared to say that Gary Francis Post.
- [160:35]
Tom Colbert
And we have mounds of evidence now after. After two years. And again, it's because of this. 1500 years of skill sets with our 40 member team. These are all volunteers. We've gathered them from around the country in every part of forensics you need, from ballistics to DNA. We have six universities and labs working with us pro bono to solve this. Not for our egos, not for fame and fortune, for. For the 20 siblings of the dead.
- [161:08]
Megyn Kelly
All right, let's get to Gary. In a minute. We'll postpone that for one second because we want to set up the crimes so people can have a feeling for what we're talking about. So you say the earliest one. I think you said 62. I thought that the earliest confirmed one, according to police, was 68. This was the attack on David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen. Is. Is that not correct?
- [161:33]
Tom Colbert
Well, according to our team, and they've not been wrong in 10 years on this quest on cases. They feel there are matching MOs and profiles of murders in other parts of the States. Other parts in the other part of the States have other bullets that match the caliber of the Zodiac in San Francisco Bay.
- [162:02]
Megyn Kelly
Okay, and so the one in 1962 was of whom? That murder that you're talking about earlier,
- [162:07]
Tom Colbert
that was a Navy couple on the beach of San Diego. Walking on the beach. A sniper shot them both. And then he. Up close, yes.
- [162:18]
Megyn Kelly
Okay, that was actually very disturbing. It's like they. People seem to have been minding their own business. This is Johnny Swindle. Swindle and Joyce Swindle, killed by snipers. They walked along a San Diego beach. Okay. And that. That murder was committed with a.22. She died almost instantly, and he died later that night. The police believe the two were victims of a, quote, thrill killer. But that's as much As I guess they would say. So that was 19. That was February 7, 1964. And what other than the fact that the bullets were the same? It was from a.22. As murders we know he committed, the Zodiac, what's the evidence tying him to that crime?
- [163:00]
Tom Colbert
Same caliber, same MO and similar to a Santa Barbara murder in 63. There was also a cabbie killed in 62 in Oceanside Police Department. All of these are the MO of what happened in some San Francisco. Again, we have ballistics experts that are about to compare the ballistics we have from our alleged Zodiac. We collected over 1000 bullets with 24 calibers from neighbors in his high Sierra town. And we have them. There is a new technology that allows us to literally dunk a bullet into a, a liquid and off falls the DNA. And that is something we're going to be doing with these various calibers. And again, particularly 9 millimeter and.22s. He had all sorts of guns after World War II. Collected Polish guns, French guns, and so forth. But the departments we are working with are saying 9 millimeter and.22s are the key caliber S they're looking for. And we're planning to meet with one of the departments with those calibers.
- [164:18]
Megyn Kelly
I mean, it's very common. So it's, it's not, it's not like a rare caliber gun. And of course, just because the same similar gun was used doesn't mean it's the same person. But let's just go back. So the first confirmed killings are date are David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen, December 20, 1968. That we know from authorities were the Zodiac. And the thing that grabs anybody when they're looking at the Zodiac killings is, is how heartless they are. I mean, there's no murder that is kind and loving, but just there's no reason. There's no robbery, there's no beef, there's no, you know, you look for some sort of sense, even though you can't make sense of murder, because I think it makes us feel better, it makes us feel like it won't happen to us. But these felt so random and merciless. Absolutely merciless. So tell us what, what happened with David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen.
- [165:14]
Tom Colbert
Tell me where the city is on that one.
- [165:16]
Megyn Kelly
That was, let's see. And he approached their park station wagon at Lake Herman Road in Benicia, California.
- [165:26]
Tom Colbert
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was an ambush in a lover's lane spot. He went after Lovers lanes couples twice. And nine millimeter and.22s were involved in those Cases.
- [165:44]
Megyn Kelly
And were they ever able to say why? Because this case, like the others, no indication of a robbery, no indication of a sexual assault. It appears that they were. That shots were fired into the vehicle to force them out. Betty Lou exited the front passenger door first, followed by David Faraday. He was 17, she was 16. He shot David once in the head at point blank range. Betty Lou was shot five times in the back as she fled, and she was killed instantly. It was Betty Lou Jensen's first date, age 16. No one understood why. Like, what would you do? And then six, why would you do it? And then six to seven months later, there was another attack on another couple. Dr. Marlene Farren and Mike Mago. He lived, this is in Vallejo. He lived to tell about it. And that was important.
- [166:41]
Tom Colbert
Yes. And there are two men that lived, young men that lived. All the rest died. And multi shots into cars, into people, stabbings. The common thread of this is the why, Megan. It's the why. And being the son of a shrink, I've heard these cases over the years through my father, from DB Cooper all the way up to Zodiac and Hafa and Atlanta. It's something my dad and I talked about when he was alive. And he talked about, you know, the, the psychopath. The psychopath that, that would come into a community and make no sense to anyone. No robbery, no jealousy, no love triangle. That is what we believe. Our suspect fits the profile. And that's why we're so strongly in the belief that we're on the right man.
- [167:42]
Megyn Kelly
So if you look as an investigator, you've got to see what the similarities are. Like, what is his M.O. how do we know it's Zodiac? And this will become relevant when you try to explain, extrapolate to these other cases that you and your team are trying to figure out were whether they were Zodiac cases or not. The attack on Darlene Farren and Mike Magot, July 5, 1969. Darlene was 22, Mike was 19, again, parked at an isolated location in Vallejo. They were talking. A car, possibly a light brown Ford Mustang or a Chevrolet Corvair, pulled into the lot a few feet away. Now, I'm imagining this is six or seven months after the other murder, but it's, it's, as far as we know, the only, the second, like, publicized murder, you know, of this type. So they didn't necessarily know that somebody's running around killing young people who park, you know, and talk or make out or whatever they were doing. A man with a flashlight exited the vehicle, approached the couple, no Other cars in the parking lot, they thought it was a cop, had their ID ready. And just as in the other murder we just discussed, the man began firing at them. Five shots at the man. After five shots, the man walked slowly back to his car. Mike screamed out in pain and the guy returned firing two more shots at each victim. Mike was able to see the Zodiac and as far as I know, he's the only one who ever gave like a detailed description of him. He said he was white, five eight to five nine, in his late 20s to 30s. Again, this would have been 1969. So you know, subtract 30 years from 1969. He's born around, around 1940. Stocky build, round face, brown hair. No conversation. Again, it's so disturbing. There was no ask, there was no attempt to negotiate. There was no. It was just murder for the sake of. Sake of murder, which really is a true psychopath. Somebody once described the difference between a sociopath and a psychopath is neither one has any empathy or feeling for the killing at all, but the psychopath actually enjoys it, looks forward to it.
- [169:56]
Tom Colbert
Not only the psychological aspect of this is interesting to us, but obviously the evidence, and the greatest spot for evidence was Riverside. Riverside Police Department found military style boots, size 10, that matches three of the Zodiac. Other locations, size 10 military boots, all sorts of other things in Riverside. The most intriguing one is a piece of evidence that the FBI, which is did the lab work and Riverside technically owns it for a potential case, are four hairs found in the hand of a college co ed in Riverside and literally took it off his head. This was 1966, way before DNA. But God bless the lab work and the coroners in Riverside county, they kept those in a fridge until DNA. DNA came around. That DNA. The Hares has cleared several local boys in that town, but for some strange reason, the department will not consider people that are not locals the only person in law enforcement. There have been nine police chiefs in Riverside. The first one at the murder scene in with the co ed, what happened there was that.
- [171:37]
Megyn Kelly
Wait, just, can I just, can I just reset because I'm getting a little lost. Riverside is not one that we've talked about yet. But you're saying that they had a boot print, size 10 that matched boot prints found at ones we know the Zodiac did?
- [171:51]
Tom Colbert
That's correct. Same size.
- [171:53]
Megyn Kelly
Okay, so it hasn't. Riverside didn't actually get pinned on the Zodiac. But you're looking at it and you think we should test these hairs because given the boot print and the way it was committed it's worth seeing what the connection is, and if we can get a DNA match, so much the better. But what happened in Riverside? What was the crime?
- [172:09]
Tom Colbert
You should also know, though, that The FBI in 1975 declared the Riverside case as a Zodiac case. For some reason, they pulled it off of that many years ago in about 2000. But that was a Zodiac case on an FBI memoir, and I sent that to you, so that would interest your audience.
- [172:32]
Megyn Kelly
So what happened in Riverside?
- [172:36]
Tom Colbert
This is a very junior college. A victim was at a library. She came out, her VW Bug starter was unconnected. It just happened to be somebody watching her in the library, came out to help her, said, I'll drive you home. And what proceeded was one of the most horrific knife attacks in the case. It was close to 40 stab wounds. As the police chief at the time said she was almost decapitated. This is the Zodiac. Because of footprints, we know that the Zodiac, our suspect was a painter. They found paint spots on the watch that fell off of the attacker. He was also at March air Force base, 15 minutes away for regular medical checkups. So we have about a half dozen pieces of information that absolutely have convinced, convinced our team that she definitely needs to be on the list.
- [173:50]
Megyn Kelly
And when you say he was at an airport, you're talking about Gary Post. He was at an Air Force base nearby.
- [173:54]
Tom Colbert
Okay, yeah, he was at several bases. He left in 63, but he continued with veteran care.
- [174:01]
Megyn Kelly
He could be placed near the spot of this murder. This woman's name was Sherry Jo Bates. October 3, 1966. She was 18. She visited the River City College library. And we know that her car, her Volkswagen Beetle, was disabled because somebody, whoever the killer was, we feel, wrote a letter explaining exactly what they did to her. I'm not going to read it because it's too disturbing, but he said that he disabled her car, that he came upon her, and that they found this Timex watch in a military style heel print on site, about size 8. 8 to 10. Again, 10. And then the watch was traced to a military post. And the shoes could have been sold at as at nearby March Air Force Base. Now, the there, the letter that was sent after this woman's murder was not signed. It was not signed. So Zodiac did wind up, he started to send letters, and that's why we know to call him Zodiac. That's what he called himself. This one wasn't signed Zodiac, but it definitely claims ownership of this murder and says he's talking about how there was only one thing on his mind when he killed her making her pay for all the brush offs that she had given me during the years prior. Now that's interesting to me because that seems like there's a motive behind this one versus the others.
- [175:26]
Tom Colbert
You're absolutely correct. And that is the line I was about to talk to you about. That seems like a red herring line. And the police departments, after the current. The police departments, especially the chief of the murder date said, this is intriguing, but it doesn't mean it's a local guy. But all the other detectives disagreed and there have been eight police chiefs since that say, we're only going to go after local guys. You want to believe that in this day and age, traveling serial killers, they won't even look at that is the line that you just read that convinced us that this was a red herring and could possibly be from the Zodiac. Here is something else you should know. There is one word that's. There are three words that are repeated. I shall twitch and. And squirm. Those are found in Zodiac letters in San Francisco. But here's what's key. Twitch is spelled tw, I, C, H in Riverside. And the letters in San Francisco. Very intriguing.
- [176:38]
Megyn Kelly
Wait. Oh, in all you're saying it's misspelled in all three of those?
- [176:43]
Tom Colbert
Correct.
- [176:44]
Megyn Kelly
That's fascinating because your belief is that the zone Zodiac liked. He wanted credit, sort of, but he also would throw out misdirections. It's like it feels like he wanted to get caught, but he didn't want to get caught.
- [177:01]
Tom Colbert
The letter was mailed from the town too, to make it, in our view, extra clear that he was a local boy. So you have them describing. She blew me off paraphrasing and mailing it from town. What a great way to get them off the trail. And as I said, the chief at that time in 1968, when the murders were identified as Zodiac in Vallejo and in San Francisco and so forth, he contacted the whole task force and said, I have the same M.O. i have the same details. I have a size 10, I have this and that. So do you. I think it's the right guy. No one agreed with him after that. It was always a local boy.
- [177:51]
Megyn Kelly
How far away is Riverside from Vallejo? And the first location that we discussed,
- [177:57]
Tom Colbert
I can't remember what town it was in those days. Probably about three and a half, four hours.
- [178:04]
Megyn Kelly
Okay, so it's doable. I mean, why would they. That's an easy connection to draw. It's not like they were. They were all in California so far.
- [178:12]
Tom Colbert
And don't forget that The Vallejo. I'm sorry, let me say it again. Don't forget that the. The Air Force base he was going to was just 15 minutes away from the murder site, and he was there for several days for treatment.
- [178:27]
Megyn Kelly
Again, you're talking about your suspect, Gary Post. But we. We don't know that this is the. The actual killer. Now, actually, I should ask you that separately. Whether he was Zodiac or not, do we know that Gary Post killed anybody?
- [178:40]
Tom Colbert
Gary Post was in the Air Force radar systems, part of the early warning system in Indiana. We know that he is not connected to any murders. He was meticulous and careful, and that's how he wound up in the middle of this, because we found all the evidence of that connected him.
- [179:02]
Megyn Kelly
Okay, we'll go there again in a second. Just wanted to see if we knew we were dealing with an identified killer in. Under the heading of Gary Post or not. The answer is no. But we'll get to why he's your. He's your favorite suspect, why Tom believes and his team believe he did it. So that we talked about. The first two confirmed Zodiac, and they look very similar to one another with the. With the couples in the cars. And then there was. Was another one. About two, three months after that second one of Darlene and Mike Magot, there was an attack on Cecilia Shepard and Brian Hartnell, September 27, 1969. And similar to the fact that Mike Magot survived that earlier attack and gave that detailed description, Brian Hartnell, the man, survived this one. So what happened was they were relaxing on a blanket at a remote location by a lake in Napa. Cecilia shepherd noticed a man approaching them wearing a costume, a black hooded costume with a white cross circle stitched onto the front. That's interesting, because it's kind of like the Zodiac sign. And holding a gun described him as a heavy build, no more than 6ft tall. That would match up loosely with what Mike Mago described. The man claimed he was a prison escapee from either Montana or Colorado and needed money and a car to flee to Mexico. The man, Brian Hartnell, offered him his wallet and car keys, which, of course, they realized they were in trouble here. And the man did not take the wallet or the car keys. After several minutes of conversation, the man tied up the couple with plastic clothesline in plastic clothesline and began stabbing them, then casually walked away. And again, amazingly, Brian Hartnell survived. So here again, you tell me, Thomas the investigator, they're not in a car. They're in Napa. There's conversation this time, all different things. From the previous two. And of course very different in that they were tied up. And this is a stabbing, not a shot shooting. Is that unusual? Is that, you know, for us for a serial killer to change up his M.O. that much?
- [181:18]
Tom Colbert
Well, again, because of all the calibers he had, he was extremely brilliant. He would know to switch calibers, switch knives, switch locations, the hammer hits on bullets. He would switch out the actual hammers so that they couldn't be tracked from another investigation. This man you mentioned too, he is the same height, weight of the Zodiac described in other locations. It is the only daytime attack of the Zodiac suspected murders.
- [181:59]
Megyn Kelly
Now, this murder and the one that preceded it have some something else in common and that's that he appears to have called authorities on a payphone after he did it.
- [182:09]
Tom Colbert
Yes.
- [182:09]
Megyn Kelly
Right. Jumping back to the murder of Darlene Farron and the attack on Mike Maggot. At 12:40am there was a call to the police and it was to the Vallejo Police Department. The man said, I would like to report a double murder. He didn't know that Mike Mago had survived. If you will go one mile east on Columbus Parkway to the public park, you will find the kids in a brown car. They were shot with a 9 millimeter Luger. I also killed those kids last year. Goodbye. An apparent reference to David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen. Then after the Cecilia Shepard and Brian Hartnell attack in Napa. Similar and call to Napa county sheriff's office, etc. 7:40pm I want to report a murder. No, a double murder. They are two miles north of park headquarters. They were in a white Volkswagen. Carmen Gia. I'm the one who did it. What's that? What do we glean from these confessions which everyone seems to agree was Zodiac?
- [183:16]
Tom Colbert
Well, I'll give you another example too because it matches Oceanside pd. First cab driver killed and before he killed him, he called the police department, said, I'm going to. This is paraphrasing. I'm going to commit a crime that you're never going to be able to figure out. And sure enough, after shooting him in the back of the head, just like the San Francisco cab shot back in the head, he calls a few days later from that area and said, I told you you'd never figure it out. He was stationed at a Air Force base along the coast in Santa Barbara area. And there is a railroad track that empties right at his base and is five minutes from the murder scene of that cab driver in Oceanside.
- [184:08]
Megyn Kelly
Now, I want to keep my crime straight because the next crime we know is committed by Zodiac was of a cab driver. It seems like you're talking about a separate one, but the one. Let me just set this one up before we get to your one. This is, this would be Zodiac number four confirmed again, he's claimed to have killed 37 people. So it's or maybe 34 or 37, but the list is very long. We're just going with the ones that law enforcement has said. Yeah, this is him. So, Paul Stein, October 11, 1969, his cab was hailed. The cabin cab wound up a block away from the destination that was asked for. Paul Stine, 29, was shot once in the head at point blank range. Weapon was 9 millimeter. Three witnesses watched the suspect from approximately 60ft away as he wiped down the cab with a cloth after killing Stein. That's interesting. So maybe different weapon. Not a.22, not a knife. Now we're onto a 9 millimeter. And someone's sees him clean up, which is a new detail. They describe the man as a white male, 25 to 30 years old. Again, that's all consistent with Mark with Mike Mago. Stocky build, consistent reddish brown hair. Consistent Mike had said brown hair with heavy rimmed glasses. That's a new detail. And they initially thought this was a robbery gone bad, but then they realized it wasn't. And once again, Zodiac wrote a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle this time. And he said, I did it and tell us why. We had every reason to believe that was not a hoax letter. The person writing it really did kill Paul Stine.
- [185:49]
Tom Colbert
Well, he also sent letters afterwards, and one of them, he bragged the reason they were not finding any prints of him was because he put glue on his finger fingertips, and that left no prints. And he bragged about it in a letter right after that too. So it matches the oceanside back of the head. That is a one shell that was recovered on the floor of the cap. It is with right now San Francisco PD and our plans are to compare our 9 millimeters to there.
- [186:25]
Megyn Kelly
This is the one, if I not mistaken where with the letter he sent to the San Francisco Chronicle. He included a portion of the bloody shirt of Paul Stine, which is just so chilling. And his letter, this is the one I mentioned in the intro where he talked about, he said, I'm the murderer of the taxi driver. To prove it, here's a blood stained piece of his shirt. I am the same man who did the people in the North Bay area. And he goes on to mock the San Francisco police And then he makes the comment about school children making nice targets. I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning. And goes on in detail what he wants to do to the children. This is signed with the Zodiac symbol. So he's getting more aggressive and he's getting needier, Right? Like, needier. This, to me, seems like somebody who really wants them to know who he is.
- [187:20]
Tom Colbert
Well put. And that's exactly what happens with a lot of the psychopaths. They're narcissistic sociopaths, psychopaths that are hoping someday they can share with people who they are. And they sometimes leak it out. And that is just a perfect profile in that particular case.
- [187:44]
Megyn Kelly
Now, that murder was October 11, 1969. On your suspected killings list. There's another cab driver. And is this the one you were referring to? It happened seven years prior to Paul Stine. It was a murder of a guy named Ray Davis of the Checker Cab Company.
- [188:03]
Tom Colbert
We believe that was the first killing by Zodiac because he was out of the military in 16, but we believe he took a train down from the Air Force base in Santa Barbara and conducted a similar cat killing, back of the head, and then vanished. And again, bragging, no writing, no calling himself Zodiac. But he said, you're not going to be able to figure this one out. And then he called him back and bragged about it.
- [188:33]
Megyn Kelly
Okay, that's the one you were talking about. Now it's all coming together, right? He called the cops and in advance said, I'm going to commit a baffling crime. And soon after, this guy, Ray Davis was killed. And again, no robbery. Police couldn't find a motive. That is sketchy. And it does follow a pattern of no motive. Shoot in the back of the head and telling cops either before, before or after, I'm the one who did it. I'm the one, like, just taunting them. I mean, I have to say, as I. As I listen to all the crimes, with all due respect, I feel like. Were the cops fumbling? Because I feel like in today's day and age, you could never get away with this.
- [189:19]
Tom Colbert
Very well put. That's exactly true. Remember, in that era, from the 60s to 70s and early 80s, cops had fingers, fingerprints, and a hunch. There was no DNA. There was no other incredible databases you could search things in. It was a very simple time. And they did the best they could. Remember, though, before our times in the 60s when this was going on, there was a lot of drug experimentation, a lot of violence and murders, that people were high. I mean, there's when we went through the California murders, we found at least a half dozen that could fit the initial profile of this man. But it all came down to that. They were high. The six that we looked at were extremely out of their heads.
- [190:16]
Megyn Kelly
Hmm. The. The reason he's known as Zodiac, as I said, is he started signing these letters that he would send to the press with a little Zodiac symbol, and then some of them. He signed it Zodiac, like the word Zodiac, and his need to bring the press into it kind of reminded me of the Unabomber. We did a special on him.
- [190:39]
Tom Colbert
That's right.
- [190:39]
Megyn Kelly
You know, he couldn't. He was totally getting away with it. Ted Kaczynski was getting away with being the Unabomber. And his own letters would wind up sinking him because his brother, they published them in the paper. And the brother saw one and read one and said, oh, my God, this is very familiar to stuff. He's my own brother sent me. One thing led to another. This guy kept writing to the press, but no one ever had that revelation. But he used the LA Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and others. For what? Like, how would you describe his correspondence with the press?
- [191:13]
Tom Colbert
You know, this is before social media. This is before the Internet. This is before, frankly, a lot of color TVs weren't in play. This was his way to be a celebrity in his own warped mind. And that is, in essence, what was happening. He was up. And by the way you talked about the shirt, he took slivers of that shirt and sent it to a very famous lawyer. He sent it to the papers. He cut that shirt up so he could be definitively identified as the Mystery man.
- [191:48]
Megyn Kelly
He wanted them to know, and he didn't. He. In some of the letters, he was like, that one wasn't me. You know, like he. He wanted credit for his crimes, and he didn't want to be saddled with ones he didn't commit. Letter to the LA Times, dated March 13, 1971. So this is right in the relevant time frame of the murders. We know. We know the Zodiac did. And this is what he writes. This is the Zodiac speaking. Like I have. And there are lots of misspellings in here. FYI, like I have. Have always said, always has two Ls. I am crack proof. If the Blue Meanies are ever going to catch me, they had best get off their fat asses and do something. Because the longer they fiddle and fart around, the more slaves I will collect for my afterlife. I do have to give them credit for stumbling across my riverside activity but they are only finding the easy ones. There are a hell of a lot more down there. The reason I'm writing to the Table Times is this. They don't bury me on the back pages like some of the others. So it's. He's mad he's not on the front page.
- [192:53]
Tom Colbert
He's shopping for media. And when San Francisco finally realized that, hello, you're part of the problem when you're putting it on the COVID You're. You're integrating yourself into a hostage situation, a murder, but by. By exploiting his. His language. And so they made a decision to bury him.
- [193:14]
Megyn Kelly
It's not so dissimilar from what we see now. Somebody was just positing on. On a show. I listened to our podcast, I can't remember, but they were talking about, why do we not have the serial killers today like we used to? You know, I. I was born in 1970. I grew up hearing these stories and being afraid and Son of Sam in New York and all of that. And they were saying it's not really a thing anymore. And the answer was, it's kind of moved on to mass shootings. You know, the murderous, crazed lunatic has chosen a different thing now. But both groups tend to want infamy. And it's one of the reasons why a lot of security experts say, and I've been doing it for a long time, don't name the shooters in these mass shootings.
- [193:55]
Tom Colbert
Exactly, exactly. But I would also tell you that technology, technology after 1970 exploded. I mean, they had databases to track license plates, what, in the last three or four or five years. They have special banks for tattoos. I mean, they're tracking people left and right now. And that's why serial killers can't stay out long. The cameras are everywhere. Megan. There were no cameras back then. None.
- [194:24]
Megyn Kelly
That's true.
- [194:25]
Tom Colbert
And so that's totally changed law enforcement, and that's why. Why serial killers have vanished. This was one of the last ones. And again, he retired, quote, unquote. We'll talk about our man later. He retired in 1970, moved up to Ohio, Sierra Town, and spent the rest of his life up there. So, you know, he. He knew that they were getting closer and closer, and he finally made the decision. I really. He still wrote letters into the. Into the late 80s.
- [194:58]
Megyn Kelly
How many letters in all? How many letters do we think we
- [195:01]
Tom Colbert
have from the Zodiac we have right now? I'm just thinking they just eliminated two that turned out to be a teenager in Riverside, believe it or not, who said she deserved to die. It was a terrible thing. The FBI confirmed through a genealogy unit that he was.
- [195:20]
Terry Turchi
He.
- [195:21]
Tom Colbert
He confessed. And he's now an older man. But all the others there are approximately, I want to say 20, 26 or so. I'd have to double check, but it's 26. Let's just say it's close to a couple dozen.
- [195:38]
Megyn Kelly
Because as I was reading up on this, one thought I had was if I'm a murderer back in the 1970s, I'm definitely writing a fake Zodiac letter and pinning this on him. You know, like, just to try to get the police off my trail. So how did they figure out this one's the real Zodiac and this one's a phony trying to pin his murder on this serial killer.
- [196:01]
Tom Colbert
Well, again, it was primitive back then. The handwriting. There were handwriting experts. He wrote left and right, by the way. So does our suspect. Right, left, and right. Same age, same shoes. Don't get me started.
- [196:17]
Megyn Kelly
I'm going to in a 10 minutes.
- [196:19]
Tom Colbert
But bottom line is, is that he wrote both ways. He was very clever, and there were some extremely brilliant people that were able to not only identify the correct writing, but they started to get into the coding.
- [196:38]
Megyn Kelly
Okay, so now we haven't talked about that. What do you mean, coding?
- [196:43]
Tom Colbert
This is military coding that goes back to. To a book. It's been around since World War I. The Navajos used it in World War II to protect our radio communications between islands in Vietnam. That's when the coding ended in Vietnam. Because now with computers, of course, you don't need coding. But it's the same code book. It's a 1950 code book. I have a lieutenant colonel from Vietnam on the, the Cooper case who brought us that code book. When we found out these were codes, I linked up the code buster from Cooper, who is a three time NSA man, wait to work with.
- [197:25]
Megyn Kelly
Stop. Nobody knows Cooper yet. And nobody understands code yet. All right, so like codes, That's. Okay, so that's what I'm here for, the codes we're talking about. Because he, in his letters, would offer, like, a cipher, like a little riddle for people to decode and made promises like, if you can decode this, you'll know who I am. So, of course, everybody was trying their hardest to decode this. And you're saying there's a military book that talks about how to make these codes? And who's Cooper? Why are you mentioning somebody named Cooper?
- [198:03]
Tom Colbert
DB Cooper is a Vietnam vet who took over a plane and asked for $200,000. And then he said, fly me to Mexico and he jumped by parachute. That is one of our other cases that we believe we have solved.
- [198:20]
Megyn Kelly
How does that factor into this story?
- [198:23]
Tom Colbert
The same code book used in Vietnam is the same code book that was used by our Air Force man, our man Gary Francis Post. It was used at all Air Force bases. These codes were used to scramble signals as they spoke and protected our country back in the 60s and 70s.
- [198:45]
Megyn Kelly
So why couldn't an Air Force man back then take one look at that and say, I know what this is?
- [198:52]
Tom Colbert
Well, there are. There is the code, but then there are words that are clues. He would embed these clues so that the public couldn't just quickly get a code book. Very clever. Very clever. Anagrams is how they broke it. And as I said, with the Cooper Project, we brought that NSA man, a codebuster, three tours in Vietnam, to work with our team on the Zodiac. And that's how we feel. We cracked it. It's the same code book.
- [199:32]
Megyn Kelly
So it's an interesting point because you can't come up with these ciphers and elude police this well by being a complete lunatic who isn't smart, you know, but he's got all the mystic misspellings. So do we think the misspellings are, as you said earlier, a red herring, you know, an attempt to downplay his own intelligence? What do we think about his level of smarts?
- [200:03]
Tom Colbert
We had some people on the team talk about describing him as an ADHD kid who would only pay attention if he was interested. And he, our suspect, was that type of person. He was sloppy, he misspelled. But he also planted words on purpose so that he could point to them, you know, and he would give clues with certain words. And that is how that code became so important on both cases.
- [200:38]
Megyn Kelly
Now, as we discussed, he starts writing to the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco examiner, the Vallejo Times Herald, as early as July 31, 1969. And he includes these ciphers or cryptograms, which he claims contain his identity. And he demands that they be printed on the paper's front page. Or he would, quote, cruise around all week killing lone people in the night, and then move on to kill again until I end up with a dozen people over the weekend. Interestingly, the San Francisco Chronic Chronicle published it on its third or fourth page. The threatened murders did not happen. And they eventually published all three parts of what he had sent them. That's so interesting, because, boy, as a member of the press, that does put you in an impossible situation. So they really did wrestle with the moral burden that he was trying to place on them.
- [201:34]
Tom Colbert
Do you remember Megan in the buses in that story in San Francisco? The bus buses, they threatened to blow up buses with children on them. That is what our suspect in Oceanside did. After killing the cab driver there in 62, he calls in and said I'm going to blow up some buses. Well that you know what would happen in that town. Everybody, all the police, the military were put on every bus there were they, they blanketed the small town. And he meantime, we believe our suspect got on the train and went back to the air force base. And then he called in and said, told ya. USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance.
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Tom Colbert
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Megyn Kelly
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Terry Turchi
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Megyn Kelly
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- [203:34]
Tom Colbert
When it broke the FBI and we have the memo, they all the agents in charge on the west coast were told stand down. The only thing we're going to do, we're not going to get involved in these murders all over the state. We will provide law lab help, fingerprinting help and occasionally to a small department if they need some technology. But we are not going to get involved in these murders. And frankly with the Lake Tahoe killing, that's a cross state line. But they're not saying Lake Tahoe yet is a Zodiac case.
- [204:13]
Megyn Kelly
That's one of your suspected cases. So the FBI is basically saying this is an intra state problem. Hasn't quite cross state lines we don't need to touch it. Good luck. California. And so what was it? What, like? So as local authorities, town by town in California, was there any mass coordination, you know, somebody running point?
- [204:33]
Tom Colbert
There was a task force put together, four or five departments, mostly in the San Francisco Bay area. After the cases you spoke of, again, the cases we're talking about from San Diego, go to Lake Tahoe, were not in the task force, but there are some similarities and our former law enforcement people have pointed that out.
- [204:55]
Megyn Kelly
So how, in what year did he stop writing his letters?
- [205:01]
Tom Colbert
I want to say late mid to late 80s.
- [205:06]
Megyn Kelly
Oh, so it went on for 10 plus years.
- [205:09]
Tom Colbert
And again, that's not official. The last official letters you mentioned were 69, but we have letters from. From 1970 again to the late. Let me correct myself, from the early 1970s all the way to the end of 85 or 84, he was writing to newspapers and.
- [205:32]
Megyn Kelly
But was he still committing murders? Like, do we. Did he change his mo did he continue to say things like he said in the early letters that that would show you this is definitely the murderer and not just some lunatic trying to send us on a wild goose chase?
- [205:48]
Tom Colbert
He was no longer talking about murders. He was commenting, he was talking about particular movies involving murders. I mean, he almost became a commentator and sent these letters to newspapers, as I said. But the murders, his discussion of murders stopped in 1980, 1970, and that was his last claim. And after that, that's the other part of the story.
- [206:20]
Megyn Kelly
So what. So flash forward to, you know, when did DNA become the everyday thing it is now? I mean, 2000, sometime in the 21st century, it really got hot and started to get used in all the criminal cases and so on. I remember covering the Duke lacrosse case, you know, the fake rape case down there in 2005, and they still were really struggling to explain what DNA is in that case. And obviously it wound up falling apart. But I remember it was just as late as 2005. This was still sort of a mystery to lawyers who had to try criminal cases. So eventually we got there. Now there's all this evidence. There's shell casings and, you know, there's got to be. I don't know if there's any fingerprints, if there's. What is there that they, with the benefit of now new technology, they can go back in these crime scenes and see, okay, we got something.
- [207:14]
Tom Colbert
Well, I'll be honest with you. We have thoroughly looked into all the cases, not only our cases, but the original cases, and sadly, we brought them evidence to compare that they wouldn't compare with our suspect. But what we was intriguing is that they a few years ago on one of our members on our team approached the departments and said, check DNA on such and such a letter flap or behind the stamp. Well, unfortunately Megan, back in the 60s and 70s and even into the early 80s, nobody was keeping evidence in sealed paper bags in refrigerators. They were just stacked in files, sometimes with the sun on them. So heat and passage of time they were not able to get any DNA off of shell casings and so forth. We think we can update that technology because the only thing that we believe in, the FBI agreed in 75 those, those hairs have been used to clear people, but they have not shared the hairs with anyone else.
- [208:32]
Megyn Kelly
Now when you say we bring these things to them, are you talking about the FBI? Who do you mean? To whom do you bring the clues that you want evaluated?
- [208:40]
Tom Colbert
We went to the police departments that had bullet shells. We've gone to others that have DNA evidence, we have gone for ballistics up to San Francisco. We're in disc discussions with them and we've been everywhere. And the only evidence left from the killings are those four hairs.
- [209:06]
Megyn Kelly
Yeah, go ahead.
- [209:09]
Tom Colbert
The, by the way, the hairs are brown like our suspect.
- [209:14]
Megyn Kelly
I should reiterate that your group, thecasebreakers.org it's 40 member task force of volunteers, retired bureau agents. You have a combined 1500 years of skill sets. You guys solve cases, you try to fund more teams and you promote careers in all branches of public service. So you've been at this for a while and you've got trained professionals with impressive histories trying to figure out these unsolved crimes. So it's not like you're just some nutcase who walks into the police station saying go, go back and test that hair. You know, they know who you are. And some, some are more cooperative than others, from the sound of it.
- [209:55]
Tom Colbert
I was a CBS newsman for 10 years in LA and I was recruited by the state of California to go to an incredible school where I met my first team. And that was California Specialized Training Institute at Camp San Luis. This is where they teach everyone on every imaginable horror they have to face. And I was flown up for 18 years every other month to teach cross crisis management, hostage situations, you name it, terrorism, all with a media angle. In other words, how do you get your case out without jeopardizing it? That's how we created our first team. And then it expanded from 10 to 40 because the word got out. And my wife and I have dedicated the rest of our lives to making this work, so to speak. Because frankly, Megan, there's not enough tax dollars in the world for more cops.
- [210:50]
Megyn Kelly
That's right.
- [210:51]
Tom Colbert
We have to go after the people in their 50s and 60s and that. Okay, they have a little arthritis or they can't climb the fences. But you know what? As my dad the shrink used to say when we were in trouble, they have incredible brains. Incredible brains. And, you know. Can I give you one quick example?
- [211:12]
Megyn Kelly
Yeah.
- [211:13]
Tom Colbert
We were up in the woods, Oregon. We were tipped to the actual parachute site of DB Cooper, where he jumped and buried it. And we went 10 miles from the nearest home to a particular spot. A, believe it or not, a former cop was tipped to this and called us. We went all the way to that spot in the middle of the woods. We dug. We found something that looked like a parachute, but we couldn't tell. We wondered if it was a potato. So the way our team works is we can call them, and they're rowboats, they're lazy boys with a grandkid on the golf course, and they'll give us the technology. And we called and said, we have a piece of material that we don't know if it's a potato sack or a parachute. And he said, take a strip of it, light it. And we said, light it. And he said, light it. Tried to light it. It dripped and smoked. He said that was dunked in non flammable material. It's a parachute. This is how the team works. And so we get their expertise wherever and whenever you want it. You should know, as far as my wife and I, we've never been sued in 42 years. And those are the type of people we're bringing to our team. They're phenomenal.
- [212:30]
Megyn Kelly
Don't jinx it. Don't say. Don't say things like that out loud, Tom. I said, don't jinx it by saying something like that out loud.
- [212:39]
Terry Turchi
Out loud.
- [212:39]
Megyn Kelly
You know what a litigious society we have now.
- [212:43]
Tom Colbert
Well, yeah, but we're very comfortable. And the zooms that we have with these people, we've got Republicans, Democrats, every type of person. But you know what they have. They have souls. And they are absolutely committed to these families to get them answers.
- [213:01]
Megyn Kelly
Well, and the other thing is, the cops are so undermanned right now, and just in general, they're not going to devote resources to something that happened 50, 60 years ago. You know, they don't have the time or the manpower for that. Jumping back, something you said reminded me of something I wanted to ask you about the hairs, the four hairs that they have from what they believe is a suspect. You know, they have that technology now where you can, you can take DNA and create a picture of the person. They can find out enough about the person's ethnic heritage and so on. They can engineer a picture that they will say, this person was Nordic. This person probably had blue eyes. This person probably had a nose that looked like this. It's crazy, but, you know, they do it on Dateline all the time. So has anybody ever tried to do that with those hairs?
- [213:54]
Tom Colbert
Been there doing that? Oh, oh, we are not being given the hairs. But let me you tell, tell you, I have three attorneys, all pro bono. They're going to convince Riverside and the other departments, hey, let us end the pain of these families. And that's our approach. And that's about to happen.
- [214:16]
Megyn Kelly
Okay, so because you think you know who did it. And that leads us back to Gary Francis Post, who, after looking at tons of. Of suspects, you believe is the guy. The first thing I said to my team was, is Gary Post dead or alive? Because if he's alive, we're going to have to run a lot by him. He's dead, which is good, maybe on a couple of fronts, if he really was the guy. And also, you can't defame a dead man. So let's talk about Gary Post, who's no longer here to defend himself. And tell us, what's your elevator pitch for why he did it?
- [214:53]
Tom Colbert
Gary, we got tipped to this case by a wonderful man. And this man was a TV anchor in Salinas who had one of these members of Gary Francis Post. Let me start this this way. Gary Francis Post left San Francisco area. He became a union painter. We have his certificate. He moved up to a small town in the High Sierra. We have the background on his move, and he befriended everyone as a painter. But when you're finding paint spots on a watch in Riverside and when you find out that he has the same shoe size and has the same, same military smarts on coding, we could go down a list of about 15 different things that have convinced us we have it. And among those 15 are nine witnesses who when one of Gary Francis Post's posse members, as he called it, a criminal gang, ran for it in 2014, it freaked out the town. They had no idea the painter could be the Zodiac. And that's changed. And to this day, we believe the best evidence is in that town.
- [216:25]
Megyn Kelly
Now, wait, let me stop.
- [216:26]
Tom Colbert
Sure.
- [216:27]
Megyn Kelly
Let's talk about the posse, because people are like, what do you Mean posse. We do know enough about Gary Posterno. He didn't exactly spend his youth gathering friends the way the average person does.
- [216:40]
Tom Colbert
Right. Well, when Gary moved up to this small town, he found a single mom, married her, a very simpleton woman who is still alive and loved by a lot of people. He met this woman with a child and moved them up to a very one street town in the High Sierra, just like the old West. And he became a father figure to about a half dozen kids who barely got through high school. And they became his so called posse. Well, they became a criminal posse. He not only trained them how to avoid cops, he taught them how to take a pipe bomb and make it a bomb that could blow up a house. When cops moved into that town, he would throw rocks through the bedrooms to get them out. He had this posse up there from about 85 and they pretty much broke it up in about 2005. And there are about 10 people he was involved in with this posse. He'd never take more than two or three up in the mountains at a time with mules, horses and so forth.
- [217:54]
Megyn Kelly
And what? And so the one guy escaped, ran from the posse. And what's his story?
- [218:01]
Tom Colbert
Will was one of the last ones he appeared in 87 in town and Gary befriended him. He got in trouble with the law and Gary was the unofficial lawyer in town. He had law books covering his A frame and convinced him that he could get him out of his charge. It was a minor charge and he introduced him to the gang and the gang would meet in the woods and have the bonfires and he would provide marijuana and liquor. And he in essence became like a Fagin. He trained them. He trained them to kill every type of animal they ever saw.
- [218:44]
Megyn Kelly
Like Fagan from Oliver Twist, is that what you mean?
- [218:47]
Tom Colbert
Yeah.
- [218:48]
Megyn Kelly
Okay.
- [218:48]
Tom Colbert
Yeah. And so, and that's how everybody loved this man. But then he taught them how to kill everything on site and they watched him. One story that has been told to us by Will, that's the man who ran away, was now in his mid-50s. At about 2000, he started reading books and he loved books and he started getting into true stories. And then one day he's given a book of serial killers and he opens it up and he looks at the sketch in San Francisco and he has, holy cow, that's our guy. Now all these kids were brainwashed. Took him 10 years to break away. He collected photos, he collected examples of his writing and he in essence was chased out of town when the other posse members heard he was gathered these Things And Post literally tried to kill him with a hammer at 70 years old in his shed. When he heard this, and everybody came when the fight was going on and the kid ran for it. Took him a. He hiked through the mountain. They were all in tremendous shape. He hiked through the mountains. He stayed off of roads. He hiked all the way to Sierra, all the way to Sacramento and walked, walked into a newsroom and he said the worst thing, Megan, that a news person wants to hear. I have a long story to tell you. And I was the guy who had to answer that at cbs. And I know what, it paraphrases what I would say, and that is, can't you cut it down?
- [220:34]
Megyn Kelly
Could you give me the Evelyn Wood version?
- [220:37]
Tom Colbert
No one would listen to him. So what did he do? He walks to San Francisco, off of the freeway, through the desert, through the land, gets to San Francisco, talks to newsrooms, same problem. Then he talks to the FBI later, nobody would confirm it.
- [220:57]
Megyn Kelly
What's he saying to them? What's he saying? Is he saying, I've found the Zodiac Killer? Or what's he saying, I know who
- [221:01]
Tom Colbert
the Zodiac is and I have a long story I need to tell you. So no one would to listen. Well, he goes down to Salinas because that's where he grew up with his parents. And he said, you know, there's that newsman that I grew up with. I wonder if he's still there. And that is Dale Julen. Dale is a retired newsman now. And Dale, he comes to his door at the station and said, I have a long story to tell you. Well, Dale takes him to lunch. Now, you might ask, what is an anchor at a TV station spending several hours, as he called it, a wacko. You know, I took a chance with a wacko. Well, here's the interesting story. Remember we mentioned the buses and the threats to blow them up. Dale was a Boy Scout on one of those buses. And he remembered the fear and he looked at and he never forgot it. And when he looked into the eyes of this 50 year old kid and this homeless guy who smells, he's been out on the street, he took the chance. And that's how we have the case.
- [222:12]
Megyn Kelly
So this all started from him seeing a sketch in a book of what somebody, I assume this is based on the eyewitness IDs that we've been discussing, said the Zodiac looked like. And that sketch was so close to your suspect that he said, it's him. Like that was enough. That plus all the weird ways that they were Living together.
- [222:36]
Tom Colbert
Yes. And what's very important to know, when he was at the Air Force base in Indiana, he was in a horrible Jeep accident. The driver died, hit a bridge and our guy had Gary Post. Gary Post had chest injuries, brain injury. They had to go in to take care, fix the brain. He lost all his teeth. They pulled them all out to save his life. And when he got out of that, months later he's back at that base and what's sitting in the front, don't drink and drive. The jeep all torn up. And he demands. I got to get out of here. I can't see that every day. I can't see it every day. Well, what do they do? They send him to the worst place for a radar guy on the ice of Greenland. One guy in there with the screen. And we believe that's where in the combination of the brain damage and other things he faced, we believe that's where he lost his mind. He came back, he wound up in Vandenberg Air Force Base, which is Santa Barbara. And he was there until. Until. I'm trying to think, let me think for a minute. He was there for three years and then he got out and moved to San Francisco to be a painter.
- [224:02]
Megyn Kelly
So the cities line up.
- [224:05]
Tom Colbert
Oh yeah, that would be the first thing to check. There's a murder in, in Santa Barbara less than 15 minutes away from that Air Force base. And that was a couple on ditch day of high school killed just like the Navy couple in San Diego. Sniper, they found bullets all over the sand. He stuffed their bodies into a homeless shelter there on the cliffs. And they have the sheriff in that town found the boxes, boxes that he discarded there with the bullets and those shells with the code numbers on the shell box matched the gun shop on base at Vandenberg for hunters. It was the only gun shop and the only place you could buy bullets at the time for 100 miles.
- [224:58]
Megyn Kelly
Why wouldn't the custom that was our suspect. Irrespective of whether that's Zodiac, a Zodiac Kodiak murder or Gary Post. Why wouldn't the cops have been all over that base at the time, even with the technology they had then saying we want to witness, we want to interview everybody, we want to know, you know, who's been in here, who on base, like figure out where everybody's been. Like everybody who's on the base should have been a suspect.
- [225:21]
Tom Colbert
Well, it was about 15 to 25 minute drive. The Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Department held a big news conference several years later and say we have looked at the forensics. Now, we have looked at these things. This was five, eight years later after that murder of the couple. And they looked at it, and they felt there was some connection. But San Francisco did not accept them as a official Zodiac case. That happened in Oceanside, happened in San Diego. It's happened in Lake Tahoe. Those are the other outliers that we strongly believe are the same man.
- [226:05]
Megyn Kelly
Why? Like, why. Why won't they accept it as an official. Like, what does it have to. Have to be deemed an official Zodiac case by authorities?
- [226:14]
Tom Colbert
Well, if you're talking about today, or are you talking about back then?
- [226:18]
Megyn Kelly
Well, I guess both, because it should be updated if they decided no back then and now today, if they Taking another look. But, like, what did they need a letter from Zodiac with his little cipher saying, I did that one?
- [226:31]
Tom Colbert
Well, again, these departments at that time were very small. No technology. They had their favorite detective, they had their favorite chief, they had their favorite driver, they had their favorite sniper, and those are the ones they lied on. There was no methodical, who's the best person for this? We know a forensic guy who's in another county. Let's bring them in. That was minimal back then. Now, even today, you know, if. If you looked at it today, they're all so busy. I mean, Riverside, God bless them. Look, they have over 200 unsolved murders in their own town. Do they really want to pick up a case, as you pointed out earlier, 50 years ago?
- [227:16]
Terry Turchi
Yeah.
- [227:16]
Tom Colbert
So it's those. That's the dilemma. But that's why we have this incredible team.
- [227:21]
Megyn Kelly
So we put pictures on the board while you were talking. Our YouTube audience can check this out, and you should, if you're listening to this via podcast, just go to YouTube and check this out. But it's a drawing, 1969, of what I understand is the Zodiac based. That's the sketch artist's rendering of the Zodiac Killer based on the people who survived his attacks. And then you have a picture. Picture next to it, and that's of your suspect. That. That right there with, like, on the right with the. The actual photo is Gary Post. They do look. They do look similar. I. I mean, I'm. I'm gonna say. And you're. We've got the red circle around what you think are scars.
- [228:02]
Tom Colbert
We. That we know those are Gary Francis Post scars on the photo in 1963. That was his last year of military service. On the left, it's 68. So it's five years apart, the scars, according to my FBI members. And there's about 10 of them of the 40 members said this can't be put ignored. This can't be ignored is what they said to us.
- [228:31]
Megyn Kelly
Look at the jawline.
- [228:33]
Tom Colbert
It is a match. And he's Nordic, from Europe. He has two brothers that are still alive and we plan to talk to them too.
- [228:43]
Megyn Kelly
And what is the other picture of a man wearing a little Zodiac sign with a grocery bag over his head. That sketch, what is that? Because I know you've got a split screen of Gary walking in the snow in 1974 up against what is labeled Zodiac 69 Lake Attack. But what is that Zodiac? Where are we getting, getting that sketch from?
- [229:08]
Tom Colbert
That sketch was done by an artist with the help of the police. The police had original sketches of the Zodiac there and that was defined, refined, I should say, by some artists and has been used in several documentaries. And it does, it does appear to. There is even a police sketch that has the so called bag or the, they have head cover. And again, this was the one we talked about the only daytime. So he worked very hard to be covered up for that.
- [229:39]
Megyn Kelly
And this is like the reason obviously you have a pose of the actual, you know, Gary Post right next to that. And it could be anybody, you know, that we have no idea. But the build is definitely consistent and Gary Post's build was consistent with what was described by, by those witnesses.
- [230:00]
Tom Colbert
Same weight, same hair color as found in the hand in Riverside. Same height, same shoe size.
- [230:09]
Megyn Kelly
And no fingerprints at any of these crime scenes that we know are Zodiac are the ones you suspect?
- [230:16]
Tom Colbert
No, there were, there were fingerprints found, but not of the victim or the suspect. In Riverside and all the others, they found a bunch of. Look, this was a VW days back in, in the 60s. You remember the old stories where you, how many kids can you put in a vw?
- [230:30]
Megyn Kelly
Yeah, I was one of those kids.
- [230:32]
Tom Colbert
Oh, no comment. Well, anyways, so that in essence, that's how it was treated. They went and looked at every print and couldn't match anything to any particular suspects in Riverside and elsewhere. Again, I think he gave a pretty good explanation and that was putting the glue on his fingertips. So you couldn't find his fingerprints anywhere.
- [230:52]
Megyn Kelly
Well, but if you didn't find, if you didn't find photo, if you didn't find prints of the victim gums either, then that, it's a different explanation. Right. Then he would have had to wipe it down.
- [231:01]
Tom Colbert
Yeah, yeah. And, and because he only did two or three knife stabbings, everything else involved bullets. And those bullets have been recovered. He did not pick them up. And again, I think it's because he had the idea that the fingerprints would not show up. But as I said, we have a incredible lab up in Salt Lake. Francine is the name of the owner, and she has developed where they can literally dunk a shell or a rock involved in a murder into this liquid and off falls the DNA.
- [231:38]
Megyn Kelly
How did you get the bullets? Wouldn't the police departments be holding onto those and not giving them to you?
- [231:43]
Tom Colbert
Well, we don't have the bullets.
- [231:45]
Megyn Kelly
Not the bullets, but the shells.
- [231:47]
Tom Colbert
We went. We don't. We don't have the bullets that were found on the ground. What we have are the bullets that he gifted to several people in his small town, and they held onto them, and then they contact. This was only two years after he died. He died in 19. I'm sorry. In 20.
- [232:08]
Megyn Kelly
20.
- [232:08]
Terry Turchi
18.
- [232:09]
Tom Colbert
He died in 2018. And he gave them all the shells and. And the hammer hits pieces of the guns. He found artists. He found people that are collectors. Well, they stayed in the boxes, in the attics, or in the closets for two years. And then we got a call from the group and said, we heard about your Riverside situation. We think we have the Zodiac here, and we have nine witnesses up there that grew up with the Zodiac. And finally, phenomenal stories.
- [232:43]
Megyn Kelly
But wait, if they're giving you boxes of bullets that they believe Gary Post handled, and you run a test on them, you should be able to figure out whether those are. Ideally, whether those are Gary Post's fingerprints, that. Whether he handled those boxes. But that doesn't answer the big question, because we don't have fingerprints at a crime scene that we know the Zodiac
- [233:06]
Tom Colbert
was at no crime scene. But we do have hairs, and we believe the DNA of those hairs are going to match the DNA on the bullets.
- [233:17]
Megyn Kelly
Oh, I see. You're going to get. Okay, so you're looking for DNA in
- [233:21]
Tom Colbert
the whole world, on the whole page. And they're not putting. Here's the other thing you know about CODIS. Does that need an explanation, please? CODIS is the FBI's database for DNA. And by law, in California, when somebody commits a felony, they have to have their DNA put up on CODIS to see if he has other victims, whether it be murder or rape or whatever. Believe it or not, we brought DNA. Dale Julin brought DNA to San Francisco and Vallejo and said, hold on to this, we may have a suspect. This is before we were involved two years ago. And so Dale left it with them, and they thanked him, they passed it around to the cities, nothing would match because remember their evidence, whether it be a licked envelope or the shell casing, none were secured forensically.
- [234:21]
Megyn Kelly
They weren't even envisioning DNA testing.
- [234:24]
Tom Colbert
We have it in the hairs and we have it from the shells. We also have. You'll love this. We even have his backpacker sleeping mat he slept on for 30 years with his posse.
- [234:37]
Megyn Kelly
Oh, man.
- [234:38]
Tom Colbert
And we found DNA on that too. And that's going to be compared.
- [234:43]
Megyn Kelly
All right, here's a, Here's a different question I have for you. Back when I was on NBC, we didn't interview. I interviewed the grand grandson of a man named Ed Edwards. The grandson's name was Wayne Wolf and he was coming out with a documentary at the time called It Was him the Many Murders of Ed Edwards. And the grandson's story was just absolutely compelling. It was like he had done some DNA searching. It turned out his dad had a different whatever there was some biological link that was, that was missing that he'd been told was legit. And long story short, Edwards was a murderer. That seems clear whether he committed any of the Zodiac murders. Less clear. But this documentary done by the grandson and featuring someone named former Sergeant Detective John Cameron, says Ed Edwards was the Zodiac killer. They said he pleaded guilty to five murders, including couples on lovers Lanes. They said if you solve two of the cryptograms that the Zodiac put out, because he said if you. Zodiac said if you solve these, you'll have my name. And they said they solved it. And they, they determined that if you take Edward Edwards, that name, Edward Edwards, and spell it backwards, it's 13, 13 characters, you reverse the letters, it matches up with the cipher, but you'd have to know the name Edward Edwards in order to do that. And they only went there because they knew Ed Edwards had murdered others and they decided to cross frame it. Now, I will say this. In my interview, this former Sergeant Detective John Cameron basically said that this Ed Edwards case killed everybody ever like it was like Jimmy Hoffa, JonBenet Ramsey, Scott. Lacy Peterson. Yes, Lacy Peterson. So which we all disclosed, you know, we were having an interesting interview, but have you ever heard of Ed Edwards? And what do you. What do you think?
- [236:59]
Tom Colbert
There are a half dozen we like to call, you know, in Cooper, Cooper Land and DB Cooper. We call them Cooper Rice. They're called Zodiackers. People that have theories, have some interesting links. And Hofedites is the other group that thinks they know where he's buried. And surprise, surprise, we believe we know where he's buried. That's Our next one.
- [237:23]
Megyn Kelly
Wait. Gary Post didn't kill Jimmy Hoffa in your story, did he?
- [237:27]
Tom Colbert
Bigfoot did.
- [237:28]
Megyn Kelly
Okay? It always goes full circle. I appreciate that.
- [237:32]
Peter Tragos
Yes.
- [237:33]
Tom Colbert
No, look, everybody has their own theories. I appreciate that. There are some things they have that we integrate into our investigations. For example, on accurate locations and ages and, you know, how the information changes. So you have to be really meticulous. And look, we feel we're the only ones. All these people have theories. But you know what? We're the only ones. Ones with a 40 member cold case team and the only ones with evidence. And that's why we're very drawn to this.
- [238:06]
Megyn Kelly
The story of him, of Gary Post losing his mind and, you know, sort of going crazy is interesting. One of his letters said I'm. How did he put it? Said something. He said, I am insane. He owned his mental illness and he clearly is. If you read the body of the Zodiac letters, it's not like a Ted Bundy who seems very logical and brilliant and methodical, though. Evil, right? This guy sounds like a lunatic. That I'm amassing slaves for the afterlife. And now I think I've got enough. And the rest of you are all going to be screwed because you don't have any slaves. He doesn't sound well.
- [238:45]
Tom Colbert
No, he's not. And there was one example from Will, and I sent you some footage of Will. What's interesting about.
- [238:57]
Megyn Kelly
I'm sorry, he's the guy who escaped
- [239:00]
Tom Colbert
exactly when Will ran for it. One thing that we learned from Will was there was a time when they went up in the mountains, three or four of the posse members with him, and he hung some meat in a container up in a tall tree. And they went out with the horses, came back several days later. He unfolds a chair, and on the tree, Will notices there are salmon hooks on the tree. And what had happened is there were three bears leading to death on those salmon hooks trying to get to the meat. And Will, what is supposed to do? He sits down and taunts and laughs at the animals till they die for hours.
- [239:49]
Megyn Kelly
Oh, God.
- [239:50]
Tom Colbert
This is why we say this is the Zodiac. He would immerse his arms. We have photos of him immersing his arms into the innards, the insides of dead animals, pulling out pieces, laughing about them, throwing them. This man was in his 60s and 50s and 70s doing this with the posse.
- [240:10]
Megyn Kelly
Well, that was one of the kids
- [240:11]
Tom Colbert
had lots of nightmares after this.
- [240:14]
Megyn Kelly
That was one of my questions for you. How did he live out the rest of his life? Right, because, you know, he died in 2018. Was anyone onto him prior to that? Had anybody. I mean, Will had been running around saying, I think I know who it is. But had anybody looked into him? Had police ever visited him? And was he married? Does he have a family? Was there anybody that you could talk to about his mental state, how he was, et cetera?
- [240:39]
Tom Colbert
We have phenomenal witnesses. And it starts with neighbors. You want to believe this? The Zodiac and his wife became babysitters for one of the neighbors. And that went on for seven to eight years. And the young girl, he would take them into the woods. His stepson and this young girl, he take them into the woods, give them guns, and show them how to shoot. And this was children in the ages of 5 to 15. And the girl told us that she was going out. He would take her out sometimes five days a week to shoot in the woods. That was the babysitting.
- [241:24]
Megyn Kelly
Maybe that's not unusual. I'm a city girl, like, in more room, rural parts of America, the rest of it's not so normal. But, like, wouldn't he. If he was this crazy, wouldn't everybody who knew him say, oh, my God, Gary Nutcase. And he got in trouble with the law here and have a long history of interactions with the authorities.
- [241:45]
Tom Colbert
When Will went to the authorities and the FBI, they said, we don't believe you, but guess what we have learned from the town, that the FBI actually, actually went up there. Now, the thing about this town, it's on the top of the mountain, and when you're going up there, they usually call ahead because the roads wash out the local sheriffs. And our Zodiac suspect was friends with a couple of deputies that we believe they tipped him because the minute they showed up, he somehow had dementia. He couldn't remember things. And he would crash cars. He'd put sugar in gas tanks and act crazy. He even told some of the kids, kids now in their 50s, that, I knew this is how I'll never be put in jail. And it almost worked. He did abuse his wife and had the last two years in jail, but that was just for abuse. And he died in jail.
- [242:43]
Megyn Kelly
Didn't he ever. Did he. I feel like the Zodiac would have left a note. You know, he's a prolific writer and loved writing notes about himself. Wouldn't the Zodiac have owned it upon his death?
- [243:00]
Tom Colbert
No, he chose to. He did tell a half dozen people. We have three affidavits, two of them from prisoners, one from Will, where he admits who he is. And we brought those to a courtroom in a very remote County. And again, we have them, but no one has looked at them. And that'll be part of the documentary that we're pursuing, is revealing that he did tell three or four people very close to him that he was the Zodiac. By the way, when he did die, that girl that was babysat by him and his wife when he died, the widow was called. Got a call from a 30something woman, and that was the little girl. And the minute she got on the phone with the widow, the widow said, I'm sorry, and I'm paraphrasing, I'm sorry I never told you about Gary, and I'm sorry for what's happened. It was a stunning. And they were stunned. That woman was stunned to get that call. Then another neighbor called her and said, and she confirmed the same story with the other neighbor that.
- [244:15]
Megyn Kelly
But, I mean, it could just be, I'm sorry Gary was such a bastard and that you got stuck with the worst babysitter ever as opposed to, I'm sorry you grew up being tutelaged, you know, with tutelage from the Zodiac.
- [244:27]
Tom Colbert
Well, we do have her quoted talking about the Zodiac and the murders, but
- [244:33]
Megyn Kelly
you know how it is. Like in the same way these guys said Ed Edwards did it, maybe this guy Gary was like, and I'm the Zodiac too.
- [244:41]
Tom Colbert
Well, I will tell you, when the FBI went up there in 2014, after Will ran for it, what happened then is that the town split. Half believed he could be, the other half said, no, he's a painter. We love him. He's a great guy. This is a town of 300 people, very small. And when several. We have nine witnesses, six of them very strong, when they heard he could have been the Zodiac. These folks slept on their couches, in their closets for months. They were freaked out, freaked out. And that's what happened to the town. When Will ran for it, it split the town in two.
- [245:25]
Megyn Kelly
This is all you say was on the top of a mountain? This is Northern California.
- [245:30]
Tom Colbert
This is in the high Sierra? Yes, Northern California.
- [245:32]
Megyn Kelly
Okay, and was anybody ever able to find people who knew Gary in his youth, you know, talk about what he was like back then, before he had these injuries? Have. Do you have any idea of his childhood background?
- [245:45]
Tom Colbert
We have some of his veterans who talked about and remembers when he lost his mind and remembers how it affected him, that accident and the surgery. That's one of his veterans. We tracked him down. We have neighbors that knew him, that worked with him in his paint company, and they all think he's a great guy. Well, he he divided his world. You should know. He never went to funerals, he never went to weddings. When he went to the market, he'd make his wife go in and he'd sit in the car. He was off the grid, Meghan. There was, you know, no cell phone phones, nothing. And so he stayed off the grid in this little town until he passed. And then out came the bullets from neighbors.
- [246:29]
Megyn Kelly
Wow. So what do you think? I mean, like, I know that not everybody's cooperative and you're still working on it and you're going to do your test, but do you think we'll know? Do you think you'll get this to a place where it is beyond doubt that it was this guy?
- [246:47]
Tom Colbert
I think it's going to happen because of our three attorneys. I hate to go that route, but we've taken this evidence from Riverside to the task forces on DNA and these hairs, we've been all the way up to the Attorney General of California who turned us back to San Francisco. Nobody wants to deal with this 50 year old headache. But look, all we need is the hair to compare. They're sitting in that fridge. We have DNA to compare it to. It's just a matter of time and the FBI, which did the lab work on the hairs. I think it's going to be awfully hard, we hope awfully hard for the FBI to not cooperate. We went to them a couple years ago, not only with our Hoffa story, but Zodiac. We met with the agent in charge in Los Angeles, who happened to be another. You know, hey, Tom, I know a guy who knows a guy. One of our team members was buddies with him on the jttf, the Terrorism Task Force in Chicago. So he arranged for me and our member, Jim Zimmerman to meet with this agent. And he looked at the evidence and he literally said, I think you got him and I think this is Hoffa. I'm going to take it to the Crime division. This agent took it to the Crime division three times and they turned it down.
- [248:14]
Megyn Kelly
Well, who did kill Jimmy Hoffa, now that we're down that lane there?
- [248:20]
Tom Colbert
But I will tell you he's buried in the Great Lakes area, not Giant Stadium. No. You know, I can't give you where, but. But I will tell you that we sent a van up there and a couple of my guys with vests and hard hats and big foot long sandwiches and sat where the exact spot he was buried, we were brought to on a deathbed cop, a corrupt cop who worked for a mobster who cased Hoffa. That cop on his Deathbed gave us the exact location in a Met. He gave it to his niece who was another cop. And that niece brought it to her boyfriend of 10 years and he's a cop. And he said, and she said, I've got six brothers and sisters. I don't want to break this. They'll go after my family. And the boyfriend said, that's fine. You know, you do what you think is best. 25 years later, that boyfriend's on my team, Jim Zimmerman. And he came into my office and said, you know, I have a 10 year girlfriend that thinks she knows where Hoffa is. We went there with Jim and some other cops with a van set up like we're workers, cops waving at us, rent a cops and suddenly out rolls a ground penetration radar machine from the van. We go to the exact spot in the middle of nowhere and they there it goes down five feet to clay. You can't see through clay. And the geophysicist that looked at it said, I usually use words like anomaly and disturbance, but this is a backhoe
- [250:04]
Peter Tragos
job
- [250:06]
Tom Colbert
in the middle of nowhere. And so we are now coordinating with universities and the state involved and the attorney general probably to tent it so that there's no interruption. Because if we're wrong, we're wrong.
- [250:21]
Megyn Kelly
That's what I was going to ask you. If you're wrong and if you do get a test on these hairs and they don't match, Gary, will you accept
- [250:28]
Tom Colbert
that There's a lot of things that match Gary? I'm not worried about that one at all. I really am not. There's so much I haven't told you. There is so many pieces of evidence, so many clues, so many quotes, affidavits, shoe size. I mean, everything is all in the right spot now, I think. And again, I think it's. I have quotes from friends at doj, friends at police departments that I've known because of my teaching and they've told me, tom, don't go there. You're going to just be, you're going to be embarrassed. Literally. That's what they said. Others said, I can't. After saying, getting very excited, they go to the head of their department and they said, no, no, no, I can't do it. Nobody wants to be embarrassed. So that's what we're facing and that's where we hope these attorneys can help.
- [251:25]
Megyn Kelly
Well, we will certainly continue to follow it and have you back once you get those results, if you want to talk about it. Fascinating discussion. Thank you so much for walking us through such a complex case and letting us understand how this. How this thing went down.
- [251:41]
Tom Colbert
Megan, I really appreciate your invitation. If I may, I want to mention to the audience that there are three stats they need to understand. One is quarter million. Another one is 6,000. The other one is 5%. There are a quarter million unsolved murders now in this country, and it grows by 6,000. And only 5% of departments now can afford cold case teams. That's what this is all about. And my wife and I are expanding. We are now a.org nonprofit. We've funded it for 10 years on this team. We want to spread these teams out in every state because there's no more cops coming. We're getting retired cops down, help solve these problems.
- [252:30]
Megyn Kelly
Tom, thank you. Thank you so much.
- [252:33]
Tom Colbert
Thank you. God bless.
- [252:34]
Megyn Kelly
Colbert and his team do some truly important work. But what about his theory on the Zodiac killer's identity? It is just a theory. Later this week, we're going to bring you a fascinating interview with Paul Holz. Paul is the real deal. He's a former cold case investigator who really was the guy. I mean, he was part of a team, but he really was the guy who helped solve the Golden State Killer case. Okay, this is a guy life, lifelong law enforcement. He's got a book, too, on the cold cases that he's looked into and so on, and one of them is the Zodiac. So I asked him about this interview with Tom Colbert and what he thinks, and here is what he said. Can I ask you about Zodiac? Because we had a guy come on the program, the guy's name is Tom Colbert, and he made the strongest case he could that the Zodiac Killer was a man named G. Gary Post. And I asked him about a show I did on NBC in which the filmmakers, because they had done a documentary, were saying the man, that the Zodiac Killer was Ed Edwards. And he said, no, it wasn't Ed. I'm very certain it was Gary Post. And presented the case for Gary Post. As somebody who's looked into the Zodiac Killer. Who do you think it was? What do you make of these pronouncements that it was definitively Ed Edwards or. Or it was definitively Gary Post.
- [253:55]
Tom Colbert
I put no weight on them whatsoever.
- [253:57]
Terry Turchi
I got involved in the Zodiac case
- [254:00]
Tom Colbert
in the late 90s into the early 2000s. I was dealing with the early online sleuths during that time frame.
- [254:07]
Terry Turchi
They all have what they call their
- [254:08]
Tom Colbert
pois or persons of interest, and they build these circumstantial cases, and oftentimes they're way off the mark, even with the Circumstantial cases, cases, but they miss. You know, what we look at is we have to find a nexus to the crime. We can't just say, well, this person lived in an area where these crimes were committed, or this or that. Working Golden State Killer. I have built tremendous circumstantial cases against numerous individuals. Some of these individuals, I think to this day, circumstantially match up better than d'. Angelo. And only I eliminated them with DNA. So when you start working these cases with this type of notoriety and you
- [254:52]
Terry Turchi
cast such a wide net of suspects,
- [254:55]
Tom Colbert
you know, 10,000 people being looked at,
- [254:59]
Terry Turchi
you are going to find individuals that
- [255:02]
Tom Colbert
have circumstantial aspects to them, to where you go, well, this, this can't be coincident. It must be him.
- [255:09]
Terry Turchi
And I will tell you, it's coincidence.
- [255:12]
Tom Colbert
Personally, the only way I am going to believe that the Zodiac has been identified is if they do get that objective identifying evidence that shows this is the guy. Do they, do they match DNA? If they get DNA from, let's say, envelopes or stamps that the Zodiac sent
- [255:32]
Terry Turchi
in, can they get DNA off of
- [255:34]
Tom Colbert
the, the bindings at the Zodiac brought with them to the lake? Barry Essese. Or does somebody find a shoebox, you know, in their, maybe their dad's house
- [255:45]
Terry Turchi
after he dies that has, you know, Paul Stine's bloody shirt in it, you know, something like that.
- [255:52]
Tom Colbert
Now I'm interested, but I've seen it too many times. They throw these, these names out there, and this is, this is a Zodiac. I'm not convinced. And, and I don't think the Zodiac
- [256:05]
Terry Turchi
has been identified yet.
- [256:06]
Megyn Kelly
For now, the mystery continues. But we're going to stay on it. We will bring you updates. Thanks for listening to the Megyn Kelly show. No bs, no agenda, and no fear.
- [256:22]
Terry Turchi
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Tom Colbert
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Terry Turchi
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Tom Colbert
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