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Unto the episode,

1:01

Hey it's Jake here, I just wanted

1:03

to give you a heads up that this episode

1:06

contains a detailed account of a hate

1:08

crime, a murder previously

1:19

on deep Cover.

1:22

Greig Peterson, you don't know us, but we're here.

1:24

I want to talk to you federal agents. Can

1:27

we approach you? And Craig

1:29

just looked at us and

1:32

said, I don't know what you're talking

1:34

about.

1:35

I think he says something like, yeah, we heard rumors about that

1:37

that someone said we did a homicide.

1:39

But man's now, that's nothing

1:41

to it. We didn't do any homicides. It's

1:44

a bunch of junk.

1:45

You could feel the tension, but you

1:47

can also feel like he's about to

1:49

say something, and then he says,

1:54

I'll tell you everything.

2:02

So there are Scott Duffy and

2:04

Terry Mortimer in a conference room

2:07

at the FBI's offices in Willington,

2:09

Delaware, and they're sitting

2:11

on the edge of their seats because

2:13

across the table from them is Craig Peterson,

2:16

the electrician from Vermont with the spiderweb

2:19

tattoo. Now they

2:21

suspect that Craig was an accomplice to a

2:23

murder. For months, Craig had been playing

2:25

at cool, admitting to nothing. But

2:28

now in this conference room, Craig

2:31

has promised to tell them everything.

2:34

It was a moment that I think

2:37

of everything that Terry

2:39

and I had been through, had prayed

2:41

through, and

2:45

this was the moment in time. This

2:48

was it. It was almost like, this

2:51

is the reason why

2:53

you were brought together.

2:56

Mind you, this moment, it wasn't

2:58

just the result of good luck. Two

3:00

days prior, Scott and Terry had

3:03

played their best and last card.

3:05

They had handed Craig a subpoena to appear

3:08

before a grand jury. They

3:10

were hoping that this would get him talking. It

3:13

was a long shot.

3:13

Really.

3:14

Truth was, the Feds had very

3:17

little on Craig, but Craig

3:20

he offered to tell them everything.

3:22

Before he did, however, he

3:24

made a request.

3:26

He says, I need to have assurances,

3:30

and we said what type of assurances?

3:33

Well, you have a prosecutor on board.

3:36

Can you call the prosecutor? Absolutely, we can call

3:38

the prosecutor. But

3:42

Greg, you gotta I

3:44

can't just call a prosecutor over here and waste

3:46

his time. You've

3:49

got to tell us what is it

3:51

we're asking the prosecutor to come for. And

3:55

that's when he

3:57

says, I'm not the shooter and

4:02

I want immunity.

4:06

Upon hearing this, Scott's partner

4:08

Terry, kind of sat up in his chair.

4:12

Now I'm thinking myself, this dude's

4:14

pretty savvy. Dude thinking like

4:16

attorneys talk about immunity, Federal agents talk

4:18

about immunity. Not the

4:20

electricians from Earl and Tim Vermont

4:23

get like, where did you get that from? That's

4:25

what he said, I want immunity.

4:27

Now, Typically giving someone immunity

4:30

is not a quick or easy task, especially

4:33

in a situation like this where

4:35

someone's been murdered. Getting

4:37

all the higher ups to sign off can take

4:39

days or longer, but

4:41

Scott knew time was of the essence.

4:44

He needed to jump on this before Craig

4:46

changed his mind. Fortunately

4:49

he had a prosecutor on standby.

4:52

Prosecutor dropped

4:54

everything, ran to my office. We

4:57

spoke with him briefly, saying, in

4:59

so many words, he's confessed and

5:03

we don't know where to go from here. And

5:06

so he said, so

5:09

what you need is immunity? Am

5:12

I hearing that?

5:13

And Scott's like, yeah, that's exactly

5:16

what Craig is asking for. And the

5:18

prosecutor is like, I think I can

5:20

help you, guys. But first,

5:23

the prosecutor had one crucial question

5:25

and he wants to ask it directly to Craig.

5:28

So he hurries over to the conference

5:31

room.

5:32

And the first thing the prosecutor asked him very

5:34

first thing, are

5:37

you the shooter if it comes

5:39

back at all in any way that you

5:42

pulled the trigger? Deals

5:44

off, no immunity

5:46

nothing.

5:48

Craig tells them, no, I

5:51

didn't pull the trigger, wasn't me. The

5:54

prosecutor seems satisfied. He

5:56

whips out a pen and begins to write

5:58

out a grant of federal immunity.

6:01

I'm looking at Scott in one this

6:04

is unbelievable, that never.

6:06

Happens, but that's

6:08

exactly what happened.

6:10

So with that, Craig

6:13

tells us that he starts the

6:16

Damn breaks.

6:19

Up until now, Scott and Terry had

6:21

been going on a prayer, quite literally,

6:24

chasing down rumors and nothing more.

6:27

But that was about to change.

6:30

A confession was at hand, one

6:32

that would validate Scott and Terry's hope

6:35

that they were uncovering something they were

6:37

destined to find. Ultimately,

6:39

this confession would upend many people's

6:42

lives. It would transform

6:44

a whispered rumor into a full blown

6:46

murder investigation, and maybe,

6:49

just maybe it could lead them to the victim.

7:05

I'm Jake Alpern and this is Deep

7:08

Cover, Season four, The

7:10

Nameless Man, Episode

7:24

two, The Confession. After

7:37

the Damn Breaks, Craig just starts

7:39

talking, recounting what he could remember

7:41

from that night back in nineteen eighty nine

7:44

when he and tom Guybison were

7:46

still in high school.

7:48

And so he starts telling us how it went down. That

7:50

basically that he and Tommy

7:53

decided one night to go

7:55

and find a black man, to

7:58

kill that black man so that they

8:00

could get their spider web tattoos as

8:03

skinheads.

8:04

Craig tells them. They borrowed his mother's

8:07

car, a gray Chevy. Craig

8:10

drove, Tom was in the passenger seat.

8:13

They'd gotten their hands on a gun, a thirty

8:15

eight caliber Revolver, and they

8:17

started looking for a target.

8:19

All of this, by the way, and what I'm about to

8:21

tell you, is based on Scott and Terry's

8:24

recollections and the report

8:26

that they filed at the time, and also

8:28

from sworn testimony that Scott, Terry,

8:31

and Craig later provided. Anyway,

8:34

Initially, Craig and Tom drove through Wilmington,

8:37

Delaware, where they lived.

8:41

He said it was very busy. He said,

8:43

there were just so many people out and

8:45

there would be no way that they would be able to

8:47

shoot somebody and not have a witness around.

8:50

So they made the decision to leave Wilmington

8:53

and travel north.

8:55

They drove north on the Interstate until

8:57

they reached Philadelphia. Here,

8:59

they got off at the Broad Street exit.

9:02

By now it was late. Craig wasn't

9:04

sure exactly how late, but the

9:06

streets were mostly empty. Craig

9:09

said. At one point they stopped and stole

9:11

a license plate to put on his mom's

9:14

car as an added measure of protection,

9:17

just in case someone witnessed what they were

9:19

about to do. At

9:21

some point, they passed a large wall, and

9:23

eventually they turned onto a one way street.

9:27

Craig's driving, and they drive down a very dark

9:29

street, and Tommy is

9:31

in the passenger side, and he

9:34

tells Craig slowed down, slowed

9:36

down.

9:36

Slowed down, because up ahead they

9:38

saw a pedestrian, a lone black

9:41

man, as

9:43

Craig recounted it, the man turned

9:45

and started walking toward them.

9:48

Tommy pulled out a thirty eight caliber

9:50

revolver, leaned out

9:52

the window and shot

9:55

him and exclaimed,

9:58

I got him right between the eyes.

10:01

The way Craig remembered is the

10:03

guy hit the ground so hard that

10:08

he I had to be dead.

10:11

Craig said that even all these

10:13

years later, he still remembered the

10:15

sound of that thud as the man

10:17

fell onto the pavement.

10:27

And that was it.

10:29

These two high school kids, with their

10:31

gun and their mom's car sped

10:34

off into the night, back home to

10:36

Delaware. So

10:41

far, this entire investigation

10:43

had been based on a rumor, a

10:46

rumor that initially seemed like

10:48

it might be impossible to verify the

10:50

two teenagers drove into a nearby

10:53

city to murder a complete stranger

10:55

because of the color of his skin, and

10:58

that they'd commemorated this murder with

11:00

a tattoo. It

11:05

was the kind of story that you didn't want to believe

11:07

in, because if it were

11:09

true, what did that say about us

11:11

as human beings? About our capacity

11:14

for hate and cold bloodedness?

11:17

In a way, the veracity of this

11:19

rumor was about more than just one

11:21

murder. It seemed like a

11:23

test, a light meter that would

11:25

measure just how dark the depths of humanity

11:28

could be. It

11:30

all hinged on a single question, could

11:33

these kids really have done this? And

11:36

in a situation like this, you

11:38

almost have to hope, maybe even pray,

11:40

that the answer is no, because

11:42

then the world isn't so bad, right.

11:46

But if the answer is yes, they

11:48

really did this, well,

11:50

then the depths are darker

11:53

than most of us would care to admit. As

12:02

Craig recounted the details of the murder

12:04

in that FBI conference room, Scott

12:07

listened intently. If you

12:09

recall, Scott had trained to become a priest

12:12

back then, sometimes people would notice

12:14

his priest's collar and just start talking,

12:17

sharing their darkest secrets. So

12:20

Scott he was comfortable in this

12:22

role as the confessor. He knew

12:24

how to listen, how to watch, which

12:26

is exactly what he did as Craig

12:28

spoke.

12:30

And when when you watch somebody

12:32

tell the story,

12:35

you can tell that they are just reliving

12:39

it, that they were there. It was

12:42

just amazing to

12:44

watch, because that's all I'm doing, is watching

12:46

him.

12:48

Craig's confession raised so many questions

12:50

for Scott and Terry, like why

12:52

would Craig, the steadfast sidekick,

12:55

turn on his old friend now because

12:58

in the past Craig had been very

13:00

loyal, Like a few years back,

13:03

Craig had tried to protect Tom from the authorities

13:05

by storing some weapons for him, weapons

13:08

that Tom wasn't supposed to have. Craig

13:10

paid for this, did a few years in prison

13:12

in fact, so maybe he

13:15

was willing to talk now just to avoid

13:17

a repeat of that. Craig

13:19

got out of federal prison in nineteen ninety

13:21

nine. A few years later he

13:24

moved north to Vermont, to that house

13:26

in the mountains with the dogs and the

13:28

floodlights. Bottom line,

13:31

it seemed like Craig had made a decision to

13:33

escape his old life and maybe

13:35

to escape Tom too, I

13:38

should mention. We reached out to both

13:40

Craig and Tom for this story.

13:43

Craig declined an interview. We never

13:45

heard back from Tom, but

13:48

here's what we can say about Tom. He

13:50

had a long and well documented history

13:53

of violence. As a teenager,

13:55

he'd been convicted of reckless endangerment

13:58

after he shot a gun at a moving car

14:00

full of people. Police

14:02

records from the time confirmed that Tom

14:05

had an arsenal of weapons, including

14:07

a billy club, two blocks, black jacks,

14:10

two sets of brass knuckles, and a

14:12

mess of knives. To put

14:14

it plainly, Tom seemed like the kind of friend

14:16

that you might not want to anger by

14:19

turning on him.

14:20

We believed

14:24

that a

14:27

real danger existed. There

14:29

is a very real potential

14:32

of danger against Craig. People

14:35

will go to great lengths to

14:37

protect their their self

14:39

interests, but.

14:42

At this point there was no turning

14:44

back for Craig. More

14:47

after the break, Scott

15:04

and Terry now had a confession, which

15:07

under normal circumstances would be

15:09

a very big deal, potentially a

15:11

game changer, and in some

15:13

ways the confession was very promising.

15:16

Craig were called some details, like

15:18

the moment of the actual shooting vividly

15:21

in a way that might be very persuasive

15:23

for a jury. The problem

15:25

was the alleged murder took place more

15:28

than seventeen years prior, and

15:30

there was so much that Craig did not remember.

15:33

For instance, he couldn't tell the FEDS

15:35

where exactly this happened. He

15:37

couldn't provide the name of a street or

15:40

intersection or park, nor

15:42

could he tell them exactly when this happened,

15:45

could not offer a day, or a week or even

15:47

a month. Most vexing of all,

15:50

Craig had no idea who the victim was. And

15:53

this right here underscored

15:55

the central problem that Scott and Terry

15:57

had been facing from the very beginning. Simply

16:00

put, they didn't have a body.

16:04

They were trying to solve the murder of an unknown

16:06

man, and without knowing who

16:08

he was, they couldn't

16:10

do much of anything. But

16:13

Scott remained determined, we.

16:16

Have to do our job and we have

16:18

to find out who

16:21

did they kill. If if possible,

16:24

how are we going to do that? It then felt

16:27

like a mandate, like Okay,

16:30

we're we're in this.

16:33

This sounds awfully confident, But both

16:36

Scott and Terry told me that they felt on

16:38

some level like they were trying to find a needle

16:40

in a haystack. They both use that

16:43

exact phrase, which raises

16:45

the question, how do you find a needle

16:47

in a haystack? Well, in

16:49

theory, you start by sorting through all

16:52

the pieces of hay right. In other words,

16:54

you create a finite pool of possibilities.

16:59

So let's talk about the finite the things

17:01

Craig knew or claim to know with

17:03

some certainty. Craig knew the

17:05

murder took place sometime around the spring

17:07

of nineteen eighty nine. He remember this

17:10

in part because he recalled going to senior

17:12

prom not long after the murder took place.

17:16

So the agents had a year nineteen

17:19

eighty nine, and they had a city,

17:21

Philadelphia, And for whatever

17:23

it was worth, Craig had mentioned a one

17:26

way street and a dark colored wall.

17:29

According to police accounts, there were

17:31

four hundred and seventy three murders in

17:33

Philadelphia that year. So

17:35

in theory, one of those murder victims

17:38

was their nameless man. But

17:40

which one

17:44

turns out, our federal agents they

17:46

had an ace up their sleeve. Scott

17:48

knew someone, someone he believed could really

17:51

help them, a detective who worked

17:53

in the homicide unit of the Philadelphia

17:55

Police Department, a veteran investigator

17:58

named Leon Lubieski went

18:00

by Lubi for short. Scott

18:04

gave me a very vivid picture of

18:06

what Luby looked like.

18:09

Large physical stature, Like when you hear

18:11

a bear, you think of a

18:13

bear, and you know, scary

18:15

or cuddly. I mean, bear

18:18

has many different views

18:21

depending on who you ask, right, but

18:24

nobody will ever deny

18:26

the fact that a bear is big.

18:28

And you can't argue with Scott on that one.

18:32

When you saw him, you perked

18:34

up and you're like, oh, he's not somebody

18:37

to fool around with.

18:39

But apparently Luby also had

18:41

this other aspect.

18:43

He had the face of someone

18:46

who is just extremely caring.

18:50

You just looked at him, you knew immediately

18:53

this is somebody who will do anything to help

18:55

you. So he was a multifaceted bear,

18:58

multifaceted cuddly,

19:00

but he could turn grizzly if

19:03

he needed to. Scott's hope

19:05

was that his old friend Lubi, the multifaceted

19:08

bear, could now help them find

19:10

the victim.

19:21

Hello, Hey, is this Louby.

19:24

It's Louby Louby. This is

19:26

Jake, is this still a good time to talk to you? Yeah,

19:29

it's scrip time.

19:31

It took me a while to track Luby down.

19:33

He's retired now. When

19:35

we spoke, he remembered the case

19:37

right away.

19:39

They had these details, but

19:42

they didn't actually have a body to

19:44

go with it. How unusual is

19:46

that to have someone

19:48

say, hey, we we're

19:50

pretty certain there's a murder, we have a confession.

19:52

We just we got no body. That's

19:57

rather unusual.

19:59

Scott had passed along a short list of

20:01

facts to Luby to help him with his

20:03

task. They included the following

20:06

one the area where Craig remembered

20:08

drive, two the type of

20:10

weapon that was used, three the

20:13

nature of the wound, a single shot to

20:15

the head for the race of

20:17

the victim, and five a general

20:19

timeframe for when this happened, the

20:21

spring of nineteen eighty nine. How

20:25

optimistic were you that you were going to

20:27

be able to get them what

20:29

they needed to solve this.

20:33

I was actually

20:35

very optimistic because we keep pretty

20:37

good records on our dead bodies.

20:40

For Scott and Terry, this was a search

20:42

for a needle in a haystack. But Louby

20:45

was an insider who knew how things worked

20:47

in Philly and knew exactly

20:49

where to look. As far

20:51

as the records go. The authorities

20:54

believed this murder case would

20:56

have been marked as unsolved. It happened

20:58

back in nineteen eighty nine, and Luby

21:00

was getting this request seventeen years

21:03

later in the spring of two thousand

21:05

and six.

21:07

So what happens with a case when it goes up

21:09

solved, Well, it stays

21:11

with the assigned detective, and

21:14

that he gets a chance, he goes out and works

21:16

on it in between things. If

21:19

he doesn't, it just lays there, becomes

21:21

cold.

21:22

Basically, the file just sits there

21:24

in a file cabinet in the homicide

21:26

department.

21:27

Homicides just want one

21:30

big room, and there's file cabinets

21:32

all along the walls, and

21:34

in those file cabinets are the open cases.

21:38

And then they move from into storage.

21:40

Luby told me that typically after

21:42

a few years, the unsolved case files

21:45

are sent to the city's storage facility,

21:47

a big ten story building. The

21:50

homicide files are kept down in

21:52

the basement.

21:53

And when that happens, the assigned detective

21:55

he no longer it's

21:58

a bit of a problem for him to get to his case.

22:00

File now, so is

22:02

it kind of a little bit out of sight,

22:04

out of mind.

22:05

And basically once it goes

22:07

into storage, like the supervisor doesn't

22:10

bother you anymore to get anything done on it.

22:13

So it's like in limbo.

22:16

As far as I could tell, these cold cases

22:18

kept down in the basement, kind of like

22:20

the messages at the very bottom of your

22:22

inbox that slowly recede

22:24

from your consciousness and eventually

22:27

get moved into some folder that you'll

22:29

most likely never look at again. So

22:33

when Luby got the call from Scott and Terry,

22:36

he didn't have the actual case files from nineteen

22:38

eighty nine right at his fingertips. What

22:41

he had was a loosely finder

22:43

an index of all the murders from

22:45

the past. This index

22:48

was a collection of so called summary

22:50

sheets.

22:51

It's a single page. It's got the deceased

22:53

name, cause death. You

22:56

know what the outcome is, It's still open.

23:00

Thanks to that nature, Louby

23:03

searches through these summary sheets and

23:05

narrows the possibilities down to unsolve

23:07

murders that occurred around the spring

23:10

anywhere from January through May.

23:13

There were thirty seven of them. Then

23:15

he weeded out all the ones that didn't match

23:18

up with the details that Scott had given him.

23:21

In the end, Luby was left with

23:23

just one case, an unsolved

23:26

murder from April sixteenth, nineteen

23:28

eighty nine, of a thirty three year old

23:30

black man. He was

23:32

killed by a single thirty eight caliber

23:35

bullet to the head. This

23:38

happened in North Philadelphia on a

23:40

one way street, just one block away

23:43

from an imposing stone wall.

23:47

Louby made arrangements to get the entire

23:49

case file pulled out of storage

23:52

unearthed from that basement, and

23:54

then he reached back out to Scott

23:57

Louby facts the summary sheet directly

23:59

over to the FBI's offices in Wilmington,

24:02

Delaware. It was an efficient

24:04

bit of detective work. He'd done

24:06

all of this in roughly twenty four hours.

24:09

So you can imagine Scott's

24:12

reaction when, just a day

24:14

after getting Craig's confession of

24:16

facts arrives from Luby and

24:19

Scott. He just holds it

24:21

in his hands and stares

24:23

at it.

24:24

It was.

24:27

Unbelievable feeling

24:30

that this is it. Seeing the

24:32

name and

24:36

seeing the the specifics

24:40

of the crime, having

24:42

a location a street,

24:49

I don't even think I put it down. It was this

24:54

is it.

24:57

Wait, how could you be so certain?

24:58

I don't know. I just felt

25:01

like everything

25:04

that Craig told us

25:10

fit this very crime.

25:12

And so much of it did seem to fit,

25:15

including the time frame, the one

25:17

way street, the proximity of the

25:19

wall, the caliber of the bullet,

25:21

the single shot to the head. The

25:24

motive noted on the facts was one word

25:27

drugs. Objectively,

25:29

at this point you could not say it was a

25:31

slam dunk. There was no DNA

25:34

match. No one had found a murder

25:36

weapon and matched it to a bullet from

25:38

the scene of the crime. None of that. But

25:41

even so, Scott remembers

25:43

turning to his partner Terry, and

25:46

saying.

25:47

We have a name. We

25:49

have a victim. Terry,

25:52

I think this is This is why

25:54

we're here. We believe

25:56

this is this

25:59

is who we've been pursuing. That

26:01

was pretty

26:04

powerful to us.

26:06

At long last, they had a name. It

26:09

was right there on the facts plane

26:11

to see, printed out in smudgy

26:13

letters, Aron Would.

26:19

They strongly believed that he

26:21

was the victim. This was a huge

26:23

moment in their investigation, and

26:25

yet it could still amount to

26:27

nothing. Identifying a potential

26:30

victim did not guarantee a conviction

26:32

or even guarantee that there'd be a trial.

26:35

Now, the question was would

26:37

there be enough evidence to bring a case

26:39

and convince a jury that this

26:42

is what happened all those years ago.

26:46

Terry and I said, it may be that

26:48

this does not ever go to a court. There

26:50

may be nothing that we can do, or Philadelphia

26:53

can do, even with Craig's

26:56

cooperation, that this is

26:58

ever going to see the inside of a court,

27:00

and letting Craig know that

27:05

this all may be just to

27:09

give Iran

27:12

Wood's family some

27:16

sense of some

27:19

sense of.

27:23

Understanding, but

27:27

a kind of terrible understanding, right.

27:30

Yeah, definitely. I just believe having

27:33

no name, having

27:37

no understanding

27:43

of how your loved one's life came

27:45

to an end, who did it and for what purpose?

27:48

I think, can drive you

27:50

mad.

27:54

As investigators would soon learn, Iran

27:57

Wood had a family, including a mother

27:59

and two younger brothers. For

28:01

seventeen years, they'd been searching for answers

28:04

about how and why he died. The

28:07

last chapter of Iran's life was

28:09

like a story that stopped abruptly mid

28:12

page. No explanation, no

28:14

closure. There have been very little

28:17

to hold on to. But

28:19

all of that was about to change.

28:25

Next time on Deep Cover.

28:27

Everybody liked him.

28:29

That's why we was baffled, like,

28:32

Oh, somebody shot a run, shot

28:34

a run. You can't na no

28:37

way, And I guess that's what pleases

28:39

the most in the beginning, couldn't

28:42

figure it out.

29:09

Deep Cover is produced by Amy Gaines

29:11

McQuaid and Jacob Smith. It's

29:14

edited by Karen Schakerji mastering

29:16

by Jake Gorsky. Our show

29:19

art was designed by Sean Carney. Original

29:21

scoring in our theme was composed

29:23

by Luis Gara, fact checking

29:25

by Arthur Gomberts. Our

29:28

story consultant was James Foreman

29:30

Jr. Special thanks to Jerry

29:32

Williams, Sarah Nix, Greta Cone,

29:34

and Jake Flanagan. I'm Jake

29:36

alber

30:11

The po