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Chapter 2 One of my first phone conversations with John before we met, I asked him if he thought it was possible that maybe Kaitlyn Burt hadn't killed anybody. It was possible that the murder he contacted me about was actually just a rumor. A fiction. No, John said there was little down his mind that it was true.
And then by wave explanation, he launched into this parable. Let me tell you something I saw one time. I should admit that at the time, this story was completely lost on me. Me and Roger Price had went up with the truck to stop together to get a little dinner.
We came back by. It was passing by the South 40th right of park. So Roger's one of these dudes. He's a during a transmission mechanic.
He's not really talking to him. He's a good dude. He only has one too. And it's really amusing to see how he can balance a cigarette on that one too.
The whole time he's talking and it's just bouncing around all over that one too. We're coming by. Welcome to South 40ch and there's this girl out there walking around in front of the damn side holding a cell phone. She's got a pink top and nothing else.
No fucking panties. No goddamn socks barefoot. And I remarked that to Roger. I don't remember what I said.
I probably said, but God, look at her or something like that. And Roger's say she advised was, usually when you say jokers that they don't sell the gift like that. That's the lesson. That went just straight through you.
Like so many things having to do with John, it took me a long time to understand the meaning of this story. Years. But I think I finally get it now. From Serial and This American Life, I'm Brian Reed.
This is shit him. My second night in Alabama, I finally get to talk to Jake Goodson. Jake's the guy who had originally told John that Capenbur had bragged him outside the little Caesars about beating a guy to death. I sit with Jake and John's kitchen, asking him to rack his brain for any extra details that could help me solve this.
It was a while ago, he says, his memories are fuzzy. But he makes a suggestion that, I don't know, seems crazy to me. I could get him and ask him and he'll be able to tell me. If he had probably come up here and talk to you about it, Capen.
Capen lives right nearby. Why not just get it from the horse's mouth? No, probably so. That makes no sense.
I would stick a microphone in his face and he would tell me about a guy he killed. It's probably, he's burned up. He went no better. He's probably just laughing about it with you.
I tell Jake no thanks. At least not now. I do not feel like I'm armed with enough information to confront Capenbur yet. Aside from seeming far-fetched, the idea also just sounded potentially dangerous.
For John, for Jake, and for me. But then the next night, a bunch of other people proposed the exact same thing. Talk to you dude. I mean he's burned out.
He's arrogant dude. He don't give a fuck. I know he would. I'm pretty sure he would.
Probably tell you the truth. I'm chatting with a few guys on a tattoo parlor. All of whom have heard about the murder. Some are pretty sure they heard from Capen himself.
Can we call him and ask him? No, don't do that. No, I'm not a person. I'm a fuck.
Apparently I'm the Puss because I do not want the dudes I'm talking to to call Capen right now. Already this tattoo shop does not feel like the safest place to walk into alone at night. Trying to get the gun photo about a covered up murder by a guy everyone seems to know. All of which are things I've just done.
The last thing I want right now is for the alleged murder show up. I was invited here by Tyler Goodson, Jake's brother, who by Matt and John's workshop while he was filing that chain saw. He's one of the owners. Tyler knows Cabrum.
They're both in the early 20s. And I thought maybe some of Tyler's friends who hang out here might have more information about the possible murder. John didn't feel like coming with me because he was driving at night. When I walk in at first it seems like a pretty small place.
Just a couple of at two stations and a little waiting area. But if you push the back wall of the shop, it swings open. It's a secret door. Which leads into a hidden clubhouse in the back.
There's a bar with some people around it. A pool table, small stage with motorcycles parked there. And a brass stripper pole that's currently vacant. The shop is called Black Sheepink.
And I learned that the guys who hang out here take the name to heart. They see themselves as a collection of misfits. Of self-proclaimed criminals and runways and hillbillies. And Tyler has built this place as a haven for them.
A place to swap their tails of getting jerked around by cops and judges and clerks and bosses. And to cultivate a sense of pride in their status as the outcasts of their world. There's this gentleman who's name I never to catch who tells me quote, I'm so fucking fat I don't care no more. And lifts up his shirt to show me the giant words he has tattooed on his stomach.
Feed me. Tyler, give him a picture. I'm a six foot 350 pound bearded man and John Deere hat would feed me on my belly. Just so y'all get a clear picture here.
There's a guy who's been wearing the same trucker hat for seven years. Same hat. Then there's this guy. People call him razor.
Man, man was back in the outside of his working side. He's got a bit he will ricks up. He got a wall thrown comb by man and seen the yard already die. And was his already died.
And was my bastard's ass turned yard out to be out to be in the outside of six beers. He's a shit face. I believe he's telling a story about his friend Willard who was impervious to death. You know I've gone over it three times and one fucking night.
Three times. One night. The bastard won't die. And then there's Tyler who's been sleeping at the tattoo bar lately because he can't afford anywhere else to spend the night.
He was 23 years old and has three daughters with three different women and who's been haunted his whole life by people assuming he's just like his father. His father who abused him and his siblings and his mother and who was a convicted sex offender for having sex with a minor. One day Tyler will tell me that he often wakes up in the morning in a puddle of sweat having dreamt during the night of killing his dad. Tyler's friendly to me when I arrive welcoming.
As I'm getting out my recording equipment I hear murmurs from other people wondering who I am wondering if I might be a cop. People are asking me questions, feeling me out. If you guys ask if I'll smoke a bowl with them out of some beer antlers. I don't want to be stoned but I also don't want to seem like a narc so I pretend to take a puff.
I pretend to do a number of things that make me feel very uncomfortable in order to keep as low a profile as possible. Such as act like I'm not shocked or upset or scared when someone says this to me, a radio producer with a microphone in the first few minutes that we're talking. At the risk of ruining any surprise the statement is racist and nonsensical, replete with multiple uses of a terrible word. You know we had a tax-free labor that didn't have nothing to do with a bunch of niggas picking cotton and we worked our ass off and we earned everything we got.
This is a tattoo artist who goes by Bubba. So now we have a tax payer job. You got to take care of some niggas wife that's in jail because she's drawing a child sport check on each woman. Later Bubba will display a rather fluent knowledge of the differences between various white supremacy groups.
Mind you we're in a majority black city right now, Bessimer. About 20 minutes from Bibb County heading towards Birmingham. But everyone in here is white including me. Someone mentions offhand that the small tattoo area in front is about as much shop as you want here in Bessimer.
Otherwise the place will be filled with black people who piss you off and won't pay anything. Hence the secret door. Before I left for Alabama my girlfriend Solange, now my wife, who's black and whose family is from the south, had insisted I make my Facebook and Instagram accounts private. Because they're filled with pictures of us together.
I told her she was being silly, overly paranoid. Now I'm grateful I decided at the last minute to follow her advice. When someone asked me what the women look like up in New York, I tell them they're all shapes, sizes and colors. When someone asked what my ethnicity is, I tell them about the Italian part without mentioning the Russian Jew part.
But there's no hiding the fact that I'm a Yankee. Y'all just as racist as we are. Let's go quieter. Y'all left on my foot down here.
In an effort to change the subject, I turn the conversation to one of the few things I know have in common with these guys. See you guys know John? Our mutual acquaintance, John D. Maclomer.
Who do you have? He's a character. I never met nobody else like him. Nobody like him.
You've been bugging to piss out of you? What's that? You've been bugging to piss out of you? Yeah, but it's exhausting to hang out with him for a long day.
He's a Zalz and I apologize. He's a slow-to-fuck now, but you want to tell him slow down. They tell me John comes around the tattoo parlor pretty often and likes to lecture them and give them a hard time. He'll argue with them about their views on the south, on politics, on race, but it says he'll submit them to tirades about the coming climate and energy apocalypse.
How is running out of fossil fuels and the world was going to come to the fucking end? John tells off their customers for talking about what he sees as an ancient shit, tells these guys that their lives are mounting to nothing, that their examples in the flesh of what's wrong with this place. This is another tattoo artist. He calls you guys failures.
Fuck yeah, he calls us failures. You know what I mean? It's like jokingly? No, everybody's a failure.
Like in his brain everybody's a failure. For all I know you could be a failure. You know, sometimes I wish he could kind of fail. These guys dished out too.
They teased John for his many peculiarities. Like how he'll devour whatever leftover food is around, no matter how old or rock hard it is. His ability to buy new shoes to alleviate his athlete's foot, which he's allegedly had for three years. His extemporaneous solving and math problems.
His utter aversion to being in a room with more than two or three people at a time. His living with his mom his whole life. His being a loner. It's friendly though.
They like John. After all, John is the granddaddy of all black sheep. So the screw gets him. They truly seem to accept him.
Though that doesn't stop them from wondering. I'd love to know what he's worth. I'd love to know what he's worth if you need me guys says. Just not because I give a fuck.
Just to know why does he live like that. How is he gonna be? Poor as church, bro. That's Tyler saying.
He lives like he's poor as a church mouse. And Tyler would know. He and John are close. He's the only reason all these guys know John.
Tyler helped build John's maze. He's done all sorts of different odd jobs for him. He's over there all the time. And as far as the church mouse, I did notice that John's refrigerator is pretty bare.
His mom invited me to stay for dinner one night. So long as I didn't mind even like po-folk she told me in a way where I couldn't tell she was joking. They live without air conditioning, without TV. It's mysterious to me too because at the same time John has all these dogs he feeds and brings to the vet, this elaborate yard that requires constant upkeep.
He mentioned to me that he spent more than $60,000 on the maze alone. Feed me guys says to Tyler. I don't understand why. If he's as low as you say.
He is. He is. He's worth millions. Millions?
Have you not done any research on John? Tyler explains that John's family comes for money. He says that one of his grandpas was a judge and John got an inheritance and played the stock market with it and made even more money. Aside from all that Tyler says John made good bank restoring old clocks.
All of that sounds like it could be true enough. But then Tyler and his friend start listing off John's assets and I can't tell if any of that is real or if they're just letting their imaginations fill in the blanks about their local Boo Radley. They claim John is $400,000 in cash, $100,000 worth of tools in the workshop, all the antiques around his house, you're going to get $150,000 for yourself. That old ass shit Bubba says.
Where books in the basement? A single clock worth $10,000 that's just sitting on the floor in a plastic storage bin? Not to mention since Tyler. Go that his grandad, his grandad, his goad, his dad, his stuff.
Tyler's up on the counter of the bar, crouching. He has a brown briefcase he carries around with him. He calls it his minister's case. It has a sticker that says Minister's Slap on the outside.
And it's filled with his tattoo machines and a gun and his welders cap and some nipple jewelry and his black-sheeping business cards and also his minister's license, which he got online because he wanted to found a non-denominational church where people of all backgrounds could come together and talk it out. This clubhouse is meant to be a version of that. He says it's his church. Tyler stares down at us from the corner of the bar like he's about to divulge a secret.
When it comes to John, he says there's no telling. What? He's got because there's a lot of shit that I'm sure I don't know about because I've been finding stuff out slowly over the years and there's no secret little dungeons and shit under his downhouse, man. I ain't playing.
I've built gates for. I've built gates for the night. I've built gates for the dungeons, Tyler's telling me, dungeons in John's basement. He soon clarifies their actual old crawl spaces, but the way John had them ring them up, Tyler says, with tiny doors and these locking iron gates inside, dividing them into sections, what was the purpose of all that?
It was creepy. But Tyler digs creepy stuff, so he also thought it was cool. That guy Bubba, the one who's especially outspoken about his racist views, as the night goes on, I put together that he's the one who gave John all his tattoos, the tattoos that John showed me up roughly at his workshop that cover his whole chest. Bubba explains that being a tattoo artist is a lot like being a therapist.
People sit in his chair for hours on end and each person he works on is getting that tattoo for some specific reason. It's his job if he sees it to uncover that reason. Maybe it's a meditation, a milestone, an excuse to get out of a house, a new girlfriend, a death. John's motivation was especially bewildering to Bubba because John made it clear almost every time he came in the shot how deeply he despised tattoos.
You got a tattoo on your etu, you wouldn't shit, your low life, you shouldn't have that on you. So a shocking as it was to me when John lifted up his shirt to show me all his tattoos, it was far more shocking to Bubba when John strolled in one day at the age of 47 and asked him to start putting them there. I thought he was going to commit suicide. That's what I thought in my mind.
Why? Is it something you're completely against? You think fucking failures at tattoo, you know what I'm saying? Why on a buck would you just start tattooing your whole upper body like that?
You know what I mean? And around your neck, pistons, tattooing pistons on him, you know, redneck ass tattoo, you know. So I mean, first thought I thought he was going to kill himself. I thought he was going to get tatted to fuck up and blow his brains out or something.
I don't know. And then the more I got to do it, you know, I realize, you know, we're in a rut, you know, we need some money and he helped us out. I mean, he helped a lot. Bubba and Tyler Coo and Black Sheep Inc together.
And Bubba started noticing they'd have a bill about to come do for the business. They'd be wondering how they were going to pay it. And then conveniently John would come in and hand over $300 or $400 and ask for another tattoo on his chest. Bubba says people around here don't throw down money like that.
John would just in the nick of time and then schedule another appointment for soon after. He might not have said I'm helping you out, but when you sit down and pay me $2,000, $3,000 in a couple weeks span, you just help me out. You know, you just cut my bills, you just got everything back to where it needed to be. You know.
You think that's why he did it? Now I do. He keeps a book, man. He writes down everything.
So he knows when we're having a bad time. He'd ask certain things like what's the rent, you know, what's your power bill wins it do. And he already knows this shit because he writes shit down. He's just, you know, planned his tattoo out, but we're pretty much played everything up in increments.
Wait, it was like that exactly. Almost. If it wasn't for John, we'd be shut the fuck down. It wasn't for John.
Yeah, if it wasn't for John, I'd be tattooing at my kitchen table right now. And I think he sacrificed his skin to help us out. Bubba says John is an emotional guy and sure a lot of that emotion is discussed. But there's also sympathy, in particular for Tyler.
If he's helping the tattoo parlor, he's only doing it because of Tyler and his brother Jake. He's just watched him, boys, man. He knows how his daddy was. I mean, the kid was laying block at five years old.
Tyler, that is. You know, on the jobs site working, not going to school, working. Go to school two days a week, work by a days a week. You know what I mean?
So he just seen it and he knows it wasn't right. So he's what how Tyler's been programmed to be the way he is by his raising and his upbringing. You know, and feel sorry for him, I guess. I don't know.
Or knows that he's smarter than what he's letting on. I mean, I don't know. The Tyler is. Yeah.
When John hires Tyler to chop down trees in his yard or build iron gates in his crawl spaces, he doesn't really need that stuff done, Bubba says. He's just trying to find an excuse to put money in Tyler's pocket. When Tyler gets caught driving with a suspended license and ends up in jail, something that happens now and again, Bubba knows John's the one to call because he'll bail him out. He loves Tyler.
I mean, Tyler's his boy. I mean, this is his boy. Tyler's brother. He cares about Tyler's little brother, Jake.
You know, John can say anything he wants to do, but he loves Tyler probably just as much as you would your own son. You know, him flesh and blood. I ain't figured it out. We're standing in the backyard as we're talking behind the tattoo shop.
A train whistle starts to blow in the distance. Eventually, someone comes out and tells me I might be interested to know that Cabrum's sister, Cashinver, is here. Like right inside, 15 feet away from me. Why don't we just go ask her about the murder?
This town. I go to the bar, leave $6 for my beer, and careful to avoid Cabrum's sister. Head out the secret door, not knowing what I eventually will know months and months from now. The Cabrum bird didn't murder anybody, but also that before this is all over.
Someone will end up dead. More in a minute. Hi, this is Ashley. I live in San Francisco with my boyfriend.
We would love to officially share my new time subscription with separate logins. We both love cooking, loving in the kitchen, but in the 30 minute and under efficient dinner, I want a sheet pan meal. He is a elaborate. He wants to get into the storytelling.
I want to be able to save my easy meals and check off the ones I've completed, and I think him having his own profile would be great. Ashley, we heard you. It's why we created the New York Times family subscription. You get your own login, and Mr.
elaborate gets his. Plus room for two others. Find out more at nytimes.com.com. Hey, I'm Brian Reed.
I'm doing a radio story. I'm a reporter from New York. These are some of the quiet we could sit. It's a year later, and I'm pulling into K3 lumber on a Friday morning, nervously asking if K3 was around.
I feel comfortable doing this, only because I finally determined that the incident John contacted me about where K3 was allegedly gone to a fight and beat a guy to death. Although it did in fact go down almost exactly as John and Jake and Skyler and others told me was wrong in one relatively important detail, the to death part. The guy K3 did not die. They just thought he did for a while.
That's what I eventually gathered from talking to people more. Once I heard that, I started contacting law enforcement to find out what did exactly happen. It turns out the incident in question actually took place in the Tuscaloosa County, a chief at the Sheriff's department there read to me from a details case file showing that the police had investigated the fight thoroughly, that no one had been killed, and that they had closed the case not because they were paid off or anything, but because none of the guys involved wanted to press charges. And so here I am at K3 lumber to ask K3 why he would go around bragging to people that he'd killed a guy he had not killed.
He's with some coworkers in the lumber yard in a plaid shirt, green trucker hat, and dark sunglasses. Hey, I'm Brian Reed. There's a particular philosophy I've encountered down here, and we'll continue to encounter. That is the fuck it philosophy.
A belief that there's no sense in worrying or thinking too much about any given decision, because life is going to be difficult and unfair regardless of what you do. It's a belief really. It's a way of moving moments moment through the world. And from the get go, K3 seems to be a subscriber.
I show up with a microphone and ask if I can talk to him on the record about a matter I've yet to name, and he's immediately game. Fuck it. And we walk over behind some stacks of lumber to be alone. What do you want to talk about, bud?
So basically, were you at one point going around telling people that you'd killed someone? No, boy, cut my buddies neck out here with a knife. But no, I baked a piss out of him. What happened was, K3 says, they read a party and he doesn't know how the fight started, because he and almost everyone else were zonked out of their minds.
Drinking and doing everything else under the sun. And taking Xanax and doing Nixon's speed with it. According to the police report, it was a clear moonlit night, about 4 or 4 or 13 in the morning, on August 4th, 2012, just a few days outside the time window, John had discerned from his records. Kibram says all he remembers is they were in the middle of the woods, chilling around a fire, a fight broke out, and then suddenly the stewed Dylan, not Dylan Nichols, as John had told me.
He was not involved, but another Dylan with a different last name came up from behind with a knife, and cut Kibram's buddy Tim in the neck. So Kibram went after him, held Dylan's head down, punched him, hit him with a beer bottle, Tim got involved, might have bit the guy in the cheek, Dylan kept swinging his knife the whole time. He stabbed Kibram too. He brought up to your side there.
You almost cut my couch mate. And then it was over. Kibram thinks the whole thing lasted maybe 15 seconds. It wasn't some beautiful drawn out movie fight he says.
It was a real life fight, which means it was scrappy, awkward and quick, and left his friend Tim clutching a 4 inch gash on his neck that was gushing blood. Did you think like Tim might be like it might be life threatening? Yes, that is the craziest shit I've ever seen in my life. Kibram looked around and saw almost everyone at the party, maybe 30, 40 people, scattering.
Tim was in a bad way, so someone had called 911, and now people were driving away or hiding in the woods before the police got there. The ambulance came, carted Kibram and Tim to the hospital, and after getting a few stitches near the meat of his gooch, Kibram went outside to smoke a cigarette and bumped into a group of random girls from the party. Tell him he all kind of crazy shit like somebody had died, like up, but what were you going to fight with, Dad? What did you think?
He was like I don't think I got away, Dad. He said you wouldn't think so, he'll have the fight, it'd last that long. But still you had this part of your brain that was like maybe? Well yeah, I started coming down from Xanax and you get to think like oh god, I hope I didn't do something stupid.
I don't think nobody died, but if I did I ain't gonna hang around to find out. Kibram says he was kind of wicking out, wondering if he killed someone. He called a buddy of his to come pick him up at the hospital. That buddy was in a motel room full of meth-heads in Bessemer, Kibram says, and judging from police records and other sources, it seems possible the rumor that Dillon had been killed started in that motel room and then spread from there.
Kibram says by the time you have to work on Monday, it had already taken hold. People were coming up to him at the lumber yard and other places around town, asking if he killed a guy. And so you never, I just want to ask you this again, you never maybe were drunk one time and saying yeah, I beat that guy to death to anyone, because I heard that you were bragging about it for multiple people. I wouldn't even be something to brag about it, like a deer or something.
You know, I'm glad to hear that. I'm glad to hear you say that, I gotta say. So where would people get that from? Just them small town, man, shit gets fucking twisted.
But saying that you told them directly to their face. Hell, I don't know, buddy. I don't know either. I can't tell if what Kibram is saying to my face right now is true or not.
I spoke to Kibram's father too, Kendall Burt, and told him that John said he'd overheard him on the phone here at K3 one day, saying something about how his son was guilty as hell and he knew it. And Kendall told me he doesn't know what John heard him say or if he heard him say anything, but that he's a tough love kind of guy, and that if his son had done something like killed a person, he would never cover that up. According to Kibram, there is a moral to this story. He shares it with me after I wonder aloud to him about something one of the police officers told me.
Why did his buddy Tim, rather than pressing charges against the man who almost killed him with a knife, decide instead to shove his middle finger in the face of the cops, when they came to talk to him in his hospital bed? I mean, nobody wants to be a title teller. I mean, he'd almost die, he got stabbed in the neck. Kibram takes a drag of his cigarette.
You're shrugging your shoulders. If you're gonna live like white trash and shit, then hell, you might as well not tell him nobody, because if that's the life you're trying to leave, if you can't be mad when you know, and low down dirty shit like that happens when you hang out with low down dirty people. You there? I'm here.
I'm here. Cool. I like don't take the ball. You have time to talk?
I have some stuff I'd like to talk to you about. I'm sitting here right now. I'm 25. My orange pants.
I don't like for Tyler to get his hands back over here. I figured he was calling to lower the boom or something. I'm so tired. Yeah, it's time I turn to talk a lot.
I'd like to catch up on actually. I'm excited to tell John what I figured out, finally after all this time. I now narrate the story of the real crime back to him almost a year and a half after he first told me about it with details colored in and facts illuminated, including the rather germane one that cabbard did not kill anybody. After I'm done, John summarizes my findings.
A bunch of fuzzing and fighting, snaggle tooth, stolen trucks, meth, labs, stabbing, hooping, hauling, going to jail. I can't believe how much you've worked on this little bitch, and at the same time, my God. What? What'd I say?
I'm sitting here looking out the window at the clouds going by just as low as the discuss at the town that I live in and the pack my bags and get the hell out of here decades ago. I think it's the part about hiding in the woods that did it. That's just so classic, Deb Kelly. I don't know how many times I've heard that expression in my life hiding in the woods.
I think hiding in the woods in Deb Kelly is like having your afternoon tea in London. You know, there is another way John could have responded to all this news. I dare call it the normal way. That's side you let out rather than being one of despair could have been one of relief.
Relief that a young man has not been killed. That local officials have not been bought off by a powerful rich family. And then in fact, law enforcement has done what appears to be a competent job responding to this incident. Shittown, at least in this case, doesn't look so so terrible to me.
I don't know, progress, right? But no, I've learned that sometimes you catch John into spell depression, sometimes you catch him in about Armenia, and sometimes like today, I think you catch him in an alchemy of the two. Can I have you come back to that? Because what is it?
If not progress. Oh my god, the clusterfuck of sorrow, isn't it? A clusterfuck of sorrow. The clock is progressing, the eye is just making progress.
You know, it's that type of progress. I'm talking about it. Damn, man. I'm over here busting my ass off.
When you contacted me, you wanted to know what actually happened. So it's progress in that sense, right? It's progress. I am not saving the world over here.
I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not bringing jobs and sustainable employment to Alabama and lifting people out of poverty. But you asked me to try and figure out what happened here on that front. I'd like you to a pretty goddamn good. Well, thank you.
Yes, if I feel like I'm this interested today, it's firstly because I'm tired of war, and secondly, because, you know, I just, I'm not the most cheerful person. You know, I've been most spare time now either studying energy or climate change, and it's not looking good. So, yes, sometimes it's hard for me to get focused back on something when the whole goddamn Darnock summer sea ice is going to be gone by 2017. You know, we're fixing to have heat waves inside area this year, and sometimes I feel like a total idiot because I'm worried about a goddamn crackhead out here and fucking shit in Alabama.
So, yeah, that's just a personality disorder of mine. You know, sometimes when you call me, I'm kind of in a big mood, and sometimes like today you call me in one of these tired somber, you know, reflective moods rather than, you know, sitting there, you know, mulling over climate change for about the past ten damn hours. Oh, I mean, my God. When John says he's been mulling over climate change for the past ten hours, what I think he means is that he's been mulling over climate change for the past ten hours.
I don't think he's exaggerating. It's like work for him. Like he's made it his job. We've now been talking to each other for a year and a half, and while some of that time we've discussed the murder, there's been so much other stuff John wants to chat about.
It's interesting stuff, but it's all over the place. Even if I haven't talked to him in a while, nearly every day he sends me emails about all sorts of global calamities that he continues to keep up with, even though they've fallen out of the news. How many people are still concerned today about the Philippines? He's referring to Typhoon Hay-N from 2013, or how about the tsunami in Sri Lanka in 2004, John says, or the terrible flooding Pakistan year before last?
Not hearing a lot about that already. How about the fallout from the Ebola outbreak, or the nuclear disaster in Fukushima? Or a deeper cut Chernobyl? The list goes on and on.
And it's not just catastrophe. John also gives me lectures and sends reports on the systemic problems he sees leading to complete breakdown of the social contract. Problems in our food production chain, our healthcare industry, our monetary policy. He also shares a variety of disturbing stories that he manages to dig up from all corners of the country, but the son of a US Senator suffocating 21 dogs, or a KKK branch giving out bags of candy to children as a recruitment effort in South Carolina, or a guy down the street from John trying to kill his wife by running over with a Bobcat.
I was on home facts last night in the city, but I was in the city of the city. As being the child molester per capita capital of Alabama. This is another data point John likes to send me now and again. The number of sex offenders per capita in his area, Vance and West Blochton are both towns and good county.
Vance is now one child molester for every 192 citizens. West Blochton is for about every 63 or 4. Why do you check that statistic so often? Why do I check crude, all-plus-least-condent-state production so often?
Or why do I go pour over the tables from the IPCC so often? The IPCC being the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC being the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. For the longest time, I thought the only connection between all of John's random interests was that it was all shitty.
But the connection is deeper than that. He's distressed by the lack of outrage compared to the amount of shittiness in the world. To him, that ratio is totally out of whack. That's why he was still upset about the Cambridge rumor, even after I told him it wasn't true.
Even though the murder and the cover up weren't real, everyone sure did believe they were. And still, they did nothing. That part, the inaction. That's more disturbing to John than the idea of the murder itself.
You know, I really like these kids know all the things that they know, and they just accept them as normal. I know, that seems to really bother you. Accept it if something can't do nothing about it. The shitty misfortunes John fixates on.
They're not a bunch of disparate things. They're all the same thing. His shit town is part of Bib County, which is part of Alabama, which is part of the United States, which is part of Earth, which is experiencing climate change, which no one is doing anything about. It managed John.
The whole world is giving a collective shrug of its shoulders and saying, fuck it. What I admire about John is that in his own misanthropic way, he's crusading against one of the most powerful and insidious forces we face. Resignation. The numb acceptance that we can't change things.
He's trying to shake people out of their stupor, trying to convince them that it is possible to make their world a better place. Yes, that lady over there. She's barefoot, and she's pantsless, but we can lend her shoes. We can give her some pants.
Instead of just putting our heads down and speeding past her and muttering that she must have done something to get like that, we can ask her if she's in trouble, and we can offer her help. There is a different way. That's why John ranssen raves at the tattoo parlor. That's why John adopts dozens of stray dogs.
That's why he devotes night after night to studying and writing about climate change. That's why he contacted a national radio show and asked me to come investigate. And that's why I now see John is devoting so much energy to what is arguably his most ambitious project of all, radically altering the life of Tyler Goodson. For almost embodies everything I hate about this shit, Taylor, and one convenient package.
Have you ever thought of it that well? You all bet you hadn't tared. As the months have gone by since my trip to Alabama, I've heard more and more about Tyler. I've learned all about his tough childhood, the petty legal troubles that continue to dog him, his persistent financial problems, his struggle to support his three daughters, whom he had by the age of 21, and whom he loves dearly.
John has devoted his life to restoring all clocks, methodically and thoroughly. He sorts through the busted parts of these timepieces, trying to revive a sense of beauty and order. And in a way, that's what he's attempting to do with Tyler. Every time John picks up the phone and I ask what he's up to, Tyler's either there or he was just there or he's waiting for him to get there.
It seems like he's giving him consistent work. John's also been accompanying Tyler to court and hiring him a lawyer, to help him clear up some misdemeanor charges and get his driver's license back. And Tyler's recently moved to the trailer park across the street from John, so now he can easily walk to John's place. John's even talking about writing Tyler and his brother Jake into his will.
I don't want these two bastards to know all over day, and each one of them is going to get 20 ounces of gold each. I'll keep that secret. That's assuming the goddamn cops don't come in and steal it. But John's relationship with Tyler is not just as a benefactor.
I can tell if they get something more from one another. John'll mention a walkie and Tyler took through the woods or an expedition they made to the junkyard to search for treasures or help her count some bit of their conversation. They like to spend time together. One day John was on the phone with me and he looked out his window and started listing off the flowers that were in bloom in his yard and the ones that were dying.
He sighed and said, it's tedious and brief. Never sundial motto. tedious and brief. Before we had clocks, we had sundials.
And I never thought about this until I started talking to John, but watching a sundial, which could be as simple as a stick in the ground. As the shadow crept along, you were actually witnessing the rotation of the earth. It's so much less abstracted than a clock, a level closer to time itself. Anyway, John told me sundials often have mottos engraved on them.
John says tedious and brief is one. What do you mean? tedious and brief. tedious and brief.
All sundial modos are sad, like that. There are hundreds of these modos. Life passes like the shadow. Make haste, but slowly.
Use the hours. Don't count them. Even as you watch, I'm fleeing. Soon comes night.
These little reminders are out there, hidden in crannies around the world. I recently happened to find a sundial in the cemetery of an old Catholic mission next to a grave because of John I knew to look for the motto. It read, Neil Bonny Hodei, Diem Perdidi. I did nothing good today.
I have lost a day. I mean, I thought John used to make sundials, but I made them for the mathematical exercise. I would pick difficult dials to test abilities of geometry and trigonometry. And these are things that we should tell our own shake could experience.
There's a real excitement in geometry and trigonometry. They just, you know, I thought we was building the swing. I built the swing for Tyler. This is one of the ways John and Tyler have been passing the hours together lately.
They've been constructing an adult swing set, a giant rectangular frame, to the side of John's house, not far from the apple trees, with a single John-deer tractor seat hanging from it. It has a 24-year-old action, John says, which I understand mean at the pretty gnarly swing. When John first told me about it, he'd said he was building it for himself, but now he amends that. I found out that old man's safety was going to swing for about 20 minutes and it's back hurt, so I didn't build it for me after all.
Don't say on that, I'll, it's tough like I've built it for Tyler. Fuck it. I want to build him a pull-up or because he wants to be strong. I told him, well, it's nice to be physically strong, but you need to be strong between the ears because physical strength goes away.
You know, you need to have strong neurons. I told him you need to have them in general, algebra, but you should always have some trigonometry. You should have some G on what you're doing. I never, I remember this conversation.
He said he never saw that. He had any, he had any, I thought you could do much with. I like imagining this on par, a polymathic middle-aged clock restorer and a tatted-up kid in his 20s with Harley and revolved on his briefcase. Adam John's yard on Summer's Day, staking swings at pulls into the ground, the dogs circling around them, maybe a butterfly fluttering by.
I like imagining John interrupting their work for a minute to give Tyler a math lesson, feeling gratified that he has someone to give a math lesson to, and Tyler perhaps taking something from it but at the very least humoring John because he's grateful that John's helping him get his life together. I like knowing that this is how two people have chosen to spend an afternoon together in Bibb County, Alabama. Take the gifts of this hour, one sundial says, another, it's later than you think. And I point out the diagonal chain that was going to shore up the, uh, you know, upright.
Other things. Yeah, I tell them the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the square of the two sides. He hadn't used the sacrum. So I could calculate the length of the chain without climbing up on the goddamn top of the pole and pulling them diagonal to take measure.
That was my answer. What did he say? Mm. Or something like that.
Yeah, he has a lot of his daddy's mannerism. Mm. If I often heard when there's not a significant answer, uh, hold on, let me, hold on. I'm on piss on the sink.
I hope that's politically incorrect. It's something that flips for Tyler Ryan. Yeah, I just pissed in the kitchen sink because I'm killing it. I can't.
If the phone had enough signal, I just went out there and pissed in there with a guard, dingers, the designers, the commutators, the crayons, they like acid. But I didn't think the phone had enough signal. So instead of waiting, three or four gallons to flush the commode, I just peek here in the kitchen sink and use about what cup of water to flush the sink. And I got a little short dig, but I got a pretty good aim.
So I can usually hang right for the center of that damn thing without splashing everywhere. Oh man. Put any of them in it. What was the question I forgot?
I forgot to. Hello. Hey, is Jake around? It's got a couple of weeks since I last spoke to John.
And I just got a text from Jake Tyler's brother asking me to call him when I got a chance. Yeah, this is Skylar. I was the one to call G-Jike text. Did you want me?
Oh, hey. Hold on. Has anybody called you? No.
I have a few missed calls. I don't think they're from anybody down there. Oh, well, we have some bad news to kill you. OK.
John, they killed herself Monday night. The summer is here at last. The sky is overcast and no one brings a road. She watches her flowers grow.
The lovers come and go. Jake, each other roses from a tree. The cat arose. You can't you see there's nothing you can do.
There's love in every web. The roses are fading out. Jake keeps her pride somehow. That's all she has protecting her from pain.
And as the years go by, she will grow old and die. The roses in the for her great night arose for Emma. S town is produced by Julie Snyder and me, with editing from Ira Glass, Joel Lovell, Sarah Koenig, Neil Drumming and Nancy Updike. Whitney Dangerfield is our digital editor, Starly Kind is a story consultant.
Fact checking and research by Ben Phalen. Seth Lind is our director of operations. Mixing by Lyra Smith and Matt Tierney is our technical director. The S town staff includes Emily Conden, Elise Ferguson, Julie Whitaker and Kimberly Henderson.
Music for the show is composed by Daniel Hart, Trey Pollard, Alotto Negro and Matt McGinley. Music supervision by Damian Graf. Our website, stownpodcast.org. Special thanks to Bennett Epstein, Ted Sheynan and Evan Smith.
S town is a production of serial and This American Life.