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Chapter 5. On a Sunday evening in 2015 with Christmas lesson a week away, I log into Facebook at home and notice I have an urgent seeming message from Tyler's mother, Maya. FYI, she writes, Tyler will probably be in jail Monday. There's a warrant out for him, theft in the first, grand jury.
John's still haunting us. I think he's giving up. She tells me of Tyler with a frown emoji. Then she writes, he won't last a day in prison.
I think I'll pull it John. Hello? Hi, I'm Miss Hicks. This is Brian Reed, the radio reporter.
I quickly call Maya for my cell phone, hence the lower quality recording. But her mother, Tyler's grandmother, Miss Irene Hicks picks up and says Maya's not feeling up to talking. So instead, Miss Hicks explains to me what's happening with Tyler. They've got nine felony charges against him right now.
Nine felony charges? Yes. He's saying, please, help me some stuff, because I might not get none but terrible for the next couple of months. Tyler's grandmother, Miss Hicks, says she doesn't know all the details of the charges against her grandson.
They're not publicly filed yet. But Tyler's mom, Maya, heard from a family friend who works in local law enforcement that a grand jury had indicted Tyler on a felony count for theft of the 48-foot trailer he took from John's property, along with the buses filled with lumber and antiques. Tyler's had misdemeanors before, but never a felony. And to exacerbate things, it turns out about a month ago around Thanksgiving, in an incident unrelated to John, Tyler was also arrested for armed burglary.
He went to pick up his youngest daughter, who lives with him, from her mother's place. And according to Tyler, her mom wouldn't let him in, and he was concerned for his daughter's safety. So he busted down the door and pulled his daughter out, and the mom called the cops, who charged him with armed burglary, because he had a gun. Which he says was in his car, but which the mom said he had on him.
Tyler's a court date tomorrow for the burglary charge, and his mother and grandmother are worried that the judge is going to toss him in jail when he sees the new theft count for the trailer from John's. This all couldn't be happening at a worse time, because Tyler recently found out he has a fourth baby on the way with his current girlfriend. Oh, man. Tell me about it.
As we're talking, Miss Hicks does this thing I've heard so many people do. Not only in Mid County, but everywhere. Talking about what she sees as one injustice that's happening to someone close to her, her grandson. Suddenly gets her thinking about another injustice, a little further removed, and then another further removed from that.
And then another further removed from that. We're on the phone for 45 minutes, and she ends up giving me this whole litany. She's complaining about sexual abuse by police officers, about the cop in Chicago who shot a black teenager 16 times, the atrocious candidates for president, and her quote, sorry governor, Robert Bentley. Holy macross, it's a whole bunch of mess.
It's actually sound like John D. Mackelmore. You are kidding. Well, I mean, like now, it is very precarious.
Right now, it's very precarious, Miss Hicks says. I've carried you whole system, Miss Hicks. Miss Hicks's life has felt precarious for a long time now. Tyler's ordeal is only the most recent trouble to wedge itself into her days.
Miss Hicks still cares for her son Jimmy. Tyler's uncle Jimmy, even though he's 58 years old, because he's severely incapacitated by the bullet lodged in his brain. She also supports her 45-year-old daughter Maya, Tyler's mother, who lives in Miss Hicks 2, and who, despite being really smart and having a college degree, finds it hard to hold a job because of depression and other health problems. There was also an extended family member living with Miss Hicks for seven years after he got out of prison for a sex offense.
He just moved out and no sooner did his room clear than he moved a granddaughter. Meanwhile, someone's left a dog behind who's about to have a litter of puppies, and Tyler and his kids and pregnant girlfriend are living in a half-finished house Tyler's building in Miss Hicks's yard. You find a motion for my condition here, but I would appreciate it. Any idea you have, I believe it be welcome.
Take a minute, shoot them or do something. I don't know what I'm coming to go. If I had a different disposition, I probably would go stark or even crazy. I just take my medicine and take my Bocelli and if you hear me play Bocelli then you know I'm sad.
Andrea Bocelli, Miss Hicks is an opera lover. Oh yeah, I like all operas. Yeah, very is my favorite, but... Bocelli is for when you're feeling depressed.
If they hear me play Bocelli, I say, oh, granny's upset about something, don't bother her right now. Have you been playing it lately? Oh, I play it all the time. See you're feeling sad.
I've been feeling sad, well, and upset about things that I can alter. I mean, miseryless company, so my and I, we get to say it together and we see tears well in our eyes when we hear of a sad story. I say, oh my, don't start, you're crying. I say, I'll be making me cry now.
But when she talks about childhood, she always cries here. She says, yes, don't have no tears left, how they? I'm just a right, a middle man, you know, but I'm not a love child or more than anything, but the idiot just won't do it right, you know. He's doing some dumb things.
I can't make up my mind. Whether to scold him or love him or something. Whether to scold Tyler Goodson or whether to love him. A conundrum that is driven its fair share of people, mother, grandmother, girlfriend, buddies, John, a radio reporter from New York, driven all of us at one time or another.
Salvar exasperation with our own personal versions of the Bachelli. Oh, that's not a boy, it's like an angel. From cereal in this American life, I'm Brian Reade. This is Shit Town.
How you doing? Let's back up. A month and a half before my Sunday night phone called with Tyler's grandmother, before the news of the grand jury and felony charges, to Woodstock Town Hall, it's four months after John died, four months into this battle between Tyler and John's cousins, and another of Tyler's court hearings has just ended. This one for misdemeanor trespassing, with which he was charged after going on to John's property and taking the trailer and buses.
John's cousin Rita and her husband Charlie are here from Florida, a special prosecutor was called in from out of town, and Tyler's lawyer came in from Bessemer. The only person who wasn't present for Tyler's hearing was Tyler, because he got a temporary job at a factory in Georgia and says he didn't want to lose the day's work to come back to Woodstock, so he sent his lawyer in his place. Rita and Charlie, John's cousins, drove ten hours from Florida, all to watch as the judge slapped Tyler with a new offense, failure to appear, and in the course of two and a half minutes adjourned court. The last time I saw Rita was our meeting after I discovered that we were staying at the same hotel and left a note under her door, though she didn't want to talk on tape.
But now, as we're lingering in the Town Hall parking lot with the sun setting, we start chatting and she says it's okay if I record. She seems frustrated with Tyler. And that's sad because of the whole situation with him taking advantage of an eighty down year old that can't take care of herself. Rita says they found just one bank account for John that used for his mother's expenses.
It had $98 in it. All the items that Tyler's taken from the Macklemore property and his eyes to keep from falling into the nefarious hands of the cousins, the buses full of lumber, the trailer, the vehicles, Rita sees as Tyler stealing from John's mother, his legal heir, Mary Grace. And she has some money and you know, you just see her whole life. It's just one meant to be this way.
You know, it just breaks my heart. If there's people like that in the world, you know, they can take advantage of good people. And I personally think there was something more than this. What do you mean?
I don't think John would have ever taken his life and left his mother in the shape that he did. Yes, he probably would have ended up killing himself, but I think it came prematurely. Evidently, this is how dark this feud has become. I think he drank cyanide, but I think he was forced to drink cyanide.
I think he was probably intoxicated. And someone just cheered him on and it was something he wanted to do eventually anyway, and he just did it prematurely. I mean, someone, do you think it was Tyler? I do.
I've told the play. I think they dropped the ball on this one. I really do. I think John and Tyler had an argument.
I think he probably got fed out with John. And... Where's my speculate now? I don't know.
I don't know. I don't know. I told him I'm speculating. Charlie, Rita's husband, is hanging around, not exactly thrilled that Rita's talking to me.
And he's right. Rita is absolutely speculating. There's just no evidence at all to back the suspicion up. There's nothing noted in the police incident report for John's suicide.
John was texting Tyler minutes before he downed the cyanide, and Fay Gamble was on the phone with John as he did it, and reported nothing about hearing another person in the background, egging him on or anything like it. She says all she heard were dogs. Rita acknowledges this, but there's no evidence whatsoever. Still, she says.
It's just about the little bit. You do. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
That's what we do. Tyler's a thief Rita tells me, whose trespass repeatedly onto the property of a dead man and his infirm mother, ransacked it, looking for gold, and taken valuable things that weren't his. Why wouldn't he be capable of offing John? We'll never know, but nobody will change my mind about it.
At one point, Charlie starts making a cut at gesture across his neck. Charles won't just stop. Hello, let's go. But somehow they don't go, and before we know it, we've been talking for more than an hour.
Rita tells me all the ways she's tried to track John's goal. She's called the Mint, the US Treasury, but she's had no success. She also pulls out a baby book that Mary Grace kept for John, and shows it to me. It has family pictures and class photos and report cards and John's birth certificate.
She offers to make me copies of it. I ask how Mary Grace is doing. Oh my gosh, she just got back from the Bannenberg. What's there?
She went just up to see the leaves change? And that's a surprise to me, because when I met Mary Grace, while she was living with John, I did not get the impression that she was healthy enough to travel. But now, Charlie and Rita have her staying with family friends. And they say, except for the moment she gets emotional about John, she's doing quite well.
She has a TV to help her pass the time, which she didn't have living with John. Charlie says she's gotten sharper and become more aware of current events. She used to be a librarian and cared about that kind of stuff. Her caregivers bring her out to eat a lot.
She's gained 18 pounds in the last three months. She went to the river. She went to carry her own boat ride to the river here a lot. Really?
Yeah. She was running the boat. She's really doing good. Hearing about all this, it occurs to me for kind of the first time that John probably wasn't providing the best life for Mary Grace.
I don't like to judge the way people live. And so I hadn't the few days I was there with Mary Grace and John. But Rita says before John died, Mary Grace probably hadn't been on a trip in 30 years. She didn't have new clothes.
There were fleas all over the house when they got in there. The windows of Mary Grace's bedroom, John had boarded up. Rita says he told her he had trouble keeping Mary Grace in the house. Rita says Mary Grace's nurse told her living in a dark room like that can cause a dementia patient to lose track of time.
And Mary Grace's case, Rita believes she lost 10 years because she knew when her birthday was, but said she was 78 turning 79 instead of 88 turning 89, which is the age she actually was. Rita and Charlie have lived in Florida for 30 years, but they both grew up here in Woodstock. They still own property here, and they kept in touch with John and Mary Grace over the years and visited them on trips back to Alabama. So Rita says she feels embarrassed and matted herself that she didn't put together what was going on and intervened sooner.
I'm glad to hear Mary Grace is doing better, I tell her. By now the sun is set. Rita and Charlie and I are standing in a dark empty parking lot. This whole time the door to the recipe has been open right next to us and it kept feeling like they could get in and speed away from me at any minute.
And now, finally, they do. Okay, have a good night. Enjoy your stay. Two months later, I get an email.
Hey Brian, I know you are a busy, busy man, so when you have time, please call me. Thanks Rita. Sitting at my kitchen table, I call. Okay, I think we're recording now.
Rita says it's okay for me to take on my cell phone. She's at home in Florida, Charlie's out of town, which makes for an opportune time to call me because she knows you might not approve. Rita tells me there's something she wants to ask me about. So what's up?
Information, honestly, you know more about what's going on with the Woodstock police in Beup County blah, blah, blah. You don't have to tell me what you know, but I'm not really sure who I can trust and who I cannot trust. Rita goes on for a bit and I can't figure out what she's trying to ask me. She's talking about the Woodstock police officers.
They're four of them full time and now she suspects they're working against her. John was skeptical of the cops too, she says. You know, he called, she's a special, but he called Woodstock a shit-town. He hated you a lot more.
Well, we're about. Isn't that what John first got in touch with me about to investigate, she says? Corruption in the local police? Was John telling you not to trust the Woodstock police?
Was John telling you not to trust the Woodstock police? Could not be trusted? Was there one certain guy? I tell her, John called me down here to investigate a murderer that, in the end, never actually happened.
Yes, he hated the police in town government, but in a completely unbiased and all-encompassing way, he wasn't ratting on one specific person. It's still confusing to me why exactly Rita's asking about this until she tells me this next part about Tyler. She's discovered something she believes he's done, something more serious than taking the trailer or buses, and this time she has actual evidence. Rita knew that after John's suicide, one of the things Tyler had taken was John's pickup truck.
So one day she called the state motor vehicle office to order a copy of the title, and when she told him the circumstances, the John B. Macklemore was deceased. The woman on the phone was surprised. John B.
Macklemore died in June. That was strange, because someone signed his name on the truck's title in July and sold it. Oh, okay Rita said. She got the name of the guy who bought the truck and tracked him down, not far from the Mississippi state line.
What did the guy did? Did he get it directly from Tyler? He bought the truck. He got it directly from Tyler.
Tyler had posted it on Facebook, and he went over to Tyler's house and met Tyler and paid $3,300 for the truck. And Tyler told him that he had bought the truck from his stepdad, John Macklemore. Meanwhile, Tyler told me once that the truck was John's. The state revoked the title.
Rita got the guy to write out what happened in a statement, and he gave her the truck, saying he'd eat the $3,300 he paid for it, if it meant avoiding trouble with the law. Rita also just discovered that Tyler allegedly pulled off the same shebang with John's Mercedes. That he sold for $900. And well, you need one to know this, because I just don't know what they're feeding Tyler.
Which brings us to why Rita was plumbing me for intel on the Woodstock police. She doesn't want to tell them about her investigation, because she believes they're protecting Tyler. She says she asked the cops to look into these vehicles months ago, but that they came back and told her everything was fine that they belonged to Tyler. And there have been other issues she's reported since John died, where Rita feels they've chosen not to investigate or arrest Tyler.
Take the saga that started one day, back during the summer, when Rita and Charlie were home in Florida, and sent their niece, who lives in Woodstock, to check on the Macklemore property. Rita says her niece arrived and saw that John's workshop had been broken into, so she called the cops. Where's she got Lacey? That's Officer Jerry Lacey, a veteran Woodstock cop in his 60s.
And Lacey says, where is Mary Grace? The homeowner should be calling. Jerry Lacey was familiar with the situation. He had to have known that Mary Grace would not be handling something like this.
Where's Rita? He asked. In Florida, Rita's niece told him. And he told her, we don't have time to come over there.
I'm not going to follow we pull her. And then the very next day is when Tyler took the buses. A friend of Rita's in town called her when that happened, to say she'd just seen Tyler riding in front of a giant tow truck with one of John's buses. So Rita and Charlie quickly packed and booked it first thing in the morning to Bube County.
They went to Tyler's grandmother, Miss Hicks's house, and drove slowly by, snapping photos of the buses, and the large trailer Tyler had also taken from John's. Which were all sitting in plain view in the yard. Soon after Rita says, the person who was watching their house back home in Florida picked up the phone there. And someone who identified himself as Tyler said, If you don't quit driving by my house and rapping me, I am going to kill your ass with buttshot.
Rita wasn't intimidated by this threat. Let me say that she told me, we carry a gun when we're in Woodstock. But she was pissed. She went in person to the Woodstock police station to report it.
And who should be there? But Jerry Lacey. And when I got the Queen of Rapping Ham, I'm going to have to arrest you. And I'm like, you got to tell me, I can't drive down a public road.
But he can go over at mere graces and steal all of her stuff. Which I didn't really say stuff because I was mad. And then, you know, he's like, Lady, you got to back off. And I'm like, wow, I think he's on Tyler's side.
I don't know. That's why I just, I don't trust, trust my, you know, tell me that to his face. I tried asking Officer Lacey about all this to his face. After a few phone calls, I approached him one morning in the Woodstock town hall parking lot.
But he declined to speak to me. The Woodstock police chief, Len Price, didn't respond directly to Rita's claims that the department's been on Tyler's side. But he told me that he and his officers made clear to Tyler that he could not take anything from the house until matters were settled in probate court. He also told me that the cops found no money or gold in John's house.
And he made a point in mentioning that the town had to pay for the clean up of the suicide scene. All that said, I do have some insight into what's going on with Tyler and Jerry Lightsey. Hey, he comes over here pretty often. Jerry's a family friend.
Tyler says he's especially close with his sister and her husband, and Tyler's mom, who told me herself at Jerry's Appel. Not long after Rita vented her worries to me about Lightsey covering for Tyler, Tyler tells me that Lightsey's one by his grandmother's recently. Tyler's been constructing his house there out of the old lumber that was in the bus as he took. I've been observing Tyler's progress on the house myself every time I visit, and it is truly remarkable.
As the heart of the house, he's used the white trailer from John's place, outfitting it with a kitchen, and then assembled this giant fascinating two-story structure all around it, kind of like a non-treehouse version of the Swiss family Robinson, making use of the bus lumber, but also all sorts of other materials he scavenged. It's a driftwood with stereo vines, telephone poles, he was able to buy off a guy, an old deck he took apart, pieces of fence, a horse's watering trough, he's turning into a shower. There's a huge workshop with a pool table and bedrooms for all his girls, and a second floor porch that looks out over a pond in the forest. I come from a family of home builders, and I've never seen anything like it.
Anyway, Officer Lightsey came by not long ago, and Tyler gave him a tour. He walked into the house and even walked around and looked at the backside of the addition and everything. So you gave him a tour of the house that you're building with the stuff that's disputed that his office technically arrested you for, and is going through the courts? I told him I said, yes, don't think that, if I ever get done with it, and if I stay out of prison, he said, yeah, you better hope they don't want this thing on playing back.
I'm talking about the trailer. I said, this thing ain't going nowhere, Jerry. He said, oh, this ain't the same one. I said, no, he said, oh, okay.
And then we just carried on the covers, another conversation. Tyler says it was like Jerry was winking at him, being his buddy. Tyler's mom told me Jerry's stressed over Tyler's legal issues, given that he's their friend, and then he's, quote, eagerly waiting for his retirement date next year. Tyler says Jerry's told him he's tired of having to choose between his friends and his job.
There's more right after this. Hi, this is Ashley. I live in San Francisco with my boyfriend. We would love to officially share my New York Times subscription with separate logins.
We both love cooking, love being in the kitchen, but I'm a 30-minute and under-efficient dinner at Gurley. I want a sheet pan meal. He is very elaborate. He wants to get into the storytelling.
I want to be able to save my easy meals and check off the ones that I've completed, and I think 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 log in and Mr.
elaborate, it's his. Plus room for two others. Find out more at nytimes.com.com.com. Can I tell you what Tyler's view of you guys is?
Would you mind if I told you that? Then I just would hear what you did. On the phone with Rita, I realize there's this whole version of her that I've gotten from Tyler. They cast her in Charlie as heartless, money-grubbing carpet baggers, swooping in conveniently after John's death to rest control of the property and assets from Tyler without a thought for Mary Grace.
But then there's the other version of Rita and Charlie. Then I'm getting from them, of high school sweethearts who've been married 41 years, who seem to have a nice relationship, who make each other laugh and don't appear to get on each other's nerves, even after a 10-hour drive from Florida to Woodstock. Almost every time I've seen Rita and Charlie at probate court at our best Western hotel meeting at John's funeral, Charlie has been wearing some kind of Hawaiian shirt as if he's trying to will these unpleasant settings into the fun-filled retirement he'd imagined. They both stopped working about seven years ago, and they tell me they've been trying to enjoy it, except for the fact that for months now they've been having to drive back and forth between Charlie's father, who recently had surgery and moved in with them in Florida, and this whole mess in Biv County, John's suicide, and Mary Grace needing care, and no money to be found, and this never-ending flight with Tyler on top of it all.
Another for Tyler, whenever I brought up the possibility that this could all be a misunderstanding that Snowballed, that both sides could have meant well, and maybe if they just hashed it out, bygones could become bygones. What he always returns to, what he can't seem to get over, was that very first interaction he had with Rita and Charlie in John's driveway. Over the months, he has repeated that story to me. How Rita and Charlie passed the hospital, where Mary Grace admitted after John's suicide, to go straight to her and John's house, trying to get in.
How Tyler called Mary Grace on his way to meet them there with the keys, and she instructed him not to let them in the house. The whole thing rubbed in the wrong way. He didn't like the fact that you went to the house before the hospital. He said that to me that day.
He said, I can't believe what first of all he's like, well, momma, who in the heck's mama? Mama, you might remember, is what Tyler called John's mother, Mary Grace. Rita says the only reason they went to the house first was to pick up some essentials for Mary Grace, clean clothes, and a purse. And she says, actually, they didn't pass the hospital to get there because they came through Montgomery, not Birmingham, like Tyler assumed.
When they arrived in Woodstock, the police chief escorted them to John's house, but they found that the door had been padlocked. The chief told them Tyler Goodson had probably put it there, and that was the first time Rita had heard his name. Tyler told me some stories about Rita and Charlie, especially about that first day when they met in John's driveway. He told me it escalated into an all-out fight really quickly, which I wasn't sure how fully to believe.
It was hard to picture these harmless seeming retirees getting an a rattle like that, especially in front of the police chief. Tyler says Rita and Charlie were screaming at him in the driveway, telling him off. Rita says, absolutely. According to Tyler, Charlie cussed at him.
According to Rita, Charlie said, I don't know what you think. As she goes through her side of the story, it's like nearly every little thing that Tyler said happened, Rita confirms only the opposite, if that makes sense. Like she's the lost role of negatives to Tyler's developed photographs. We got the hospital.
He had basically turned Mary Grace against me. What happened after the driveway quarrel, if you recall, is that Tyler refused to unlock the house for Rita and Charlie, and they all went to the hospital to see Mary Grace. You know, we got the hospital and he said about it as close as you can get to Mary Grace without being in a lap. And I walk in the door and I said, Mary Grace, I am just so sorry.
And she said, you've never had kids. You've never lost any kids. You don't know how hot feel. I said, Mary Grace, do you know who this is?
She said, I know who you are Rita. I went out to the nurse station and asked them what was going on and they said, she's upset because he told her you were taking her to Florida. Which wasn't the case. They barely even knew what was going on.
Rita says there were no plans yet. And the nurses were saying, who is this guy? Why connection is he to her? Is he her adopted son?
He told him he was her adopted son. And so I go back in there and I said, Mary Grace, now I'm here to see it. Is there anything that I can do that, you know, happy or whatever. And Tyler, he's like, well, I'm going to get, you know, I'm going to get mama home and tell me mama said I'm on the porch and we talk about old times and mama, I'm going to get you some new shoes and mama's going to get her.
And mama, my kids are going to pick you fresh flowers every day. And I walked out and I told Charlie, I said Charlie, if I hear him call her mama one more time, I'm going to go the listing. Before you move on, can I tell you the way you're describing Tyler at the hospital as putting on a show for you guys? That's how he describes you in the hospital.
Saying that you guys were crying over Mary Grace and were like all boo-hoo, we're so... No! You'd say, we're a great guy and I'm so sorry. I'm not saying I wasn't crying.
I probably did cry. I mean, my God, I knew John Drew. I didn't want to be in the stranger, his family. But I was like, oh, Mary Grace, I'm so sorry.
You know. At that point, Rita says she really wasn't sure what to make of the situation. Mary Grace was saying that she wanted to go back to her house and her dogs and have Tyler take care of her. Rita hadn't seen Mary Grace for a while and said she didn't yet realize the extent of her dementia.
So after a while, Rita turned to Tyler. I just want you to move in and take her hurry. You want to do that? So, how about it?
I'll say after the funeral and then I'm going home to Florida, I'll need this. Good luck to you. Wait, were you actually willing to let Mary Grace go with Tyler? Like, are you just calling a bluff or like...
No! She said it was okay. She liked him. He liked her.
I'm like, fine. And then the social worker called me at Momma Taylor and said, we're not turning Mary Grace over to him. Part of the reason was that Tyler isn't keen to Mary Grace. But Rita says in addition to that, the hospital staff had doubts about what Tyler was claiming.
He said over there and said, well, I've been turning to Mary Grace for years. I take her to the doctor. I do this and I do that. Well, what's a doctor's name?
Uh, uh, uh, uh, I don't know. Who's a health care? Well, uh, uh, uh, uh, I don't know. What does she take any medications?
No, she don't take anything but vitamins. Well, they knew that was a lot because they had a medical record. So, he does not give stuff a ditch. One thing Rita has in common with her cousin John, she too is a fastidious record keeper.
She'll eventually give me a copy of a daily journal she's been keeping of what's occurred since John's death, in impressive detail. She lists each little interaction with authorities in there, lunches, visits to the pharmacy. When we're done talking tonight, Rita will enter this, our very phone call into the journal. And I wrote, talked to Brian Reed, reporter for over three hours.
I'm also in the run day, teen at probate court, described as being with American radio, and that I showed up and quote, seemed to know a lot of information, which I find flattering. On this day, according to Rita's journal, after the social worker declined to release Mary Grace to Tyler, Rita got a call from a friend saying, with two trailers and two trucks. At John's house, they're to load up stuff, allegedly. So I got my car went down there in the place of the one that told me, you know, you might want to go ahead and try to get cussed.
In her journal, she wrote quote, that is when I realized that Tyler was a gold digger and I decided to fight him for Mary Grace's sake. And the days become immediately busy. The journal documents an urgent and successful effort involving Fay Gamble, the town clerk, and Boozer Downs, the town and John's attorney, to get read a temporary guardianship over Mary Grace. It documents a trip to Lowe's to purchase locks to secure Mary Grace's house.
A trip to the post office where Rita says she learned that Tyler's girlfriend had picked up a package addressed to John's PO box, a trip to the police station to report that and choose Tyler's girlfriend out of a lineup, which never led any charges. A trip to the nail salon from Mary Grace to get a pedicure, leftovers for lunch on Tuesday. The trip to Boozer Downs office where they met with Tyler and kind of sort of tried to talk things out, but that went south when Mary Grace said to him. Don't call me Mona, I'm not your mama.
Which Rita says Mary Grace uttered of her own volition. She also says she didn't break up Tyler and Mary Grace's conversation at the funeral, like Tyler told me, that she's not brainwashing Mary Grace against him. There's a trip documented in the journal to Walmart to get John's imperial clothes, a trip to the funeral home, and to the florist, to the cemetery, to point out where did John's grave. And let me tell you another funny story, that's not funny, but the undertaker came out and told me he says, now you know John's got some real big gold nibble rings.
And I said, really? I didn't know that. When I said Rita corroborated nearly everything Tyler told me, well, here you go. Rita told the undertaker.
I want those nibble rings. Sure the undertaker said, no problem. But then as Rita and Charlie were leaving the cemetery, they realized he hadn't given them to them. So I went and asked the undertaker where they needed to.
We couldn't get them off. You know, I've now that I think back. They don't think the nibble rings were on him. I think the undertaker got them.
Because you're telling me that you've got a guy there that you've done an autopsy on and you cut him from neck to private and you can't get a nibble ring off. Cut his nibble off. He's dead. Ooh.
Wait, why would you want those? Well, you know what? The main thing I got to thinking about is I didn't know if it was just something that I would have up here, that maybe I could have had some a mirror grace or something. Or just something to keep up here.
You know what I mean? You would have given them the forex of Mary Grace, but she didn't. Well, I would now, but I mean it was just something up here, I guess, that I didn't have anything up here. Rita says part of the reason is that she's had a lot of deaths in her family and doesn't trust funeral homes, but still.
Oh, I'm sorry. I ended up reeling from you saying that she cut his nibble off. I'm gonna say it. Don't tell me if you can't get those nibble rings off.
Rita is now going after Tyler on multiple fronts. She's pressed charges for trespassing. She's pressing charges for theft of the trailer and buses, both of which the Woodstock Police Chief pointed out to me. They did arrest Tyler on.
She will soon bring the District Attorney's Office. The evidence she's gathered. The Tyler fake John's signature on the titles for John's cars. And a grand jury will also indict him on multiple accounts of forgery.
The assistant district attorney told me he's impressed by how industrious Rita's been investigating these matters. Completely on her own Rita tells me she thinks Tyler should do time for what he's done. To me, anyone that goes over and takes other people's possessions is a criminal. Charlie told me he's not necessarily mad at Tyler.
Tyler's just doing what he knows. He's a criminal. That's what Tyler's been reduced to in their eyes. But this is what conflicts like this do to the participants.
Reduce them. Half a year into the fight. Rita says she feels minimized by it too. Like the fight has turned her into someone meaner and cruder than she is.
I'm serious. I mean, if a Christian I even have trouble with this because you know you're special. Let everybody get in. I don't want him to think that this is the kind of person I am.
I'm not a bad person. I'm not that type of person. You think I'm kind of a drug addict or thief or a goddamn tinkle with all these. I don't consider myself a damn criminal.
I mean, hell I don't do nothing but work and take care of kids. The feud is wearing on Tyler too. That Sunday night when I spoke to his grandmother on the phone, the night she and Tyler's mother were freaking out that the judge might throw in jail the next day. Well, that didn't happen.
Tyler paid his $1,000 bond and remained free. Right now his forgery and theft case is scheduled to go to trial in early summer. He says he sees nothing wrong with the measures he's taken. Yes, he took the trailer and buses.
But would a criminal have bills of sales for those things? Which Tyler has? Even though Rita and Charlie claim they must be fake based on the dates. And would a criminal have asked the Woodstock police after telling them about the bills of sale if he was allowed to go on John's property and repossess the trailer and buses?
Because according to Tyler, that's what he did. And the police said it was okay. And would a criminal say this when he got wind that he was being investigated for possibly forging John's name on a document? I don't say how in the hell they get proved that, you know.
Is there something to prove? I don't know. I mean, I don't know. When Tyler and I talk about this, he doesn't yet know what the forgery allegations are about exactly.
The county hasn't yet filed the charges against Tyler claiming he's forged John's signature on the titles for John's truck and Mercedes. The file goes soon, but at the moment when we're talking, he's simply heard word that someone has been going around asking questions about him, about a forgery, and he thinks it maybe has to do with the bills of sale for the buses. Either way, I ask him broadly. But is there a forgery that happened, Tyler?
Oh, I don't know. Okay. Not on my part. Not on my part, he says.
For a year, Tyler and I have talked regularly, on the phone and when I come to Alabama, he's told me all sorts of stories, some about John, but even more just about his life. About the abuse his father Rodney inflicted upon him and his family when he was a kid. Abuse Tyler's mother and grandmother have told me about two. Rodney, by the way, said to me that he was not abusive.
He used a different word. He said he whooped his family. Tyler told me about what it was like just as he was entering high school to have Rodney get convicted for sexually abusing a child, to have to suddenly cram with his family into his grandmother's house and have everybody at school know what was going on. About what it's like to have your license suspended for failing to pay a fine one time for a minor traffic offense and to keep getting pulled over again and again because you have no other way to get to work in rural Alabama, so you're driving without the license.
And the fines keep mounting with John called fine slavery and so much of the money you do manage to make it to shovel right back over the courts or lawyers. About what all that does to your worldview. I know I got some bad luck. I tell you that.
Like I just expect the worst to happen everywhere I go and just hope and I get surprised that it don't. Getting Rodney as a dad, dad is a bad hand. A cashier refusing to sell you beer at Walmart because you happen not to have a valid ID with you. Not so much.
But Tyler complains about that kind of thing all the same, bouncing between his many grievances, between big injustices he's experienced and petty ones. He and I have had long sometimes frustrating talks about this where I've tried to understand his justification for some of the choices he makes. Like earlier on when the legal battle was just starting to get more serious with Rita and Charlie and I suggested he might have an opportunity to prevent it from escalating. Have you considered giving the buses back just to avoid the trouble?
He told me it tickled him. That was his word tickled to see Rita and Charlie struggle. And then there's this story which gave me a vivid sense of how Tyler sees things. He recently hired a guy to do some electrical work on the house he's building and according to Tyler the guy stole two of his grandfather's old guns out of Tyler's home.
And Tyler came up with a whole plan. He contacted the guy and acted like he hadn't noticed, told him there was more work to be done and tricked the guy into coming back over to his house where he was waiting for him with a rifle in hand and walked him over to his shed. I had a chair sitting up there next shed and some damn snips, pitch clipper snips, propped up beside it, waiting. And I was going to cut a finger or two off.
I mean I was going to snip fingers until he had my guns delivered back here. Tyler, really? Yes, really. At first I thought maybe Tyler was just saying something ridiculous and bellishing.
But I asked him about it and he's clear with me. He was serious about this and going into that shed had every intention of following through. He says he did have a change of heart once he got the guy into the shed and ended up instead whipping the guy across the face with the gun and beating him silly rather than dismembering him. But he hasn't had a change of heart about the appropriateness of his plan.
As we discuss it in retrospect, he still thinks it would be a completely acceptable thing to do given the situation, which I find unsettling. You thought it would be okay to cut his fingers off? Well, if he thought it was okay to come in and steal my granddaddy's gun that is irreplaceable, then yeah, I was going to fix a thief. I believe it would have took one finger and then guns would have been found.
If one finger had a win, it would have took two-third to hand-to-eat. I kept questioning Tyler, trying to understand why he thought this was okay, but nothing he said did quite make me understand. And I realized it was probably going to stay that way. Eventually, as I'm saying goodbye, I'm about to hang up the phone.
Tyler asked me this. Can you just do one thing for me? I'm thinking a bad person at all. Do you see me being a bad person?
Do I? Yeah. No, man, I see he was a complicated, normal person. I disagree with some of your decisions.
But you've had a very different life experience than I've had. Yeah. Why do you feel like a bad person sometimes? No, I just want to know what people think of me because I mean, how I do anything for anybody.
I'd help somebody. I got down any way I could steal for nobody. Not like that. I don't know.
They treat me like Rodney is what it is. It's way for me in my whole life basically. To Tyler, Rodney, his dad, that's a criminal. And that's how Tyler measures if he's being a good person.
Is he acting like Rodney? I mean, yeah, I have a temper. But I don't be on my kids or my wife or my mama or my sister. I have made some mistakes for the insurer.
But damn, I wish I had a little bit better guidance. John had a phrase for the MO Tyler would often employ when faced with in front. Quote, the whoop ass now solution. John cared for Tyler, but he was also perpetually frustrated by him and was fixated on the possibility that if Tyler didn't get his life in order soon, he could end up becoming an irredeemable fuck up.
When Tyler did something John didn't approve of, like party too much of the tattoo parlor, or get an nasty screening match with one of his exes, or get locked up in jail and ask John to bail him out. It would annoy John. I've never seen him fly on a tire lock until I've made you PPA. And I would hear about it.
If that's what he can't do, he can't keep his fucking ass out of trouble. I'm expecting too much. You know, he was raised by a fucking child unless you're maybe unexpected too much. And just like with Tyler's grandmother, talking about Tyler's tribulations could quickly get John riled up about tribulations the world over, which I know we've all heard John deliver this kind of a ring before.
But I share this only so you can see how riled up Tyler can make John. He really inspired some of John's most virtuastic work. Here, I'll save you all the wind up about Tyler and go straight to the money. We ain't nothing but a nation of God damn chicken shit, horseshit, paddle tail, pissy ass, whiny fat, flatty out of shape, Facebook looking damn twerp fast, peeking out the windows and slipping around, listening to the cell phones and spying on the people holding, peeping the crack on the goddamn door, listening in the fucking sheet rock.
You know, Mr. Putin, please show some fucking mercy. I mean, come on, drop a fucking bomb, won't you? Still, John really stuck with Tyler despite the irritations, gave him more and more work, helped him out with more and more money, kept track of his court appointments on a calendar, hired him a lawyer, accompanied him to court, gave him lectures and advice.
Though it could sometimes field to John like a one way street. On the phone one time, I asked on a lame question about him and Tyler, but the way he responded stayed with me. Do you think your guys relationship is more of a friendship or more of a paternal relationship? What you wanted to say, you didn't come out and say it is your guys relationship or more of a friendship or more of a user ship?
No, it actually wasn't what I wanted to say. It's what you wanted to say apparently. Why do you say that? You do say that when you're pissed off at two in the day of morning and you know he's off the way today I'm drunk.
See, this is the first time I pulled this gun. I could keep you on this phone for hours with another case with a name on Michael Fuller. John brings up this name, Michael Fuller, in the last conversation he and I ever have, a little more than a week before he killed himself. He doesn't reveal a ton about him, just that Michael was a 20-something guy John had also kind of taken under his wing years ago when he was much younger himself.
Unlike Tyler, John says Michael came from a family professional's, a quote good family, but was rebellious, didn't hang with the best of influences. You know, the wild crowd partying, hanging out at senior frogs in the quest and all these damn discos and doing all this damn dough. Hey, the career, I'd go in a jail. He would be about 45 now and the last time I heard from him he was living up there in your neck of the woods, paying some, you know, like $1,800 a month, living some scruffy apartment that didn't even have a damn bathroom and backed up with some damn dollar Argentine girl that was bringing up high-powered pie.
So yeah, I've seen the shit before. John felt like he failed with Michael and he worried he was about to fail with Tyler too. Oh, so he's having a very good track record for me, is it? After John died, I found Michael Fuller in New York City, called him to set up a time to visit, and what I walked into is this bleak scene.
So yeah, I want to take stuff, but nobody has space on their phone. Michael Fuller does live in an apartment in New York and he may be paying $1,800 a month in rent, I don't know, but I believe that would be under market for his lovely apartment in Upper Manhattan, which not only has a bathroom, but three bedrooms. Michael's a waiter, he likes his job, and he is shocked up with a woman, though she's Brazilian, not Argentinian, as John has said, and she does not happen to be a smuggler of high-powered South American marijuana, but rather a sweet Montessori teacher, who is also Michael's wife. They have a smart and precocious seven-year-old who speaks Portuguese in English, and cheers for Alabama football, from afar.
Michael tells me he got the no-John in his early 20s, while he was living down the road from him in Woodstock. That was over there a lot. Kind of as just a safe place to be. You thought you thought of John as a safe place to be?
Michael uses a version of that word several times to describe John's. A safe place. A safety harbor. A place of safety-ness.
He was partying a lot then, he says, over in Birmingham, dancing as a scantily-clad cowboy in a traveling mail review, and doing a lot of drugs, drinking. And John's was somewhere he could go to sober up or escape the scene for a while, and he always felt welcome there, because John would be eager for the company and would usually be up in the middle of the night after Michael was done clubbing, working on clocks. Michael says once he even hit out at John's for days, when he had a warrant out for skipping a court appearance. Meaning Michael, I realize John couldn't have been more wrong when he said his project had failed.
Michael says without John as a refuge, a voice telling him to slow it down to drink less. He might have ended up dead some night from drunk driving or in jail more than he did already. And it was John's place that Michael went to when he was about to hit the bottom of his addiction. From there, he headed back to his family and on to rehab.
So you really think John had that much influence, like? Oh yeah, because that drinking got bad. And he was a good person to be there, you know, for me. At that time, he helped a lot.
It's interesting, like one of the reasons I wanted to come talk to you. Do you feel like with the Goodson's, does that name ring a bell at all? No, the Goodson's no. I explained to Michael the context in which John had told me about him.
How John mentioned him because we've been talking about this other guy, Tyler Goodson, who done it also recently, but trying to shepherd through a rough period. And while I'm telling Michael about this, about the things John was doing for Tyler, he interrupts. And that's like John, yeah. Carrying and helping and that's John.
You're smiling like the recognition? Yeah. I ask Michael if it sounds from what I've described, like Tyler is a later iteration of him. And he says it's weird, but yeah, that does seem about right.
John would let him say it as long as he wanted, Michael says. Then he says, and that's how he was with Tyler, I guess. A thought seems to be occurring to him about John's suicide. And something probably happened with Tyler.
I don't know. Maybe... I don't know if I think John was gay, which has nothing to do, doesn't bother me at all. But...
What do you think he thinks something happened with Tyler? Like, he could have stopped coming around. He could have found a girlfriend and, you know, something like that. Is that what happened?
Yeah. Like right before the end. Not long before John killed himself, Tyler had started getting serious with his current girlfriend, Cammie, and they had recently moved in together. And when Michael said Tyler could have stopped coming around, all I could think of is the weekend leading up to John committing suicide, the weekend of Father's Day, when Tyler had been avoiding John and not speaking to him.
Because John had made an insulting comment about his daughter on the swing set. Michael says this is something he always sensed about John all those years ago. He kind of wanted you by himself. He didn't want to share you.
Especially not with a woman. I'm just saying when I took a girl over there, you could tell he would let them go, would you stay? How could you tell? You could just see it.
You can tell. It was always with girls, it was nasty. He was never really talking nice about women. This is true.
John could be scathing about lots of people. So when he was alive, this didn't necessarily jump out at me. But in retrospect, I have noticed that John could be particularly mean about women. He often used the word whore as well as the more vulgar and inventive language to talk about women.
And it sometimes seemed like he reserved a bit of extra vitriol just for them. On the other hand, John also expressed interest in feminism, but mown the fact that women in his area were more educated than men but didn't seem to get the same opportunities. Talked about reading Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, and was a fan of Audrey Lord. And he was enraged by sexual abuse.
So as usual with John, it was complicated. But since he died, quite a few people have told me, like Michael, that he was a woman hater. Michael has now formulated a theory in front of me, a speculation to be sure, but one that he's compelled by nonetheless. That Tyler retreating from John that weekend, and then the night he killed himself, Tyler choosing to stay home with his girlfriend and kids, rather than heeding John's pleas and going back to his place.
Michael thinks that's what led to John's suicide. I'm just thinking that that's what pushed him over the edge. He's afraid he's fixing to lose Tyler. I asked Michael something I've wondered often about John, if he ever knew him to be in a relationship.
I have no idea, Michael says. I don't think so. I know not with a woman. And I have no idea about a man, but he never mentioned it to me.
Do you think John's relationship with you and then now Tyler, having heard about it, like was the closest thing he had to a romantic relationship? I would think so. Yeah. Yeah, I would think so.
Is that sad or not sad? It's sad, because we're both straight. It is sad, but as I'd learned, Michael and Tyler being the closest thing John had to a romantic relationship. That's also not true.
The summer is here, old and cast, and no one but she watches if I was good. The scum and go to get each other rose as far as true. Emily, can't you see this? S Town is produced by Julie Snyder and me, with editing from Ira Glass, Sarah Kamek and Neil Drumming.
Whitney Dangerfield is our digital editor. Starly Kind is a story consultant, fact checking and research by Ben Phalen. Seth Linde is our director of operations. Lyra Smith mixes the show, and Matt Tierney is our technical director.
The S Town staff includes Emily Condon, Elise Ferguson, Julie Whittaker, and Kimberly Henderson. Music for the show is composed by Daniel Hart, Trey Pollard, Elado Negro, and Matt McGinley. Music is a provision by Damian Graef. Our website is stownpodcast.org.
That's stownpodcast.org. Special thanks to Elizabeth Aaron, Russell Johannon, Kerry Lewis, and Scott Sinclair. S Town is a production of Serial and This American Life.