If you didn't know we have criminal merchandise available on our website, you can get T-shirts, tote bags and stickers and every now and then we've limited edition merchandise available to head did. This is criminal dotcom slash shop to get criminal merch now that this is criminal dotcom slash shop. Thanks very much for your support. This episode contains adult language and descriptions of violence. Please use discretion. I used to say about the city as if they would do this to themselves, think about what they would do in a year, that was going to be my tagline for the movie if they would do this to themselves.

Just think about what they would do to you.

Errol Morris is an Academy Award winning filmmaker and writer. He's perhaps best known for his 1988 documentary, The Thin Blue Line, about a wrongful conviction in a murder case. He's also made movies about a pet cemetery, a lion tamer and the U.S. government's actions in the Vietnam War.

But there's one movie he's always wanted to make that he tried to make early in his career but never figured out how, I remember one weekend I'm reading The New York Times magazine and there's an article about an insurance investigator named John Healy.

And he's talking about his crimes, working as an investigator. It's a half a paragraph in the article. He mentions. The worst case he's ever been involved in, of course, this immediately gets my attention, the worst case. Oh, boy.

Knob City, the town in the swamp in Florida, where there's been this extraordinary history of insurance crime.

What kind of crime? Self mutilation.

So the way in which insurance policies are written, you can take out a policy if you're going on a hunting trip. So you're going to be gone for a week, 10 days, whatever. And you want some protection against the possibility of a hunting accident.

God forbid you take out a policy that has an accidental dismemberment clause.

But, you know, you can take out just so much insurance on a hunting trip, much better life insurance.

Most life insurance has a provision, an accidental dismemberment provision that if you lose both arms or both legs or an arm and a leg, you get the full get jenckes, the whole life insurance policy that also works if you put out both eyes or put an auger through both ears.

But the preferred method was an arm and a leg on opposite sides of the body so you can use a crutch.

And there was a whole mess of those guys, not the city. The Knob Club itself really called the NUPE Club.

Well, not by them, but by the insurance companies. It's called the club. Yes. Yeah. Errol Morris went to visit insurance investigator John Healey, and I tell them, you know, the subsidy thing, I'm kind of excited about this story. You said you're not going to go down there. That place is dangerous. They'll kill you. Don't even think about it. That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. And I went down there against good advice.

And I don't know what I was thinking. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal.

When Errol Morris first visited the place that insurance investigator John Healey called the city actually town called Vernon, Florida, 90 miles west of Tallahassee, it had a population of less than a thousand people.

This was in the 1970s.

Vernon was a rural town.

And John Healy wrote that there was little or no work there. So most of the people who did work had to drive 30 or 40 miles to other bigger towns nearby. In the first part of the 20th century, the steamboat had stopped coming through and the mill shut down. The county seat was moved from Vernon to a nearby town. By 1960, more than half of the population of Vernon received welfare aid. According to John Healey. The first dismemberment occurred sometime in the 1950s, when a man shot his hand off and collected 1500 dollars on a small policy.

After that, he said, quote, Word spread like wildfire throughout the community.

By the early 1960s, insurance experts estimated that more than two thirds of all loss of limb accident claims in the United States came from Vernon, Florida, and the panhandle area around it.

An editor at the local paper wrote, You have to realize there was a time when these people Eight Possum's because there is nothing else to eat. So you had to go out and run down a possum. Welcome to death and eat them. What do you need your left foot for? If you can cut it off, get 200000 dollars and not have to worry about chasing possums anymore?

There were a number of investigations, but according to the Tampa Bay Times, in 2007, not a single insurance claimant was ever convicted of fraud. As one insurance official put it, it was hard to make a jury believe a man would shoot off his foot.

I was a moron. Because what do you think you're going to do, Mr. Morris, you're going to go around to people's houses and ask them about how they committed insurance fraud. These people have committed horrible crimes, they've mutilated themselves. What are you going to ask them? What are they going to say to you? What are your crazy, crazy expectations of what is going to transpire here and I learned pretty quickly. This was not a good way to go.

I mean, the sheriff. Of Washington County subsidies in Washington County. And looking at the criminal docket, I want to know what kind of crimes do they have down here? And. I can't really find any murders. None. So I asked the sheriff, I said, you know. They don't seem to be any murders down here in Washington County, and he looks at me like. And crazy.

Sits down here, we don't have murders, we just have disappearances and he gives me this odd look and I thought to myself, you know, I actually don't want to be a disappearance down here.

But notwithstanding, I move down there.

I went to an insurance agent and he tried to construct with me all of the incidences of, you know, insurance claims, accidents.

And with his help, I was able to piece together a list of I am about 30, 30 of these cases.

The insurance agent helping Errol Morris, LW Bird Shaw, told the Tampa Bay Times about one man who collected payments from 11 different insurance companies. Batista himself had sold the man a 10 day policy to cover a hunting trip, and on the very first day out, the man claimed his friend accidentally shot him in the foot.

Batista remembered being at dinner at his daughter's house when he got the call about the shooting.

He says he didn't even need to be told what happened. He knew right away that the man had been shot in his left foot.

When his daughter asked him how he knew, he said, because that son of a bitch is going to drive a Cadillac with his right foot.

He described another payout to a different man who lost a foot. That man claimed that he accidentally shot himself when he thought he saw a squirrel on the ground. His insurance policy was less than 12 hours old. There is also a man who sawed off his left hand at work, a man who shot off his foot protecting his chickens at night, a man who shot off his hand while trying to shoot a hawk, and a man who somehow managed to lose a hand and a foot in an accident involving a rifle and a tractor.

Buttershaw had sold policies to all of them. He wasn't the only insurance agent trying to make sense of this increase in accident claims, specifically why more and more people in Florida were losing their hands and feet. One insurance agent, Murray Armstrong of Liberty National, told newspapers about a farmer who lost his left foot to a shotgun blast. This particular farmer had taken out so much insurance that his insurance bills exceeded his income. Dismemberment was a feature of nearly all of the farmers policies.

When the accident occurred, a tourniquet, it was found in the farmer's pocket. He claimed that he carried a tourniquet, quote, in case of snakebite. He also happened to be driving his wife's automatic transmission car around the farm the day the accident happened, usually drove a pickup truck. The insurance agent pointed out that it seemed pretty convenient that he happened to be driving a car with automatic transmission so he wouldn't have to use his left foot to work the clutch.

According to the insurance agent, the farmers coverage with around 38 companies exceeded two million dollars, but in the end, he agreed to settle for about half. An attorney with Liberty National described another case where three men in northwest Florida each lost a hand or a foot in accidents involving the same saw.

Errol Morris wanted to find out what was going on. But when he got to Vernon, Florida, hoping to find some answers and make a documentary, the only people open to talking to him were insurance agents. He was only able to speak with a few residents. He says that some people in Vernon didn't appreciate him asking questions.

One night at a bar, a man put his cigarette out on Errol Morris his lapel. He says another man tried to run over his cinematographer with a truck. He says the only time he was ever beaten up in his life was in Vernon.

So that first trip was unsuccessful. And I don't know what I would do today.

But if the idea was that I was going to go with a film crew around to these various houses and talk to these people, it was pretty clear pretty quickly that that was not going to work out very well.

Eventually, so many people in and around Vernon were filing insurance claims that insurance companies reportedly stopped selling to them.

According to the Tampa Bay Times, some insurance companies implemented a rule that they would not pay if the policyholder lost a hand or a foot within a year of signing the policy. The Florida legislature later outlawed these kinds of exclusion classes. As insurance investigators try to crack down, some people reported they couldn't get insurance of any kind. In 1972, one woman told the Tampa Bay Times that when she tried to insure her home after her husband died, she was told, quote, It couldn't be done.

Not in this town. That same year, insurance investigator John Healey told The New York Times, we pretty well stop this thing. Errol Morris never did get to make a movie about the alleged insurance fraud, but he did go back to Vernon, Florida, to make a completely different documentary. The movie doesn't exactly tell a story, it's just people of Vernon talking, a couple who believes some sand they've collected in a jar is growing. A preacher who's obsessed with the word, therefore, and the only police officer in town who waits in a squad car for something to happen.

I have different areas. I like to sit around and wait. I sit here a lot of time since his car was sitting around so much by the people. I don't know for sure if we have a police officer on duty or not. So I can sit here and get a lot of them as they come across the bridge or come down through town like a tanker. He sounds like he's getting out now. Errol Morris called the movie The Vernon, Florida, and there's no mention of any accidents or insurance fraud.

Many residents of Vernon were not happy about the movie in August of 1982, Vernon City Councilwoman Narval Armstrong was quoted in the Tampa Bay Times as saying that Errol Morris came here to do one thing run down the town.

And when he found he couldn't do what he came here to do, he made Vernon look bad, picked on the eccentric things.

After the film Vernon, Florida, was released in 1981, Errol Morris had trouble getting financing for other film projects, so he became a private detective. He once said being a private detective is having, quote, the ability to sit and talk to people and have people even more importantly talk to you, it comes down to an interest in finding out things. So I learned quickly that what I did as a filmmaker was not so different from what I was doing as a private investigator.

I remember I had one job. Where I had to pose as a filmmaker.

In order to get information and I thought this is really fucked up, I am a filmmaker out of work, filmmaker, I'm not making a film as we speak right now, but I'm a filmmaker. I've made a couple of films. People actually even thought they might be pretty good.

But I couldn't get work as a filmmaker, so I'm working as a private detective, posing as a filmmaker.

Was it exciting work? Yeah, I like. I like being a detective, were you good at it? I think I'm very good at it and it's self-serving of me to say so. But yeah, I think I'm good at it, I made this movie The Thin Blue Line, the movie that I'm still very, very proud of. And that was an investigation and unusual and in all of these movies that are made of true crime stories. I threw some strange set of circumstances, uncovered a terrible miscarriage of justice in Texas, you don't get to do that every day.

I always think that the best ways into a story. Are unexpected ways into a story. I've never had this desire to go through the front door. But go through a side door, climb through a window, maybe if necessary, like Santa Claus, go down the chimney. I had come to Texas to interview a Dallas psychiatrist, Dr. James Grigson.

Who testified at capital murder trials and played a very, very critical, crucial role in sentencing people to death.

James Grigson was sometimes called Dr. Death. He testified in more than 100 capital cases in Texas, almost always for the prosecution.

And so at his behest, I went down to a number of Texas prisons. And interviewed people who had been sentenced to death. Some of them have been commuted off of death row, but all of them at one time or another had been sentenced to death in Texas. In part because of the testimony that Dr. Grigson had offered at their capital murder trials. That was the beginning of it. And. Quite simply, I had no reason to believe that any of them were innocent.

That was not why I was talking to them, that was not why I was there, I was not there to uncover miscarriages of justice. Or to rebalance the scales of justice in some way. Put the Adams case. Which became the thin blue line grabbed a hold of me, the thin blue line tells the story of a man on death row named Randall Adams, who was convicted of killing a Dallas, Texas, police officer in 1976. Adams always maintained his innocence.

In the film, Errol Morris interviews almost everyone involved in the case the judge, the detectives, witnesses. He reexamines the evidence and looks at inconsistencies.

I went to Austin because every single murder trial, capital murder trial is automatically appealed under Texas statutes to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. And you go to their library, go down to the basement, you can get every single transcript for every murder trial. You can sit down there and read to your heart's content, which is what I did. And in reading the trial of Randall Adams. Now, this is a guy I had spoken to without a camera.

I had met him a preliminary meeting. I couldn't understand his story. He was one of those people. Not everybody said this, but a number of people did say this. I didn't do it. I'm innocent. This is terrible.

Adams kept talking about the kid I needed to talk to, the kid, the kid. And I didn't understand the case, I go to Austin, I start reading the transcript of his trial and I thought, oh, this doesn't quite add up, does it?

I love, love, love, love, film noir, film noir that I particularly love out of the past with Robert Mitchum, and this line kept coming back to me again and again and again.

I don't quite quote it accurately, but it's the essence of it.

Robert Mitchum is in the back of a cab. He's talking to the taxi driver and he says, I can see the frame, but I couldn't see the picture.

And that was very much my experience of the Randall Adams case, I had the strong feeling that he had been framed, but the details of exactly what had happened and how it had happened and what it meant, I did not know and wouldn't know until I spent over a year and a half investigating.

Had you talked to other people in prison who were proclaiming their innocence, but you kind of tell were really actually guilty, and was there anything different in the way that Randall Adams was asserting his innocence in the way that he was telling you that made you think maybe this guy really is innocent?

In retrospect, yes. But how do you view what someone says is so dependent on what you think about what they have done and who they are when someone tells you they're innocent?

Been on death row.

The inclination is to think little, maybe not. I knew that there was some missing piece in this story. It's interesting in retrospect, because a lot of this is in retrospect. Adams had a very strange way, this is the guy who was convicted of a murder that he didn't commit, who wasn't there, was home in bed. He had a way of talking. It's really crazy way of talking. A kind of sing song way of talking, where he would say things almost as if he had gone through some kind of performance piece, this endless recitation that he had gone through many, many, many times.

But he knew no one was going to believe them, but yet he did it anyway. Now, I look back on it, I think you told the story as a story that was true, but you knew well telling the story, I was never going to believe that that was the case then.

Something so unbelievably sad about that. Here's Randall Adams speaking with Errol Morris in the film. His whole story from the start was two hours late. I met this kid at around 10:00 in the morning, he says we met at noon.

I say we were at the Bronco Bowl at two or three o'clock. He says it was five or six o'clock. Everything that we did coincide what he was two hours late, two hours later, two hours into the night.

His testimony is that as we were getting off the freeway on Inwood Avenue, he stated that I'm driving the car that were pulled over. He gets scared and he slumps down in the seat of the car.

That as the officer walks up and shines his flashlight and I roll down my window.

I pulled a pistol out, blow this man away. His testimony is when I finally do drive to the motel.

I get out, I tell him, don't worry about it, forget this ever happened.

Now, that's courage. That's courage. This person who Randall Adams said was two hours late about everything, who testified against Randall Adams and the trial was named David Harris, David Harris had testified that he had seen Randall Adams shoot the police officer several times. Randall Adams begged Errol Morris to go find him and talk to him, and I thought, what the hell, I'm going to try to find this kid who had come from a small town in. East Texas, Viter.

And I found David Harris's parole officer. It turns out that since these murders, he had been in prison for other crimes. It has been released from San Quentin. When I was living with his family back in east Texas. And I asked the parole officer, and would you mind giving me his phone number? I'd love to talk to this guy. And he said, no, no, no, no, I can't do that. But you give me your phone number, and if he wants to talk to you, he'll call you.

I thought, OK, I gave her my phone number, I thought I'd never, ever, ever hear from this person, but within I would say five minutes, he called me, called me and invited me to come out of Lyter.

Meet him at a bar in the swamp outside of Viter, Viter, Texas, was once known as a KKK stronghold and as the sun downtown, where black people were threatened with violence for being outside after dark, it was a scary place.

I mean, a really scary place and. David Harris was still like a kid covered with tattoos. And clearly, he was meeting me because he wanted information from me. He thought, oh, Randall has probably been executed. And he was surprised I told him, you know, the guy still very much alive. And so then David Harris kept asking me, well, what does he have to say about me? I try to be diplomatic and say, well, you know, he's upset about a number of things.

Thank you. Fingered him for a capital murder. And we sat in this bar drinking and at the end of our meeting.

He kept saying to me. I want you to be really careful driving home. I was driving back to Huntsville from Viter, Texas, want you to be really careful, and I've often thought if someone tells you to be really, really careful driving home. Once they probably mean that they want you to be really careful driving home. If they see it twice. That's something different. And if they say it three times. It's a threat. And I remember being freaked out.

And at first I thought he was following me, I thought these headlights, I was completely spooked. And. Then the headlights drifted away. I thought, he's gone and I stopped at a gas station. And I called my wife in New York. And I said to her, I, I just met David Harris. And I think he might be the real killer. Hmm, and my wife started screaming at me, you idiot. So that's the beginning of the thin blue line, if you like, the thin blue line was released in nineteen eighty eight.

The final scene is a recording of David Harris telling Errol Morris that he's sure that Randall Adams is innocent of the murder. Here's part of that recording. The first voice you hear is there a Morse? What do you think about whether or not he. How can you be sure? I want to know about. Are you surprised the police left like. Up after the film was released, there was a motion for a new trial for Randall Adams, David Harris recanted his original testimony and said, I realize I've been responsible for a great injustice.

David Harris was never charged with the murder of the police officer. He was in prison for another murder when the film was released and he was executed in 2004. The evidence presented in the Thin Blue Line is credited with helping to exonerate Randall Adams. He was released from prison in 1989.

The Museum of Modern Art describes the Thin Blue Line as, quote, arguably one of the most influential films of the last 50 years and a seminal true crime document. How did you learn to investigate, how did you. I don't know if you learn that kind of thing, do you? It's fueled by some kind of strange curiosity, some kind of strange desire to find out more, to learn something that you don't know. It's like interviewing people, it's not even about what you want to know, it's wanting to know something you don't know.

I often say about interviews, to the extent I know what someone is going to say in an interview, why bother won't even do the interview. Why talk to anybody? Unless the nature of the enterprise is just a recitation of stuff that you already expected to hear or wanted to hear or thought you were going to hear. What I love in the end about interviewing people, whether it's in the course of writing a book or making a movie or hearing something truly extraordinary, something that you could never even have made up on your own.

Like what? Can you remember a couple that I suppose the very beginnings of this? We're interviews that I did when I was a graduate student at Berkeley and the Santa Cruz area, there were a series of serial killers, mass murderers, however you want to describe them.

This is in the 70s that fascinated me. And that was the beginning of it, I started to interview killers, I started to interview killers and their families. Killers in their psychiatrist's. By the way, if you ask me, one lady was doing this stuff, I don't know. My mother, who never really liked my talking to mass murderers. My mother had this amazing euphemistic style said to me, you know, Carol, I wish you would spend more time with people your own age.

I said, But, Mom, the mass murderers are my own age, Hurby Mullein. Herbie had just been convicted. Have 10 counts of murder in August 1973, 26 year old Herbert Mullein was convicted of two counts of first degree murder and eight counts of second degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison and I went to visit his father.

This is right after the sentencing. In the interview, he said. Are you going to see Hurby? You can visit Hurby said Yafai. They probably earn. He said, well, there's something I'd like you to tell Hermès for me. Tell him you better watch out or he's going to be in big trouble. Is it OK? Yeah. I'll tell them. I suppose in parentheses, sir. Herbie is already he's there in big trouble. No need to tell them that, and I didn't.

You you interviewed him here, I'll give you I'll give you another story as long as we're in the story mode. I had been an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin. In Madison. And no one who lived in Wisconsin, probably no one who lives in the whole area, maybe in the entire United States, was unaware of Ergin.

Jean was a serial killer in the 1940s and 50s whose crimes inspired the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs. When police examined his home in Plainfield, Wisconsin, they found that he had collected body parts than it used them to make household items, clothing and masks. He admitted to killing two women, then was hospitalized in psychiatric institutions until his death. Errol Morris says he spent about a year investigating Edkins crimes and visited him and what was then called the Central State Hospital for the criminally insane.

And the superintendent of Central State Hospital is a Doctor Schubert, who I befriended. And we had a whole number of conversations about it again. In the cafeteria. And I asked him at one point, is there any truth to these claims that Ed was a cannibal? And he looked at me appalled. He said absolutely not.

I talked to Ed about this very thing and Ed assured me although he had eaten human flesh many times, he never enjoyed it.

Oh, boy. Oh, so like the first time you sat down with him, what did he look like and how did he treat you? Well, how was your back and forth, the manner between the two of you?

He was very, very soft spoken. And almost inaudible voice spent a lot of time he had a shortwave radio in his room. Listening to Radio Moscow popular in those days. And. We talked about a whole number of things I never asked him, I was possibly embarrassed. I never asked him about the details of the crimes, but we did talk about a whole number of different things. Errol Morris didn't end up making a movie about again, but he was thinking about it.

He had actually talked with director Werner Herzog about meeting in Wisconsin to exhume the body of Edkins mother to see whether Etkin had stolen her corpse from a cemetery, as was alleged. But they never went through with it. We checked in with Errol Morris about this by email after our interview, and he said he, quote, ultimately declined to participate in the exhumation of the grave. Herzog ended up shooting part of a film there in Plainfield as the story goes.

Errol Morris took offense that Werner Herzog was filming in what he thought of as his landscapes. Werner Herzog gave him 2000 dollars as a kind of apology. The two thousand dollars was just enough money to fund a trip to Vernon, Florida, otherwise known as NRB City. RMN says that even now, more than 40 years later, he still wants to make that movie.

The time, I suppose, in everyone's life where you feel very acutely, the time is running out. I think I feel that way today, so many stories. That I still would like to tell so many things that I would still like to investigate. There's something about the mystery of people, the mystery of what people do or don't do that is still unendingly compelling to me. Crime is just a way of looking at human behavior, way of looking at ourselves, of trying to understand why we do what we do.

I used to joke about why does the chicken cross the road? Why do we why do we tell each other this joke in its punch line to get to the other side? Why is that even funny?

If it is funny, which it well might not be?

To me, ultimately, it's been a question about human motivation or chicken motivation, if you prefer, why did the chicken cross the road? Is there a kind of deep understanding that we might have of that chicken and his desire to get to the other side? Or is there really nothing?

There is the joke that somehow we try to find an explanation where there is none? I don't know. Criminalist created by Lauren S'pore and me, Nidia Wilson is our senior producer, our producers are Susanna Roberson and Aaron Waed, audio mix by Rob Byers.

Special thanks to Michele Harris.

Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at this is criminal dotcom. More on Facebook and Twitter at criminal show. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio WNYC, where a proud member of Radio Topia from PUREX, a collection of the best podcasts around shows like Home Cooking, Home Cooking, launched in March to help you figure out what to cook and keep you company during the quarantine.

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