Pushkin.

In the nineties, New York detective Louis Scarcella locked up the worst criminals, putting bad guys away.

There's no feeling like it.

Then jailhouse lawyers took aim. Led by Derek Hamilton, Scarcella took me.

To the precinct and lied.

20 men eventually walked free. Now in the Burden podcast, after a decade of silence, Luis Garcella finally tells his name story, and so does Derek Hamilton. Listen to the burden on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, there. I'm doctor Maya Shankar, and I'm a scientist who studies human behavior. Many of us have experienced a moment in our lives that changes everything, that instantly divides our life into a before and an after. On my podcast, a slight change of plans. I talk to people about navigating these moments. Their stories are full of candor and. And hard won wisdom. And you'll hear from scientists who teach us how we can be more resilient in the face of change. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, it's Jake. Before we get into this episode, I want to let you know that you can now binge the entire season ad free by becoming a Pushkin plus subscriber. You can hear all six episodes before they're released to the public. Sign up for Pushkin on the Deepcover Apple podcast show page or visit Pushkin FM. Your subscription also unlocks more early and ad free content from other true crime shows coming later this year, like new seasons of Death of an artist and lost Hills and a brand new true investigation called wheres Dia? Now onto the episode. Hey, it's Jake here.

I just wanted to give you a.

Heads up that this episode contains a detailed account of a hate crime, a murder. Previously on Deep Cover.

Craig Peterson. You don't know us, but we're here. I want to talk to you. Federal agents.

Can we approach you?

And Craig just looked at us and said, I don't know what you're talking about.

I think he said something like, yeah, we heard rumors about that, that someone said, we did a homicide. But, man, that's. No, that's nothing to it. We didn't do any homicide. It's a bunch of junk.

You could feel the tension, but you can also feel like he's about to say something, and then he says, I'll tell you everything.

So there are Scott Duffy and Terry Mortimer in a conference room at the FBI's offices in Wilmington, Delaware. And they're sitting on the edge of their seats because across the table from them is Craig Peterson, the electrician from Vermont with the Spiderweb tattoo. Now, they suspect that Craig was an accomplice to a murderer. For months, Craig had been playing at cool, admitting to nothing. But now, in this conference room, Craig has promised to tell them everything.

It was a moment that I think of everything that Terry and I had been through, had prayed through, and this was the moment in time. This was it. It was almost like this is the reason why you were brought together.

Mind you, this moment, it wasn't just the result of good luck. Two days prior, Scott and Terry had played their best and last card. They had handed Craig a subpoena to appear before a grand jury. They were hoping that this would get him talking. It was a long shot, really. Truth was, the feds had very little on Craig. But Craig, he offered to tell them everything. Before he did, however, he made a request.

He says, I need to have assurances. And we said, what? What type of assurances? Well, you have a prosecutor on board. Can you call the prosecutor? Absolutely, we can call the prosecutor. But, Greg, you gotta. I can't just call a prosecutor over here and waste his time. You got to tell us, what is it we're asking the prosecutor to come for? And that's when he says, I'm not the shooter, and I want immunity.

Upon hearing this, Scott's partner Terry kind of sat up in his chair.

Now, I'm thinking to myself, this dude's pretty savvy.

Dude.

Thinking, like, attorneys talk about immunity. Federal agents talk about immunity, not electricians from Burlington, Vermont. Where did he get that from?

That's what he said.

I want immunity.

Now, typically, giving someone immunity is not a quick or easy task, especially in a situation like this, where someone's been murdered. Getting all the higher ups to sign off can take days or longer. But Scott knew time was of the essence. He needed to jump on this before Craig changed his mind. Fortunately, he had a prosecutor on standby.

Prosecutor dropped everything, ran to my office. We spoke with him briefly, saying, in so many words, he's confessed. And, um, we don't know where to go from here. And so he said, so what you need is immunity. Am I hearing that?

And Scott's like, yeah, that's exactly what Craig is asking for. And the prosecutor is like, I think I can help you guys. But first, the prosecutor had one crucial question, and he wanted to ask it directly to Craig. So he hurries over to the conference.

Room, and the first thing the prosecutor asked him, very first thing, are you the shooter? If it comes back at all, in any way that you pulled the trigger deals off, no immunity, nothing?

Craig tells them, no, I didn't pull the trigger. Wasn't me. The prosecutor seems satisfied. He whips out a pen and begins to write out a grant of federal immunity.

I'm looking at Scott and one, this is unbelievable. That never happens.

But that's exactly what happened.

So, um, with that, Craig tells us that he starts the damn breaks.

Up until now, Scott and Terry had been going on a prayer, quite literally chasing down rumors and nothing more. But that was about to change. A confession was at hand, one that would validate Scott and Terry's hope that they were uncovering something they were destined to find. Ultimately, this confession would upend many people's lives. It would transform a whispered rumor into a full blown murder investigation. And maybe, just maybe, it could lead them to the victim. I'm Jake Halpern, and this is deep cover. Season four, the nameless man, episode two, the Confession.

In the 1980s and nineties, New York City needed a tough copy. Like Detective Louis Scarcella putting bad guys away.

There's no feeling like it in the world. He was the guy who made sure the worst killers were brought to justice. That's one version this guy is a piece of. Derrick Hamilton was put away from murder by Detective Scarcella.

In prison, Derek turned himself into the best jailhouse lawyer of his generation.

The lawyer was my girlfriend. This is my only way to freedom. Derek and other convicted murderers started a.

Law firm behind bars.

We never knew we had the same.

Cop in the case.

Scarcella. We gotta show that he's a corrupt cop. They could go themselves.

I'm Steve Fishman.

And I'm Dax Devlin Ross. And this is the burden.

Listen to new episodes of the burden on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad free with exclusive bonus content, subscribe to Truecrime Clubhouse on Apple Podcasts.

Hey, there. I'm doctor Maya Shankar, and I'm a scientist who studies human behavior. Many of us have experienced a moment in our lives that changes everything, that instantly divides our life into a before and an after. On my podcast, a slight change of plans. I talk to people about navigating these moments. Their stories are full of candor and hard won wisdom. And you'll hear from scientists who teach us how we can be more resilient in the face of change. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

After the dam breaks, Craig just starts talking recounting what he could remember from that night back in 1989 when he and Tom Guybecausen were still in high school.

And so he starts telling us how it went down, that basically that he and Tommy decided one night to go and find a black man, to kill that black man so that they could get their spider web tattoos as skinheads.

Craig tells them they borrowed his mother's car, a gray Chevy Beretta. Craig drove. Tom was in the passenger seat. Theyd gotten their hands on a gun, a 38 caliber revolver, and they started looking for a target. All of this, by the way, and what im about to tell you is based on Scott and Terrys recollections and the report that they filed at the time and also from sworn testimony that Scott, Terry and Craig later provided. Anyway, initially, Craig and Tom drove through Wilmington, Delaware, where they lived.

He said it was very busy. He said there were just so many people out and there would be no way that they would be able to shoot somebody and not have a witness around. So they made the decision to leave Wilmington and travel north.

They drove north on the interstate until they reached Philadelphia. Here they got off at the Broad street exit. By now it was late. Craig wasn't sure exactly how late, but the streets were mostly empty. Craig said at one point, they stopped and stole a license plate to put on his mom's car as an added measure of protection, just in case someone witnessed what they were about to do. At some point, they passed a large wall, and eventually they turned onto a one way street.

Craig's driving. And they drive down a very dark street, and Tommy is in the passenger side, and he tells Craig, slow down, slow down, slow down.

Because up ahead they saw a pedestrian, a lone black man. As Craig recounted it, the man turned and started walking toward them.

Tommy pulled out a 38 caliber revolver, leaned out the window and shot him and exclaimed, I got him right between the eyes.

The way Craig remembered is the guy hit the ground so hard that he had to be dead.

Craig said that even all these years later, he still remembered the sound of that thud as the man fell onto the pavement. And that was it. These two high school kids with their gun and their mom's car sped off into the night back home to Delaware. So far, this entire investigation had been based on a rumor, a rumor that initially seemed like it might be impossible to verify, that two teenagers drove into a nearby city to murder a complete stranger because of the color of his skin, and that they'd commemorated this murder with a tattoo. It was the kind of story that you didn't want to believe in, because if it were true, what did that say about us as human beings, about our capacity for hate and cold bloodedness? In a way, the veracity of this rumor was about more than just one murder. It seemed like a test, a light meter that would measure just how dark the depths of humanity could be. It all hinged on a single could these kids really have done this? And in a situation like this, they almost have to hope, maybe even pray, that the answer is no.

Because then the world isn't so bad, right? But if the answer is yes, they really did this, well, then the depths are darker than most of us would care to admit. As Craig recounted the details of the murder in that FBI conference room, Scott listened intently. If you recall, Scott had trained to become a priest back then. Sometimes people would notice his priest's collar and just start talking, sharing their darkest secrets. So Scott, he was comfortable in this role as the confessor. He knew how to listen, how to watch, which is exactly what he did as Craig spoke.

And when you watch somebody tell the story, you can tell that they are just reliving it, that they were there. It was just amazing to watch, because that's all I'm doing, is watching him.

Craig's confession raised so many questions for Scott and Terry. Like, why would Craig, the steadfast sidekick, turn on his old friend now? Cause in the past, Craig had been very loyal. Like a few years back, Craig had tried to protect Tom from the authorities by storing some weapons for him, weapons that Tom wasnt supposed to have. Craig paid for this, did a few years in prison, in fact. So maybe he was willing to talk now just to avoid a repeat of that. Craig got out of federal prison in 1999. A few years later, he moved north to Vermont, to that house in the mountains with the dogs and the floodlights. Bottom line, it seemed like Craig had made a decision to escape his old life and maybe to escape Tom, too. I should mention we reached out to both Craig and Tom for this story. Craig declined an interview. We never heard back from Tom. But here is what we can say about Tom. He had a long and well documented history of violence. As a teenager, he'd been convicted of reckless endangerment after he shot a gun at a moving car full of people.

Police records from the time confirmed that Tom had an arsenal of weapons, including a billy club, two blackjacks, two sets of brass knuckles, and a mess of knives. To put it plainly, Tom seemed like the kind of friend that you might not want to anger by turning on.

Him, we believed that a real danger existed. There is a very real potential of danger against Craig. People will go to great lengths to protect their self interests, but at this.

Point, there is no turning back for Craig. More after the break.

In the 1980s and nineties, New York City needed a tough cop like detective Louis Scarcella.

Putting bad guys away. There's no feeling like it in the world. He was the guy who made sure the worst killers were brought to justice. That's one version this guy is a piece of. Derrick Hamilton was put away from murder by detective Scarcella in prison, Derek turned.

Himself into the best jailhouse lawyer of his generation.

And the law was my girlfriend. This is my only way to freedom. Derek and other convicted murderers started a.

Law firm behind bars.

We never knew we had the same cop in the case, Scarsella. We gotta show that he's a corrupt cop. They can go themselves.

I'm Steve Fishman.

And I'm Dax Devlin Ross. And this is the burden.

Listen to new episodes of the burden on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad free with exclusive bonus content, subscribe to Truecrime Clubhouse on Apple Podcasts.

Hey, there. I'm doctor Maya Shankar, and I'm a scientist who studies human behavior. Many of us have experienced a moment in our lives that changes everything, that instantly divides our life into a before and an after. On my podcast, a slight change of plans. I talk to people about navigating these moments. Their stories are full of candor and hard won wisdom. And you'll hear from scientists who teach us how we can be more resilient in the face of change. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Scott and Terry now had a confession, which under normal circumstances, would be a very big deal, potentially a game changer. And in some ways, the confession was very promising. Craig recalled some details, like the moment of the actual shooting vividly, in a way that might be very persuasive for a jury. The problem was, the alleged murder took place more than 17 years prior, and there was so much that Craig did not remember. For instance, he couldn't tell the feds where exactly this happened. He couldn't provide the name of a street or intersection or park, nor could he tell them exactly when this happened. Could not for a day or a week or even a month. Most vexing of all, Craig had no idea who the victim was. And this. This right here underscored the central problem that Scott and Terry had been facing from the very beginning. Simply put, they didn't have a body. They were trying to solve the murder of an unknown man. And without knowing who he was, they couldn't do much of anything. But Scott remained determined.

We have to do our job, and we have to find out who did they kill? If it's possible, how are we going to do that? It then felt like a mandate. Like, okay, were in this.

This sounds awfully confident, but both Scott and Terry told me that they felt, on some level, like they were trying to find a needle in a haystack. They both used that exact phrase, which raises the how do you find a needle in a haystack? Well, in theory, you start by sorting through all the pieces of hay, right? In other words, you create a finite pool of possibilities. So lets talk about the finite, the things Craig knew or claimed to know with some certainty. Craig knew the murder took place sometime around the spring of 1989. He remembered this in part because he recalled going to senior prom not long after the murder took place. So the agents had a year, 1989, and they had a city, Philadelphia. And for whatever it was worth, Craig had mentioned a one way street and a dark colored wall. According to police accounts, there were 473 murders in Philadelphia that year. So in theory, one of those murder victims was their nameless man. But which one? Turns out our federal agents, they had an ace up their sleeve. Scott knew someone, someone he believed could really help them. A detective who worked in the homicide unit of the Philadelphia Police Department, a veteran investigator named Leon Lubieski, went by looby for short.

Scott gave me a very vivid picture of what Luby looked like.

He's a large physical stature. Like when you hear a bear, you think of a bear and, you know, scary or cuddly. I mean, bear has many different views depending on who you ask, right? But nobody will ever deny the fact.

That a bear is big. And you can't argue with Scott on that one.

When you saw him, you perked up and you're like, oh, he's not somebody to fool around with.

But apparently Luby also had this other aspect.

He had the face of someone who was just extremely caring. You just looked at him, you knew immediately, this is somebody who will do anything to help you.

So he was a multifaceted bear.

Multifaceted, cuddly. But he could turn grizzly if he needed to.

Scott's hope was that his old friend Looby, the multifaceted bear, could now help them find the victim.

Hello?

Hey, is this louby.

It's Luby.

Looby. This is Jake. Is this still a good time to talk to you?

Yeah, it's a good time.

It took me a while to track Looby down. He's retired now. When we spoke, he remembered the case right away.

They had these details, but they didn't actually have a body to go with it.

How unusual is that to have someone say, hey, we're pretty certain there's a murder, we have a confession, we just. We got no body.

That's rather unusual.

Scott had passed along a short list of facts to looby to help him with his task. They included the one, the area where Craig remembered driving. Two, the type of weapon that was used. Three, the nature of the wound, a single shot to the head. Four, the race of the victim. And five, a general timeframe for when this happened, the spring of 1989. How optimistic were you that you were going to be able to get them what they needed to solve this?

I was actually very optimistic because we keep pretty good records on our dead bodies.

For Scott and Terry, this was a search for a needle in a haystack. But Looby was an insider who knew how things worked in Philly and knew exactly where to look. As far as the records go, the authorities believed this murder case would have been marked as unsolved. It happened back in 1989, and Looby was getting this request 17 years later, in the spring of 2006. So what happens with a case when it goes unsolved?

Well, it stays with the assigned detective. And if he gets a chance, he goes out and works on it in between things. If he doesn't, it just lays there, becomes cold.

Basically, the file just sits there in a file cabinet in the homicide department.

Homicides. Just one big room. And there's file cabinets all along the walls. And in those file cabinets are the open cases. And then they move them into storage.

Luby told me that typically after a few years, the unsolved case files are sent to the city's storage facility, a big ten story building. The homicide files are kept down in the basement.

And when that happens, the assigned detective, he no longer. It's a bit of a problem for him to get to his case file now.

So is it kind of a little bit of out of sight, out of mind?

Basically, once it goes into storage, like the supervisor doesn't bother you anymore to get anything done on it. So it's like in limbo, as far.

As I could tell, these cold cases kept down in the basement. Kind of like the messages at the very bottom of your inbox that slowly recede from your consciousness and eventually get moved into some folder that you'll most likely never look at again. So when Looby got the call from Scott and Terry, he didn't have the actual case files from 1989 right at his fingertips. What he had was a loose leaf binder, an index of all the murders from the past. This index was a collection of so called summary sheets.

It's a single page. It's got the deceased name, cause of death, you know, what the outcome is, if it's still open, things of that nature.

Luby searches through these summary sheets and narrows the possibilities down to unsolved murders that occurred around the spring, anywhere from January through May. There were 37 of them. Then he weeded out all the ones that didnt match up with the details that Scott had given him. In the end, Looby was left with just one case. An unsolved murder from April 16, 1989, of a 33 year old black man. He was killed by a single 38 caliber bullet to the head. This happened in north Philadelphia on a one way street, just one block away from an imposing stone wall. Luby made arrangements to get the entire case file pulled out of storage unearthed from that basement. And then he reached back out to Scott. Looby faxed the summary sheet directly over to the FBIS offices in Wilmington, Delaware. It was an efficient bit of detective work. Hed done all of this roughly 24 hours. So you can imagine Scott's reaction when just a day after getting Craig's confession, a fax arrives from looby.

And Scott, he just holds it in.

His hands and stares at it.

It was unbelievable feeling that this is it. Seeing the name and seeing the specifics of the crime, having a location, a street. I don't even think I put it down. It was. This is it.

Wait. How could you be so certain?

I don't know. I just. It just felt like everything that Craig told us fit this very crime.

And so much of it did seem to fit, including the timeframe, the one way street, the proximity of the wall, the caliber of the bullet, the single shot to the head. The motive noted on the facts was one word, drugs. Objectively, at this point, you could not say it was a slam dunk. There was no DNA match. No one had found a murder weapon and matched it to a bullet from the scene of the crime. None of that. But even so, Scott remembers turning to his partner Terry and saying, we have a name.

We have a victim. Terry, I think this is. This is why we're here. We believe this is. This is who we've been pursuing. That was pretty powerful to us.

At long last, they had a name. It was right there on the fax, plain to see, printed out in smudgy letters. Aron Wood. They strongly believed that he was the victim. This was a huge moment in their investigation, and yet it could still amount to nothing. Identifying a potential victim did not guarantee a conviction or even guarantee that there'd be a trial. Now, the question was, would there be enough evidence to bring a case and convince a jury that this is what happened all those years ago?

Terry and I said, it may be that this does not ever go to a court. There may be nothing that we can do or Philadelphia can do, even with Craig's cooperation, that this is ever going to see the inside of a court. And letting Craig know that this all may be just to give or on wood, his family. Some sense of. Some sense of understanding.

But a kind of terrible understanding, right?

Yeah, definitely. I just believe having no name, having no understanding of how your loved one's life came to an end, who did it, and for what purpose, I think can drive you mad.

As investigators would soon learn, Aron Wood had a family, including a mother and two younger brothers. For 17 years, they'd been searching for answers about how and why he died. The last chapter of Iran's life was like a story that stopped abruptly mid page. No explanation, no closure. There had been very little to hold onto. But all of that was about to change. Next time on deep cover. Everybody liked them. That's why we. We was baffled. Like, oh, somebody shot a Ron. Shot a ron, you cat. Nah, no way. And I guess that's what puzzles the most in the beginning. Couldn't figure it out. Deep cover is produced by Amy Gaines McQuade and Jacob Smith. It's edited by Karen Shakurji. Mastering by Jake Gorski. Our show art was designed by Sean Carney. Original scoring. And our theme was composed by Luis Guerra. Fact checking by Arthur Gompertz. Our story consultant was James Forman junior. Special thanks to Jerry Williams, Sarah Nicks, Greta Cohn, and Jake Flanagan. I'm Jake Halpern.

In the nineties, New York detective Luis Garcella locked up the worst criminals, putting bad guys away.

There's no feeling like it.

Then jailhouse lawyers took game, led by Derek Hamilton.

Scarcella took me to the precinct and lied.

20 men eventually walked free. Now, in the Burden podcast, after a decade of silence, Luis Garcella finally tells his story. And so does Derek Hamilton. Listen to the burden on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey there. I'm doctor Maya Shankar, and I'm a scientist who studies human behavior. Many of us have experienced a moment in our lives that changes everything, that instantly divides our life into a before and an after. On my podcast, a slight change of plans. I talk to people about navigating these moments. Their stories are full of candor and hard won wisdom. And you'll hear from scientists who teach us how we can be more resilient in the face of change. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.