Catching A Cop That Murders Teenagers

this is things police see firstand accounts with your host Steve gold welcome to the podcast that interviews AC and retired police officers about their most intense bizarre and sometimes humorous moments on the job I am old Ginger face your host thank you for being here everybody thank you for all the the listen all the downloads that have been going on I truly appreciate that the rating and reviewing is excellent also the numbers for the show Are Climbing which is um which is something I like I like to get as many people as possible to hear the stories of these great men and women of law enforcement and what they actually see and have to deal with on the job in order to gain a better appreciation for what it is that they are actually doing out there I think we all know uh if you turn on the TV and watch the news you know that they’re not really getting a fair Shake uh whatsoever so the show is kind of a platform for that and I’m proud to say it’s it’s reached a lot of people and um I hope it continues to do so thank you for the patreon supporters people who really keep the lights on over here if you really really love the show and you want to show your support you can do it through patreon the link is in the show notes there are two different levels there’s patrolman there’s Sergeant you get slightly different things with each but either way I will send you a vinyl TPS uh sticker and you’ll have direct access to me um we can chat back and forth at patreon if you don’t know what it is it’s kind of like your own private uh Facebook feed for the show and there’s just people in there um supporters and I also release the video interviews of the show a day or two early typically for patreon supporters so links in the show notes if you can’t afford it have no worries the show will remain free as always in order to reach as many people as POS possible it’s just a way for you to show support if you like I said if you’re a Die Hard fan and you if you’ve beening listening to all this free content and you really want to um uh show me you love me that’s where you can do it so happy to have you but if you can’t I totally understand Today’s show is going to be a great one have a gentleman on with many many years of law enforcement experience um he’s got a total of 52 years in law enforcement currently he did 32 years as a Missouri highway patrolman a Missouri State Trooper he uh then worked after he retired from there he worked as a reserve for almost four years then decided to run for Sheriff and did that for eight years then thought he was going to leave that but the incoming Sheriff decided he needed his help wanted him on board so he came back in and did a bunch of years there he’s also a um popular author and we will talk about that as well it’s JB King books.com we’ll uh we’ll go there and check it out and so without further Ado let me bring on JB King JB good afternoon sir good to have you on my man thank you for being so flexible with the schedule that’s U always a big help well that’s not that big of a deal here but I have to confess having looked at some of your other uh guests that you’ve had over the past several months I may not be quite as exciting so many people people say that but you couldn’t you’re wrong because we’ve had we have had cops from small town America to Big City LAPD Robbery Homicide guys and people people really love all the episodes and I think it it probably gets lost on us as policemen where it just the job just becomes like we know the job so it’s not really surprising to us but anytime a cop really speaks about behind the scenes and and what actually happens people want to listen so especially with your career I’ve got no worry sir okay fire away you’re like whatever you say are you still in Missouri yes sir I’m still in Wayville the highway patrol sent me to palaski County Missouri which is the home of Fort Leonard Wood back in December of 1969 and I’m still in Wayville ah the infamous Fort uh leonardwood I’ve heard so much about from the last few guests on here I thought you were going to say something about it well we have had some interesting times with Fort Wood yes yeah I heard it’s kind of calming down which is too bad because it’s really good Cal down it’s good for the podcast to have uh some stories to go through so you started with the highway patrol was and was that uh your first pick as for a PD did you want to be a State Trooper or is that just kind of where you got in I was the first place I was selected after I graduated from the highway patrol Academy Academy they assigned me to troop ey which is headquartered out of R Missouri about 30 Mi east of here and within the troop they assigned me to the Waynesville Zone which is basically Fort Leonard Wood and been here ever since were you prior military did you know any state troopers no my dad retired out of the US Army I had just finished four years in college in August and I started the patrol Academy in September of 1969 what was the academy like back then how long was it 16 weeks that’s pretty long for back then they uh they had this philosophy that if you did not want to be a trooper they would assist you in leaving the academy so you had to work at it there was no gimme I’m sure was it a sleepover no it was you were in the we went I think the first four weeks without a day off they gave us our first weekend off after the fourth week yeah yeah those state policey are always the toughest it seems like they were rough we had a couple of guys in my class that had been through officers basic training with the Army and they said the academy was definitely tougher than that so I have no comparison there yeah yeah I know up here in Mass for the Mass state troopers there’s I know some Troopers that were um that are there’s no X Marines so they are Marines um they they said they’d rather go to Paris Island Again than go through the mass State Police Academy we had a marine or two in our class and they said something similar yeah no no fun but it’s great I mean those standards not only does it gel the class and makes lifelong bonds with law enforcement mates uh it really makes you feel like you accomplished something when you got out it’s not a Mambi pambi Academy you know well it also prepares you realistically for the future because we only had we had less than 800 men to cover the state at that time so you were going to be out there by yourself 30 mil from nowhere depending on backup from a county or a City PD which may or may not have been in a position so you had to learn how to stand on your own two feet and take care of business yeah the academy was pretty well geared to that yeah absolutely that’s that’s what I’m worried about now when you see the um some places the softening of the Academy where it’s like you know it’s you’re supposed to have somebody up in your business in your face pressuring you so you know what it’s like to deal with someone who’s hostile and you don’t lose it either way you don’t cower and you don’t also lose your temper and overreact cuz some people are just are Fighters you know if you get them going you you fluster their feathers they might they might go Hands-On too quick and other people need to know I need to be able to stand up for myself and not be a wimp right correct we had a couple of X Marines in our training Cadre and yeah they they gave us the business yeah Marines love the Academy I went through um the head di was a for or was a marine and uh I’m grateful for it now because he was every bit the Frog voice and the hat you know what I mean like oh yeah just so squared away like I’d always look at his uniform when he was doing our inspection being like there’s got to be something on this guy that is like you could gig him on and there was nothing it was like perfect all the time well we we kind of got our first taste when the guy put on white gloves and started running his finger over the top of the door cills in our dorm rooms looking for dust oh yeah you know you’re screwed time yeah we’re screwed did anybody do the top of the trim no yeah we did it after the first time that is oh man that’s great JB can you take us back to um a young JB King on the road by himself to the first um call you would have considered a hot call when you got your adrenaline going about three hours into my first shift I’ll take it now you have to understand that here in Bas County at that time there was quite a lag in law enforcement around here we had roughly 10 houses of ill repute running wide open pimps prostitutes everywhere we had arm robbery shooting stabbings weekly and we didn’t have a lot of Municipal and County backup so there were eight of us assigned to the zone and we basically I I’ve been told this many times by other people that we were the law in palaski County now typically as a state trooper you think we’re going to be working reck and giving out tickets well we did do that but virtually every shift we we would hear a municipal officer or a County officer tell their dispatch that send me the state I need assistance and we literally got into every crime that you can think of Missouri has two statutes that kind of conflict with each other one of them says that as a trooper we’re supposed to be dedicated to Traffic Safety and enforcement but then another statute says we have the authority to investigate any crime of any nature anywhere in the states so you can’t get much broader than that right so we we handled everything yeah absolutely so to answer your question having you know kind of put the background in my fto showed up to pick me up at a little before 4 p.m. on my first day January 1 1970 and 3 hours later we find ourselves at a disturbance at a garage out in the county and as soon as we pull up in the parking lot got about seven guys charging us two of them have Bloody heads and when we got out of the vehicle they all went to the senior guy and ignored the rookie which was fine with me until one of the guys came over and told me that there was another fell inside the building holding his friends at gunpoint oh jeez now when we or I should say when my fto picked me up his his words to me were stick to me like a shadow don’t leave my side so he’s surrounded by people yelling and screaming and like I said two of them had bloody heads and this guy’s telling me a man’s inside with a gun so I went inside and disarmed him at gunpoint and when I told him to put the weapon down he immediately complied so in that sense of the word it was really a minor situation but but it kind of drove home later on that night the whole idea of what we were getting into or what I was getting into you know in the academy they teach you all the disarming tactics and the defensive tactics and they give you lectures on officers being shot sure and it all really didn’t seem all that real until yep here we are with guys all around us bloody heads guys got a gun walking into a hostile situation but it turned out in the end that it really wasn’t that bad because the man with the gun was actually the owner of the business who was defending himself he was well known to all the Troopers but being the three-hour on the job rookie he had never met me and I’d never met him so we started out kind of bad but we ended up as friends before the year was over so really the first hot call really wasn’t that hot except for the fact that what did I get myself into to was I thinking when I signed up for this job yeah was I you know it it kind of brought all the academy realism and stuff to the front and you know I we can’t use that word on here but it was one of those oh you know what moments yeah absolutely and I that is a very hot call especially for your first three hours I mean now you said that that brought it all to the Forefront of your mind of like wow this is for Real um did you ever have any second thoughts or did you think like oh my gosh if the first day was like this uh what’s the next day or what’s the next month going to be like did you have was there any doubt in your mind I had thoughts along those lines at night I had a little trouble going to sleep that night but I finally decided that I’d went through 16 weeks of Hell going through the academy and I wasn’t going to give up that quick which again is a reflection of what the academy drilled into your head so we were off and running the next next day and kept on trucking yeah I feel like if um if a cop quit every time he had those thoughts there’d be no cops you know like every every cop’s gonna have those thoughts Amen brother yeah absolutely that that I mean that’s insane so when you end when you get the whole thing sorted out you get the the guy disarmed and the whole thing did you end up did you take him into custody or did you guys kind of just separate the parties and figure out who the bad guys were we separated the parties and by that time time my fto was in the building and he of course knew the owner it was a towing service that towed cars from our wrecks all the time so they’re on a firstname basis so it didn’t take long to get it sorted out were these bikers no they were GIS oh really yeah wow did what he tow one of their cars or something I I can’t remember what the original dispute was over sorry yeah that that’s crazy sure was I’m sure it probably was something along those lines a toad car a car bill won’t release your car you know we we’ve responded to that call hundreds of times at recer services so you know it’s a routine call so to speak yeah it sounds like that situation especially in the time it was you probably pick up the phone to the base called the sergeant and be like there needs to be some refand here and just get rid of them well we did do that a few times but the reer man that night was the fto who took me over in the corner after it was all over and chewed me up one side and down the other for leaving his side and I of course tried to explain myself and it was no shut up I’m talking yeah and that went on for a couple of minutes and then he started slowing down and you could see him thinking and after a couple of minutes he finally oh well uh you know under the circumstance oh hell you did it right stay as close to me as you can in the future yeah yeah that’s fny we got along just fine after that yeah yeah I gez he could he he almost knew right off the bat he could trust you under under extreme circumstance that’s doesn’t get any better like than that for an fto you know yeah well the bad part about our program the fto program back in that in those days was the fact that you never met your rookie until he got assigned to the Zone uh the current fto program I well I’ve been out for several years but I believe they still bring the field training officers into the academy and they get introduced to the kid they’re going to be breaking in so they at least have a chance to spend a few minutes and you know get some kind of an idea what the other one looks like and maybe thinks like right yeah a little bit of something there yeah they um it’s amazing that the I think the gez it feels like the state police for the longest time in a lot of States would do um they’d have a up in the Northeast we just called him like oh that trooper’s got a boot with them and the boot was like they wouldn’t talk you know they they wouldn’t talk to you unless the guy said that they could talk to you like they were very much controlled um and very very quiet but it didn’t even they never even called it fto it was just the boot with the senior Trooper getting kind of broken in and then then all these fto like these um officially designated fto programs kind of sprouted out the last 20 30 years yeah well we called it a field training officer almost from the beginning oh wow yeah you guys were ahead of the curve then I I think we were in some respects back then but then again you have to remember I’m 76 now and the old memory is a little bit foggy here and there I’m 44 and my memory is a little bit foggy I I can feel you um JB can you tell us about a strange or bizarre thing you dealt with in your career well in your liar you said strange bizarre or intense and this would this would come under the heading of a a b I don’t know strange bizarre I’m not sure what to call it we had a report one night that two people had walked into a Farmers field and surprised two guys who had shot some cows and were butchering them and these passer by scared the two bad guys off well the county re Sheriff responded word went out in the dispatch really good car description and my partner and I put our heads together and we were both convinced these guys were going to strike again that night so we started running gravel roads looking for the car and I just had happened to be going through the town of Waynesville heading for my next Gravel Road and at the time I was talking on the CB radio to a local U gentleman that I knew when he broke off talking to me and started answering somebody else and a minute later he tells me that a friend of ours had just surprised two guys in his field with cows down and he was chasing them toward the end of a lonely rural Gravel Road that dead in or a black top road that dead ended at gravel oh wow and a minute or so later he passes the word that these guys have wrecked and then a minute or so later he passes the word that they pulled a gun on him and he got the heck out of there so about four minutes later I find myself on that scene we’re out in the middle of nowhere it’s pitch dark it’s about midnight and I mean there’s no houses this is a deserted rural area all the way I jump out of the car take about two steps and the hair on the back of my neck went up just like a dogs it had never happened before and I found myself in a ditch immediately Sheltering looking around nothing in sight except the wrecked car and I stayed in the ditch for several minutes until back up and several interested people who had been listening to the CB radio traffic show up and I finally forced myself to get out of the ditch and we didn’t quite know what to do next because we had no clue where these guys might have gone and we were surrounded literally by hundreds of Acres of just woods so things kind of came to a head when we look down the road and here comes two guys walking up the road and as they approaches one of them yells out where are the guys you’re looking for so long story short my partner took the older gentleman into custody because he was drunk and we had an admission that he was driving plus the farmer that reported this originally had seen him driving so we made it made a DWI case on him I took the Juvenile and started questioning him and to make a long story short he took me to into the woods about 80 yards from where my car was parked and there’s a big log laying down and on top of that log is a right pointed right at my car and he’s telling me how uncle was trying to get a shot off at me when I first got out of the car but I kept ducking down into the ditch and Uncle couldn’t get a shot off what yeah I I had never had the hair on the back of my neck stand up before and I’ve never had it since and I have faced many people with guns pointed at me and I’ve been in the dark many times with people that I knew probably were armed and it never happened but that that particular night I took two steps out of the car the hair on the back of my neck went up and I hit the ditch and the only thing I can tell you after that experience is if it ever happens again and the hair on my back of my neck goes up you’ll find me over there behind cover or down in the ditch I have no I have no explanation for it damn what what was the point of this why were they just drunk and having a good time killing cows or was there any motivation well no they were butchering cows to take him a as a postcript to this after we put everything together with the deputies who had investigated the first cattle uh killing call we figured out that in between the two events these guys had gone back to a trailer in a rural part of the county so we went to visit the trailer and the trailer turned out to be occupied by a GI who was the brother of the guy who was trying to shoot me and and and the father of the Juvenile and while we were standing there talking to them you we’re we’re asking him if he knows anything about cattle you know being killed and butchered and he he’s kind of you know you know what’s Beef I don’t know what beef is play Dum butow yeah while the deputy was questioning him I happened to glance over and on the counter was a big roast that they had had for dinner and the end bone of the roast was sticking out and these guys had been cutting the cows up with a hacksaw which was leaving a curvy wave on the bone of the uh cows they had down in the field excuse me and on the H quarter they had in the trunk of the car when they wrecked it so I kind of ran my finger over the the end of the bone and tell him well we’re looking for beef with the cut about like this and he suddenly remembered he had about 50 pounds of it in his freezer so since we were off the public Highway the deputy stepped up and said okay you know you’re mine and we took him on a misdemeanor possession charge really so back when you were investigating that can you remember is um is killing a cow now if you were doing this what you described it would be like animal you know animal cruelty fiveyear felony there would be you know destruction of property uh theft all that stuff when you were doing it it was probably just straight up theft right it was probably no nothing else uh theft and there was a provision for theft of animals uh so we could get them on two charges I got you but no felonies really oh yeah they were felonies uh the guy who tried to shoot me ended up with 15 years in the State pin okay yeah okay good good yeah I totally discounted that part we won yeah my goodness and were these guys like was this an operation to make money or were they just using it to sustain themselves I think to sustain themselves and I think the drinking played a major part in it too because uncle was pretty wasted yeah man that is a bizarre one that is weird I forgot to mention that when my partner took him into the Zone office for the breathalyzer there was a little fight and uncle had to be subdued again so yeah he he was wasted uncle had a little miss tap fell down a few times did he uh well back then you could uh tune him up you could you you could do business and it wasn’t really uh you know frowned upon right yeah no I I totally get it um um JB can you tell us about a your most intense or terrifying call that you went on well it’s intense we had a we had a murder one night the County Sheriff’s Office investigated they made a case they got a warrant for the guy who had fled the scene and that started a Manhunt that lasted for several months and this guy kept breaking into houses he eventually shot and killed two more people in an adjoining County and things were getting pretty hot we law enforcement had established a command post at the home of one of his victims the guy was a widower who lived alone and the family gave him permission to do the command post there so we had probably 200 or so officers every shift different departments uh looking for this guy and then right in the middle of all this one faithful day when the Manet was in progress I was uh the senior supervisor on duty that day which sounds great except there was only two of us myself and a trooper so we were supposed to handle the routine calls and assist the manhood officers if needed and so all of a sudden this armed guy walks into a bar just outside of Richland Missouri starts waving a gun around everybody runs for the hills and the call comes out as this was our murder suspect from The Manhunt so everybody and their brother descends upon it right including myself and the only trooper that was on duty and we both end up at the back door of this tavern looking in the door and we find the the gunman standing there hold a gun looking right at us and that started a 19-minute nightmare because he repeatedly pointed the gun at us and threatened to blow our heads off with a few adjectives thrown in he did that probably a dozen times and we we showed great restraint in not firing maybe too great I’ve still got second thoughts on this one is that because there was um not a safe backdrop or something or you just didn’t feel like he was going to shoot no we were at the back door we had a clear shot at him he was standing behind the bar in the tavern nobody was there but the little voice in the back of your head it said you don’t have to shoot so I was obeying it even though he he pointed the gun at us at least a dozen times uttered threats clear-cut situation where we could have fired but we didn’t and after almost 19 minutes well let me back up a second I’m leaving something out since this was in The Manhunt area we soon basically had more off officers on the scene that we know what to do with we had a helicopter floating overhead and the news media hord that had been at the command post followed the officers down to the scene so we had TV cameras at the front door filming in and then we had a TV cameraman on the ground about 30 yards behind us great filming us and we didn’t really have the time or the energy to run off because this was a very public situation if you will with the Manhunt so basically everything I’m about to tell you is on film so after about 19 minutes we finally got the guy to start walking toward us like he was going to come out and surrender he had been talking on a old-fashioned wall rotary phone with one of those 25 ft long telephone cords M and as he came toward us he hit the end of the cord and he stopped now I should mention that he’s drunk he’s belligerent but during one of the episodes where he turned around and pointed the gun at us we got a good look at his face and we realized it was not our murder suspect this was an unknown person so that kind of cooled our I don’t know maybe our desire to shoot or our willingness to shoot and like I said when he reached the end of the telephone cord my partner and I had backed up a couple of steps and at that point fate took a hand in things because the wind blew the back door shut and we lost sight of him the officers who were covering him from the front door told us that when he turned around he saw them for the first time and he fired seven shots at them wow they they of course hit the ground scattered ducked and he jumped back behind the bar bar to load another magazine we opened the rear door looked in he’s loading a magazine into the pistol and the next thing I know I’m laying on top of him and we’re fighting for the gun what’s on the floor underneath us and here’s the bizarre part I have no memory of charging him never have had doubt that I ever will and that’s despite the fact that the cameraman on the ground behind captured the whole thing and when I called the news team they were gracious enough to send me a copy of the footage because frankly this drove me crazy i’ prided myself on my officer safety techniques for quite some time and here I had just literally run down the barrel of a loaded gun and tackled him and all the other guys on the scene were asking me why I did it and I couldn’t answer that one because I didn’t remember doing it wow yeah it high stress situations those things happen high stress I I’d like to say I blanked out but I don’t know what and it drove me crazy because you don’t go charge down the barrel of a gun if you want to stay in law enforcement it’s not the correct maneuver right and I was I was going nuts till I got that film from the TV station and on the film I can clearly see that once we open the back door I took a step looked at him sized up the Split Second took another step sized it up again took a step and then I charged so even though I do not remember it on film I clearly saw myself exercise some sort of vigilance discretion right you know planning tactics I whatever you want to call it before I you know ran down the gun barrel so it it was bizarre it was intense it was you name it yeah absolutely wow I I mean I can kind of relate to that and it’s not nearly as um stressful a thing as that was but um I I at one point um tackled a guy that had um was a you know uh was a mental health issue and he had a big pair of shears and I I assessed the situation and he looked away for a second and I decided Now’s the Time it was close quarter there was a lot of options but I decided to do that one and I don’t I was talking to the guy I was with cuz I grabbed onto him I did end up getting a cut on my wrist um but all I remember is making the decision to do it I don’t remember how I ended up on the opposite side of him we got him it was fine but I don’t remember how I got on the opposite side of him how it happened how we got him down I just and it’s funny you said that cuz I just kind of have this hole in my memory and the other guy who came in second remembers but I don’t I don’t really remember cuz I was really I was really stressed out about it I was like staring at the shears staring at him and I I made the decision and then it kind of there’s just holes in it you know I think just blocked it out yeah well in my case the TV crew that was filming through the front door would not send me the footage but I copied what they put on the TV off the you know TV and they clearly showed a c of the guy he’s waving the gun around and then you see me come in and you see me bring the butt of a shotgun down on him and then we all disappear down on the floor so basically I charged him butt stroke the gun out of his hand and then drew a 15 yard penalty from the NFL for roughing the passer when I hit him on the floor and then we fought for the gun underneath us and uh one of the other officers well my partner at the back door came running in behind me and he was able to get the gun out from underneath us and by that time there’s five or six officers trying to crowd in behind the bar so you know we had it one at that point that’s some Clint Eastwood stuff right there I I do not remember any of it and what’s killing me still yet is the fact that I look at this film footage every once in a while and I still don’t remember it and I’m watching it on film that’s crazy yeah yeah it like you said the intense the the almost a blackout yeah the mind does incredible things doesn’t it yes it does that’s crazy that’s a good one wow I can’t imagine that um it’s like you know they say that’s why police officers can have a shorter life is because you’re you know not everybody but a lot of the majority police officer if you run your body on Nitro like that too much it just it just cores you out you know and like a situation like that that went on for that long having your heart rate up where it was for that long having the adrenals going for that long is like that’s major taxing on you yeah big time I agree yeah fully agree um JB can you tell us about a um situation that you would consider uh heartwarming or positive well as a trooper I responded to a lot of car wrecks would get there ahead of the Medics and I made quite quite a few medical decisions so to speak at the scene and rendered different first AIDS that had a profound effect on the victim and you know that gave me the the warm feeling and we recovered a lot of stolen property that we returned to the owners that gave me the warm feeling and then of course we made the criminal cases you know the the victim was killed and we were able to give his loved ones a measure of Justice because we made a case on the guy and convicted him and that gave me a warm feeling but when I read your question on the the paper you sent me the first one that came to my mind is such a minor one I almost hate to tell this story but I was on a day shift in St Robert Missouri and I had a car go by and of course he hits his breaks when he goes by me and he’s got a tail light out so long half had taught us that if you do 10 traffic stops for tail light headlight out you’re going to get a no driver’s license or you’re going to get a warrant right you do 10 you’re going to you’re going to get at least one so I stopped and besides it’s you know it’s Traffic Safety the three EAS of traffic safety Enforcement Education and Engineering well this is enforcement so stopped him to tell him his tail lights out and he does not have a driver’s license we’re talking talking to young black male about 24 25 mhm and in a uniform of a local business mechanic and so I cided him for no operator sent him on his way and about 3 weeks later I look up and he’ driving by me again so I stop him again and no operators so I write him a second ticket and about two weeks later I look up and here he comes again so I stop him again and this time I kind of got on him you know why aren’t you going down and taking the driver’s test like I told you to and he starts giving me some BS excuses and wait a minute that’s not ringing true so I started Almost Boring in on him like he was a murder suspect and he finally hung his head and said well sir I can’t read or write there’s no way I can pass the driver’s test I told him well you’re wrong go down to the driver’s license testing section those are Highway Patrol examiners tell them I sent you tell them you cannot read or write they will read you the questions and write down the answers for you and he kind of looked at me like huh wow and we parted ways and about 3 weeks later I look up and there he goes again so I stop him again but this time when I get up to the door big driver’s license big smile on his face nice and as I contemplated that a little bit later I realized that it’s a simple action but it had a profound effect on his life young wife two young children under five uh not having a driver’s license limited almost everything he could do he had to sneak to and from work and hope he didn’t get stopped right so it made a profound effect on his life and it it gave me a warm fuzzy probably far beyond what it should have absolutely that’s great I love that JB I have to ask you cuz you were a trooper for all those years um worst crash you went to I know you have a plethora and I didn’t warn you about this question but I know you guys go to some gnarly crashes probably one of the worst [Music] ones we had a pursuit in progress trunk driver going the wrong way on i44 he comes around a curve into a big rock cut I’m paralleling him in the eastbound Lane he’s going east in the westbound Lane I’ve got my red lights going I’ve got my Spotlight on his car trying to warn the uncoming cars and he Nails a family of four head on oh so I’m on the scene literally within seconds uh mom was driving checked her pulse she’s pinned in the car the they hit so hard the engine literally jammed up into her abdominal region it broke free from the mounts she had a strong pulse dad is on the other side he’s binned in he’s in agony back seat has two kids a seven or eighty old girl and a 5-year-old boy I get the girl out and get her over to the to the nearby embankment go back to get the little boy he’s dead I get him out go back to check on Mom it’s probably been oh maybe 60 seconds Since I checked on her with her fast pulse you know when I first got there and she’s now deceased oh my goodness it took the the fire department probably 35 minutes to cut dad out of the car his pelvis and broke both legs were broken so one of the heartbreaking things about that one was it was the 5-year-old’s birthday they were going to Grandma’s house they had a big sheet cake in the back seat between the two kids with blue icing the kid had they weren’t restrained so the kid ended up Landing in the icing and so he’s got blue icing all over him it’s scattered everywhere and he’s dead so yeah it sticks in your mind you you can’t get rid of it oh JB I’m sorry that is that is a brutal one man that how was the suspect fine oh of course yeah probably jumped right out took off on you no he didn’t it okay he wasn’t quite that fine and you know we got him like I said we were in a Pursuit there were three officers behind him and I’m paralleling him so we had him in custody in 60 seconds yeah what year was that like how what you’re were the cars oh Lord uh it would be mid 70s maybe 7879 I really don’t remember the date my dad tells me that all the time when he was on the road when he was new cuz now we’ll go I’ve said it before in the podcast but I’ll go to uh like a rollover and everybody’s standing out of the car and they’re like hey can I can I crawl on and get my laptop like everybody’s fine a lot of the time not all the time but a lot of the time everybody’s okay and my dad has told me before he goes Steve when I started it was there were still cars on the road with no seat belts the steering columns didn’t collapse and the dashboards were metal yes you go to a crash and four people would be dead yes just because they were like blenders on the inside yep engineering they they’ve engineered the cars better they’ve engineered the roadways with the guard rails and the medium barriers and everything else better so Enforcement Education and engineering yeah Traffic Safety yep absolutely man what an what an unfortunate story JB um really popular question on the show is advice to new officers or people who are on the fence about becoming getting involved in law enforcement what would you tell the young person out there today uh looking to getting into it or they’re in backgrounds or they’re in Police Academy well I’m crazy enough to have been in it now for 50 plus years so I really can’t badmouth it I considered a a noble profession you do a lot of good uh but you also see a lot of bad if you’re going to be an officer for any Department of any real size even a fiveman rural department and you stay with it a few years you are going to to go to scenes that are not going to be very pretty you’re not going to like what you see the people are going to be screaming in pain and Agony you’re not going to like what you hear and there’s going to frequently be a smell that you’re really not going to want to smell and you’re not going to forget it yeah so you will develop PTSD or whatever they’re calling it these days and I have found that it helps to talk about it don’t hold it in get it out you know if you want to go on a podcast like this and tell stories do it talk to your best buddy your high school sweetheart your wife your mistress not at the same time of course uh but you got to get it out you can’t hold it in and I found that by getting it out probably my most memorable I was asked to do a mandatory traffic safety on Fort Wood one time for about 600 people in an auditorium wow you sweating for that one or what you know they’re getting ready to go on Christmas break and here’s this mandatory Traffic Safety they they all want to be there they do not want to be there but at the end of my presentation I got hit with questions which kind of surprised me and one of them was the same question you just asked what’s the worst wreck you’ve ever been to and so I started describing c a couple of them and I broke down and cried in front of these people you know you’re standing on the stage veteran officer and you’re crying in front of 600 people it was almost embarrassing but I just flat told them you know if you had seen these sites or listened to these screams you’d be crying too yeah basically I didn’t quite say so deal with it people but that was kind of the message I put out you know we have to deal with it you might as well deal with the reality and the reality is is if you’re going to be an officer you’re going to get the PTSD you’re going to have to learn how to deal with it don’t turn to alcohol drugs uh wife beating or any of the other things that officers have been known to do when they’re suffering from PTSD yeah get the help it’s thankfully it’s getting more and more um more and more acceptable now to do that uh we had in my high school we had a school resource officer and he spoke to us at our um driver’s education you know same thing big Auditorium all of us are there and um I had never been involved in like a obviously I was only 16 never been involved in like a a obviously serious crash but the stories he told us from the town we lived in were like mind-blowing to me that he had to see this stuff because it it there really is this like innate um unappreciation for your local cops you know cuz when you’re a kid and like if you’re from a good family in a good neighborhood you’re really just you’re just wonderfully protected and insulated from the bad so you you really don’t know what your local coppers or the highway patrolman on your local Highway are doing you really don’t know because you’re not involved and you’re a good kid but when to hear them talk about it you know he made him a little more G-rated but he got a little edgy with some of the injuries to me that was like whoa that can happen like I think that’s valuable for young people to hear that stuff well I’ve turned into something of a Storyteller and I I frequently do presentations and I’m not the least bit bashful about bringing up stories of things that have occurred uh in fact two of my books deal with short stories of law enforcement U incidents I tried to tell them with humor and there there situations where there was Gore there was violence and in the book I downplayed those particular things and played up the humor but again it’s the same premise as your store store as your show get the word out to people what officers see and go through and make us more human to the people that hear these stories right and that was my underlying aim behind those stories but it also goes back to the advice I just gave you that or for the new people you got to talk about it you cannot hold it in yeah absolutely yeah there’s always that old adage out there that people that get into law enforcement were the um were their their bullies or they were the the high school jock and it’s the only job they could get they just did it so they could push people around though if that was the case that person wouldn’t last a year with this with the stuff that’s required one of the the the things I found almost immediately was you could get in as many fights as you wanted to but at that time the FBI statistics were pretty simple 20% of all officers killed in the line of duty were killed with their own handgun after it was taken away from them so obviously the fewer fights you’re in the better off you’re going to be so right you know back then we just called it talking them down then later on it became Verbal Judo and now I think the magic word is deescalation oh if I hear that word one more time JB yeah but really it’s just a matter of there’s no point in getting into a fight unless you absolutely have to now having said that for the average person listening you occasionally run into that person who is determined to fight you and it doesn’t matter what you do you’re going to end up in a fight with him so you might as well get ready right yeah but a surprising number of times you can talk your way out of it yeah absolutely your mouth can be your best your best defense your mouth and your brain can be your best weapon heck yeah JB tell us about uh the books the latest book you have about Frozen tears well it is an intense case that didn’t help my PTSD any but basically in January of 1977 an on duty military police officer on Fort leonardwood driving a government vehicle carrying the the government issued 45 did a traffic stop late at night on four civilian kids on a double date that were crossing Fort Wood he uh told the two boys that they were under arrest for a bogus armed robberies had just occurred off base handcuffed him put him in his vehicle put the 16-year-old girl back between him in the back seat put the 19-year-old girl up in the front seat with him and then just before he started to drive off with him he pulled P out his 45 and shot the two boys in the back seat of his patrol car then he took all four of them down to a deserted cabin on the rubyo River where he basically sexually molested the two girls for about four hours then he transferred all for them to another site where he shot the two girls um the one boy in the back seat was dead the other one was wounded and when he took him out he broke into a run and tripped over a log and fell down and then he came up behind him and shot him so the score for the evening was three dead and one wounded he uh buried them in a snow bank and drove off the surviving girl dug her way out and walked about six miles to get off base to a house wow now we had about 8 Ines of snow on the ground the temperatures were in the teens and the low 20s and about a 15 to 20 mph wind blowing so by the time she got to this house she was suffering from hypothermia and wasn’t making a hell of a lot of sense yeah but the homeowner saw that her clothing was soaked and snow cake so she immediately started helping her change closed and in doing that she sees that the girl has two bullet wounds damn and at that point call goes out to the highway patrol and things got a little confused somewhere because the next thing I know the patrol sending me South on Highway 17 to check on The Runaways but one of them’s been shot and I get down there find the the car roadside that the wounded girl was in now and get to talking to her and find out I’m dealing with a triple murder by a federal cop wow it got kind of intense because her first words told us that the MP vehicle had stopped them handcuffed the boys shot the boys shot them all buried them all and my first thought was here we go again we had just had a situation the year before where a GI from Fort Bragg had flown into Fort Leonard Wood overpowered a real MP left him handcuffed to a tree on a firing range stole all of his MP equipment in his car then this guy went to the payroll dispersing office on fortwood picked up a payroll officer and a cash payroll for a company to take him to the company area to distribute he left the payroll officer locked in the trunk of the stolen MP car and he flew back to forth brag with they never would confirm they just said it was over 50,000 in cash what’s with these Fort lenward guys leonardwood guys this guy was from Fort Bray okay so the at the time we had a Twan FBI Office on Fort Wood and between the FBI and the Army’s criminal investigative division they made a case on this guy and since I was a local Trooper I’d heard some of the details so as she’s describing you know this MP stopped him in the car my first thought is great here we go another impersonator so I run back to my car and tell Troy to have the military police come in send me MPS the highest ranking officer they can find and four-wheel drives we’re going to need them because the body she’s talking about her on Fort Leonard Wood Federal reservation and I have no jurisdiction so I’ve got to have Federal cops so after I got the message off that I needed help I go back and start questioning the victim again and she starts giving me more and more details and finally after a while the 5,000 lb brick falls on my head and I realize this is not an impersonation this is a real life MP in a real life patrol car and I just called the MPS for pup oh boy that was kind of a sobering moment yeah but and then from there it really gets screwy because two car loads of their friends the victim’s friends showed up you know telephone calls were going like crazy in the background and they show up to the scene they’re going to follow tracks in the snow back down to the shooting scene and I’m telling them no you’re not and things are getting kind of tense when finally two car loads of MPS and C agents show up and the lead officer was a captain in charge of the 208 military police company and the duty shift officer so he comes up to me you know what have you got so I start briefing him on the situation everything that I had gotten from the young lady and and after a minute or two some more military vehicles arrive and he told me to you know hold up I want the this Sergeant over here to hear this story because he’s going to take the C team down to the scene in this four-wheel drive vehicle so as we’re as I’m giving these two the story I looked down at the vehicle and one of the things this young lady had given me was a number off the side of the vehicle X she thought it was x327 um basically it’s in the accounting number charge your gas your department probably had something very similar marking the car so you you know all purchases go against that particular serial number and as I am standing there I look down and I realize I’m looking at x37 wait a minute this is the suspect vehicle oh dude my goodness you crystal clear this is is the suspect vehicle it just drove up to my you know my car and here we go again another blackout I was I was conscious of the fact that everybody was looking at me and they were asking what’s wrong with him but I couldn’t respond and finally the captain realized what I was looking at I’d already given him the number a minute before the sergeant got there and he looked down he recognized the number and he immediately turned to the sergeant and said who had this vehicle last and we went from what do we have totally unknown is it an impersonation is it real to Red Hot suspect in about 10 seconds because the sergeant named off two MPS from his detail the game warden detail and then he said Thorton said he shot some dogs last night oh so the Manhunt order for specialist first class Johnny Lee Thornton went out immediately [Music] and wow you know it just another one of those screwy situations what would I mean obviously he’s got a screw loose but I mean he dumped everything in his life down the drain well it’s actually worse than that because the previous October of 1976 two other kids went missing on Fort Wood under the same type circumstances the only thing we they had to go on was their vehicle was abandoned on base well after we got Thornton in custody that that night following a Manhunt they told everybody to be back on fortwood the next morning at 8: a. for a big briefing to start the investigation they brought in 13 additional FBI agents overnight and so the next morning we got 15 FBI agents 14 or 15 CID agents a platoon of MPS two platoon of f Engineers with mind detectors shovels you name it and they’re clearly going to go crazy working this case on Fort and I’m the only civilian officer standing in the room wow and while I’m standing there the radio operator comes running up to the command staff and tells them that we check the records and thoron is the first guy to report the missing kids’s car abandoned well that told us right there what happened to him we’ve never been able to solve it we’ve never been able to find the kids and he won’t talk about it wow it sounds like an insane book you have this is one of five books you’ve written right yes sir are the other are the other books uh are they novels are they also all uh true oh no everything I do is is true life history the uh the Frozen tears is a true crime murder whatever you want to call it I have two books Tales from the blue adventures and law enforcement and tales from the blue two more adventures in law enforcement which is basically stories just like you’re telling on your show you know events that officers have been into how they felt you know what happened some screwy situations and then I have a civil war kick going I’ve done two books on the Civil War Missouri one of which uh in 1962 a real life buried treasure was found on the outskirts of Fort Leonard Wood by accident and I traced it back into the Civil War to the family who buried it because the guy who buried it in 1864 was murdered by Persons Unknown shortly after he buried the money and before he told Mom and the kids where he buried it so they knew the money was out there there but we’re talking a couple of thousand acres of river bottom and oh frustrating end of story in 1864 until 1962 so it’s the story of a real buried treasure which you don’t see very often the Tilly family which you know was responsible for it and then all the Civil War action we had here in the county wrapped around it and we had quite a bit of Civil War action here the Civil War in Missouri was vastly different from what it was in the East and it’s kind of an enlightening book in that sense of the word well so far book go ahead I say for our history Buffs out there it sounds like it’d be a good one because I don’t know much about that the history of Missouri in this in that at all yeah for for a history buff if you’re interested in the Civil War I think you would enjoy it my second book is entitled Justice military tribunals in Civil War Missouri and it’s basically a elction of criminal cases if you want to call them that from the AR Archives of the Union Army when the Civil War started the Civil Authority in Missouri basically collapsed so the Union Army took control and established military tribunals and Court Marshals if you were the soldier charged you got a court Marshal if you were the Southern sympathizer charged you got to go in front of a board of seven Union army officers to decide your fate you know what be more fair than that right well that’s what I thought when we first started but then as I got into this research I actually found several cases where the southern sympathizing defendant told the board of Union Officers that basically yeah I did it and guess what I’m G to do it again and they found him not guilty it totally destroyed my notion of a kangaroo court yeah and then there was the fact that one of my cases that I found occurred here in Aly County it was a violation of the oath of Allegiance where the kid gave his oath to the United States government then promptly went South joined a Confederate Army didn’t like Army life came back home got arrested put in front of a tribunal convicted and sentenced to death his wife wrote a personal letter of appeal to Abraham Lincoln and the case went all the way to Lincoln’s desk for him to make the final decision and he spared the kid’s life yeah and the guy still has descendants here in the county so it created kind of a stir U I don’t know Civil War history the Union Army executed at least 267 of their own men during the Civil War that we know of and two of those cases are in the book very cool yeah my you know it’s crazy my I’ve been interested in this lately because my kids are learning about um they just learned about uh a kid that Lincoln pardoned again that fell asleep and he’s just a kid the kid’s like you know he’s 18 he fell asleep he was from Maine or somewhere and um and the kid was like he I’m guilty That’s the Law I deserve to die you probably know the story and Lincoln was so taken aback by the honesty of the kid and the kid’s like um appreciation for order and law and the need for his death so that this doesn’t happen happen again that he pardoned him and um I just thought it was so cool you know it’s like it it it stuff like that from history is so neat well during the Civil War you know when I first got that that first case and here’s Lincoln Signature you know commuting the death sentence of a of a local boy so to speak I thought i’ really had something but the more I got into it the more I research I figured out that Lincoln probably did 15 or 20 of those cases every day he basically had the attorney general do a synopsis of the case and send him a one or two page synopsis of what happened and he based his decision on that synopsis but since these were military tribunals and Military Court Marshals they very frequently were appealed all the way up to chain of command to the commanderin-chief and so Lincoln had to make the decision crazy imagine his life back then which just everything’s going up to him I mean and he was by all accounts he was a real God-fearing man he had a real conscience you know well it’s kind of a contradiction you know everybody knows him as the man who freed the slaves you know etc etc but Abraham Lincoln was a racist if you read his speeches he clearly was a racist he in the superiority of the white race over the black race Now by 1860 standards he was probably a very mild racist he was woke but if a yeah if a politician was to say that today that just about get SW up in the nearest tree with a rope right yeah it it is crazy history can be very confusing yeah it’s it’s it’s really you don’t really get a good picture in school like you get a little bit a lot of it is just and you know I’m not against it a lot of it is raw RW whatever country you’re in in in Canada you’re going to a lot of raah raw Canada in United States you’re going to let raw ra the United States but it is interesting when you grow up to actually start reading into what these people these very flawed people were like it it makes it all the more interesting to me it’s like fascinating you know what I mean yes I I love finding some obscure guy in history that did something and researching it and presenting the story so yeah because they kind of get they get deified you know it’s like oh this he must have been Flawless they’re like oh no he wasn’t at all oh no Lincoln was not flawless right but on the other hand he did preserve the union so yeah was he totally wrong and that goes down to you’re either Pro Southern or you’re pro-union and even today there’s really very little middle ground right so interesting JB I’ve taken over hour your time here but um it was an honor to have you on thank you so much for coming on doing the interview you had some amazing Stories I’m going to do the outro and before I go I just want everybody to know that JB KS uh JB King books.com is where you can go to purchase the book or they’re all also available on Amazon correct correct but if you want the autograph you got to go through me go through the website unless you want to ship me the book right then I send it back to you right so go through JB King books.com for the autograph um I will put the link in the show notes so people can click there and then can get to your books no problem um anything else any parting words JB uh have I talked too much no frequently I frequently do that no man you were you were excellent I’m going to do the outro and can you hang on for like a couple minutes and I’ll right be right back with you no problem all right the great JB King Fantastic stories man um so glad we we were able to organize that and get him on so glad I got connected to him guys that’s what it’s all about uh me uh speaking of I need guests guys so if you want to be a guest or you know somebody who would be a good guest things.com to scroll down to be a guest click on it write me a quick note and it’ll get you on the show or just write to me directly Steve things policy.com I’d love to have you on I get tons of emails get um the show gets you know around 40,000 downloads a month so people are really listening people really love it um but we got to we got to feed the beast there there’s got to be people to come on and tell there’s stories so uh if you’ve been listening in your patrol car or if you’re retired and you’ve thought I’ve got some pretty good stories bring it let’s do it let let’s do the podcast come on write me an email and let’s get it done guys thank you so much this is the uh time in the podcast where I think the patreon sponsors for their monetary monetarily their monetary support woo oh boy who I’m talking about is the Great and Powerful Andy B PS Greg Gad Boy Adam mihal the great Chris June Gary Steiner 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