Criminal - Ransom

Episode Date: March 11, 2022

Miles Hargrove was in his sophomore year of college when he got a phone call that his father had been kidnapped. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. I was in college. It was a Friday, and it was a beautiful day.

I only had one class that day, Spanish, and I came back to my dorm. I'd only been gone for a short time, but there were something like seven or eight voicemail messages on my machine. It was machines back then. And that seemed odd right away. They just seemed like too many in too short an amount of time. And I hear this, I play back the voicemails. And the first one is from my mom saying, Miles, we have a problem. I need you to call your Uncle Rayford.

My Uncle Rayford's my dad's brother who's in West Texas. And so I called my Uncle Rayford, and he said, your dad was on his way to work this morning. And I was like, oh, my God, he's been in a car accident. Something, I mean, he's injured or he's dead. And, I mean, this is all in a split second. And he says, and he was taken hostage by a guerrilla group. He was kidnapped.

This is Miles Hargrove. He was in his sophomore year of college at Texas Christian University. Miles was born in Texas, but had spent most of his life outside of the United States, mostly in the Philippines. And then, when he was in high school, his family moved to Columbia, to a city called Cali. His father, Tom Hargrove, worked for the International Center for Tropical Agriculture. Miles' parents were living in Columbia in September 1994 when he heard the news that his father had been kidnapped. I really don't remember much after that. I just zeroed in on the kidnap and I just it was just it just knocked the wind out of me I just literally could not I could not figure

out how to react to it it just was the most shocking news that I'd ever received and completely unexpected we somehow got off the phone and I just remember putting it down and just like I stormed out of the dorm room. I went sort of paced back and forth to up and down the halls. I went into the bathroom. I went back out, you know, and then finally went back into the dorm room. And by this point, the school had sent a resident advisor over to my room and then people started coming around me and I was able to then get a hold of my mom. And she sounded scared, but she sounded like she was trying to be, you know, as in control as she possibly could. But she just, she was like, it's bad. I want you to come down. And so we just agreed that I would try and find a plane ticket

down to Columbia, which I managed to do and was on a plane the next day. When Miles arrived in Colombia, his mother Susan met him at the airport. A friend drove them home, and in the car, Susan explained everything they knew so far. I just remember driving from the airport. The guy that was driving was driving a little fast and it was, the roads were wet and a light turned red and he had to slam on the brakes and he slid through the intersection and then kept driving and luckily nothing happened.

But while it happened, we were in the middle of this intense conversation and we didn't even stop. Like, you know, it was, the fact that this car almost had an accident, it just was so trivial or unimportant compared to what that discussion was that we were having right at that moment. Miles's mother told him that the last time she'd seen his father was the morning of Friday, September 23rd, when he got in his car to drive to work. What we heard right from the beginning was that there had been some kind of a roadblock set up.

These guerrillas, they set up roadblocks. They'll pull over buses and cars and rob people of cash and jewelry and maybe take some cars. So there were witnesses that had been in the roadblock that morning that saw an American being pulled over, pulled out of the car at gunpoint, and that he had been ordered to, you know, jump into the back of one of the pickup trucks that had just been stolen in that roadblock, and that they headed east out into the central range of the Andes Mountains.

His father's car was found empty at the roadblock, with his ID lying on the front seat. But also there was some FARC propaganda left in his driver's seat. FARC is short for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. It was formed in 1964 as the armed wing of the country's Communist Party. FARC's stated goals included overthrowing the government, the redistribution of wealth, and equality for the rural population of Colombia. Their tactics involved guerrilla warfare, and they funded their efforts in large part by trafficking drugs, illegal gold mining, and kidnapping.

So at this point, what were your options? Well, I mean, all we could do was wait. I mean, there was no way to contact them. And we always understood that, you know, when you're in a foreign country, you can't, I mean, the laws of the United States don't apply there. The authorities don't have any sort of jurisdiction. So our expectations weren't incredibly high, you know, what our government, what the U.S. government was going to do or what they could do. And the thought of a rescue operation

didn't really appeal to us. You know, what we learned was that the FARC guerrillas, they were at a real advantage when they would take their kidnapped victims because they could bring them to these isolated areas, like in my father's case in the Andes and there are other people's cases into the jungles where there would be no repercussions for them and that they would have sort of the benefit of time. And if you send a rescue operation into an area like that, that the chances of somebody surviving it would be so slim. Miles and his family talked with an FBI agent, who was stationed in Bogota, who helped them understand kidnapping, what they could expect, and what he'd seen in other cases. They waited for the kidnappers to contact them. Miles says they were afraid they could be being watched, and so he and his mother and brother stayed inside as much as possible. They didn't hear anything for 29 days. And then Tom Hargrove's employer,

the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, received a letter asking for $6 million. And along with it was a proof-of-life video taken maybe a week before the video arrived at the company. And in it was a grainy video. He's wearing like a poncho, just explaining that he's healthy and he's safe and to cooperate and that hopefully he could see us all soon.

The company Tom worked for made a public statement that they wouldn't negotiate with the kidnappers and they wouldn't pay the ransom. So at this point, what's basically happened is that you've realized that the government is not going to help you. The company's not going to help you. And so you as a family are going to have to negotiate with these hostage takers all on your own. Yeah, that's correct.

We just, we didn't really think much about it. We just proceeded as quickly as we could. The kidnappers contacted the Hargrove family directly. They said they'd only speak with a member of the family, or a friend of Tom's. No police. They said that we needed to get a radio, and that we should be speaking this next Tuesday,

and here's the primary frequency, and here's backup frequencies. And when this demand came, and it said we needed to get on the radio, we knew that none of us spoke Spanish well enough to be the ones to, and we were too emotionally sort of close to the situation, certainly for my mom and for my brother and myself, that we couldn't negotiate on the radio. So we needed to find somebody that we could trust and who spoke with kind of a local dialect and all that kind of stuff.

And it doesn't really make sense to me now that all these years have passed. But for some reason, it made complete sense to put that job onto a, I think, 21-year-old college student. It was a huge ask, and I knew it then, but I only know it more so now, you know, just what a huge thing it was to be asking of him. When Miles asked me if I could help, it was an instantaneous decision. Knowing Miles, knowing Susan, knowing Tom, having a very nice relationship with all of them, I wanted to be able to do my part, and I was actually happy to be able to help with whatever I could. Robert Clerks was a close friend of the family. He'd gone to high school with Miles.

He was my best friend in high school. I met him the very first day I went to school in Columbia. And he loved my dad. My dad loved him. And without hesitation, he said he'd do it. Robert was 22 years old and studying at a nearby university. And he had no experience whatsoever negotiating with kidnappers. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. The kidnappers provided Miles and his family with instructions to speak in code.

At one point, the code name for his father was El Barco, the boat. They had code names for different amounts of money. A million dollars was La Hacienda, the estate. They were getting advice not only from the FBI agent in Bogota, but they also solicited help from consultants who specialized in helping families deal with kidnapping. For their first negotiation, the family planned to make a counteroffer to the $6 million demand. Even if we as a family had $6 million, which we didn't have anything close to that, we'd be fools to offer it up right away.

Because if you easily offered up something like $6 million, they'd be like, oh, well, that was easy. Great, that's a great down payment. And now we're know, we can, now we're going to demand X amount more. And so part of what we learn about how you go into these negotiations is you, your ultimate goal is to convince them

that they've sort of milked you for everything you're worth. The first conversations, we will all sit around the table during the negotiations. Everybody will be quiet. We'll have a script and basically by sign language, we will say, OK, there, stop, don't do anything else or go forward. And or within low voice, we will say, okay, ask this, ask that. Especially in the beginning, it was more like a learning process of getting acquainted both with the person you're speaking with,

and in my aspect, getting used to talking through a CB radio with someone you didn't want to talk to, in a way. So that first conversation when you said, hello, through the radio, did someone on the other side say, who are you? Did they ask you who you were? Yes, that was a scary point, actually, because they literally wanted to know who i was like i'm a friend of the family now who are you i don't recall exactly at this moment what i told them but i think i ended up saying my name look i'm robert i'm a friend of the family i'm the one that uh speaks proper

spanish to be able to talk to you and relay all the information. And let's get this negotiation going. Miles had a camera and kept a video diary of everything that happened. Here's his recording of the negotiation. Robert Clerks made the offer they'd planned on, $41,000. And they were not happy. They were just like, for that price, we won't even tell you where he's buried.

We'll be right back. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation

takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts.

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is going on live. There's not much time to think about it. And we know it's a tense situation. So it's basically just taking a deep breath and say, this is their reply. How long before the next contact? It became, for the most part, twice a week. I don't remember the exact order of events, but maybe the next time we wouldn't make any offer we'd say we tried and we can't we're trying to borrow more money and we can't go any higher than that and then they'd make more threats and then the next time we'd be on we'd raise it by another three or four thousand dollars I mean just but you know and they again just get so mad because we weren't anywhere close

and it went back and forth like that for uh gosh maybe two almost two months and we couldn't tell people exactly what we were up to so this german family that lived next door to us the grinders they were lifesavers in in that in in this scenario because uh supported us, but also Claudia, the mother and the wife, her big thing was that we should meet up most nights a week if we could together and have dinner. There was a common space between our houses and we would put up lights, we would bring in flowers, we wired speakers down there so we could have music and um we would we would each take turns sort of preparing these sometimes simple sometimes elaborate dinners just really as

kind of a thing to as a an event to sort of remind us you know that we were you know that life was still going on it gave us something to look forward to at the end of the day. It gave us a sense of camaraderie with this group. And it was also sort of our roundtable where we would just discuss the latest points of our negotiations and what we were going to do next. Did it feel like you started to have a relationship with this person on the other side of the radio? Yeah, in some part of the whole negotiation,

you start building a rapport with the person. You start getting to know them. And I'm not going to say you establish a friendship with them, but you establish a relationship where you agree that you have to talk to each other. So you're partners in the negotiation, and I have to deal with you, you have to deal with me, and let's get the negotiation moving. Were you the only person that the hostage takers spoke with over the radio? Were you the only voice they ever heard? Only once someone else got on the radio for like a few

minutes because I was in, it's a funny anecdote, I was in a final exam in college and in the computer room there were some issues and the exam got delayed. And when the exam was starting, it was about the same time that I had to start the negotiations, and I actually had to just get out of the classroom and say, I'm sorry, I have to leave. The teacher will look at you very strange. We're going to start the final exam. Like, I'm sorry, I have to leave. And you cannot give any explanations.

Like, I have to leave. It's not my fault that this is late Like, I have to leave. It's not my fault that this is late. And I have to leave. And then that day, actually, Claudia, she was part of Team Tom, which were the neighbors. She got on the radio and said, give us a minute. He's on his way. He's on his way. And I arrived.

I parked. And I got immediately on the radio. So you were going to school. It was like you were living this double life. You would go to class during the day and then switch your hat and become a hostage negotiator. Yes. Did you tell anyone you were doing this, your family or other friends? Initially, I didn't. I was a little worried of what my parents would say because, again,

it's something because of security reasons. You try to avoid certain scenarios in Colombia. You always try to maintain a low profile to avoid risk as much as possible. And just by being involved in this type of negotiations, you are getting involved in risky situations. On the radio, for example, you could see like a meter of how strong the signal was. And there was in some communications that you could tell that the person you were talking to could be just two or three blocks away. And after the communications, I will be getting on my car and going home and always just like looking over the mirror, like, okay, am I being followed or not? Especially if it's a day where you hear the communication is very crisp and you can tell they're close by. And then you stay for dinner, for example,

and then you leave and you see a car parked a block away, then that gets you worried, okay, are they talking from this car? So then you take a long way home, make sure nobody's following you. So yes, it was, at the beginning, I didn't say anything, but later on, well, you just have to get off your chest and tell them, look, I'm involved in this and basically I'm already doing it, so it's no way back. After about two months of going back and forth on the radio with the kidnappers, usually increasing their offer by $3,000 or $4,000 each time, the Hargroves and Robert had negotiated the ransom down to $4 million. And finally, they were so angry with us,

they put us into what was called a silence, where they said, well, we'll give you a month to think about, you know, where you're going to get this money. And basically, that's it. Radio silence. And it had taken so long to even get to the negotiating point that when we were finally getting what felt like some momentum, it was pretty devastating to have it completely shut down. And when they call it a silence, it's an apt name. That's what I remember about that time period was just everything just shutting down. The silence ended up lasting for three months.

Finally, the kidnappers made radio contact. The Hargroves were prepared to double what they'd been offering previously. They planned to offer $199,000. And what we couldn't believe was, well, first of all, when we got back on on the radio the guy's voice sounded so positive and There was almost like how are things kind of back and forth it, you know exchange And so that was kind of different and then we made our offer we doubled our offer Nuestra oferta puede aumentar por 91 millones haciendo un total de 180 our offer, we doubled our offer.

And there was a long pause. And then they said, you know what, if you round it up to 200,000, we'll make this happen. It was like a burden getting off your back. It's like seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. We knew when they would accept an offer that was still not the end you still have to go over all the details of how the transaction has to be done but at least the going back and forth that had been going on for a very long time regarding the amounts of the ransom were over so it's uh like okay we let's uh we finish one chapter or one big part of the book, and let's go to the last chapter on how we're going to finish this ordeal.

But now you had to come up with the money. So we did, and it was during that silent that period of silence that we were able to secure you know a decent amount more money nothing even remotely close to what they were asking us but it's actually even something that I to this day can't really discuss but how we ultimately ended up doing it because it involves people that were in Colombia and that are still in Colombia. You know, it's something that I still to this day can't and never will discuss.

For their own safety? For their safety, absolutely. The Hargroves prepared to make their ransom payment. They packed the money into garbage bags and then packed the bags onto wooden pallets. Then they asked for a new proof of life. So there was sort of an elaborate thing where they said, go to the men's bathroom of a fast food restaurant nearby our house,

and you'll find a package, you know, get that. And so we were, we were, we drove out into the darkness and went to this fast food restaurant and found this package and brought it back home and pulled it out. And it's a Polaroid, uh, of my dad. And this time, this was a few months later, this is eight months into the kidnapping at this point. And that proof of life scared the hell out of us because he looked so gaunt. And his eyes didn't look as confident as the previous proof of life that I'd mentioned. And his finger was in a weird position, like maybe his hand was broken and he was barefooted and he looked, you know, dirty, like he had soot all over him. And it was, it was,

it was really alarming. You know, we knew we were in the process of getting him out. The mechanism was in place, but it just, it, it just emphasized the need, like how badly we needed to get him out, the mechanism was in place, but it just emphasized the need, like how badly we needed to get him out, and soon. The Hargroves found an old pickup truck and loaded the wooden pallets full of money into the back. They tried to make it look like a delivery truck full of building materials. They hired a professional drop man.

They worried that if someone from the family delivered the money, they'd risk being kidnapped too. And this guy went up into the mountains for us. And of course, you know, we couldn't, we didn't hear about what had happened for a number of hours. We were waiting sort of desperately at home. But he came back, you know, not with my dad. We never expected him to be returned at that point. But just, you know, not with my dad. We never expected him to be returned at that point. But just, you know, we wanted obviously to know if he'd been able to pull it off successfully. And he had. So all we could do at that point was just wait.

And basically you were waiting for your father to show up because you had done what they had asked you to do. Yes, we had lived up to our end of the bargain. And so the next step was for him to come home. You know, we had heard that they were usually, hostages were usually released anywhere from three days to a week or so after a payment. And it went day three to day four to day five to day six and day seven, eight, nine, 10, you know. And it became more and more clear that he wasn't coming home. And of course, all kinds of questions go through your mind. like, did we pay the wrong people?

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Sign up for your trial today at Noom.com. In the days after the Hargrove family delivered the ransom money, they heard nothing. And then, the family received a phone call instructing them to turn on the television. There was a news story about American missionaries who'd been kidnapped, held for a year and a half, and then killed. Miles said he'll never forget that.

It had been a month since his family had paid the ransom, and about nine months since his father was kidnapped. Experts had advised the family that they should not call attention to the kidnapping. They were told that publicity could incentivize the kidnappers to increase the ransom and put Tom Hargrove in more danger. But Miles' mother felt like they had to do something. So she asked Miles and his brother to go on the news and try to make a plea directly to the kidnappers.

Here's Miles' brother. Tomorrow, nine months from now, they will be held in custody. That's why we want to ask those who have him to free him as soon as possible. You know, what we don't want is for families to think even quietly that if they pay without saying anything, it won't work. We want this business of making money on families to continue. And now you've got someone saying, even if you pay, they're not going to give them to you. Yeah, exactly.

That's not good for business. So what happened? Did it work? I don't know if it was the broadcast or if it was just a coincidence, but two days after that broadcast, a package arrived at our house again by courier. a rancid man very much like the first one saying, dear Susan Hargrove, the money that we received has enabled us to provide Tom with better food and better care. But if you want to see him alive again, it's up to you to pay. And it was something roughly the equivalent of, I want to say another $200,000. So you would think that that would be really upsetting. I have to say it was one of the biggest reliefs that I can remember because A, it confirmed that we had paid the right people. And B, it opened up a new avenue for us to resolve it, finally, after this excruciating, grueling month.

And we began that negotiation process again, and it actually went really quickly. It took about a month to where we got to the point where we agreed on a sum. So that was really exciting. It was all moving so quickly. I probably did tell them, like, okay, but is this time for real? We want to make sure it's going to be real and we won't be deceived again with our plans.

Once they agreed to the second ransom, $110,000, the Hargroves received a new proof of life. But this time, they didn't get a photograph. It's the worst proof of life that you could have. It was a series of handwritten letters. My father's handwriting, you know, saying that it was a certain date. But unless you have some sort of photographic evidence or something, there's anybody can write whatever date anybody wants with a gun put to their head. It's, uh, it wasn't what we call sufficient proof of life. And we argued back

with them saying this, this isn't going to work. We, we, you know, the same reasons that I've just stated. Um, and there, they came back at at us and were like, we can't get through anywhere. And if you're going to be asking for another proof of life, this is going to cost you six months. Around the same time in the summer of 1995, the Colombian government was cracking down on the Cali drug cartels. The police began arresting cartel leaders. Miles remembers that there are roadblocks everywhere. He says the roadblocks made it harder for people to move in and out of the city,

and Tom Hargrove's kidnappers claimed it would take months to deliver a new proof of life. It was shocking to find ourselves in this kind of situation where we had to accept such a major decision based on such flimsy kind of evidence that he was alive. But we were all aware of exactly what was going on with the situation. And my mom actually believed them. You know, it was a strange thing. Like these are the people that you shouldn't trust, but she actually believed that that was the situation that they were in. And again, after long, heated, emotional debate,

my mom, being the ringleader of it all, made the decision that we were going to pay that second ransom based on that bad proof of life. They packed money into bags and loaded them on a truck. This time, Miles' mother asked a Catholic priest to help with the delivery. And then they waited. Three days went by, four, five, ten days went by, and we could barely speak to each other

because we had sort of exhausted all the things on the checklists. And I just remember I was in the kitchen. It was getting late. I was trying to help get something together for dinner. And I was with Robert. And I was looking in the refrigerator and I heard this noise coming out of the foyer area. And I heard what sounded like a male's voice. And I ran out of the kitchen, ran into the foyer, and there he was.

It was my dad standing there in the darkness in this poncho with soot all over his face and this long kind of orange hair and this orange beard his hair had normally been white and um you know i it was the scariest it i i mean i knew it was him but it was it scared the hell out of me because he looked so different. And I had been waiting for, as we all had been waiting for that moment for so long, that it was just, it was unbelievable that there he was. I couldn't quite believe it. And I ran up to him and I grabbed him and I was like, Dad.

And he's like, what are you doing here? Why aren't you in school? And I just remember being like, Dad, we dropped out of school the day you got kidnapped. And he wanted to know where my mom was. My mom had been on the phone with my dad's brother, Rayford in West Texas. And Rayford, all he can hear is all of a sudden this screaming. The phone gets dropped.

He's thinking that my dad's body's been dumped or the gorillas have come in to get another family member because it's so chaotic. Ow! Ow! Oh, my God. Oh, my gosh. You were expecting me.

We didn't know. Ow! Oh my gosh! You were expecting me? No, we didn't know. And my mom and dad embraced, and my mom's just bawling at that point. It was the most crazy and shocking moment of my life. It was remarkable. He's here! Mr. Hardgrove is here! Tommy's here. Tom's here. Tom's here.

I mean, it must have been amazing to see him in person. Yes, yes, yes, it was. All of a sudden, you feel like, okay, everything that had been done for a year was actually successful because before that, actually, everybody was very down thinking perhaps he wasn't even alive. So to see him walking, it was a relief for all of us. It was a sense of success of a whole year of negotiations. At the same time, it was a sense of success of a whole year of negotiations. At the same time, it was shocking to see him so skinny. Because of malnutrition, his hair was from a different color. And one thing I also recall a lot, the smell. He smelled like a concentrated

bonfire. They learned that Tom Hargrove had been held in the eastern range of the Andes, at high altitude, in various FARC camps. He hadn't had a vegetable since April and a bath since March, you know. And we later found out that the orange

hair that he had, which had been white, I thought it was some bad attempt of a dye to try and disguise him, but it turned out to be a form of vitamin deficiency from lack of vegetables and, you know, good nutrition. Tom Hargrove had quietly kept a diary the whole time. He wrote about trying to convince the kidnappers that they'd gotten the wrong person. He showed them his business card for the Center for Tropical Agriculture. But there was a misunderstanding.

On the card, the initials for the company name in Spanish are C-I-A-T. He wrote that when they saw the letters, they assumed he was a CIA officer. He kept notes about what they did each day, what food they ate, what the weather was like, and the things the kidnappers told him about what was going on. He would get rumors back from his captors

every once in a while about the family. And, you know, one of them was that my mom had left and gone back to the States. So he just had no clue. And he often, he would always say that he had it easier than certainly my mom did because he always knew he was alive and he actually had a simple task every day and it was just to stay alive. And that, that for us, we never could know. And we could never know if whatever decision we made

would end up getting him killed. You know, my mom always said that, you know, if somebody in your family is kidnapped, you as a family are kidnapped too. The night that Tom Hargrove came home, the family ate dinner around midnight. Robert Clerks was there with them. Miles says people thought he'd be eager to get out of Columbia,

but it wasn't like that. He says it was complicated. They were sad to leave. Miles and his brother eventually resumed their lives as college students. His mother and father bought an old house in Galveston, Texas, and slowly fixed it up for the rest of their lives. Robert Clerks would go to Texas to spend time with them. When Tom Hargrove published a book about his time in captivity, he dedicated it to his family and to Robert, who he writes,

became the voice of my family. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson and Libby Foster. Our technical director is Rob Byers. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com or on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show and Instagram at criminal underscore podcast. Miles Hargrove used footage from the video diary

he kept during the whole experience to make a documentary called Miracle Fishing, Kidnapped Abroad. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. The number one selling product of its kind with over 20 years of research and innovation. Botox Cosmetic, adipotulinum toxin A,

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