Infamous America - DIXIE MAFIA: GEORGIA Ep. 5 | “Billy Sunday Birt”

Episode Date: July 24, 2024

Dirt poor and struggling with a severe speech impediment, Billy Sunday Birt grows tough and violent. He quickly replaces reading and writing for whiskey-running and armed robbery. While Birt’s reputation for retribution is no secret, the people of Barrow County don’t suspect how cruel he is until neighbors start disappearing and bodies begin surfacing along the banks of the Mulberry.  Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join   Apple users join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes, bingeable seasons and bonus episodes. Click the Black Barrel+ banner on Apple to get started with a 3-day free trial.   On YouTube, subscribe to INFAMOUS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: hit “Join” on the Legends YouTube homepage.   For more details, visit our website www.blackbarrelmedia.com and check out our social media pages. We’re @OldWestPodcast on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

By 1974, the five men who conspired to kill Solicitor General Floyd Horde had been in prison for six years. Chief among them was Cliff Park, the longtime bootlegging king of Jackson County, Georgia. He had ordered and paid for the assassination of Floyd Horde at Horde's home in the town of Jefferson, the county seat of Jackson County. And while Cliff Park had seniority in the criminal underworld of Jackson County, he was in his last night. late 70s when he was convicted and had been in the bootlegging business for nearly 50 years. He probably wasn't the most notorious criminal in the county. That honor likely belonged to Ambry DeWitt Allen Jr. Crime was a family profession for the Allen's. A.D. Allen's two brothers, his son, his nephew, and probably a bunch of others were involved in all kinds of crimes.

Allen may have softly organized the murder of a man in the mid-1950s. He ran a car theft ring from his hometown of commerce in Jackson County. He was involved in bootlegging, an illegal gambling, and then, in October of 1973, he was involved in kidnapping and armed robbery. He and two other men broke into the home of a bank vice president in the tiny town of Molina, an hour and a half south of Atlanta. The robbers held the man's family hostage overnight and forced him to open the bank vault the next morning. The robbers were caught in December 19. convicted at trial and sent to prison in 1974. Shortly after that, in March of 1974,

there was an armed robbery of a bank in Loganville, Georgia, and that was when the criminal career of Billy Sunday Bert came to a head. Despite the terror that serial killer Paul John Knowles, known as the Casanova killer, would inflict on Georgia later that year, Billy Sunday Bert is often referred to as the deadliest man in Georgia history. Paul John Knowles killed at least 18 people, and maybe as many as 35. Billy Sunday, Bert's body count typically starts in the 20 to 35 range,

and most believed he killed well over 50 people. But his murders didn't have the pattern or the ritualistic quality that is required for a person to be classified as a serial killer. And so many of the murders he's associated with are cloaked in speculation, and legend and can't be proved that it's impossible to know the truth. But one thing is for sure, after the Loganville Bank robbery

in the spring of 1974, investigators started uncovering bodies in the sands of the Mulberry River in North Georgia. By that time, the labeled Dixie Mafia had spread far and wide. The New York Times was printing articles from small towns like Brazleton, Georgia, about the crime wave down south

and this mysterious confederation of loosely connected criminals who were grouped together under the label Dixie Mafia. The label seems to have come from a gathering of lawmen in the South who were analyzing the brazen and often violent crimes throughout the region. They were trying to figure out if they were dealing with one huge, sprawling network of criminals who all answered to bosses in a similar structure to the Italian mob, or if they were dealing with separate criminals who only worked together when the need or the opportunity arose. It turned out to be the latter, but Dixie Mafia was a catchy name and it stuck.

And in the small town of Winder in Barrow County, about an hour northeast of Atlanta, the undisputed heavyweight champion of the Dixie Mafia was Billy Sunday Bert. From Black Barrow Media, this is Infamous America. I'm your host Chris Wimmer, and this season we're going back to the story of the Dixie Mafia. Georgia is ground zero for stories of bootlegging, car theft, bank robbery, and murder. This is episode 5, Billy Sunday Burt. In the early to mid-1960s, at the same time Floyd Horde was trying to clean up Jackson County, Sheriff Buford Pusser was trying to clean up McNary County, Tennessee.

He was battling a group of criminals who had been dubbed the state-line mob. Just five days after Floyd Horde was murdered in 1967, Sheriff Pusser's wife was murdered in an attack that was meant to kill the sheriff. The top suspect in the attack has always been Kirksey McCord, Nix Jr. He had been making a name for himself in Biloxi, Mississippi, a town that was for about 20 years the second coming of Phoenix City, Alabama. And right after Cliff Park and his co-conspirators went to prison in Georgia, Kirksey Nix joined them to a lesser extent. He was wanted in Louisiana in connection with a murder in 1969. He was also wanted on lesser charges in Georgia.

Georgia, so he chose to go to jail in Georgia while he tried to figure out how to handle the murder case in Louisiana. In a marvelous coincidence for Kirksey Nix, while he sat in jail in Georgia, the primary witness against him in Louisiana was murdered. And then, the man who allegedly murdered the witness was also murdered. By the time Knicks got out of jail in 1970, the murder case against him had collapsed, and he returned to Biloxi free and clear. And while all that was happening, Billy Sunday Bert was following a very similar path to Kirksey Nix. So it wasn't hard to see why Lawmen from the local level all the way up to the FBI were trying to understand what was happening in the South. Nicks committed crimes all over the South.

Burt committed crimes all over the South. A.D. Allen committed crimes all over the South. And there were many more like those guys. But regardless of the infamy they achieved, few compared. to Billy Sunday, Bert. Bert lived his whole life in Barrow County, Georgia. He was named after famous evangelical preacher Billy Sunday, who was one of the most popular preachers in America

for 30 years in the early 1900s. Billy Sunday died in 35, three years before Bert was born. By the time Bert was a teenager, it was clear that the name was the only thing the two would share. Bert developed a speech impediment at an early age, which got him bullied. He toughened up quickly and started fighting anyone who picked on him. Before long, kids got the message. Don't mess with Billy Sunday, Bert.

He gave up on education as soon as he was old enough to work, but he wasn't interested in honest work. He began working for moonshiners, lugging sacks of sugar to stills hidden deep in the hills of Barrow County. Soon, he began hauling corn liquor across Georgia and beyond. Burt quickly earned the reputation as one of the best and most daring bootleggers in the state. His souped-up mercury cyclone could haul 100 gallons of whiskey, and no police car could catch it. In later years, fellow moonshiner would call it the fastest whiskey car ever. Bert was charming, despite his stutter, but he was also volatile and incredibly dangerous.

When provoked, his temper was short, and he seemed almost eager to settle disputes with violence. In 1955, at the age of 17, he married a local girl named Ruby Nell. Ruby was just 12 years old. Five years later, they started a family and eventually had five children together. Despite his growing reputation as a criminal, Bert was regarded by those closest to him as a loving husband and father. With mouths to feed and a reckless streak, Bert expanded his criminal enterprise. By the 1960s, Bert was smuggling drugs from Mexico. His drug of choice was bipedamine 20, known on the street as black beauties.

It was a stimulant similar to Adderall. He also began committing armed robberies. In the words of his first child, a son named Billy Stonewall Bert, whom everyone calls Stony, he pulled more bank jobs than John Dillinger. He committed more robberies than Jesse James, and he was an informant's worst nightmare. The comparisons to legends like John Dillinger and Jesse James may have been hyperbole,

but the fear that Burt struck in the hearts of people who were willing to cooperate with law enforcement was no exaggeration. The authorities, local, state, and federal, knew that one of the keys to the Dixie Mafia's success was the Code of Science. But as always, that code had its limits. Looking back, almost everyone broke the code at one time or another. It was just a question of motivation.

For a bootleger named Jim Dawes, the motivation was as common and as old as time. Revenge. It just didn't work out the way he planned. My relentless sleep problems have always come from an overactive mind. I lay in bed at night with my mind racing from one thing to another, and then, of course, I have a brainstorm about something new. That lights the fire, and then I'm in real trouble. To calm my mind, the only things that have ever worked with any consistency are sleep gummies.

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And they have a 100-day satisfaction guarantee. Mood.com promo code infamous. In 1965, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation led an initiative known as Operation Dry Up, which was designed to reduce the production of illegal liquor and rid the state of its criminal element. In Jackson County, right next door to Barrow County, Solicitor General Floyd Horde would spend two years working with the GBI on that initiative before he was murdered. But as the violence and chaos in Jackson County was winding down, at least somewhat, with the convictions of Cliff Park and his co-conspirators,

it was ramping up to crazy levels down the road in Barrow County. Operation Dry Up was only mildly successful in its first few years. It failed in many cases because of corruption. Local politicians, lawmen, and otherwise upstanding citizens had skin in the moonshine game and didn't want any disruptions. And, at least at the time, the code of silence among moonshiner's remained in effect, and they refused to turn on each other. That, of course, wouldn't last. In 1970, Barrow County became the focal point of a new investigation by a joint task force

made up of the GBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, commonly known as the ATF. By May of 1971, the investigation had produced four major indictments in a federal liquor conspiracy case. The four men who were indicted were Billy Sunday Bert, Harold Chansey, Fred Cooper, and Otis Fortner. That was the beginning of a 14-month wave of violence in and around Barrow County. The same month that Bert, Chansey, Cooper, and Fortner were indicted, a man named Jim Dawes was in the middle of a bitter divorce. Dawes lived in the town of Winder, the county seat of Barrow County, and the hometown of Billy Sunday, Bert. Two years earlier, in 1969, 65-year-old Jim Dawes had married Ruth Chansey, the matriarch of a family with deep ties to the moonshine business.

Her son, Harold, supervised a bootlegging operation that stretched from North Georgia to South Carolina. Two of his top moonshine runners were his cousin, Donald Chansey, and Billy Sunday Bert. The union between Harold's mother, Ruth, and Jim Dawes, was never destined to be. be a matchmate in heaven. It was Jim's third marriage and Ruth's sixth, and Jim turned out to be an abusive husband. In May of 1971, two years after they were married and at the same time Harold Chansey and Billy Sunday Bert were being indicted, Jim and Ruth were embroiled in a bitter divorce. Jim was about to be cut out of the lucrative Chancy family bootlegging operation, and he was bitter about that as well as the divorce.

The sheriff of a neighboring county heard about Jim's embitterment and told the lead ATF agent that Dawes might be a prime candidate to act as an informant. The agent convinced Dawes to testify against Billy Sunday Bert, the Chances, and several others. The agent provided near round-the-clock protection for Jim Dawes and promised him immunity in exchange for cooperation. But once word got, out that Jim Dawes was talking to the feds and that others probably were too, no one was safe.

Jim Dawes disappeared from his home on November 22, 1971. His body was found in Mulberry River, north of Winder, a month later. That same month, December 1971, Charles Sibley was killed and possibly robbed afterward. He was a gambler who was believed to have crossed Billy Sunday Burt's partner in crime, Billy Wayne Davis. The details of Sibley's death wouldn't come to light for another five years, and his murder would be posthumously added to the 14-month crime wave. As would the murder of Samuel Thompson, two weeks before the murder of Jim Dawes. Charles Martin, who was scheduled to testify against Bert and the others, disappeared. His remains were later found in Barrow County.

Carolyn Cooper disappeared on February 12, 1972, two months after Jim Dawes' body was found. Carolyn's ex-husband was Fred Cooper, one of the four who had been indicted the previous year. In March 1972, a few weeks after Carolyn went missing, her body was discovered at the bottom of an abandoned well. She had been shot, thrown in the well, covered with garbage, and then the well had been dynamited to cover her. up. More than likely, she knew information about her ex-husband's dealings and she was a threat. The next month, April, 1972, six buildings burned down in Winder. Investigators believed they were all the result of arson, but no one was arrested. That same month, Lewis James House disappeared. He was believed to have been murdered,

and his car was found at a used car dealership that was owned by Bert's partner, Billy Wayne Davis. Lewis House's body was never found. Two months later, in June, 1972, the bodies of an elderly couple were discovered in the burned-out ruins of their small grocery store in Wynder. They were both 74 years old, and they had operated the business for decades. They had been strangled and killed before the store was set on fire. A good-sized whiskey still was found at the store, but there was no obvious motive for the crime. A month later, in July 1972, Donald Chansey disappeared after leaving his house in Winder. He was a moonshine runner along with Billy Sunday Bert for his cousin Harold. Just before Donald disappeared, he was

indicted on liquor charges, just like his cousin and Bert and the others. His remains were found seven years later, buried in the sandy banks of Mulberry River, near the place. where Jim Dawes' body was found. Clearly, someone believed he was a threat to talk. There was no proof that Billy Sunday Burt, whether alone or with his partner Billy Wayne Davis, committed any of the murders. But when the entire saga was done,

it would be hard to imagine who else could have done them. Billy Sunday Burt met Billy Wayne Davis in 1968, and the belief is that they met while transporting stolen goods for Harold Chancy. They committed an untold number of crimes together in the six years that they were partners, and the first one that made major headlines was a double murder. Like the deaths of Charles Sibley and Donald Chancy, the details of the double homicide wouldn't be known for several years.

But the murders happened in May of 1971, at the same time that Burt and three others were being indicted for liquor charges. The double murder was the beginning of the 14-months. crime wave attributed to Billy Sunday Bert. In Cobb County, on the other side of Atlanta from Barrow County, Warren and Rosina Matthews lived on an eight-acre property. Warren was 68, Rosina was 59, and they were both doctors, specifically pathologists at different hospitals.

They were wealthy, and that was why Billy Sunday Bert and Billy Wayne Davis paid them a visit on May 7, 1971. Davis had robbed the Matthews home the previous year, and he knew it was a good target. The two Billies and a third man, Willie Hester, tried for a double dip, but it all went bad. On that Friday morning, Warren Matthews opened his garage door to go to work, and there were three men in ski masks waiting for him. According to Billy Sunday, Bert, Warren was either in his Mercedes or near it when Davis pointed his gun at Matthews. Warren went berserk and started fighting.

During the scuffle, Warren snatched the ski mask off of Billy Wayne Davis. With Davis's face revealed, Bert took off his own mask and attacked Warren. Either inside the car or right outside it, Bert hit Warren on the head with the butt of his gun multiple times, but the blows failed to subdue Warren Matthews. Warren burst out of his garage and started running down his driveway toward lower Roswell Road. Burt chased Warren and shot him twice in the back. Moments later, the door from the house to the garage flew open,

and Rosina Matthews turned the attempted robbery into a gunfight. She had been in her bedroom when she heard the commotion and the gunshots. She grabbed a pistol from the room and rushed down to the garage. Rosina charged through the door and opened fire. Unfortunately, she missed with every shot. Billy Wayne Davis quickly recovered from the shock of being fired at multiple times, and he returned fire. At least one of the shots must have struck Rosina because her blood was later found on the front of her husband's car. Despite her injury, she made it out of the garage and ran around the back of the house.

According to Bert, Billy Wayne Davis chased her around the house, caught her in the backyard, and shot her once in the back of the head. regardless of whether it was Bert or Davis who fired the fatal shot, Rosina Matthews died minutes after her husband. Bert, Davis, and Hester, if he was there, abandoned the robbery effort and fled the scene. It had all gone wrong, but that didn't mean Bert and Davis were brokenhearted about it. They had a rule.

If they were seen and could be identified, the witness had to die. If Warren Matthews had not grabbed the ski mask off of a woman, Davis's head, maybe it would have ended differently, but then again, maybe not. Bert and Davis were cold-blooded, remorseless killers, as they would amply prove over the next three years. But in the immediate aftermath of the Matthews murders, they weren't suspects. The investigation took a faulty detour when a woman named Deborah Ann Kid spun a story about being part of the robbery homicide. She said she and seven men had attempted the robbery and killed the Matthews couple, and she, Deborah, had fired the bullet that killed Rosina.

Deborah said she had been forced to do it by the seven men. She took the lie all the way to court. She told her story on the witness stand, and the seven men were all convicted of a murder they didn't commit. Three years later, her lie unraveled and scandalous details emerged about the lawmen and prosecutors who handled the case. Reportedly, her initial motive was that she was mad at her boyfriend, one of the seven men who had just been sent to prison. But the story was far more convoluted than that. And by the time everyone learned the truth, there were only two men left who knew what happened at the Matthews home. Shortly after the botched robbery and the murders, the third man at the Matthews house, Willie Hester, went missing. For the first

few weeks of the Matthews murder investigation, law enforcement offered a reward for information leading to an arrest. Allegedly, Willie Hester kept talking about the growing reward. As he did, Bert and Davis grew more paranoid that Hester would rat them out to claim the reward. It would be nearly 10 years before the body of Willie Hester was found. He was buried in the banks of the Mulberry River in the same basic area as many other victims. Mulberry River, Mulberry River, became Billy Sunday Bert's dumping ground, to put it crudely. But that wording was also common at the time, because similar scenarios were playing out all over America in 1972.

John Wayne Gacy started burying bodies in the crawl space under his home outside Chicago. The bodies of young women began appearing on a patch of ground south of Houston that would be called the Texas killing fields. And serial killer Ed Kemper was discarding the remains of his victims in the Santa Cruz Mountains in Northern California. All of those things and many more were happening at the same time the crime wave gripped Barrow County.

And despite the crime wave, Billy Sunday Bert and Billy Wayne Davis were still free to go about their business. They were suspects, there's no doubt about that. There just wasn't any hard evidence to tie them to the crimes. And when Bert was finally charged with a crime, it was minor by comparison. In August, 1972, police stopped Burt for a traffic violation and discovered a gun in his car.

Burt didn't have a registration for the gun, and it didn't really matter that he claimed he won it in a poker game. He was charged with possessing an illegal firearm, and he was sentenced to two years in jail. By the fall of 1972, Billy Sunday Burt was finally out of action, at least temporarily. But his partner Billy Wayne Davis kept their criminal enterprises going, and it was around that time that their law enforcement nemesis entered the picture. Like Cliff Park and A.D. Allen had Solicitor General Floyd Horde, Billy Sunday Bert and Billy Wayne Davis had Sheriff Earl Lee. In August of 1972, Lee was elected sheriff of Douglas County. It's on the opposite side of Atlanta from Burt's stomping grounds in the town of Winder in Baxter. County, but it was squarely in the stomping grounds of Davis, who was based at his car dealership

in the town of Austell. Sheriff Earl Lee was born and raised in Douglas County. He married his high school sweetheart and worked at a feed store and a tire company before he dove into law enforcement as a deputy sheriff in 1964. Eight years later, he was sheriff of his home county, a position he would hold for the next 20 years. He was often described as a lawman's lawman, and sometimes called a modern-day Wyatt Earp. In his first few months as Sheriff, Lee busted a group of young men who had been selling drugs at area high schools. He broke up a bookkeeping syndicate, and he caught a couple who were committing, quote, funeral robberies with their teenage son. The family scoured the obituaries in the newspapers looking for

survivors of the recently deceased. When the relatives of the deceased went out of town, the trio robbed their homes. Despite Lee's early successes, the thorn in his side was Billy Wayne Davis. Davis's car dealership, and therefore the headquarters of his criminal activity was in Sheriff Lee's jurisdiction. But after nearly a year in office, Lee still couldn't get anything on Billy Wayne Davis, and the grace period was almost over. Billy Sunday, Bert was getting out of jail after just eight months of his two-year sentence. And Sheriff Lee knew that, that a reunion of Davis and Bert would supercharge crime in the region. Sheriff Lee was struggling, like other lawmen,

to cure the disease of Davis and Bert by catching them in the act or finding evidence to send them to prison for a long time. So, Lee decided to practice preventative medicine. Sheriff Lee would make it impossible for Davis, and by extension, Bert, to operate in his county. Sheriff Lee approached local banks and told them that if they did business with the state, Billy Wayne Davis, they were doing business with criminals who were increasingly called the Dixie

Mafia. Lee ensured that Douglas County residents knew that if they bought a car from Davis, they were funding organized crime. It got to the point where Davis couldn't buy a sack of sugar because Sheriff Lee made sure sellers knew it would be used to make moonshine. But then, Billy Sunday Burt got out of jail. Davis contacted his friend and offered to let him in on several crimes, that Davis had planned. But they needed to do one thing first. Deal with Sheriff Lee. Davis told Bert that Lee was investigating them both for the murder of a gambler in Lithia Springs who had double-crossed Davis. That gambler was Charles Sibley, who had been killed in December 1971 in the middle of the crime wave. Davis wanted Bert to get rid of the sheriff.

Both men would benefit from Sheriff Earl Lee being taken out of the picture, but Davis was under constant surveillance in Douglas County. So Davis offered Burt $5,000 to kill the sheriff. Billy Sunday, Bert bristled at the idea. Just as Bert had warned Cliff Park about murdering a well-respected solicitor general back in 1967, he cautioned Davis about murdering a well-respected county sheriff here in 1973. It would create more problems than it would solve. That had certainly been the case for Cliff Park. And, like Park, Davis wouldn't listen. He reasoned that if Lee could make a case against them for the murder of Charles Sibley, they would be looking at life in prison, or worse, the electric chair. Bert grudgingly agreed to do the hit. Davis suggested they strike on a Sunday when Lee

was coming from or going to church. Lee would be off duty, and his guard would be down. Most people in the county would be at church and off the roads, which would make it easier for Bert to get away. According to Bert, when he asked about the other people who would be there at the scene, specifically Lee's wife and children, Davis replied, well, hell, just get them too. Bert enlisted a man named Charlie Reed to be his driver. Reed was one of two men who regularly worked with Bert and Davis, and his name would resurface many years in the future, during a cold case investigation of a triple homicide in North Carolina. Bert and Reed drove from Winder to Douglas County early on a Sunday morning and waited outside Sheriff Lee's church. Bert and Reed were in position just before 9 a.m. when the service led out.

Like many in the congregation, Lee and his family lingered inside the church and socialized with other parishioners. Almost half an hour passed before Lee, his son. wife and their four children walked out of the church and crossed the parking lot to their car. Lee had his arm around one of his children, and he and his wife were laughing. Bert waited until they were almost to their car. He gripped his gun, stepped out of the car, and started to walk across the lot toward the unsuspecting family. But then his steps faltered. He was a killer, but he was also a father, and he wasn't entirely heartless, as crazy as that claim would sound. in the near future. He put the gun back in his waistband and watched Sheriff Lee and his family

drive away. Sheriff Lee wouldn't know of his near assassination for four years. By that time, the careers of Bert and Davis were over, and the former partners had turned on each other. The end would begin with a bank robbery in Loganville, and then citizens of North Georgia and North Carolina would finally learn some of the details of the people who had disappeared. The list of crimes would be appalling, and it would fill whole pages of newspapers. Next time on Infamous America, Billy Sunday Bert and Billy Wayne Davis commit their most notorious murders, and then commit their final crime, the Loganville bank robbery that led to a shootout with police. And when two of the deadliest men in Georgia break the code of silence,

They reveal at least some of the extent of their mayhem. That's next week on the season finale of Dixie Mafia, Georgia, here on Infamous America. Members of our Black Barrel Plus program don't have to wait week to week for new episodes. They receive the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials, and they also receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. Memberships are just $5 per month. Original research and writing by Jamie Lyko.

Additional research and writing by myself with story editing by Jordana Houchins. Original music by Rob Valier. I'm your host and producer, Chris Wimmer. Find us at our website, blackbarrelmedia.com or on our social media channels. We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram and B-Barrell Media on Twitter. And you can stream all of our episodes on YouTube. Just search for Infamous America Podcast. Thanks for listening.