Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - The Most Terrifying 911 Calls Ever Recorded
Episode Date: May 9, 2025Brandon Hall goes over 911 call stories. Brandons website https://musiccity911.comFollow me on all socials!Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/insidetruecrime/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@mattcoxt...ruecrimeDo you want to be a guest? Fill out the form https://forms.gle/5H7FnhvMHKtUnq7k7Send me an email here: insidetruecrime@gmail.comDo you want a custom "con man" painting to shown up at your doorstep every month? Subscribe to my Patreon: https: //www.patreon.com/insidetruecrimeDo you want a custom painting done by me? Check out my Etsy Store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/coxpopartListen to my True Crime Podcasts anywhere: https://anchor.fm/mattcox Check out my true crime books! Shark in the Housing Pool: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0851KBYCFBent: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BV4GC7TMIt's Insanity: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08KFYXKK8Devil Exposed: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08TH1WT5GDevil Exposed (The Abridgment): https://www.amazon.com/dp/1070682438The Program: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0858W4G3KBailout: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bailout-matthew-cox/1142275402Dude, Where's My Hand-Grenade?: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BXNFHBDF/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1678623676&sr=1-1Checkout my disturbingly twisted satiric novel!Stranger Danger: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BSWQP3WXIf you would like to support me directly, I accept donations here:Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/MattCox69Cashapp: $coxcon69
Transcript
Discussion (0)
It's probably three or four o'clock in the morning.
This woman calls and said, there's this guy that's been knocking on my door for the past like 10 minutes.
And he walks back over to his car that's in the driveway and he pulls out the bag.
Then she starts screaming.
He's setting my house on fire.
There was an RV park downtown on 2nd Avenue and it had a message playing saying that it was going to blow up.
Oh, and it just blew up.
When I got hired on, I was 20 years old.
and I had a call from a woman who
she had just got free from somebody
had taped her up and
after they broke into her house.
And it was, I mean, it was an apartment, but, and it was
really close by where I worked at. She was a student
at one of the universities. And, you know, like,
after that happened, it was, there was a lot that went on. She couldn't
manage to free herself afterwards. She was held at
knife point, apparently repeatedly.
And then he's, the suspects,
stole her credit cards and kind of left from from there and left her tied up or taped up,
I guess it's the better way to put it.
But she managed to get free when she called us.
She gave a description to the guy.
Once the police got out there, they actually got a good description of the guy and everything
and got her credit card information.
And they actually found him trying to take some of her money out at ATM about two or three
miles away.
So they called him.
That was really good, quick work.
I was going to say, do you ever find out what happens to these?
you know, I would assume you don't.
Yeah, yeah, most of the time we don't.
I mean, that's one of the things that, you know,
and actually with that incident there,
I didn't know what to do.
I mean, I was brand new and I was like,
I feel like I want to go and, you know,
help. I want to do something more.
You know, and my trainer that was sitting next to me,
I'm like, no, this was your part.
You did your job. And that was,
that's all you're needed, your part of it's over with.
So it's, it was kind of hard to hear at first because I,
you know, I've never experienced something like that on the phone
before you know really at all so right it was kind of shocking for me but you know the calls
continued that month and i got a few more that you know we're pretty screwed up so uh like
the first month that's another one that i've told people about this is it's pretty nuts the
way it happened um i was working this was midnight shift like my first month it was they usually
start you out on midnight shift because they wanted to be slow for you and have time between calls
It's not really that busy, but that's a good part about being trained on that shift.
The bad part about it is the calls you get, they're real.
They're not, they're not any of these, you know, BS type calls where people are calling
in because they want, you know, extra sauce on their, their chicken sandwich or something like that,
which that does happen.
But like this one is probably three or four o'clock in the morning.
This woman calls and said, there's this guy that's, he's been knocking on my door for the past,
like, 10 minutes.
And, you know, he's like, as she said, I can't really see who he is.
you know, it's dark outside and I'm,
I'm afraid to answer the door.
So I was like, okay, that's fine.
You know, I'll send the police out and they start on the way and she and I keep her
on the phone.
The guy stops and he walks back over to his car that's in the driveway and he pulls out
this, this bag and he starts walking around her house.
And when he's, he's doing this.
He was knocking to see if anybody was even home.
I think he doesn't bring her right home now.
Yeah.
I think that's probably what his plan was.
But, you know, when he starts doing this,
She's quiet. She's like, I don't know what he's doing. He's just walking around the house.
And then he walks back to his car, drops the bag off and then walks back to the front of the house.
And then she starts screaming. He's setting my house on fire, like just over and over again.
And she's trying to do so where she remains quiet, but you can tell that she's obviously, you know, frightening at this point.
And at that point, me as a dispatcher, I don't know what to do. I'm thinking to myself, okay, I can leave her inside of a burning house or send her outside where this guy might be wanting to, you know, hurt her kill her.
right luckily he ran and jumped in his car and drove away and i managed to tell her to get out of the
house right then and you know when she did that she went outside and she saw his car she's like i
know exactly who that was and apparently she had a workplace dispute with some guy and the guy
got fired over it and he thought it was enough to go and burn her house down maybe even kill her
while she's sleeping or something i don't know so what the cop show up yeah the cop showed up and
uh took a statement from her i don't know what happened to the
guy after that I would hope that he got arrested, but that's one of those things where
we don't find out a lot. I mean, by the time they got everything wrapped up, I think
that there was a report taken, and I don't know if they went and actually found the guy
and arrested him or anything like that, but I'm sure that they put out the fire.
Yeah, yeah, fire department. They were sent. So from what I could tell, it was probably
something that he, essentially the thing that was in his bag that he had, he had gasoline.
and he was just dowsing the house as he walked around it with gasoline.
And, you know, it's set it on fire.
One good thing about gasoline when it sets on fire like that,
it flames up, it gets really hot, really quick,
but it doesn't usually stick that long.
So I think the damage to her house was actually kind of minimal.
You take so many of these calls and it's just so routine to you,
you could take a murder or suicide or something like that.
And it's not that big of a thing.
You just go on the next call.
I mean, it's when you get,
like a really, really bad call or something like that.
Sometimes they'll stick to you.
Like the,
I'd mention the suicide calls.
One of the things that really kind of gets you on those is the fact that,
you know,
if somebody calls in and says,
I'm a,
I'm suicidal.
I think I might want to kill myself.
You know,
they're most of the time when they say stuff like that,
they're wanting some help.
They don't want to actually kill themselves.
They may think they do,
but they're not actually going to do it most of the time.
That's,
it's just not something's happening.
They want to go to,
a hospital. They want to get some medicine. They want to get some sort of mental health treatment or
something like that. But the people who call in and they say something like, you know, my name is
this. I'm at this location. I'm going to kill myself. You can find me, you know, here. When they call
in and they say something like that, almost every single time they kill themselves or they at least
attempt to. So I've had a call where a woman did exactly that. She said, my name is so and so. I live
this address and I'm about to kill myself, you know,
please tell my family, I'm sorry.
And then she lays the phone down and then you hear a gunshot and,
you know, something like that or one of the other ones that was actually
pretty bad too that I've talked about before and people were just like,
oh, I can't understand why anybody would do this.
The guy said the exact same type of thing.
I live this place.
I'm going to kill myself.
You can find me at the bottom of the pool.
And then the phone, you know, puts the phone down and then you hear a splash
the background and they got out to that one and apparently the guy tied on some
rick-o blocks to his ankles and threw him in and he jumped in afterwards so he
he drowned himself was a horrible way to die I was because there's a horrible way to
die yeah most people don't know that you once you actually do that you know he's down
there and if he has a second thought if he can't get himself out he's holding his
breath most likely and when you pass out from holding your breath you immediately start
breathing again right so you know his first breath he got back in
was all water and it's a deep inhale when you do that so yeah i mean we got out there but by that time
he had already passed away there was no helping him yeah i was going to say it's it's funny like
gunshot wounds i or when people kill themselves with a gun you know you see it in the movie they
stick the they stick the the gun to their head and boom and it's listen i don't always work out like
that like i you know a lot of times people will put the gun here and then they'll fire the gun well
the gun goes up there and it shoots out there doesn't kill him you know or i had a buddy whose
father went to commit suicide and he stuck the gun to his temple and fired and the bullet went through
his through his eye cavities right like through that so now he's blind and he's laying on the
ground passes out wakes up and then has to search around to find the gun to shoot himself again
yeah um i had a similar one uh to that it actually it went on this guy he calls and
I could barely understand what he was saying when he first called.
He apparently put a gun into his mouth and he pulled the trigger.
But when he did it, he kind of did it sideways.
So it blew the side of his face off.
And like part of his jaw was missing.
It was, and he was when he was talking, he was gurgling blood.
It was, you know, really bad.
And we got out there.
We pick him up.
We start transporting him.
We just had a brand new hospital open up in Nashville when this happened.
And luckily it was like before this happened.
the closest hospital would have been probably twice as far away.
So they got him in the ambulance and I guess midway there,
they're traveling on interstate highway speeds,
probably 80, 85 miles an hour,
if not faster than that,
he decides still he doesn't want to live and he gets up
and he jumps out of the back of the ambulance.
And at that point,
three cars run over him at highway speed.
What's messed up is once they turned around and got back to him,
he was still alive.
So even with all that,
he shot himself, jumped out of an ambulance,
moving that fast.
and then run over by three cars and he was still alive.
I don't know if he lived much longer,
but when they picked him back up,
he was still alive.
A buddy mind who was working the radio up front.
He stood up and looked back at me and gave me a thumbs up.
He's like, he's got a pulse.
I mean,
if you didn't want to kill yourself before,
yeah,
blow your half your face off and get run over by two or a couple of cars.
Like, I mean.
Yeah.
And that's,
I think I saw a comedian one time that it kind of pointed that out.
He's like,
yeah, I just,
I went and I jumped in front of us.
a bus and trying to kill myself and now I just got this really bad limp or you know shot myself in the head now I got this ringing in my ear what were what were some other ones that were and or I hate to say interesting bro yeah I know it's it's kind of a hard thing to you know say like interesting of like one of the active shooters that I had this was at a church a few years ago and I actually tried to get the 911 calls from this and I didn't take one of the 911 calls I was actually working on a fire dispatch
video for this one. So I was helping to dispatch out the ambulances and stuff. And this guy, he walked into a church during the service and started shooting up. And, um, you know, we got a lot of calls from it, uh, from people inside the church and people from across the street here in the gunshots inside. And, um, one of the most notable calls that we got was, uh, it was a woman who called and she just kept repeating. She couldn't say anything at all. We got the GPS from her cell phone. Uh, so we knew she was inside of the church, but she got, but she was, uh, it was a woman who called and she just kept repeating. Uh, she couldn't say anything at all. Uh, uh, so we got the GPS from her cell phone. Uh, so we knew she was inside of the church. Uh, but she was. Uh, but she
She was so nearly catatonic, but all she could say over and over again was shotgun, shotgun, shotgun.
She couldn't tell us the description of the guy where he wasn't the church, what the address was, nothing.
She just kept repeating that over and over again.
So, and that kind of shows you sometimes when you get the calls like that were people just, they're hysterical.
And they're so hysterical, you can't control what they're doing at all.
You know, there's most people, if they're a little bit excited, you can try to calm them down a little bit.
but some people are too far gone and you can't do that.
What happened with that one?
They ended up getting out there.
They arrested the guy, but one of the parishioners there at the church actually managed to fight with a guy,
pulled the gun from him, like I actually got the gun, and shot him.
And, you know, he was still alive when they got out there and they, you know, he went to trial and he's in prison now.
So I'm trying to remember how many.
I think there was like one person was killed and then I think he shot four or five others while he was inside the church.
But, you know, I don't think as far as if he was wanting to go in there and kill as many people as possible,
it's, I think he probably had a better opportunity or maybe didn't plan it out the way.
But I'm glad regardless that only that many people got shot because it could have been a whole lot worse than it was.
Well, have you ever had anybody, you know,
call up that had killed has killed somebody like yeah just killed my whatever yeah a few times i mean
that's it's pretty rare to have something like that but and most of those you think oh those are probably
the most exciting calls they're really not because you you talk to them on the phone and you just
have to keep them on the phone while they're while the police are on the way out that way you just
sort of ask them you know what they did how they do it or whatever and uh you just try to keep them talking
And most of the time, they're at that point, not always, but some of the times they'll be just really regretful for what they've done and everything.
Like, they didn't really think it through all the way.
And, you know, they're not wanting to, they're just really regretting what they did.
You know, and they're hoping that they can take it all back.
But, I mean, at that point, obviously, there's not anything you can do about it.
So you're talking about, like, are you thinking of a specific one?
We're like, yeah, I mean, some people will call in.
And they'll, they'll be, well, as far as a specific one of a couple over the years,
one guy called in and said that he, you know, he'd beat up his wife, but beat her to death.
And, you know, he didn't think she was breathing anymore.
It was, you know, the way he was describing it was kind of vague.
And that's, that's one of the things you think about, like, that's, okay, well, what happened, you know.
But apparently he just, he beat her.
I'm not even sure if he, he may have had a weapon.
I don't know.
It's another one of those that I didn't.
pay attention to after I left from work and never found out the details about it.
But yeah, I mean, you just talk to him, you get his address and you ask him what's going
through his head and he's just like, oh, we've had problems for a long time.
And, you know, it's most of the time, something like that's influenced heavily by drinking
and or drugs and then sometimes like a mental health issue.
And that's really the more rough part about it is that you get somebody that's that far gone
and drugs or alcohol, I mean, they're making horrible decisions and they're not even really aware of.
Do you have any, any comical ones?
Yeah, I got quite a few of those.
So first off, I guess you allow bad language on the show, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
So this one is one, it's actually not my call.
Right.
That I took, but it was a buddy of mine's call.
He, uh, this guy, he was a dispatcher for 40 years and he's hilarious by himself, but he took this call really early on when I just started and it was a guy calling in saying his, his house is on fire. And, you know, the first thing you get is the address or something like that. That's they honed into you. You've got to get the address. Got to get the address. Um, so he's, he's trying to get the address. And the guy goes, I'm on 17th Avenue north. He goes, yeah, but what's the address? He goes 17th Avenue north. He says, no, no, I need an exact address. What's the actual?
numerical on the address and he says look just have the fire department drive up 17th avenue i guarantee
you i'm the only motherfucker whose house is on fire right now yeah that one and um let's see that
i actually this is uh i was just at crime con i actually met you at there kind of briefly i had a speaking
session here and i talked about this one uh too that and this is feel really actually you know really
bad for the guy it's just the way that it was kind of played out it was it was it was
really funny. Um, this guy called in and he, he was like, you know, I'm, I'm in a bad way, man.
I need an ambulance. So I was like, okay, what's going on with him? I got his address, all
that kind of stuff. And when, um, he starts telling me about it, he says, it's like,
yeah, I'm just feeling real bad. I've been, I've been sick for three, four days.
And, you know, I just, I can't even move now and I've been throwing up and now I've been
pooping. And he's like, I can't stop pooping. I was like, okay, he goes, yeah, no, every
time I cough, I poop.
and then he starts coughing.
So that's, you know,
and that was one that I really had most of the time.
If I get something that's funny on the phone,
I'm able to just kind of wave it off.
I keep my,
keep a straight face.
I almost laughed at that one just because I wasn't expecting that at all.
It was really,
really bad.
But, you know,
like I said,
somebody like that,
they're in genuine need.
I feel bad for even thinking about laughing,
but it's,
you know,
it is what it is.
Some of the things I was talking about earlier on with the,
the people calling in for just really stupid stuff.
I mean, you've got people who call in because they get one too few chicken nuggets
and their combo meal at McDonald's or something.
They'll leave and they'll see that they have nine chicken nuggets instead of
10 and they'll call the police once they can't get the manager or whoever
there to give them an extra one or give them their meal for free.
And, you know, at first I sort of laughed at those two,
but after you start getting them, I'm not joking.
Once a week, I get a call like that.
You think about it, like if we've got 25 people working on a shift, you know, half of those people are answering phones and we're taking one of those per day and it doesn't matter what shift you're on.
So we're probably taking as a center hundreds of those calls every single week.
It's pretty insane.
What do you tell them?
Well, in most places, Nashville is one of them.
I tell them just straight up, that's something that we, the police can't handle.
You know, you have to work it out with the manager there.
If you can't get something like that worked out with a manager, you can go up.
You can go to their district manager or even contact, try to contact the owner or CEO of whatever restaurant you have.
And, you know, but if they start getting violent or, you know, say the employee calls in or something like that and say they won't leave, you know, we'll send somebody out and they'll get them to move along.
But there's nothing they can do about it.
But one of the funny parts about it, too, though, somebody will call.
in about this stuff and you know they they won't think about it they'll have a warrant
and they'll when they get out there they'll check them for a warrant they'll take them to jail
so you know those we get the dumbasses calling in too so uh people calling in and they
have previous criminal histories and they have a warrant sitting there for you know
something like a probation violation or worse and they get picked up because they
wanted to complain about a freaking chicken nugget yeah i mean do they do you not
explain to them like what you don't say like what are you doing you don't call 911 for this
oh yeah yeah yeah we'll do that too but uh has it escalated by that point like it yeah yeah
they don't care i mean uh you'd be surprised that that probably only about 10% of all calls
that come in on 911 are actually real life threatening threatening emergencies and um you know
the the rest of the calls we get you know you've probably heard of the butt dials and stuff
like that where people's phones will be in their pocket or something like that right or some little
kid yeah yeah and that's that's another thing too that people don't know that uh like a disconnected
cell phone so if you've got an old phone that you just got in your desk or something like that
or you let a kid play with a old phone those they can still call 911 even though they're not
they're not hooked up to a service yeah how does that work yeah connected to
it just it latches on to a you know whatever nearby tower
there is and that's all it is. But it works the same way with home phones. If you walk into a
house that is vacant and they've still got like it's still connected to the pole and it's running
into the house, if they still got an old phone that's connected to the wall, you pick up and
dial 911 one, it'll still go through. And how do you know when someone calls? What if they don't
know their address? I'll kind of go through a few different things with the, you know, I'll ask
them if they've got a piece of mail or something like that they can look at or you know
ask somebody that's there uh luckily the GPS technology we got now for the cell phones
they've got a lot better uh when they when i first started hardly anybody even had cell phones
back then it was uh 2000 there was you know maybe uh i think i read some time some time ago
that it was like eight or nine million people in america had cell phones back then and you know
if you do the the numbers that's like i don't know maybe one and 75 million or 75 or so
So really hardly anybody had a cell phone.
So if you had a wreck or something like three o'clock in the morning, you know, you're going to work, you didn't have a cell phone.
You actually had to walk to somebody's house, knock on the door and say, hey, can I use your phone?
I've got to call 911.
But as far as now, GPS, we can get within a few feet of where they are.
So if they're inside of a house, we can usually pinpoint where they are.
But most of the time, the people are cognizant enough, they can actually tell us what the address is and stuff.
So like here recently, like the Christmas Day bombing that we had, it was in 2020.
That was one of the bigger calls that I had anything to do with.
And I was actually working on police radio that day.
But the way it happened, I don't know if you're familiar with the bombing.
No.
Yeah.
It, you know, Christmas Day for a dispatcher, it's like one of the slowest days of the year.
There's nothing going on.
Everybody's sleeping in.
You know, there's everybody's with their families.
Nothing really happens.
barely anybody's on the road so there's hardly any wrecks or anything and in Nashville it's the same way especially now that most people in Nashville they live somewhere else they're from somewhere else so they leave the city and they go back to whatever their hometown is and visit family but that morning we got caught we started getting calls I think it was like two or three o'clock in the morning it was before my shift happened and the calls the people were calling in was there was an RV park downtown on 2nd Avenue and
And it had a message playing saying that it was going to blow up and it had kind of a timer kind of countdown thing going every 15 minutes.
It will say this will, you know, it's going to blow up and so, so many minutes.
And one that actually got down to the last five minutes.
I mean, in between all this, it was playing like songs that old 60 song called Downtown.
I can't remember who it is that played that.
but he played that on a loop.
And, you know, at 6.30, that's when I walked in.
That's when my shift starts.
I walk in, everybody's up standing around and kind of moving about, which usually on
the Christmas, everybody just kicked back and chilled.
There's nothing going on.
I was like, I asked the guy, I'm relieving.
I said, what's, what's going on here?
What's, why is everybody up?
And he says, oh, there's an RV downtown and he keeps playing this message over and over again
saying it's going to blow up.
And then he goes, oh, and it just blew up.
And I was like, all right, just hop up.
let me take over and see what happens.
And turns out the guy, like I did a couple episodes on that.
It was pretty bad.
It blew up a couple of buildings completely demolished a whole bunch of others.
But luckily, he was the only one that died.
He actually kind of did that, I think, by design.
He was inside the RV.
He may have killed himself beforehand, but the entire thing was blown to shred.
So they couldn't find out if he shot himself or if he was just blown up like that.
But he was actually kind of a.
a conspiracy theorist type person.
He worked at one point in some capacity for AT&T,
and he had a thing out for them,
and he parked right in front of one of their main junction buildings.
And when he did that,
it blew up that portion of the building,
and it knocked pretty much all the AT&T service out for a lot of the
southeastern states for,
I mean, it was a few days before they got everything back up.
So this is like a Timothy McVeigh,
he must have had,
he put together his own,
mix and had it in the RV just in a drums or something? I mean. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know that they ever
determined exactly what type it was, but, uh, you know, they've, they've went back and,
and looked. It turned out that his, his girlfriend at the time, uh, well, previous to that,
I guess it was. She actually called and said, hey, you know, he's making a bomb out there. And
apparently police went by the house. Nobody was answering. And it's, they're kind of limited
in what they can do. They can go out
there and knock on the door, try to talk to
somebody, because anybody can call
in and say, you know, hey, there's a dude over
here with a gun and there's just be some
Joe Schmoe walking down the street, just
some rando trying to get him in trouble.
Right. So they kind of did that
and they didn't talk to anybody. They didn't
see anything out of the ordinary. So
at that point, they had very little
they could do as far as doing any searches
or anything.
I think they tried to follow up with
the same kind of result. So
There was not too much they could do at that point.
So it's, and he, it wasn't one that was on anybody's radar.
I think they said that he had one previous conviction from like the 70s or something like that where he got arrested for like marijuana possession or something.
It was like nothing at all.
So it wasn't like he was some sort of a career criminal or anything, but he was crazy.
They started looking into his past and he believed that there was like a race of like alien reptiles or something like that that, you know,
walked among us and he would go out to
like these state parks
and just stay out there with all this
camera equipment and
you know he's like they live out here in these parks
and oh they do and once he gets out there
with the camera equipment he starts
trying to film these creatures that were there
then he's like oh they've got cloaking devices
so I can't see him on camera
so you know any little thing to
kind of mess him up with his
own theories he had in his head
and I think he was one of those 5G
conspiracy conspiracy theorists
too where he believed that the 5G networks were eating our brains and such.
And he worked for AT&T at one point.
Yeah, he did like private security and stuff like that.
Like he apparently was really good with the, when I say private security, like computer type, you know, security.
Right.
He was, he had a shop where he worked on computers and stuff.
And, you know, he was, he seemed like he was a smart guy overall, but he just wasn't all there.
Well, I mean, look at the Unibon.
or like the guys you know he's brilliant but oh yeah you know yeah with something like that you
i don't know if it's one of those things where if you reach a certain level of intelligence
in your life there's just kind of like a tipping point where everything's you know it's a little
bit too much for your brain to handle i don't i don't know but uh well this guy i guess it was and
he just he went over the top and he did everything that he was planning on doing so and he
he was actually the message it was playing saying over and over again this is going to blow up
evacuate the area so it sounded like he was not trying to kill people he was just trying to
kill himself and well i mean i wonder what the bomb squad called yeah they um they were
notified that this was happening but we didn't have any knowledge at the time that there was
an actual bond there so um the the police went down to the area they cleared out some of the area
they were going door to door because a lot of downtown Nashville it's you know bars and clubs and stuff like that right none of them were open at this time they were all closed everybody gone home and the the few apartments that are there they're like lofts above the places so they managed to evacuate them some of the homeless people that were out on the street they got them out of the way and um you know what's what's really messed up is the whole thing was called uh on one of the body worn cameras the officer that was there it's you know it was pretty bad uh he was
walking back to his car that was like around the corner from where it happened at.
And as he's getting into his trump for something,
the whole thing blows up,
it shatters windows out,
like through buildings that he was next to.
Like as he's walking,
everything's normal.
When he turns around,
there's debris everywhere and there's still stuff falling down.
And it was just chaos for a long time.
Some of the other bigger calls that I've taken,
like the,
for instance,
the floods that we happened and that we had in 2010,
like that's not really a crime type.
thing, but it's something now on one dispatchers have to do.
Right.
And it was kind of unprecedented for what happened.
I was actually, when it first happened, I was actually in South Carolina at my cousin's
wedding and I saw, I started seeing it on the news.
I was like, oh, I got to turn around and go back home.
Luckily, the wedding had already happened, but Nashville got like it was, I think it was
like 13 and a half inches of rain in two days.
And like it, the downtown area, completely flooded, uh, surrounding areas.
close by the main river, the Cumberland River in Nashville.
It was completely flooded and, you know, most people, they got out and stuff, but there
were a few people that had to be rescued. They climbed on top of their roof, the roof of their
house, and we had to fly in helicopters or take boats over to pick them up. Some of them were
stuck in their attic for hours before they can get out. And what's really screwed up is it's not
like the, you know, that itself is there's no crime involved in a flood, obviously, but the
aftermath of it. So many looters. I mean, I'm amazed at the type of people that just go out and,
you know, they see an abandoned house. They're going to run inside it and steal as much as they can
from it and run back out with it. And that, that was a huge problem. It's all over. Yeah, what do you
get for stuff like that anyway? It's not like anybody's keeping cash or jewelry or anything like
that. You know what I'm saying? It's like, you know, everybody's got money in the bank. They've
gotten it. Even if you grab, if you somebody walked up and tried to get your wallet, how much cash have
you got on you, you know, almost never have cash.
Yeah, nobody has cash anymore.
So it's, yeah, the, you know, robberies, I mean, that's, that's a good one.
And, you know, robberies in general, they're not happening as much anymore.
Right.
They still, like from, from a person anyway.
So, you know, you have like now the big thing's carjackings.
So you'll go up and have somebody just bump you from behind a car and they'll run up with a gun.
And, you know, because you'll think, okay, it was just a little accident or.
something like that.
You want to swap insurance.
Exactly.
And then the guy, you know, runs up, you know, there's two or three people in the car behind
you. They'll come up, pull you out of the car, throw you out like it's, you know,
GTA5 or something like that.
And they drive off in your car.
And the whole reason it's not for keeping your car.
It's because they're going to use the car to go and do other crimes, drive-bys,
robberies, you know, whatever like that.
And that's one of the big things happen.
It happens quite a bit in Nashville.
And most of the time it's juveniles that are doing that.
It's like, you know, 15, 16, 17 year old kids that are out there doing these like carjackings and then going around and shooting somebody with that car and then they'll dump the car, you know.
And actually, um, you got a story about that too.
I actually had, um, uh, this was like last year.
I guess it was it's kind of hard to like put them all together.
But I actually had somebody, uh, I took little bits of every piece of this call.
The first call I got was a woman who had just been carjacked.
She was, it's a little area of town just barely outside of downtown.
Somebody did just that.
They ran up to her at a stoplight, took her out of her vehicle.
It was a, I think she had like a Dodge Charger, Challenger, one of those.
And threw her on the ground, held her at gunpoint, you know, and they just drove off in the car.
So I got all the information about that, sent it up and I actually talked to her, the person that actually got robbed.
And then a few minutes later,
I say a few minutes, probably a couple hours after that.
Now I'm thinking about it.
I get a call, weird call from this dude.
He's a locksmith.
And he's like, yeah, I've got these guys and they've called me to,
they want me to make a key for their car.
And they said the car's running and everything like that.
And then they just lost the key somewhere.
They just need another key for it.
And he's like, there's something wrong with it.
I don't, I don't feel right about it.
And he's like, you know, when I get over there,
they're causing all kinds of trouble, it seems like,
with each other kind of arguing and then I look in the back seat and there's a bunch of guns back
there and I just kind of pulled back off and I asked what kind of car it was and he told me and it matched
the description the people that were there matched the suspect description so I got the police going
out there and they believed that they were part of a kind of a bigger carjack and ring and they
ended up surrounded the entire place with SWAT they had the helicopter kind of hovering out of the
area ready to go that that way if they ran somewhere like get them canine the whole deal
and then I went down and I actually jumped on the radio
where they had the kind of secret command going on
where they were setting everything up
and they ended up rushing in all at once
and a couple of them took off on foot,
but they called all of them.
And I don't know what they actually got charged with after that,
but that was like, you know, several hours start to finish
for, you know, pretty much a carjacking.
Yeah, well, I was going to say carjack, that's a serious offense.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, you'll realize you get 20, 25 years for,
yeah and we'll see that you think that i mean that's that might be what they're sentenced but
you know the the way that uh the criminal justice system's working now i took a call about a guy
of the suspect i found out later on like uh i was actually on a police radio when this happened
we get in a shooting and you know of course they go out there it's chaos second they get out
there everybody's screaming uh and this was like in um in one of the projects in Nashville
which that's where a lot of the shootings and stuff like that happened it's usually like
drug related or whatever and we get out there and um the guy um they got shot he was dead and they
start putting out the suspect description and everything and they got a name for the guy luckily because
a lot of times you know the people that are there on the scene they forget um right what this person
look like because they're going to go and try to take revenge on that guy and so but luckily they
did get somebody that said his name and stuff like that and once they put that out um we ran the criminal
history, he just got out for homicide, but he only spent like two years in for like an actual
homicide. To this day, I have no idea how in the world he only did two years for killing
somebody. Well, I mean, every state's different. So, you know, it's, you never know. Like in Florida,
you, if you, it's a carjacking in Florida, like you could, you can do some serious time. Yeah.
Yeah. Tennessee is usually pretty hard on stuff like that. Now, again, it might have been that he was just
out for what i can't even think of a reason that he would be out for i mean no i was
thinking like oh he's out on bond or something but no he he was convicted and put in prison
but he only spent two years there yeah you know it's funny uh i i owned a bunch of houses
next to j c napier project oh really yeah yeah you probably get called there yeah uh yeah i'm
very familiar with that place it's uh like that between uh they call it j c and uc uh jac c napier and then
university court they're right next to each other and those are probably the most
dangerous housing projects in Nashville and we get tons of calls there it's like you know
there's always drugs there's always guns there's always somebody shooting or stabbing
somebody I mean it's it's just it's nuts there all the time I mean we've and they
had something a while back if you're familiar with the area so they've got a dollar
general that's right there and there were something that happened down there it was like
I can't even remember what it was.
It was like a big fight or something like that.
And then they ended up burning the place down.
And that was like their closest grocery store.
It's like a, you know, walking distance where they can go in and get what are they
want and they ended up burning the place down.
So luckily they've rebuilt it and everything.
But I was just thinking myself, why would you do that?
That's, you know, it's kind of asinine.
I lived in, well, I lived in J.C. Napier for a while, too.
But I also lived in Green Hills.
like that's a stark contrast man yeah yeah yeah you go from the you know from one place to the you know
green hills zip code that's a a big jump i mean you go from government assistance and uh jacian apier
over to green hills where now you can't buy a house there for probably under two million dollars
yeah i bought i just bought up a bunch of property right around the just around the projects in that
general area and just renovated them and was pulling money out and yeah now it's they're trying
to reform that whole area and you know just kind of like you were saying the edge of that area that
a lot of people are buying houses there and they're uh you know redoing the inside and
sometimes they just do a complete tear down and and build something new on the property and you know
there's still a bunch of crime in the general area but now it's getting kind of more
confined to just directly around the projects there yeah i was going to say
Germantown, the two, I remember Germantown, um, was on the other side of the city.
Yeah, Germantown, they, um, like the, uh, so there's a Kroger there.
I don't know if you remember that Kroger, um, one of the things we always talk about is
dispatch is if we know the address to a place, if we know about heart, you don't want to go
there because we get so many calls there.
Right.
And, you know, that Kroger that's over that way, everybody knows the address because we
get so many calls there about shoplifting and stuff like that.
And, you know, it's just.
there's always some sort of insanity.
There's people that have just moved to Nashville,
and they've made a kind of a fete map of Nashville
where they have different areas.
They call that the murder crover because people have been shot out in the
parking lot and stuff.
And just the other day, I took a call from,
we had like four or five calls from this.
It was just some people that were up by the front cash registers,
and they got in an argument, started fighting.
Then they went to the back and started picking up wine bottles
and started hitting people with them.
So no good reason.
They just started a fight.
And I guess they wanted to escalate it by hitting each other with wine bottles that they just took from the shelves.
It's just, it's so funny compared to, you know, when I was in Nashville, compared to now, like, just how much stuff is out there.
Like, you would see, you would see, like, insanity.
Like, you would drive around there and people are, you know, there's homeless people and people.
and people arguing and getting into fights on the street and everything.
And I wonder what it's like now.
Like, I wonder what was that you were here?
2006.
Okay.
Yeah, that's, it's changed a whole lot since then.
I mean, back then it was still like really dangerous, even the outside areas from it.
So, um, but yeah, they're the housing projects.
They're kind of, they're revamping them.
They're trying to move them around some sometimes, uh, but they're still there.
Uh, there was talk about.
them trying to move that one to a different part of town like all the residents move them to a different part of town and kind of do a new area they haven't jumped on that though I wouldn't be surprised they you know for a city aspect it would probably be a good reason to do that because all the property there they could put up you know millions of dollars worth of houses there yeah but yeah it's it's it's it's one of those kind of weird things where you have to kind of map out the the the good and the map
from it like those the people who live actually in the projects they you know a lot of them most people
think oh everybody's drug users or whatever like that no some people just they they don't have
education they don't have good jobs they you know don't have cars they have to ride a bus everywhere
and um you know they might work at that dollar general or something like that and that's how
they're making a living so um you know they want to stay closer to where they work at and
a lot of those people that live there they might work in a restaurant downtown or something like
that so it's a close walk or a bike ride or something that they can do that you remember what
street you lived on uh donelson okay yeah we owned a property we owns a property on
is it fairfax or fairfield yeah yeah um and then there was a what was it um it's like green
street or yeah that's that's on the other side uh so like yeah green street kind of runs into
You know, the area runs into Hermitage Avenue, which is across the interstate.
But, you know, like you got Green Street and Little Green Street.
And back there in that corner of that, that place is where a lot of those stolen cars get dumped at and sit on fire.
And, you know, you live around there.
You probably saw a bunch of dumpster fires, didn't you?
No, I mean, not that I can recall, but then I only live there.
Like, I only lived there maybe five or six months.
And I only lived in that area because we had bought up so much property in the area.
So, you know, I could go out on my porch and I own the house next door.
I own these three houses over there.
I own four houses over there.
And we had two vacant lots over there.
We were building new houses on.
So, you know, I was buying up the whole neighborhood.
So.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The dumpster fire thing is over in that area and a couple other housing projects, but specifically
that one, anytime there's a.
a dumpster fire that was lit.
That's always when there was like a new shipment of drugs that came in.
It was just a signal that everybody, if they saw the dumpster going up,
they knew that they could go to their dealer and get some more stuff.
Wow.
Yeah.
Nice.
I remember one time walking, we were renovating a house and I walked out on the porch.
And one of the guys, one of the contractors that worked there, I remember his name
was Wayne.
He was an old black guy.
And there were two guys in the middle of the street, like one guy was trying to
stab the other guy.
Yeah.
But, and there's just, you know, and the other guy's not running away.
Like he's staying, you know, 15, 20 feet away.
And the other guy'd run at him and he'd kind of run and dodge out of the way.
And then he'd stop for a minute.
And they're screaming at each other.
And, and I was like, what's going on, bro?
Like, I go, I go, should I?
And so I told Wayne, I was like, man, I think that guy's, that guy's got a knife.
Yeah.
And I was like, should I call 911?
And he goes, nah, he said.
that's like he knew both of them that dude sleeping with that guy's wife it's been going on forever
they're not he's not going to hurt him they're just screaming it's fine and they did they they set
did this for 10 maybe for five minutes five or 10 minutes yelling swinging at him and running at
him real quick to try and get to him and he couldn't get to him and you know and then they just got
tired and wandered off yeah that's pretty nice what do you know what's going on yeah I mean like
you were saying, like, oh, they, they know these guys.
They're just playing.
They're messing around, whatever like that.
And that actually made me think of another call that we,
I actually, when we first started, when I first started, we actually had a program
where we had to go on police ride longs at least once per year.
And I was on a ride along with the officers over in North Nashville,
which is Germantown area, that area.
Right.
And we got a call from this people that said, oh, these two guys are,
they were in a fight in the middle of the street.
And they said, oh, I think one of them probably needs an ambulance.
Didn't go into detail about what it was.
And we get out there, the ambulance is there, there's another officer already there.
The ambulance is already there.
They got one dude sitting on the back of the ambulance, like the steps of the ambulance.
They just sitting there talking, describing what happened.
And he's like, yeah, it's just me and a buddy.
And this dude, he was a big dude.
He was probably four or five hundred pounds.
Like he was like really overweight and he was just talking just like I am right now.
And he was like, yeah, I mean, uh, he was just a buddy mine.
we were just play fighting and we were just kind of wrestling around and you know it wasn't anything big
and then I looked down and like his foot was literally off of his leg but being it was held on by
a piece of skin about that wide it was just dangling off of his leg and he was high as shit
on something because like he said he wasn't telling any pain he was just talking like I am right now
even with his leg his foot hanging off of his leg and apparently I guess what happened was like
when they were wrestling, just play fighting, the dude stomped his ankle and it broke
compound fracture and it knocked his foot off.
So he had no clue.
No, he knew what happened.
I mean, he looked down, but there was like you, you would think somebody like that,
they'd be screaming in pain or passed out like just, right.
He was, he was high as shit on something and like he, he was feeling no pain at all.
Why didn't they take it?
If the ambulance was there, why he wasn't in the ambulance on his way to the hospital?
Well, they were still trying to get him squared away, and they were taking vitals and stuff like that.
Oh, okay.
They were like just kind of your basic normal stuff before you would go to the hospital, but he was like sitting there and like one of the things that with breaks like that, you know, you have like the type of break that would, as far as veins go, you either rip or they, they slice, you know.
And apparently some of them, when they're cut the right way, they'll just keep bleeding.
and it doesn't stop that easy.
But if they're, like, ripped apart,
sometimes they'll pull back in and it'll stop the bleeding.
And, you know, like, he was barely bleeding from it.
It was just kind of a stump that was there.
It was bloody, but.
Oh, it's horrible.
Yeah.
I just, I can't even imagine.
Like, after his high came down,
I'm sure he was,
he was pretty fucked up after that.
So, uh,
it was bad.
How did you get into,
or how did you become a dispatcher anyway?
Actually, when I was,
uh,
just a long time.
ago that's been 23 years ago I was a tuxedo salesman believe it or not I started
started out like I worked at a tuxedo shop and it was a they also did costumes so it was like
real busy around Halloween and stuff like that and I actually had a trip scheduled to go to
Scotland and you know everything was paid for I was 20 years old back then and actually I was
yeah I was 20 I had to think about it for a second but the the manager that I had there they actually
had somebody quit and then seriously like four or five days before my trip they said we're
going to have to cancel your vacation days and i mean it was just you know kind of a shock to me i was
like i've already paid for the tickets and like hotels everything's already paid for and it was
pretty expensive for me back then especially when i was making i think i don't know it was like
eight or nine dollars an hour so um you know i was just like i'll just find something when i get back
i quit and then when i got back my dad is actually a he was a sheriff deputy here in nashville but
even though it's done a little bit differently in Nashville,
most sheriff's departments,
they cover the county and they do everything that police does.
But in Nashville,
we have a little different system where the sheriff's office,
they actually just run the jails and they serve civil warrants and things like that.
So he was a jail guard at that point.
He knew somebody in human resources and said,
hey,
they're looking for 911 one dispatcher.
So,
you know,
I think you might actually have a good temperament for the job and everything.
And I was like,
okay,
I'll give it a shot,
see what happens and jumped in and,
you know,
a lot of training.
It goes along with it and, um, you know, just kind of worked out 23 years later.
I'm still there.
What kind of trait?
Like how long does that take?
No, it's, it's actually pretty extensive.
Most people wouldn't think of it like this, but, um, when you first get in in your
class, after you get past all the, the hiring process, which is tedious as hell.
I mean, anybody that's been interviewed, uh, and, uh, possibly taken on for a role in any
type of first responders type thing can tell you about this.
It's, you know, you have like a 20 plus page application.
They want to know everything about you.
They want to know every little piece of your past, every school, your residence for the past 10, 20 years, something like that.
Right.
Just a little bit of everything.
And then once you actually get past all that, you have a few tests.
For me, it was just a typing test.
And then you have a polygraph and site test, things like that.
But once you get past all those little tests, you get into your in-class training once you're hired.
And that can last around six weeks where you learn how to use the computer system.
you learn kind of a basic knowledge of the laws.
I mean, very, very basic how to take.
And actually, when I was hired, I was hired as a police-only dispatcher.
So when you now, most centers, most centers, a lot of the centers we have,
they're combined where they do police, fire, and medical minds that now.
But back then it was police only.
So you do that for six weeks.
And then after that, each one of your months that you're first on for your first three months,
you go to a different shift and you have a trainer sitting with you making sure you're doing everything right and trying to correct you and help you along and then after that there's another two-week training to actually do the police radio and then another three-month rotation so you're after everything said and done you're close to a year after you've trained and had a little bit of free time in between before you're actually released completely on your own it's basically like repetitive calls right yeah that's a lot of calls i mean um
Most people think, like, the police will go out to, you know, anywhere from four or five, maybe if they're really busy, 10 incidents in a day.
That's like, I mean, I'll answer that many calls in probably 15 or 20 minutes.
So, I mean, it's hundreds of calls a day that I'm either answering on the phone or dealing with on the actual police dispatch radio.
And I think in the time I've been there, I've done kind of rough estimate.
I think I've probably done somewhere around a million calls.
what is the what is the major call that you get what's the the majority of the calls is it
i mean violence no actually it's more things like fraud and theft it's things that you never see
on the news you never hear about it's you know someone who got their car broken into or someone
who i mean we get a lot of wrecks you know non-injury wrecks uh things that you know not very
noteworthy they're in the big scheme of thing is kind of boring it's uh it's just kind of a
routine type thing. I mean, we'd get 100 plus wrecks in a single day. I dispatch out in Nashville,
so it's a, you know, bigger city, but it's not a huge city by any means. And,
but even with that, we get anywhere from 100 to 200 wrecks with no injuries every single day.
It doesn't matter if it's sunny or if it's raining outside. We're always getting those.
How many, how many dispatchers are there?
In Nashville, we employ, I think it's around 180, um, but it's, but that's split up
too. That's with all our support staff and managers and things like that. We've got a pretty big tech department. So it's on a shift every single day. We'd have, like on my shift, for instance, we might have around 25 people working. Right. Yeah. I was going to say, I was just thinking it's like eight hours. It's three eight hours shifts, right? Yeah, exactly. Some centers, they do different ones where they do, you know, 12 hour shifts or I've even seen, I don't even know how they do this. They try to mirror a fire department where they work for 24 hours straight and they'll have two days.
off and I can't imagine doing something like that with dispatch with fire
department yeah absolutely because you in between calls you're sitting down and
resting you can sleep at night but with dispatch you you would be a wait for
24 hours straight can you imagine how many how many 9-1-1 dispatchers there are
in New York yeah it's it's a lot I think it's somewhere like I don't know like
1,500 2,000 something like that all together and they're split up in different
different areas. So, I mean, like my building, we've got just, it's a decent
size building, but we've got two floors. Most of our people taking the phone calls,
they're upstairs and the radio dispatchers are downstairs. But I've seen a picture of
inside of one of their centers. And it's just massive. I mean,
it's crazy. The size, like a Home Depot. Yeah, it's about like that.
And then the whole place is computers. Like, all you see is computer screens.
So on your, I'm just,
thinking about your your podcast yeah what do you go over on the podcast so i'll go out and i find
actual real 911 one calls i'll play you know anywhere from uh one to three what i call incidents
because some of them have more than one call per incident and i'll play the actual real
normal one call kind of dig into what happened during the call and from there i'll kind of critique
the dispatcher sometimes i mean if they do a good job bad job most of the time it's it's
fine. I mean, dispatchers in general do a pretty good job, even though sometimes the public don't
understand that, you know, they want a dispatcher that gets excited along with them. And that's just not
the way, that's not the best way to do it. Right. So you would follow, would you, so you would
follow up on a, on a call like that with the guy set in the house on fire. Do you follow up and
figure out what, find out what happened? Yeah. Yeah. I try to find as much as I can. And most of the
calls that I play on my show, they're not mine.
There are other places, other agencies, you'd be kind of amazed that like all the
true crime podcast and stuff like that.
I mean, there's, if you knew, have the knowledge of 911 one calls, there are about
280 million 911 calls placed every year in America.
So you think about it, almost every person dials 911 one at least once per year.
That's kind of how it is.
And there may be what, I don't know, maybe a hundred new.
worthy like national newsworthy true crime type incidents that happened so that like the the frequency is something like that just so minor you know the the big incidents that you know i kind of helped out with and the time i've been there were we had a really huge flood in 2010 we had the tornado that happened in 2020 the national bombing that happened in 2020 and then just recently um we had the covenant school shooter the active shooter there and i've
dealt with some other active shooters and things like that along the way but they were
smaller in comparison to all the other incidents okay so what what are what's another one that
you've you've done you've been uh so like out of those 23 years there have to be some good
ones yeah and that like i said the fire one's a good one but yeah yeah so like um well i'm i'm
curious about your podcast you've been doing it or what like how did you
how did you did you come up with the idea yourself or were you did you start it yourself yeah for the podcast part um
i had no experience like literally zero experience at all with anything podcast i may have listened to
an episode of one podcast one time right and i thought it was oh it's just you know this is not even
like really a thing but uh a friend of mine uh a couple friends they were like oh you should write a book
you know because you've had so many experiences i was like yeah maybe i don't know they're like
oh you should do podcasts you know you got like a decent voice and stuff i'll say you about it and
uh me and actually a buddy mine that the guy that uh took the call about the house on fire
um he was he was retired at that point and like i said he'd been on the job for 40 years
and we just started out kind of like a we didn't really know what to do with it and we just
kind of had like a buddy type show where it was like you know we were talking about calls from
the day or you know we'd have cops on the show and just kind of talking about experiences we
had or whatever like that and right but then you know this guy he's he's in his 60s and he's you know
fully retired and everything and he didn't understand how much effort it took to actually do this it's
like we would be there you know recording probably six seven hours sometimes and then the edits
and stuff and he lived in a different city back then there was no good way to do any type of remote
stuff and he was old not very tech savvy so i don't know if i could have got him set up remote anyway
but you know it was just a little bit too much for him and he just wanted to retire so it's like
all right i got to figure out a way to do this on my own and it's kind of more than what i do now so
it's more of a it's kind of a both educational and entertaining type show where people who want
their true crime fix they can get it but also be taught a little bit about what to do what not to
do when calling 911 what to expect from police once they get it to get there and you know just things
like that. So, and it's worked out pretty well. Right. How, how much do you work on it per week?
Anywhere from like, I can get a quick episode. I call it a quick episode. I might be able to get one of
those done all the calls and research and then recording editing. I might be able to get one of those done
in about 10 hours. And that's for a half hour episode. 10 hours for half hour and you're working
40 hours a week. Yeah. And sometimes it'll be, you know, 20 or 30 hours. If I
I'm doing a little bit longer episode or if there's a lot more research involved or whatever.
And I'm always trying to plan for the next week,
even though most of the time I'm kind of up against the deadline.
So I mean, for my own deadline, I set my own deadlines.
But it's, it's a lot of work for it.
And I do every bit of it myself.
I do all the recording, all the set up, all the promotion, and it's anything like that.
And I've just recently got a YouTube channel, which right now,
don't have very much actual video. It's like audiogram type stuff where I'm putting up the episodes I'm doing on there and I've put a couple of interviews on there too. But it's just started out. I've had it for a few months now and I'm still kind of learning that. I mean, I know you've got kind of a better grasp on that. You've done a ton of videos, I believe. So right now I'm just learning. Yeah, I was going to say I have a video editor that works the cameras when we do in person ones. And then this is this is pretty pretty easy.
Yeah.
You know, like, I mean, you can do some editing here, but, you know, there's not a ton that's necessary because it's only two feeds and they're both being recorded.
But Colby also does this.
He does more with this than he used to.
Like, I think initially we were just putting up exactly what you see right here.
But now he's flipping back and forth to you and I.
And, of course, he does the thumbnails.
and he does he does the bulk of you know the work on on editing and thumbnails and posting and
all of that but yeah initially and yeah i mean he puts all our stuff on spotify now yeah
but yeah when you first have to start editing all of the video it's daunting to figure out
how to everything you're uploading it and then putting it into whatever you know you're
whatever editing software you're using, you know,
figuring out how to work that software.
What a pain?
But once you get it down,
it's,
it's never really quick.
Yeah.
If you're doing it like that's a,
I know the podcast in it,
but I don't know the video end of it,
but if you're only doing Spotify,
you should put it out on all the other stuff too.
Like Apple is the biggest.
It distributes to all of them.
Okay.
So it used to be Anchor,
but Anchor got bought by Spotify.
Yeah.
Okay.
I got you.
He still uploads it to,
I think,
to anchor, but anchor is owned by Spotify,
and then it just distributes it everywhere.
Yeah, okay, I got you.
Yeah.
I know a lot of people,
not a lot of people,
some podcasts I've heard.
They only do Spotify.
I'm like,
why would you even do that?
You're missing out on so much more.
I mean,
they're only about a 20 or so percent market share as far as all
podcasts go.
But I think when you do that,
if you do like a Spotify,
like exclusive or something,
I think you might get paid a little bit more from Spotify.
I mean,
I could be wrong.
I don't know.
I mean,
Joe Rogan,
He's Spotify only, and he's, I mean, of course, he's the biggest in the world.
So, I mean, I think it's, what was this deal, like $110 million or something like that?
It's crazy.
It was excessive.
Yeah.
Well, they're making money hand over fist with that show.
So, I mean, I know that advertising opportunities on some of the bigger shows, like not even his size, like a tenth of his size.
They're pulling in probably like $50 to $100,000 per ad.
It's crazy.
That's insane.
Yeah.
It's insane.
I'd like to get $1,000 just for,
if I could just get a sponsor for a thousand bucks a month.
Yeah.
You know,
like even an extra thousand or $2,000 a month would really be like a,
you know,
unfortunately,
unfortunately a game changer.
Like that's,
you know,
like a thousand bucks is that.
That's like to me,
a thousand extra dollars a month is a lot of money.
Yeah.
Same here.
I mean,
I'm trying to,
you know,
morph this into a full-time job,
my podcast.
And I've got kind of a number in my head.
had where I need to do that, but, you know, that's just, it seems like sometimes it seems like
a pipe dream. Like, I, you know, it'll take me forever to reach that point. And, you know,
I'm sure that at that point, if I had a full time gig doing this, I could, you know, do the video
stuff, like no problem at all. And, you know, do a bunch of other stuff and have time to really dig
in deep and have a lot more research done on each episode and, you know, make longer episodes or
whatever like that. But yeah, it's doing it with a 40 hour a week job. It's really difficult.
Yeah. Yeah, it is hard. Okay. Well, I feel good. I'm ready to go.
All right, dude. Yeah. Try to get this done like some other time and we'll come back around. Maybe
circle back around if I've got, you know, something, you know, more in your will house to try to have
on my show too and we'll chat about that you know yeah hey i have a question yeah i mean definitely
i have a question like the crime con thing what what was why did you go to crime con well you
were a speaker right yeah yeah um did you have a booth yeah i had a table there on podcast row too
but i was also a speaker i um this is the second one i've been to and um it's i mean it's a great
opportunity overall because you get to you know meet fans of the show and you know everybody's
want to take pictures and you're handing out stuff to potential new listeners and stuff like that.
And then for me, with the, you know, the speaking gig, it's, it's like, you know, I got up on stage this time and did sort of the same thing I did last year.
I essentially taught people how to really briefly take 911 calls.
And then I had volunteers from the audience come up and, you know, I had scripted actors backstage where they, you know, they were the callers essentially.
And they would call in and everybody would listen.
And it was a big stress for people.
And this year, they did a little bit better than last year.
Last year, I had a actually fan of one of the fans of my show.
And you're up on stage.
You can't really see these people outstage out in the audience because the lights are so bright.
And when I asked for volunteers, I just see hands go up.
And I'm like, all right, you, you, you and you.
And, you know, this person comes up and she sits down and they start talking and she completely freezes and just starts laughing.
she later on told me she's like that's how I deal with stress I just start laughing I can't stop and she put her head down and she's there in front of probably a thousand people and not doing anything at all she just completely froze and that was like the you know at the time like the most viewed video from crime con it was it was pretty funny um yeah then why raise your hand I don't know you know I mean why put yourself in that position yeah you think that's that's kind of the thing
with the 911 dispatchers in general,
I think people that they really think they can do
a job like that, but the turnover rate is
crazy. I mean, I've seen
probably, I don't know, anywhere from
1,500 to 2,000 people
come and go in the time that I've been there.
And most of the time it's because they think
that they can do the job and they just can't.
It's either too fast-paced or
they, you know, catch a real bad call.
You know, they'll have to, you know,
help somebody give CPR
to like an infant or something like that.
And that's just too much for them.
And they're like, okay, I can't do this.
I'll quit.
So that's happened more than a few times.
Yeah.
It's a, you know, a bad thing.
It's like you might be the last person that you, you know,
you talk to somebody before they die sometimes.
I mean, that happens or the CPR thing with kids.
And that's one of the things with us.
Like we, we really hate, like myself and most others,
like anytime you have something involved in somebody who can't help themselves.
Like, you get a couple drug dealers out.
and they're in the game together.
Like, I don't want anybody to commit violence against anybody,
but them going in,
they know there's an inherent risk in doing something like that.
If it's a kid that gets hurt doing nothing at all,
you know,
we want to do everything we can to help them.
We're going to help everybody.
But like those are the people we really care about,
like the young kids,
the elderly,
you know,
stuff like that.
So,
yeah,
it's,
it'll be difficult like that sometimes.
Well,
you didn't help.
You didn't leave it on a higher note.
That only made it work.
You got a point there.
I didn't live on her and over.
All right.
Well, well, I appreciate you coming on.
Hey, I appreciate you guys watching the video.
Do me a favor and hit the subscribe button.
Please consider joining my Patreon and leave me a comment in the comment section and share the video.
So thank you.
And I will see you.
I found an area of Nashville that I liked where the houses were going for.
they were just dirt cheap. They're going for, they're going for 40,000. If they were renovated,
if a house was renovated, you could get it for $65,000 or $70,000. It was just that. That was
how bad this area was. So I go in the area. I end up talking one owner into owner financing me
the property. Her house was so bad. It was going for like, she went like 19 grand or 15, 15 to 16 grand,
19. I forget. It was cheap. I have the exact numbers in my book. But I end up getting her to
own her finance. I gave her like four or five, like three or four thousand dollars down and have her
finance like something like $10,000 or $15,000. So then I find another guy who buys and sells
houses. I buy, convince him to owner finance three houses. You have to understand,
I convince them to owner finance the house by saying, look, I'll give you 5% down or
10% down or 20% down, but I tell them, like, I don't want to buy your house. Like this one guy,
his houses were renovated. They were all selling for about 65,000. One was going for 75,000.
So I think it was like two were 65,000. One was 75,000. Regardless, I say, look, I'll, I need you
to own a finance the houses. For him, I said, I need to close on all three houses on one, on one HUD
statement. That way, all of the houses end up getting recorded for like,
$210,000 or something outrageous.
Was that the one I did that with?
No, that was another transaction.
Anyway, for him, I, for the woman that I got to do it, I told her I wanted to record the
sale of the home at like $150,000, even though I was buying it for like $20.
So for, let's say, $150,000.
And I wanted to, I wanted a construction credit on the house for like,
$130,000, and I would pay the doc stamps. So it gets recorded for $150,000. I paid the extra
doc stamps. So the sale ends up showing up in public records as being a sale for $150,000.
And I think it was like 152 or 154. It was roughly around there. The other three properties,
I get this guy, I end up, I didn't do them all in one closing statement. I had each one I
added like $100,000 some odd thousand dollars to each sale. So one got, one was, came in at like
190,000. One came in at like 175, and the other ones came in at like 175. Well, I did, all of these
houses were within about three or four blocks of each other. So what obviously, if you've been
watching, what that ended up doing was I could now use that one property. Each house, I could
use the other houses as comparable sales. I immediately refinance those houses and pull out like
$100,000 on this house, $120,000 on this one, $90,000.
thousand on this house. So I refinance those houses. Now I'm flushed with cash again. I have like
30. I'm sorry, 30. I have like 300, 350,000 dollars. So now I'm doing okay. So I start buying more
houses in the area because, you know, I don't have anything else to do. And it's just what I do.
So, and I need to get a few million. So I need to buy 20 or 30 properties. I figure I can
refinance all those properties in multiple names. At this point, I'm starting to build additional credit
profiles for additional synthetic identities. But I'm also dating. I end up meeting this girl named
Amanda Gardner. So I meet Amanda and Amanda and I start dating and she thinks I'm like this
just super successful real estate guy. So I ended up buying a house in that same neighborhood where
I was buying all the other houses. I buy this one house and I renovate it. I renovate it. It's super
nice. I've got hardwood floors. It's really, really nice.
and but I'm buying other houses too. I'm continuing to drive the value of this area up through the roof while I'm building other identities. I end up meeting Amanda. Amanda and I hit it off right away. I mean, what's not to hit out? What's not the like? I mean, she sees me. I've, I'm a decent looking guy. I've got a ton of money. She had just gotten out of the military. She had a son named Cameron. He was a cute little kid.
He, you know, he liked me.
Amanda loved me.
She moved in with me right away.
I mean, right away within weeks or months she was living in my house.
And keep mine, too, she's broke.
So I look like a savior to her.
And I'm buying her whatever she wants.
I got her and bought her a new car.
She's got new clothes.
Granted, we live in a shit hole area.
But we also, I also own at this point, eight to ten houses in the area.
I'm buying vacant lots.
within six months
on building
brand new houses
and she quit her job
she's helping me now
so I
I remember
one of the houses
like really to be on
this is funny
one of the first houses
I refinanced
one of the first houses
I refinanced
so going back a little bit
I remember
I had bought these houses
just the first four houses
I bought before I refinanced anything, bought the houses, recorded the value high.
And what was so funny about that was, I ended up putting these signs on the houses.
I made these banners that said Nashville restoration project.
So I made these banners and I stuck them on everyone in the houses.
I renovated the houses.
So they looked really good on the outside.
Like they didn't look great inside.
They look like crap.
But I put these banners and the banners said, you know, Nashville Restoration Project, Nashville Restoration Project over and over again.
And then along the side of it, it would have like Nashville Restorationproject.com.
And then I designed a website.
I got a ton of before and after photos from properties.
I took pictures of the entire neighborhood.
I really dressed up the website.
I mean, it looked great.
I even used the same.
exact color scheme as as the city's future comp plan.
So every city has a future comprehensive plan for what they want their city to look like
in the future.
And typically they work in conjunction with different developers.
So I basically said I was one of those developers.
The other thing I said on the website was that this area in Nashville was called J.C. Napier.
That was the subdivision.
That was the name of the area.
And it was right next to the J.C. Napier projects.
So the problem with that is that there was obviously that this is right next to the project.
So you can imagine the kind of area this is.
So on my website, I specifically said that the projects were scheduled to come down within the next two years.
They were currently vacating the projects.
So if you went, if you looked up Nashville restoration project or you went to the website, you got all this information that said this entire area was going through gentrification or being revitalized.
The city was dumping a ton of money into it.
Developers were coming in there.
It was work, we were working in conjunction with the future comp plan with the city and that the projects were coming down within the next year or two, 18 months to two years.
So, and there's a ton of photos of all these houses being renovated.
Anyway, what I ended up doing was I refinanced one of the houses and when the appraiser comes out, I go to meet him at one of the houses.
So I go out there and I said, so, you know, we, he measures the whole house.
I said, well, what do you think?
And he looks at the house and he was a grumpy old guy.
And he kind of looked at the house and he goes, you know, it's not bad.
It's not too bad.
And I said, what do you think it's going to come in?
What do you think it's worth?
He goes, what did you pay for it?
And I said, I think I paid like $180,000 for it.
And he looked at the house and he goes, you know, a year ago, I'd have said this thing was worth
50 or $60,000.
I went really.
He said, yeah.
But, you know, since the, he has since the Nashville Restoration Project has come in this area,
because this whole area is going up through the roof.
There's comparable sales popping up all over the place.
there's
there's comparable sales popping up all over the place
he said the whole
he said the whole area is going up through the roofs
he goes I'd say this this thing's worth at least
180 180000 whatever he ended up saying
and I just remember thinking fuck that's awesome
it was great because he bought it
he'd obviously and I knew he went to the website
because he told me he goes you know the projects are coming down
and I was like really and he goes yeah he said the projects are coming down
and then I remember I'll never forget
he said this. He said, you know, I said, Nashville restoration project. I said, really? I said,
and what is that anyway? And he goes, yeah, it's one of these big developers. They work with the city.
They come in and they revitalize an entire area. He said, you know, they did the same thing in Germantown about 10 years ago.
I go, really? He's, oh, yeah, Nashville restoration project went in there. They revitalized the entire area.
You can't buy anything in Germantown now that's not worth less a million dollars. He goes, you hold on to this place.
You're going to easily double your money in the next year or two. I was like, wow.
thanks. Like he totally added that whole thing. Like that wasn't anything I said. I didn't know
about Germantown. I didn't know anything even about the area. He threw that in there.
So that house, that's one of the first houses I refinanced, which I always thought was hilarious because
what I did was I went into that area, bought up all those houses, and put signs on every single
house that said Nashville restoration project. And then, of course, I kept recording the value of these
houses higher and higher. So within a couple of, within a year, these things are everywhere.
There's 20 properties that are worth over $200,000. I can refinance these things anytime and get
$2 or $3 million easily. Hey, I hope you're enjoying the video. And if you're interested in buying a
painting from me, my contact information is in the description box. Back to the video.
so I'm dating Amanda everything's going good um I've built up several synthetic identities
and we'd been dating about a year and the relationship was going great we start seeing so
this is what's comical one of the chicks that I had gone on a date with was a chick named
Trina I went on a date with Trina and we went out one time and I just wasn't interested
She had, like, typically I like a southern accent, but she had this really, really bad, almost like a Kentucky southern accent, which is way different than a Florida or Georgia southern accent, which to me I find sexy.
Trina's was not sexy.
And so we went out, we went to, I remember when we went to go see the movie, the Dukes of Hazards, which she wanted to go see.
So we went to go see it, and afterwards, like I didn't even try and kiss or anything.
I just wanted to get out of there.
I wasn't interested. I got my car and left. Well, Amanda and I were dating and at one point, Amanda says to me, you know, you know how it is. You're sleeping with a chick and you've been sleeping with her for a while and six months or something. And she, Amanda ended up saying, have you ever thought about being with another woman? You know, me and another woman. I was like, yeah, I mean, I guess I would be willing to do that, you know, out of love for you. So she says, well, I would be interested. And so Amanda, you know,
know, Amanda starts looking.
Amanda starts looking on the website, shit, it's called match.com.
She starts looking for other women.
So she comes across Trina.
And I remember looking at Trina's profile and being like, holy shit, I went out with that girl.
And she's, no, you did.
I said, I swear to God, I went out with her.
I said, flip through her pictures.
There's a picture of her leaning against a corvette and another one where she's running a marathon.
on sure enough that was her and i was like i went out with her she was what happened i told her i
kind of blew her off she sent me a couple of emails or a couple of text messages afterward and i just
never responded so Amanda hits her up ask her if she wants to meet they go to a lesbian bar
because it turns out that trina was was gay they go to a lesbian bar Amanda and her end up making out in a
car in the car she mentioned
mentions me, asks if she would be interested in all of us getting together, Trina says yes,
we all end up going to dinner. Trina comes back home. You can imagine what happens. So what
ends up happening is we all, we all start to hang out together, right? Like we're going to festivals,
we're going to movies, Trina's coming over every once in a while, like things are good. Life is good.
I've got tons of money. We're building new houses. We're renovating houses. And everything is going
good. Well, then one day Amanda ends up going online. Well, that's not how it happened. So here's what
happened is at one point, Amanda ends up finding, I had a corporate lawyer that had incorporated
all of these several corporations, because obviously I can't just dump all this money in my
account. You have to kind of launder it through different accounts. So, and those accounts actually
were in Amanda's name. So what ends up happening is, I,
the corporate lawyer contacted me one day and asked me to send her something.
I sent it to her, never heard, you know, she never got it for some reason.
So she called back and she called Amanda and said, hey, I never got this document.
So I told Amanda, go on my computer and look in word, here's the name of the document.
Well, when Amanda did that, she ended up seeing, finding a letter that I had, the letter that I had written to my parents, the day I left Tampa.
years earlier, two and a half years earlier, she finds that letter, she reads the letter,
she looks up who Matt Cox is, she sees a ton of articles, she spends a whole day reading
articles. By the time I get home that night, I walk in, I'm like, hey, what's going on?
And she's like, oh, everything's fine, everything's fine. She says nothing. I end up going
on my computer. And when I go to do, to close out all of the programs, I see that word
is open. When I go to click on word to close it, I see the last thing that had been open
was the letter to my parents. And obviously, I hadn't opened it in a year and a half,
in like two years. So I realized, holy shit, she read it. So then I go and I look at my history
and boom, there's nothing but all these articles on Matt Cox, Maccox, Maccox, MacCock,
wanted, wanted. Wanted, wanted. So I go in and I said, Jesus, God Almighty, I said,
what did you do? And she was like, and she immediately realized,
that I know. She breaks down. She starts crying. She says, I'm sorry. I had no idea. I didn't mean to.
I said, well, I have to leave. So I can't stay here if you know who I am. If anybody knows who I am,
like, it's dangerous for me. She begs and pleads and cries and says, please don't leave. Please don't leave.
I'll never, I'll never tell anybody. I'll never tell anybody. And the truth is I was like totally
in love with this chick. I thought she was amazing. She was great. So I stayed. So she knows my true name is
Matt Cox, not Carter, not Joseph Carter, which is bad for me.
We end up seeing Trina, everything's going good.
One day Amanda goes online, she was checking on Google, just randomly she would check my name.
So she checks my name and she sees something on Dateline.
Turns out that Dateline was about.
to do an article on me.
I'm sorry, an article.
A Dateline was about to do a news program on me.
At this point, I've already been in Bloomberg magazine, has already done two articles.
One, just about me.
And two, the second article was when they caught Becky, because they had caught Becky at this
point.
Then I had been in Fortune Magazine, had done an article on me, like a 6,000 word article.
horrible. Then, so then she went online and she found this article about, not to mention all the
St. Pete Times articles, all the Chicago Tribune, all the Atlanta Journal Constitution. There was
just one article after another. So she finds this thing about Dateline. There's a blog about
Dateline how they're interviewing people that have, that knew me or that know me. And they're going to
do a one hour episode on me. So I now know I'm going to be on Dateline.
That's not good.
Like, local newspapers aren't a big deal.
Even a national magazine or two.
Like, the kind of people that I hang.
First of all, I don't have a big circle of friends.
The kind of people that know me or that I associate with aren't reading Fortune magazine.
These are contractors.
Like, I'm not concerned about them stumbling across my photo in Fortune or Bloomberg.
But this is Dateline.
It's a tabloid.
and your average blue-collar worker watches Dateline.
Dateline, I don't even know if it's still out, but so I realize I'm going to be in
living rooms everywhere, and somebody's going to recognize me.
I'm somebody working at Starbucks or working at Home Depot is going to say,
holy shit, that guy comes in here all the time.
They're going to catch me.
Like, it's a problem.
So Amanda tells me about it, and I go, Jesus, oh my God, this is, this is really bad.
I can't stay in the United States anymore.
So she and I decide, we've got a month or two, about two months, a couple months before
it comes out.
We decide we're going to refinance all the houses, pull out a few million dollars, and
leave the United States.
And at this point, we started researching where to go.
We figure we're going to go to Australia.
And the nice thing about Australia was Australia would allow you to go to Australia.
If you had a, okay, if you shut up in Australia with like $200,000 and a business plan to open a business in Australia, you could go there and you could be a permanent resident alien.
They would give you a driver's license.
They'd allow you to buy a property.
They would allow you to stay in their country and open a business.
You could not go to Australia and get a job, but you could go there and open a business and hire all.
So I can't go there and become a citizen because if you were to go and become a citizen, they wanted you to do a background check.
But I could go there and become a with U.S. documents.
If I showed up with my U.S. passport, I could become a permanent resident alien.
And keep in mind, I'm living as a homeless person.
I can easily become a permanent resident alien in Australia and he'll never be notified.
And then if he dies someday, they're not going to turn around to notify Australia that I died.
So we decide we're going to Australia.
A man who's researched the whole thing.
I start refinancing properties.
I start pulling out cash.
As we're pulling out cash, we start asking people like my general contractor.
His name was Tracy.
I ask him, hey, can, would you do me a favor?
and could you cash some checks for me?
And he's like, yeah, sure.
So I have him cash a check for like $8,000,
then another check for $6,000,
another check for $9,000.
Then I have another guy that we worked with cash a check for $4,000, $3,000, $9,000.
So Amanda ends up giving Trina a check,
of several checks, and asks her to,
asks her to cash those checks.
I remember
Amanda and I had gone
We had a couple of friends
One was Brittany
Another chick that I had dated
And her new boyfriend
Which they just gotten married
His name was Brian
So Brian and Brittany
We went with them on their honeymoon
To Venice to Italy
We went there for like 10 days
We did a 10 day trip
So we were gone for two three weeks
We left
And we went to Croatia
We went to Greece
Like we hung out. We went on this cruise, European cruise. And I remember we'd come back. And as soon as we
came back, we hadn't been home more than a few weeks when we started asking everybody
to cash checks to start pulling out money. So we're pulling out money. And we had pulled out a few
hundred thousand dollars one day i'm at home and suddenly i hear this bam somebody had kicked in the front
door and it was like oh my god i had i had cameras all over my house i had cameras in the living room
dining room outside the house but i would go to walk out to see what happened because i remember
it was so loud i remember thinking maybe the tv had fallen like the flat we'd have to
big flat screen TV and I thought maybe Cameron had pulled the knock the TV or some I don't know but as soon as I
started walking out of the bedroom this fucking guy these two black guys had kicked in the front door
comes running in and he sticks a gun in my face and he goes get on the ground get on the ground so I go
oh Jesus so I get on the ground they lead Amanda in the room she gets on the ground
Cameron gets on the ground they throw a blanket over us they rob the whole house they grab some
I mean literally I'm like bro what
you want you know they're they're they're like shut up shut up i'm like what do you want and they said
you know where's the money where's the money i said bro there's money here like i told them where
there's some money here there's some money here we had some money in the refrigerator or in the
freezer i didn't say that i told them to give the money out of that we had a gun safe which was
amanda's gun and they grabbed the gun safe they grabbed our Rolexes they grabbed a couple of
uh cardier watches and stuff and some jewelry and then they
they grabbed, oh, they grabbed the keys to, I think, a mandish truck, and they jumped in her truck and took off.
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No, do they take my truck? I don't know. They stole one of our vehicles. So we immediately sit up and,
And as soon as they're gone, we call the police.
Police show up.
And the guy, the cops, like, I'm like, hey, I got a video of it.
But they had ski masks on.
So the cop comes and he's, I remember he told me, look, you need to find another place to live.
You can't, you guys can't stay here.
Like, you can't stay in this neighborhood.
You know, I said, I told him my own like 20 houses in the neighborhood.
I another five or six lots.
We're building new houses.
He's, I don't care.
He says, what these guys didn't steal this time, they'll just come back and steal.
So I said, I said,
okay, so we ended up going to a hotel. Well, I didn't, they had taken my, my wallet. So I didn't
have my driver's license or my, they took my, a bunch of stuff. I didn't have anything in my name.
So they took all my stuff. All I had was a passport in the name Walter Holcomb. So they took my
Joseph Carter stuff. So I got a passport as Walter Holcomb and a driver's license in Walter Holcomb's
name. So we go and we check in to a hotel. We were there maybe a day or two. We didn't go back
to the house. We were just going to buy a new house and stay in the hotel. It was a really nice
hotel. So we stay in the hotel. And while that's happening, Trina is calling because they took
our cell phones. So we get our new cell phones back. And I remember Trina, as soon as I got it back,
and mine was back on, like, we got a phone call. I got a phone call from Trina. And she was like,
oh my god what have you guys been what are you doing what's going on where's amanda what's happening
i said trina calm down i said look we had a home invasion and we're staying in a hotel and
and i said uh she goes what hotel and i went i remember thinking what like she didn't say like
are you okay how's it oh my god that's horrible she was what hotel are you at and i was like i'm
I'm at the whatever hotel it was.
I just told her the name of the hotel.
I forget, like the, fuck, I don't remember what it was, the Westing or something.
So I tell her, I was this hotel, and she goes, okay, well, tell Amanda to call me because
Amanda was in the shower.
I go, okay, no problem.
So I hang up the phone.
What had happened was a couple days earlier, Trina had called the Secret Service and turned us in.
And the Secret Service had gone to my old house where we weren't staying.
and had staked out the house for the, like the day, the day we left that night,
the next day they showed up and started staking out the house.
So they've been staking it out for two days, and we weren't there.
So she was calling to try and find out where we were.
So she called the Secret Service back.
She said, this is where they are.
They sent, Secret Service sent a team, sent themselves and the marshals,
went to the hotel where we were.
And they asked, is Joseph Carter staying here?
And they said, no, because I wasn't.
I was staying there as Walter Holcomb.
So then Trina calls back and says, I called the hotel.
You're not there.
You're not there.
And I was like, it was weird.
I was like, what?
And at that point, I wasn't at the hotel.
I was at our office.
We had rented like a 10,000 square foot warehouse.
And I said, look, I'm not there.
She goes, are you there now?
I said, no, I'm at the warehouse.
Amanda was dropping off her son.
And she goes, well,
Okay, so you're there now? Is Amanda with you? And I went, no. Amanda's dropping off Cameron. And she goes, okay, I got to go. And she hangs up the phone. Like a couple minutes later, Amanda calls me. And I go, hey, what's up? She goes, Trina just called me. And I go, okay, well, what's going on? She goes, I don't know, Matt. I'm worried. She said, Carter. She goes, I don't know, Carter. I'm worried. I'm worried. And I said, why? And she said some stuff. Like, she told me how much she loves me and cares about me.
And she goes, it was just weird.
And I go, she's, I'm concerned.
I go, what are you concerned about?
I go, if she doesn't know anything, what are you worried about?
And she goes, oh, God, Matt, I'm so sorry.
And by this point, I'm concerned.
Because by this point, I got a phone call from the local police.
And the local police asked me if I could meet them, if I could meet them at the house.
So I'm now driving to the house.
Because they wanted me to meet them at the house because they said they wanted the video.
of the home invasion.
So I'm driving to the house.
And when Amanda called,
and I'm getting in the car,
I'm driving, and I'm like,
yeah, well, what are you worried about?
And she's, oh my God, Matt, I'm so sorry.
I'm worried.
I'm worried. I go, what are you worried about?
So at that point, I had just pulled up to the house
because our place was only a couple blocks away,
our office.
So I pull up to the house and I'm like,
well, if you're not worried,
I mean, if you're worried,
you must be worried about something.
What are you worried about?
If she doesn't know anything,
there's no reason to be worried.
And she's like, you know,
she didn't want to tell me what had happened.
But she goes, I think I might have fucked up.
And I go, how did you fuck up?
What are you trying to say?
Like, what are you going on?
But at this point, I'm getting out of my car, walking to the front to my house.
And a black SUV pulls up, another SUV pulls up, another car pulls up, another one pulls up.
And they all lock up their brakes.
And I'm standing there in the middle of the street holding my cell phone when the Secret Service jumps out of their vehicles.
screaming, get on the ground, get on the ground, get on the ground.
And obviously, at that point, I realized what the issue is.
Amanda, I later found out, Amanda had told Trina who I was.
And Trina had called the Secret Service and turned me in.
And when Trina called Amanda, she was basically just making sure that she wasn't
with me, that she wanted her to know how much she loved her and cared about her and was trying
to kind of distance herself from the situation. And I end up getting arrested. So the Secret Service
runs up to me and I remember, you know, I remember at first I thought I was getting robbed
again until I saw the secret, they have these white, they're all in black, they have these white
things that say Secret Service on them. So a Secret Service was there.
And they throw me on the ground.
They were like, get on the ground, get on the ground.
I was just like numbed.
I get on the ground.
They handcuffed me, pulled me up, dust me off.
And I remember they're holding me.
And I'm just standing there.
They're like, Matt Cox, are you Matt Cox?
Mr. Cox.
And I'm just staring at him.
And I'm not saying anything.
And the guy looks at, he has a clipboard with my wanted poster on it.
And he holds it up and he's looking.
And another officer comes up.
And I remember he looked at me.
And he goes, is it him?
Is it him?
He goes, no, I don't think it.
He's, oh, shit.
I don't think it's him, bro.
And he looks at him, no, it's him, it's him. He goes, look at his eyes. It's him. And he looks at me and he goes, hey, Mr. Cox. He's, we've been looking for you. And he goes, you are Mr. Cox. You are Matthew Cox, right? And I went, yeah, yeah, I'm Matt Cox. I mean, at that point I, you know, I'm done, right? That officer told me, that agent told me when they had arrested, when they arrested Becky, Rebecca Howick, when they arrested her in Houston,
six months earlier, they said she didn't admit who she was until they put her hand on the
scanner. They said she complained the whole 30-minute drive back to, they arrested her, by the way,
they arrested her at school. They arrested her. And they brought her all the way back to the
Secret Services office. And she's, the whole time she was there being driven there, she goes,
you guys fucked up. You're going to lose your job. I'm going to sue. You've embarrassed me.
She said, they said, he goes, she didn't break until we put her hand on the scanner. And she goes,
okay, I'm Rebecca Howlick. So I broke immediately. Yeah, you got. I said, I know I'm done.
So they bring me back. They handcuffed me to a table. I wait. They fly the Secret Service agent from Atlanta and she flies in. I'm there for hours.
And they come in and they read me, you know, of course, they read you your rights.
They tell you what you're charged with.
And they say, we're going to bring you back to Atlanta.
And they brought me back to Atlanta.
And I went all the way back to Atlanta.
And that was an ordeal.
And what's funny is when they called Amanda, this was weird.
Like, Amanda, when she found out that they had caught me, she immediately
drove to the bank, went to our safety deposit box. First of all, there was cash in the box.
So she doesn't pull out, she pulls out the cash, but she pulls out the passports. She keeps all
the cash in the ice box, and she keeps the cash in the safety deposit box. She grabs all the fake
passports that I had and driver's licenses, and she brings those to the Secret Services office,
and she gives them to them immediately and says, I just found these.
I don't know anything.
I was completely duped and don't have a clue about who this person is.
I thought his name was Joseph Carter.
And she gives them all my driver's licenses and IDs and everything.
She later tells them that she did know who I was, but she didn't think it was a big deal.
Like she waits until she gets a lawyer.
When she gets a lawyer, she goes in and she cooperations.
She tells them who I was and what I was doing, but she had nothing to do with it.
didn't really know what was going on, and it was all me, which is fine, because it was pretty
much all me. Anyway, yeah, I go back to, I go back to Atlanta, and I get a lawyer, and I fly on Conair,
which is nothing like Conair in the movie. And it takes about a month, month and a half to get me
all the way back to Atlanta, because they bring you from one prison, they bring you one county
jail where or U.S. Marshall's Holdover where they hold you for two weeks and they hold you here
for a week. Then they hold you here for two weeks and they held you here for five days.
And so you keep getting bused from one place to another until you're eventually flown back to
Atlanta. And I was flown back to Atlanta and I was held in the, I was held in Atlanta in two different
jails. And I get my attorney. And I remember when I got my attorney, she told me I was looking
at a bunch of time. She didn't really know how much time. But she said you're looking at like 15, 20,
years. She didn't really know. She said that I was responsible for like 25 or 26 million dollars in
loss. The Secret Service was saying something like $40 million, $40 or $50 million in fraud at my
mortgage company. And the numbers were all over the place. And yeah. So I end up taking a plea,
I end up pleading to 26 years and I end up getting sentenced to 26 years in prison.
And yeah, that, I get a PSI for 26.
Actually, my pre-sentence report said, 34 years or 30, yeah, 32 years of life is what
my pre-sentence report said when it eventually came out. I was interviewed by the Secret Service
and the FBI. I mean, I was trying to help myself. I cooperated fully, told them everything I
could think of that by this point they'd already indicted me in Atlanta, in Tampa, and in Nashville.