The Binge Crimes: Lady Mafia - Friendly Fire | 5. Something Bad is Going to Happen

Episode Date: July 4, 2022

If the prosecutor won’t take Marty to court, Lori will. She hires a famous and relentless lawyer to start building a case, one she learns won’t be easy to win. Lori reveals why she believes Marty wanted to get rid of her husband. A Campside Media & Sony Music Entertainment production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It hadn't been publicly announced yet, but Marty Carson was about to be promoted to Chief Deputy of the Scott County Sheriff's Department. That's the highest-ranking officer, right below his father, the sheriff. But then he shot his partner, so his father delayed that promotion. The optics—you know, promoting his son after he just killed his partner—would have been terrible. But a few months later, Marty was in fact made chief deputy. Lori Yancey had already been living with a low, gnawing fear, and it was only getting worse. Because Lori is living in a county where she believes the chief deputy intentionally killed her husband, and it seemed as if Marty was being rewarded. You feel like you have no law enforcement

because I don't trust them. Basically, I just tried, you know, just be careful, watch my back, and, you know, just always be aware of my surroundings because I knew anything could be possible, what these people might do, or, you know, what was their next step going to be. So I did have a gun here at the house. We had several. So I did feel comfortable, you know, if I needed to use it. I added on a security system here at the house and was just always making sure the doors were locked. At that point, I felt like I didn't have anyone, no one to turn to.

There was something Lori didn't know yet, which is just as well because it would have frightened her even more. In the weeks before he was killed, John John had been trying to leave the Scott County Sheriff's Department. He never told Lori, but he called the Oneida police chief, Mike Cross, looking for a job. He called him twice. John John had told him that he needed to get away from the Sheriff's Department.

Cross has since died, but he said that John John was vague when he called. He didn't give the chief any details, just told him, quote, something bad is going to happen. And that would have been the week before he, you know, he died. From Campside Media and Sony Music Entertainment, this is Season 2 of Witnessed. Friendly Fire, Episode 5. I'm Sean Flynn. I'm Indra Varma, and in the latest season of The Spy Who,

we open the file on Daphne Park, the spy who killed a prime minister. As the Belgian Congo gains its independence, Officer Park sets out to build a spy network. Together, they're about to go to new extremes to keep Congo free of communists. Follow The Spy Who now wherever you listen to podcasts. In mid-December, a couple of weeks after John John was killed, Laurie had a conversation with a man named Arzo Carson. The case wasn't sitting right with him either.

Arzo's from Scott County, but he's not related to Marty or the sheriff. He is, however, related to John John. He's his great uncle. But he wasn't just an angry relative or some hopped-up conspiracy theorist. He was actually a mentor to John John, because Arzo had a long and distinguished history in law enforcement. He was the elected District Attorney General in Scott County until 1979. He left when the governor appointed him to help reform what was then known

as the Tennessee Bureau of Criminal Identification. Arzo wrote a lot of the legislation that replaced that agency with an independent one called the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. Yep, the TBI, the same agency investigating the shooting. He gave the TBI its motto, that guilt shall not escape, nor innocence suffer. And he ran the place until he retired in 1990. The agency's headquarters is in Nashville, and it's named after him. It's the Arzo Carson TBI State Office Building. After John John was shot, the local authorities were keeping Arzo informed about the investigation.

This is a big case, a dead officer, and Arzo's got a personal stake in it. So he starts poking around too. We were both feeling that something more was going on and that this was not an accident. Yeah, we both had come to that conclusion. Arzo, you know, was the only person I knew, you know, to go to that, you know, could offer any advice on what to do or, you know, and help or what direction to go to, you know, further investigate and get something done. Arzo tells Lori, get a lawyer. Lori had actually already met with a lawyer, but hiring one is tricky. Scott County is very small. Everyone knows everyone, and that could be a problem for Lori. She ends up finding a country lawyer who practices some

distance away and tells him about the inconsistencies, the questions she has, and he agrees to meet with her. We went into the trailer. He was very scared. He was scared to death of this area. I mean, this was a big guy, but absolutely terrified of this place. I almost like to see his hands shaking when we were at the trailer and he was talking to the neighbor. I mean, he was definitely afraid.

I get it. Scott County had a reputation. When I first reported this story back in 2008, I was told by a number of people, you don't want to go to Scott County and start asking questions. A lot of people we interviewed told us about scary rumors of intimidation, of a boys club, things we can't begin to verify. Whether any of it was true didn't matter. Nobody wanted to get on the wrong side of the Carsons. The sheriff is often the most powerful person in a small county like Scott. And consider what Lori was asking this lawyer to do. Yeah, go into a rural county with a lot of back roads and places to get lost and accuse a sheriff's deputy, the sheriff's own son, of deliberately killing his partner. If that were true, if a

sheriff's deputy could literally get away with murder, well, a lot of lawyers might be afraid to take that case. I knew this wasn't going to work. He would not fight these people. And it was going to take someone that wasn't afraid, you know, to go ahead with this case and investigate and find out what's happened. See, Lori wasn't interested in suing for workers' comp, a cash settlement, because of a big mistake. She believed a crime had been committed. But when the prosecutor says there is no crime, at least not evidence of one beyond a reasonable doubt, that's that. Those are

the rules in criminal court. So she can accept the prosecutor's decision, just let this all go, or she can move this battle to a different arena with a different set of rules. If the prosecutor won't take Marty to court, Lori will. She'll sue him. She'll take her case to a civil jury, let them sort through the evidence. Lori was scared, just like that lawyer she called. She'd be going up against the community that raised her. She was declaring war, and she needed a wartime lawyer. She found the perfect one, Herb Monsier. He's a super famous, hardcore criminal defense lawyer. Everybody in Knoxville knows Herb Monsier. This is Ben Barton, a law professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. I talked to Herb years ago. He wasn't feeling up to an interview this time, but Barton has it covered. Barton used to practice, and he clerked for a federal judge,

and he represented indigent clients for a dozen years. He also knows a lot about Herb because every lawyer in the area knows a lot about Herb. He's one of the few lawyers in all of East Tennessee who will bring this kind of claim. You can imagine if you're a lawyer and you're in the business of suing police departments or jails or other government entities in Tennessee, you're going to be persona non grata. And Herb, his entire career has been persona non grata with those folks, but very much grata with criminal defendants. There's a joke in Knoxville. If someone says, if you have a criminal charge, who's the lawyer you should hire? And you say, you're not asking the right question.

The question is, am I guilty or innocent? Because if I'm guilty, I want Herb Montseer because he's going to put them through the ringer. He's going to make their lives a living hell. And I mean that as praise. Herb defended the only person ever accused of being a serial killer in Knox County. And he got him a hung jury, which for four alleged murders is as good as a win. The guy went to prison for rape, though. Herb sued the Knox County Commission for violating open meeting laws. And he would eventually go after the law that let the TBI keep all of its records secret. Lori needs Herb. I remember the first time

meeting him going to his office in Knoxville downtown. She takes an elevator up and meets this big garrulous man with a flop of gray hair. Herb is very successful, drove a Jaguar, but he often looks kind of rumpled, as if he's too busy to notice that his suit needs pressing. He's loud. He's very talkative. He just kind of tells you how it is. It doesn't sugarcoat anything, and it kind of just lets you know how he thinks this is going to happen. He's just one of those people that's a go-getter. I don't think he's afraid of anything or anyone, you know, to be threatened. He will do what is right. Like he's a bulldog. He's a motion filer. He's a scorched earth guy. And so once you're already in that category, right, that's his brand. That's how he gets business. Then this is right in line with that. So this is a perfect case for him. It wasn't going to be easy.

We would have to sue civilly. It's basically a tort case, and tort's a fancy word for wanting money for an injury. The typical tort case is like a slip and fall. This is a really special type of tort case because what you're claiming is a constitutional violation by a government actor. So you're suing a government actor and saying they took away your constitutional rights. This one's not super complicated, like another officer shot him. So that's, he's like, you know, he murdered me. He didn't shoot me by mistake. He actually murdered me. So that's definitely a taking of life, liberty, and property there. This is basically a civil murder case. Yes. Yes. But that's different than murder-murder, which is a criminal offense.

A state criminal case is beyond a reasonable doubt. And the neutral position, the beginning position, is innocent until proven guilty. You've got a high burden of proof on the prosecution. The rules of evidence are much tighter, much harder to get through in a criminal case. In a civil case, it's not like anything goes. It is a little bit looser on that. Basically, they state their theory of the case, and their theory is that this officer, operating as an officer of the Scott County Sheriff's Office shot and murdered this other officer purposefully. They don't actually have to prove one or the other. You just have to get to preponderance of the evidence, meaning it's more likely than not.

And when I teach it in class, I say it's a 51%, basically. It's just a hair closer to true than not true. On balance, you think that it's more likely than not. Think of it like a scale. On one side, you've got he shot him on purpose. On the other is total accident. After all the evidence is in, after all the testimony, a jury looking at that scale has to see it tip just a tiny bit to one side or the other. Now, in reality, that's probably not a decision a jury is going to make based on what amounts to little more than a coin toss. Lori's accusation is so serious that she'll have to tip that scale way beyond 51%. If she does,

if she and Herb convince a jury, then she'll be owed damages. Marty will not go to jail. In civil court, you can take their money, but not their freedom. However, she's working on that, too. The plan is to win the civil case. With the hopes of getting a criminal case, that would be the avenue we'd have to take by suing the sheriff's department. A civil trial could unearth all sorts of new evidence, maybe new witnesses. A prosecutor, in turn, might then look at that evidence and take another look at criminal charges.

But first, Herb's got a winner civil case. It's actually really, really hard to win one of these cases. There aren't very many lawyers who take these cases because they're so hard to win. It's such an uphill fight all the way through it. That starts with the defendant. He's a police officer, and the police are really hard to sue because they have what's called qualified immunity. What that means is they can't be sued simply for making a mistake, even a fatal one.

And courts have interpreted what counts as a mistake very broadly, pretty much anything short of intentional evil. That's a really gigantic shield. If the story on this had been that Carson was sloppy, he knew Yancey was in the trailer, and he burst in anyway, it's just guns blazing, this case would have died immediately. That kind of mistake would not have been enough to go to trial, even in civil court. And dude, all you have to do is look at the officer-involved shootings with regular people. You just have this wide latitude to make mistakes, to make errors. And again, if you wanted to be fair about it, you could be like, it's not an easy job to be a police officer. You know what I mean? So we can't have people suing them just

because they made a mistake or a mistake in judgment. The allegation has to be so strong as to get by qualified immunity, but then you have to get by the factual part of it. Like, you actually have to establish some facts that suggest that that might have been what happened. And the facts in this case, Ben says, are, well, unusual. What they found is a freaking hornet's nest. I mean, basically like each one of the witnesses

had a different version of the TikTok of the event. In a typical drug raid, it's not that uncommon to have one officer say these three officers went in the back and another officer saying, Oh, two went in the back to one in the front. Like little, that sort of little misunderstanding is pretty common under these circumstances.

The police will gather and come up with a story where they can agree on the story. We came in, this happened, that happened, but it's not the case at all. This disagreement shows like a significant schism within them and great disagreement about how all of this should have been handled.

Laurie's lawyer, Herb, was looking at all the facts, all the discrepancies, and he saw an injustice, a wrong that had been committed. Even so, Herb knew how thoroughly and how densely the odds were stacked against him and stacked against Lori. But here's the thing about Herb. He doesn't care what the odds are. He doesn't care they're stacked against him. I asked another lawyer in Knoxville to explain Herb's tactics and strategies. He laughed a little and he said, you know that old saying about how you have to pick your battles? Herb doesn tactics and strategies. He laughed a little and he said, you know that old saying about how you have to pick your battles? Herb doesn't pick. Herb will take every battle. And he takes Lori's

case. Did he tell you what a long shot that was? He did make it sound like it would be difficult. Yeah. Remember, John John's death was publicly dispensed with only days after it happened. The prosecutor, the sheriff, the TBI, they were all on the same page at that press conference. An accident. But Lori kept pushing on her own. She went to the scene. She interviewed witnesses. When her first lawyer was scared, she pushed harder, found Herb. Now Herb and his

co-counsel, David Wigler, are going to assemble a team of witnesses and a catalog of evidence to bring down a man they believe is a killer, or at least make him pay. From the award-winning creators of the hit podcast Father Wants Us Dead comes the stunning new true crime series In the Shadow of Princeton. In 1989, a prominent woman was found stabbed to death in her Princeton home. With no clear motive, it's a chilling mystery that vexed investigators for years. Was the culprit a young outsider the police said was a serial attacker?

Or someone in her family? Or even well-heeled students at the renowned Princeton University? He had a ski mask in his possession and a knife. She was familiar enough with them and trusted them enough that she turned her back on. And that was her mistake. One investigator sees a conspiracy. Is he way off base or does privilege help you get away with murder? In the Shadow of Princeton is available wherever you get your podcasts,

or you can binge it ad free by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Frankopan. And in our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season, we are looking at the life of the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. It's fair to say he's a complex and controversial character. Almost 150 years since his birth, how does his legacy hold up today? Winston Churchill. It's fair to say he's a complex and controversial character. Almost 150 years since his birth, how does his legacy hold up today?

Follow Legacy now wherever you get your podcasts. Or binge entire seasons early and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Once John John is shot, the clock starts ticking, meaning the statute of limitations begins to run. Laurie had one year from the time of John John's death to file any civil action, but filing is just the first step in a long process. Justice can grind along very slowly. That first step, though, is the biggest one.

It's when Lori announces that she's going to fight, and with a lot of people. When she files her suit, the complaint names Marty and the other two deputies who were there that night, as well as Sheriff Jim Carson, Chief Detective Robbie Carson, and Scott County. She includes all of those people and the county because she's alleging that they had all conspired to cover up the fact that Marty murdered John John. An allegation, by the way, that they all denied. It's scary making those accusations, making them official. Lori filed her suit on November 22nd, 2004, six days before the one-year anniversary of John John's death. It was really a very odd day because I may have been paranoid, but I felt like we were being followed. I just felt like everywhere we went we saw Scott County Sheriff's Department which is Carson's were still in office at that time. So that's really when everyone

found out that I was going to sue the Sheriff's Department because I didn't discuss that with anybody. I didn't really want the Sheriff's Department thinking I was suspecting them because I was really just more worried of what they might do to me and my sons here. I just, you know, I really wasn't telling a lot to people. I'm just kind of keeping quiet. The District Attorney General, Paul Phillips, he told me he was trying to stay in touch with Lori throughout the investigation. He could tell she wasn't happy with the progress. I was frustrated because I kept telling the officers who were investigating, specifically Robbie Carson, to let Lori know that if she wanted to come to the office, we'd go over where we were with the investigation, or I would come to her office and do that and I kept not hearing from

her so I went to the hospital where she works and she was very gracious took time to talk to me for a few minutes and I just said I you know if you want to come and let's go over this investigation. I have the TBI there. And we, I think, agreed on a date. And then I was contacted by an attorney, and I think we had a date that they were going to come. And then he later called back and said, well, Lori's not sure what she wants to do. And then the next thing I knew, the lawsuit had been filed. Here's how Lori remembers it.

I did meet with Paul Phillips. He actually came to the emergency room on the day that I was working, and it wasn't a long conversation. He asked me if I had any questions. I don't think he gave me a lot of information or anything like that. Phillips says the investigation remained open even after Lori filed her suit and that eventually he exhausted all of his options. Before the federal trial, the trial for Lori's case, I asked the federal government to review the case. And the reason I

did that, and we had shared with them our file, but the reason I did that is because I knew that the family was dissatisfied with our review of the evidence. And at that time, the U.S. attorney declined to review the case. Laurie will have almost three years to keep building her case. Her lawyers will take depositions, which is where some of the interview tape from Nikki and Marty you've already heard came from, and she'll learn new facts. That's when she'll learn things like John John was trying to leave the sheriff's department, that he thought something bad was going to happen. And her lawyers will hire experts to study all those facts and offer some perspective, like this guy. My name is Richard Cuglia. I'm a retired FBI special agent.

Cuglia retired in 2004 after 32 years with the FBI. Then he went to work as a private investigator. But his history with the FBI, in addition to being very long, is also very relevant. He was a firearms instructor. He taught new recruits how to use weapons. He taught agents in the Washington field office and the Knoxville office, and the agents who protect dignitaries and high-ranking officials. He's also an expert in tactics, especially high-risk tactics, or HRT. Not just how to use a gun, but when. And how firing a weapon in a life-or-death situation is so different, physically and emotionally, than being a dead eye at the range.

And so I've taught SWAT and HRT and all the firearms that new agents get, well, since 1983. And there's one more thing. I wrote a book while I was at the FBI Academy called High-Risk Encounter Techniques, which is given to every special agent that goes through the FBI Academy. That's the guy Herb and Lori hired to take another look. He starts with the mobile home where it happened. I wanted to see for myself. I'll go in there, photograph it, take measurements, and see tactically what could and couldn't be done under those circumstances. Eventually, he drafts a 16-page report laying out a case against Marty.

I had like three opinions. First is that Marty Carson is responsible for shooting John John Yancey. Secondly, Carson didn't shoot John John Yancey for his own self-defense. John John Yancey. Secondly, Carson didn't shoot John John Yancey for his own self-defense. John John Yancey didn't do anything but back him up. And three, Carson's account of the shooting indicated to me a consciousness of guilt. That's the key phrase, consciousness of guilt. You know, when you tell the truth, you don't have to remember what you said. And when you say something to John John's wife, that's different than what you say in your deposition. That's different than what you might tell the other people involved on the outside perimeter. And you don't think it's ever going to come back on you. It's kind of crazy. When John John Yancey is shot with one shot, one projectile, and you tell people that he was

shot with a shotgun, and you know that your weapon is the only one that's been fired, the circumstances don't line up with the facts of the case. Marty's shifting accounts of the lighting conditions are a problem for Cuglia. He says that the physical layout of the home makes Marty's version of events implausible. Marty said that at one point, when he was in that tiny hallway, the bedroom door swung open three-quarters of the way. And that door had hinges on the right-hand side, meaning that the door swung into the room as opposed to out into the hallway,

which is critical in this particular case because anyone that opened that door would expose themselves. They couldn't use it for cover, and they'd be easily seen. Which, curiously, is what Marty said, that he saw a silhouette of a man standing there like a big fat target after the door suddenly swung open. But that man would have had to pull the door into the room to get it open and then sort of step around it. At that point, he would have been close enough for Marty to grab. Culea's fundamental problem, though, is that Marty's story just doesn't make sense, at least not for a law enforcement officer with even minimal training. Like the idea that he would tell other deputies to stay out.

If he were to say, well, don't come in, he has a shotgun, where does it go from there? I mean, what's he going to do? Is he going to handle it himself? John John's there, he's got two other deputies there. You know, if he was of the mindset it's too dangerous in here, he should have left. He said, okay, guys, surround the trailer, set up a perimeter. We're going to call him out, and one way or the other, he's going to come out.

But we're not going to get anybody shot here. There's another issue. After John John is shot, Carson said that he holsters his weapon and gives aid to John John in the hallway. Well, that just does not make any sense. Turning his back on someone who allegedly just shot his partner with a shotgun. Carson admitted also that he fled the residence after the shooting and says he was not trained to stay with an officer who's down. That's incredible. You never leave an officer that's down.

You just can't do it. But what if Marty was in a fight-or-flight panic? If his amygdala had hijacked his brain? We teach a lot of this in the FBI Academy. If your life is threatened, and I mean really threatened, like this would be a serious threat, you get tunnel vision. You get tunnel hearing. You can't take your eyes off that threat. No matter what happens, people could be doing anything in back of you, and you don't know it because you don't have time for that. You're in the survival mode.

One of the things that happens also when you're in the fight-or-flight response is that you lose fine motor skills. And what is it that we need to shoot effectively is fine motor skills. Most people in law enforcement, they get into a gunfight. If you ask them, how many rounds did I fire? That's part of that fight or flight syndrome. You're pulling the trigger. You're trying to save your life. You're not shooting accurately. In other words, most people in a live or die situation will keep pulling the trigger. They'll fire wildly and not remember how many shots they got off.

Marty? One shot. He wasn't even worried about it. He holsters his weapon, turns his back on the door that supposedly had the threat. If we put everything in the best possible light, is there a chance that Marty was just dangerously incompetent? No. He was dangerously incompetent, but that's not the only thing. The final issue for Culia, and it's a big one,

is John John's gun propped up behind the toilet. The investigators have never been able to explain that other than assuming it flew out of John John's hand and into the bathroom. Then it made a 90-degree turn and slid a couple of feet before improbably coming to rest against the wall, balanced on the barrel and the butt. There's only one way that it could have gotten there. His partner, quote-unquote partner who just shot him, took his weapon, placed it behind the commode so that he couldn't get it, even though he wasn't moving, just in case. So since John John wasn't dead, he's laying there,

I'm convinced that he wanted to take that gun and place it behind the commode and put himself between John John and the bathroom so that he is not going to get his hands on that weapon. That gun, by the way, was never checked for fingerprints. At the time, there didn't seem to be a reason to believe anyone other than John John had handled it. So no one knows if Marty's prints were on it. A couple of years later, when Lori's case finally goes to trial, Culia won't be allowed to present any of this. Federal courts have rules about evidence

and about who can express opinions about what. The defense will object to Culia speculating about Marty's state of mind or telling the jury what he thinks Marty should have done. He'll be able to answer only objective questions on the witness stand. How wide the bathroom doorway is, whether that's a washing machine in the hallway, that sort of thing. Pretty dull testimony. Still, he's a retired FBI agent and firearms expert, and the jury will know that he has opinions about the way Marty said it happened,

and that Marty's lawyers do not want him to express those opinions. That's not a bad witness. He can help make Lori's case just by showing up in court. you know what's great about ambition? You can't see it. Some things look ambitious, but looks can be deceiving. For example, a runner could be training for a marathon, or they could be late for the bus. You never know. Ambition is on the inside.

So that road trip bucket list? Get after it. Drive your ambition. Mitsubishi Motors. What was the last thing that filled you with wonder that took you away from your desk or your car in traffic or your sink full of dishes? As an actor, it's very free being part of these shows.

You can step in the booth and kind of be anything. Well, for us, and I'm going to guess for some of you, that thing is... Anime! Hi, I'm Nick Friedman. I'm Lee Alec Murray. And I'm Leah President. And welcome to Crunchyroll Presents The Anime Effect. It's a weekly news show.

I literally, when I saw it, when I found out about this, I literally had like a nervous breakdown in a good way. What the best celebrity guest. I've never pirated anything, but I'll steal it if I have to. That was how I felt when I started to get really hooked on black Butler. Oh, it's coming back.

It's coming back. So join us every Friday, wherever you get your podcasts and watch full video episodes on Crunchyroll or on the Crunchyroll YouTube channel. It should be clear by now that Lori will go to trial. I mean, hell, there wouldn't be much of a story here if she didn't. But that wasn't a given. And here's why. Just because she filed doesn't mean she automatically goes to a jury. She's first got to convince a judge that her case has merit, that it's not just some legal Hail Mary.

Lori's case was assigned to a judge named Thomas Varlin. Judge Varlin is not a person who is easy to convince that the state, meaning the government, has done something wrong. UT law professor Ben Barton again. No surprise, he knows this guy too. He's a tremendous judge. I know him personally. He's super smart. He's hardworking. He's great. He's a George W. Bush appointee. He's a law and order guy, top to bottom, all the way through it. So it's a hike. It's an uphill battle to make it out of his court and to a jury on a claim against a police officer for murder. And remember, Lurie isn't suing just one cop.

They sued all the other officers who were there. They sued the Scott County Sheriff's Department. That's a lot to ask Judge Varlin to believe, that all of these people operated together to murder our guy Yancey. And he didn't actually find that. He didn't find that because everyone Lori sued, the officers, the county, filed for summary judgment. It's very common in civil suits. They want Judge Varlan to say Lori's case is so thin, so lacking in merit, that it should just

be dismissed outright. As it turns out, a little more than a month before the trial opens, that's exactly what Varlan finds, for most of them. I mean, all the other officers get dismissed, Scott County gets dismissed, and then we're just stuck with the case against Carson. Now Lori's left suing only Marty Carson. For Judge Varlin, they were like, we're asking you to say that it's at least plausible

that this thing was not a mistake, that it was done on purpose. He does find that there's enough of a dispute of fact that they can go forward on the trial against Carson. And just that alone, that's a crazy finding. Maybe, in fact, too out there for a jury. It's not a Washington, D.C. jury, you know what I mean? It's not a jury that's suspicious of police power or suspicious of the government. East Tennesseans aren't exactly squishy when it comes to supporting the local police. Drive through some of the small towns and you might even see it spelled out explicitly.

Like when we're doing some reporting in Jamestown, the next county over, there's a big sign at the main crossroads. We respect the police. Trying to convince a jury that deputies are killing each other could be a big lift. Maybe even a bigger lift for Lori. She's never wavered on her fundamental belief that Marty meant to kill John John, but she wasn't entirely sure why Marty would want him dead. You're missing that one important thing. The motive. Yeah.

That's something the jurors are going to want to know. The only theory Lori has, and she's not the only one who has it, is that John John was going to be a threat to the Carson family's power. He wasn't happy with the way the things were running with the sheriff's department. He wanted to see things done right and, you know, be able to get a better control on the drug situation in this county. You know, John John had planned on running for sheriff. John John was planning to run against Marty's dad. When I talked to Herb and we were discussing, you know,

what possible reasons could they have had, you know, wanting John John out of the picture, out of the way. And that's the only thing I knew could possibly be at that time was him going to run for sheriff, which that was still going to be, I think, maybe two years away. So, you know, he had already made his plans that he was going to run for sheriff, which that was still going to be, I think, maybe two years away. So, you know, he had already made his plans that he was going to run. He hadn't officially announced that, but he had told me that he had planned on running for sheriff on the next election.

And a lot of people we talked to agreed that John John's potential campaign would have been a threat to Sheriff Jim Carson. I believe that that deputy would have become sheriff eventually. I don't want to be talking out of turn, but John John would have been elected. He was that well liked. Is this it? The reason? The motive Lori's been searching for?

It's all she has to go with. And in any case, Jim Carson does lose the next time he runs. What was your platform? The professional change. That, by implication, suggested that the sheriff's department wasn't professional. No, no. Next time on Friendly Fire. When the Carsons lose power, people talk. There were things about that

incident that was handled properly and things that were not. Jim Carson was unbateable until that happened. He goes to me, Miss Yancey, he goes, you've got this all wrong. welcome to origins with me kush jumbo the show where the biggest names in entertainment tell me the stories that made them who they are today. Origins is a conversation about my guests' early inspirations and growing up. Guests this season include Dame Anna Wintour, Poppy Delevingne, Pete Capaldi, and Golda Rushavelle, aka Queen Charlotte in Bridgerton.

I only kind of discovered my sexuality when I went to drama school. Join me every week to hear where it all began. From Sony Music Entertainment, this is Origins with Kush Jumbo. Witness is a production of Campside Media and Sony Music Entertainment. Friendly Fire was reported and hosted by me, Sean Flynn. Lindsay Kilbride is the senior producer, and Callie Hitchcock is the associate producer.

The story editor is Daniel Riley. The series was sound designed by Shani Aviram, with mixing by Iwen Laitremuen. This episode was fact-checked by Alex Yablon. The theme song is Booey by Shook Aviram, with mixing by Iwen Laitremuen. This episode was fact-checked by Alex Yablon. The theme song is Booing by Shook Twins. A special thanks to our operations team, Amanda Brown, Doug Slaywin, Aliyah Papes, and Allison Haney. Campside Media's executive producers are Josh Dean, Vanessa Grigoriadis, Adam Hoff, and Matt Scher.

If you enjoyed Witnessed Friendly Fire, please rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.