True Crime Campfire - Episode 42: Stunning: A Very 80s Story of Love, Lies and Murder, Pt 2

Episode Date: February 28, 2020

In part 1, we introduced you to John Hawkins, a movie-star handsome young party guy with an endless appetite for sex and scamming—and Gene Hanson, his much older friend/business partner/possible lover. After a few years of unsuccessful scams, the two men had finally launched a successful, legitimate business selling workout gear. But then it all went to hell when, after a year of supposed health problems, Gene turned up dead of a heart attack on his doctor’s exam room floor. John Hawkins was left to pick up the pieces and move on, albeit $1.5 million richer from Gene’s life insurance policies. However, when we left you at the end of part 1, a routine investigation by the life insurance company had alerted detectives to the astounding fact that the man who had died in that doctor’s office was NOT Gene Hanson after all. Now investigators were scrambling to figure out who the hell he was—and where the hell Gene Hanson was hiding. Sources:Vanity Fair, "The Murder Hustle" by Ann Bardach. October 1989.Timeline of the case from "Forensic Files Now:" https://forensicfilesnow.com/index.php/2017/06/29/just-sweats-fraud-murder/LA Times: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-10-14-me-56965-story.htmlAP News: https://apnews.com/6056d3bf876f8f4989241f55f32b3831Oxygen's "Snapped: Killer Couples," episode "John Hawkins and Gene Hanson"Columbus Dispatch: https://www.dispatch.com/article/20140521/NEWS/305219823Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail] a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. In part one, we introduced you to John Hawkins, a movie star handsome young party guy with an endless appetite for sex and scamming. And Gene Hanson, his much older friend, business partner slash possible lover. After a few years of unsuccessful scams, the two men had finally launched a successful, legitimate business selling workout gear. But then it all went to hell when after a year of supposed health problems, Jean turned up dead of a heart attack on his doctor's exam room floor. John Hawkins was left to pick up the pieces and move on, albeit $1.5 million richer from Gene's life insurance policies. However, when we left you at the end of part one, our routine investigation by the life insurance company had alerted detectives to the astounding fact that the man

who had died in that doctor's office was not Gene Hansen after all. Now investigators were scrambling to figure out who the hell he was and where the hell Gene Hanson was hiding. Join us now for part two of this bizarre true story. So detectives knew something sinister was going on at this point. They weren't sure what exactly. It could be a misidentification or it could be a murder. So they called John Hawkins and told him, look, this dead body, it's not your partner, Gene.

We don't know who it is, but it's not Jean. So can you come in and talk to us again? And John played it real cool. seemed totally stunned and bewildered and this has to be a mistake, et cetera, et cetera. And just as he had been before, John seemed real cooperative. Sure, sure, I'll come in tomorrow, no problem. And by now he was back home in Ohio. So the detectives from L.A. had to fly out to interview him the next day. And I'm sure you're all going to be just shocked and disappointed to hear that John Hawkins didn't show up. I know you were rooting for him, but he didn't show up. And when they went to

his apartment, it was clear he had left in a rush. Not good. Not good. This whole thing was just stinking to high heaven now. So detectives decided to talk to one of John's best friends to try to figure out where he might have gone and what the flippin' hell might be going on. And John's buddy, who was also his roommate at the time, was a guy named Eric DeSando. And he was a big admirer of John's, one of his many, many admirers. And he claimed not to know where John was now, but said he'd seen him at a bar the night before and John had dropped one hell of a bombshell on his friend. John had said, Eric, I'm leaving tomorrow and I'm not coming back. And apparently he was pretty intoxicated for this conversation. So had the disinhibition going on and everything. He said, I'm leaving and I'm not

coming back. And Eric thought he was kidding at first, but John was really intense and he said, look, Gene's not dead. And then he launched into this incredible story that they had been planning to pull off a scam to end all scam. They had taken out over a million dollars in life insurance on Gene. They'd been telling everybody for months that Gene was having health problems, that he was selling his interest in just sweats because he was so sick. And they had hooked up with this Dr. Boggs and cut him in on the deal. So Boggs had gotten a fresh body from the morgue, John said, and passed it off as Gene. Fresh body.

Like it's a fucking baguette. I know that gross phrase. Fresh cadaver. jean was going to hide out while the insurance claim was in the works and once they had the money they were going to split it three ways and john and jean were going to ride off into the sunset presumably for a life of margaritas and monkey butlers and piles of money i assume but john said the plan's gone tits up they're on to us they know the body isn't jean so now i've got to get the hell out of dodge and i mean unsurprisingly eric was just gobsmacked by this astonishing turn of events and he was furious too i mean this was his roommate and his friend and he was even more pissed off when john begged him the next morning as he and another friend were like frantically packing up all his stuff so he could flee begged him never to tell anybody what he had told him the night before and he especially not my mom he said which is i mean you can't let

your hot mom know about your insurance scams exactly mother mustn't know and now hearing eric Sando, you know, telling this story, the detectives were pretty floored themselves. I mean, why would these guys do this? Didn't they have a successful business? And why the hell would this doctor get involved? I mean, this was a guy who had been to Harvard Medical School. I mean, it just was bizarre. So they started digging into John and Jean's Just Sweets Biz and soon uncovered all that

business about John and Jean taking over the check signing rights from the accountant and sending the accountant to Europe and making off with one. $1.8 million of the company's money, they figured that that had been John and Gene's plan A to just embezzle that money and take off. But when the accountant had come back and wigged out and threatened to call the feds, they had decided to put the kibosh on that idea. So it seemed to the detectives that this absurd idea to fake Gene's death and collect on his life insurance was probably Plan B. Or they may have always intended to do both, Plan A and Plan B. I mean, after all, Gene had been filling everybody's ears about how sick he was for months.

And that was before he took that 1.8 mil. So it's very likely it was, you know, in the works to do both of those things. You know, oh, no, I'm not going to be around much longer. I'm sick, boo-hoo, et cetera. So he was probably priming the pump for that. So that if he suddenly dropped dead in his doctor's office, everybody would be expecting it and nobody would ask any difficult questions, right? Now, how the hell they thought they were going to get away with all this is far

beyond me, but Hawkins is clearly a narcissist and Jean was just so madly in love with him that he would probably fire himself out of a cannon if John asked him too. So let's take this opportunity for yet another piece of true crime campfire relationship advice. Campers, y'all, bless your hearts. Don't let some pretty young thing suck your brains out with a straw, okay? Because here's the thing. There are always more pretty folks out there for you to fall in love with. So don't pick one that's going to leave a big smoking crater in the place where your life was supposed to go. Just don't do it. Yeah. And a significant other that would ask you to go against your personal ethics is not a very good partner. I don't care how sharp their cheekbones are.

You sound like my mom's saying, if they tell you to do the marijuana, they're not your friends. I am your mom on this podcast. So campers. You're all of our mom. campers. If your friends all jumped off a cliff, would you follow them? Like a lemming to your certain demise just to be like the in crowd? No. But seriously. But seriously. Seriously, avoid people like that. They're not good for you. So don't fake your own death. For the love of God, right? Because you are 100% going to get caught. So anywho, the detectives were finally starting to unravel it all. What they couldn't figure out yet is A, where the hell gene was. B. where the hell John was now, because he's scarpered off,

and see how the hell they rope Dr. Boggs into this wily coyote bullshit in first place, right? I mean, this guy was a neurologist, for God's sake. So when they spoke to Dr. Boggs, he seemed shocked to learn that the man who had died in his office on that April night wasn't really Gene Hanson. The guy had been his patient for seven years, he said. He'd always presented himself as Gene Hansen. Oh, I'm just as surprised as you are, officers, et cetera. etc. This was Dr. Boggs' story, and he was sticking to it. And the investigators did not buy it, unsurprisingly. The timeline Boggs had given them didn't make any sense. The timing of that

EKG readout was 12.02am, remember, and the time he called it in was like five or six hours later. The fact that the body had been in rigor mortis when the paramedics arrived, all of this was highly suspicious. So they started digging into the good doctor's background, and oh boy, Oh, boy. Turns out Dr. Boggs had a bit of a reputation. He was a regular at the gay bars and clubs around town, and he was basically a walking pharmacy. Like, he was providing just a cornucopia of prescription drugs to all the guys that he met at the clubs. And he also liked to hire, quote-unquote, gigolo's like John Hawkins, and he had a reputation for liking violent sex.

He liked to inflict pain, apparently, on much younger. men. In fact, remember the limitless drug hookup that John Hawkins had chaired with all his glitzy celebrity buddies back in his studio 54 days? Well, that was Dr. Boggs. And remember those hit and run insurance scams that John used to run with a doctor signing off on his fake injuries and splitting the payoff? So you guessed it, that too, was Dr. Boggs. And there were rumors that he'd cooked meth in his office building for a while, too. So like if Walter White was Harvard educated. Exactly. Exactly. Breaking Bad, California style. And he'd been involved in all kinds of fraud and malpractice. He had been performing unnecessary surgeries on people and just a stand-up fellow,

Dr. Boggs. So they also discovered that the doc had recently had assault charges filed on him by a young man named Barry, who he'd picked up at a bar. Now, here was Barry's story. A couple weeks earlier, he had met Dr. Boggs at a bar, and the doc had used the name Peter Richards. So that's already, like, red flaggy as hell, right? He's introducing himself with a fake name. And he'd bought Barry some drinks, chatted him up, and eventually invited him back to see his, quote, unquote, dad's doctor's office, which I'm sure was real convincing, given how old he was at the time. And also just, ooh, sexy. Like, who doesn't want to make sweet love in a doctor's exam room? I know my loins are just all a quiver, just thinking about it. So what I kind of suspect given Boggs' reputation is that he invited the guy there to do drugs.

But it's just a theory, I don't know. So once I got there, Dr. Boggs caught Barry up in like a bear hug, and Barry felt something odd and kind of cold and metallic against his bare neck. And he realized after like a split second of confusion that it was two little metal prongs. and then it hit him oh my god it's a stun gun yeah so Barry freaked

because of course he did and they started kind of grappling over this stun gun and thank God Barry was able to fight Boggs off and escape and as he was doing that he actually noticed these diplomas hanging on the wall and he remembered the name Dr. Richard Boggs

and afterward he put two and two together and realized this guy was probably not who he claimed to be this was probably probably the Dr. Boggs in the diplomas, right? Barry went right to the cops, but infuriatingly and probably also not surprisingly, they didn't show a lot of interests. Gee, you wonder why. So, for one thing, Dr. Boggs was a prominent citizen, trademark.

He came from a prominent family, trademark. And the detective that Barry spoke to knew Boggs and his well-connected fam and basically just said, yep, this can't be true. these people. These are stand-up citizens. Yeah. Eat a dick. That's ridiculous. Infuriating. But of course, this kind of gross stuff happens a lot more often than we'd like to think, and probably even more back then, but still today.

I mean, when your complainant is a gay man, it's probably a little more likely to happen. So, Barry had filed assault charges, but the charges ended up being dropped. But now that the detectives were looking at... into the Jean Hansen case, they were really interested in Dr. Boggs. Who was this guy that they had found dead in Boggs's office? And was this, like, attempt number two? Had Boggs lured this guy there just like he had Barry? Had he promised him drugs or a romantic encounter and then killed him?

It was looking pretty damn likely. So the next step for the detectives was to dive into recent missing person reports, looking for someone who matched the description and post-mortem photograph of the dead body. It didn't take them long to get a hit. A young man named Ellis Green. Ellis was a sweet 32-year-old guy who had had some trouble finding himself. He'd been married to a woman for a few years, but the marriage had ended when he realized he was gay. Which, by the way, was the same thing that ended Dr. Boggs' marriage years before. Interestingly enough, yeah. He'd moved to Hollywood after that and worked a couple different jobs.

bookkeeping, tax work, et cetera. But what he really wanted to do was start a cheesecake business. Apparently Ellis made some bomb cheesecake. Campers, let's all take a moment of silence in appreciation of cheesecake. No. Cheesecake. Okay. I take this very seriously.

I know people say this all the time, okay? And don't really mean it. and like it's just an expression, but I need you to listen to me very carefully and believe me when I tell you that I could literally, no exaggeration, eat my entire weight in cheesecake. Like, I could do it right now. I promise you that I could do it. And I just had dinner, but I could do it. It is my favorite food on this entire big blue marble that we call Earth.

It is the perfect food. It combines cheese with dessert. Right. And when I was a kid, I thought it sounded gross. And now I just mourn for all those wasted years when I didn't know how delicious it was. Right? Yeah. So one day in April of 1988, Ellis calls his brother, all excited.

He said, okay, I met a couple guys who were interested in investing in my cheesecake business. And a couple weeks after that phone call on April 15th, Ellis went missing. The last anyone remembered seeing him, he was leaving a North Hollywood bar with another man. Ellis was a pretty heavy drinker and very much irregular on the gay club scene in North Hollywood. Witnesses said he'd appeared pretty drunk when he left the bar that night. Ellis's aunt filed a missing person's report a week later. So the dead man on Dr. Boggs's office floor. whose body had been cremated and scattered at sea by John Hawkins was Ellis Green.

And Ellis was sure as hell not some purloined corpse from the morgue, as John Hawkins had told his buddy Eric. It was becoming clear to detectives that this plot was a lot darker than John had claimed. They'd faked Jean's death to collect on his life insurance for sure, but they'd killed a man to do it. murder for financial gain I think that's the coldest kind don't you? I do actually

I think it's the creepiest kind really in some ways because it's just so absolutely devoid of any humanity just I want your money therefore I feel I have the right to take your life it's astonishing for something so

small I mean I know money's not really small but like in the grand scheme of things when you compare it the human life it is. And money comes and goes, and a lot of times it's not even that much money. Oh, I know. That's the crazy thing. If you look at spouse murder cases, especially the life insurance will be just tiny sometimes

that they kill for. And $1.8 million. I know it was a lot of money in the 80s, but split between three people. Yeah, you're not. It's not going to last you forever or anything. No. Not that I think any amount would be an appropriate amount. I know.

That's always the weirdness of that conversation. Well, what amount would be? satisfy you. No, no amount would satisfy me, but it's just like the greed, the greed is horrible. And the tiniest amount of money that blinds people is just baffling to me. And I think it's what's upsetting about that is that it's almost like it indicates to me or suggests to me that that's just how little this meant to you. Yeah. That this is just a stepping stone to launch me into my new life. You might do it again in five years because that's how little it means to me, you know. It's 100%. Super creepy. Yeah. And now, both John Hawkins and

Gene Hansen were in the wind. So what were our two favorite con men up to while the investigators were figuring all this out? Well, as investigators would eventually discover, Gene Hanson had gone about as far away as he could within the continental US of A from L.A. He was living in Miami, Florida, under the name Wolfgang von Snowden. Vufgang von Schnauden. So, jeez, drama queen marched. Oh, my God. You're trying to stay under the radar, my dude.

I know. Way to be inconspicuous. Way do we get to John, too, like in his, like, just. These guys did not know how to be inconspicuous. Wolfgang von Schnauden. And he didn't just, like, come up with that name. Snowden was his bio-dad's name. So that was smart to, bro. It gets worse, too. This guy was not good at this. So he's in Florida. He lived it up down there for a while. He made lots of new friends, most of whom realized he wasn't from

Germany, as he made it out to be. For one thing, this dude didn't even speak German. Oh, my God, heaven. And for another, he still had his Florida accent. I love that so much. Look, I have feeders ain't, y'all. Spreckin de Deutsch. It's hysterical. Like, what do you think you're doing?

What do you think you're fool? And dips shit, unbelievable. Just take one acting class. You live in L.A. Or just don't claim to be from Germany. It's so easy. Jeez and croppers. They also notice.

noticed that he sometimes slipped. One friend overheard him on the phone saying, this is Gene Hansen. And others noticed that he had a couple different spellings for Snowden. Oh, my God. Oh, Moses smelled the roses. This is a pitiful display is what this is. The thing is, if you're going to try something as ambitious as this, you got to come correct, man. And he was not coming correct, KT. It irritates me. I mean, obviously, I'm glad that these people got caught, and I'm glad when criminals are dumb.

We've said this before. But also just stupidity irritates me. He did not come correct. He came incorrect, and it bugs me. He came about as incorrect as you possibly told. Yeah. At any rate, Wolfgang was apparently loving life in Miami. Oh, yeah.

He looked into a couple of real estate deals. went to dinner parties, and he partied hard with a revolving door of handsome male escorts. He also struck up a relationship with yet another beautiful young man. Detectives have no proof of this, but they came to suspect that this guy was intended to be victim number two, John Hawkins's body double, for a repeat performance of what they'd pulled off with Ellis Green. Gene slash Wolfgang kept his new young companion well supplied with drugs. He had a hookup back home, he said. Hmm.

Right? I wonder who that was. Yeah, it's a tricky one. The detectives believe they were planning to kill this poor guy so they could fake Hawkins's death, have an accomplice collect his life insurance benefits, and all three could split the proceeds. Their goal, after all, was to never have to. to work again. Yeah, and like you said, you know, 1.5 mil is not going to last you forever, especially split three ways. So, yep. So obviously, it didn't matter to them who got stomped

in the process. Yep. So Hansen, aka Wolfgang, hung out in Miami for a while. While he was down there, he got some cosmetic surgery on his face. He told the doctor he wanted to look as young and handsome as my boyfriend. Was that it? Or was this about evading police? Oh, now, that's a thinker. That's a thinker. Yeah, it was obviously about evading police.

I mean, I'm sure he was probably plenty vain, too. I mean, why not? But, yeah, he was trying to fly under the radar. Yeah. So we mentioned Jean's dipshittery with regard to his new identity. Messing up on the names and whatnot. Well, it gets worse. Oh, man.

At one point, he went to rent a cottage in Key West, and he used Ellis Green's motherfucking identity on the paperwork. Oh, so dumb. Campers. I know. You've got to be rolling your eyes right along with us, right? Because what's the one thing? The one thing you probably don't want to do if you've just taken part in a murder and gone on the land. class? Anyone know the answer? I do. Oh, I do. Oh, Whitney, I see you raising your hand. Yeah, I know

me. Use your murder victim's identity thereby connecting yourself unequivocally with that victim and giving your future prosecutor a beautifully wrapped present with a great big bow. Correct. Fucking dumbass. Don't you love when they help the state to catch them? That's my favorite thing. It's like, hmm, what could I do that when I get caught will make it really easy for the prosecutor to convict me. O'y, Gene, dude, what are you doing? This guy was not built to be a murderer, apparently. You, you.

So, phone records would later show that Jean was in frequent touch with both John Hawkins and Dr. Boggs the whole time he was hiding out. Presumably, at some point, he learned the disturbing news that the police had discovered that the body who had expired in Dr. Boggs' office was not his. Must not have shaken him up too badly, though, because apparently he asked one of his new Miami friends if he'd heard the story about the guy from Ohio who faked his own death for the life insurance money. Referring campers to his own case. Oh, my God. The guy hadn't heard of it yet, but holy shit was that dumb.

He seemed to be getting a charge. of the story. But it may have been this revelation about the dead body's true identity that lit a fire under Gene slash Wolfgang. Right, right, right. Slash Wolfgang to dump a bunch of money in a Cayman bank account and hight tail it to Acapulco, Mexico. He told friends he had AIDS and was going to San Francisco for treatment. Yeah, and none of that was true, of course. He just needed a reason to give people as to why he wouldn't be available for a while. So down in Acapulco, he started looking for a gay club to buy. So it seemed like he was planning on settling in, but he still had some real estate business to finish up in Florida. So on January 29, 1989, customs agents at the

Dallas-Fort Worth Airport felt their antennae start to kind of vibrate a little bit. A guy who had just arrived from Acapulco was acting really squirrely, like way more nervous than you would likely be if you had just had a nice Mexican vacation, right? So they stopped the guy and searched him, and they found some very interesting stuff in his bags. They found $14,000 in undeclared cash. So the first thought was, okay, drug dealer, drug runner, whatever. But then they also found a book on how to start a new identity.

Which, by the way, bless your heart, honey. Good for you. Good job, good try for reading about that. But, honey, you want to do that before you do the crime, sweetheart. Because if you don't know how to do it before, darling, then you're going to make mistakes like spelling your name three different ways using your murder victim's name, you know, accidentally saying on the phone, Eugene Hanson, stuff like that. Because it probably says in the book not to do all those things. And you didn't own that, bless your heart, darling, if you had read that book before instead of, you know, after. Anyway, just a tip.

Just a quick note. So they found the book multiple different IDs with multiple different names. One of those names was Ellis Green. And he also had a checkbook for a bank account in that name. So this was, of course, Gene Hanson. And he looked a little different because of his cosmetic surgery, but it was him. So boom, one down. And they nabbed him and they extradited him to Ohio to face charges that had been filed by the life insurance companies.

Against him and John Hawkins for theft by deception. Now, the murder charges would come a little bit later. The investigation was still ongoing. so this is bananas when they booked him into the jail they asked if he could make his rather extraordinary five million dollar bail which i have to believe must have had something to do with the fact that they knew he was a flight risk right and they probably knew that there was this murder investigation going on in the background and when they asked him if he could make that bail he said i shit you not if they let me die a few more times i can jesus christ i gotta give it to him he's got a pair on him holy smokes that is just the arrogance of that astounding. Okay, so we know what Gene was up to now while he was hiding out after Ellis Green's murder. And don't worry, we are going to tell you what happened with that in a bit. We're going to get to the murder. Bear with us. We know where Gene was, but what about John Hawkins? Where had Boy Wonder been since that night that the LA cops had called to tell him, hey, that body on Boggs's

floor, not Gene? And he'd confessed the whole plot to his buddy, Eric, and just disappeared. So the first thing John did was loot the Just Sweat's bank accounts of as much cash as he could quickly get his grubby little mitts on. And that amounted to about $250,000. And over the next few months, he just kind of drifted around the country from friend to friend. He stayed with Mommy in Las Vegas for a while, obviously. And he stayed in St. Louis with some friends. He stayed in Phoenix for a bit. He seemed to have decided that staying on the move would keep him safe from the long arm of the law.

but he just couldn't keep his story straight with his friends or family. So he told some people he was selling Just Sweets. He told some people he was going on vacation to recover from the stress of the whole gene unpleasantness. He told one friend he was planning on going to Australia. And meanwhile, in the absence of its two captains, just sweats filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy. So they're one successful business, an honest business that could have made them both rich for as long as they were willing to work for it, just gone.

I mean, just, God, these guys are idiots, you know? Just because, you really want to work. I know we made millions of dollars in our first year. But this is boring and hard. Let's kill somebody and take their money. Life insurance money. Are you kidding me? Jeez and crap.

Like, it just irritates the crap out of me. Because, like, look at somebody like John Hawkins. He's handsome, smart, charismatic. Gene, you know, was a good businessman, had great taste. good eye for fashion had built an impeccable reputation in his field. They start this successful business and then they pull this nonsense. It's just ridiculous. Yeah, these two are like, I think we all know these people that are just incredibly smart, but they're like, they get together in the same room and it's like they're sharing two brain cells between the two. Yeah, they were

definitely like a match made in hell. I agree with you there for sure. So John hinted to some people that he was in some kind of trouble, but he didn't usually specify what it was. He did tell his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Sally, bless her heart, the one that got told that she were in a bikini, she reminded him of his mom. He told Sally that the FBI was after him because he'd been laundering money for his drug-running family members through just sweats. And by the way, those stories about his gangster family, apparently those were true. According to Vanity Fairs and Baldock, both the FBI and DEA verified that, Some members of John's family were involved in burglary, drug manufacturing, drug dealing. So there was a bit of like a Hawkins crime family.

But, of course, that wasn't why authorities were after John, who for at least part of his time on the lamb, was running all kinds of scams, of course, because he never stopped scamming, from credit card fraud to identity theft and using the alias Jerry Green, which I find interesting because green again. Like Ellis Green, you know? Was that on purpose, or was it a Freudian slip? and I don't give John credit for much of a guilty conscience so part of me suspects it was deliberate

just another example of his arrogance but we have no way of knowing for sure and this is interesting after John fled his apartment back in Ohio his roommate and buddy Eric DeSando had found a to do type list in John's handwriting and it said get the money

get a birth certificate distance myself from Wolfgang and Eric soon realized that his own birth certificate was missing. So clearly, John intended to manufacture a new identity and thought nothing of taking his good friend's birth certificate, you know, just in case he needed it. Which is just gross, astute is the worst.

Because these guys have been friends for years and roommates and everything. So on February 3rd, 1989, a little less than a year after Ellis Green's death, the district attorney of L.A. finally charged Gene, John, and Dr. Boggs with a slew of criminal counts, including grand theft, insurance fraud, and murder. And they put the habeas gravis on bogs that same day, and he was super miffed about it. He still insisted he had no involvement in this thing whatsoever. He said to a bank of reporters that he demanded to know why Ellis Green had pretended to be Gene Hanson for seven years.

Like, dude, are you kidding me? Give it up, man. You caught. You're caught already. Just suck it up for God's sake. And John bolted. He took $400,000 that he had scrounged together from the plunder of just sweats and various scams and schemes, and he fled to Europe. And while Gene Hanson and Dr. Boggs both went on trial for Ellis Green's murder, among other charges, and we'll get to the outcomes of those in a few minutes, John managed to stay on the run for three years. Living it up in Ibiza, Amsterdam, Italy, Sardinia.

He got lip injections, he dyed his hair, he wore fake mustache. and beards, which I would love to see that. And he took steroids to kind of bulk up and change his look. He also changed his name, like most people, changed their socks. And campers, this is by far the best part. He bought a fire engine red sailboat. A catamaran, he named Carpe Diem. Yeah.

Take a moment and just let that sink in. Carpe flippity flapping deem. Oh my God. So how did they finally car pay his DM? Well, one night John's girlfriend was watching TV, met her in Amsterdam. She was a Dutch woman. And whose pretty little face popped up on America's Most Wanted, which I didn't even know they had in Europe, but apparently they did, our boy John. And his girlfriend flipped out and turned him in immediately, which I love. Well, actually, what she did was she called the TV station. She called The Oprah Show, which had also covered the case, and she called America's Most Wanted. Yeah, you know you fucked up when somebody tattles on you to Oprah. Right? I'd be scared shitless of Oprah. I'm not going to lie.

That woman will see into your soul. She's got like laser beams coming out of her eyes. So they found John on his nice red sailboat, and after a brief struggle where he insisted he wasn't John Hawkins and like tried to like tussle with the cops, like, yeah, good luck with that. they took him into custody finally finally authorities had all three of the culprits in this unbelievable case

so how did it all shake down well jean hansson and dr boggs who again let's remind everyone was harbored educated god what a waste they went on trial separately boggs's trial came first and his story was that he hadn't killed ellis green

that jean had killed him and then he made boggs get involved under the threat of blackmail. He said Gene threatened to out him as gay if he didn't help. And the jury didn't buy it. And he was convicted of murder and insurance fraud and sentenced to life in prison. And I do not get the impression, by the way, that it was a secret that Boggs was gay. Like, he was all over the gay scene and everything.

So, plus, his family worked in his practice. And he had, like, a long-term partner that also worked there and, like, worked right alongside his family. Like, people, like, had to know this guy. I don't buy the blackmail thing at all. And neither did the jury. So convicted. sentenced to life in prison

now jean's trial came next he admitted to the insurance scam but he swore up and down that he and john had just asked dr boggs to find a dead body from like a morgue or medical school and passed that off as jean sure bud so jordan by that either jean was convicted he was sentenced to life without parole dr boggs died in prison at age 69 of i believe pancreatic cancer as for Jean, he's still serving his sentence at Corker in state prison, and he's never coming out alive. And once they had Johnny Boy in custody and got him extradited back to the States, he was up next. His story echoed Jeans, that they'd planned to fake Jean's death and collect the life insurance, but they hadn't intended for anybody to be killed.

Now, unlike Jean and Dr. Boggs, there was no evidence to tie John directly to the murder. In fact, he was in Ohio at the time. Just like he'd always arranged to be out at the bars when he'd have somebody torch his cars for the insurance money back in his studio 54 days. So, John skated on the murder charge. But he was convicted for the fraud and sentenced to 25 to life. And campers? In 2012, after 20 years in prison, Mr. John Hawkins was released early. He'd participated in a prison outreach program to keep troubled kids out of trouble.

And apparently, a lot of people vouched for him and claimed he was a changed man. He's very charming. Mm-hmm. In an interview in 2014, John stuck to his story that no one was supposed to die for this scam. He said he'd been an arrogant young man and made some stupid mistakes. He said he learned his lesson in prison, and now he wants to have. help teenagers avoid the same mistakes he made. Well, you know, we can only hope, can't we, that he means what he says.

But forgive me if I'm not super optimistic. The prosecutor in John's case said that he's a master manipulator, and I have to agree with that based on what we know about him. So can people like that change? I guess we all have to come to our own conclusions about that. But I'll tell you what, I don't buy for a second that they never intended to kill anybody for this. Yeah, it makes no sense whatsoever. First of all, the idea that Boggs had a hookup, he could bribe to score a fresh cadaver,

sounds like something out of a stupid movie. And it would be so obvious that the body hadn't just died, like, unless you could score one that had just expired. Yeah, and how the hell could you? Exactly. And unless you could, it would be so obvious to the ME that this person hadn't died when you said they did. Mm-hmm. And how could you be sure that you'd find somebody at the right time who bore a close resemblance, enough to Jean Hansen.

Exactly, exactly. So to me, that's just a pile of horse stucy. And it's not like I can't buy the idea that there might be some scuzz bucket that works at the morgue or at the medical school that would be bribable. It's not that. It's just that a body's not like somebody's going to want that body. Like they're going to keep track of dead bodies. And even if you, and by the way, if you were going to do that, you wouldn't pick somebody

like Ellis Green. You would pick like a homeless person as awful as that sounds or somebody that's, more likely to not be missed. Right. You wouldn't pick Ellis. He was a bookkeeper. You know, he wasn't somebody that nobody was going to miss. His aunt filed a missing person's report almost immediately about him. And you would know that. I would think to look at him, you know, that like this is not likely to be somebody who's not got family who's going to come looking for him. So. Yeah. And I guess in this case, it's easier to source your own dead body. In this case, storebot is not fine.

So it's clear to us that the plan was most likely always to go out to the clubs, find someone who looked enough like Jean, lure him back to Boggs's office, and kill him. And that's what they did. And by they, of course, I mean Gene Hansen and Dr. Boggs. We're not 100% sure who dealt the fatal blow or even exactly how Ellis Green was murdered. Yeah, that's true. The prosecution's theory is that they either use a stun gun like Boggs had used on his first try, poor Barry, or an ungrounded wire from the EKG machine to electrocute him or stun him and or injected him with something to incapacitate him, something that the Emmy wouldn't check for in a talk screen,

which Boggs would have ample information to do, and then they suffocated him. I think that's very plausible. If you want more detail about the trials, by the way, there's a book. about this case? Well, actually, there's two books, but one of them came out before John Hawkins was captured, so you might want to read the newer one. It's called Insured for Murder, and it's by Robin Yocum and Catherine Kandiski. Full disclosure, we haven't read it, so we can't vouch for it. We used newspaper and magazine articles as our sources, and the full list of those will be in the description, as always. And campers, buckle in.

Brace yourselves. Johnny Hawkins wrote a book, too. Oh, of course he did. Bless his heart. Uh-huh, uh-huh. It's called The Dirty Nasty Truth, 18 True Crime Stories to Stop Juvenile Delinquency. He describes it as chronicling his dissent from successful entrepreneur to convicted felon.

And if you must, if you have to, you can find it on Amazon. Yeah, but let's just not, though, okay? Because, ew. You know, although Gene and Boggs were the hands-on guys in this awful thing, the ones who actually killed poor Ellis Green, the general consensus among the investigators and prosecutors is that John was probably the mastermind, if you can call it that. we hope those 20 years in prison has tempered his apparent need for adrenaline rushes and personal adoration and we hope that he's being honest with himself about all this because unless you're honest with yourself number one there's no such thing as accountability and there's number two definitely no redemption so you're fooling yourself if you're lying to yourself about this and by the way there was a tv

movie about this one too which shouldn't surprise anybody it was called if looks could kill and Antonio Sabato Jr. plays John. And if you must, it's on YouTube, at least as of the time of this recording. Oh, and by the way, for years, Gene Hansen still spoke fondly of John in prison interviews and vice versa. And on the show, snapped killer couples. John was like on the show, and he said Gene was one of the kindest, best people he ever knew. So make of that what you will. Rose for Life, I guess.

Oh, and oh my God, I have to tell you this show, I was about to forget. But on the day that John Hawkins was sentenced, he got married in the judge's chambers right before they took him off to jail. Just like freaking Ted Bundy. Oh, my God. I could not. I about fell out of my chair. And his sentencing was like delayed a little bit so he could get married before they dragged him off to prison. And the woman was never identified as far as I know in the press.

Just he got married to some unknown woman who I'm sure thought he was the cat's pajamas. and I don't know, you know, when he got out, he initially was reported as living with his mom. So, apparently, it didn't last for some reason, but why I do not know. But, yeah, Shades of Bundy. Interesting, right? So, that was a wild one. Right, campers? Y'all are going to need a nap now, I assume. And you know we'll have another one for you next week, but for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe. Until we get together again around the true crime campfire.

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