True Crime Campfire - Lamb to the Slaughter: The Murder at Emmanuel Church

Episode Date: May 12, 2023

The great poet and painter William Blake wrote that, “It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.” And I think that makes sense to all of us. Few things cut so deep as betrayal from someone you trust and care for—the shock of it makes the treachery all the more painful, and makes you question whether your supposed friend ever gave a damn about you in the first place. And you’ll rarely see a betrayal as deep as the one in this week’s story -- a tale of friendship, redemption, reinvention and gruesome murder. Sources:For I Have Sinned by John GlattInvestigation Discovery's "Grave Secrets," episode "Baptism by Fire"https://casetext.com/case/state-v-terry-74https://casetext.com/case/terry-v-state-295Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least 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]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com/Become 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. The great poet and painter William Blake wrote that it is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend. think that makes sense to all of us. A few things cut so deep as betrayal from someone you trust and care for. The shock of it makes the treachery all the more painful and makes you question whether your supposed friend ever gave a damn about you in the first place. And you'll rarely see a

betrayal as deep as the one in this week's story. This is Lamb to the Slaughter, the murder at Emmanuel Church. So, campers, for this one, we're in Nashville, Tennessee, June 15, 1987. Just before midnight, the darkness of the warm summer night was broken by flames licking into the black sky from the Immanuel Church of Christ, Oneness Pentecostal on Woodland Street. By the time firefighters got there, the two-story brick building was completely engulfed by fire. It took them two hours to get the blaze under control, and as soon as they managed that, the firefighters rushed to call in Nashville PD.

We need homicide down here quick, they told dispatch. We found something in the attic. Robert Moore was one of the first detectives on the scene. The church still stank of the fire as he walked in, charred pews steaming from water pumped in by the fire crews. He could also smell gasoline and could see a trail of dark patches on the floor where the gas had burned after being splashed around. Poor patterns, clear as day. This fire didn't start accidentally. The church attic was used as a storage space,

but there was a pile of random debris on the floor that looked out of place. Plywood and stuff like that laid over a green carpet that looked like it had been rolled around some big, lumpy object. The wood was charred, but not completely burned. Luckily for the investigators, a big jet of water from the fire crew's hose had come right through the attic window and landed right on the side. pile of stuff. Otherwise, it might have been completely destroyed. Now, a homicide detective, looking at a big lump in a rolled up carpet, has a pretty good idea of what he's probably going

to find. And... A mannequin. No, Katie, it's never a mannequin. As we already know. Yeah. Where the bottom of the carpet had been pulled back, more could see a singed human foot. There was a body under the carpet, and that would be plenty to sicken most of us, but it was something else. that made Moore's stomach drop. He was an experienced detective, and he'd seen a lot of dead bodies. He could tell right away that this one belonged to a large man,

and that it was too short. Sure enough, when he pulled the carpet off completely, he saw he was right. The charred body was missing a head. Not only that, the right arm had been cut off just below the elbow. A large axe lay nearby, its handle burned. A charred headless body is always going to be hard to identify, but there was one clue.

Around the corpse's waist was a leather belt with a stylized buckle in the shape of the letter T, and this told detectives were to start looking and identifying the body. The church's minister was the Reverend David Terry. Neighbors and church members had gathered around outside, and these included the Reverend Terry's wife, Brenda. She was already worried and crying. She hadn't heard from David all day. The last time his family had seen him was when he'd left at 8.30 a.m. that morning to go fishing with his friend Jim Mathini. There was words spreading in the crowd that Reverend Terry might have been in the church when it burned, so Brenda was already terrified.

When investigators asked her if David had a belt buckle with the letter T on it, she broke down. He did have a belt buckle like that. Brenda had given it to him the year before as a Father's Day gift. He wore it all the time. As news of David's death spread, Brenda wasn't alone in her grief. Pastor Terry was popular and well-respected in his blue-collar congregation, and he was well thought of in the Southern Pentecostal Church. Before tonight, he'd been on the verge of being made a bishop. He was a hard-working minister who got along really well with people. When police asked around to see if anybody knew who might want to hurt him, they got a whole chorus of no. Of course, there was one person they already knew they'd want to talk to. Jim Mathini, the Reverend's friend, the church handyman, and a dude with a life about as messy as a spilled plate of spaghetti. It was Jim Mathini that the Reverend had gone fishing with, and as far as police knew right now, he'd been the last person to see David Terry alive. But Jim Mathini was nowhere to be found. So how did we get here? A beloved pastor dead and decapitated in his burned church and his friend, apparently on the run.

The Southern Pentecostal Church had always played a major role in David Terry's life. His father was a bishop in the church. John Terry had a strong personality. by which I mean he was kind of a dick. Little David couldn't take a step without his dad criticizing it. He was closer to his mom, but the dynamics of their relationship were definitely kind of askew. David got married and divorced when he was really young, and while we don't know anything about his first wife, the second one, Brenda, had to win his mom's approval before the knock got tied. Oh, boy.

So if you want to know what overly critical parenting can lead to, it's a great. grown-ass man who has to get his mommy's okay before he can get married. Mother approved of Brenda. She was meek and churchy, and she let David take charge of everything, pretty much a perfect minister's wife, for a certain kind of church anyway. Not that being a minister was something David was super stoked about. Not at first. His first marriage was not the only thing he'd failed at in his early adulthood. He dropped out of college, then tried to make it as a butcher before falling into the ministry. I mean, he was a bishop's son.

It felt like a safe bet. Regardless of how he started, though, David was a good pastor, hardworking and always there for his congregation. His sermons were popular. He had a great singing voice, and he played the organ, and his church was proud of him.

Of course, he was also human with human faults, and one of them was vanity. By the time he turned 43 in 1987, David looked about 10 years older, and he lost most of his hair. His solution to this was a thick, luxurious Burt Reynoldsy toupee, which based on the pictures I've seen was not fooling anybody. Oh, bless the song.

He cared a lot about appearances. His yard was always perfect. And whenever his four kids left the house, they looked like they'd just been steam cleaned and pressed at the dry cleaners. All they were missing was the plastic wrap that I always, like, I don't know, that stuff sticks to me like cling wrap. It's crazy. The good pastor even refused to wear shorts, which he considered beneath the dignity of his position as pastor.

So he'd be out there in those roasting hot Tennessee summers mowing his lawn in long pants. Big dude with glasses or Ron Swanson stash and that lustrous rug on his head. He must have been sweating like a Sasquatch. Yes, Sasquatch is sweat. I'm a card-carrying member of the Sasquatch Museum in Colorado because, you know, they're really just guys in fur suits. Oh, God, you just lost us some listeners with that one. Don't piss off the cryptid people. They're probably like 97% of our listenerships.

How dare you? It's a joke. It's a joke. Bigfoot is real. Totally, definitely 100% real. Actually, my mom is texting me right now because she does. She is a member of the Sasquatch Museum in Colorado. So she's 100% going to text me or call me as soon as this line gets read.

My mom believes in Bigfoot. Both our moms. Both are moms. Listen to Wild Thing, by the way. It's a great podcast, investigative journalist looking for Sasquatch. It's fantastic. Not sponsored, just a podcast I like. So anyway, we're off track.

David Terry was a little bit of an odd duck in some ways, but who isn't? I mean, look at us. Our lives are ruled by cats, and in my case, a dog who weighs as much as Whitney. And David was in a hard spot right then. His mom died in the mid-80s, and it hit him hard. She was the person he'd been closest to in his life. He was depressed and put on a lot of weight really fast, which didn't help with the depression at all. He confided his troubles to his friend and fellow minister Ronnie Banks. Didn't talk to his wife about it for some reason, though. He told Ronnie he couldn't open up to her. Well, I guess if you're choosing your life partner based on your mom's criteria, then bearing your soul might not always be part of the deal. David told Ronnie he felt unsuccessful in his career, felt bummed out all the time, and worried a lot about money.

His ministry paid $35,000 a year, which translates to about $90 grand now. Not bad at all, but David had expensive taste. He had a couple of side hustles in real estate and his old career as a butcher, but he's still worried. He was in a deep funk. He was, you know, in some kind of a crisis right there in the middle part of his life, you know, which you might call mid-life. If only there was a phrase that sum that up. I've heard of this phenomenon.

Through all of it, though, he continued to be there for his congregation, including one guy who hadn't so much drifted from the church as flown from it like he'd been shot out of a cannon. In 1987, Jim Methini was 32 years old and recently divorced from his wife Teresa. She loved Jim a lot, but she couldn't take him when he was drinking, and lately, if he was awake, he was drinking. Teresa blamed Jim's problems almost entirely on booze, which is maybe being a little generous. He'd been in jail for a whole series of crimes, including mugging and pimping. I don't think you get blackout drunk one night, and when you wake up, you just find out you're now a pimp. Like, oh, shit, not this again.

Hate it when that happens, I'm just suddenly in this colorful leisure suit, this hat with the, you know. With the feather. with the feather in it and big sunglasses. Now, that's Elton John. I don't know. I'm getting pimped clothes mixed up with Elton John clothes. No, that's not how it happens. There are some bad choices being made there,

which is not to understate the severity of Jim's troubles with alcohol. I mean, these were major. At the end of 1986, he started a detox treatment at Nashville General Hospital that would keep him hospitalized for five months. I mean, that's a serious problem. Now, unlike Jim, Teresa still is still a. attended Emmanuel Church, and she still cared a lot about her ex-husband. She worried about him, figured the path he was on was going to take him straight to an early grave. So she turned to Reverend Terry

for help, called him up one day and asked him to come to the hospital with her and pray for Jim. And when Reverend Terry told her, you're not going to believe this, but I was just thinking about Brother Jim. Teresa's heart lifted. It felt like a sign from God. That direct quote, by the way, comes from John Glatt's book, For I Have Sinned, which was one of our main sources for this story. It's a great book. It's actually a compilation of different true crime stories. It's very good. And Teresa felt even better when Reverend Terry arrived at the hospital. Whatever he thought of Jim Atheney's life since he left the church, David Terry was warm and friendly to him now, and he promised he'd help Jim get back on his feet and start living a better

life. And over other visits throughout the spring, he kept his promise, giving Jim a few hundred dollars for six weeks rent at a rescue mission after his discharge and hiring him as the church handyman at $10 an hour, which at the time was three times the minimum wage. There were a few strings attached, of course. Initially, Jim and Teresa reconciled, and when he got out of the hospital, he moved back in with her. But Pastor Terry said that wasn't going to work. They were divorced now. They couldn't live together. That would be living in sin. The message was clear. Reverend Terry would help him, but Jim had to follow the rules of the church. The handyman gig was the first proper job Jim had ever had, and other than

Teresa, Reverend Terry, was pretty much the first person to give a shit about Jim in his entire adult life. Jim's father died when he was really young, and if we put on our amateur psychiatrist hats for just a second, mine has sequins on it, it's very fetching. Mine's at a jaunty angle. Of course it is. If we put on our psychiatrist's hat, it's not hard to see why he just totally basked in all this attention and care from a respected pastor, right? He really seemed to be flourishing since he got out of the hospital, and when Reverend Terry baptized him back into the church, Jim Methini really seemed touched. Sometimes people really can turn their lives around. The pastor and the former pimp had become good friends. Now that's it. You tell homicide detectives

investigating a decapitated corpse that their prime suspect, who's been in trouble with the law his whole life, couldn't have done it because he's been on the straight and narrow for an entire three months, and they're going to struggle to keep their eyes from rolling out of their heads. As far as they were concerned, Jim Mathini was a sketchy guy who was also the last person seen with Reverend Terry. And their suspicions weren't allayed when they found the Reverend's car just down the street from Mathini's apartment. There was no reason for it to be there unless something had happened to the Reverend close to Mathini's home. In the back of the car, police found a couple of empty beer bottles and David Terry's ID card and credit cards, as well as some fishing gear that didn't seem to have been used that day.

Under one of the seats, investigators found a towel with what looked like blood stains on it. None of this was reassuring. It was looking like Jim Mathini might have fallen off the wagon and gotten into some kind of altercation with Reverend Terry. He had to be found and fast. A witness just down the street from the church told police he'd seen a big guy, Jim Mathini was just over 250 pounds, on a motorcycle riding away from the church, right when the first flame started shooting up into the night. But that was about it as far as Leeds went on the first day of the investigation.

Police put out an APB on Jim Methini. And then the day after the fire, the autopsy results came in and turned the whole case upside down. Remember how a jet of water from the fire crews managed to land right on the rolled-up carpet with the body in it, saving it from being totally destroyed? So because the body wasn't all the way burned, the medical examiner was able to x-ray the body and see a couple of prominent surgical scars. And there was nothing in Reverend David Terry's medical history to match. The body wasn't him. The beloved Reverend Terry hadn't burned in the church fire at all. So who the hell was the victim? When investigators asked Teresa Mathini about Jim's

medical history, she told them he once had lung surgery over at Nashville General Hospital. The medical examiner got a hold of the x-rays from his stay over there and found they were a match to the ones from the burned headless corpse. Jim Mathini, prime suspect in a gruesome murder, turned out to be the victim instead. Damn. So where did this leave the case? Well, there was a difference between what the investigator said publicly and what they were thinking in private. Publicly, they said they were deeply concerned about Reverend Terry's safety, that whoever had killed Jim Mathini may have done the same to him. But among themselves, they were all thinking what I bet you're all thinking right now, that Reverend Terry had flipped the script, from victim to prime

suspect. The autopsy also revealed that there was no way the axe found at the scene had been used to remove the victim's head and arm. They'd been severed neatly, cleanly by someone with the skill and sharp tools of a surgeon, or, you know, a butcher. The axe had been left there to try to tell a story to misdirect the investigation. Yet another line on the long list of killer is getting too damn fancy. And if the attic had burned as badly as the killer hoped it would and the body had been totally destroyed, it might have even worked. Removing the head is an obvious step if you're trying to confuse identification of a body. And the arm? Well, Jim Mathini had a tattoo on his right forearm. Another easy ID, so that had to go. The Emmy also found that a couple hand-sized pieces of

skin had been cut away from the back of both Jim Methaney's shoulders. He'd had tattoos in those spots, too. The burned body, if you recall, had been wearing a belt with a buckle in the shape of a big letter T, a gift to Reverend Terry from his wife. Thing is, the only other thing it was wearing was a pair of underpants. Fellas, have you ever in your life worn just underpants and a belt? and we're not talking about a belt with like a holster for whatever weird freaking young guns, sex games you get up to in the privacy of your own house. Please don't tell us about them. I'm saying just underwear and a belt. I'm guessing the killer made the mistake a lot of amateur arsonists make and thought the fire would just totally obliterate anything that wasn't solid metal, which is of course not how fire works at all. Even on bodies much more badly burned than Jim Mathini, you can usually figure out basic stuff. like, were they wearing pants? The belt buckle, anyway, meant that the killer not only wanted to disguise the body's identity,

they deliberately wanted to make it seem like Jim Atheney's body was actually Reverend David Terry's. And by far the most likely suspect for that, of course, was the Reverend Terry himself. But why would this beloved minister want to fake his own death? What could have driven him to such desperation that he would kill and dismember, a member of his own congregation, and burn down his own church?

It would take a little while for investigators to put all the pieces together, but it would come down to two familiar favorites in the world of murder motives. Wounded pride and money. The Reverend David Terry, a bishop's son, had always assumed that one day he too would be a Pentecostal bishop. Not only would this be a huge boost in prestige for a man who cared so much about appearances that he refused to wear shorts, it also came with a salary of $75,000, about $200,000 today. That's a nice chunk of cheese right there. And there doesn't seem to have been any reason for Terry to believe he was going to get to be bishop, other than a deep faith in the wonderful powers of nepotism.

It couldn't have been his performance. Reverend Terry's congregation might have considered him a fine and hardworking minister, but Terry cared more about numbers, and his church wasn't growing. As it happened, Terry's faith in nepotism might not have been entirely misplaced, but if he thought this through, he might have spotted a pretty big stumbling block on his road to bishophood. Bishop Rob Roy Banks, great name, by the way. Rob Roy Banks actually chose not to retire at all right then. And when he ultimately did, it was going to be his own son, Ronnie, who succeeded him.

When Terry found out, he was furious, devastated. Already depressed by his mother's death and worried about his performance as a minister, he started spiraling. And as people tend to do when they're in that kind of mental state, he made a whole series of bad, bad choices. Right after he got passed over for the promotion to bishop, Terry went and sold the parsonage attached to his church for $50,000. A parsonage, a.k.a. a house, which was owned by the Pentecostal church, not him.

He had zero right or legal standing to sell it. But he wanted the money and he wanted to stick it to the church. It's not often you come across spite-based real estate deals, you know, unless they're like divorce-related. but here we are. So he'd essentially embezzled 50 grand from his employers. What could go wrong, right? The answer, of course, is everything,

and no sooner had he pocketed the cash that he started panic. He was going to get caught. He was going to lose his job. He was going to be shamed in front of his congregation and his family. Yeah, money is a lot easier to conceal in the sale of a literal house. Like, someone is going to miss that. Like, David Copperfield had to use mirrors and junk. Right.

And for someone as hyper-aware of status as David Terry, who'd already shown a willingness to commit a crime most of us wouldn't dream of in a million years, this was a dangerous place to be. I mean, we've seen a zillion cases where desperate people commit murder over stuff like this. And in February of 1987, churning with worry and fear, the Reverend Terry was in an East Nashville magazine shop when he happened to pick up a copy of Soldier of Fortune magazine. Ah, hello again, old friend. Good old soldier of fortune pops up in true crime almost as often as fake vampires and Ambien. Perfectly normal reading material for a preacher man, I'm sure. Church work is like 60% ministering your flock and like 40% reading up on violent adventures of international mercenaries. It seems like it's a pretty even balance, to be honest.

In most denominations, actually, you get to choose if you're Cascic, comes from, like, comes in black or a multi-terrain camo pattern. That's a fun fact for you out there that might not know. Anyway, among the terrifying ads for poison-making guides and guns for hire, Terry noticed one for a guide on how to put together a fake identity and just disappear from your life. The idea grabbed hold of him immediately. Here was the answer to all his troubles. his life was a mess? He'd just get a new one.

He ordered several books on the subject from Soldier of Fortune and binge read them all. As time went by, he got more and more obsessed with the idea, and he started spending hours at the library going through obituaries in old newspapers. His plan was to steal the identity of a dead person who had been born around the same time he had. He first planned to use the identity of a boy he'd been friends with as a kid, Ronnie Alderson, who had drowned at the age of six. but he couldn't put together the personal information he need to get a birth certificate at the time, which I guess would have been place and date of birth plus the parent's names.

In 1987, pre-internet, it wasn't likely that anyone would cross-check against death record, so this would usually be enough. Yeah, this would be a lot harder to pull off today. Yeah, yeah, for sure. On a visit to Mount Olivet Cemetery in Nashville, where I assume he'd gone just to scout out tombstones from the right time period, Reverend Terry hit peterd. He found the grave of Jerry Millim, who'd been born just three days before David Terry

and died at age seven, poor kid. Back at the library, Terry dove into the old newspapers for details on this kid's death, and he found them. Young Jerry Millim's death had been tragic, with his father drowning at the same time after jumping in to try to save him. This meant there were quite a few news stories about the deaths,

and David Terry was able to put together enough info about Jerry Millen to get a copy of his birth certificate. Once he had that, it was pretty easy to get a social security number and a driver's license. And y'all are going to love this. Reverend Terry later said he felt there was something almost Christ-like in resurrecting the identity of this poor kid. Yeah, just sit back and let that percolate for a second. Stealing the identity of a drowned child so you can run out on your life and your family,

Christ-like. Yeah, that's just what Jesus would do. Very holy, bro, you absolute fucking turnip. Wow, that's a lot of heavy. There's a lot of heavy sighing in this one. I just, I just can't. So his new identity as Jerry Millen was all set, ready for him to slip on like a comfy pair of shoes, but not quite yet. It wouldn't be a good idea for him to just disappear. year. For one thing, if he just vanished, people would look for him. And for another, and probably more important to him, they would know he ran away. Even if he never planned to see anyone from his life ever again, the idea that they'd know he fled all his responsibilities,

like the shame of that was unbearable to him. So the idea of faking his own death took hold. And not just a death, but a dramatic death, a martyr's death for a great man of God. He decided he'd have himself murdered. And after that, it didn't take long for his attention to hone in on poor Jim Mathini. And not only was Mathini a pretty close match to Reverend Terry's body type and basic look, he also had a sketchy past, which would make his disappearance believable.

You know, he was fleeing from justice after murdering Reverend Terry. And Terry had already decided that Jim was his best candidate for a body double when he got that call from Teresa Mathini, asking him to come to the hospital and pray for Jim. You're not going to believe this, but I was just thinking about Brother Jim, he told her. She'd taken those words as a sign of divine intervention. There was no way she could have known the awful truth behind them. For all the months that David Terry prayed with Jim Mathini, helped him get back on the straight and narrow,

got him a place to live and a job up to and including baptizing the guy, Terry was just methodically putting the pieces together to execute his plan. He planned on killing Jim the whole time. God, that's evil. I can't even process that. Land to the slaughter. That's so creepy. God.

In April 1987, using a check intended for a missionary program, lovely, David Terry bought a Suzuki Cavalcade, one of those big touring motorcycles using Jerry Millim's identity. He stuck in the dealer's mind for a couple of reasons. One, because of his awful toupee, and also because he refused to provide a contact phone number. A lot of numbers about to change, Terry told him. He also rented a self-storage unit to keep the bike in, again as Jerry Millam.

A couple weeks later, he took out a $100,000 life insurance policy with his three sons as beneficiaries, which is pretty much in keeping with who he is, but come on, dude, they're children. Give them money to your wife. They're going to blow the whole wad on like Nintendo and Transformers. Oh, and by the way, his fourth and youngest kid, a daughter, also got bupkiss. You suck, Reverend Terry. Ew. And just to be clear, it really does seem like Reverend Terry did intend this insurance money to go to his sons after his, you know, death to help them out. It wasn't like part of a scam to get the money for himself as far as we could tell.

It was probably just a small way to soothe his conscience for deserting his family. He planned to leave everything in the rearview mirror of his bike. On the morning of June 15th, David Terry got up early for the fishing trip he'd set up with his good friend Jim Mathini. He put $10,000 of embezzled money in new $100 bills into a dresser drawer for his wife to find, along with a letter telling her how to pay the bills and when she needed to take the car in for servicing. And sidebar, by the way, he had to tell her how to pay bills. Ladies, I'm begging you, please don't get yourself in a situation like this. Like, know how to do stuff, okay?

It's fine if your man wants to support you to stay home. As long as y'all have a fair distribution of labor in your relationship, hell, my husband stays home. I make the money. He takes care of me in a million other ways. We've worked it out. It's all good. But please, don't become so dependent that if he leaves, you're screwed. It's just such a trap that women fall into all the time.

Learn this stuff. It's important. So it's just two cents. Anyway, so Terry slipped a $100 bill into each of his son's bill folds, then packed a bag full of new clothes, his Jerry Millam documentation, and his butcher's tools. Did he think that this wouldn't strike the cops as odd? Like, I know. Oh, this dude got randomly murdered.

It's so lucky that he also left behind instructions on how to pay bills, money to pay those bills, and gave money to his sons. But not his daughter, because the women folks shouldn't have money. It turns him into jazz bells. It was a bizarre choice. And surely his wife must have suspected something. I mean, it's just, I don't understand. Anyway.

A few miles away, Jim Mathini was excited. He loved spending time with Reverend Terry. For the first time in years, he was feeling good about where his life was going. While he waited, he called Teresa up to tell her about the fishing trip. Then Reverend Terry pulled up at his blue Hyundai, and they headed out. On the way, Terry asked Jim if he'd mind stopping by the church to move some furniture down from the attic. Jim, always ready to please his new friend and benefactor, said, sure. In the church, Jim hurried up the stairs, Reverend Terry just behind.

This was the culmination of months of planning, and Reverend Terry was leaving nothing to chance. The night before, he'd come and hidden a 38-caliber pistol just inside the entrance to the attic, along with the axe and a homemade fuse, and as Jim Mathini bent to pick up some furniture, David Terry retrieved this gun and shot him in the back of the head at point-blank range. Jim fell forward, dead in an instant. Reverend Terry rolled his body into a green carpet and stripped him down to his underpants for reasons. Honestly, I have no idea why. He was planning to burn the place to a crisp anyway, why I undress the guy. It's weird or whatever. My best guess is that he wanted to put Jim in his clothes.

Like, like, redressing bodies is a pretty common fuck-up for killers. Like, you really can't dress a dead person well without, like, training, like a mortician. But I genuinely have no idea. Then he wrapped his own belt with the teabuckle around Jim's waist. Now it was time for the gruesome part. The Reverend Terry didn't seem to have a problem with it. Using his butcher knives and bone saw, he neatly took off Jim Mathini's head and his right arm below the elbow, putting the head in a heavy canvas bag.

He took the severed arm and pressed the dead hand against a couple of beer bottles and his own credit cards to get Jim's prints on them. Then he put the arm in the bag with the head. He drove his Hyundai close to Jim's apartment and left some clues for police. The beer bottles and credit cards with Jim Atheney's prints on them, his own ID card, and a towel smeared with his own blood. Then he took a cab to his self-storage unit to pick up his motorcycle, which is genius choice for a large and physically distinctive man to make in the middle of a murder.

Go ahead. Add in a witness. Why not? As a treat. I know, and he thought he was so flippin' clever, too. Like, oh, I'm going to put his fingerprints on stuff. and then he goes and does something dumb like that. That's just amazing. And cab drivers love to talk. Like, that's the thing that bothers me. It's like, they are chatty, chatty fuckers. He rode the Suzuki back to the church,

rolled Jim's body in the carpet, then took his bag of body parts out into some bushes near the church, where he'd hidden his motorcycle and rode out to Old Hickory Lake just outside of Nashville. He drove all around the lake looking for somewhere to dump Jim Mathini's severed head and arm, but was frustrated. This close to the city, there was nowhere really remote he felt confident the body parts wouldn't be found.

So he headed west instead, riding 50 miles to the wilder shores of Lake Barclay. There, he rented a little fishing boat and rode out to the middle of the lake and discreetly dumped the candace bag over the side, weighed down with rocks, watching with relief as it slowly sank into the murky depths. Reverend Terry rode back to Nashville and, as darkness fell, unrolled the green carpet, holding Jim Matheny's mutilated body. It was only then, he noticed the two tattoos on the back of Jim's shoulders. Damn. He got a fish scaling knife from his tackle box and sliced off the inked-up skin,

which, I'm sorry, this is horrible. He flushed down the toilet. Ah. Then he rolled Jim's body up again and covered the carpet with two-by-fours and plywood, then set the axe beside the pile. He'd already stored two cans of gasoline in the attic, and he splashed this all over Jim's body and all over the attic, then trailed it down the stairs and walked up and down the aisles soaking the whole place in gas.

At the back door of the church, he set up his homemade fuse, made from a candle and a piece of cloth, and tried to light it. But his matches wouldn't strike. None of them. Soon he ran out and had to go to the convenience store to buy a lighter. This slit the fuse straight away and the homemade fuse might not have worked quite as he'd intended because the next time anybody would see David Terry, most of his eyebrows would be missing. Seems the fire caught on quicker than he thought it would, dumbass. Remember what we said about arsonists in the Deborah Green episode last week?

Yeah. Arsonists gives themselves bad haircuts with fire all the time. He rushed away from the church as the fire bloomed up behind him and sped away into the night on his Suzuki, leaving the life of David Terry behind him. And the next morning, in a little motel on the outskirts of Nashville where he'd grabbed a few hours sleep, he started putting together his new identity as Jerry Millam. He ditched the toupee and shaved off what little remained of his actual hair,

then tidied up the remains of his singed eyebrows. He thought about shaving off his big old bushy porn stash, too, but decided to keep it, because he thought it made him look tough. Which might seem as go strange now, but you got to remember, this was the mid-80s, okay? golden age of Hulk Hogan and Magnum P.I. So maybe he was right at the time. I mean, it was literally the most recognizable feature on his face. So keeping it was a weird choice for an attempted reinvention. But evidently, our boy was determined that Jerry Millam was going to be a tough dude as he, I don't know, rode from town to town performing freelance butchery, maybe, solving

mysteries along the way. I don't know. He doesn't seem to have given a lot of thought to the next part, you know, to what his life was actually going to be after flying the coop. All that mattered for the moment was getting out. The final touch to Jerry Millam was a slathering of self-tanner that landed him somewhere on the spectrum from healthy glow to

liver failure. And with his shiny new identity complete, Reverend Terry hit the road and scooted a couple hundred miles to Memphis where he treated himself to a big meal before taking in a Memphis chick's baseball game. As you may or may not know, many Pentecostal

faiths frown on sports. Hey, you know, if you want thrills, stick to those Bible quizzes, right? The Reverend Terry had never been to a sporting event in his life, even though his oldest son was a star on the high school football team. But as Jerry Millam, he couldn't get enough. I know, isn't that awful? He wouldn't, I mean, like, come on, go to your kid's game. I can't believe they don't let them have sports. Like, that would seem to me, like, if you're marketing, your denomination, you know, like, that's going to be a significant black mark for a lot of people that you can't watch sports? Seriously? So he'd never been to a sporting event in his life, but as Jerry Millam, he could not get enough. The very first night of his new life, he went to a

ball game. He might have even had a beer. Clutch the pearls. Jerry Millum didn't last long, though. On the morning of Wednesday, June 17th, a day and a half after Jim Methini's killing, he turned on the TV thinking he'd see a story on the murder of beloved minister David Terry. Instead, he learned that police were hunting him for Jim Mathini's death. Whomp, wamp, I just love that because he thought he was so flippin' smart, you know, and it literally took him like a day now. One day, in a new identity, was all he'd bought for months of planning and manipulation and the brutal murder of a vulnerable man who considered him a friend.

Once again, bowed down by dejection and feeling quite accurately like a complete failure, Reverend Terry called his attorney in Nashville and asked him, to start negotiating a safe surrender. But apparently he wasn't willing to come all the way clean because before riding back to Nashville, he went to the bank of the Mississippi River and tossed in the gun and used to kill Jim. Now, to Reverend Terry's many failings,

and there are many, you can also add being an incompetent motorcyclist because on the ride back to Nashville, he fell off his bike, bruising the shit out of his arms and legs. I love that and I love the burned-off eyebrows. It's just delightful. So good. He made it back to his self-storage unit, though,

where he left the bike and the Jerry Millam driver's license and limped over to a nearby doctor's office. He told the doctor that a drunken employee at his church had beaten him up with a two-by-four, but refused to offer any more details. Whether this story was just reflexive bullshit from a trapped rat or whether Reverend Terry was still hoping to make the whole situation

somehow Jim Mathini's fault, I don't know. But option number two was clearly a non-starter. justified decapitation, really not a thing. Mm-mm. Nope. Yeah, self-defense kind of flies out the window when you start cutting body parts off. Mm-hmm. When he was done at the doctor, Terry retrieved his bike and rode downtown, where his attorney had arranged a meeting in his office with the assistant police chief,

Sherman Nickens. But that attorney also told Terry not to answer any questions or discuss the case, so the meeting really didn't go anywhere. It was getting late. Chief Nickens went to arrange an arrest warrant and Reverend Terry not yet in went home. When he showed up, shaven-headed, and with something sort of kind of resembling a tan, if you squinted, his wife and kids were shocked and thrilled. But Terry more or less ignored them and went straight to his bedroom, refusing to answer any questions. Jesus, are you serious? Like,

hi, I'm back. I'm not taking questions. Slam. Like, really? It's very, like, 1950s husband. Like, I just got off my shift. Leave me alone. alone. We were just so glad he was home that we didn't want to go into any questions, his wife, Brenda, said. He told me he could not go into details, and I know my husband. We did not pressure him. Brenda. God. I know my husband. Do you? Do you, Brenda? Bless your heart. Bless your heart. I feel so bad for Brenda. Okay. So first, you think your husband has been murdered and beheaded, and then your husband is wanted for murdering and beheading somebody, and then he turns up out of nowhere in what is clearly a half-ass attempt at disguise,

walk straight to his room and slams the door. I got to say, I'd have questions. Just a couple. Just a couple. Early the next morning, a grand jury indicted Reverend David Terry for first-degree murder and arson. He turned himself in. Being behind bars didn't loosen his tongue any. He still refused to talk about Jim Atheney's murder or the location.

of a severed head and arm. His shocked congregation and colleagues refused to accept his guilt, as did his wife Brenda. She visited him every week in jail. Just before the trial, Terry finally told detectives where he dumped Jim Atheney's head and arm and even drew them a map, but police divers would never find them. It took the jury just four hours to find the Reverend Terry guilty of murder and arson, and now they just had to decide whether he'd be sentenced to death. A weepy apparently

Contrite Terry told him he'd been plagued by screaming voices in his head and that he'd somehow thought he was shooting himself when he shot Jim Mathini Uh-huh That seems legit Like shut up, dude God

I'm crazy He tried it, he tried it Oh yeah He denied any meticulous planning And begged the jury not to send him to death row But on September 25th, 1988, that's precisely what they did, sentencing him to death by electrocution. Dang. The death sentence was successfully appealed a year later due to errors made with one of the aggravating circumstances of Ginny's murder.

But the jury in the resentencing hearing came back with the same verdict of death. He didn't make it to execution, however. In 2003, David Terry took his own life by hanging himself in the bathroom at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. Did he feel guilty for what he'd done to his friend, his wife and children, the church members who trusted and looked up to him? Or did he just decide he couldn't hack prison life any longer? Who knows? Jim Mathini wasn't a perfect person. Nobody is.

He had some struggles in his life going all the way back to his childhood. Some of them weren't his fault, and some of them were. But whatever he had in his past, by the time he met David Terry, Jim was genuinely. trying to get his life together. He loved his wife and children, and they loved him. Yeah, you know, we talk a lot about betrayal on this show, and I honestly can't imagine a betrayal more cold-blooded than this one. I mean, from the moment he visited Jim in the hospital,

hospital where, remember, this poor guy was taken the first incredibly difficult and courageous step toward recovering from a lifelong addiction. From that very first moment, David Terry was planning on taking his life. also he could ride off on a motorcycle and escape being outed for theft he took this guy's life more or less to just avoid embarrassment i mean first offense preacher respected by the community he probably wouldn't have even done jail time no but the idea of losing face with those people who admired him to terry that was worth more than jim mathini's life and that my friends is a master class in narcissism so that was a wild one right campers you know what 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. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Cassandra with a K, Donna, Emma, boo.

Ah! Jessica, Laura, Rachel, and Catch These Hands, awesome name. We appreciate y'all to the moon and back. and if you're not yet a patron, you are missing out. Patrons of our show get every episode ad-free, at least a day early, sometimes even more, plus an extra episode a month. And once you hit the $5 and up categories, you get even more cool stuff. A free sticker at $5, a rad enamel pin while supplies last at 10, virtual events with Katie

and me, and we're always looking for new stuff to do for you. So if you can, come join us at patreon.com slash true crime campfire. And for great TCC merch, visit the True Crime Campfire store at Spreadsharpier. com.