6 | Angel of Death
6 | Angel of DeathUpdate: 2024-12-16
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An unlikely source reveals Mick's dark past, offering a new perspective on the murder of Cindy Cozad.
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00:00:00
"Lords of Death" is released weekly every Monday and brought to you absolutely free.
00:00:06
But if you want an exclusive ad-free bench, sign up for Tinderfoot Plus.
00:00:11
Check out the show notes for the link to subscribe.
00:00:14
You're listening to "Lords of Death", a production of "Tenderfoot" TV and association with Odyssey.
00:00:23
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the individuals participating in the podcast.
00:00:29
This podcast also contains subject matter which may not be suitable for everyone, including themes of murder and sexual violence.
00:00:36
Listener discretion is advised.
00:00:38
While my mom carry gave me the box to start all of this,
00:00:53
I wanted to figure out why Cindy Cosad was murdered in June of 1995.
00:00:58
And what was the extent of Mick's involvement?
00:01:01
When I was a kid, my mom was adamant that Mick was just driving the car and had nothing to do with the murder.
00:01:07
But if this is true, it's not clear why Tim killed Cindy.
00:01:11
Even today, Mick claims he doesn't know.
00:01:15
When I spoke with Tim's close friend,
00:01:26
Pete Gravens, he revealed one potential motive for the murder.
00:01:31
This made me wonder if the murder was supposed to be Mick's sacrifice to join the "Lords of Death".
00:01:47
Remember, to join the group, you had to take a soul.
00:01:51
As much as I didn't want to believe this, I couldn't just write it off.
00:01:55
In the only person who knew the real reason behind the murder was Tim.
00:01:59
So I wrote him a letter and asked him to tell me the truth about what happened and if Mick shot Cindy.
00:02:04
You want to know if Mick lied, he wrote, "I'm not asking you to believe me over Mick."
00:02:09
So ask him to explain what happened on his last case when he went to prison for manslaughter.
00:02:15
So Tim's reasoning for why I should believe Mick shot Cindy Cosad is simple.
00:02:20
He says Mick has killed before, but if this is true, I need to know the full story.
00:02:25
So I sat down with my mom and asked her what she knew about it.
00:02:29
I knew about Mick having a past from day one.
00:02:33
From the very first day that he came over and sat on the porch and talked to me.
00:02:37
He was very open and honest about his past and the fact that he had been in prison before and why he was in prison.
00:02:42
He told me that in the mid-80s, he had served some time in prison for killing his uncle.
00:02:50
He told me that his uncle was very abusive, a very mean, angry man that abused Mick and his cousins.
00:03:00
And they all got together and decided to put an end to it and the only way they could do that was by murdering him.
00:03:08
From Tenderfoot TV, I'm Thrasher Banks.
00:03:13
This is Laura's death.
00:03:15
[Music]
00:03:39
So he told me that they killed his uncle by shooting him,
00:03:50
that they all had participated in shooting him.
00:03:53
And then they took the body and buried it in Wayne National Forest.
00:04:00
He took the blame for the murder completely himself.
00:04:03
He didn't want his cousins and any kind of trouble at all.
00:04:08
So he was the only one who served any time.
00:04:11
I was never skeptical of anything that he told me because he didn't have to tell me.
00:04:17
He volunteered everything that he told me.
00:04:19
So I never questioned it.
00:04:20
It just seemed like the truth.
00:04:21
He wasn't putting the blame on anyone else.
00:04:23
He was taking the blame.
00:04:25
He wasn't making any excuses for it.
00:04:27
So yeah, I believed him 100%.
00:04:30
Now do you think that he was the ringleader of that situation or anything that he was just more along for the ride?
00:04:35
I kind of feel like he might have been along for the ride and then took the fall for it because his personality, although he had a strong personality and he was very outgoing, he kind of does seem to be a follower,
00:04:46
not a leader.
00:04:47
So with Mick's whole uncle thing, how did you feel about that?
00:04:51
I had no reason and still have no reason to not believe what he had told me.
00:04:56
I didn't have the internet then, nobody did.
00:04:58
So I couldn't look things up and verify anything, but I had no reason to not believe him.
00:05:02
Although I don't condone, murder, and any capacity, I understood why he did what he did.
00:05:10
Did it ever cross your mind and make you feel uncomfortable?
00:05:14
No.
00:05:15
I was never afraid of him because of that, because I trusted him.
00:05:18
If anything, I felt terrible that he had to do what he did to protect his cousins and his family.
00:05:24
You know, unless you knew him, you probably wouldn't understand.
00:05:27
But I also know that I'm not the only person that's ever been in this type of situation that saw someone for who they really were and not the way the rest of the world saw them.
00:05:39
So here's the thing about my mom.
00:05:42
She always looks for the best in people, the idea that Mick sacrificed himself to protect his family, outweighed the fact that he had killed someone.
00:05:50
But for me, as an adult, I had a hard time believing Mick's story.
00:05:55
I mean, what are the odds that Mick was involved in two different murders?
00:05:59
At this point, I started thinking that maybe Mick had manipulated my mom and wasn't the person we thought he was.
00:06:05
But to give Mick the benefit of the doubt, I gave him the opportunity to tell me his side of the story.
00:06:11
I look a busker Kentucky at the time, saying, "Well, my grandma."
00:06:15
Like I said, I was in my little bad ass phase.
00:06:17
When I was a teenager, me and my grandma don't get along at all.
00:06:21
And my uncle, he would come down and pick me up.
00:06:23
He would take us down to his place right there in Ohio.
00:06:27
He did that a lot too.
00:06:28
I really liked him, because I think he'd come and get me like every summer.
00:06:33
You know, he would take me down there.
00:06:35
I'd stay there the whole summer and he'd bring me back toward the fall.
00:06:39
I'd hang out with him.
00:06:41
Mick's uncle, Jack, lived in a rural part of southeast of Ohio with his wife, Geraldine, and her three kids from her previous marriage.
00:06:48
To protect their privacy, I'm not using their real names.
00:06:52
There was Caleb, who was mix-age, his brother Miles, and their older sister, Maddie.
00:06:57
You know, those really good people, they are.
00:06:59
I pretty much love him like brothers.
00:07:02
I mean, we do have to get it pretty much, you know.
00:07:05
Yeah, they're my people.
00:07:06
After spending a few summers in Ohio with the family, Mick developed a close relationship with his cousins.
00:07:13
For a while, everything seemed fine.
00:07:15
Mick even admits he enjoyed spending time with his uncle, Jack, and the rest of the family.
00:07:20
But in the summer of 1985, things started to change.
00:07:24
The stories they told me I was just horrified.
00:07:27
They would show them all these holes in the wall when they would make them stand and shoot around them.
00:07:32
That was just a foul shit.
00:07:34
The whole family, I guess, had been going to them since they married him.
00:07:37
Oh, they were scared to death of him.
00:07:39
They were literally scared of him.
00:07:41
Everybody was.
00:07:42
I never had a clue he was like that.
00:07:44
I wonder if he was a dickhead about things.
00:07:47
But I don't know if he was like that to that family until the time.
00:07:50
I'm starting seeing things and put two and two together.
00:07:53
Nick witnessed some of this firsthand, like the bullet holes in the bedroom wall that he mentioned.
00:07:58
But as cousins shared other stories about Jack, the detailed pattern of abuse they'd endured during the seven years he'd been in their lives.
00:08:06
Here's one of the cousins, Caleb.
00:08:08
He refers to Mick by his first name, James.
00:08:11
I'll be straight up, okay?
00:08:14
The guy with a sick bastard.
00:08:17
The guy was just perfect, the fucking head.
00:08:21
He told me that I would fuck my whole mother if somebody would hold her down, let me fuck her.
00:08:27
I don't know, but I'd be out of something to be like that.
00:08:30
Seven years we lived with this guy.
00:08:33
We went to a lot of shit.
00:08:35
I couldn't even eat something, dude.
00:08:37
He flipped the table over, says he would walk in the kitchen, he said that he would just grab the table and just laugh.
00:08:45
This was a sight of Jack that Mick had never seen before.
00:08:48
I just couldn't believe what I was seeing, you know?
00:08:51
I was ashamed.
00:08:52
He was my uncle.
00:08:53
I was like, wow.
00:08:54
This is something he had hidden from the family forever.
00:08:57
And I just couldn't believe he was doing what he was doing.
00:09:00
I'm using him like that.
00:09:01
I mean, he was that bad of a dude, he was.
00:09:05
He pulled gun, he'd draw down on you so quick at what he was funny.
00:09:07
And he was serious, you know what I mean?
00:09:09
He was a real bad dude, he was.
00:09:11
It would just leave you in shock, too, because you just couldn't believe it.
00:09:14
Some of the stories Caleb and Mick shared with Mick are so horrific.
00:09:18
I don't even want to go into detail here.
00:09:20
Like I said, we went through hell, dude.
00:09:22
We sat in the house and he would just pull out his gun and just start shooting.
00:09:27
We have to get out of there.
00:09:28
It's bad, because he's just come and just start shooting.
00:09:32
His load's 22 pesos, a pound, a pound, a pound, a little while then.
00:09:37
We get down again.
00:09:39
It's bad, you know?
00:09:41
He beat my sister so bad, my sister's been good a lot.
00:09:45
Maddie had it the worst of them all, and it's the abuse escalated over the coming months.
00:09:50
The other cousins couldn't bear to let it go on a day longer.
00:09:53
As you have walked way up to it, as you beat my sister so bad, then we just had enough, man.
00:10:00
We had enough.
00:10:01
We could do it no more.
00:10:03
As the night went on, and Jack became more intoxicated, his behavior towards Maddie grew more violent and unpredictable.
00:10:11
Making his cousins felt that if they didn't do something, her life could be in danger.
00:10:16
Well, that night, we all knew.
00:10:17
I mean, we just knew.
00:10:19
I was like, "Oh, man."
00:10:20
And he was actually seriously strange to that night.
00:10:23
He started showing his ass, got a drunk.
00:10:26
It starts out like every time we're down there every weekend.
00:10:30
He likes to get drunk.
00:10:31
Well, that's when his true, true, true colors come out.
00:10:35
He threatened to kill a ****.
00:10:37
She really didn't know that this is how he was.
00:10:39
He just picked on her.
00:10:41
He picked on all of them.
00:10:42
And then, particularly, I can't remember exactly how he said or what he said, but we knew.
00:10:47
That's a nah.
00:10:48
He's gonna hurt her or kill her or something.
00:10:51
And I don't know.
00:10:52
I've had enough myself.
00:10:53
Everybody had enough.
00:10:55
And we just knew.
00:10:57
I knew we were gonna take a stand that night.
00:10:58
I just knew.
00:10:59
Did you know that happened Halloween back by the way?
00:11:02
The way Jack was treating Maddie, pushed Mick and his cousins over the edge.
00:11:07
Rather than let him continue to abuse her, they decided to finally do something about it.
00:11:12
We said it's enough.
00:11:13
We can't do it no more.
00:11:15
Here's our rampage.
00:11:17
He was dead by violent.
00:11:20
Some reason, he left us at home and we said no more.
00:11:23
We couldn't do it no more, man.
00:11:26
We couldn't do it.
00:11:28
I got to say that I played that seven years of hell.
00:11:32
And according to Mick, the cousins weren't the only ones ready to do something about Jack.
00:11:36
Drowning whispered in my ear that night.
00:11:39
I wish she was dead.
00:11:39
That's what she said.
00:11:41
Whether you're looking for a new true crime podcast with minimal side talk or one that focuses on the victim and their story,
00:11:54
you've got to check out our show Going West.
00:11:58
Going West is a true crime podcast hosted by me, Heath, and my partner, Daphne.
00:12:02
Hello.
00:12:03
In each episode, we dive into various US-based disappearance and murder cases.
00:12:07
Whether it's the bizarre stalking story of Dorothy Jane Scott, a young mother who received harassing phone calls before she went missing from a hospital parking lot in 1980, or the episode on The Man Upstairs,
00:12:18
where we discuss the 1950 murder of Janet Christman and the urban legend that came of it.
00:12:24
We drop episodes twice weekly on Tuesdays and Fridays, so go check out Going West True Crime wherever you listen to podcasts.
00:12:32
The cousins decided that rather than call the police and run the risk of Jack making bail and at all coming back on them,
00:12:47
they needed to end it once and for all.
00:12:49
To them, the only way out was to kill Jack.
00:12:53
So after he left the house with Maddie to drink with a friend, Mick, Caleb, and Miles put a plan into motion.
00:13:01
The plan was for Mick and Miles to wait behind a coal pile and shoot Jack when he got out of his truck.
00:13:07
Caleb's job was to guard the back door with a shotgun in case Jack tried to get inside.
00:13:12
He went and got the shotgun, loaded him, gave me a pocket full of shells, he took a pocket full of shells and arrested his tree.
00:13:20
We went for him to come back and that's what we was all concerned about because we knew once he came back, we all knew it was on.
00:13:27
We knew there was no turning back and you could really hear our hearts pounding when he was driving up the driveway.
00:13:34
We was scared to death, I know a lot.
00:13:37
Jack pulled up, he stepped out of the truck and we made sure we went in first before we started firing.
00:13:43
As soon as Jack got toward the end of his truck and she was inside, I fired.
00:13:48
Since him's been in the back, he fell, I reloaded again and fired another one.
00:13:54
At that point, they went inside the house to check on Maddie and Geraldine, who were both the strut.
00:13:59
We stepped back outside to look on him and see what we were going to do with him and he was gone, right?
00:14:05
We were like, where the hell did he go?
00:14:07
Then we looked around and he was up on the truck with his hand up on the axle.
00:14:13
He was slipping away and then dragged him out and Jack asked the question, "Why are you doing this?"
00:14:20
And replied, "You know why."
00:14:23
He fired three or four times, I'll remember correctly.
00:14:26
I ain't gonna lie to you, I'll be straight honest.
00:14:30
When that happened he came over by the truck, he was scared up there.
00:14:35
I pulled out a shotgun of that back door and I went, "Home!" I don't know if I gave my eight truck, no but I was a truck, I don't know if I gave it or not.
00:14:45
But I was so scared he would come in the fucking house, dude.
00:14:49
I was having it again.
00:14:55
The guy was sick, but the guy was just sick.
00:14:56
He hated me.
00:14:58
I gave him two and I paid back a bit, try to look at it.
00:15:05
Then finally we went back inside again and Geraldine was, you know, "I'm sorry, you could just see the look of happiness on her face.
00:15:13
I'm sorry, she was happy."
00:15:15
"I think it was the one that suggested burying her, Mike says I don't know exactly where to go."
00:15:21
After killing Jack, they wrapped his body up in a rug and put him in the back of a pickup truck.
00:15:27
They decided that Mickey Miles would bury his body in a remote part of Wayne National Forest while Caleb stayed home to clean up the blood and pick up the shell casings.
00:15:36
We drove around forever though, God, I mean, I think we drove around for three or four hours, but I can remember seeing a transmitter tower blinking off in the distance.
00:15:45
It wasn't that far off either.
00:15:46
I mean, it couldn't have been no more than 500 yards and he went down over the hill.
00:15:52
It was like a little where he could fall to the side of the road.
00:15:55
And in fact, when we dragged him out of truck, he was in the tarp, right?
00:15:59
And as soon as he hit the ground, he took off.
00:16:02
He started sliding down the hill, we had chased after him, but he stopped when he hit a tree down to the bottom of the bluff.
00:16:08
That's where it's at the very end, right where he stopped.
00:16:11
Mickey Miles spent several hours digging the hole for Jack's body.
00:16:15
By the time they were done, it was daylight, and it drove into town to wash the blood off of the truck.
00:16:20
So what happened after, did you guys, like, leave town or what happened?
00:16:25
If I remember correctly, they left that day.
00:16:26
Where did you go?
00:16:29
We all went to Kentucky, and while I went back home, you know, with my brothers and everything, my mom, grandma.
00:16:38
The story they told the rest of the family was that Jack got upset, left, and never came home.
00:16:44
Nobody believed it, though, as far as you can just see grandma, you know, it's her son.
00:16:48
She was like, "I don't make sense," you know.
00:16:50
I guess they would come and get her and they would take it down to the postman's police department.
00:16:55
They found a missing person to report.
00:16:57
They found one that they came and talked to me, and they said, "We know what happened."
00:17:04
It took authorities nearly two years to figure out what happened.
00:17:08
When they first spoke with Mick, he wrote out a detailed confession about the murder.
00:17:13
Here's part of his statement.
00:17:15
That was a very nice family, Mick wrote.
00:17:18
They would do anything for a person.
00:17:20
But when Jack came into their lives, it was a whole new deal.
00:17:24
Jack had that family scared to death.
00:17:27
What we did was the only way out for the family.
00:17:30
And if you knew Jack the way we did, you would agree that was the only way out for them, too.
00:17:35
You know, I've never had any feelings of taking someone's life.
00:17:38
And after we shot and killed Jack, things in my life haven't been the same for me.
00:17:42
And I'm sure it hasn't been for miles in Caleb.
00:17:45
You have these weird dreams.
00:17:47
Can't think, right?
00:17:49
But as time goes by, it clears up little by little, but not all of it.
00:17:54
I can see myself not wanting to do things like I used to.
00:17:57
It's just a different life to live with.
00:17:59
Although Miles, Maddie, Caleb, and Geraldine could finally live in peace after seven years of fear, beatings, and whatever else Jack put them through.
00:18:07
They're free to live their lives the way they want to.
00:18:10
But you gotta understand this much.
00:18:12
I ain't no murderer.
00:18:14
I don't intend to be one either, even though I have killed a person.
00:18:18
But that was the only chance that I could see of getting something done about Jack.
00:18:22
You must understand it had to be done.
00:18:25
We had a purpose to do what we did, and I sure do feel bad about it.
00:18:28
We had no choice.
00:18:30
All I want to do is get this out in the open so I can go on living a normal life.
00:18:34
Because I feel that after all this is over with, I'll be able to go on without any problems.
00:18:39
But I want you to understand we're not cold-blooded.
00:18:42
And I don't want to be thought of as that.
00:18:47
Just investigate it, and you'll see I speak the truth.
00:18:49
Even with mixed confession, the lack of a body made it difficult to build a case.
00:19:00
So they asked me to take them where they buried Jack out in Wayne National Forest.
00:19:05
They took us all down the porch with this dual drive-along.
00:19:09
We ended up going down there with them, driving the back roads.
00:19:12
And I just knew something wasn't right because those back roads had been reworked.
00:19:16
They did a lot of road works back there, and they just weren't the same.
00:19:19
Because I couldn't find that spot for nothing.
00:19:21
Yeah, this is a hell of a story.
00:19:23
It's crazy.
00:19:24
It's crazy.
00:19:25
Look.
00:19:26
I found documents in the box about Jack's murder, and noticed that an attorney named Rick Faulkner represented Mick on the case.
00:19:33
I have no reason to doubt making Caleb's account.
00:19:36
But I hope to get additional clarification from a third party.
00:19:39
So I gave Rick a call and asked him if he remembered Mick's case.
00:19:43
If this was the Halloween killing and it was at South Webster Ohio, I'm pretty sure that's my quarter.
00:19:50
I got it.
00:19:51
I remember the case now.
00:19:52
Once you do a homicide, you don't forget it.
00:19:54
So what's my quarter got to do with you?
00:19:57
Kid was bound to lose.
00:19:59
The way he was brought up.
00:20:00
When we got him, he was a nice kid.
00:20:02
He didn't have an axe to grind with the world, but bad shit seemed to happen around it.
00:20:06
He would have been maybe 18, 19.
00:20:08
The quarter was a follower.
00:20:10
This guy that was a victim was not a good guy, and that was pretty well uncontroverted.
00:20:16
He was a bad guy.
00:20:17
No question about it.
00:20:19
And the way he was treating this little girl, she was young.
00:20:22
He pimped her out to local guys.
00:20:24
The whole thing was about what he was doing with the daughter and how mean he was to the kids.
00:20:28
And they were all scared to death having roughed him up pretty bad.
00:20:32
It was certainly one of those brought up on by a very emotional circumstance.
00:20:37
It wasn't justifiable, but it was certainly understandable.
00:20:41
Even law enforcement understood why they killed Jack.
00:20:44
As Caleb said, they went through seven years of hell.
00:20:48
Given the pattern of abuse they were subjected to, I can see why they did what they did.
00:20:53
Although I don't condone it, and so far, it sounds like Mick has been truthful about why they killed Jack.
00:21:00
His public defender Rick was able to confirm it almost to a T all these years later.
00:21:06
They jumped up from behind the coal pile, shot him, didn't kill him, letting lead out.
00:21:12
They pulled him out from underneath the truck, rolled him up, put him in the back.
00:21:16
It was the middle of the night, because it was close to midnight when they got over to the gas station with them rolled up in a rug, playing in the back of a pickup truck.
00:21:24
And they were going to take him out in the forest and bury him, and then they come up with the idea that one of them knew where there was a well, and they're just dropping him in the well.
00:21:31
And then grandma found out where he was and started talking to him about the ghost who was walking the ridge out there someplace.
00:21:38
And I rode with the deputies out there with the kid for a couple of weekends.
00:21:44
We're trying to place it from the boy's memory, because they had driven out there in the middle of the night on Halloween, because he was very, very specific where they came from.
00:21:54
And there's only three ways up on top of that ridge.
00:21:57
And we went through literally a half a dozen different occasions of wells.
00:22:01
And we got into one that seemed to fit his description, because there was a radio tower.
00:22:07
Not too far, he described.
00:22:09
Well, there's only one radio tower out there.
00:22:11
It's at a place called Roe.
00:22:13
We made a serious effort, because it's in an area that I had originally grown up in.
00:22:20
And so we knew from his description as to where all this was.
00:22:26
And we knew that there were wells out there, because if you walk those hills and ridges, you got to be aware that there's wells out there that you could fall into.
00:22:34
So we knew where this little community of Roe had been located.
00:22:39
When we was up there looking, we went through several of these wells, got down in this well and dug it up, and there was trash and such, and they found some bones.
00:22:47
Turned out the bones we found were bovine in nature.
00:22:52
We never did find the body.
00:22:54
So you've had bodies still out there somewhere?
00:22:56
Somewhere, I don't think he was ever found.
00:23:00
So the discrepancy between Mix Account and Rix is that Mix told me that they buried Jack.
00:23:06
But when he went with law enforcement to search for the body, he told them they dumped him in a well.
00:23:11
So I talked to Rick Falkner.
00:23:13
Yeah, I'm all right.
00:23:15
Rick seemed to think the body wasn't an old well.
00:23:18
Listen, he's buried out there.
00:23:20
They did a lot of road work, I guess, since 1985 back there.
00:23:24
I mean, I was made to have different things was.
00:23:27
So what I gathered without Mix stating it explicitly is that he had no intentions of leading them to Jack's body.
00:23:34
So he made up the story about the well.
00:23:37
Even though they didn't recover Jack's body, Nick was charged with aggravated murder.
00:23:42
He felt bad about it, but he gave a confession and statement and then did a plea on it because we played into a manslaughter.
00:23:49
They didn't have anything really to put him except the testimony to co-defendants.
00:23:53
They didn't have a body.
00:23:54
You know, it's very rare that you can convict somebody, but you can't out a body as long as they're clear that he's dead.
00:24:00
He did, I don't know, a couple of years, not a lot of time.
00:24:04
Given the circumstances of Jack's murder, Rick was able to get the courts to throw out the aggravated murder charge if Nick pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter, which carried his sentence of three to ten years.
00:24:16
After that, Nick never saw his cousins or Geraldine again.
00:24:20
[ Music ] The last time I saw them,
00:24:38
of course, McKenny Jail.
00:24:39
The last time I saw them, they were called in as witnesses to the grand jury.
00:24:44
That's the last time I saw them.
00:24:46
That's the last time I heard or anything you knew about them, you know.
00:24:50
Nick's cousins avoided charges for the murder and didn't know what happened to Mick until I connected with Caleb a few years ago.
00:24:57
Guys, see the boy, I can say, with 35 years, they're long, long, long times, you know, high-spot and the poor boy.
00:25:06
Did he get jail time out of this shit for the 85s, you know of?
00:25:11
He was at a man's field for like three years.
00:25:16
Over the 85 mother.
00:25:18
Yeah, so from '88 through '91, I don't wish I had nobody, the boy was innocent.
00:25:25
I swear, man.
00:25:27
So how did it turn out that James is the one that got in trouble not you?
00:25:31
I don't know.
00:25:32
I swear to God, man, I do not know.
00:25:36
I just, we were, they came to God as we come all the way back to the house.
00:25:42
And I said, all the way back to South West.
00:25:44
So we went to court.
00:25:46
I can remember sitting in there.
00:25:48
And it was just, the one person out at the end of the table was asked the questions.
00:25:54
The prosecutors was actually on their side, but they just told me to go home.
00:25:59
Why James got blamed, adults.
00:26:01
I told the whole truth.
00:26:03
But the truth, best.
00:26:05
And why James got, I did, those James got in trouble.
00:26:08
Not to you got a hold of me.
00:26:10
Well, his lawyer told me that he made a deal that as long as you and [bleep]
00:26:15
didn't get any trouble that he would take us all for it.
00:26:18
We took them blame, huh?
00:26:24
I just love, I just love.
00:26:27
He knew what we was going through, man.
00:26:30
He's innocent on the 85.
00:26:33
We all had parts in it.
00:26:35
Not just him.
00:26:38
I live with him every day.
00:26:40
Think about it.
00:26:41
And they made me a better person, baby.
00:26:43
They made me love more.
00:26:45
They made me realize what you got.
00:26:48
I'm so sorry.
00:26:55
I'm so sorry.
00:26:58
[music]
00:27:15
Learning about the circumstances surrounding Jack's murder gave me a new perspective on Mick.
00:27:20
It turned out that he wasn't manipulating my mom at all.
00:27:24
What he told her about the murder when they first met was true.
00:27:27
What he did wasn't right, but he did it to protect his family.
00:27:32
So he operates in a moral gray area.
00:27:35
He's willing to make sacrifices to protect the people he loves, even if it involves violence.
00:27:41
If they didn't kill Jack, Matty could have ended up dead.
00:27:45
But what does this mean for his role in Cindy Cosad's murder ten years later?
00:27:49
Do you think that Mick would kill someone, kill a woman or no reason?
00:27:53
I do not.
00:27:57
I think that the only reason Mick would have fired a shot would be if he thought she was already dead and he was doing it to save us.
00:28:03
He did what he had to do so that he felt like we were safe.
00:28:07
That's the only way it makes sense to me.
00:28:10
Knowing Mick the way that we knew Mick.
00:28:13
Even my aunt Tammy felt that Mick was trying to protect us.
00:28:17
Was he forced to?
00:28:19
Because I don't think Mick would have done it otherwise.
00:28:22
I think he was in a situation that he didn't know how to get out of and the only way to save his life, your life, your sister's life,
00:28:33
and Carrie's life was to do what Tim was telling him to do.
00:28:38
I think he did it to protect you guys.
00:28:41
Like a sacrifice.
00:28:42
Yes, his life freeers.
00:28:46
I found a news article in the box where Mick is quoted saying that Tim had threatened to kill me, my mom, and my sister.
00:28:53
If he told anyone about the murder, he even echoes this sentiment in his interview with Detective Wave Lawson.
00:28:59
I can't tell what did this.
00:29:07
I'm sorry, I didn't shoot her.
00:29:10
Well, I don't know.
00:29:12
I don't think it looked like that time.
00:29:14
What?
00:29:14
Look what I said, shoot.
00:29:16
He wanted me to.
00:29:18
He threatened me.
00:29:20
He threatened to fuck out.
00:29:22
He said, you know what's going to happen if you don't.
00:29:25
I may not be no angel, but I did not shoot that girl.
00:29:29
I got a woman out there very much and two kids that he ain't my brother.
00:29:33
So if Mick did shoot Cindy, did he do it out of fear that Tim would harm my family?
00:29:40
If he was coerced by Tim, is he equally responsible for Cindy's death?
00:29:46
Ultimately, that question was decided by a jury at his trial.
00:29:51
But he didn't kill her.
00:29:52
I can't, I can't convict this person when he didn't kill her.
00:29:56
We were looking at the same facts differently.
00:29:59
That's when the truth becomes a more abstract idea.
00:30:04
The verdict was read and I don't think either one of us thought that that was going to happen.
00:30:09
[Music]
00:30:20
"Lords of Death" is a production of "Tenderfoot TV" in association with Odyssey.
00:30:27
Your host is Thrasher Banks.
00:30:29
The show is written, produced and edited by Thrasher Banks, with additional writing by Meredith Stedman and Dennis Cooper.
00:30:36
Produced by Meredith Stedman and Dennis Cooper.
00:30:40
Executive producers are Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay, consulting producer and video production by George Miller.
00:30:48
Supervising producer is Tracy Kaplan, artwork by Byron McCoy, original music by makeup and vanity set, with additional music by Thrasher Banks,
00:30:59
mixed by Cooper Skinner.
00:31:01
Thank you to Orin Rosenbaum and the team at UTA, Beck Median Marketing, and the Nord Group.
00:31:08
Special thanks to Tori Ross, Caitlin Kaboski, and Thrasher's mom, Carrie.
00:31:13
For more podcasts like "Lords of Death," search "Tenderfoot TV" on your favorite podcast app, or visit us at tenderfoot.tv.
00:31:22
Thanks for listening.
00:31:24
Thanks for listening to this episode of "Lords of Death."
00:31:41
This series is released weekly, absolutely free.
00:31:44
But if you want an exclusive, ad-free bench, sign up for "Tenderfoot Plus."
00:31:49
Check out the show notes for the link to subscribe.
00:31:52
(upbeat music)
00:31:53
