Last Rites

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I'm Kate Winkler-Dawson.

I'm a journalist who's spent the last 25 years writing about true crime.

And I'm Paul Holes, a retired cold case investigator who's worked some of America's most complicated cases and solved them.

Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most compelling true crimes.

And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring new insights to old mysteries.

Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime cases through a 21st century lens.

Some are solved and some are cold.

Very cold.

This is Buried Bones.

Hey, Kate, how are you?

I'm great, Paul.

How are you?

It's kind of Halloween-y.

It's looking very Halloween-y on your side there.

Well, you see my buddy over here.

Wait, yeah, right direction.

Yep.

My buddy back here.

And I was just joking to one of my kids that they said, how did he die?

And I said, waiting to see if that Victorian era chair is ever going to get comfortable.

And this is the result.

They are not comfortable.

And I'm sitting in one right now, but my poor guy died back there.

Yeah,

we had an anatomically correct skeleton when I was first started out with the Sheriff's Crime Lab back in the day, had been there forever.

And of course, his name was Sherlock Bones, you know.

And every now and then we'll get dressed up around Halloween.

So it's kind of neat.

Oh, good.

And you have, we've talked about this probably four years in a row, but, you know, your kids did Halloween and now you guys don't do a lot, right?

No, we will throw up some decorations, you know, like we've got some stuff out because we do get small kids in the neighborhood that will come.

But obviously with the small kids, we don't do anything gory or over the top.

It's more of the, you know, just kind of a little spooky

and keep things relatively tame for the little kids.

Okay.

So did we do, I did warn you, you know, that I am planning to upgrade my cottage for the next couple of episodes because it is Halloween time.

Did you do anything spooky in your man cave slash manly library?

I don't know how to describe your space right now.

No, well, I've got a couple of Easter eggs.

I have this book over here, Bones.

Oh.

And, you know, kind of matching, you know, your skeleton over there.

And, you know, this book, it's by Dr.

Douglas Ubelacher, who's with the Smithsonian Institute.

And he's

quite a famous anthropologist.

And in fact, I sent him a skull back in the day that I had recovered from a backyard.

And the skull came back.

It looked like it had been used in some occult-related activities with some paint and

some sooting on it, like it had been over a fire.

And

the skull came back to a young girl per his assessment.

Oh, no.

Now, we don't know

if this is

somebody that is more of a modern AL skull, if this was a war souvenir, because we didn't get much

kind of the racial information indicating that maybe, you know, somebody from Vietnam war brought this back from overseas or Korea.

Don't know that at this point.

But

that was surprising.

You know, I was like, oh, you know, and to this day, I don't know if this skull has been identified and if my former coroner's office has even attempted it.

Was he able to date it?

I mean,

how many years is it?

Do we know?

No, you know, there was inside the skull was a fragment of a newspaper.

It looked like a rat had probably made a nest inside the skull and brought that newspaper in.

And if I remember correctly, there was a 1982 date on this fragment of newspaper.

So it predates that for sure, you know, but

you know, who knows?

And that's just one of those those things is like this eternal mystery for me is like well did we identify her and and I will say with you know the genetic genealogy being done on human remains like what what my employer Authram is doing day in and day out we're finding that the anthropologists aren't necessarily right in terms of you know identifying gender identifying race based off of the physical features of of the bones and so the DNA has really proven to be much more more robust to get the real answer as to who this person was.

And of course, we can use genealogy to identify who the person was.

You need to give the coroner's office a call and find out where you are on that case.

It's fascinating.

I need to harass the coroner's office, yes.

Well, I mean, that's just amazing.

And then, of course, you would follow that up with, now we're supposed to be talking about light things and we're talking about a case, but you would follow that up with, once we figure out where she lived, looking for missing person reports from that time time period and all of that stuff, right?

Then you'd have to do the regular detective work.

Right.

And that's just, you know, as we've talked about in the past, when you have an unidentified person,

you know, where do you start?

And particularly with just a skull, you can't even say this is a homicide.

That's the complexity.

But once that skull is identified, if it ever is identified, then you can start digging into the circumstances of who this person was.

And it was there anything suspicious, you know, like a

missing girl from somewhere, maybe in the Bay Area.

Hmm.

Well, this is very Halloween-y talk, absolutely.

And I'm glad that you're embracing your background.

This is the power of YouTube when you

I know so many people are listening, but then you can see our fun little things, the bones book, and all of that.

Well, I even have a, it's a, it looks like a crystal skull.

It's actually an empty vodka bottle that's in the shape of a skull.

So I move that into view.

You're so festive pole holes

I should have filled it yeah I was looking for food coloring to put like red liquid in there so it would stand out a little bit more but we just don't have any in the house so

yeah well maybe for the next one we'll see

okay this is not a particularly spooky story but it'll be interesting because I don't quite know if we've ever told a story like this before.

And it starts out with a bit of mystery.

We're in one of my favorite time periods, I know it probably sounds like I'm constantly saying that, but this is for real.

This is where American Sherlock was set in 1921, and it's in Birmingham, Alabama.

And there will be some historical context that I'll have to give you to understand this case.

Let's go ahead and set the scene.

Let me tell you about where we physically are, where we're going to be, you know, exploring this murder, and then I'll kind of give you a little bit more about the place and the time period and everything.

So this is a Catholic church.

You know, the first thing I thought of when I started to think about this case being, you know, involving the Catholic Church, and it's not a case that we have unfortunately become to associate with a Catholic Church.

This is different, is there going to be a lockdown of information?

within the church, you know, depending on who's involved and what will this do to their reputation, presumably.

So, you know, I'm going to look out for that kind of stuff too as I tell you the story.

So we are in Birmingham, Alabama, 1921,

and it is Thursday, August 11th, because this was important to me.

I looked, and this is about 18 months into Prohibition, which I'm fairly sure most of our audience is aware of, you know, prohibiting of alcohol in most circumstances, except medicinal.

And I think I did tell you this then in my book, I found out that during Prohibition, Walgreens, which was making medicinal whiskey, you know, for medicine to help people, They were the only ones legally making alcohol in certain circumstances.

They expanded their pharmacies from like 14 to 275 during prohibition.

So, so probably I would say Walgreens was the only place that actually loved prohibition

in much of the country.

Yeah, probably a lot of black market whiskey was making its way out of the Walgreens distillery there.

I think so.

And, you know, Oscar Heinrich, my forensic scientist guy from American Sherlock, that's where he started becoming interested in chemistry is they taught him how to make medicinal whiskey and what its uses were so he thought well this is really interesting and i'm sure took a little sip sip here and there he was in high school of course okay so we're at st.

Paul's Catholic Church Birmingham Alabama at 630 and this is a wedding you know and we have a priest named Father James Edwin Coyle and he's important so that you would want to jot his name down like you are and he had performed a ceremony just minutes before, okay?

And he had married two people with a massive age difference, an 18-year-old named Ruth Stevenson and her fiancé, who was a 42-year-old man named Pedro Guzman.

And I'll tell you a little bit more about them in a minute.

He has performed this ceremony.

I'll give you the background on how that came about, but the opening scene of this is he is sitting on the swing of the rectory porch.

So, not right where the chapel cathedral would be, but you know, the adjoining building.

And he has a rectory housekeeper who is inside named Stella, and then Marcella is his sister, and they're both inside.

He's on the porch by himself.

He had just finished this ceremony for Ruth and Pedro and was sitting outside relaxing.

And he did not think that this wedding was, this was not a planned wedding on his part.

He had been visiting with a friend at St.

Catherine's Church in Pratt City, which is about seven miles away that day.

And he gets a call that sounds pretty desperate from one of his fellow priests, Father Brady, in Birmingham.

And he said that, you know, there is a young couple, Ruth and Pedro, who showed up at the rectory and they want to get married immediately.

And they didn't say why.

They say this is going to be a small ceremony.

And so the priest comes back and says, okay, we're going to go ahead and do it.

And so Father Coyle comes back and it's a small ceremony, very uneventful.

He's on this swing.

And while he's on the swing, the people inside who were Stella and the priest's sister, as I said, Marcella, heard two shots ring out.

And then there's a pause and there's a third.

So they can hear him from inside the house.

They rush to the porch just in time to see a tall man, six foot tall man, dressed in black, move slowly and deliberately across the yard toward a hedge that is separating the rectory from the church's goods supply house.

And they can see clearly that he's holding a gun.

He's not pointing this gun at them.

And he's not threatening them in any way, but he is separating himself from the rectory.

It's a 38 or a 45 automatic revolver.

They both come out and they look down and they see Father Coyle the priest is splayed out on the front porch to the left of the door.

And then I have a description of the scene, you know, where his body is.

Is that where you would want to go or do you have any questions so far?

Tell me what is observed about Father Coyle.

Is he just shot while he's on the swing or is there more things going on, more interaction between this tall man and the father?

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So, you know, like any investigation, you'll have the crime scene and then you'll have the results of the autopsy and more information in a little bit.

So, this is the crime scene if you're a deputy who's just showing up here.

So, he's on the front porch to the left of the door.

His head is against the wall, underneath one of the windows.

His feet are stretched beneath the swing toward the street.

And again, the last time somebody saw him who was not the killer, he was sitting on the swing.

There's a bullet wound in his temple that is still bleeding, and there are blood pools around his body.

The body extends halfway between the steps and the end of the porch swing.

And the blood is also spattered against the wall.

Everything else is in place.

So his hat is on the swing.

The papers are still neatly arranged on the swing.

And the porch's two rocking chairs and a bench are not disturbed at all.

So this is what they walk into, and then there's an ambulance that shows up in less than a minute.

And he's unconscious, but he's still alive.

So, you know, we've got this man who's sort of disappearing very calmly, holding a gun.

You've got this dead priest right after a ceremony on the porch.

And the last time people saw him, he was sitting on the swing.

And I have a photo of the porch, not the crime scene, but just so that you can see, you know, it's a beauty shot of the porch, just so you're able to see it.

Yeah, let me take a look because, you know, one of the questions that comes into my mind is: the shooter, would Father Coyle have seen him approach, or is there a chance that the shooter could have snuck up?

But let me see.

I know you sent me this.

So, this is a photo of the rectory.

And so, what I am looking at is it's a photo showing, in essence, what appears to be a porch.

I see stairs that lead up to a door on the left side of the photo.

And then there appears to be to the right, maybe some sort of overhang.

There's columns that go up, probably supporting a roof.

And then I see just a standard bench, what appears to be a chair, maybe a rocking chair next to that bench to the right.

And then to the furthest right, what appears to be a swing that's facing

kind of the length of the porch towards where the door and the stairs are.

You know, there is a chance, and this is where, you know, the autopsy results will be important,

but there is a chance that the shooter could have come up from behind with the father kind of facing towards

the door.

There appears to be space for the shooter to have either snuck up

to get close before starting to shoot.

Based off of the position of Father Coyle's body, where he's off the swing, you don't have the disturbed items, like there was a struggle.

It almost appears like maybe the shooter walked up onto the porch or walked up right next to the porch and the father stood up off of the swing and then he gets shot, likely with the two shots.

My guess is his autopsy is going to show that he has two shots that may have hits more center mass in the torso chest area.

And then you have the pause.

Father Coyle goes down and then you have the execution with the gunshot wound to the temple.

Now, that's just right now, you know, just say educated speculation.

So from here, can you give me the autopsy results?

Sure.

And I can also give you, the deputy sheriff goes, and we have a pretty good detail about where bullets are found, like what walls, the measurements,

all of that.

So, which one is more helpful?

Do you want to stay at the scene or do you want to go to the autopsy?

Let's do autopsy first, and then I'll revisit the scene with those trajectories.

Okay, well, this is going to be anticlimactic, but he was alive, and then, you know, we get him to the hospital.

And I wanted to mention mention this to you because I thought this was really interesting.

So when the ambulance driver gets him to the hospital, he's still unconscious, but he's alive.

And there's, you know, a small crowd that has gathered around and had loaded him onto the ambulance.

And it goes to St.

Vincent Hospital, which is less than 10 minutes away.

In the meantime, our deputy sheriff, who's going to give you all this great information, is examining the crime scene and I'm assuming looking for this mysterious man in black who had done this, we think.

Okay, so the medics, there's a doctor named Dr.

James Mason,

and the medics at the hospital first give him a stimulant to try to kind of wake him up.

So then I was thinking in 1921, what would the stimulant be now?

That, you know, I don't know if it's the heart racing.

And, you know, I was thinking defibulator, but they're talking about a chemical.

Would there be something now that would, in this circumstance, would be appropriate?

Yeah, that I don't know.

You know, I know at times that you'll see medical staff inject epinephrine in order to, you know, stimulate the heart or

whatever else potentially.

Father Coyle is shot through the temple with a 38 or 45.

You know, yeah, he may still be, you know, his heart is beating and his lungs are, you know,

he's breathing.

But, you know, in essence, his brain has been,

in all likelihood, destroyed to a great great extent.

So the term alive when you made it to the hospital is probably a loose term based off of, you know, I've seen what happens, you know, inside the skull when you have a close-range shot from a 38 or a 45.

Well, the stimulants that I was looking at, I was trying to figure out what they meant.

And I thought you'd think this was interesting.

So they would use cocaine would be one of them.

And then I thought, oh, okay, if it's cocaine, then also maybe amphetamines.

The amphetamines didn't come into hospitals really until the late 1920s.

And this is 1921.

So they're using, you know, cocaine.

They also used strychnine in small amounts to try to get the heart going again.

It didn't work.

And he dies.

So these are the observations first of the doctor who is Dr.

Mason.

He says there are no powder burns and there is no gunshot residue on Father Coyle's body.

And an x-ray of these wounds reveals that a bullet had pierced just in front of his left ear, which is right at the jawbone, and it tore through his brain and had blown a hole through the base of his skull.

You know, they had thought, I guess Dr.

Mason thought that maybe this would be emergency surgery.

And then he backed away from that when he saw that.

He said, you know, this guy is not going to recover.

And he was given his last rights and then he dies.

Yeah, you know, so that sounds like that was the observed shot that was seen at the crime scene, which was described as the temple area.

It's kind of just a little down from the temple area in front of the ear, but it's going through the skull as opposed to kind of going down through, let's say, the face.

His observation of, you know, no, what I'd call stipling

or gunpowder residue, you know, this firearms discharge evidence is what we can look at in order to try to determine how close or how far away

the shooter was standing from the victim.

So at least with his observation, this was a shot to Father Coyle's left side of his head at a distance that this gun wasn't leaving this type of firearms discharge evidence.

However,

the extent of damage inside Father Coyle's head, the base of the skull, he's describing as basically being blown out, 38s and 45s.

I mean, that seems like that's an awful lot of internal damage for this caliber of weapon at a distance.

I'm kind of wondering if this wasn't what would be considered a contact gunshot, where literally the gun is held tight up against right by outside the left ear, and all the gases from this gunshot literally go inside Father Coyle's head.

And that can cause significant damage.

These gases are very damaging.

But right now, you know, it's I just have to assume that maybe this is a shot that's maybe greater than two feet away.

I mean, it doesn't take much distance for this type of firearms discharge evidence not to be deposited on Father Coyle.

Well, and it seems clear to both of us, right, that because his hat is still there on the porch swing neatly, his papers, which would have flown everywhere if he were shot on the swing, right, are there neatly.

So he clearly saw somebody coming or something and stood up or heard something and stood up.

Is that right?

Well, that's, you know, that's my guess, you know, and this is where, you know, I'm kind of curious to see where else he was shot and then revisit the crime scene, particularly, you know, the position of the body as well as this statement you made about some blood spatter that's present.

So that's significant because this right now, it appears that this this shot to the left side of his head didn't exit the Yet Os.

And so is this spatter

coming back out of the entry wound, or is there another gunshot wound that could account for the spatter?

Well, it's interesting.

So he says Dr.

Mason had said there was no metal to remove.

So does that mean, that must mean that it was, it went through, right?

Yeah, so I misunderstood that.

Okay, so it's a through and through.

So it's possible that that spatter,

just depending on what side of

his head, that spatter could be very possibly from an exit.

Okay.

So this is why the photo and the body positioning or what we think the reenactment part of this is going to be really important later on.

So they've recovered one bullet.

They find several holes.

So there were some shots fired.

Only one hit him.

So there are no other bullets in him, no other wounds on him, just that one that we just talked about to the temple.

But there's evidence that there were other shots fired.

And of course they heard two shots and then a third,

the women inside.

But where they find these is what's going to be kind of important.

And I think it's going to be a lot of like trajectory, bullet trajectory.

And I don't know where you land on that.

Do you always believe in that?

You know, that they can predict from what height somebody was holding a gun when they shot somebody based on the pathway?

Well, it's just straight physics, you know, particularly if it's close enough range.

We're not talking about 100-yard distance.

Typically, we're talking about a matter of feet to a little bit, you know, 10, 20 feet, whatever.

And the bullets, as long as they're not impacting, you know, intervening objects or passing through other objects, you know,

they're going to fly true for that.

that stretch.

And so when we go and we have, let's say, bullet defects and walls, we will

evaluate that defect, document it, as well as then try to determine a trajectory if there's a possibility.

And that does give us accurate information in terms of stringing it back or now using lasers to be able to see what the flight path was of that bullet.

Now, sometimes, you know, you have to take into account, you know, how the offender is holding the gun

and

what is the question that needs to be answered in order to determine, can you actually draw any conclusions from the trajectory as to the circumstances of the shooting itself?

Sometimes you can, sometimes you can't.

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Let's go ahead and get to what the deputy sheriff found when he was on the front porch.

So we know it was one bullet, and that's what killed him.

And we know that the women inside Stella and Marcella, so they heard two shots ring out, and then there's a pause, and then there's a third shot.

So this is what the deputy finds so uh his name is fred mcduff the officers are there and they find bullet holes they examine the bullet holes in the porch and the church so i think what we're seeing is the church right next door with the kind of you know back on that photo it looks like oh yeah you can see maybe is that the drawing of a priest against the wall do you see that's kind of an odd almost like behind the porch.

Yeah, it looks almost like an apparition.

Yeah, it is.

Yeah.

Yeah, it looks odd.

But I think that's the church, and then the rectory is separate because that's his residence.

So what they say they found is

there's one bullet hole that is about 20 and a half inches from the floor to about three or three and a half feet in front of the swing.

I don't know if that goes into the wall.

I think maybe we'll get information about that.

The second hole is about 52 inches from the floor to about two feet behind the swing.

Yeah, so these must be in walls.

Both bullets pierced through the clapboards, entering higher than they exited.

So is that somebody shooting downwards?

Is that what that means?

Well, it indicates that the bullets at that point had a somewhat downwards trajectory.

Now, they're not indicating how steep of a downwards trajectory there is.

Describe that, the location of that second shot again.

So he says the second hole is about 52 inches from the floor and about two feet behind the swing.

And both bullets pierce through the clapboards, entering higher than they exited.

So if I'm understanding the directionality, they're finding these bullet defects into,

I would say, the kind of the wall that is behind the swing.

as if the trajectories are coming from the shooter standing, let's say, on the lawn and then shooting at Father Coyle towards the swing.

And then the wall behind that is where the bullets are striking.

Does that make sense?

I think that does make sense.

Yeah, so now you have one shot that's in front of the swing.

You have one shot that's behind the swing.

First shot is 20 inches above the floor.

The other shot is, you know, almost four and a half feet above the floor, but still having somewhat of a downwards trajectory.

Both shots have downwards trajectory.

So we have this tall man potentially standing on the lawn, shooting towards Father Coyle, missing him, and those bullets are going into this wall, which is sort of like the front of the rectory itself,

is what I'm thinking this is indicating.

And then you have this other shot that is catching Father Coyle in front of the left ear, and that's obviously the fatal shot.

Now, I have a newspaper article, which is terrible quality, and I did not think it was going to be helpful, but now all of a a sudden I think it's going to be helpful.

So it's poor quality, but I think actually it'll help clear out where the bullets are.

One of the officers finds a 38, so here's an answer to our weapon, a 38

steel jacket bullet from the left side of the porch.

And then another one, another officer removes a bullet from a bookshelf inside the rectory.

Okay.

So I don't know if that's more confusing or if that's helpful, but I'm going to send you this photo of this article because I think the photo from the article, at least it points to where one of the bullets is, which is the rectory.

Okay.

So that'll help.

Well, it's interesting that

these are jacketed bullets.

What does that mean?

Bullets often have a lead core, and then they can have a thin metal covering

that's often...

you know, in this case,

it's made out of steel.

And modern handguns, you know, when you're loading your weapon to be used, let's say for law enforcement, typically you have these bullets that are what we call hollow points.

So they're only partially jacketed on the side, but the tip is left unjacketed.

And that's exposed soft lead core, when it strikes an object or a person, it naturally mushrooms out and has a larger surface area.

And so it, in essence,

puts more energy into, let's say, the wound, but it also slows down rapidly inside a person's body.

So you don't overpenetrate.

When you have something that is completely jacketed, that's more of like for target practice.

And because it has this hard steel all around it.

it's going to have a greater tendency to penetrate deeper into an object or pass through a person.

So now what you have is you have a bullet found in the bookshelf.

You So that jacketed bullet penetrated all the way through the exterior wall and then ended up embedding into this bookshelf.

And that almost sounds consistent with this

bullet defect that was 52 inches high above the floor.

But maybe it could be the one that's 20 inches.

So it just depends.

But you might be able to line, you know, where that bullet is found with one of the two holes in the wall of the rectory.

Then you have this other bullet that's just laying on the porch.

It sounds like left side of porch near the front door.

And so that sounds like a bullet that, you know, it could be from one of the two holes in the wall if it bounced off of a stud or something.

Or that may be the bullet that passed through Father Coyle's head.

And now after it's gone through his head and has exited, it's lost energy.

So it doesn't go into the wall or pass through the wall.

It bounces off and then ends up bouncing over by the front door.

That's what I'm guessing.

And of course, we could look at these bullets and determine which bullet actually has potentially blood and brain matter on it and determine, yeah, this is a bullet that's the fatal bullet.

Does the fact that this killer used a steel jacket bullet, does that indicate anything about intent?

Because you said I heard target practice, but then I also heard penetrates deep.

So is this an ideal thing to go and murder someone intentionally?

Could he have purposely selected a

full jacket bullet?

Yes.

In my experience, the shooters rarely are paying attention to that aspect of the ammo.

Now, most of my cases are dealing with gangs,

and so they, whatever ammo they get, that's what they use.

So I don't know.

I really can't draw any conclusions as to what the use of a steel jacketed, full metal jacket bullet would mean to the killer or what his intent was.

So I'm looking at this photo that you just sent me, and I'm assuming on the left is father coil, Coyle, which is sort of like a portrait of him, if you will.

And then to the right is the right side of the porch, which shows the swing.

And yes, it's been photocopied way too many times.

But there is a white circle with a white arrow pointing at what appears to possibly be the bullet hole that is at a height that is above the back of the swing and towards what I would say behind the swing.

So that would be the second bullet hole, not indicating what the sequence is, but just the second bullet hole that you described.

And then there must be another bullet hole in front of the swing that is

maybe one-third the height of the second bullet hole.

I mean, this is just indicating to me, yes, your shooter is standing on the lawn shooting at Father Coyle.

You know, again, it's trying to figure out his body positioning, but it doesn't appear that the shooter and Father Coyle ever came into physical contact with each other.

Basically, Father Coyle is ambushed and shot.

And you think

that the lack of gunshot residue and powder burns is one of those big indicators, right?

Yeah.

And I'm kind of surprised, but it...

In all likelihood, you have a shooter that's going boom, boom.

Father Coyle is possibly moving, and then the shooter basically takes better aim and catches Father Coyle in the head.

But it sounds like it's going to be at a distance versus what my initial thought was is that Father Croyle collapsed and then the shooter came up and did a close-range shot to the

left side of his head.

Now, they're saying that he was found, let me double-check the body positioning to the left of the door.

So what I was thinking was, okay, it's probably maybe it's the door's left.

Like if you're standing, you know, looking out from the front porch, he must be going for the door handle to try to run inside and he gets shot beforehand?

Or does that make sense to you?

Well, the shooters, obviously, I mean, you got two shots, you know, that are right there on the right side of the porch, you know, where the swing's at.

You know, so yeah, it is possible.

You know, Father Coyle gets up and starts running and the shooter misses and then eventually, you know, tracks him as he is approaching where the door is and catches him on the left side of the head.

Now, that's where it's like, okay, is that where we are seeing the blood spatter up on the wall?

Yeah.

And it said that the top of his body, his head, it was found under one of the windows.

So he shot on the left temple.

He's going for the door.

And then what?

He's kind of thrown, he falls backwards and his head ends up, you know, even further away from the door under the window.

Or he just collapses, you know, and the body flops one way or another.

From a reconstruction standpoint, it really does indicate that at at the time of the first shot, Father Coyle is close to the swing.

The shooter is shooting twice in rapid succession at Father Coyle on the side of the porch where the swing's at.

And then Father Coyle appears to at least try to move away towards the front door and then catches the round in the head where he collapses.

And that's pretty typical.

Let's talk about the shooter.

And we're going to assume that the man who's dressed all in black, holding a 38, is the shooter.

And he's walking calmly away.

He's just sort of exiting the yard.

He's not making eye contact with anybody.

He's not running.

He's not doing anything.

So

is this the potential of somebody who is having some kind of a psychosis, psychological break, or a cool, calm assassin, or someone who is just so confident that in what they just did that they think they're going to get away with it?

Or maybe that's too vague of a description to give you to make a conclusion.

Who did this, Paul?

Yeah, you know, right now, all we know is that you have somebody that you know approached father coyle and intentionally killed him you know with a firearm uh it's interesting that he is not trying to get away quickly you know but also maybe he's he knows what's going on on the grounds of the church that you know potentially he has the time to be able to just kind of walk away.

I don't know at this point, you know, what to extrapolate related to his psychology or his mental state.

This is now, well, why was Father Coyle killed?

You know, this is where victimology comes into play.

And then, you know, you open up this episode talking about Ruth and Pedro and, you know, this, you know, marriage of a man and woman that have very, you know, large age gap, and it was a last second thing.

So is there a nexus with this wedding that Father Coyle performed and the reason Father Coyle was killed.

Well, let's, before we talk about Pedro and Ruth, because they're important, but let's talk about the overarching theme of what's happening in the 1920s, particularly with people who are Catholic in this country.

This is a very, very anti-Catholic time in America.

And Alabama is one of those places.

So, a little bit of background.

When prohibition comes in, of course, there's a religious sentiment to it, the belief that alcohol was corrupting people.

And there is, you know, the conservative part of the churches are coming together and saying this has to stop.

Of course, we also know prohibition was the origin of organized crime because anytime you tell people don't do it, they're going to find a way to do it.

So what comes with that is you have a lot of these Protestant groups, of course, like traditionally white nativist groups, who are blaming the immigrants, especially the Catholics, and saying that the saloon, they called it saloon culture in America, is corrupting everyone and causing cheating and murders and, you know, gambling and the corruption.

And they blamed a lot of people, including the Irish, and in some ways, especially the Irish.

And Father Coyle came from Ireland.

So he had been receiving a huge amount of hate from all across the city, even though he had been in Alabama for quite a long time, because it was really ramping up from the racists and the, you know, the xenophobic people and all of these hate groups led by the KKK.

And the KKK was really interesting in the 1920s because when prohibition came out, they said to law enforcement, we have a lot of men.

We're all really strong.

Let us help you tamp down the immigrants who are coming in and bringing alcohol like the Irish and the Italians and wrecking our way of life.

So in a lot of cities across the country, the KKK was responsible for cracking down on people who were breaking the law during prohibition.

And you can imagine this turned into just a nightmare for an awful lot of people.

As if prohibition weren't bad enough, then you're engaging with this clearly racist group that is willing to use violence.

And so the KKK is everywhere across Alabama in 1921 when this is happening.

And Father Coyle will not stay silent when people, you know, attack him and attack Catholicism in general.

So you're talking about a very outspoken priest in an area surrounded by so much hatred towards Catholics.

Well, and this is where there's a bit of victimology in there in terms of Father Coyle and potentially upsetting these groups, notably, you know, KKK, who sounds like they're in bed with law enforcement during this era in this particular town.

And this may explain why the killer didn't feel like he had to run away because he basically, in his mind, he carried out a mission that is accepted, socially accepted in this community.

There wasn't going to be anybody coming after him.

That's now maybe

you had asked me before, what does it mean about the killer?

And it's like, well, now it may just be, well, yeah, you know, this is just going to be an accepted crime.

I'll never be prosecuted.

In fact, I'll probably be lauded for committing this crime.

But you're also looking at just a massive pool of suspects.

If you're really going to, if we find law enforcement we trust and you're going to really try to drill down to who did this to this man, who's beloved within, you know, the Catholic community in Birmingham, you have just an endless amount of suspects who are willing to do this.

So where would you then start if that were the case?

If these two women who see the man in black walk across the lawn and sort of vanish into the shrubbery and they can't identify him, they've never really seen him before.

So then what happens next?

Do you try to approach these groups?

There's one called True Americans, which is a secret anti-Catholic political organization.

I mean, they're everywhere.

There's a variety of steps investigatively that could be taken.

You know, part of it is just a straight canvas,

try to find more witnesses.

When you start talking about these groups, of course, can go, you can try and go talk to them, but this is where now, depending on how law enforcement interacts with these groups, does law enforcement have informants that they can go to and say, hey, what's the word on the street?

What have you heard about who committed this crime?

Did somebody order this crime?

Was this just a hitman who's carrying out a mission for somebody else?

That's a shot caller.

And it's also just now who has Father Coyle had squabbles with, you know, in the

weeks, months, you know, leading up to his homicide.

And then, of course, the wedding.

You said that Ruth and Pedro, they're important to the story.

And right now, I don't know how they're important.

Pedro has a Hispanic surname.

Is Ruth also Hispanic?

She is not.

She is not.

What was her last name?

So her last name is Stevenson.

You know, I think the age difference and this got to get married now.

My assumption is, is that Ruth is pregnant.

You have a Hispanic male that's likely Catholic, and it sounds like Ruth is probably Catholic.

So they're rapidly needing to get this relationship ratified, I guess.

I'm not sure that's a good term or not.

And I kind of wondered, you know, is there potentially, when you initially mentioned the wedding, could this be, you know, like Ruth's father who is now upset, you know, that Father Coyle is willing to marry his 18-year-old daughter to, you know, this 42-year-old Hispanic man.

Is there anything going on along that front?

You know, so is it more in that real, like a family type of vengeance, if you will, versus what we were just talking about,

you know, this idea that Father Coyle is upsetting the community and this community, you know, struck out against him.

So it would be kind of in common culture, in a way, kind of an honor killing if this were somebody doing it on behalf of a family that did not approve of their daughter marrying somebody who was Catholic.

Something along those lines.

Yeah.

Well, let me tell you about Pedro.

Pedro was born in Puerto Rico and he grew up very Catholic.

And Ruth did not grow up Catholic, but she converted to Catholicism about four months ago.

She is not pregnant, as far as I know.

But when she was 12, she had been intrigued by the priests, you know, who were at St.

Paul's Church.

She lives nearby.

And she had even stuck in and seen some of the ceremony.

And as soon as she turned 18, she started to take steps towards conversion.

And she had met Pedro, and they fell in love.

I don't have commentary on the age difference.

We don't know very much about them, if they continued to stay married, if they had children.

But the most important part is that Ruth is the daughter of a Methodist minister.

Oh, interesting.

Okay.

He is not happy about their relationship at all.

And so when Father Coyle gets word that there's a couple on the steps of his rectory saying we need to get married, Pronto, and they had one person with them who was not even a family member as like a witness, this is the reason why, is because the dad is not approving of this.

Well, is Roo's dad very tall?

He is tall and he does like to wear black.

And he shows up on the steps of the courthouse and turns himself in and says, I shot Father Coyle.

And thus begins a big unfolding of, is this man going to get a fair trial or is Father Coyle going to get fair justice in a town that abhors Catholics?

You see where parents kill because of what somebody has done to their children, right?

In addition to this

father, because of what's happening with Ruth, he has some incentive on that front.

But also there's this religious divide that's also, you know, kind of stoking the fire, you know, the angst for this Methodist pastor, you know, to go, nope, you know, I got to take care of this, this Catholic priest.

He's done, he's done.

And in fact, I can almost see where he'd argue that

he's losing his daughter to Catholicism as a result of what Father Coyle has just done.

So his name is Reverend Edwin Stevenson.

He does turn in his gun.

Now, he doesn't say why he did it, but he says, here's my gun, and I committed this crime.

He's a local barber, and he is a Methodist Episcopal preacher in town.

They would call him an itinerant preacher, so he was kind of a traveling preacher, but he lived in Birmingham.

He is called the marrying parson, which means he does an awful lot of courthouse marriages for young runaway couples.

So, so far, so good, except he's also a member of the KKK.

So, the Reverend Stevenson has said, even though Pedro has been identified as white, I don't understand quite his heritage.

He was born in Puerto Rico.

It doesn't mean that he was Puerto Rican, but Stevenson keeps labeling Pedro as black.

So in his mind, his daughter is marrying a black man who is also a Catholic.

The approach is that he has literally nailed her windows shut.

He has whipped her when he found out that she was with Pedro.

And then, of course, when she converts to Catholicism and has, you know, done quite a lot of terrible things that people have heard.

I mean, this is all confirmed.

He strapped her to bedposts and he stuffed a rag in her mouth.

I mean, you know, he really had made it difficult.

And I think this is where the quick wedding came in.

So here we have a very violent man who seems to have this streak of wanting retribution, wanting to get his daughter out of this.

And he was too late.

She had already gotten married.

Yeah, you know, I mean, he's a child abuser, you know, first and foremost.

Obviously, you know, when he gets angry, he's willing to use homicidal violence.

You said he's not a good guy, even though he's

a leader within his Methodist community, if you will.

You know, it's interesting that

he targets Father Coyle.

And I'm just kind of thinking out loud: why not target Pedro and take his daughter back, so to speak?

But maybe he recognizes that if he kills Pedro, that is going to, his daughter is in love with this Pedro, and then he will never be able to save his daughter, if you will, or have her come back over to his side after doing something like that.

But

maybe there's more to his motive than just Pedro and Ruth.

Maybe it is also this anti-Catholic sentiment that he apparently or obviously has.

Well, I'll give you more background.

Ruth ran away.

She went to Chattanooga and Reverend Stevenson, her father sent the KKK after her and they dragged her back to Birmingham.

He had supposedly psychologists examine her and they said that her mind was disturbed through derangement.

And he said, if you screw up again, I'm going to have you institutionalized, which would have been very easy in the 1920s.

So, this is where his mind's going as days go by.

He has just had enough.

I don't think he even sees her as a daughter at this point.

It's like in a property that somebody has sullied, and he is determined to keep her locked up and to not have this fall on his family and his reputation, especially as a Klansman.

So, how does the trial proceed then?

So, he is indicted by a grand jury on September.

So, this is about a few weeks later.

And he is charged with second degree murder.

So what would that mean?

Not pre-planned, sort of kind of went out of his mind temporarily and went over and when he found out about the wedding?

Yeah, kind of in the heat of the moment.

You know,

I think it depends on Alabama's statutes, you know, but first degree versus second degree.

First degree, obviously, there's what we call malice a forethought in terms of there's been, there's obviously the pre-planning aspect to it.

And even if there had been some sort of hostile interaction between let's say the killer and the victim if there had been a cooling off period you know and then that the killer makes a decision you know this this is where your prosecutors will sit there and take a look at the circumstances and decide am i dealing with first degree am i dealing with second degree am i dealing with manslaughter so it looks like what they and they also have to take into consideration what is the jury going to believe you know and so you know in this case you have I think there's an argument that Reverend Stevenson, he arms himself with a gun and he walks over to this location and kills Father Coyle.

I mean, you could make a case, I believe, that he planned ahead.

He intended to kill.

But the prosecutors may have decided that

it wasn't convincing enough that they could get a jury to go with first degree.

And so they charge him with second degree.

And maybe it says, Well, he just found out about the wedding and he runs out of the house with his gun and is like, oh, damn it, I'm going to go get him.

Well, here's another layer, and we'll revisit what you just said and see what you think about it.

The prosecutors, rarely do I say I feel badly for a prosecutor, but I feel badly at this point with this prosecutor because the judge is a member of the KKK,

the foreman is a member of the KKK, the majority of the jurors are members of the KKK,

and several defense witnesses, including the police chief, are all Klansmen.

This sounds like a movie.

I mean,

we've talked about collusion before and corruption, but this is an extreme.

I mean, most of this town is KKK, and this Reverend is

well-known and higher-ranking in the Klan.

It comes down to, okay, these members of the Klan, are they...

Are they accepting of one of their own members committing homicide

with this type of motive?

Or is this something that they themselves even find deplorable and would be willing to convict?

I don't have a clue because, of course, the KKK just did horrible things to so many people that I'm just assuming all these,

the judge and the police chief and everybody else, they're all have the same mindset and go, yeah,

we killed a Catholic.

The defense is led by a guy named Hugo Black, which, you know, I don't expect you to know that name.

He was a Supreme Court judge.

He would eventually become a Supreme Court judge.

Okay.

And he was not part of the KKK until 1923.

So he became a Klansman.

What's interesting about Black, though, is later on, when he was on the court, he would vote against segregation with Brown versus Education.

So he has like a, I mean, to say a spotty history with the Klan, he voted with a lot of the liberal justices in a lot of cases.

So he has an interesting trajectory.

We don't have to get into.

But anyway, he's the head of the defense here.

And of course, the whole defense is Klansman, and it's funded by the Klan.

Here, you have a community and you have a government structure that is infiltrated by a private group that has very strong philosophies.

And so

from my perspective, obviously the government is just going to be extremely influenced by the KKK.

Now, how does that impact Reverend Stevenson's trial?

Is he going to get an honest trial?

Is the defense going to be able to

sounds like the cards are stacked against the prosecutors in terms of being able to get a conviction?

Stevenson enters two pleas.

I didn't know you could do that.

One is not guilty and the other one is not guilty by reason of insanity.

Can you do that?

I don't know if you can or not, you know, but obviously it's

trying to cover all bases, right?

For me, neither of these work with what he says happened, which was he said Coyle attacked him and it was self-defense.

And you've already said that there are no marks.

And we've talked about in the autopsy report, it's just this bullet wound, and that's it.

There's no defense marks, there's no nothing happening on Coyle's body.

You know, and this is where you get into the crime scene reconstruction, those trajectories.

The space on this porch is very tight and confined.

You know, all these items on the porch, these chairs and everything else, when you have two men that, let's say, are struggling, you know, you're going to see potentially, you know, items being disturbed.

But I don't see how these trajectories line up with...

Reverend Stevenson being up on the porch and then getting into a struggle and shooting in self-defense.

Basically, those trajectories are suggestive that he's right there, walks up on the, you know, on the lawn lawn and starts shooting at father coyle bits of information i don't have is how steep the downwards angle of these shots are because if they're if they're fairly steep and they're putting you know the the gun up on the porch then maybe there's a a chance that stevenson got up on that porch but based on what i'm seeing i just don't think that that's a possibility he basically walked up and executed father coyle we have a lot of people in on this including the sheriff's deputy who had examined the crime scene initially.

He says that Stevenson came to his office before Stevenson apparently went over to the porch, and he said, I think that the Catholics, meaning Father Coyle and Pedro, I'm assuming, have kidnapped my daughter.

And I want a search warrant from you to look at the rectory and see if she's there.

Macduff says he didn't do it.

It was not granted.

Then he says that Macduff, and there weren't other people who were corroborating this, but Macduff says, oh, yeah, you know, initially I saw there was a chair that had been flung.

And then I looked at the crime scene.

And then I looked at Stevenson.

And actually, several deputies said that Stevenson had an abrasion about the size of a man's thumb on his head.

He said that he also complained of back and foot injuries because he had been attacked by COIL.

But these are all things that none of these guys reported until after Stevenson had been confined to a jail cell.

So before there weren't any marks, and afterwards, there are these marks.

And the sheriff's deputy is like, listen, you know, I'm sure they have been there the whole time and that this is a result of a fight.

So it's like the prosecutor is not going to catch a break in any of this.

You know, everybody's against them.

Yeah, no,

Stevenson is just now trying to, you know, set up his defense.

He's bouncing himself off the wall inside the jail cell in order to get some abrasions to make it look like he had been in a fight.

Yeah, I'm not buying it.

So, one witness, and I'm not kind of, I'm not sure what this means, and I don't know if we believe this witness anyway.

One witness says that he saw flashes on the rectory porch from a nearby, he was at a nearby grocery store and he could see the flashes.

Each flash was progressively higher than the last,

which suggests that the gunmen had opened fire from kneeling and later standing positions.

Does that make sense to you?

Well, it makes sense sense to me because, you know, the porch is elevated.

And this is where now, did Reverend Stevenson just walk up in plain view and shoot Father Coyle?

Or the porch would allow Reverend Stevenson to sneak up.

possibly on hands and knees below the eyesight of Father Coyle and then start shooting from a kneeling position and then stands.

And then Coyle, of course, is now trying to get away and then catches the round in the head.

So, yeah, I think that's a distinct possibility.

Okay, well, let me tell you a little bit more about motive.

Now, they're saying they're shifting over and saying, okay, yes, this was self-defense, but also Stevenson went crazy.

He, you know, it's temporary insanity.

He found out that Ruth had married this guy, Pedro,

and that the union was breaking a law.

So we know that there were laws in place that people of, you know, that a white person and a black person could not be married.

The Supreme Court took care of that in 1967

and even though pedro is legally classified as white right i have my quotation marks around there stevens has said no this is this is a black man so this is what they did in court it's a very dramatic move the defense turns off all the lights and pulls the blinds and shines a floodlight at poor Pedro's face.

And so they're looking to see, they produce these photos from Pedro where he had like curls that were rubbed from his hair, you know, meaning

this was somebody who was a black man.

There's no getting around it.

So they're having the jury kind of examine this guy, just his facial features to confirm what they already know, which this is a black man, even though Pedro is not black.

And so this is where the defense is trying to indicate that the act

of Ruth, in essence, being stolen away from him by Pedro, a Catholic, and a black Catholic at that, was so enraging that he lost, Reverend Stevenson lost his senses and went and shot Father Coyle.

Well, let me tell you about the prosecutor because now he's ticking me off.

He does not do a good job.

And I don't know if it's because he's a Klan member or if he was so intimidated that he ended up doing stupid things.

He tries to poke hole in the defense, but doesn't do a great job.

He doesn't call hardly any witnesses, including Ruth.

He does not put Ruth on the stand.

He tries to introduce a guy named Douglas White, who was a miner, like as in coal mines, who had seen the murder unfold and probably could have said everything.

But Tate, the prosecutor, introduces him too late into the trial.

And the judge says, no, it's too late.

He can't get on the stand.

Which Joe Tate would have known.

He would have known that that was going to get thrown out.

So I don't know what happened there, but you can imagine that the jury is not convinced of anything and he is acquitted.

You know, this in thinking about Reverend Stevenson's actions, you know, he obviously arms himself.

He goes to the Catholic Church, but he had stopped by in the, I'm assuming it's the police department, to try to

tell the deputy, my daughter's been abducted.

I need you to, which seems weird.

I need you to get a search warrant to find my daughter at the Catholic Church.

So you can see where he has got

a mental clarity of what's going on.

He could be very upset about the circumstances, but he's doing this in a stepwise fashion, where now

when the deputy doesn't pursue getting a warrant or going to the church, Stevenson takes things into his own hands.

I think just his acts in terms of how he approaches this homicide really kind of underscores.

He knew exactly what he was doing.

You You know, he took it in a stepwise fashion.

It wasn't like he flew off the handle and ran over to the church and just started shooting.

I agree.

So the end of the story, it was a two-hour deliberation and he is acquitted, of course.

The end of this story is, it's so odd.

These two men at the center of this, the Catholic priest and the Methodist preacher, are both revered.

in very, very different ways.

So Stevenson gets a seat of honor at all of the Klan rallies throughout Alabama.

His defense attorney, you know, becomes a member of the KKK.

I talked about black.

And then Coyle is seen as a martyr even today.

And actually, people have mentioned putting him up for sainthood because people were threatening to burn down the church and his house and the rectory.

And people who were law enforcement, who sounded like good people who were not colluding with the Klan, had said, you need to change your routine and don't sit outside in public.

And he ignored all of it.

He said, no, I'm not doing that.

I'm not going to cower down.

Ultimately, what ends up happening is, you know, he is embroiled in this.

And I'm not saying this wouldn't have happened had he not married Ruth and Pedro, but it becomes, yes, political, but more of just the fury of a father.

Yeah, I think the acquittal is wrong.

But once that is done, there is no way to pursue Reverend Stevenson again for this homicide.

And it just really shows his calm demeanor after killing killing Father Coyle and walking away.

He had all the confidence in the world that he was going to get away with it.

Yep.

And he was right.

Yes.

He did.

Well, we tell a lot of stories that for me, I are, you know, in true crime are very, very frustrating.

And we know why, you know, people die, especially when children die.

This is frustrating on almost a different level for me, where it's just like, no matter what you do, no matter how many people see it happen, and it's so clear that it doesn't matter the politics step in it doesn't matter and that's what you know i picked this story just because you know we the clan was political i mean let's face it they had infiltrated every single area of of power that there was in this country so you know it's a reminder for me of you know keeping a check on who is in charge of everybody who controls your life you know and and father coil just paid this awful price for sure in many ways it's just a this is where the justice failed.

You know, this was a failure of the system because of, you know, the biases

of everybody within that court.

You know, so it's obvious to me, Reverend Stevenson should have been convicted of murder, and he got off, and it's just too bad.

Okay, I know this wasn't Halloween-y, but we're going spooky, I promise, next week for the coup de grace with our Halloween season, and we'll go much spookier.

But thanks for joining me on what I think is a really important case.

Well, thanks for sharing.

We'll see you next week.

See ya.

This has been an Exactly Right Production.

For our sources and show notes, go to exactlyrightmedia.com/slash buried bones sources.

Our senior producer is Alexis Emorosi.

Research by Allison Trouble and Kate Winkler Dawson.

Our mixing engineer is Ben Talliday.

Our theme song is by Tom Breifogel.

Our artwork is by Vanessa Vanessa Lilac.

Executive produced by Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark, and Danielle Kramer.

You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at Buried Bones Pod.

Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked: A Gilded Age Story of Murder and the Race to Deco the Criminal Mind, is available now.

And Paul's best-selling memoir, Unmasked: My Life Solving America's Cold Cases, is also available now.

Listen to Buried Bones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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