S-Town - Chapter II

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Speaker 2 These first two episodes of S-Town are free, but to hear the whole series, you'll need to subscribe to the New York Times, where you'll get access to all the serial productions and New York Times shows.

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Speaker 1 Chapter 2

Speaker 1 In one of my first phone conversations with John before we'd met, I asked him if he thought it was possible that maybe Cabrin Burt hadn't killed anybody.

Speaker 1 If it was possible that the murder he'd contacted me about was actually just a rumor, a fiction. No, John said.
There was little doubt in his mind that it was true.

Speaker 1 And then, by way of explanation, he launched into this parable.

Speaker 3 Let me tell you something I saw one time.

Speaker 1 I should admit that at the time, this story was completely lost on me.

Speaker 3 Me and Roger Price had went up to the truck stop together to get a little dinner.

Speaker 3 We came back by, and we was passing by the South 40 trailer park so Roger's one of these dudes he's a darn transmission mechanic he's not really talkative he's a good dude but he's just you know he only has one tooth and it's really amusing to see how he can balance a cigarette on that one tooth the whole time he's talking that cigarette is just bouncing around all over that one tooth and he never loses that son of a bitch

Speaker 3 So we're coming by the Welcome to South 40 sign and there's this girl out there walking around in front of the damn sign holding a cell phone and she's got on a pink top and nothing else.

Speaker 3 No fucking panties, no goddamn socks, barefoot.

Speaker 3 And I remarked that to Roger. I don't remember what I said.
I probably said, My God, look at her, or something like that. And Roger's sage advice was:

Speaker 3 Usually, when you see jokers that look like that, they've done something to get like that.

Speaker 1 That's that's a lesson

Speaker 3 that went just straight through you.

Speaker 1 Like so many things having to do with John, it took me a long time to understand the meaning of this story. Years.

Speaker 1 But I think I finally get it now.

Speaker 1 From Serial and This American Life, I'm Brian Reed.

Speaker 1 This is Shit Town.

Speaker 1 My second night in Alabama, I finally get to talk to Jake Goodson.

Speaker 1 Jake's the guy who'd originally told John that Cape and Burt had bragged to him outside the Little Caesars about beating a guy to death.

Speaker 1 I sit with Jake in John's kitchen, asking him to rack his brain for any extra details that could help me solve this.

Speaker 1 It was a while ago, he says. His memories are fuzzy.
But he makes a suggestion that, I don't know, seems crazy to me. I don't know.

Speaker 1 I could get him and ask him and he'd be able to tell me.

Speaker 1 He'd probably come up here and talk to you about it. Who? Cabrim.
Cabrim lives right nearby. Why not just get it from the horse's mouth? No.
Probably so. That makes no sense.

Speaker 1 I would stick a microphone in his face and he would tell me about a guy he killed. Probably.

Speaker 1 He's burnt up.

Speaker 1 He wouldn't know no better. He'd probably just laugh about it with you.

Speaker 1 I tell Jake no thanks, at least not now. I do not feel like I'm armed with enough information to confront Cabrim yet.

Speaker 1 Aside from seeming far-fetched, the idea also just sounded potentially dangerous for John, for Jake, and for me.

Speaker 1 But then the next night, a bunch of other people proposed the exact same thing. He'll talk to you, dude.
I mean, he's burned out. He's arrogant, dude.
He don't give a fuck.

Speaker 1 He would talk to me about it? I know he would. I'm pretty sure he would.
Probably tell you the truth.

Speaker 1 I'm chatting with a few guys in a tattoo parlor, all of whom have heard about the murder. Some are pretty sure they heard it from Cabrim himself.
You mean call him and ask him? Nah,

Speaker 1 I don't give a fuck.

Speaker 1 Apparently I'm the puss because I do not want the dudes I'm talking to to call Cabrim right now.

Speaker 1 Already this tattoo shop does not feel like the safest place to walk into alone at night trying to dig up info about a covered-up murder by a guy everyone seems to know, all of which are things I've just done.

Speaker 1 The last thing I want right now is for the alleged murderer to show up.

Speaker 1 I was invited here by Tyler Goodson, Jake's brother, whom I met in John's workshop while he was filing that chainsaw. He's one of the owners.

Speaker 1 Tyler knows Cabram, they're both in their early 20s, and I thought maybe some of Tyler's friends who hang out here might have more information about the possible murder.

Speaker 1 John didn't feel like coming with me because he didn't like driving at night.

Speaker 1 When I walk in, at first it seems like a pretty small place, just a couple of tattooing stations and a little waiting area. But if you push the back wall of the shop, it swings open.

Speaker 1 It's a secret door, which leads into a hidden clubhouse in the back.

Speaker 1 There's a bar with some people around it, a pool table, a small stage with motorcycles parked there, and a brass stripper pole that's currently vacant.

Speaker 1 The shop is called Black Sheep Inc., and I'll learn that the guys who hang out here take the name to heart.

Speaker 1 They see themselves as a collection of misfits, of self-proclaimed criminals and runaways and hillbillies.

Speaker 1 And Tyler has built this place as a haven for them, a place to swap their tales of getting jerked around by cops and judges and clerks and bosses, and to cultivate a sense of pride in their status as the outcasts of their world.

Speaker 1 There's this gentleman, whose name I never do catch, who tells me, quote, I'm so fucking fat, I don't care no more, and lifts up his shirt to show me the giant words he has tattooed on his stomach.

Speaker 1 Feed me. Tell him, tell him, give him a picture.
I'm a six foot, 350 pound bearded man in a John Deere hat with feed me on my belly, just so y'all get a clear picture here.

Speaker 1 There's a guy who's been wearing the same trucker hat for seven years. Seven years.

Speaker 1 Same hat. Then there's this guy.

Speaker 1 People call him Razor.

Speaker 4 Bam, bam, ambulance backing up. I was working on the side of the road.
If I look down there, I said, the son of a bit heat road wakes up. Yeah, Walter Odin come by, man.

Speaker 4 See him laying in the yard and thought he'd die.

Speaker 4 Ambulance is already able to call it an ambulance. Man, bastard's laying out there in the yard, got an Alice Pot laying inside him, six beers.
He's his shit face.

Speaker 1 I believe he's telling a story about his friend Willard, who is impervious to death.

Speaker 4 You don't run over him three times in one fucking night. Three times, dude, one night.
The bastards won't die.

Speaker 1 And then there's Tyler, who's been sleeping at the tattoo parlor lately because he can't afford anywhere else to spend the night.

Speaker 1 Who's 23 years old and has three daughters with three different women, and who's been haunted his whole life by people assuming he's just like his father.

Speaker 1 His father who abused him and his siblings and his mother, and who is a convicted sex offender for having sex with Minor.

Speaker 1 One day, Tyler will tell me that he often wakes up in the morning in a puddle of sweat, having dreamt during the night of killing his dad.

Speaker 1 Tyler's friendly to me when I arrive, welcoming. But as I'm getting out my recording equipment, I hear murmurs from other people wondering who I am, wondering if I might be a cop.

Speaker 1 People are asking me questions, feeling me out. A few guys ask if I'll smoke a bowl with them out of some deer antlers.

Speaker 1 I don't want to be stoned, but I also don't want to seem like a narc, so I pretend to take a puff.

Speaker 1 I pretend to do a number of things that make me feel very uncomfortable in order to keep as low a profile as possible.

Speaker 1 such as act like I'm not shocked or upset or scared when someone says this to me, a radio producer with a microphone, in the first few minutes that we're talking.

Speaker 1 At the risk of ruining any surprise, the statement is racist and nonsensical, replete with multiple uses of a terrible word. You know, we had a tax-free labor.

Speaker 1 It didn't have nothing to do with a bunch of niggers picking cotton. And we worked our ass off and we earned everything we got.
This is a tattoo artist who goes by Bubba.

Speaker 1 So now we have, if you got a tax-paying job, you got to take care of some nigger's wife that's in jail because she's drawing a child support check on each one of them.

Speaker 1 Later, Bubba will display a rather fluent knowledge of the differences between various various white supremacy groups.

Speaker 1 Mind you, we're in a majority black city right now, Bessemer, about 20 minutes from Bibb County, heading towards Birmingham. But everyone in here is white, including me.

Speaker 1 Someone mentions offhand that the small tattoo area in front is about as much shop as you want here in Bessemer, otherwise the place will be filled with black people who piss you off and won't pay anything.

Speaker 1 Hence the secret door.

Speaker 1 Before I left for Alabama, my girlfriend Solange, now my wife, who's black and whose family is from the South, had insisted I make my Facebook and Instagram accounts private, because they're filled with pictures of us together.

Speaker 1 I told her she was being silly, overly paranoid. Now I'm grateful I decided at the last minute to follow her advice.

Speaker 1 When someone asks me what the women look like up in New York, I tell them they're all shapes, sizes, and colors.

Speaker 1 When someone asks what my ethnicity is, I tell them about the Italian part without mentioning the Russian Jew part.

Speaker 1 But there's no hiding the fact that I'm a Yankee. What's up? Y'all just as racist as we are.
It's go quieter. Yeah, y'all left him the fuck down here.

Speaker 1 In an effort to change the subject, I turn the conversation to one of the few things I know I have in common with these guys. Do you guys know John? Our mutual acquaintance, John B.
McLemore.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 He's a character. I ain't never met nobody else like him.
Nobody.

Speaker 1 Nobody like him. Nobody else like that, folks.
He's been bugging the piss out of you.

Speaker 1 What's that? He's been bugging the piss out of you. I'm not there yet, but it's exhausting to hang out with him for a long day.

Speaker 1 They tell me John comes around the tattoo parlor pretty often and likes to lecture them and give them a hard time.

Speaker 1 He'll argue with them about their views on the South, on politics, on race. Bubba says he'll submit them to tirades about the coming climate and energy apocalypses.

Speaker 1 About how we was running out of fossil fuels and the world was going to come to a fucking end.

Speaker 1 John tells off their customers for talking about what he sees as inane shit.

Speaker 1 Tells these guys that their lives are amounting to nothing, that they're examples in the flesh of what's wrong with this place.

Speaker 1 He calls you guys failures? Fuck yeah, he calls us failures, you know what I mean? Like jokingly, or no, everybody's a failure. Like in his brain, everybody's a failure.

Speaker 1 For all I know, you could be a failure. You know, sometimes I wish he kind of failed.

Speaker 1 These guys dish it out too. They tease John for his many peculiarities.

Speaker 1 Like how he'll devour whatever leftover food is around, no matter how old or rock hard it is. His inability to buy new shoes to alleviate his athlete's foot, which he's allegedly had for three years.

Speaker 1 His extemporaneous solving of math problems. His utter aversion to being in a room with more than two or three people at a time.
His living with his mom his whole life. His being a loner.

Speaker 1 It's friendly though. They like John.
After all, John is the granddaddy of all black sheep. So this crew gets him.
They truly seem to accept him.

Speaker 1 Though that doesn't stop them from wondering...

Speaker 1 I'd love to know what he's worth, the Feed Me Guy says. Just not because I give a fuck.
Just to know why does he live like that?

Speaker 1 That's Tyler saying. He lives like he's poor as a church mouse.

Speaker 1 And Tyler would know. He and John are close.
He's the only reason all these guys know John.

Speaker 1 Tyler helped build John's maze. He's done all sorts of different odd jobs for him.
He's over there all the time.

Speaker 1 And as far as the church mouse, I did notice that John's refrigerator is pretty bare.

Speaker 1 His mom invited me to stay for dinner one night, so long as I didn't mind anything like Poe folks, she told me, in a way where I couldn't tell she was joking.

Speaker 1 They live without air conditioning, without TV.

Speaker 1 It's mysterious to me too, because at the same time, John has all these dogs he feeds and brings to the vet, this elaborate yard that requires constant upkeep.

Speaker 1 He mentioned to me that he spent more than $60,000 on the maze alone.

Speaker 1 Feed me guy says to Tyler. I don't understand why if he's as loaded as you say,

Speaker 1 have you not done any research on John?

Speaker 1 Tyler explains that John's family comes from money. He says that one of his grandpas was a judge, and that John got an inheritance, played the stock market with it, and made even more money.

Speaker 1 Plus, aside from all that, Tyler says John made good bank restoring old clocks.

Speaker 1 All of that sounds like it could be true enough.

Speaker 1 But then Tyler and his friends start listing off John's assets, and I can't tell if any of that is real, or if they're just letting their imaginations fill in the blanks about their local Boo Radley.

Speaker 1 They claim John has $400,000 in cash, $100,000-some odd thousand worth of tools in the workshop, all the antiques around his house.

Speaker 1 You're going to get $150,000 if you sell that old-ass shit, Bubba says. Rare books in the basement.
A single clock worth $10,000 that's just sitting on the floor in a plastic storage bin.

Speaker 1 Not to mention, says Tyler.

Speaker 1 Gold that his granddaddy, his granddaddy's gold, his daddy's gold.

Speaker 1 Tyler's up on the counter of the bar, crouching. He has a brown briefcase he carries around with him.
He calls it his minister's case. It has a sticker that says minister slapped on the outside.

Speaker 1 And it's filled with his tattoo machines and a gun and his welder's cap and some nipple jewelry and his black sheeping business cards.

Speaker 1 and also his minister's license, which he got online because he wanted to found a non-denominational church where people of all backgrounds could come together and talk it out.

Speaker 1 This clubhouse is meant to be a version of that. He says it's his church.
Tyler stares down at us from the corner of the bar like he's about to divulge a secret.

Speaker 1 When it comes to John, he says there's no telling.

Speaker 1 What he's got because there's a lot of shit that I'm sure I don't know about because I've been finding stuff out slowly over the years

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 there's damn secret little dungeons and shit under his damn house, man. I ain't playing.
I've built gates for

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 dungeons.

Speaker 1 I've built gates for the dungeons, Tyler's telling me. Dungeons in John's basement.

Speaker 1 He soon clarifies they're actually old crawl spaces.

Speaker 1 But the way John had him rigging them up, Tyler says, with tiny doors and these locking iron gates inside, dividing them into sections, what was the purpose of all that? It was creepy.

Speaker 1 Though Tyler digs creepy stuff, so he also thought it was cool.

Speaker 1 That guy Bubba, the one who's especially outspoken about his racist views. As the night goes on, I put together that he's the one who gave John all his tattoos.

Speaker 1 The tattoos that John showed me abruptly at his workshop that cover his whole chest.

Speaker 1 Bubba, he explains that being a tattoo artist is a lot like being a therapist. People sit in his chair for hours on end, and each person he works on is getting that tattoo for some specific reason.

Speaker 1 It's his job, as he sees it, to uncover that reason. Maybe it's a meditation, a milestone, an excuse to get out of the house, a new girlfriend, a death.

Speaker 1 John's motivation was especially bewildering to Bubba because John had made it clear almost every time he came in the shop how deeply he despised tattoos.

Speaker 1 So as shocking as it was to me when John lifted up his shirt to show me all his tattoos, it was far more shocking to Bubba when John strolled in one day at the age of 47 and asked him to start putting them there.

Speaker 1 I thought he was going to commit suicide.

Speaker 1 You know, that's what I thought in my mind. Why? Is this something you're completely against? You think fucking failures have tattooed, you know what I'm saying?

Speaker 1 Why in the fuck would you just start tattooing your whole upper body like that? You know what I mean? And around your neck.

Speaker 1 Pistons, tattooing pistons on him, you know, redneck has has tattooed, you know.

Speaker 1 So, I mean, first thought I thought he was going to kill himself.

Speaker 1 I thought he was going to get tatted the fuck up and blow his brains out or something. Fuck, I don't know.

Speaker 1 And then the more I got to doing it, you know, I realized, you know, we're in a rut, you know, we need some money and he helped us out. I mean, he helped a lot.

Speaker 1 Bubba and Tyler co-owned Black Sheep Inc. together.
And Bubba started noticing they'd have a bill about to come due due for the business. They'd be wondering how they were going to pay it.

Speaker 1 And then conveniently, John would come in and hand over $300 or $400 and ask for another tattoo on his chest. Bubba says people around here don't throw down money like that.

Speaker 1 But John would, just in the nick of time, and then schedule another appointment for soon after.

Speaker 1 He might not have said, I'm helping you out, but when you sat down and paid me $2,000, $3,000 in a couple weeks' span, you just helped me out. You know, you just got all my bills called up.

Speaker 1 You just got everything back to where it needed to be.

Speaker 1 You know. And you think that's why he did it? Now I do.

Speaker 1 He keeps a book, man. He writes down everything.

Speaker 1 So he knows when we're having a bad time.

Speaker 1 He'd ask certain things like, what's the rent? You know, what's your power bill? When's it due? And he already knows his shit because he writes shit down.

Speaker 1 And he just, you know, planned his tattoo out to where it pretty much paid everything up in increments.

Speaker 1 Wait, it was like that exact almost? Yeah.

Speaker 1 If it wasn't for John, we'd be shut the fuck down. If it wasn't for John? Yeah, if it wasn't for John, I'd be tattooing at my kitchen table right now.

Speaker 1 And I think he sacrificed his skin to help us out.

Speaker 1 Bubba says John is an emotional guy, and sure a lot of that emotion is discussed, but there's also sympathy, in particular for Tyler.

Speaker 1 If he's helping the tattoo parlor, he's only doing it because of Tyler and his brother Jake. He's just watched them boys, man, and he knows how his daddy was.

Speaker 1 I mean, the kid was laying block at five years old. Tyler, that is.
You know, on a job site working, not going to school working. Go to school two days a week, work five days a week.

Speaker 1 You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 So he

Speaker 1 just seen it and he knows it wasn't right, sees

Speaker 1 how Tyler's been programmed to be the way he is by his raising and his upbringing, you know.

Speaker 1 And feels sorry for him, I guess. I don't know.
Or knows that he's smarter than what he's letting on. I mean, I don't know.
That Tyler is. Yeah.

Speaker 1 When John hires Tyler to chop down trees in his yard or build iron gates in his crawl spaces, he doesn't really need that stuff done, Bubba says.

Speaker 1 He's just trying to find an excuse to put money in Tyler's pocket.

Speaker 1 When Tyler gets caught driving with a suspended license and ends up in jail, something that happens now and again, Bubba knows John's the one to call because he'll bail him out. He loves Tyler.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 Tyler's his boy. I mean, it's his boy.
You know, it's Tyler's brother. He cares about Tyler's little brother, Jake.
You know,

Speaker 1 John can say anything he wants to, but he loves Tyler probably just as much as you would your own son, your own flesh and blood.

Speaker 1 I ain't figured it out.

Speaker 1 We're standing in the backyard as we're talking, behind the tattoo shop. A train whistle starts to blow in the distance.

Speaker 1 Eventually, someone comes out and tells me I might be interested to know that Cabrim's sister, Cashenbert, is here. Like, right inside, 15 feet away from me.

Speaker 1 Why don't we just go ask her about the murder?

Speaker 1 This town.

Speaker 1 I go to the bar, leave six bucks for my beer, and careful to avoid Cabrim's sister, head out the secret door, not knowing what I eventually will know months and months from now.

Speaker 1 That Cabrim Burt didn't murder anybody. But also, that before this is all over,

Speaker 1 someone will end up dead.

Speaker 1 More. In a minute.

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Speaker 1 Cabrim? Hey, I'm Brian Reed. Nice to meet you.

Speaker 1 So I'm doing a radio story. I'm a reporter.
I'm here from New York. Is there somewhere quiet we could sit?

Speaker 1 It's a year later and I'm pulling into K3 Lumber on a Friday morning, nervously asking if Cabrim's around.

Speaker 1 I feel comfortable doing this only because I have finally determined that the incident John contacted me about, where Cabrim allegedly got into a fight and beat a guy to death, although it did in fact go down almost exactly as John and Jake and Schuyler and others told me, was wrong in one relatively important detail.

Speaker 1 The to-death part. The guy Cabram beat up did not die.
They just thought he did for a while. That's what I eventually gathered from talking to people more.

Speaker 1 Once I heard that, I started contacting law enforcement to find out what did exactly happen.

Speaker 1 It turns out the incident in question actually took place in adjacent Tuscaloosa County.

Speaker 1 A chief at the Sheriff's Department there read to me from a detailed case file showing that the police had investigated the fight thoroughly, that no one had been killed, and that they had closed the case not because they were paid off or anything, but because none of the guys involved wanted to press charges.

Speaker 1 And so here I am at K3 Lumber to ask Cabrim why he would go around bragging to people that he'd killed a guy he had not killed.

Speaker 1 He's with some co-workers in the lumber yard in a plaid shirt, green trucker hat, and dark sunglasses.

Speaker 1 Cabrim. Hey, I'm Brian Reed.

Speaker 1 There's a particular philosophy I've encountered down here and will continue to encounter. That is the fuck it philosophy.

Speaker 1 A belief that there's no sense in worrying or thinking too much about any given decision, because life is going to be difficult and unfair regardless of what you do. It's more than a belief, really.

Speaker 1 It's a way of moving moment to moment through the world. And from the get-go, Cabram seems to be a subscriber.

Speaker 1 I show up with a microphone and ask if I can talk to him on the record about a matter I've yet to name. And he's immediately game.
Fuck it. And we walk over behind some stacks of lumber to be alone.

Speaker 1 What you want to talk about, boy?

Speaker 1 So basically,

Speaker 1 um, like, were you at one point going around telling people that you'd killed someone? No, a boy cut my buddy's neck right here with a knife. But no, like, I beat the piss out of him.

Speaker 1 What happened was...

Speaker 1 What happened was, Caprim says, they were at a party and he doesn't know how the fight started because he and almost everyone else were zonked out of their minds.

Speaker 1 Drinking and doing everything else under the sun, like substance-wise. Like taking Xanax and doing mixing speed with it and stuff.

Speaker 1 According to the police report, it was a clear moonlit night about 4-4.30 in the morning on August 4th, 2012, just a few days outside the time window John had discerned from his records.

Speaker 1 Caprim says all he remembers is they were were in the middle of the woods, chilling around a fire, a fight broke out, and then suddenly this dude Dylan, not Dylan Nichols, as John had told me, he was not involved, but another Dylan with a different last name, came up from behind with a knife and cut Cabrim's buddy Tim in the neck.

Speaker 1 So Cabrim went after him, held Dylan's head down, punched him, hit him with a beer bottle. Tim got involved, might have bit the guy in the cheek.
Dylan kept swinging his knife the whole time.

Speaker 1 He stabbed Cabrim too. Right up here.
It's like up in your thigh there. Yeah, like I almost cut my gooch, mate.

Speaker 1 And then it was over. Cabrim thinks the whole thing lasted maybe 15 seconds.
It wasn't some beautiful drawn-out movie fight, he says. It was a real-life fight.

Speaker 1 Which means it was scrappy, awkward, and quick, and left his friend Tim clutching a four-inch gash on his neck that was gushing blood.

Speaker 1 Did you think like Tim might be like it might be life-threatening? Yes, that is the craziest shit I've ever seen in my life.

Speaker 1 Cabrim looked around and saw almost everyone at the party, maybe 30, 40 people, scattering.

Speaker 1 Tim was in a bad way, so someone had called 911, and now people were driving away or hiding in the woods before the police got there.

Speaker 1 The ambulance came, carted Cabrim and Tim to the hospital, and after getting a few stitches near the meat of his gooch, Cabrim went outside to smoke a cigarette and bumped into a group of random girls from the party.

Speaker 1 Telling me all kind of crazy shit, like somebody had died. Like, oh, that boy you got in a fight with died.

Speaker 1 What did you think

Speaker 1 i don't think that boy died said you wouldn't think so hell the fight didn't last that long but still you had like this part of your brain that was like maybe well yeah i started coming down off him xanaxes you know and you get to thinking like oh god i hope i didn't do something stupid i don't think nobody died but if i did i ain't gonna hang around to find out

Speaker 1 cabrum says he was kind of wigging out wondering if he killed someone He called a buddy of his to come pick him up at the hospital.

Speaker 1 That buddy was at a motel room full of meth heads in Bessemer, Cabram says.

Speaker 1 And judging from police records and other sources, it seems possible the rumor that Dylan had been killed started in that motel room and then spread from there.

Speaker 1 Cabram says by the time he got to work on Monday, it had already taken hold. People were coming up to him at the lumber yard and other places around town asking if he killed a guy.

Speaker 1 And so you never, I just want to ask you this again, you never maybe were drunk one time and saying, yeah, I'd beat that guy to death to anyone.

Speaker 1 Because I heard that you were bragging about it from multiple people. Number one, that wouldn't even be something to brag about.
It ain't like a deer or something.

Speaker 1 You know? I'm glad to hear that. I'm glad to hear you say that, I gotta say.

Speaker 1 So where would people get that from?

Speaker 1 Just a damn small town, man. Shit gets fucking twisted.
But saying that you told them directly to their face.

Speaker 1 Hell, I don't know, buddy.

Speaker 1 I don't know either. I can't tell if what Cabrim is saying to my face right now is true or not.

Speaker 1 I spoke to Cabrim's father too, Kendall Burt, and told him that John said he'd overheard him on the phone here at K3 one day saying something about how his son was guilty as hell and he knew it.

Speaker 1 And Kendall told me he doesn't know what John heard him say or if he heard him say anything, but that he's a tough love kind of guy, and that if his son had done something like killed a person, he would never cover that up.

Speaker 1 According to Cabrim, there is a moral to this story. He shares it with me after I wonder aloud to him about something one of the police officers told me.

Speaker 1 Why did his buddy Tim, rather than pressing charges against the man who'd almost killed him with a knife, decide instead to shove his middle finger in the face of the cops when they came to talk to him in his hospital bed?

Speaker 1 I mean, nobody wants to be a tattletale.

Speaker 1 I mean, dude almost died. Got stabbed in the neck.

Speaker 1 Cabrim takes a drag of his cigarette. You're shrugging your shoulders.
If you're gonna live like white trash and shit, then hell.

Speaker 1 You know, you might as well not tell on nobody because, you know, if that's the life you're trying to live, you can't be mad when, you know,

Speaker 1 low down, dirty shit like that happens when you hang out with low down, dirty people.

Speaker 1 You there? I'm here. Cool.
I'm waiting on tea to ball. Do you have time to talk? I have some stuff I'd love to talk to you about.
I'm sitting here right here.

Speaker 3 I'm at 2.25 with my orange pants on, waiting for Tyler to get his ass back over here. I figured he was calling to lower the boom or some damn something.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's my turn to talk a lot. I have a lot to catch you up on, actually.

Speaker 1 I'm excited to tell John what I've figured out, finally, after all this time.

Speaker 1 I now narrate the story of the real crime back to him, almost a year and a half after he first told me about it, with details colored in and facts illuminated, including the rather germane one that Cabram did not kill anybody.

Speaker 1 After I'm done, John summarizes my findings.

Speaker 3 My God.

Speaker 1 What? What has a sigh?

Speaker 3 I'm sitting here looking out the window at the clouds going by, just in loathing disgust at the town that I live in, and the fact that I didn't pack my bags and get the hell out of here decades ago.

Speaker 3 I think it's the part about hiding in the woods that did it. That's just so classic, Debb County.
I don't know how many times I've heard that expression in my life, hiding in the woods.

Speaker 3 I think hiding in the woods in Debb County is like having your afternoon tea in London.

Speaker 1 You know, there is another way John could have responded to all this news. I dare call it the normal way.
That sigh he let out, rather than being one of despair, could have been one of relief.

Speaker 1 Relief that a young man has not been killed, that local officials have not been bought off by a powerful rich family, and that in fact law enforcement has done what appears to be a competent job responding to this incident.

Speaker 1 Shittown, at least in this case, doesn't look so so terrible to me. I don't know, progress, right?

Speaker 1 But no.

Speaker 1 I've learned that sometimes you catch John in a spell of depression, sometimes you catch him in a bout of mania, and sometimes, sometimes, like today, I think, you catch him in an alchemy of the two.

Speaker 3 I'm trying to think of a snappy comeback to that.

Speaker 1 Because what is it if not progress? Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 Oh, Lord.

Speaker 3 It's just a cluster fuck of sorrow, isn't it?

Speaker 1 A cluster fuck of sorrow.

Speaker 3 It's kind of like progress is that ISIS is making progress. You know,

Speaker 3 it's that type of progress.

Speaker 1 It's like ISIS. It's all I could come up with.

Speaker 1 Oh, shit.

Speaker 1 Damn, man. I'm over here busting my ass off.
When you contacted me, you wanted to know what actually happened. So it's progress in that sense, right? It's progress.

Speaker 1 I am not saving the world over here. Climate change is not.
I am definitely not safe.

Speaker 1 Climate change is not ending. I am not bringing jobs and sustainable employment to Alabama and lifting people out of poverty.
But you asked me to try and figure out what happened here.

Speaker 1 On that front, I've made progress.

Speaker 3 I think you've done pretty goddamn good.

Speaker 1 Well, thank you.

Speaker 3 I guess if I sound like I'm disinterested today, it's firstly because I'm tired of war ass out. And secondly, because,

Speaker 3 you know,

Speaker 3 I just I'm not the most cheerful person. You know, I I spend most spare time now either studying energy or climate change, and it's not looking good.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 3 yeah, sometimes it's hard for me to get focused back on something when the whole goddamned Arctic summer sea ice is going to be gone by 2017.

Speaker 3 We're fixing to have heat waves in Siberia this year, and sometimes I feel like a total idiot because I'm worried about a goddamn crackhead out here in fucking... you know, shit town, Alabama.

Speaker 3 So, yeah, that's just a personality disorder of mind.

Speaker 3 You know, sometimes when you call me, I'm I'm kind of in an upbeat mood, and sometimes, like today, you caught me in one of these tired, somber, you know, reflective moods where I've been, you know, sitting there, you know, mulling over climate change for about the past ten damned hours.

Speaker 3 Oh, I mean, my God.

Speaker 1 When John says he's been mulling over climate change for the past 10 hours, what I think he means is that he's been mulling over climate change for the past 10 hours. I don't think he's exaggerating.

Speaker 1 It's like work for him. Like, he's made it his job.

Speaker 1 We've now been talking to each other for a year and a half, half, and while some of that time we've discussed the murder, there's been so much other stuff John wants to chat about.

Speaker 1 It's interesting stuff, but it's all over the place.

Speaker 1 Even if I haven't talked to him in a while, nearly every day he sends me emails about all sorts of global calamities that he continues to keep up with, even though they've fallen out of the news.

Speaker 3 How many people are still concerned today about the Philippines?

Speaker 1 He's referring to Typhoon Haiyan from 2013. Or how about the tsunami in Sri Lanka in 2004, John says? Or the terrible flood in Pakistan year before last.

Speaker 1 How about the fallout from the Ebola outbreak, or the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, or a deeper cut, Chernobyl? The list goes on and on.

Speaker 1 And it's not just catastrophe. John also gives me lectures and sends reports on the systemic problems he sees leading to complete breakdown of the social contract.

Speaker 1 Problems in our food production chain, our healthcare industry, our monetary policy.

Speaker 1 He also shares a variety of disturbing stories that he manages to dig up from all corners of the country about the son of a U.S.

Speaker 1 senator suffocating 21 dogs, or a KKK branch giving out bags of candy to children as a recruitment effort in South Carolina, or a guy down the street from John trying to kill his wife by running her over with a bobcat.

Speaker 3 I was on HomeFax last night. The city of West Blockton has outdone Vance as being the child molester per capita capital of Alabama.

Speaker 1 This is another data point John likes to send me now and again. The number of sex offenders per capita in his area.
Vance and West Blockton are both towns in Bibb Bibb County.

Speaker 3 Vance is now one child molested for every 192 citizens. West Blockton is for about every 63 or 40.

Speaker 1 Why do you check that statistic so often?

Speaker 3 Why do I check

Speaker 3 crude oil plus lease condensate production so often? Or why do I go pour over the tables from the IPCC so often?

Speaker 1 The IPCC being the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Speaker 1 For the longest time, I thought the only connection between all of John's random interests was that it was all shitty. But the connection is deeper than that.

Speaker 1 He's distressed by the lack of outrage compared to the amount of shittiness in the world. To him, that ratio is totally out of whack.

Speaker 1 That's why he was still upset about the Cameron rumor, even after I told him it wasn't true. Even though the murder and the cover-up weren't real, everyone sure did believe they were.

Speaker 1 And still, they did nothing. That part, the inaction, that's more disturbing to John than the idea of the murder itself.

Speaker 3 You know, I really hate that these kids know all the things that they know, and they just accept them as normal.

Speaker 1 I know, that seems to really bother you.

Speaker 3 As accepted as something you can't do nothing about.

Speaker 1 The shitty misfortunes John fixates on, they're not a bunch of disparate things. They're all the same thing.

Speaker 1 His shit town is part of Bibb County, which is part of Alabama, which is part of the United States, which is part of Earth, which is experiencing climate change, which no one is doing anything about.

Speaker 1 It maddens John. The whole world is giving a collective shrug of its shoulders and saying, fuck it.

Speaker 1 What I admire about John is that in his own misanthropic way, he's crusading against one of the most powerful, insidious forces we face. Resignation.
The numb acceptance that we can't change things.

Speaker 1 He's trying to shake people out of their stupor, trying to convince them that it is possible to make their world a better place.

Speaker 1 Yes, that lady over there, she's barefoot and she's pantsless, but we can lend her shoes. We can give her some pants.

Speaker 1 Instead of just putting our heads down and speeding past her and muttering that she must have done something to get like that, we can ask her if she's in trouble and we can offer her help.

Speaker 1 There is a different way.

Speaker 1 That's why John Ranson raves at the tattoo parlor. That's why John adopts dozens of stray dogs.
That's why he devotes night after night to studying and writing about climate change.

Speaker 1 That's why he contacted a national radio show and asked me to come investigate.

Speaker 1 And that's why I now see John is devoting so much energy to what is arguably his most ambitious project of all.

Speaker 1 Radically altering the life of Tyler Goodson.

Speaker 3 Tyler almost embodies everything I hate about this shit town in one convenient package.

Speaker 3 Have you ever thought of it that way? I bet you haven't dared.

Speaker 1 As the months have gone by since my trip to Alabama, I've heard more and more about Tyler.

Speaker 1 I've learned all about his tough childhood, the petty legal troubles that continue to dog him, his persistent financial problems, his struggle to support his three daughters, whom he had by the age of 21 and whom he loves dearly.

Speaker 1 John has devoted his life to restoring old clocks. Methodically and thoroughly, he sorts through the busted parts of these timepieces, trying to revive a sense of beauty and order.

Speaker 1 And in a way, that's what he's attempting to do with Tyler.

Speaker 1 Every time John picks up the phone and I ask what he's up to, Tyler's either there, or he was just there, or he's waiting for him to get there. It seems like he's giving him consistent work.

Speaker 1 John's also been accompanying Tyler to court and hiring him a lawyer to help him clear up some misdemeanor charges and get his driver's license back.

Speaker 1 And Tyler's recently moved to the trailer park across the street from John, so now he can easily walk to John's place. John's even talking about writing Tyler and his brother Jake into his will.

Speaker 3 I don't want these two bastards to know this, but when I fall over dead, each one of them is going to get 20 ounces of gold each.

Speaker 1 I'll keep that secret.

Speaker 3 That's assuming the goddamn cops don't come in and steal it.

Speaker 1 But John's relationship with Tyler is not just as a benefactor. I can tell that they get something more from one another.

Speaker 1 John will mention a walk he and Tyler took through the woods or an expedition they made to the junkyard to search for treasures or he'll recount some bit of their conversation.

Speaker 1 They like to spend time together.

Speaker 1 One day John was on the phone with me and he looked out his window and started listing off the flowers that were in bloom in his yard and the ones that were dying.

Speaker 3 He sighed and said, It's tedious and brief.

Speaker 3 That's a sundial motto.

Speaker 1 Tedious and brief.

Speaker 1 Before we had clocks, we had sundials.

Speaker 1 And I never thought about this until I started talking to John, but watching a sundial, which could be as simple as a stick in the ground, as the shadow crept along, you were actually witnessing the rotation of the earth.

Speaker 1 It's so much less abstracted than a clock, a level closer to time itself.

Speaker 1 Anyway, John told me sundials often have mottos engraved on them. John says, tedious and brief is one.

Speaker 1 What do you mean?

Speaker 1 Tedious and brief. Your life is tedious and brief.

Speaker 3 All sundial mottos are sad like that.

Speaker 1 There are hundreds of these mottos. Life passes like the shadow.
Make haste, but slowly. Use the hours, don't count them.
Even as you watch, I'm fleeing. Soon comes night.

Speaker 1 These little reminders are out there, hidden in crannies around the world. I recently happened upon a sundial in the cemetery of an old Catholic mission.
next to a grave.

Speaker 1 Because of John, I knew to look for the motto. It read, Niel Boni Haudier, DM Perdidi.
I did nothing good today. I have lost a day.

Speaker 3 You know, I told you I used to make sundials, but, you know, I made them for the mathematical exercise.

Speaker 3 You know, I would pick difficult dials to do as a test of my abilities of geometry and trigonometry. And these are things I wish Tyler and Jake could experience.

Speaker 3 There's a real excitement in geometry and trigonometry.

Speaker 1 I think when we was building the swing, I I built a swing for Tyler's kids. This is one of the ways John and Tyler have been passing the hours together lately.

Speaker 1 They've been constructing an adult swing set, a giant rectangular frame, to the side of John's house, not far from the apple trees, with a single John Deere tractor seat hanging from it.

Speaker 1 It has a 20-foot arc of action, John says, which I understand to mean it's a pretty gnarly swing.

Speaker 1 When John first told me about it, he'd said he was building it for himself, but now he amends that.

Speaker 3 I think I built a swing for Tyler, actually.

Speaker 3 I found out that an old man 50, when he swings in a swing for about 20 minutes, his back hurts and his knees hurt. So I didn't build it for me after all.
Dunn found that out.

Speaker 3 So I think I built it for Tyler. Fuck it.
Oh, and I built him a pull-up bar because he wants to be strong.

Speaker 3 And I told him, well, it's nice to be physically strong, but you need to be strong between the ears because physical strength goes away.

Speaker 3 You need to have strong neurons. I told him you need to have a little bit of general algebra, but you should always have some trigonometry and you should have some geometry.

Speaker 1 he say?

Speaker 3 He never, I remember this conversation. He said he never saw how that had anything you could do much with.

Speaker 1 I like imagining this odd pair, a polymathic middle-aged clock restorer and a tatted up kid in his 20s with a Harley and a revolver in his briefcase, out in John's yard on a summer's day, staking swings that pulls into the ground, the dogs circling around them, maybe a butterfly fluttering by.

Speaker 1 I like imagining John interrupting their work for a minute to give Tyler a math lesson, feeling gratified that he has someone to give a math lesson to, and Tyler perhaps taking something from it, but at the very least humoring John because he's grateful that John's helping him get his life together.

Speaker 1 I like knowing that this is how two people have chosen to spend an afternoon together in Bibb County, Alabama.

Speaker 1 Take the gifts of this hour, one sundial says. Another, it's later than you think.

Speaker 3 And I point out the diagonal chain that was going to shore up the uh,

Speaker 3 you know, upright of the swing set.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I tell him that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the square of the two sides

Speaker 3 he he hadn't used pythagoras's theorem so he could calculate the length of a chain without climbing up on the goddamn top of the pole and pulling a damn diagonal with a tape measure that was my answer and what did he say

Speaker 1 or something like that

Speaker 3 yeah he has a lot of his daddy's mannerisms

Speaker 3 It's often heard when there's not a significant answer.

Speaker 3 Hold on, let me, hold on. I'm on piss in the sink.
I hope that's politically incorrect.

Speaker 1 That's something that flips Tyler out.

Speaker 3 Yes, I just pissed in the kitchen sink because

Speaker 3 if the phone had enough signal, I just went out there and pissed near one of the Gardenias or the Azaleas or the Camellias or the Crepe Myrtles because, you know, they like acid.

Speaker 3 But I didn't think the phone had enough signal, so instead of wasting three or four gallons to flush the commode, I just peed here in the kitchen sink and used about one cup full of water to flush the sink.

Speaker 3 And I got a little short dick, but I got

Speaker 3 a pretty good aim, so I can usually aim right for the center of that damn thing without splashing everywhere.

Speaker 1 Oh, man. But in any event,

Speaker 3 what was the question?

Speaker 1 I forgot. I forgot too.

Speaker 1 Hello.

Speaker 1 Hey, is Jake Rones? This is Skylar. It's been a couple weeks since I last spoke to John, and I just got a text from Jake, Tyler's brother, asking me to call him when I get a chance.

Speaker 3 Yeah, this is Skylar. I was the one that called you.

Speaker 1 Jake texted you for me. Oh,

Speaker 1 has any

Speaker 3 hold on just one second?

Speaker 3 Has anybody called you?

Speaker 1 No, not that I know. I have a few missed calls, but I don't think they're from anybody down there.
Oh. Wow.
Well,

Speaker 3 we have some bad news to tell you.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 3 John Bay killed himself Monday night.

Speaker 1 The summer is here at last

Speaker 1 The sky is overcast And no one brings a rose for Emily

Speaker 1 She watches her flowers grow While lovers come and go to give each other roses from her tree

Speaker 1 But not a rose for Emily

Speaker 1 Emily, Emily, can't you see there's nothing you can do?

Speaker 1 There's love in every web of love

Speaker 1 for you.

Speaker 1 Her roses are fading now.

Speaker 1 She keeps her pride somehow. That's all she has.
Protecting her from pain.

Speaker 1 And as the years go by,

Speaker 1 she will grow old and die. The roses in her garden fade away.

Speaker 1 Not one left for her grave.

Speaker 1 Not a rose for Emily.

Speaker 1 S-Town is produced by Julie Snyder and me, with editing from Ira Glass, Joel Lovell, Sarah Koenig, Neil Drumming, and Nancy Updike. Whitney Dangerfield is our digital editor.

Speaker 1 Starley Kine is a story consultant. Fact-checking and research by Ben Phelan.
Seth Lind is our director of operations, mixing by Lyra Smith, and Matt Tierney is our technical director.

Speaker 1 The S-Town staff includes Emily Condon, Elise Bergerson, Julie Whitaker, and Kimberly Henderson. Music for the show is composed by Daniel Hart, Trey Pollard, Elado Negro, and Matt McGinley.

Speaker 1 Music supervision by Damian Grafe. Our website, S Townpodcast.org.
Special thanks to Bennett Epstein, Ted Scheinman, and Evan Smith. S-Town is a production of cereal and this American life.

Speaker 1 Let fall her grave,

Speaker 1 let