Transcript of 3 | Wolf at the Door

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You're listening to Lords of Death, a production of Tenderfoot TV in association with Odyssey. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the individuals participating in the podcast. This podcast also contains subject matter which may not be suitable for everyone, including themes of murder and sexual violence. Listener discretion is advised.

After Mick and Tim's arrest In June of 1995, my life changed in an instant. Not only was Mick gone, but my sister and I moved to my grandparents house about 30 minutes away.

From the time this happened until the time we moved, you guys were never back in the house. I felt like the house was just like tainted with evilness. I just didn't want you and your sister back in there. Not that a crime had happened in the house. I just didn't want you in there.

So how did you tell me and care about this?

I mean, it was hard to keep it from you guys. You guys were close to him. It wasn't like I could just say he's gone. That's it. Forget he ever existed. After the life we had together, all the fun and going to the parks and playing with you guys, I mean, you've seen pictures of him interacting with you guys.

I remember it.

Kara doesn't.

Those are my earliest memories. It's not me and you and dad. It's me, you and Mick. That's what I remember. My mom eventually moved in with us, but she stayed at the house in Five Oaks for a few weeks. As investigators in Dayton were wrapping up their case against Mick and Tim, a detective from Tim's hometown was investigating a slew of unsolved murders that happened seven years earlier. After Cindy's murder, his investigation led him to our house in Dayton.

A few days after Mick and Tim were arrested, Arnold Van Horn from Guernsey county showed up at my door. He told me that they were looking for some potential evidence that they thought might be in my possession. Specifically, they were looking for a black leather jacket and a sawed off shotgun.

Detective Arnold Van Horn explained that he was investigating several unsolved murders and it turned out that one of his lead suspects had been living under our roof. The evidence he was looking for belonged to none other than Tim Terrell from Tenderfoot tv. I'm Thrasher Banks. This is Lords of Death.

The unsolved murders that Detective Van Horn had been investigating happened a Couple hours from Dayton, near a small town called Buysville.

Well, I guess it was a slow pace. There wasn't a lot to do. There weren't a lot of what I'd call derelicts. I'd say everybody was affiliated with one church or another.

So it was the kind of town where everybody left their doors unlocked.

Oh, yeah, certainly everybody knew each other.

That's Tim Hinnom. He grew up in Guernsey county and remembers spending time with his uncle Homer Potts and his wife Leila at their farm. The Potts lived on Vocational Road, a few miles outside of Buysville.

There's a pretty bucolic life out there. We're a few miles out of town and it was a big farm, big piece of property. Homer was hardworking. He worked at various factories and in the mines. Lela was really the alpha, that group, though she had first and last say what they were going to do, go or buy or how they were going to live.

Homer's niece Patty lived at their farm until the late 1960s.

Patty was the second youngest daughter of Homer's sister and her husband. They had, I want to say, 10 kids in the 30s. That was a lot of kids to raise. And often, you know, if you had family around, they helped. My mom always said she looked like a little doll. Always, you know, she was always dressed up and they always took great care of her.

That's Tim's sister, Theresa. After Patty moved out, Homer and Leila lived alone at their farm in a sparsely populated area of Guernsey County. Other than a church and cemetery that sat a few hundred yards away, there wasn't a neighbor in. On the afternoon of February 26, 1987, Homer and Leila were at home watching TV when they heard an unexpected knock on the door. When Homer went to answer the door, Leila heard a man yell, give me the money or I'll kill you and your wife. When she went to see what was going on, she saw Homer attempt to strike the man with a ceramic praying hand statue. According to Leela, the man knocked the statue out of Homer's hands and then pulled out a knife and stabbed him twice in the chest. When the man realized Leela was in the doorway, he pushed her against the table and stabbed her in the lower abdomen. At that point, the man turned back to Homer and stabbed him two more times before fleeing the scene empty handed.

We went to the house, saw the damage had been done in the living room and where the blood had stained the carpet, where Homer was attacked. I remember going there for that. There was some Antique ceramics in the corner, about 4ft away from the door in the corner. And those were all smashed to smithereens. And like I said, there was a big blood stain just inside the door on the rug.

After the attacker fled, Leila claimed that Homer went through the kitchen and out the back door to ring a dinner bell next to the house to call for help. When she went to check on Homer, she saw him collapse in the driveway. Then she called their nearest neighbor for help. By the time the first officer arrived on the scene, Homer had succumbed to his injuries. He was 78 years old. Leila survived the attack but couldn't identify the man who killed Homer, only that he was a bearded white male in his early 20s that fled the scene in an older blue car, possibly a Chevy Nova.

Well, it was just shocking and unbelievable that something like that would have happened. But she seemed to be in good spirits, and it was just the next day, and she was going through the story of everything that happened, but she didn't seem to be really hurting or debilitated by the wounds. So we thought that was kind of odd. That still doesn't make sense to me. Somebody come to the front door in the middle of the day and demand money. It was hard to buy that something just randomly happened like that. I thought it was weird that he would have gone to ring the bell, though. I mean, there's nobody within a quarter mile of their house. If he went out the back door, he went right past the phone. But I heard that the kitchen and everything was all clean by the time they got out there. I can't imagine he ran all the way through there.

So here's where Leila's story doesn't quite add up. If Homer had four stab wounds and ran through the kitchen, you'd expect a blood trail through the house, but there wasn't one. The only blood trail was between the bell and the back door.

How would he have run through the house if he had been stabbed so many times? How would he have done that and lost all the blood that he did at the back porch? I don't know. It just is bizarre. I just don't think it unfolded the way she says it unfolded. It sounded like there might be something that she does know, but it was flighty. She was at the hospital because she had a stab wound. Well, when you first hear that she has a stab wound, you're thinking, oh, wow, this is really something deep. Well, in actuality, it wasn't, you know, it was very superficial, and she didn't go to his funeral.

Since Leila's stab wound required surgery, she was in the hospital for a couple of weeks and missed Homer's funeral. When she was discharged, she insisted on returning to the farm, even though the man who killed Homer was never caught. So their niece Patty, who was in her late 40s at this time, hired a private security company called Buckeye Guard to monitor the property 24 7.

Once Lela got home, Patty had hired a off duty sheriff's deputy to come and live in a trailer they had brought in. And it was outside in the yard. He kind of screened everybody that came to visit at that time. I think that lasted for a month, and Lela didn't like it. She didn't want anything like that.

Even though Patty paid good money for the security detail, Lela would dismiss the guard every night.

When she did come home afterwards, she showed next to no effects of it. She did not seem afraid. She just, like, went about her daily business. And I think it was seeing that response and then knowing that, hey, this is just a superficial wound, just you know, kind of got everybody thinking.

From there, the small town rumor mill took on a life of its own. It was almost like she was even happier than normal.

And she wasn't a good singer, but.

She would sing louder than anybody.

She thought they should consider the fact that Layla's been awfully happy since Homer's gone.

I find it strange that Leila went and lived in the house still after her husband was murdered there. I would think maybe she might want to live somewhere else. But she was, I guess, comfortable enough.

To stay there because my grandmother even looked at my grandpa and said, I can't believe she's laughing right now.

Look at her carrying on. That's just always and local thought there that I've heard that Leela was somehow.

Involved in the first murder and was, you know, wounded as to make it look real.

But again, that's just local talk. But setting the rumor and innuendo aside, the Guernsey County Sheriff's Office never released the names of any suspects. However, since the lead detective, Arnold Van Horn, came to our house in Dayton looking for potential evidence, we can assume that Tim was at least one of the suspects in his investigation. I'd wanted to contact Detective Van Horn ever since my mom gave me the box back in 2014. But I didn't think he'd have any interest in speaking with me. I'm not a journalist. I have zero credentials. But in 2018, I gave him a call and told him I was producing a podcast about the case.

Hello?

Hey, this is Arnold.

Yes, I spoke with you a couple.

Weeks ago about the Potts murders.

So what questions do you want to talk about?

Could you just tell me a little bit about the day Homer was killed?

Okay. What happened is he was sitting there in his chair, knock on the door, and this guy standing there demanding money. Of course, Homer refused to give him any money. So he stabs Homer. And then his wife, she ends up getting stabbed, too. But she didn't die. And so then Homer went running through the house. He was bleeding badly because he bled all the way out to the hole where he rang the bell. They had a bell on a pole out back. In his mind, he was going to ring that bell and get attention to somebody out where they lived. Probably the closest person was a quarter of a mile away, at least an eighth of a mile away. The chance of somebody hearing the bell was slim.

The only information Van Horn had to go on was Leela's description of the attacker.

So the only witness we had was Leela. So. And she was not a good witness. She kept changing the story. And we had an artist go down and try to get her to tell us what the person looked like. We'd show her the thing, and they were so. And she said, don't look like the person. We'd say leila. That's what you said. So she changed the description two or three times on us.

If the composite sketch is accurate at all, it looks nothing like Tim Terrell. The man has bushy dark hair and a thick beard. Tim's hair is lighter and thinner. According to his probation documents from that time frame, he drove a car similar to Homer's killer, but it wasn't a Chevy Nova. It was a 1976AMC Hornet. And here's where things get interesting. Van Horn wasn't the only person investigating the murder. Marty Goodfriend, the owner of Buckeye Guard Security, was a private investigator and conducted his own investigation for Patty. He went out to the farm on the day Lela was discharged from the hospital and found her in a distraught state. She told Marty that Van Horn was trying to trick her into taking a polygraph test because of the rumors that she killed Homer. She said people were cruel and that she and Homer did not have problems. Marty began asking questions which led him to believe that Leila was hiding something. Marty noted that Leila's description of Homer's attacker using an upward motion wasn't possible. Downward stabs produced Homer's wounds, but she steadied the killer, stabbed in and up he was skeptical that she could recall exact details about the assailant's knife and vehicle, but she couldn't describe what he was wearing.

And then there's the lack of blood throughout the house. He makes it clear in the report that he believed Leila either killed Homer herself or conspired with others to do so. According to Marty, the motive was over the estate, which Leila's foster parents left to Homer instead of her. Someone had told Marty that Leila had recently destroyed their will, which could be true. According to the probate court, Homer didn't have a will on file. I noticed another inconsistency Marty wouldn't have been aware of without inside knowledge of the investigation. When Leila talked to Van Horn, she said the attacker stabbed Homer twice, then turned his attention to her before stabbing Homer two more times. She told Marty that after the attacker stabbed Homer twice and then turned his attention to her, that Homer ran through the house and out the back door. When I talked to Detective Van Horn, he acknowledged that Leila's story was inconsistent, but still doesn't believe she had anything to do with the murder. Is it possible that Leila had Homer killed?

No. No, I don't believe that at all. Just a failed robbery. When Homer refused to give him any money, Homer got stabbed and she got stabbed, and he took off. Never got anything.

Even though Van Horn eliminated Leela as a suspect, he wouldn't develop any real leads until nearly two years later, when the Potts farm was targeted a second time.

Technically, since it was 20 months to the day, I think one of the same guys went back, except there was two of them the next time.

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Across the country, police tell us there.

Have been more than 15,000 animal mutilations.

And often they were clearly used in some kind of bizarre ritual.

But there's no official explanation. In California, New Jersey, Alabama, and elsewhere, police have found inverted crosses and the remains of mutilated animals. But by far the most frightening of all are the reports of teenagers killing other kids in Satan's name.

By October of 1988. The satanic panic had reached Guernsey County. There were fears that a satanic cult was active in the area after reports of farmers discovering mutilated livestock. On top of that, locals were finding dead animals on their porches. The sheriff's department took action and sent deputies to a seminar about investigating a cult related crime.

Something was going on. These farm animals and stuff, they were. I mean, they were coming up dead. And I remember when the cattle and stuff were coming up dead and then out Vocational Road, there was farm animals coming up dead out there too. And it freaked this entire area out.

That's Tricia. She attended a town hall law enforcement hosted to ease the community's fears.

They were talking about the animals. They were showing up on people's porches or just to scare people that they don't think that was anything to do with the occult. Those are just people trying to like secondary, you know, to make it look like it is them.

And instead of easing the community's fears about a satanic cult, the town hall fueled even more speculation.

I thought, okay, there's devil worshipers. I knew at that point there were people in our area getting sucked into this whole. It was almost a fad thing, but they were getting sucked into that. You know, I mean, it was a real strange time to live here. It was scary. I mean, everybody was afraid that fear.

Would reach new heights. On the night of October 25, 1988, it was the week of Halloween. There was a full moon. And Geraldo Rivera's infamous primetime special, exposing Satan's Underground aired on NBC.

The Investigative News group presents the Geraldo.

Rivera special.

Devil Worship Exposing Satan's Underground.

Now, the very young and the impressionable should definitely not be watching this program tonight. This is not a Halloween fable. This is a real life horror story and it will give small children bad dreams.

When we discuss the satanic panic today, we know the claims of satanic ritual abuse were a hoax that led to dozens of wrongful convictions. But that night, Geraldo told millions of Americans that it was all true and devil worship was widespread across the United States.

Whether a Satan exists is a matter of belief, but we are certain that Satanism exists. To some, it's a religion. To others, it's the practice of evil in the devil's name. It exists and it's flourishing.

While Geraldo's special was still on the air, a Vocational road resident was driving home and saw a car parked at the church near Leela's and alerted police. The responding officer saw two jackets on the front seat and Took down the car's license plate number before leaving the scene.

We have seen that Satanism can be linked to dope and to pornography, child abuse, and to murder. It has led seemingly normal teenagers into monstrous behavior. And that is why we brought you this report tonight.

It was a clear night, Just one of those crisp, cold autumn nights. And we're just standing there and I see the moon. And it felt odd, it felt eerie. It just felt everything that kind of goes with, you know, Halloween that time of year. And it just felt like something was happening. But I can remember standing outside and feeling very strange about just the feeling of it.

The next day, Theresa's mom had plans to go shopping with Leela and Patty.

So mom was meeting Patty at Lela's house. When mom got out of her car, she noticed something moving. And it was a curtain in a window and the window was broken.

After she knocked on the door and Leila didn't answer, she feared the worst and left to notify police.

Phone rang. It was my brother. He said Leila was murdered last night.

They broke in and stabbed her. As I'm going from memory, But I think 17 times that she was stabbed. She had been stabbed several times with a knife and with a screwdriver. Call was 20 months to the day later, One of the same guys went back, except there was two of them. The next time, of course, they broke a window and came through her basement. And then she heard them. She was there. They come through the basement door. But she's got this plastic flashlight against a knife.

So she was pretty well defenseless before breaking in. Lela's killers punctured her car tires and cut the telephone lines on the side of the house. Apart from the broken flashlight, there was other evidence of a struggle. On the far side of the house, There was a hammer and gardening tool covered in blood on top of a chest freezer. The window behind the freezer was shattered, possibly by Leila as she tried to escape. The amount of bloody footprints throughout the house indicated multiple people were involved. The drawers in the kitchen were covered in bloody glove prints. As the killers ransacked the place, it appeared that Leila's purse was missing. Leila's body was found on her bedroom floor with a screwdriver lodged in her temple. Next to her body, there were pieces of a broken plastic crucifix. The family didn't believe it belonged to Leila. Despite this, Detective Van Horn doesn't think it was an occult related crime.

It was a robbery. Everybody knew she had money because she had the habit of carrying large sums of money that was well known that she always had several hundred dollars in that purse.

After the murders, Teresa's brother Tim was in disbelief that his elderly aunt and uncle were killed in the same house 20 months apart.

Well, I just thought it had to be some kind of conspiracy. I couldn't imagine the same guys coming right back. It just confused things even more than they were from Homer's murder. My dad took me and my brother in law into the house and we saw part of what was left of the crime scene. And you could tell it had been a very violent thing because her bedroom was right over the basement. It was the first floor bedroom. It had a pocket door that went to the basement. And that pocket door was a heavy oak door. And whoever came in just ripped through that door to get into her. And that was kind of shocking too. I mean, you could tell the amount of violence that was involved in that. And it just had a lasting impression of me, you know, that she could be in bed five feet away and somebody's had to take in an ax or some kind of tool to bust through that door because that was a really heavy, sturdy door.

The next day, Wes Wilson's article about the murder was on the front page of the Daily Jeffersonian.

From my perspective, I just thought it was very unusual that the same residents would be broken into again and that there was another murder. In 1987, Leila Potts husband, Homer, was killed and she was critically injured. She survived. And 20 months later, something like that, it happened again. Looked like a robbery and she was stabbed to death. They broke in and attacked an old woman. They were angry, hateful. Just question, you know, why this couple, were they targeted? And maybe they decided to go back later and take care of Lela because she didn't die the first time. I don't know, but that crosses my mind sometimes, you know, was it the same people? And they came back to finish the job. I said, it's just weird that two murders in the same family, months apart from each other. It still boggles the mind. I'm surprised that they let that information out so early on about the screwdriver. I didn't think that they would give that information, you know, today they probably wouldn't give that information out right away, but I was surprised they did. There's always rumor that maybe they had lots of money hidden in their house, but that was never verified.

The broken crucifix and the fact the murder happened while Geraldo's special was on the air caused Panic throughout the community.

As I recall, it was at the time there was satanic cults and worshiping and especially in small towns and stuff. People thought that they would go out into the woods and participate in their cult rituals. There was just talk that there was people that would practice Satanism because it was so desolate, and there wasn't a lot of people around that. There's a lot of wooded areas and farm areas, and people were very scared. They thought they didn't capture Homer's murderer. Liza Potts then is murdered, and they're like, is it going to come to our house? You know, are we going to be broken into and stabbed to death? You know, they didn't know who was out there, and so they were locking their doors and calling the police to ask, you know, what they can do to be safer, and just told them, you know, lock your doors and keep an eye on your neighbor's property and make sure that they keep an eye on your property.

Do you think that it was a cult related to this day?

I still don't know if it was or not. It's just strange that she didn't have those items herself, Personal items, according to family members and stuff. So I don't know. I think there would have been more signs of some kind of satanic occult activity if there was, than just the little cross that was found.

As Detective Van Horn investigated the murders, none of the leads panned out, including the car parked at the church that night, and the murders remain unsolved today. What would it take to get this case prosecuted in 2018?

A miracle.

A miracle.

Somebody coming forth and saying, hey, he confessed to me, or they confessed to me. I'm willing to testify. The longer the time goes, the more people die off and their memories, just like me, you know, you don't remember all the details and stuff, so. But it'd take a miracle.

Van Horn declined to discuss any of the suspects in the murders, but he became uneasy when I brought up Tim Terrell.

Let me ask you one other question. Who gave you my files on the Potts murder? Because, you know, things that was in my file, that's not public record unless you got a public record release. I checked with the judge who used to be the prosecutor. I checked with the sheriff and the detectives and all that, and they say they have not released anything. But you've got information that would only be in my file, like even the names of who my suspects were. You know, you just don't pull that.

Name out of thin air at that point. I Hadn't seen Van Horn's files. All I had was the box and my mom's account of Van Horn coming to Dayton. Even though my mom didn't have the shotgun or leather jacket Van Horn was after. He didn't leave Dayton empty handed.

He told me that they were looking for some potential evidence that they thought might be in my possession. Specifically, they were looking for a black leather jacket and a sawed off shotgun. I did not have either one of those. I did have letters that Tim had gotten from his friend and as he called him, his partner, Jim Tovell, that they had written back and forth while Jim was in prison. So I turned all the letters over to Arnold Van Horn.

These are the letters she found in Tim's room that described plans to torture and murder a judge and his family when Jim got out of prison. When I spoke with Mick, he told me he met Tim and Jim in prison in the late 1980s.

I think it's about 1989. Somewhere in there. I usually hang out downtown handball courts. Back then, that's when they started coming around. That's how I met them. Took a liking to them. They took a liking to me. Seemed like good dudes. It turned out to be a good friendship from there that noticed that everything they had like a Lords of Death symbol. What is this? That says that's our group. Like, what is this? This is just our gang. That's what they taught us at the time.

I first heard about the Lords of Death from my mom when she told me Tim had the initials LOD tattooed on his arm. But Tim wasn't the only one. Jim has the tattoo as well. And the story goes that to join the group, you have to take someone's soul.

It wasn't until sometime later we're actually like a cult, you know, I'm like a cult. Jim said he was like the leader and Tim was his, like, second in command. He said, we're trying to recruit people. I said, I'm cool, you know, I don't want nothing like that. But they did mention hurting some people off and on. That's when Tim joked and said, well, yeah, a screwdriver makes a good weapon.

Lords of Death is a production of Tenderfoot TV in association with Odyssey. Your hosts is Thrasher Banks. The show is written, produced and edited by Thrasher Banks with additional writing by Meredith Stedman and Dennis Cooper. Produced by Meredith Stedman and Dennis Cooper. Executive producers are Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay. Consulting producer and video production by George Miller. Supervising producer is Tracy Kaplan. Artwork by Byron McCoy. Original music by Makeup and Vanity Set with additional music by Thrasher Banks mixed by Cooper Skinner. Thank you to Oren Rosenbaum and the team at uta, Beck Media and Marketing and the Nord Group. Special thanks to Tori Ross, Caitlin Kabalski and Thrasher's mom Carrie. For more podcasts like Lords of Death, search Tenderfoot TV on your favorite podcast app app or visit us@Tenderfoot TV. Thanks for listening.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Lords of Death. This series is released weekly absolutely free, but if you want an exclusive ad free binge, sign up for Tenderfoot plus check out the show notes for the link to subscribe.