Transcript of 4 | Breaking the Law

Richard Jacobs was a complicated man.

Richard was quite smart. Probably in June. Attorney's a

bad name.

He could've really changed the world.

To the

United States Supreme Court.

He's seen

it for years. Narcissism would be the biggest.

But he was also my dad. This is how to destroy everything. A journey into the past along with my best friend.

Hey, Danny.

As we try to answer

the most important question of all. What if you're like your father?

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Lords of Death is released weekly, every Monday, and brought to you 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.

You're listening to Lords of Death, a production of Tenderfoot TV in association with Odysee. 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.

I think it was about 1989, somewhere in there. I usually hang out down at the 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.

This is Mick telling the story of how he met Tim and Jim when they were all serving time at Ross Correctional about 6 years before Cindy Cozad's murder.

I noticed that everything they had, like, a Lawrence of Death symbol. What is this? It says the guys are a group. Like, what is this? This is just our gang.

That's what they taught us at the time. It wasn't until sometime later, we're actually like a cult. You know? And 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.

If you remember from the last episode, detective Arnold Van Horn's investigation into the Potts murders led him to Dayton to speak with my mom shortly after Mick and Tim were arrested. She didn't have the leather jacket or shotgun he was looking for, but she passed along letters she found that Jim had written to Tim. While in Dayton, Van Horn went to the Montgomery County Jail to speak with Mick.

That's when they were asking about, did Tim ever brag about killing somebody? And that's when I mentioned the incident about where he said a screwdriver was a good weapon, you know, like that. And that's why I was like, what do you mean? He said, well, some something jumped off, and I had to break out a screwdriver 1 time. That's about as far as it went on that.

And then Jim cut in, changed the subject. And from what I could tell, he had killed a girl and got away with it.

From Tenderfoot TV, I'm Thrasher Banks. This is Lords of Death.

When Mick talked to detective Arnold Van Horn, he told him that Tim had bragged about killing someone in Guernsey County with Jim.

Tim, he was drunk. I know. This is sometime out of the blue when he was staying with us there on, Royal Avenue is what he told me that him and Jim had killed a girl and got away with. That's what they told me. But he didn't say who or when, he just said a girl.

I just dismissed it. I was like, I didn't think it was believable because him being drunk and all. I mean, he always said he was in a gang, if you wanna call it a gang. More or less satanic, devil worshiping type thing. That's how I came to Christ.

I was feeling to me when they said it. The The Lord's dead, but I never really took that serious either with him and Jim. They say there's other members. Maybe 4 people total, maybe 3, 3 or 4. Him and Jim were only 2 I knew of, you know.

Jim would call himself the dark 1.

Jim is the only person other than Tim I've confirmed who has a lords of death tattoo. And if the story my mom told me is true, he had to kill someone to get it. According to my mom, Mick gave her specific details about Tim and Jim's involvement in Homer and Leila's murders.

He told me that Leila Potts was murdered by Tim with a screwdriver through her head, and her husband, Homer Potts, had been murdered approximately a year prior to that. He did say that they were killed for money. There was supposedly a lot of money in the house. My question was, why would they murder them a year apart? And Mick didn't know the answer to that.

He also mentioned Homer and Leigh Lippat's name. It wasn't just they killed these people. It was by name.

If Mick knew more about the murders, he wasn't willing to share that information with me. What I can say is that Tim and Jim lived in Guernsey County when the murders happened. Jim spent the 19 eighties in and out of prison for robberies and b and e's, but wasn't incarcerated when Homer was murdered in February of 1987. Later that year, he ended up going to prison, but was released the month before Leila's murder. But just because they've lived in the area doesn't mean that they're guilty of murder.

After Van Horn interviewed my mom in 1995, she didn't hear about the Potts murders again until nearly 20 years later.

I've always always been interested in just searching random things on the Internet or things that I know about, just seeing if there's any information that I haven't seen yet. And 1 day, I typed in Homer Leelapotte's murder on Google, and I found a blog that had, like, a description of what had happened when the Potts were murdered.

So that was the first time you had seen anything about it?

Yes. Other than just what I'd heard, that was the very first time I'd ever seen anything about it. I think I called you immediately or text you.

This would have been back in 2013 or so, back when I was still in college. The blog post was written by a local reminiscing about the murders. When you read through it, were you like that Tim definitely did this?

I've I've always thought Tim did it, but I think that kind of reiterated that for me. There were a lot of things that I learned from reading that that lined up with things I had been told. The screwdriver, the fact that they were there for money, how she was stabbed, what she was stabbed with. A lot of fear felt in that moment too because someone like Tim, you just don't know what they're capable of. And we've seen a little bit of what he's capable of, but what else is he capable of?

But I wanted to contact the person because I knew about these murders. I put an anonymous comment that I ended up deleting. I don't know if it was ever seen. I don't really even remember what it said. But I was too scared to get involved, and I didn't want my comment to ever be traced back to me.

I've been investigating the Potts murders ever since my mom told me this story. I thought connecting Tim to these crimes would help me make sense of why Cindy Cozad was murdered. At the time, the blog post was the only source of information available online about the case. So even though my mom was against reaching out to the blogger, Tapu, it was my only hope of finding new information.

I was basically writing for it because my mother kept talking about it. Whenever we go past the house or anything, she would say, there's the Potts' house.

Tapu grew up in Guernsey County, a couple miles from Homerun Lila's farm. We first connected back in 2014 and have stayed in touch ever since.

I wrote these blog messages because to me, it was a really interesting subject and also because I could find no info on it either. But it kept me interested just because it's so puzzling. It was pretty strange for Guernsey County to run into this kind of murder, murder of a husband and wife. We don't have that stuff happen around here. We live too far apart and everything.

Who would do such a thing, and where it was? You'd have to, like, go out of your way to find the Pots house. It's just hard to believe that the man was murdered, you know, Homer. Then a year or so later, so was Leila. So people were definitely discussing it at that point.

A lot of people had different theories.

The comment section of Tapu's blog is filled with theories and rumors, most of which were posted anonymously.

Oddly, I see a lot of my comments deleted. I don't know why. They obviously had some kind of interest in what went on. I think the commenter would there's not that many, but I think that you should look at that because I feel like somebody else is watching my blog.

Then 1 day back in 2018, was scrolling through Facebook and saw Homer and Leila's names. It was a post listing the dozen or so unsolved murders from Guernsey County. A user named Tori posted that she believed Tim Terrell was involved in the Potts murders. It was the first time I'd heard someone other than my mom connect Tim to the murders, so I reached out to Tori.

There was, you know, a good bit of traffic on the post. People were writing what they thought, but it was completely opposite of what I know. So I was like, you know what? I see my cousin's husband wrote, basically, that person's long dead. So I commented.

I was always told it was Tim Tarrow, and he's in prison for another murder. That's when I got a message from you, being a stranger, telling me it might be for my best interest to remove that comment for my safety, be in the area I live in, and that that murder wasn't a 1 person job. Right then, I'm like, wow. Basically, I was interested in the conversation right away. Like, either this is somebody that's close to Tim and his family and trying to shut me up, or this is somebody that's got some information too.

That's when you told me about you being a little boy living in a house with Tim for a while.

Tory lived next door to Tim in the early nineties before he moved to Dayton and was best friends with 1 of his stepdaughters. After news broke about Tim's arrest for Cindy's murder, Tory overheard Tim's ex wife, Pam, and other adults talking about it.

When I got there, they were talking the adults and Pam were talking about detective Anne Horne went to Dayton to interview Tim. She proceeded to talk to her neighbor lady about specifically the pots. As soon as I heard her telling the neighbor of the pots his names, I knew exactly where the house was, and I knew exactly who they were talking about. Us kids were old enough to know what they were talking about, and we wanted to hear every little detail what Tim really did. So it's immediately when I hear his wife and the neighbor lady talking that he was interviewed for the POTS murders after killing Cindy, obviously, something had to be there, and it stuck in my mind.

So that's how this got started, and still back at that time, the only thing you could find would be a blog that Tapu made. That's all we had to start with. We literally had to start from the bottom with this, And you knew stuff, then I knew stuff. Being that I was from here, I remembered people Tim hung out with.

I knew Tim had a brother named Terry, but he had no Internet presence. It turned out there was a good reason for that. Tori told me that Terry was homeless, but she knew the area where I could find him.

I really think you should also plan a trip to Cambridge. Go to this location referred to by us locals as Goat Alley, and there is a trailer in this alley. It's the only trailer up there, and you should definitely be able to find Terry Terrell up there.

So that's when it happened. The moment my armchair investigation turned into an active 1.

Starting route to Blytheville.

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Going West is a true crime podcast hosted by me, Heath, and my partner, Daphne.

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When I arrived in Guernsey County, I drove to the area where Tori said Terry would be. I looked over at a dilapidated trailer and saw the outline of a man in tattered clothes passed out next to a bottle of cobra malt liquor. It was Terry.

Come up on the porch, but there's a sea out there you can sit at,

and my beer is out there.

Drink beer and live free. My brother, Tim, said, president's got 3 squares that I caught. He don't have to scrape and scrounge, which that's what I do.

I'll tell you something crazy. I, lived with your brother when he killed the Cindy in Dayton. I was just a boy.

Oh my god. Well, I didn't know what the girl's name was.

The name was Cindy Kozadd.

That was the prostitute. Yep. That's why I haven't talked to him.

He was in cold blood.

I don't talk to him. Well, now the story I got, Mike McCourt shot her first.

Yeah. James McCourt or Nick?

Mike, what we called him, He shot her first. And Tim heard the gunshot, and he reached underneath to see the car and grabbed the 357 and ran up check on Mike. And when he got up there, Mike, right now, you should prove your loyalty to me.

Yeah. I don't know.

When Tim shot her.

Yeah.

That was, how it was put to me.

Only 2 people know the truth about that situation.

Them 2 because she ain't talking.

If this is the version that Tim told his family, it couldn't have gone down that way. Nick didn't have a gun with him that night. The 3 bullets that hit Cindy were all from Tim's 357. I didn't bring this up with Terry because more than anything, I was looking for information about Tim's involvement in the Potts murders. I'll be frank with it.

Here's what

I'm getting at. I've I'm making a podcast about the Potts murders

from back in the eighties.

Okay. I heard about the Potts murders.

And it always doubles back to your brother.

He didn't do it.

You don't think so? No. Why's that?

Go to Jim and John Tubble. He'll find the culprits right there.

John is Jim's older brother.

Then you go out. If you wanna go do some more research, you got Martha Cole and Anton got robbed back in the nineties. That's when my brother was running with Jim and John.

Who was it? Martha

Cole. She's an old woman that got robbed and raped out there at Antrim. They broke into her store, robbed her, and raped her. They didn't kill her.

They cut her pigtails off?

Yeah.

What's her name?

Martha Cole. She worked This

wasn't the first time I'd heard about the robbery at Cole Station. It was mentioned in newspaper articles about Leila's murder because it happened the night before on October 24, 1988. Locals at the time speculated that the crimes could be connected because the telephone lines were cut at both scenes. Terry wasn't able to provide an alibi for his brother's whereabouts on the night of Lila's murder, but he did leave me with another lead to look into.

So these Towbles, you really think they did? Got away with it?

Yeah. But that ain't the only ones. I know rumors.

Let's hear them. Give me something to look into.

There's a woman named Margaret Long. I think Margaret had something to do with some of that shit. That's about all I can tell you about it really because I know I didn't do it, so I don't know no more than what I hear. But, yeah, Tim is my brother. I'm not real proud of what he did, but he's still my damn brother.

I recognized Margaret's name from a document I found in the box. It was an indictment for breaking into a gun store with Tim and Jim on October 23, 1988, 2 nights before Lilo's murder. Bob Hinthorn's gun store was in Noble County, directly south of Guernsey County, where Tim lived. Bob was getting ready for bed when he heard noises coming from the gun store connected to his home.

I heard something making up on anyway. And where would that be? So I just waited there a bit. I just waited to go to bed, and I just well, better better just not do this right now. I waited there a little while, and first thing I heard again.

Finally, I found out what it was. It was somebody was trying to tear the door open over there on the front of the store, and they didn't have enough strength to do it. So the guy went around there and got a fellow around here at the corner of the building. That was Jim Tubble. I found out later.

And, buddy, when he got around there, they got the door tore down. I mean, they tore that door up.

When I interviewed Bob back in October of 2020, he still lived with his wife Donna in the same location. The gun shop was at the front of the property and Bob and Donna lived with their 5 children behind the store. By the time Bob alerted his family and grabbed his gun, it was too late.

They got in there and got the stuff, got out and got going there. I didn't catch them.

They escaped with over a dozen firearms and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, which they took to a trailer in Biesville where John and Margaret lived. That trailer was located less than 2 miles from the Potts' farm. Bob reported the break in to Noble County Sheriff Landon Smith.

I asked Landon and the sheriff up here about it. I said, in a case like this, what do they do now? They didn't get much. He said, hey, they'll be back. Don't know how long it might take them.

It might be 6 months, but he said, they'll be back.

The next night, 2 masked men robbed Martha Cole's service station in Guernsey County. Martha was alone and heard noises coming from the back of the building. When she went to investigate, 1 of the men struck her in the face with a pistol and demanded money before forcing her to undress and tying her to a chair. While she was tied up, 1 of the men took a knife and cut off both of her braided pigtails. When detective Van Horn talked to Martha, she was unable to identify the assailants.

I mentioned we had a woman that they robbed her and tied her up and cut her braids off, but she swore up and down, I don't have a clue who it is. He said I've known Martha for years, so I sat down and talked to her. I said, it'll happen to somebody else. I don't know. I don't know, Arnold.

I don't know who it was. And I think that was the night before Lila was killed.

The next record I could find about Tim was a marriage license from October 28, 1988, 3 days after Lila's murder, when he married Jim's sister. The week after the wedding, on November 3rd, he was arrested in Florida for petty theft, which begs the question, what was he doing down in Florida? The next week, Jim and Margaret were arrested in Florida for possessing a firearm, which turned out to be 1 of the guns stolen from Bob's the month before. Back in Ohio, Bob was prepared to face the burglars in case they decided to return.

I figured if the time comes, I'll face what I have to face. And if they'd have come back, come in the house or anything, I'd have been prepared to blow them in half. So I fixed my bed over in the store, got my security system set in, slept away for about 3 weeks, maybe a little longer. The next time they come back, I was ready for them. And then a little bit later, I went outside and was standing out there smoking.

I see any lights. They were in the cemetery. I just stood there and watched for a while. There's people who were in the cemetery, and I'm just pretty sure that they was over there watching us. So that was the night that hit us.

Were you nervous?

Not particularly. No.

What was going through your mind?

Well, meanness. I slipped out, and I went in there. And 2 of them was out in the front of the counter, and the other 1, he was behind the counter. And then I jumped out of my 44 and I said, buddy, bring us right there. And the other 2 took 1 step and out that door they went.

That was unbelievable. I couldn't hardly believe. He was caught. He couldn't go nowhere. I told him, I said, if you wanna run, go ahead.

We'll see if this 44 will catch you. I just got him pinned down there and brought him around and threw him down on the floor there and tried to get him to tell me who he was, and he wouldn't do it. He wouldn't say a word. There's a hole down through the floor. And I just took that gun and shot right down through that just about that far of my ear.

Did he react to that?

Or Not a bit. Not a bit. Just laid there. I didn't know how to do this, so I just pulled it up real quick, stuck her down pretty high, and I said, you savage bitch. I said, I'll just shoot you right here now if you don't tell them.

My car didn't help any, but he didn't say a word.

So that was Tim Terrell?

Yeah. Yeah. That was Tim.

Yeah. Old Tim.

The voices you hear in the background are me, Bob's daughter, Tina, and his wife, Donna. So when you shoot at this guy and point a gun at him and he's not reacting at all Mhmm.

What what are you what

are you thinking about this person?

I'm thinking he's a real idiot. Anybody that could lay there and say nothing, you know, thinking they might die. I just couldn't hardly believe it.

So Bob tied Tim up and had Donna hold him at gunpoint. He went outside to look for Jim and Margaret by the cemetery where their car was parked.

I went across the road looking to see where the others was. She had the gun on that 1 and kept him pinned down there. Jim had got set back up here, and I seen him. Walk up there to the winches. He done that and he shot at her and, just just missed her about that much.

And they they didn't miss my daughter much either. But when I had to come back up, I seen this guy run up over this hill where I never couldn't hit him, but I just for the heck of it, I just took 2 or 3 shots anyway. All of a sudden, that little girl come tearing up on that bank, and she's saying, don't shoot me. I'm pregnant. Don't shoot me.

So Margaret was 2 months pregnant with John's baby at the time.

That she got up right over there. If you tell me what I wanna know, I said, I might let you live to the other side of the road. She told me about who each 1 of them was, what her name was, what the boy's name was. She didn't hesitate. About that time, the sheriff come pulling in.

He talked to her a little bit, and then he went in the store there and got that kid with a cuff with a collar and dug him out to the car, and he knew exactly who it was.

Margaret avoided prison time for her role in the robberies, while Tim was sentenced to 2 years. Jim wasn't as lucky. Since he fired shots through the front of the store, he was charged with aggravated robbery and served nearly 10 years in prison for his actions that night. This incident led to Mick meeting Tim and Jim at Ross Correctional in early 1989. When Tim was released from prison for the gun store robbery 2 years later in 1991, he moved back to Guernsey County and married a woman named Pam.

I found a photo album in the box full of pictures from those years. Since Tim's former neighbor, Tori, knew the family, I shared some of the photos with her to see if she could identify any of the people in

them. That Polaroid, I'm not sure who the adult male is in the middle, but left to right, I can ID those kids. All 4 siblings, all children of Pam. The other picture would be Pam's wedding day when her and Tim got married and then standing beside Tim is Pete Greubens. And, Thrasher, I'm telling you, Pete is who you need to talk to.

She sent me a link to his Facebook page, so I decided to send him a message. I wrote, I'm working on a piece about the Potts murders from back in 19 eighties. Pete responded, I didn't do it, but I do know shit. Leila had him killed. Look for a woman named Margaret.

I replied, how does she tie into this? Pete said, she knows. So I asked the question, who killed Leila? He replied, John Tubble. Not Leila, but the first 1.

So John killed Homer and went back for Leila? Why? Pete responds, guess that nobody found the truth. I'm still friends with Timmy. Pete didn't respond when I asked him if Tim was involved in Leila's murder.

Instead, he replied, I do know or heard that they buried the murder weapon deep. At 1 point, they had a photo album from Leila's with $100 bills in it. They lived off the money for a while. So the only person Pete directly implicated in the murder was John, the only 1 of these people who's no longer alive. He was shot and killed back in 2006.

And he didn't outright say Tim was involved, but he mentioned Tim and Margaret without me bringing them up and that they had a photo album from Leila's house. Then he sent me a link to a Facebook page belonging to Tim's cousin, Gary Alexander, and suggested I speak with him. So I got his number and gave him a call.

Back then, I was known to be the major alien in the whole town, whole area. You know, you mentioned Gary Alexander's name, and so I called, my god, what? Me and Timmy, we was known to be some bad boys around the whole Guernsey County area. We did some robberies and theft, you know, nothing major. We robbed the school.

We stole our We stole our uncle's car and went to Colorado with it. You know, just little eyes and aunts. I was kind of the leader in all of our craziness when we was kids, but he always had that foresight where he wanted to go that extra foot outside of the boundaries. Anything that Timmy had anger wise, I'm gonna say probably came from his dad. His dad was very, very strict strict and abusive.

Tim had about 3 different sides up. You all knew 1 or 2 of them. There was still 1 hit. And as far as the Pottsas and Homer's, from what I gathered, was double. Jim went in and robbed Homer for some money that he got.

When he wouldn't give up the money and he killed the old man, he told the old lady if she didn't come up with the money, he was gonna kill her. What she told him was, if you will let me live, I will give you all of the insurance money, which is what none of the other people even expected. But the second 1 involved Timmy.

Gary claims that Tim told him this story in the early nineties at a bar in Biesville called the Halai. That's the same bar Tim took my mom and Mick to where he got into the fight and told my mom he'd been hired as a hitman in the past. This version of the story, if it's true, explains why the perpetrator left empty handed and why Leila's injuries were minor compared to Homer's. But how was I supposed to verify this?

What are you missing, young man? Now think about that question. What am I missing? Oh, man. You just haven't learned quite enough yet.

Pete Raven.

Pete.

He was with him all the time. From what I was told, there was about 3 or 4 other people there. The 2 gals stayed outside. Only guy stayed on the porch while the other 2 went inside. Pete knows exactly what went on, when what went on, who went on with it.

Left his whole chapter out of the story. If you keep on going the way that you're going, you will know everything very soon.

So after Pete directed me to Gary, interestingly enough, Gary pointed the finger right back at Pete. When Pete caught wind that Gary implicated him in the murders, it's safe to say he wasn't thrilled about it, judging by this voicemail he left me.

Gary Alexander, that motherfucker is a piece of shit. I don't even know why Gary's breathing air at this moment in his life because he's such a piece of shit. You should call me. I can tell you some fucking stories, dude. I fucking knocked out more fucking people in this town, and I am loved in this town.

But, Gary Alexander is is a piece of shit. Oh, man. My name is Pete Graves. My dad was a deputy sheriff in Guernsey County, and he watched over the Popses, and I was friends with Timmy. But when that fucking murders, I wasn't even around.

But I know him. I know who you are now.

Lords of Death is a production of Tenderfoot TV in association with Odysee. Your host 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 Kaboski, and Thrasher's mom, Carrie. For more podcasts like Lords of Death, search Tenderfoot TV on your favorite podcast app, or visit us at Tenderfoot dot 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.