On the night of June 17 1977, Chuck Morgan, a father of four young girls, sped down a dark road outside of Tucson Arizona, and as he drove he constantly checked his rearview mirror to make sure no one was following him.
Chuck was wearing a bulletproof vest, on his hip was a 357 Magnum revolver and in his pocket was one of his own teeth, wrapped up in tissue paper.
And by the end of that night, Chuck would drive his car way out into the desert off the road and become part of a mystery that has baffled investigators for almost 50 years.
But before we get into that story, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right podcast, because that's all we do, and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday.
So, if that's of interest to you, please replace the water in the Amazon Music Follow Buttons Keurig with water that has been sitting inside of a water gun outside all summer.
Okay, let's get into today's story.
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On the morning of March 22nd 1977, a 44 year old woman named Ruth Morgan rushed around her kitchen in the American city of Tucson Arizona, like she did almost every day.
Ruth was making sure her four daughters had everything they needed for school.
As she did this, her girls all sat at the kitchen table eating their cereal, and their father, Ruth's husband, 39-year-old Chuck Morgan, sipped his coffee nearby.
Ruth wished that Chuck would notice that she could really use some help right now getting the girls' stuff ready.
But like he had been more and more recently, Chuck just seemed to be off in his own world.
Annoyed Ruth opened the fridge, took out two lunches packed in paper bags and handed them to her younger daughters, and then she grabbed two backpacks that were lying on the floor nearby and she handed them to her older girls.
Then, a few minutes later, all four girls were hurrying out the door toward the car, with Ruth and Chuck following after them.
As Chuck climbed into the driver's seat of their Mercury Cougar Ruth, who was standing outside the car and would not be joining them, asked Chuck what time he'd be home from work.
Chuck was going to drop the kids off and then go to his office.
And for a second, Chuck didn't answer his wife.
He just sat there looking totally exhausted.
Chuck ran his own escrow company, which meant that his firm set up real estate deals between buyers and sellers to make sure the deals were conducted legally.
And Tucson's real estate market was booming, so Chuck had been working a lot recently.
Through the open car window.
He turned and told Ruth that he was working on a huge deal, so he didn't really know what time he'd be back.
Ruth wished Chuck did not have to work so much, but she also knew that nothing she said could stop him.
As long as she'd known him, Chuck had been incredibly driven to the point where sometimes Ruth worried about his health.
He never took time off and on the rare instances where he was not working, he didn't do things to relax like watching TV or going and seeing his friends.
Instead, it just seemed like Chuck bounced from one business deal or crisis to the next.
And about once a year.
He would push himself so hard with his work that he would basically have a nervous breakdown.
At least that's what Ruth called it.
And at that point, he would take a week off to recover, but that was it.
The rest of the time, he basically worked 24-7.
But Ruth also knew that Chuck's insane work ethic and drive was definitely paying off.
It had already made their family much more financially successful than they ever imagined possible.
Chuck and Ruth had grown up in very modest households, and so now to be able to give their girls a comfortable upbringing was quite satisfying for the parents.
And so on this typical Tuesday morning, Ruth did not push back on the possibility of Chuck needing to work late to finish this big deal.
Instead.
She just told him he looked great in his brown suit.
She gave him a kiss and watched as he turned on the car, pulled out of the driveway and headed off in the direction of the girls school.
That afternoon the girls came home from school on their own power and Ruth sent them outside to play while she got dinner ready.
She set a place at the table for the whole family, including Chuck, but when six o'clock rolled around and Chuck was still not home, Ruth and the girls decided to just eat without him.
And when Ruth got the girls bathed and into their pajamas and tucked them into their beds, Chuck was still not home.
But Ruth was not worried.
This really was kind of typical for Chuck.
Chuck's real estate clients were mostly rich businessmen who were buying up land all across the state and they wanted a lot for their money.
They were always calling Chuck away for meetings out of town without any warning, and sometimes Chuck would be gone at these meetings for a couple of days at a time without any notice.
And at the time, in 1977, there were no cell phones and most people, including Ruth and her family, didn't have answering machines.
And so when Ruth hadn't seen Chuck or heard from him, she just figured he must have tried calling the house earlier to let her know that he would indeed be out super late on this deal.
But she just must have missed the call because she was out running errands and so Chuck would just get back whenever he got back.
So that night Ruth went to bed alone, figuring that she would wake up and see Chuck in the morning, or at a minimum she would get a call the next day from Chuck to figure out where he was, what he was doing and when to expect him home.
But the next day, Chuck did not come home, and he didn't call.
And it was the same story the next day.
But again, Ruth had seen this behavior from Chuck before.
It was rare, but Chuck did sometimes just kind of vanish for days at a stretch on certain deals.
And so at 2 am on March 25th, three days after Ruth last saw Chuck or heard from Chuck it was when he drove off to drop the girls at school Ruth lay awake in her and Chuck's upstairs bedroom, trying to now convince herself that Chuck was fine, that everything was okay, that this was totally normal.
But she now knew that this was officially the longest stretch of time she had ever gone without hearing from Chuck.
And deep down, she started to feel like something had to be wrong.
But as she lay there stressing out about all sorts of what if?
Scenarios, she heard the family dog barking downstairs and instantly Ruth let out a sigh of relief.
The dog must be barking because Chuck was walking in the door, he was home.
So Ruth climbed out of bed.
She walked into the hallway, flipped on the light and began heading downstairs.
And as she descended the steps, she called out to Chuck, but no one answered.
When she got to the first floor, there was still no answer, and the dog was now starting to bark even louder.
And suddenly the hairs on Ruth's arms stood up.
If Chuck wasn't home, why was the dog barking?
What was going on?
She dashed across the living room into the kitchen.
She turned on the light and saw the family dog, up on its hind legs, pawing at the back door and barking.
Ruth very slowly crept toward that door and pulled back the curtain that covered a small window on it, and she looked outside and what she saw took her breath away.
It was Chuck.
However, he was just standing there on the back step, not making any attempt to come in the house, and he had this crazed look on his face, and when he saw Ruth, he didn't react.
He just stood there staring.
Ruth had no idea what her husband was doing.
She was just relieved that he was home.
And so she reached down and fumbled with the lock.
She opened the door and frantically told Chuck to come in and tell her what was going on.
Where had he been?
But once the door was open, Chuck kind of just staggered into the kitchen and literally fell into Ruth's arms.
She dragged him across the room and put him in one of the kitchen chairs.
And then once he was seated, Ruth finally got a good look at her husband and she nearly screamed.
Chuck's eyes were totally bloodshot, like he hadn't slept in days, and his wrists were bound with zip ties and he had a plastic handcuff on one of his ankles.
But what scared Ruth most of all was that Chuck still was just not speaking.
She asked him again to tell her what was going on, but he just sat there silent, looking off into the distance.
Ruth ran to a kitchen drawer and grabbed a knife, and then she rushed to Chuck and cut the ties around his wrists, and when Chuck's hands were free, he finally began to communicate with Ruth, but not with words, instead with hand gestures.
He motioned towards a notepad and pen sitting on the counter nearby, and so Ruth, understanding what he was asking for, reached over and grabbed the pen and paper and handed them to Chuck.
And as he wrote Ruth, who was now kind of hovering over his shoulder, couldn't believe the words on the paper.
When Chuck was done, Ruth ran to the phone and said they had to call 911 right now.
But at this, Chuck banged on the table and shook his head at her to stop.
Then in huge letters on the pad he told Ruth that if they called the cops their whole family would be killed.
Ruth moved away from the phone and started crying.
Chuck began to stand up, and Ruth instinctively grabbed him and supported him on her shoulder and then just walked him upstairs to their bedroom, where he lay down and fell asleep almost instantly.
And after he was asleep Ruth, not knowing what else to do, just did a quick check of the girls and was very relieved to see that none of them had woken up to the commotion of their father returning.
Then Ruth headed back to her own bedroom and laid down next to Chuck but she didn't shut her eyes.
Instead, she lay awake trying to figure out what the heck just happened and what she was going to do about it.
On the notepad, Chuck had written that he'd been kidnapped and tortured for two days before managing to escape and that now his throat was coated with a hallucinogenic drug that made it impossible for him to talk and could maybe even kill him if he ingested it.
It should be noted here that we don't really know if he meant the drug was painted inside of his throat or if it was painted on the outside of his neck.
We just don't know.
The whole thing just seemed totally insane, and so Ruth, as she lay there, started to wonder if maybe this was one of Chuck's annual nervous breakdowns from overworking.
But if it was, then this was the most bizarre and extreme breakdown she had ever seen.
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Chicago, March 2nd, 1976.
A savage double murder rocks the city.
Two young lives snuffed out in their prime.
And the killer?
A privileged, rich kid caught within four days, only to walk free through a web of influence and power.
For four years, the case gathered dust, the truth buried under the web of money, drugs and corruption, until an unlikely hero emerged, former rock musician turned star prosecutor, who refused to let the justice slip away.
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Now, for the first time, step inside the investigation that brought a killer to trial.
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It took almost a week for Chuck to recover from whatever had happened to him, and during that time he only communicated with Ruth via notes on a notepad.
Again, he was convinced there was a drug painted either on or in his throat that he had to avoid ingesting, and so not talking was his solution.
At the beginning of this recovery week Ruth asked Chuck lots of questions about where he had been and what had happened, but again she got virtually no answers from him.
And so, pretty early on in that week, Ruth just began focusing on nursing her husband back to health, which included giving him water through an eyedropper, because he had written that if he drank too much liquid at one time, this hallucinogenic drug coating his throat might activate and attack his nervous system.
Finally, after that week of recovery was up and Chuck got out of bed and started talking again, Ruth now demanded answers about this whole crazy situation.
But nothing Chuck said to her made any sense.
Chuck told Ruth that owning his escrow business was not his only job.
In addition to his escrow business, he was actually an undercover agent for the US Treasury Department.
The Treasury Department is a federal agency that investigates financial crimes.
Chuck didn't say who had kidnapped him, but he said they knew he had information that could send them to prison for a long time.
As Ruth listened to what her husband was saying, she simply didn't believe him.
Instead she thought this really had to be one of his big annual nervous breakdowns and that eventually he would just snap out of this and be normal Chuck again.
And so when Chuck insisted that Ruth not tell anyone what he had told her about his real identity and the trouble he had now gotten into, Ruth didn't really care and said fine, I won't tell anyone.
But over the next couple of months, Chuck did not snap out of it.
He did not become normal Chuck.
Instead, his mental state seemed to get worse and worse.
He started wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a 357 Magnum revolver, which is a very powerful pistol, whenever he left the house.
He also bought a special belt that could conceal a knife in the buckle, and he grew a big, thick beard to disguise his face.
He was also convinced that someone had bugged their home phone, so he started to leave the house and go to payphones whenever he had to make calls.
And whenever Ruth, who was now becoming very seriously concerned for her husband, asked him what was going on or what he was so scared of, he would just tell her the less she knew, the safer she'd be.
On the morning of June 7th, so about two and a half months after Chuck had stumbled in their back door insisting he had been kidnapped and drugged.
Ruth wound up driving the girls to school that morning.
When she left, Chuck told her he would be going to his office that day.
After Ruth left, Chuck headed to a payphone near their house and called his staff, informing them that he would be there in about a half an hour.
But he never showed up.
And eventually, someone from his staff called the police.
Even though Ruth had done what her husband had asked and had not gone to police or told anyone about his strange behavior, she couldn't help but feel incredibly relieved when she heard that the Tucson police had put out a missing person alert for Chuck.
However, when the police spoke to her, she opted to continue keeping Chuck's secret, mostly because she was worried if she told them what he told her, they would think he was crazy or dangerous.
And so all she told police was that she was just very worried about him and hoped he would come home soon.
Nine days later, on the night of June 16th, Chuck had still not been found.
He was still missing.
No one knew where he was.
And this night, Ruth was home.
She was sitting on the couch, staring at the television, but she wasn't really watching it.
Her mind was wandering, wondering where the heck her husband was, and she couldn't help but think that something terrible had happened to him.
And as she sat there staring blankly at the TV, the phone rang in the kitchen.
And suddenly, Ruth felt a jolt of energy, thinking maybe it was Chuck.
And so she ran to the kitchen.
She answered the phone, but instead of hearing her husband's voice, she heard a woman's voice that she didn't recognize.
And in a quiet voice, the strange woman said, Ruthie.
Chuck is all right.
Ecclesiastes 12, 1 through 8.
Then the woman hung up.
Ruth just stood there for a second, holding the phone to her ear, listening to the dial tone.
Now she was even more confused.
Was this some sign that Chuck really was an undercover agent for the treasury department?
And this woman maybe worked with him there and maybe she was like his handler and maybe she was now reaching out to Ruth with some code.
I mean, Ruth had no idea, but at least now Ruth had a clue about what happened to her husband.
She had this Bible passage, Ecclesiastes 12, one through eight.
So Ruth hung up the phone and ran to a bookshelf in the living room.
She stretched up to reach the top shelf and she grabbed her family Bible.
And then Ruth rushed with the Bible to the couch.
She sat down and flipped through the pages until she got to the book of Ecclesiastes, chapter 12, verses 1 through 8.
Ruth read the verses, but she didn't understand what they could possibly have to do with Chuck.
They read in part, quote, End quote.
Ruth eventually just slammed the Bible closed because she had no idea what it meant and frankly, she had no idea what to think about anything anymore.
And at this point, all she hoped for was that her husband was somehow still alive somewhere in the world and that hopefully, he would return soon.
About 24 hours later, on June 17th Chuck, who was actually only a few miles away from his home, sped through Tucson in his Mercury Cougar, constantly checking his rear view mirror to make sure no one was following him.
Then he suddenly turned into the parking lot of a cheap motel where he had been hiding out for the last few days, and he came to a stop.
Chuck was wearing his bulletproof vest over a sweat-stained dress shirt, and he was also now missing a tooth.
Chuck grabbed his briefcase from the passenger seat and he unholstered his .357 Magnum.
Then he climbed out of his car, slammed the door and sprinted, with the briefcase and gun in hand, toward the motel.
Once safely inside his room, Chuck locked the door and placed the gun, as well as the briefcase, down on the bed.
And then he opened the briefcase and what he saw made him smile.
He was looking at $60,000 in cash stacked neatly inside.
For reference, $60,000 then would be worth about $300,000 in today's dollars.
Chuck had put this money in the briefcase himself, but he was paranoid that somehow it would just disappear, and so looking at it calmed him down.
Then Chuck closed the briefcase and pulled a black marker along with a $2 bill out of his pocket.
$2 bills are the rarest form of cash produced in the United States.
Then he placed that $2 bill on the bedside table and started writing on it with the marker.
After he was done, he pulled his pants down and pinned the now marked up $2 bill to his underwear.
Then he pulled his pants back up, he grabbed his gun, he grabbed the briefcase and then he turned around and rushed right back outside to his car.
Once he got there, he threw the briefcase into the passenger seat and then jumped into the driver's seat, where he turned the ignition and peeled out of the parking lot.
He sped west for a while and eventually pulled onto a dark desert road.
After getting about 30 miles outside of Tucson, he swerved off the road into a secluded desert clearing where he stopped the car and cut the ignition.
At this point, Chuck reached into his pocket and took out a wadded up tissue and he unwrapped it.
Inside was the tooth he was missing.
He stared at it for a second before balling it back up and then placing it in the backseat of his car.
Then he checked to make sure his gun was still in his holster, and it was.
And then, after taking a deep breath, he grabbed the briefcase from the passenger seat and stepped outside of his car into the desert.
The next day, June 18th, Ruth was in her living room when there was a knock at the front door.
When Ruth opened it, an officer from the Pima County Sheriff's Department was standing there.
For a second, Ruth felt a flood of relief.
Maybe they were here to say they found Chuck and that he was okay.
But moments later, when she was sitting on her couch in the living room, the officer told her that he had some bad news.
Two people driving down a highway in the desert to the west of the city had just discovered Chuck's body.
The officer told Ruth that Chuck was lying out in the sand and appeared to have committed suicide.
The officer suggested that perhaps Chuck had had some sort of mental breakdown, as his appearance was totally bizarre.
He was missing a tooth that looked like it had recently been knocked out or pulled out.
He was armed with this powerful firearm and in his pocket was a 2 bill with incomprehensible messages written all over it.
Ruth was absolutely devastated, even though she wasn't really shocked at the news.
After a moment when she had composed herself, she asked the officer if any of the messages on the 2 bill might be like a suicide note for her and the kids, explaining what had happened.
And the officer just shook his head and said no, there was no communication left behind besides on this 2 bill, and that was definitely not intended for you.
After hearing this, Ruth finally just broke down and sobbed.
She felt a horrible sense of guilt and regret about how she had handled Chuck's behavior over the last few months.
She wished she had just totally ignored his request and gone to the police right away or at least told someone about what was going on with him, because maybe then he'd be alive.
But underneath her own feelings of guilt, Ruth also started to feel kind of angry with Chuck.
Why hadn't he left behind some sort of note for her or the kids?
Why would he take his life without at least explaining the situation to his own family who he loved?
It made no sense.
In the aftermath of Chuck's death, Ruth planned his funeral and focused all of her energy on making sure her girls were okay.
She didn't want to believe that Chuck had killed himself, but the police department was adamant that that was what happened.
And in time, Ruth and her kids began to accept that that was the reality.
Fast forward to sometime in the late 1980s, roughly a decade after Chuck had died and Ruth was home in the same house she had shared with Chuck, when her phone rang.
And when she heard what the man on the other end of the line had to say, her heart suddenly started to beat rapidly and she had to grab a chair to sit down.
The caller's name was Don Devereaux and he was an investigative reporter.
And he told Ruth that he wanted to meet with her because he had something very important to tell her.
Something he said she might not believe.
It was about her late husband, Chuck.
When the pair met at a local coffee shop, Dawn asked Ruth if she was really ready to hear everything, even if it was painful.
And Ruth, even though her voice trembled, didn't hesitate.
She said, yes, tell me.
Based on Dawn's independent investigation following Chuck's death.
This is a reconstruction of what Dawn believes could have happened on the night of June 17th 1977, the night that police said Chuck committed suicide.
According to Don's theory, on the night of June 17th, Chuck drove out into the desert.
He parked, he stepped out of his car, carrying that briefcase that contained $60,000 in cash.
He had his .357 Magnum pistol on his hip and more guns in the car.
And as he's standing out there he sees up ahead.
Headlights suddenly appear a few yards away from where Chuck was standing.
And once that car came to a stop, a man stepped out who was wearing a dark suit.
Chuck took a step towards this man, but the man quickly pulled out a gun and aimed it at Chuck, and so Chuck froze.
The man told him to show him the cash, at which point Chuck did open up the briefcase.
The man told Chuck to put the briefcase on the ground and turn around, and so Chuck followed the instructions, believing that in just a few minutes the nightmare he had been living through would finally be over and he would be able to drive back home to Ruth and his girls, and then they could move far away and put all of this behind them forever.
After turning away from the man in the suit, Chuck stood there listening to the sound of this man walking closer and closer to him.
And then this man's footsteps stopped right behind him and suddenly Chuck would have felt a jerk by his hip and he would have realized the man in the suit had grabbed Chuck's gun from its holster.
And then, before Chuck could do anything, this man had fired Chuck's gun into the back of Chuck's head, killing him instantly.
Then the man in the suit wiped the gun of his fingerprints and positioned it near Chuck's hand to make it look like Chuck had shot himself.
Then the man in the suit grabbed the briefcase, walked back to his car and drove away, leaving Chuck's body where he fell.
Don wasn't sure if Chuck actually worked undercover for the US Treasury Department, but Don did think that Chuck had somehow gotten involved with organized crime, most likely through his escrow business.
Don believed that Chuck had been conducting illegal real estate deals that allowed criminals to smuggle drugs into Arizona from Mexico and then Chuck was then laundering their drug money for them.
Money laundering is concealing money gained illegally by transferring it, through international banks, into legitimate businesses like real estate.
Don knew that weeks before Chuck's supposed kidnapping, the state of Arizona and the Arizona Attorney General's Office had named Chuck as a witness in a trial that involved an organized crime boss.
Don believed that that crime boss had hired a hitman to kill Chuck to keep him from testifying against him.
And most likely, according to Don, Chuck had figured this out.
And so that was why Chuck had begun carrying a weapon around and wearing a bulletproof vest all the time.
But Don said he had learned from a friend of Chuck's, a woman known simply as quote Green Eyes, that the hitman had told Chuck he would call off the hit if Chuck just paid him the hitman 60000 in cash.
So Don believes that Chuck jumped at this opportunity to save himself and it was likely the reason he left his house on June 7th 1977 to go get the money and pay off the hitman.
However, the meeting with the hitman didn't happen until June 17th, 10 days later.
And obviously, the hitman did not keep his promise.
The hitman was very likely the man in the suit and he just took the money from Chuck and killed him anyways.
And so, as for what Chuck was doing and why he was avoiding his wife and kids and the police during those 10 days between when he left his house on June 7th and disappeared and when he was killed on June 17th Don, and everybody else for that matter has no idea.
And that was far from the only unanswered question in this case.
The friend of Chuck's known as Green Eyes admitted to being the woman who called Ruth on June 16th, the night before Chuck died, to mention that Bible verse from Ecclesiastes.
However, she never specified what it meant.
Don believed that the Bible verse could be a code that Chuck had asked Green Eyes to pass along to Ruth and his family, maybe to signify that he was okay.
But if the Bible verse was really a code, why hadn't Chuck given Ruth a way to crack it?
Because she had no idea what it meant.
Again, Don doesn't know, and really no one knows why.
As for the tooth that was found in the backseat of Chuck's car out in the desert, Don said that had a very specific meaning.
At the time Chuck died, there were rumors that some mobsters removed their victim's teeth to keep them from being identified by police after they were killed.
So Don believed that maybe Chuck removed one of his teeth in advance of his meeting with this hitman and then left the tooth in his car to ensure officials would be able to still identify him if the worst were to happen during this meeting.
As for the 2 bill that was found with the strange messages written all over it, Don said these messages were not nonsense at all.
They were Chuck's attempt to tell the world what had happened to him.
Don had not completely solved the riddle, but he believed he was close.
On the front of the $2 bill, Chuck had written seven Spanish last names.
On the back, where the 2 bill shows a picture of the founding fathers who had signed the Declaration of Independence.
Chuck had labeled each of the men in the picture with the numbers 1 through 7.
He had also scrawled a crude map of a route from Tucson to the Mexican border.
Don told Ruth that he believed the names and the map were Chuck's way of pointing to specific smugglers moving drugs between Mexico and Tucson.
There was one last clue on the $2 bill.
It was the phrase, Ecclesiastes 12.
This was the same section of the Bible that Green Eyes had mentioned to Ruth on the phone on June 16th.
And so it supported the theory that the Bible verse could be some kind of code.
But of course that code is still not cracked.
After Don finished telling Ruth his theory about Chuck, Ruth felt a sense of relief that maybe finally she had gotten the explanation she had so desperately wanted for all these years.
But at the same time, it was clear that Don's theory was just that, a theory.
And there are many more compelling theories about Chuck, some that include him actually being an undercover agent for the government, others that paint him as a man who simply lost his mind.
But as of today, all we know for sure is that Chuck was found shot to death out in the desert and officially his death is still listed as a suicide.
Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballin Podcast.
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