“Catching a Hit Man—The Charles Harrelson Case”

Katy Vine (voice-over): Hi, and welcome back for another bonus episode of The Problem With Erik, an original podcast created by Texas Monthly and Ana Worrel. I’m Katy Vine.

As a Texas Monthly audio subscriber, you’re getting exclusive access to this bonus episode—thank you for supporting our work.

The Erik Maund case is probably the best-known murder for hire involving Texans in the past forty years. And I say forty years, specifically, because 1979 was the year of the most infamous murder-for-hire case in Texas history: the killing of federal judge John Wood, in San Antonio. 

In 1982, a man named Charles Harrelson was convicted of taking money from the El Paso drug trafficker Jimmy Chagra to murder Judge Wood, who was known for dealing tough sentences, and Chagra was on trial in Wood’s court.

Harrelson was sentenced to life and died in prison in 2007. To the end, he maintained his innocence in this particular murder, though he also admitted to murdering dozens of other people beginning in the 1960s . . . including John F. Kennedy.

The story of building the case against Harrelson is pretty epic. It involves dozens of agents and a lot of interviews. My guests today were at the heart of that case. Ron Iden was an FBI agent who investigated the murder. And Ray Jahn was the lead prosecutor when the case went to trial.

This story is full of twists and turns, just like the Erik Maund case. But it was a totally different world—one without cellphone towers or iCloud or home security cameras, when authorities used a lot of other tricks to crack a case.

Ray Jahn: I first met Ron when he had helped Judge Wood’s daughter. She had a burglary at her home, and a very valuable rug was stolen, and Ron was able to track it down to the people in California that had fenced it and get it back for her. So that was where our introduction to each other, and to the Wood family, occurred, and that was some several months before the judge’s death.

Ron Iden: And that was my first case in the FBI. I had just joined the FBI in ’78, and got sent to San Antonio. 

Katy Vine: Tracking down a rug. [Laughs] That must have been a heck of a rug. 

Ray Jahn: Back then it was. I think it was like thirty thousand dollars, which today would be a hundred thousand or better. 

Katy Vine: I’m wondering—can y’all both just take a minute to introduce yourselves?

Ray Jahn: My name is Ray Jahn. I’m a retired assistant United States attorney. I spent forty years representing the United States in criminal activities, criminal prosecutions, basically throughout the nation. 

Ron Iden: And I am Ron Iden. I was a police officer with a suburban Chicago police department for ten years. Born and raised in Chicago. My dad’s advice was, “Get in the FBI if you can. They’re the best law enforcement agency in the world.” I did that; served twenty-five years with the FBI. I retired from the bureau in 2004, and then went to work for Governor Schwarzenegger as a homeland security director in California, for less than a year when the Walt Disney Company called. And I served for eighteen years as the chief security officer of the Walt Disney Company, and retired at the end of 2022. So I’ve been retired for now a year and a half. 

Ray Jahn: Ron was what they call a first office agent, and I don’t know if you have enough experience with FBI agents—first office agents are usually treated a little bit more than bag carriers. But Ron had a lot of experience in local policing, and also a master’s degree in management, and this sort of thing. So he came out with a head start on most first office agents. That was the reason I suggested you include him, because he was the lead on the Harrelson—he was the persistence, that once Harrelson presented his false alibi and convinced the U.S. Attorney’s Office that he was innocent, it was people like Ron that persisted in breaking that alibi apart and finally getting the case made on Harrelson.

Katy Vine: Well, in a nutshell, how would you describe what happened the [morning] of May twenty-ninth, 1979, in front of federal judge John Wood’s San Antonio home? 

Ron Iden: I was there at the crime scene that morning. You know, it was May twenty-ninth, warm, a little bit humid, very quiet. It was a quiet morning. You know, the shot ringing out was heard by, I think, most folks who lived in the Chateaux Dijon complex.

Ray Jahn: And the circumstances were that the judge had an early morning docket. I was in the courthouse waiting for him to arrive, in fact. He had an early morning docket. And so he and his wife, Katie, had noticed they were having car trouble with one of his cars. So they had left that morning, earlier, to try to get the car to be repaired. She gets in the car that has the federal license plates on it, that were identified as being the car of a judge. He got in his regular car, which had regular Texas plates and was an older—just basically a commuter car. And as she tried to back out, she discovered she had a flat tire. And she honked her horn, and he stopped and pulled in front of the house, and walked back to the carport and saw that she had a flat tire, and went inside and called someone to come and help her with it. And then he came out to leave. And Katie was on the phone with her daughter when he left the door, and he said he’d see her later, and she’s talking to her daughter and she hears a gunshot. And as soon as she hears the gunshot, she tells her daughter, “Someone just shot your father.” And she drops the phone and runs outside and kneels down next to him, and takes his head in her arms, and says, “John H., who killed you?” That was it. And it was a very—to me, a very moving event. I spent a lot of time with Katie.

Katy Vine: And from what I’ve read, the FBI initially struggled to find fruitful leads. Can you talk about the breaks in the case? 

Ray Jahn: It wasn’t a question of—maybe you’d define “fruitful” leads. There were leads everywhere. We had our first confession at four-thirty in the afternoon of the day of the judge’s death. Someone called from the Bexar County Jail, wanted to talk to the FBI agent. They sent an agent over, and he says, “I’ll confess; I did it; now you get me out of here and put me in federal prison.” There were so many things that the bureau wanted to cover. This was a major case, and they sent down at least a hundred agents, I guess.

Ron Iden: I mean, this was a really, really significant incident. The judge was the first federal judge assassinated in U.S. history [in the twentieth century]. And the FBI sent roughly a hundred agents to run down leads. I was one of the agents initially just assigned. And there were hundreds, if not thousands, of leads to track down. On day one, Texas Rangers called the FBI office and said, “You know, you might want to take a look at this fellow Charlie Harrelson, because he recently was released from prison for a contract murder. He lives in Dallas—known gambler, con man, and hit man.” And so Harrelson was identified early on for us as one of the many suspects who we needed to look at. 

Katy Vine: What evidence, I guess, did you find that caused you to put him at the top of your list of suspects eventually? 

Ray Jahn: Where do we start? I made a comment one time that a good agent knows how to exploit the necessary parts of an investigation. One is a good informant, and the other two is just blind stumbling luck. And so we started out—the lead to Harrelson, the major lead, started off with an informant. He called the FBI shortly after the judge’s death and said that he knew Harrelson. He was a, I guess, a Dixie Mafia wannabe. He wanted to have a criminal element, even though he was very wealthy and really didn’t need it. He had traveled to El Paso with Harrelson late April, early May for the Binion’s World Series of Poker. And en route, he discussed about how he was going to meet Jimmy Chagra—he, Harrelson, was going to meet Jimmy Chagra and find a way to get money from him, either by cheating him and gambling, or some way he was going to find money from him. After he returned, Harrelson had called this same informant and said, “I’ve got a contract out in the West. How good are you at five hundred yards? I need a rifle. I need something like that. Meet me in Austin on Mother’s Day, 1979.” And he failed to appear; he got frightened. He was afraid of Harrelson and got frightened of it. And then on the day the judge was killed, that afternoon, Harrelson called him, and said, “Well, I finished that job out West, and I’m gonna have a lot of money.” That was like two o’clock, three o’clock in the afternoon of May twenty-ninth.

So that’s where the ball started rolling. And after that, then it just became a question of trying to collect. The one thing that Harrelson was good at, we knew from his prior convictions and his acquittal, was at manipulating people into a false alibi. And he started manipulating people for false alibis on the day of the murder, that afternoon. He and his wife—after he had driven back to Dallas, he and his wife had gone to a bank in order to purchase some unnecessary cashier’s checks, so he would be identified as being in the bank that afternoon. And then they tried to make it into the morning. They tried to convince everybody that it actually had happened in the morning, as opposed to the afternoon, and this sort of thing. And he started then working on his alibi. 

Ron Iden: After receiving the information from Hampton Robinson about traveling to Las Vegas, Binion’s hotel and casino, with Harrelson, we began corroborating that information by obtaining hotel records, interviewing people who were in the vicinity, who may have seen them, and corroborating that Harrelson was in fact there. Harrelson did in fact meet with Chagra while there. And the evidences continued to build from that point. 

Ray Jahn: We were able to locate a vice president of Caesar’s Palace that had been there with Harrelson at Binion’s. And he talked about what he had said, that Harrelson had come up to him, and Jo Ann Harrelson, his wife, had introduced him to Chagra. They knew each other from their prior gambling experiences. And he said, “Well, you don’t recognize me because I just got released from prison for a murder conviction.” And then he says, “I hear your brother Lee was killed. If there’s anything I can do to help you on that, let me know.” And that Chagra’s response was, “I have more problems with Texas than I do with my brother’s murder.”

Katy Vine: Can you talk about what he was serving time for? This was the Sam Degelia murder, right? Can you talk about that? 

Ray Jahn: Yeah, he was convicted in the Valley of killing a guy, Sam—I’ve always heard it pronounced “De-jee-li-a,” so I don’t know what—

Katy Vine: Okay, I’m probably saying it wrong. 

Ray Jahn: That’s all right; I don’t know what the proper pronunciation was. The driver—he had a driver with him at the time, and the driver turned on him and later testified against him. As far as what the driver understood, he had been hired to enforce a gambling debt—”Did you owe someone some money?” He was hired to kill him.

Ron Iden: Just to add to that, in addition to serving state time in a state prison for that murder, Harrelson also received a five-year sentence for possession of a sawed-off shotgun. And he served time in a federal prison after the state sentence, after his release from state custody. So he had been released from federal prison and then was back out on the street. 

Ray Jahn: Which is funny, because that came to—that came to backfire on him later on. When he was testifying, I got a chance to cross-examine him on that. And he had boasted to his counselor that he had killed over a dozen men. And he told that to his counselor. And I probably would not have been able to introduce that in evidence until he started talking about it, and let it into being able to make him admit that, yes, that’s what he had said. But he was lying, of course. It wasn’t true. He was just kind of boasting about it. 

Katy Vine: And he did have a tendency to boast, right? I mean, out in the world, he even claimed that he was responsible for killing JFK, right?

Ray Jahn: He threw that every now and then. If you want to talk about a psychopath, a narcissist, he falls right into that area, yeah.

Ron Iden: I think the next really significant piece of evidence we obtained then was through the interview of Greg Goodrum, a friend of Charlie. 

Ray Jahn: Yeah, within a couple of weeks of the judge’s death—we had one witness on the day of the shooting who saw a gold-colored Cutlass pull away from the parking lot of the judge’s condominium shortly after she heard a rifle shot. And she couldn’t see the driver; she couldn’t see the license plates or anything else; but Charles Harrelson’s wife drove a gold-colored Cutlass. And so, shortly after the judge’s death, Greg Goodrum, who, again, was a Dixie Mafia wannabe in Huntsville, Texas, was approached by Harrelson and asked by Harrelson to detail and clean, immaculately—because it had been used in connection with a, quote, job, end quote—that gold-colored Cutlass and sell it, and that he could keep the money. He could keep the money that he got for selling the car. So within, what, two to three weeks after the judge’s death, he got rid of that car. 

Ron Iden: And during that meeting, Harrelson showed him a rifle in the trunk of his vehicle. 

Katy Vine: So you had a lot of people talking to you about things that Charles Harrelson admitted to, it sounds like, right?

Ron Iden: And so the evidence just continued to build. 

Ray Jahn: Bits and pieces. And then that was the question of putting the bits and pieces together.

Katy Vine: It sounds like some of the key evidence that was used to convict Harrelson was an undercover recording in prison where Jimmy Chagra—am I saying that right?—was having conversations with his attorney and brother, Joe— 

Ray Jahn: And coconspirator. 

Katy Vine: And coconspirator, okay. Can you talk about the decision to record that? And it sounds like it must have been tough to get permission, since that was his attorney, even if he was considered a coconspirator. Can you talk about that decision?

Ray Jahn: I was not on the case when that decision was made. I know that it was assigned to the organized crime division, and they were the ones who had the expertise of wiretapping at Leavenworth. They also then did a very thorough presentation in terms of gaining information of a prisoner named Jerry Ray James, who was referred to as the king of the Dixie Mafia, had become a friend and close cellmate in prison with Jimmy, and had been getting him to make admissions, and had gotten admissions and recorded admissions where he admitted being involved in the murder of the judge—and then also started to incriminate Joe, in terms of narcotics offenses.

Joe was still running, or very active in running, Jimmy’s narcotics business, since Jimmy was in prison. So it was based upon that information, then, that they were able to secure a Title III wiretap, with the understanding that Joe’s conversations were exempted, since he was, in fact, a coconspirator on the narcotics. And then, while that was being recorded, we found out he was a coconspirator on the murder. There was a conversation between Jimmy and Joe where they were lamenting the fact that the judge was dead and they were going through all of this. And Jimmy said, “Well, it was your idea.” And Joe said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Well, you were the one that said, ‘Do it, do it, do it.’ You’re the one that wanted him to do it.” And his response was, “Well, I thought you would get someone like the Face,” who was a Mafia hit man out of Boston. “I didn’t know you would get someone like this—profanity—individual.” And that was the big connector right there to Joe, to the operation, that Joe had been counseling Jimmy to kill the judge. That was the only alternative he had. 

Ron Iden: Additional evidence that supported the court-authorized Title III intercept in prison was the fact that it was a conspiracy on the part of the Chagras to conceal assets. And so that was a part of the affidavit that was used to obtain the coverage, the microphone coverage, in the visiting room at Leavenworth. 

Katy Vine: I mean, it’s remarkable that you got that information.

Ron Iden: The FBI leaves no stone unturned when you’re working a case, particularly a case of this significance. So there was a lot of really creative avenues pursued to obtain the evidence, the facts that we needed to determine whether Harrelson and Chagra were involved, and then ultimately to prosecute them. I’ll add one other element to the conversations that were overheard in the prison: Jimmy and Joe talking about Jimmy having hired Harrelson, and a suggestion that they had to kill Harrelson because he could flip and point the finger at them. There were also conversations about how Harrelson discarded the gun, the rifle that he used in the shooting—threw it into a river over a bridge. Harrelson had drawn a map for Joe and asked Joe to obtain—look for and obtain the rifle, get the rifle back before the feds could find it.

Ray Jahn: And we knew from the trial that in the Valley, that had been Charlie’s MO in terms of disposing of the weapon. He had disassembled the handgun he used, found a place where—a small road where they were resurfacing the road, and he had spread the parts over the asphalt, so that they would all be covered within the road and the gun would disappear. And that was what he had done—something similar to that, we thought, in connection with the Wood case.

And there’s a very interesting story in the recovery of the gun. It was one of those things where, blind stumbling luck, we owed it to the press. The FBI, once the search had gone over and we found the map, which was just basically three or four lines drawn on the thing with an X, they were able to find the area where the gun had been disposed of, or at least where Harrelson had told Joe the gun had been disposed of. They conducted an extensive search and couldn’t find a thing. Then someone leaked it to the Dallas Morning News, and the Dallas Morning News published an article basically making fun of the FBI, about how they had spent all this time and money and wasted everybody’s time to look for it. And two young men saw the pictures of what was going on, didn’t understand it because they couldn’t read, and they took it to a friend, and they read the article to them, and they recalled that in September of 1979, which had been four months after the judge was killed, on Labor Day weekend, they were walking over to go swimming in Lake Ray Hubbard and saw a gunstock off the road, up in the area. And then shortly before that, there’d been what was then the biggest flood in Texas, forty-inch rain and everything else. And that apparently, wherever the gun had been disposed of, it had floated uphill and had been left exposed off the road. When they saw the stock, they saw it was disassembled, so they just left it there. It wasn’t important. But then when they read the article, they called the FBI and took the FBI out there, and sure enough, the gunstock was still there. And it turned out to be the stock of a Weatherby, which tied into the rifle that they had seen before. And they were able to track it down and put the purchase in by Jo Ann Harrelson. 

Ron Iden: One of the other things I’m thinking about to go back to is when Harrelson met with Chagra at Binion’s hotel and casino in Vegas, witnesses told us that Harrelson had presented to Chagra a business card that said, “Have gun, will travel.” And of course, if you—you probably don’t recall that far back, but there was a TV show popular around that time. What was the name of the actor? 

Ray Jahn: I don’t remember the actor, but his character was Paladin. 

Ron Iden: Richard Boone was the actor; Paladin was the character. And Have Gun – Will Travel was the name of the television show. So, Harrelson was establishing his bona fides to Chagra, when he met with him, that he could take care of this matter for him. 

Ray Jahn: And one of the interesting features was that Harrelson used a lot of alibis during the course of his tracking the judge and planning it all. And one of them was a Boone alibi. He used the name Boone in one of his registrations at a hotel. So we could follow that particular phase of what he was doing, as he proceeded closer to killing the judge. 

Ron Iden: I think before we get to the trial, it’d be interesting to talk a little bit about Harrelson’s grand jury testimony. So, in October of ’79, somehow it became known that Harrelson wanted to present his alibi to the government. He was so confident in himself that he could con the government into presenting a foolproof alibi that he was in Dallas on the morning of the murder. So he was subpoenaed to the grand jury; he did testify; he laid out a lengthy alibi where he identified a number of people who he said would confirm that they saw him in Dallas on the morning of May twenty-ninth, so he couldn’t have been in San Antonio.

I sent leads to the Dallas office to interview those witnesses. The initial interviews didn’t refute the alibi, but they left a lot of questions in our minds that perhaps we didn’t dig deep enough in interviewing the witnesses. So we went back and reinterviewed those witnesses. One instance is a parking attendant at a building there, where Harrelson lived, who, when initially interviewed, said, “Yeah, I parked Harrelson’s car for him—not his normal stall, but in this parking stall, on the morning of May twenty-ninth.” And initially that was accepted as being, okay, he saw him in the morning of May twenty-ninth. When we went back and reinterviewed that parking attendant, we asked him, “Well, how do you know it was May twenty-ninth?” And his answer was, “Well, because it was a holiday, and that parking stall was empty. The gentleman who worked at the building wasn’t parked in that slot. So when Harrelson came by, I was able to let him park his car in that stall.” That holiday was not May twenty-ninth. It was May twenty-eighth. So Harrelson misled the parking attendant to thinking it was the day of the murder, when it was the day before the murder.

Ray Jahn: Harrelson had a great ability to manipulate people and to determine what they wanted out of life, and then promise them that that was what he could give them, or what he could provide them. Everything from his stepdaughter, Teresa Starr; to her sister; to the wife of the informant Hampton Robinson—all of them, he was able to manipulate them into thinking that he was their lover, and that he was going to give them everything they needed or wanted out of life. 

Ron Iden: A third alibi witness of Harrelson’s was a gentleman who gambled with him, and his name is Billy Dyer. When interviewed, Billy Dyer said, “Yep, I saw him on the morning of May twenty-ninth; I’m sure it was; there’s no doubt in my mind.” We subpoenaed Dyer to the grand jury. He took the Fifth. Which, even to this day, I get chills when I say that, because that was a moment where we knew. You know, there was something amiss here. 

Ray Jahn: And he testified at the trial that yes, he had lied about the alibi, and that Harrelson had asked him to come in and lie about it. And that that was shortly after the murder. So, as soon as the murder occurs, Harrelson starts creating this alibi. That was very substantial evidence of his guilt right then. Why else would he go to such extremes?  

Ron Iden: So after Dyer took the Fifth, just like the daughter in law [stepdaughter], Teresa Starr, Dyer was granted immunity—immunity from prosecution for lying—and ordered by the judge, compelled by the judge, to testify truthfully. And he went back before the grand jury, and at that point he said, “Yep, I lied. I didn’t see him at all. Charles asked me to say this, and I lied for him.” And then there were a few other witnesses who—similar circumstances, where they were misled into believing that they saw Harrelson on the morning of May twenty-ninth, when they really didn’t.

Katy Vine: And he was convicted in, I guess, ’82, which is two years before the federal murder-for-hire statute is enacted. Can you talk about the difference between prosecuting someone before that statute and after? 

Ray Jahn: It really wouldn’t have made that much of a difference, because you already had an existing murder-of-a-federal-official statute. But the big difference was the penalties. There was no death penalty at the time that we tried him. The state indicated that they were going to try him for a death penalty if we had convicted him, which we did. But then by that time, the district attorney had changed hands, and he was never prosecuted for capital murder in connection with the judge’s death.

Katy Vine: Does anything still nag you about this case? Are there still unanswered questions that you have? 

Ron Iden: From my point of view, no. I think we identified all the people involved in the conspiracy. Ultimately, they were all convicted for their role in heinous crimes. 

Katy Vine: Well, I wanted to pivot a little bit to Erik Maund’s case, the focus of our podcast, which is a different kind of murder for hire, right? Erik Maund was the heir to a car-dealership empire in Austin, asked a few special-ops guys to surveil two people in Nashville, and when the tensions escalated, the guys murdered both of the surveillance subjects for money. That’s different from a hitman for hire who’s advertising himself as a hitman for hire. But it does seem like this is one of the first high-profile cases in Texas of murder for hire with death resulting since y’all prosecuted Harrelson. Do your ears perk up when you hear about these kind of cases, because you’re so familiar with this particular crime?

Ray Jahn: I’ve listened to a couple of episodes of your program. It’s very good, very entertaining. But it shows you that the idea of the contract killer is really kind of limited. If you go back to the Texas Monthly article on the hit man in the movie Hit Man, you recognize that most of the supposed hit men are really just thugs who are willing to kill people for money. With people like Harrelson, it was a method by which he made substantial sums. A hundred and fifty thousand dollars in 1978 is the equivalent of $722,000 now. So that’s a pretty good payment for just one episode of trying to kill someone. 

Katy Vine: From what I understand, it’s more common for people to be prosecuted for trying to hire a hit man, and then finding out, often, that it’s an undercover cop. It’s rare that they actually go through with committing the murder and then get caught. But, in the world that y’all are describing, and the world that I’ve kind of been reading about, it sounds like there was a time when it was more common to have professional hit men? Do you think that it’s just that now we don’t hear about it, and it’s just as common as it was back then? Or have things changed? 

Ron Iden: I wouldn’t say there’s any more or any less. I’d say it’s a continuing problem. And in some cases, fortunately, people come forward and say something before the actual murder took place. And I think the more people hear about that, the more inclined they will be, if they hear about a potential, to report it. So the more reporting that the public sees that reflects contract hits thwarted, the better for all of us. Because it convinces the public that you can come forward, you’ll be protected, you can save a life.

Katy Vine: The murders that we deal with on our podcast relied heavily on technology to put the pieces together. It’s so interesting to hear how y’all had to really do more shoe-leather type of work. [Laughs] What is it like for you to hear, like, in the trial that I attended in Nashville for this case, you know, they were using cell towers, and they were able to get to download things off of iCloud. I mean, cellphones have made it very difficult, I think, for a lot of folks to hide anything. How do you think about the technology piece of it, and how it makes it easier, or, maybe, deceptively simple, I guess?

Ray Jahn: It makes it easier when you have it. It makes it harder when you don’t. So many things that could have happened here. Charles Harrelson was not a secreter. He did not secrete oil enough to leave fingerprints, but he did leave DNA. But at the same time, the DNA was nonexistent. There was no DNA test back in those days. And then the electronic trail—before, you looked for a paper trail, which might happen, but quite often didn’t. It’s almost impossible to move now without leaving an electronic trail. Even if you don’t use your phone, there’s a track of, every so often it gets pinged, and someone can tell you where that phone had been at what particular time. The criminals realize that now. They turn their phones off. They get rid of their SIM cards. They have all kinds of evasive activities. It’s easier, but at the same time, it’s more difficult, too. 

Ron Iden: Those devices, they can recover that evidence. And that’s becoming more and more known, unfortunately, to those who might commit a crime. So they’ll wind up smashing them with a hammer, or throwing them in a lake, or disposing them in some other way. So it just becomes more difficult the more successful law enforcement is in resolving cases through technology, which is just absolutely wonderful. I love seeing that. The harder, then, it becomes for those who are really sophisticated. But there are a lot of bad guys that don’t have that level of sophistication. Thank goodness. And law enforcement’s able to use that technology to develop the evidence they need to prove the truth. 

Katy Vine: It’s interesting that you said that Charles Harrelson had romanticized and incorporated the, sort of, legacy of a hit man in his own life, using TV show references and things like that. That happened in this case as well. One of the shooters had a password—“hitman” was literally his password on his computer. Can you talk about that? Have you prosecuted other murder for hire since, or investigated other cases of murder for hire? And is that something that is a theme?

Ray Jahn: We had a witness who was named Pete Kay, who was a member of the Dixie Mafia, who’s also been charged twice, I believe, with murder; got acquitted both times. He was my witness; I was talking to him, and I said, “You know, Mr. Kay, you have sat here and you talked about Charles Harrelson and . . .” He and Harrelson had a falling-out; Harrelson blamed Kay for him being captured, and so forth and so on. And I said, “But you’re a killer yourself. You’ve been tried and acquitted of two murders.” And he said, “Yeah, but I’m a hot-blooded killer, and Charlie’s a cold-blooded killer.” And I think that might be a—a lot of this is a psychological problem, not necessarily a cash-type thing. It’s people with a certain psychology that get involved in it, and the money’s something extra.

Katy Vine: Well, I’m sad that we’ve run out of time, because this has been on my wish list for a long time, to talk to y’all. It’s a great opportunity, and anytime you say “hit man” to somebody who’s been in Texas for a long time, the Judge Wood murder is really the most well-known, the most complicated—as far as just, like, all of the different people involved, and how long it took in the investigation, and, I mean, so many twists and turns.

Ray Jahn: Well, and there was a time back in the late seventies and eighties where law enforcement knew more about who were the hit men, but they couldn’t get the evidence to prove it. You know, so that, Pete Kay was in that area; Harrelson was in that area. You knew who you thought were hit men, but you couldn’t get around to proving it. So there was a lot more knowledge coming out to law enforcement at that time than, I think, than there is now. 

Ron Iden: Yeah, I think, you know, if you . . . kind of my parting thought, if you watch some of these investigative shows on television—and this case is another example of that—in order to solve complex cases like this, tenacity is really important. Double-check everything. It’s disappointing for me to watch on television, the investigation of some cases that went cold because there were a couple of leads there that just were missed, that were overlooked. And, again, it gets back to—particularly in cases of death, and especially if you’re talking hit men, who could be killing other people—tenacity. Don’t ever give up digging and looking for the facts, and question everything. That’s just, in this case and in all those others, I think is a critical element for a successful investigation.

Ray Jahn: Well, and there’s always been a rule of thumb that if you don’t solve a murder case within so many hours, or so many days, your odds of solving that case go down dramatically. And that’s it—it’s the easy ones that get solved quickly. It’s the ones that are difficult that you do need the tenacity, that don’t get solved. And that’s where I think the hit men come in. They’re good enough at it, either whether they’re amateurs or professionals, that it doesn’t get solved. 

Ron Iden: When you hear about those cases, too, that are made today by DNA, sometimes familial DNA that makes cases—incredible, just incredible technological asset to law enforcement—and when investigators receive that information, and they look back on the case file, oftentimes they see leads uncovered, leads half covered, information that they didn’t dig deep enough on. I think law enforcement today—I know law enforcement today is much more sophisticated than it was twenty, thirty, forty years ago. And the investigations done today are done very thoroughly, with great diligence and a lot of integrity.

Katy Vine: Great. Well, thank you both so much. I’m really grateful for this hour. I appreciate it.

Ron Iden: Our pleasure. Thank you. 

Katy Vine (voice-over): That was Ron Iden and Ray Jahn, discussing their work on the infamous Charles Harrelson murder-for-hire case. Thanks to them for coming to talk about their work. And thanks to you for listening to the show and for supporting Texas Monthly.