The Voices of Serial Killers

by Christopher Berry-Dee

  I had already targeted the bus. Here is the PLAN I was making.

  There was this bus that carried Junior high school girls to OUT OF TOWN football games to cheerlead. There were probably a dozen young girls in the bus around 14 to 15 years old. There were 2 or 3 adult women on there with them.

  I was going to dress up in a police officer’s uniform. By the way I had one of these flashing blue lights cops put on their dash. I was going to pull up behind this bus & turn the blue light on. When they pulled over I was going to tell the chaperone that we had a report that there might be a bomb on the bus. I’d tell her, don’t tell the girls, but let’s just switch busses and y’all can go on. This adult would tell the girls that we have to change buses & everyone would get off & get on the other bus. Now I would have jammed the door & window so they couldn’t be opened.

  When everyone was on OUR bus, I’d stand up & pull a gun & tell them all if they tried anything they’d be shot.

  I had a lot of little things to work out. But I would have tried it. Having that many to enjoy would have been pure rush☺. Right off the bat I would have chose one girl and killed her in front of the others to show them I mean business.

  Anyway, that was my sick world ☺.

  Of course, by now the reader is asking what planet David Gore came from. For his part, Fred Waterfield says that knew nothing of his cousin’s insane schemes, dryly remarking, “Next, he’ll be telling you that he was building a spaceship so that he could take his victims to the moon.”

  I am sure that Fred Waterfield will not be permitted by the Florida Department of Corrections to read this chapter. However, I do intend to make sure that a copy of this book is sent to the FBI and to the present governor.

  CHAPTER 6

  CHARLES “CHUCK” LANNIS MOSES—A REAL-LIFE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES

  Down every road there’s always one more city

  I’m on the run, the highway is my home

  I raised a lot of cane back in my younger days

  While Mama used to pray my crops would fail

  I’m a hunted fugitive with just two ways:

  Outrun the Law or spend my life in jail.

  —MERLE HAGGARD

  “I’M A LONESOME FUGITIVE”

  My friends call me “Outlaw Mosey Wales” after the movie “Josey Wales” starring Clint Eastwood. I am a true outlaw, survivalist, and a Christian God-fearing man. I love to play the guitar and sing.

  —CHARLES MOSES

  LETTER TO THE AUTHOR, OCTOBER 19, 2009

  He goes for camping equipment and weapons. Ninety-nine percent of the time he always runs. He’s good at it.

  —CHIEF SHERIFF’S DEPUTY GARY STUDEBAKER

  NOCONA, TEXAS

  A serial killer is a person who murders three or more people at different locations, over a period of time, with a cooling off period in between the events.

  —FBI DEFINITION OF A SERIAL KILLER

  IN THE MIDWEST, a fugitive drug dealer did anything to avoid capture, and his desperate flight was fueled by drugs and punctuated by gunfire, and as he barreled along from Nebraska to Wyoming, authorities united in pursuit. This is Charles “Chuck/ Charlie” Lannis Moses’s story, written with the assistance of Moses, aka “The Lonely Fugitive.” He became notorious as one of the FBI’s Most Wanted, and he relates his account exclusively to this author in letters from prison.

  The record shows that Charlie Moses killed just once. Nonetheless, he did attempt to shoot dead two law enforcement officers and, had he not been caught, undoubtedly he would have committed murder again and again. So, for the purposes of this book we can call him a “serial killer in the making.”

  Wednesday, February 2, 2000, Lincoln County, Nebraska: The ground was as hard as a plaster cast, but now a thaw is underway with the Nebraska Weather Center logging a high of–18 degrees. The state, south of Columbus, would still need a few more days of moderate temperatures to make deep slush and mud.

  It had just started to rain, and Sheriff’s Deputy Stan McKnight was on a routine patrol when he saw, in his rearview mirror, high beams gaining on him. Then a maroon Chevy pickup truck sped past leaving a filthy spray in its wake.

  McKnight noted that the truck had a Texas license plate, but he couldn’t read it properly. He switched on his red and blue strobes, but he was unable pursue the truck because the road was too icy, so he cautiously followed while radioing for backup.

  Several Nebraska State Patrol troopers were alerted, and it soon became apparent that whoever was in the truck had no regard for his own safety. However, although the roads were empty, McKnight decided against a high-speed chase. It was not worth the risk, as McKnight recalled:It appeared that the driver knew the area he was in, and because he could take more chances than I would, he was able to disappear. I had called in assistance from the police department and all the State Troopers that were working. We combed the entire area to no avail.

  Nebraska police sent out a lookout bulletin for the maroon pickup with Texas plates, but that night there were no further reports of the vehicle or its driver.

  North Platte (pop. 23,900) Lincoln County, Nebraska: A week later, and 40 miles away in the county seat of North Platte, a farmer called the police. He had not used his barn in years, so he was surprised to find that somebody had been there recently. He was also worried by what had been left behind.

  Deputies found chemicals and other farm supplies, a dangerous combination. The ingredients could have been used to make methamphetamine.

  An illegal stimulant drug, “meth” is otherwise known as “crank” or “speed”; the drug is simple to make, and deputies in Lincoln County had seen this kind of setup many times before. In recent years, the Midwestern United States had seen an epidemic of methamphetamine production, as Lincoln County Sheriff’s Corporal Casey Nelms explained:Methamphetamine labs are a problem because it’s such a rural area, a lot of abandoned farmhouses; farmsteads where people don’t live anymore give these drug people the opportunity to go in and manufacture this drug undetected. The drug is addictive and extremely dangerous. Most users become aggressive and desperate. When meth labs pop up anywhere, violent crime always follows.

  During the search of the makeshift lab, deputies also found several letters. They were addressed to one Charles Lannis Moses, Jr., at an address in Nocona, Texas, so they contacted the Texas authorities asking for information on the man. They were sent photographs of Moses and were told that he was wanted for firearms theft. Nebraska authorities also learned that he owned a maroon pickup truck with Texas license plates, which matched the description of the vehicle McKnight had chased the week before.

  If Moses was manufacturing the drug, there was a good chance that he was using it, too, which at once explained why he had driven so recklessly. Nelms said, “The people who use this drug become very paranoid. They have no pain threshold. Sometimes they are up for days. They are just a real problem and hard to handle.”

  Police went door-to-door, asking if anyone had seen Moses or noticed an outsider fitting his description. A few people thought they had seen him before, but no one had spotted him during the past few days. He had no known local address.

  11:30 p.m., Saturday, February 12, 2000, Sutherland (pop. 1,200), Nebraska: It had been just a over a week since the lab had been discovered. On “a pretty nice morning,” Moses had found a quiet place beside the Platte River at an old farmhouse. He had a few hours to kill before meeting with one of his buddies, Huey, who was driving out from New Jersey, and Charlie was cooking a batch of meth for his pal.

  After he finished cooking the meth, and with his police scanner crackling away in the cab of his truck, Charlie called up his buddy on the CB. They arranged to meet in the evening near North Platte, and Moses, now super high after cooking the meth, would be driving into “a straight-on blizzard,” which was blowing in from the northwest.

  “By the time I got to North Platte, snow had covered all of the highways and medians. I pulled into the Flying J truck
stop, then I drove around till I met my pal’s rig,” Charlie recalled.

  The two men chatted, and the meth exchange was completed. They then made plans for Moses to drive to Denver, where he would change the paint job on his truck, change the license plates, and alter his own appearance in an effort to keep him on the run.

  Parting company, Huey told Charlie to stay cool and not get caught by “Smoky Bear.” Moses responded, “If I get caught it will be the shoot-out of the century.” Both men laughed and went their separate ways.

  It began to get dark, and Moses followed his pal’s rig 25 miles west to the Sutherland exit, the weather now so bad he could hardly make out the taillights of the truck in front of him. He turned off the interstate and into a gas station where he “pumped gas and bought a bag of Doritos chips to munch on.” On the way out of the door, he spotted “this huge policeman,” who was leaving at the same time.

  Corporal Casey Nelms was about to start his shift, and just as he did every night, he stopped at a gas station a few hundred yards from the Interstate 80/Sutherland interchange to pick up a cup of coffee. But this night would be anything but routine.

  Through the gas station window, Nelms spotted a parked vehicle that matched the description of Moses’s pickup. The officer wiped the condensation from the glass and peered through. Now he was sure it was Moses, but to confirm this he needed a close up and personal look at the driver, who resembled the man police were looking for. The Texas plates—2TCB58—matched Moses’s truck, so Nelms walked outside and wiped the snow from his windshield. When the driver said, “How’d ya do?” Nelms replied, “Allright.”

  “What are the roads like out there? Is it gonna snow all night?” asked Moses.

  “Yes,” came the curt answer.

  Corporal Nelms then asked Moses where he was heading.

  “Just heading out,” said Moses, now making for his truck 100 feet away. The officer asked for Moses’s ID. “It is in a bag in my truck, I’ll get it.”

  At his truck Moses asked the cop if he could switch the engine on to warm the vehicle up. “Go ahead,” Nelms agreed, while examining the driver’s license in the name of Charles Lannis Moses and making a note of the front tag.

  Leaping into his vehicle, Moses slammed the shift into first gear and tried to take off, but the parking lot was all ice, and the truck was just spinning out.

  “You are under arrest!” shouted Nelms, as he slipped and scrambled into the still open driver’s side door. The officer tried to pull Moses from his seat. He pulled on the steering wheel. The vehicle gained some traction and shot forward a few feet. Then Nelms pulled his sidearm and stuck it into the suspect’s temple. “I’m gonna blow your fuckin’ head off!” Nelms screamed.

  Charlie Moses takes up what happened next:Naturally, I grabbed his gun and pushed it up to the top of the cab, and I told him, “Man, I’ve paid for the gas, what the fuck is wrong with you?” Then he started pulling the trigger to his gun . . . bullets and glass flying everywhere. I dumped the clutch . . . the truck took off and spun around . . . hit the gas pump . . . the cop fell down. I took off across the parking lot, my door still open. Then he unloaded his clip .40 caliber Glock pistol into my truck . . . glass and blood was flying all over.

  In his report, Nelms said that, “the suspect pulled a.22-caliber revolver and bolted for his truck. I really expected that once I got ahold of him in the vehicle, I could take him out without any problem. But he was just so spectacularly strong. I couldn’t do anything with him, except to keep struggling to keep his gun away from my face, and I managed to wrestle it away from him.”

  Nelms loosed off several shots and radioed for help. “I was pretty sure that two of my rounds hit; the second round I saw hit the back of the cab,” Nelms later recalled.

  Moses sped off. He knew that he had been hit but was not sure where. He couldn’t move his left arm, and his right hand was “bleeding bad, so I took off like a turkey through corn. My heart was pumping, and I heard the cop on my scanner calling for backup and shouting, ‘Shots fired . . . Moses is on the run . . . I think I shot him . . . all of his windows are shot out . . . there’s blood in the parking lot . . . Got to be his . . . I shot him up pretty good.’”

  Charlie Moses disputes the account given by Corporal Nelms, and Charlie’s story seems to have a ring of truth about it:This cop knew straight off who I was and he knew I was wanted ’cos he had seen me before. I reckon that he had already called for backup and was told to wait for help. So, when I went out to my truck, hee could have simply pulled his gun and told me to get on the ground. But he didn’t do that, and he lied about me running to my truck . . . we walked over to it together. No way would he not shot me if I had run to my truck, knowing how dangerous I was. His story is bullshit!

  Nelms tried to follow Moses, but the fugitive drove south down Highway 25, past the Oregon Trail Golf Course, with the recklessness of a man high on meth. Nebraska State Police heard the “shots fired” radio call, and Sheriff’s Deputy Stan McKnight learned about the chase on his radio. What McKnight now needed was a place where he stood a good chance of intercepting Moses.

  McKnight: “There is an area commonly known as ‘The Question Line.’ It is a place where I could see three different roads intersecting with this area. From that location, I could see a mile either way along all three routes.”

  Now with the police in hot pursuit, Charlie Moses explained what happened next: I took [off] out of that parking lot like eggs through a hen. Driving down a single-lane gravel road, snow blowing in my truck from all directions, I get to the road I need to get to, and to a place I’m familiar with. I hear the police talking with each other trying to set up a parameter, and they’re driving with no lights. I ran out of road but continued on through an old cornfield, through fences, corrals, then finally got behind a barn, where I stopped for a few minutes.

  I lit a smoke, opened the door and stepped out of my bullet-riddled truck. Not too much damage . . . all my tires were still up. My left arm was just hanging down . . . couldn’t feel nothing . . . the adrenalin pumping like crazy (and probably the meth numbing the pain). My Levi jacket was soaked with blood, which was frozen by now. I jumped back into my saddle, started my girl up, took off down the highway. I went trying to make a run for the border.

  McKnight had been waiting in the darkness, hoping that Moses would drive by:After sitting there, a vehicle did come from the west to the very road intersection where I was at. When it came past me, I turned my headlights on and saw that it was Moses’s truck. He was traveling in excess of 70 to 80 mph . . . at night, in those conditions, and because of his speed, he was soon able to outdistance me quite rapidly.

  Moses had also seen McKnight’s cruiser. It had come out of nowhere and was running parallel to his own truck. Then the cop was behind him:The roads in front of me are starting to twist and turn, so I slow down. Tink, Tink, Smash, Smash. I hear pieces of my truck getting hit. I look in the mirror, an’ I see muzzle flashes . . . bullets are whizzing by my head, hitting all around the cab of my truck.

  For the second time, a frustrated McKnight thought he had lost the same pickup truck in a chase, so he decided to to change tactics:At that point, well, he had pretty much got ahead of me, an’ at the same time I had to slow down and check driveways and road intersections to make sure he hadn’t turned off on me.

  In fact, Moses had not pulled off the road. He was enraged, so he slipped the shifter into neutral and hit the brakes. Pulling out a high-powered rifle, he watched as McKnight’s flashing high beams came toward him.

  The deputy spotted Moses’s brake lights in the distance. The speed freak’s vehicle had stopped. McKnight slowed down, eased his cruiser to a standstill, then he called for backup. Apart from the pitter-patter of rain on his car, it was dark, misty, icy cold, and far too dangerous to advance alone, but while he waited for support, Moses, rifle-in-hand, made his move. There were two muffled reports. One bullet struck McKnight’s head. Another round ripped throug
h his hand, then the fugitive drove off.

  “I tried to blow the motherfucker’s head smooth off,” said Moses. “I sprayed his windshield with several rounds, then I stood there and looked into what I thought were his dying eyes, at the same time calling him a back-shooting bushwhacker. Then I drove off . . . slid off into the night just as easy as a rattlesnake.”

  McKnight said: “Upon figuring that I had been hit by bullets, I was going to try and call the rest of the officers to let them know what was going on, only, when I reached for the microphone, I couldn’t talk. My mouth was full of blood and I was starting to choke. I found some napkins in the seat, and I got them shoved up in my mouth to make the blood stop. Then I spat out, then I could talk and let them know I had been hit and that the subject had gone to the left and I would keep chasing him.”

  Despite his injuries, the brave deputy continued chasing Moses: “The wind was coming through the bullet holes in my windshield, blowing glass all over me. My left eye was completely shut from blood. My right eye was just blinking, but I could still see enough in my headlights to keep going down the road.”

  Based on the coordinates that McKnight radioed, Nebraska State Troopers staked out the area. They drove without headlights and indicators so they would not alert Moses; two police cruisers positioned themselves on a dark country road and waited. Minutes later, high beams appeared over the brow of a hill. It was the fugitive. One of the troopers spotted a gun, so he fired at Moses. In the following exchange, a round penetrated State Trooper Jeff Crymble’s body armor. He started to lose blood fast. With his life at risk, a colleague called for an ambulance. Paramedics stabilized Crymble, and he was rushed to the hospital.