1830
Dillsboro was laid out in 1830.
about 0:05:34The story
Raymond Green was born in 1950 and grew up to be, by every account the episode gives, a cowboy. He broke broncos, served two tours in Vietnam with the Airborne Division, and later became a horse trainer, breeder and farrier, shoeing and trimming hooves. His friends called him Freebird. One friend, Bob Stevens, remembered a twelve-foot alligator on the ranch that broke every trap animal control set for it; Ray, he said, grabbed it with his bare hands and put it in the barn. He married Maggie, a woman he had known since he was eleven and she was six, and they lived on a two-hundred-acre ranch in San Antonio, Texas, with their daughter Tracy and around seventy horses. The family was close and, as Tracy described it, idyllic.
She was born in 1972, roughly twenty years younger than Ray and Maggie, a disciplined and competitive horsewoman who spent all her time, energy and money on horses.
On May 27th, 2002 Maggie Green was driving on Interstate 40 when a barge struck the bridge. A dozen cars plunged seventy-five feet into the water and she was killed. Ray was devastated; Tracy remembered him saying over and over that he missed his rose. He received about a million dollars from her estate and from the bridge-collapse settlement.
They bought a horse property worth around a million dollars in an equestrian community with twenty-two miles of horse trails, and threw themselves into horses and into the Cowboy Action Shooting Club, where members dressed as 1880s cowboys and shot replica firearms at speed.
In 2008 the economy and the horse market collapsed. The couple used a second mortgage to pay the first, sold eggs and livestock, and took work mowing the common areas and rights of way for the homeowners association. The house was sold in a short sale. A friend gave him a phone so that Tracy could reach him again, and Bob Stevens paid for a ticket so he could visit his daughter and granddaughters for the first time in eight years.
They exchanged hundreds of emails and spent hours on the phone, and some of the messages were sexually suggestive, though George insisted nothing physical ever happened.
In 2013 both of her parents died. Ray moved up from Florida and the couple lived in a rusty single-wide trailer in the yard while they planned to run the land as a horse farm. Ray got his commercial driver's licence and went to work as a truck driver, taking out life insurance through his company and shopping around with SelectQuote. An agent named Raymond Quang, trying to sell extra policies, sent a quote for insurance on Tracy to the house even though Ray had asked him not to send anything with Tracy's name there.
In January 2014 the couple divorced, not because of trouble but because, unmarried, Ray would collect more Social Security and other benefits connected with Maggie's death. They carried on living together in the trailer.
She then cut the bloodstained carpet out, packed the sheets, blankets, her sweatshirt, rags and cleaning supplies into bags, dragged the body outside, put everything into a large metal truck storage box that had belonged to Ray, along with the pistol and a bag of spent cartridge cases, padlocked it, and used farm equipment to move the box about thirty feet from the trailer. Ray's eighty-four-year-old mother Betty called the sheriff's department, bewildered that anyone would invent such a story.
On May 28th, 2014 deputies from the Ohio County Sheriff's Department went to the property for a welfare check. His mobile phone pinged on the property. The deputies returned with a search warrant, having been allowed to search everywhere except one metal box, which she said held Ray's things and which she could not consent to open. The box had one latch padlocked and the other ajar, flies around it and a smell of decomposition. Inside, under carpet scraps, rags and bloodstained cleaning supplies, they found Ray's body and, on top of him, a .38 pistol in a zip-lock bag with ten spent shells.
She denied the dog and said she had shot Ray in self-defence. She described shooting him five times as he came at her, running to the far side of the trailer past the front door to reload, coming back, and shooting him five more times in the head as he sat on the bed. A video reenactment was recorded in which she pointed a finger like a gun at a detective sitting on the bed.
The medical examiner found her account inconsistent with the injuries. Ray had five shots to the head, four entering the back of the head and one the left temple, none of which exited; and five to the torso, two entering the back and travelling downward, three entering the left side, one of those passing through his left arm. The torso wounds would not have been instantly fatal, and he could have lived for minutes and been able to speak and move. Bullets had passed through the sheet and comforter before striking him, and expirated blood was found low on a television stand and the lower walls, suggesting he had been lying down and coughing blood.
The state called Dr Edward Connor, a licensed psychologist, who said Dr Fisher was not licensed to diagnose PTSD in Indiana, had not used recognised protocols and had not tested for malingering. Witnesses were divided. But many others described Ray as gentle and said they had never seen any sign of abuse.
Jazzy was never found.