Hit Man: The True Story of a Fake Contract Killer
What if I told you the most sought-after hit man in Houston in the 90's wasn't really a hit man? He worked for the police
Gary Johnson spent his career working with members of his community who thought they were hiring someone to kill their loved ones. They were other police officers, churchgoers, and parents. But they all had a dark side, and they all wanted instant gratification. And now, Gary is the subject of a new movie streaming on Netflix, HIT MAN.
TW: brief mention of suicide
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SOURCES
https://www.texasmonthly.com/true-crime/hit-man-2/
Woman_faked_own_death_to_stop_solicitation_plot.pdf
https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/banker-s-wife-sentenced-to-probation-for-trying-2054385.php
Police_say_woman_tried_to_have_husband_killed.pdf
http://www.ejfi.org/DV/dv-141.htm
Woman_Charged_In_Death_Plot_Against_Husband.pdf
Woman_Gets_80_Years.pdf
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-13325181/netflix-real-life-story-fake-hit-man.html
https://www.compass.com/neighborhood-guides/houston/tanglewood/
https://txcip.org/tac/census/profile.php?FIPS=48201
https://www.newspapers.com/image/588625183/?match=1&terms=
TRANSCRIPT
On a spring evening in 1989, a well dressed woman named Kathy nervously picked at her fingernails. She was at a Houston area bowling alley for her company’s corporate league.
But as she sat and watched her coworkers crack jokes and bowl gutter balls, her mind was somewhere else. she kept looking over her shoulder at the front of the bowling alley, eyes fixated on the entrance, waiting in nervous anticipation.
And that’s when she saw him.
A man in an old T shirt and jeans entered the bowling alley and walked over to the bar. On his neck was a chain with a silver human skull as the pendant. He looked like a biker, and blended in with the other regulars at the bar. That must be him, she thought to herself.
When her coworkers weren’t watching, she slunk away from the lane. She had never imagined she’d be in this situation. She practiced what she would say to the man in her mind over and over again. How do you do this casually? The man must be used to these kinds of encounters, the ones that begin and end in suburban bowling alleys. Kathy was not, and she braced herself as she approached him.
Come with me, she said. The man scooted off the bar stool and followed.
This is it, Kathy thought to herself as she power walked towards her car in the lot, the man silently following behind her. How was she going to face her husband after this? How was she going to go home and pretend everything was normal? Her friend had connected the two, and she was the one who told him to meet her at this bowling alley, but now she wasn’t sure if she regretted it.
No time to think. She opened the driver side door of her car and climbed in, and the man popped open the passenger side.
When she turned to look at him, she saw he was already looking at her. He was probably around 40, with brown hair and kind brown eyes. Slender build. And while he looked like a tough guy in the bar, he now had a softness to him. His brow had softened, and he carried himself almost like an old friend. It made Kathy relaxed a little as she took a deep breath and prepared to say what she needed to say, the reason they were both here in the first place.
“I’d like to hire you to kill my husband for me.” And just like that, she knew there was no going back.
Welcome to heart starts pounding, a podcast of horrors, haunting and mysteries, I’m your host, Kaelyn Moore.
I want to talk about Hit Men. Or, really, I want to talk about the types of people who hire hit men, because it’s probably not who you think.
Later this week, Netflix is releasing their new summer movie Hit Man, starring Glen Powell and directed by Richard Linklatter. The movie is a fictional retelling of a very real story. It’s the story of a hit man, but at the core of the real story that inspired the movie, it’s a story of the people who chose to hire someone to kill someone they know.
The movie is based on the fantastic, fantastic reporting of my favorite true crime journalist Skip Hollandsworth, a writer for Texas Monthly. This episode will reference his article on the case, as well as other coverage and articles on it.
And should mention here, at some points I’ll be building out scenes and fictionalizing elements based on the real information we have on this case, just as I did with the opening scene of this episode.
Ok, let’s dive back in where we were.
A few weeks before Kathy asked a stranger to murder her husband for her, a phone call came in to Houston area police.
It was a bail bondsman. He said that a former high school classmate of his had reached out to him asking if he knew of anyone she could pay to kill her husband The bondsman felt incredibly uncomfortable with this ask, so he called the cops. But the police didn’t have resources to look into this kind of case, so they called the DA’s special crimes division to ask if they had anyone who handled murder-for-hire cases. The lead investigator said that they didn’t, but looking around, he noticed a man Gary Johson sitting at his desk. Gary was a 42 year old investigator who mostly tracked down stolen cars and sometimes helped with stakeouts. He never wanted to be an investigator, he wanted to be an academic. But when he wasn’t accepted to a PHD program in Psychology, he wound up with a job at the DAs office
But Gary was a good looking guy. He was decent under pressure and a fantastic listener, and maybe that’s why his boss got an idea. “Hey Gary”, his boss shouted, “you’re our new hit man”
And just like that, Gary was plucked off his desk and told to meet the 37-year-old Kathy Scott at the bowling alley.
He had no idea what he was doing. He was bookish, with wire rimmed glasses, and now he had to go pretend to be a hitman? What did hit men even look like? Gary chose a biker persona named “Mike Caine”, as if he was going off of the representation we’ve seen of hit men in movies. He figured the tougher he looked, the more believable it would be that he killed people for money. And sitting in Kathy’s car, it seemed to have worked.
During the encounter, Gary was wearing a wire, and he was instructed to get details and verbal confirmation that Kathy was fully intending to pay for a hit on her husband. He had worked with criminals before, they were usually tough to crack, but Kathy seemed desperate and mild mannered. He wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that she had never committed a crime in her life. He had a whole tough guy act planned out, but sitting here now, it seemed like Kathy needed a friend. He dropped the act and just started asking her thoughtful questions about her situation, choosing to come across as sympathetic rather than bruteish.
And just like that, all of Kathy’s walls came down. She had been holding in her frustrations with her husband of four months, her fifth husband in 10 years, actually. And told Gary everything.
She told him how she was frustrated that her husband had removed her name from their checking account after he got upset at how much she was spending. There was a lot of money on the line, $50,000 worth of insurance money, $47,000 of retirement money and two houses that would all be hers if her husband died.
Kathy told Mike that the best place for her husband to be killed would be the black neighborhood. They had lots of drug problems anyways, she said, no one would suspect a thing.
Any sympathy Gary may have had for this woman was now completely gone. She then leaned forward and told him she’d hire him for $2500, and pay him $100 up front. Bingo, that’s what he needed her to say on tape. Gary told her he’d do it, got out of the car, and within minutes the bowling alley parking lot was lit up with lights and sirens from cop cars. He had successfully done his first sting.
Kathy would go on to be sentenced to a whopping 80 years in prison for trying to order the eXecution of her husband. At her trial, she tried to make it seem like Gary had charmed her into thinking she wanted her husband dead, she didn’t REALLY want that.
But Gary hadn’t coaxed Kathy really at all. No, he just had this almost super human ability to listen to people and ask questions, and they would tell him everything he needed. And with that, he had an official new job within the DA’s office. He was their fake hit man.
Gary, as you may imagine, was never who anyone expected would play a convincing killer for hire. He had a masters degree in psychology and taught a class on human sexuality at a local community college. Three times divorced, he was closer to his two cats, Id and Ego, than any other person.
Yet, it was this experience that most likely made him the perfect pretend contract killer. Instead of approaching cases from the angle of a cop trying to get a confession, he played therapist, and allowed people to confess their darkest desires to him.
His next investigation took him to 32- year old Katherine Biesel, who had asked a private detective she hired “how much it would cost to get someone killed”. That was enough for the detective to contact the police, and Johnson was assigned to the case.
Biesel had been seeing a man named Nelson in 1991. She claimed they had a proper relationship, Nelson claimed it was a brief fling. That part isn’t super important. What IS important, though, is that Nelson was married, and when he got nervous and broke off their “entanglement”, Biesel flew off the handle. she’d call him non stop and sent him letters when he wouldn't answer the phone. She even went so far as to sue him for medical bills for ailments she decided were his fault. When none of that sufficed as revenge, she got in touch with Johnson.
At their first meeting, which I can’t confirm was at a Denny’s but may very well have been - that was Gary’s favorite meeting spot- she told him that she didn’t want Nelson dead, she just wanted someone to go over and break his legs and trash his apartment. Gary wasn’t interested in meddling in the affairs of a woman who wanted to get back at her lover. Once again, he was in character as tough biker guy Mike Caine, and maybe being dressed like Bruce Springsteen gave him more confidence than his regular, desk job persona, but he got up and walked away from Biesel. Call me when you want the real thing, he said.
Not long after that, Biesel asked Gary to meet her again. She came equipped with a few hundred bucks, a picture of Nelson, and information about his schedule. She wanted him dead, and she was ready to pay Gary to do it.
Once again, that’s all Gary needed to hear, and Biesel was arrested, though she was only sentenced to 10 years of deferred adjudication.
Everything would change for Gary that same year, 1991. That year, the infamous “pom pom mom, Wanda Halloway, tried to hire a hit man to kill another woman. See, she was nervous her pre teen daughter wouldn’t make the cheerleading team, so she plotted to have the mother of her daughters rival killed in hopes it would distract the girl from trying out. Wanda was caught when she reached out to an undercover cop to handle the hit, but it was so mishandled that the case ended up being mostly a nightmare for prosecutors. After that, Gary’s DA office put out word that if they wanted a sting operation done right, Gary was their guy. Soon his black landline was constantly ringing off the hook.
If you’re wondering how many possible murder for hire plots could have been happening in the Houston area in the 1990’s, the number may actually shock you. Johnson estimated that from 1989-2001, he investigated over 300 cases of people searching for hit men to hire.
I talked about this in episode 41: Two Mary’s Two Murders, but I am always shocked when I hear about the types of people who hire hitmen. Gary was even surprised by the clientele. When he came up with the persona of Mike Caine, the tough biker who doesn’t mess around, he thought he needed to look like a tough guy because he’d be dealing with hardened convicts or dangerous psychopaths. He didn’t realize most of his clientele would be middle to upper class men and women around his age, with good jobs, and families. They were people who blended into society but had dark impulses and wanted instant gratification. wolves in sheeps clothing.
This is how Gary described the people who reached out to him ““Except for one or two instances, the people I meet are not ex-cons. “If ex-cons want somebody dead, they know what to do. My people have spent their lives living within the law. A lot of them have never even gotten a traffic ticket. Yet they have developed such a frustration with their place in the world that they think they have no other option but to eliminate whoever is causing their frustration. They are all looking for the quick fix, which has become the American way. Today people can pay to get their televisions fixed and their garbage picked up, so why can’t they pay me, a hit man, to fix their lives?”
So when he was approached by one of these people, it always disappointed him. He got a glimpse into all of the bad actors in society, even the ones no one expected. Like when he got connected with a cop in his community about killing his ex wife. After the break
One of the most shocking clients to be connected with Gary was William Peoples, a veteran cop who was highly esteemed in his community. Peoples felt like his ex wife was costing him too much money in child support payments and asked another cop, who also wanted HIS own ex wife killed to help him find a hit man. They contacted a criminal on parole, who was referred to Gary who, as a reminder, WORKED FOR THE POLICE. It seems like the cops had no idea they were working with one of their own, which is a testament to how skilled Gary was. Peoples offered to pay Ten Thousand dollars to kill his ex wife, and 2,000 more to kill her new husband. He was sentenced to 10 years in jail, but the other officer was never convicted.
There was also the woman of god, 61-year-old Patsy Haggard. Patsy had asked a young woman in her neighborhood who had struggled with drug use if she knew a hit man, a common mistake. The woman called the police, who instructed her to introduce Patsy to Gary. Patsy immediately became infatuated with the handsome hit man, and offered to sleep with him during some of their clandestine meetings to discuss the plan, of which he declined every time.
Patsy found Gary to be understanding and patient, and she opened up to him immediately. She told him about the time that she burned down her kitchen just to annoy her husband. And now, she wanted him dead.
The confessions were coming so easily, that Gary realized he didn’t really need to play such a tough character. Instead, he became a master of being able to change his appearance and parts of his personality to suit each person he worked with. With women, he played a softer character who listened and didn’t interrupt, and was shocked at how much they would open up. For men, he’d play it a little tougher to convince them he was capable of doing the job. Usually, he’d come across as sympathetic toward his clients, he understood their marital troubles or their financial woes, but he was also cold blooded enough to kill without feeling bad. He’d off your ex lover and make it look like a suicide, no problem. He could car bomb your sister so she wouldn’t get your parents inheritance. He’d even offer to break your wife’s neck and make it look like she fell. All because he understood why you wanted that.
But Gary never pressured any of his clients into confessing. Like Katherine Biesel, if he felt like they weren’t serious about hiring a hit man, he’d drop it. There was no use in throwing someone in jail for just having dark thoughts. Sometimes people would get drunk and say they wanted their husband dead. Those people were usually not serious and he never pursued those leads too far. He needed proof that they wanted to go through with this plot, and were willing to pay.
Maybe you’re like me, and you’re wondering how dealing with these kinds of people affected him psychologically. Well, on one hand, he felt like he was saving lives. If these people weren’t connected to him, they were going to find another hit man, these people were dead set on having someone killed.
There were also times where he felt like he almost understood where the person was coming from. One person reached out to ask Gary to throw his ex wife’s new boyfriend down a well because he was mistreating his daughter. The father felt powerless in the situation and was trying to protect his child.
On the other hand, over time he started realizing just how much evil there was in the world.
On January 6th, 2000, Gary took a meeting with 32 year old Bobby Wigley. Bobby nervously bounced his leg up and down as he dreamed up ways Gary could kill his 28 year old wife and their 9 month old baby. Maybe he could break her neck and make it look like she slipped. Or perhaps the brake line of her car could be cut and the two would slam into a tree. As long as it looked like an accident, he could collect the insurance money on their lives.
Gary had met with a lot of unsympathetic people, but Bobby was something else. Killing your own child for the insurance money? I’m sure in that moment, Gary just wanted to reach over and wring that guys neck, I mean, I would. But he was a seasoned pro at this job, so he listened to the man, asking a few questions to try and understand where this desire was coming from.
"I'm just greedy…that's all it boils down to," Bobby reportedly told Gary during the meeting.
Over the last few years, he had gotten and idea in his head that started as a seed but grew and grew and grew into an obsession. He wanted to become a private detective. There was something about living a life as a man of mystery that enticed him. He loved the idea of owning rare guns and going to detective school.
But, he told gary. He needed money to go live this life. Money that he didn’t have. Money that was sitting in his families $650,000 life insurance policy.
Why not just kill your wife? Gary asked
Bobby didn’t want to deal with the child once he was on his new life path. It’d be better if the kid was gone too. Or… he waffled. Maybe the kid can live.
After their meeting, Bobby jumped in his car with his child in the back seat, and pawned a gun he owned for $250 for a down payment. As he did this, officers rushed to his home to tell his wife what was going on and get her to safety. Once Bobby handed the money over to another undercover officer, he was in handcuffs.
It’s relatively easy to not feel bad for the people that were soliciting Gary’s services. I mean, to just ask any person they assumed was a criminal for help finding a hit man is a… choice. These people were in their little bubbles and assumed anyone with a criminal record was willing to help them kill their spouse. They didn’t realize that many of the criminals they approached were now informants for the police.
But also, as more people were falling for Gary’s trap, more publications were writing about him. By the mid 90’s, Gary’s name was out there publicly as an undercover cop posing as a hitman. He became terrified that he’d sit down with a client and they’d look at him and say, “you’re gary Johnson, aren’t you?” If that were to happen jig would be up at any moment and his life could be in jeopardy.
However, that never happened. People never thought to dig into the person they were hiring as their hitman. They went into the situation with blind trust. Which is surprising, when you take into account how prominent some of Gary’s clients were. Take Lynn Kilroy, for example.
Gary and the 39 year old Lynn Kilroy sat in a hotel in the nice part of town one October evening. Instead of hospital lighting and leaky faucets, this one had 1000 thread count sheets and AC. This time, his client was a little more high profile.
Lynn sprawled out on the King bed and ran through a laundry list of complaints.
Firest, She hated her husband, 34 year old heir to a gas and oil fortune William Smiley Kilroy Jr. Mostly, She hated that he had cerebral palsy and she had to help him. Despite only being married for 13 months, she was tired of feeling handicapped by his well…handicap.
What was Lynn’s draw to her husband in the first place, you may ask? William was the only son of one of Houston's most important cultural benefactors, Jeanie Kilroy, and was set to inherit astounding wealth upon his parents death.
Gary glanced over at Lynn, her sparkling diamond necklace making little reflections on her face. He was confused. What was her angle? Lynn was raised middle class and had a business degree. The life she was living with William in their 15 room home was far better than the life she was living without him. She wasn’t set to receive much if he died, did she reall feel his disability was worth killing him over?
And that’s when Lynn revealed a deeper layer of her hellish plot. “I just want to be with Derek” she sighed.
Derek was Lynn’s lover. The two met, get this, FOUR DAYS AGO. You can’t even watch every episode of The Office in four days, and Lynn met a man and planned her husbands murder in that time.
Lynn worried that if she filed for divorce from William he’d use his families influence to receive full custody of their 6 month old daughter. Better be safe than sorry and have him whacked, she joked looking up at Gary with a pouty mouth.
Ideally, she’d like her husband to be killed while she was gone. Later that week she was going to leave with Derek for a vacation. Could you do it then? She asked with the same pouty expression.
Gary looked at Lynn with his signature collected and sympathetic expression. Normally, he may want to act fast in this situation. If Lynn couldn’t hire Gary ASAP, maybe her lover would go off and find a real hit man and have Lynn’s poor husband killed for real. But Gary wasn’t worried about that. Derek wasn’t going to go find a hit man. No, Loverboy Derek was also an undercover cop.
See, A little while before she met Derek Lynn had been complaining to her neighbor about her husband William in a way that made the neighbor fear she was homicidal. Worried she might actually kill William, the neighbor went to his mother, who hired Derek Hartsfield, a real cop, to spy on Lynn. The affair Lynn thought she was having was really all due to Jeanie Kilroy’s intervention. Don’t get me wrong, Derek was very convincing and very into the role, he slep with Lynn within hours of knowing her. And two days into their affair, she asked Derek if he knew a hit man.
Gary knew all of this as he sat on the stiff king bed of the hotel room. He didn’t show his hand at all as he asked Lynn questions to get her intentions on tape. She was being quite vague as she spoke, saying things like “I want away from him’
"The only way you're going to be free is if he's dead," the faux hit man said. "I just want you to understand how serious this is."
"Do what you need to do," she told him. Then, she reached for her designer bag and pulled out $200,000 worth of jewelry and offered it to Gary as payment. There’s be another 50k in it for you before we leave for Brazil, she said.
And with that, Gary got up and left the room, he was running late for the college class he was teaching that evening, and the cops would be at the door any minute now.
Lynn would go on to be sentenced to just 5 years probation for the solicitation. Her lawyers argued that the fear of losing her child in a custody battle prevented her from thinking straight. But Gary knew better.
There was really only one time where someone realized he was a cop and backed out of the deal, but it was only because the informant that connected the two felt bad and revealed Gary’s identity. No one else ever double crossed Gary, and none of the clients ever figured out who he was. One time, while a client was in the middle of telling Gary how he wanted his wife killed, the police came to the door.
This man, named Roberts Holliday, had spent weeks planning the murder of his wife, even going so far as to report her for being suicidal so that when she died no one would look into it.
Eventually, asked a topless dancer at a club for recommendations for a hit man. The dancer immediately called the police.
Holliday asked Gary, who was using his Mike character for this meeting, if he could slit his wife’s wrists and make it look like she had done it herself. That way he’d get her life insurance policy and could file a malpractice lawsuit against her doctor.
Within minutes of agreeing to pay Gary, the police banged on the motel door where the meeting was taking place. In a state of fear, Holliday held onto Gary and asked him what they should do, not realizing his hit man was the one who tipped the police off.
But as the early 90’s shifted into the late 90’s, the economy got a little better and business died down. “It’s very much tied to the economy” he once said in an interview with the Washington Post. He later told Skip Hollandsworth “When the economy is good… people don’t get so frantic,” “But when it starts going bad…everyone gets a little bit crazier and starts thinking about knocking someone else off.”
During a particularly dry time in the late 90’s, he said that his only solicitations were for the murder of witnesses during trials. However, the early 2000’s brought another down turn in the markets, and work started picking up again.
It’s during that time that a woman was sitting at home when she heard a knock on her door. It was Gary. “Your husband has put a $20,000 hit on you.” he informed her.
Her husband was a 60 year old used car salesman who also was upset at the prospect of his wife getting something he wanted during their divorce. This time it was their property. Initially, the man had asked a neighbor to perform the hit, and the neighbor got in touch with Gary, not realizing he was a cop.
Gary told the woman he was planning on arresting her husband. There was just one problem. The man said he’d only pay if the hit was confirmed. And Gary needed the money to prove the man was serious. Would you mind helping us stage your murder? He asked
with the help of a few other officers, the woman lied down on a tarp with her hands and feet bound in tape. Gary even added some ketchup to her hair to get the full effect. On an early 2000’s point and shoot camera it looked believable, and it wasn’t long before the police were at the man’s door carting him away. The wife lived to tell her side of the story.
Doing the work that Gary did, it would have been easy for him to become heartless over time. I mean, he had seen the worst of the worst, people who were willing to have their children killed to pursue their fantasies, people who wanted to kill their disabled partners to run away with their lovers, but surprisingly for Gary, that didn’t happen.
He developed a sort of soft spot for people, in a way. Not everyone who wanted to hire a hit man was selfishly trying to solve their problems.
Later in his career, he heard about a woman who asked a starbucks employee if she knew where to find a hit man. She wanted her husband killed.
Gary was about to take the case when he decided to dig into the woman’s past a bit, and what he found really affected him. The woman’s husband was abusive, horribly so, and she feared that if she left him, he would just hunt her down and do god knows what. She felt like her hands were tied and the only way forward was a world without him in it.
It would have been easy for Gary to do his usual routine. Drink watered down coffee in a booth at Denny’s while she told him what she wanted him to do. Lean forward at just the right times so her confession was clear on the wire under his shirt. Go through the charade of her digging out $100 from her tattered purse, probably the only $100 she owned, as an up front payment. But Gary didn’t want to do that, he didn’t think that would solve this problem.
Instead, he referred the woman to a therapist as well as a social service agency that could help her safely get away from her relationship. He wanted to make sure she’d have a secure shelter she could get to.
I said at the beginning of this episode that I didn’t want to only talk about Gary Johnson, the fake hit man, but about the types of people who hired hit men. A lot of the people Gary got involved with wanted money. They were afraid their partners would do too well in a divorce. They were nervous their sister would get a better inheritance. They wanted to be with their lovers or start new careers. All issues that could have been resolved without murder.
But when he came across someone who legitimately needed help. Who actually had to get out of a tough situation and felt like if she didn’t kill her partner he would kill her, he still tried to help her. It seemed like Gary was in this job to save people. He was saving the loved ones of his clients, and he may have saved that woman’s life.
Gary sadly passed away in 2023 at the age of 76, but his story lives on in the Netflix movie hitman. If you get the chance to watch it, let me know what you think. What parts of Gary’s story really made it into the film? And next week, you can check out my youtube video I’ll be doing breaking down the movie vs. the real story, so make sure you subscribe to Heart Starts Pounding over on youtube. The link will be in the description.