Wicked Words - A True Crime Talk Show with Kate Winkler DawsonHurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005. Four years later, a young prosecutor in the Justice Department was drawn into examining a mysterious death after the storm. Henry Glover was found dead in a burned-out car two weeks after Katrina. And who he was last seen with became the center of controversy and reform. Jared Fishman tells me the story from his book: Fire on the Levee.
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The message that we were getting was that you can't bring in your modern day justice to try to respond to the tragedy that was Katrina, and that we should best leave it alone.
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career, research for my many audio and book projects has taken me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers, and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the unpublished details behind their stories. Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in two thousand and five. Four years later, a young prosecutor in the Justice Department was drawn into examining a mysterious death that happened after the storm. Henry Glover was found dead in a burned out car two weeks after Katrina, and who he was last seen with became the center of controversy and reform. Jared Fishman tells me the story from his book Fire on the Levee. So let's just talk about how you came across this story, because I often talk with nonfiction writers about how they find it and it's sort of like a blip on a blog, or you know, they've read about it really briefly, but you're much more intimate, you know your connection to this story.
At the time this story came across my desk, I was a rookie prosecutor at the US Department of Justice in the Civil Rights Division. I worked for the part of DOJ that was responsible for enforcing American federal civil rights crimes, and that included hate crimes, human trafficking, and police misconduct. So at the time that I received the case, it wound on my desk. There was a mysterious death of a man in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and it came across my desk because allegations were beginning to surface that perhaps the police might have been involved.
Set the scene for where we are. We're in New Orleans.
Right, We're in New Orleans. It's September two, two thousand and five, four days after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. For most of the city, about eighty percent of the city was underwater after the hurricane breached levees that protected the city, and about eighty percent of the city then went underwater. This particular story takes place in one of the few parts of New Orleans that was above the waterline that had stayed dried in Algiers. A lot of the people who live in this community were predominantly lower income African Americans, and the people who were still in the city four days after the storm were generally those who lack the resources to be able to leave.
So with Katrina, we know sort of what happens later on the aftermath, sort of the long reaching aftermath of Katrina. What is happening in the days right after in Algiers or really across the city. Does anything set the stage for what's going to happen to this one man, this victim.
Yes, I mean in the immediate aftermath, there's almost a total breakdown in normal policing infrastructure. The federal government does a terrible job in responding, and so in the initial days after the storm, the police are primarily responsible for rescuing people. They're driving around the city, they're piloting boats in the parts of town that are underwater, and they're rescuing people off of roofs. So in those initial days, a lot of the response was just trying to deal with civilians who were still around. But as those days continue and new resources did not come in to support the community, we see a major breakdown in law and order. We see people beginning to steal in order to survive, everything from things that make sense like food and gasoline, do other things like guns and cars and flat screen TVs. So in the course of this, the police are both trying to exercise in a search and rescue type scenario, but then they're also dealing with the breakdown of law and order that follows afterwards.
Is there a way to look at Katrina when it hits? When Katrina hits, is there a way to look at it as the haves versus the have nots? Is it the people who were able to leave were the wealthier people or exactly how did people leave? Who chose to leave who didn't.
Well, it's a combination. I think if you had the means to leave, most people did leave. They were predicting a worse storm than they have historically got. But many of the people in New Orleans are also very proud they have rode out a number of different hurricanes over the years. And so it's a combination of people, those who lacked the resources to get out, some who didn't believe this storm was going to be that bad, people who wanted to stick around and see what the storm actually would look like and feel like. So I think there's a mixture of people. But at least as it relates to Henry Glover and his family, they didn't have enough cars to get their entire family out of New Orleans, and they simply didn't have the resources to be able to mobilize for such an uncertain period of time, and so they stayed and the family definitely suffered as a result of that.
So I'm in Austin, Texas. We don't get hurricanes, we don't really get tornadoes. We get a lot of flash floods, and I know how we try to sort of prepare for the flash flood What happens with Katrina. Are people boarding up windows? What is the protocol?
Just so I don't know, Yeah, I mean people are boarding up their their windows and gathering as much as they can to get out. And one of the things that I think is interesting about Hurricane Katrina and its impact on New Orleans is a lot of us think of it as a natural disaster. It was a hurricane, it hit the city, but that wasn't really what caused all the damage. What really the massive amount of damage came from the breaking of the levees. So if you think of New Orleans as being a bit of a bowl, much of the city is under sea level, and so in order to protect the city, they created this protective shield of levees so that as the Mississippi River rised, it didn't flood the city. Now, those protective levees were supposed to be able to keep the city safe. However, as the storm hit and as the waters rose, they broke. And so once those levees broke, the water infiltrated into the city and then we begin to see that bowl begin to fill up with water.
So, you know, we're talking about the levees breaking, and we also talked about the crime and disorder that was happening. Can you give me some contact for what's happening with the New Orleans Police department before Katrina happens. I know there's a long history of Louisiana's corruption in government and corruption in the police department in New Orleans, but are we at the worst before Katrina's happening.
It was pretty bad. I mean, I would say the nineties were probably the worst in terms of what New Orleans Police department was facing. It has a long history of corruption of abuse. In the nineties, New Orleans had two police officers on death row, one for assassinating a witness against him who made a civil rights complaint, and another who assassinated her own partner during a botched robbery of a restaurant where she moonlighted as security. There were a number of New Orleans police officers who were accused of murder and various other felonies over the time, and then you mix in that with corruption with other sorts of civil rights abuses. It was in pretty bad shape. Now. There were efforts over the years to combat that, but by the time Hurricane Katrina hit many of the reforms that had followed the late nineties it began to recede, and so they were at a point where the department was beginning to fall apart. Again, and Hurricane Katrina really stirred some things up.
Were they understaffed when Hurricane Katrina hit? I mean, were they really struggling to get people out onto the streets.
Well, there were a number of officers who abandoned their post. I want to say it was about two hundred two hundred and fifty officers if I'm remembering correctly. So certainly understaffed in terms of resources. And you've got to remember a lot of the city lost electricity. The thing that I would hear police officers talk a lot about is the absence of communications. So typically police officers there's a lot of communications via radio. But as there were issues with the electrical grid, as there were issues with communications systems, it was harder and harder to get messages back and forth between different parts of the city.
So the hurricane hits and there are several days of just trying to get the city in order. I'm sure people coming back and forth trying to figure out what happened to their belongings. Let's talk about the racial tension in the city, because you know, I'm sure there is a before and an after. What is the before of Hurricane Katrina and the racial tensions there.
Well, people were not coming back into the city at this point. The city was walled off. So by this point it's becoming more and more clear that the city is not going to be rebuilt. So you're actually seeing a one way movement out of town at this point, with increased efforts to get people out. Now, those people who are trying to leave around day three, day four are predominantly black, predominantly lower income, and there's a lot of tension between the police force. So you've got the police force who very much believes that their job is to keep this community safe, to prevent crime, to hunker down, and I think the prevailing view of many officers in the aftermath of the storm was very much in us versus them. There was a sense that you should have left. There was a mandatory evacuation order, there were buses, there were opportunities for people to leave, and the prevailing mindset of many of the officers who remained was if you remained, that was because you wanted to stir stuff up and cause trouble. And so there was an immediate creation of tension between the police and the people who remained, who are predominantly black. But this is not so much a white and black issue. The police force at that point is very integrated. There's many black officers who are part of New Orleans. There are white officers who are part of the New Orleans Police Department. But the tension that follows in the days after Hurricane Katrina are very much a black and blue story. The story of the blue the police against the civilians who remained behind. Now in defense of the police department, many of the people that they are also saving, that they are rescuing off of rooftops that they are transporting to different but are also black. Those are the people who are they are saving because those are the people who are in the city. And so you see different reactions between the police department and the civilians who remain depending on the context. But I think as more and more time passed after the storm, the predominant feeling was that if you stayed, it was because you were here to commit crimes and cause trouble.
Well, you mentioned Henry Glover, who is the victim in this case. So tell me as much as you can about Henry and his family. You talked about them hunkering down, they didn't have the money to leave, They didn't have the cars to leave. But before Katrina, what is his family like? What is he like? What's his family dynamic?
So? Henry Glover is a thirty one year old black man who had grown up and spent his whole life in Algiers in New Orleans. He grew up in the Fisher Projects, which was one of the low income housing projects in New Orleans where where life is rough. There's a long history of tension between the police and this community. Henry worked two jobs, he had kids. He's one of five children. His mother, Edna Glover, was the matriarch keeping the house together. He was known for fixing electronics and the ability to fix things, and people came to him for help and he did what he could. But he was lower income. He didn't have much savings. He didn't have a whole lot of opportunities, and he decided he needed to stick around New Orleans because there wasn't much of a way out.
How big is this family that's actually living in the house during Katrina.
Well, there's a group of about twelve of them in a few different apartments. It's Henry and his girlfriend and their daughter, and then his sister, Patrice and her boyfriend and their two children, and then his brother Edward and his wife and their children, and so they all live in different apartments, but in this one neighborhood quite close to each other.
Did you get to talk to his family for your book?
I got to talk to his family a number of times over the years.
So let's talk a little bit about his personality, because I'm sure that one of the things they must have emphasized to you is just you know Henry as a person, and what a loss he was to the family. You mentioned he has a girlfriend and a little girl.
Yeah. I mean from all reports of the people who knew him best, he was a loving guy. He was funny, he was helpful, he was working hard to try to support his family. I think what I would hear over and over again from his family members is just what a carrying guy he was. You know, he grew up in this neighborhood in Algiers and the Fisher Projects, and early in his life had a number of run ins with the police for low level for low level crimes. But by the time he's thirty one in Hurricane Katrina hits, he's basically got his life together and he's trying to he's trying to do the best he can with the cards he's been dealt.
So that was going to be my next question because I was thinking to myself, a thirty one year old black man in New Orleans in this time period had to have, of course, had interactions with the police. What did his family say those were like those interactions for him specifically?
Well, I mean, the first story that we hear come from a period of time in New Orleans known as the Algiers seven. There was a police officer who was killed, and I want to say it was nineteen eighty and the police believed that it had happened in Algiers and so they sent a bunch of forces into the projects. They killed four people, they committed all sorts of civil rights violations. And at that point, Henry was two years old. So this is the context with which he is growing up. And his sister said, you know, she remembered his older sister, since she remembered the police busting down and hearing all the yelling in the background, and there's a mom holding little Henry in her arms. Now, over the years, you just look at the lack of opportunity in that particular neighborhood, there's a lot of drugs, there's a lot of theft, really a total lack of opportunity for most black kids growing up in that community. And so, you know, I think Henry had a very similar childhood as many of those people growing up in that space. That being said, he's able to get a job, begin to support the family, trying to settle down his life, and that's where he is when Hurricane Katrina hits.
What does the family say to you that their experience was like with Katrina? I mean, was this just they thought they were going to lose everything or I mean, I know you said that Algiers is on higher ground, but still it must have been petrifying for them.
Well, it's interesting. Henry's sister, Patrece, at the time, was working for Harri's Casino, which is in downtown. Harri's Casino put her and her boyfriend, Bernard Callaway, and their children and mother Edna Glover, and so they're all staying downtown when the storm hits. Storm hits, it's breaking windows. It's certainly a scary experience. But when the storm passes, everyone thought that they had survived it. Everyone thought that they had endured the storm, and that they would go back on their way, so they actually leave downtown. They go back to Algiers. So Algiers is separated from downtown by a bridge, so they cross the bridge back. They go to their home. They find some damage. Water's out, electricities out. But their assumption at that time was that, yeah, this is part for the course for a hurricane in New Orleans. The electric and the water will be back on in a few days. That they had no idea that the levees had broken, and so the city begins to slowly fill up over the course of that first day. So for the people who had lived through the storm on day one, they think that they're past it. Henry's family, Patrece Edward King, they all think that they've beat it. And as they get back home and they see the damage, they think things are going to come back together. But they're also cut off from communications for the rest of the city, so they don't even know what's happening in the rest of the city. Is it's beginning to fill up with water and as law and orders beginning to break down.
Explain to me about the levees. How long was this process of the levees breaking from the end of the storm when they think we're out of.
This, I think it's about twenty four hours takes place for the city to fill up.
And so breakdown of communications. And I'm assuming you have the state government, the city government, television stations if they're up, anybody saying you need to stay out or stay safe because there's more water coming.
And that we're not able to get to you. But then you also have to take into account that it's not like they're watching TV. And yes, the world is being broadcast the story of what's happening in New Orleans, but if you're in Algiers at this point, you're not watching TV. Don't you have sporadic cell phone? And so what was happening a lot is you're getting rumors coming in, some of which sound true, some of which sound crazy. But the rumors that were going around were that there were mass murders and rapes taking place at the Superdome, that people were just getting gunned down in the street. A lot of those rumors just simply were not true, but as they began to circulate not only among the civilians but also among the police, the police believed they were true. There was a police officer in Algier's point, who was in fact shot in the head and survived by a group of looters. And so those stories are surfacing, and so there's a lot of tensions as the days pass.
How prepared with equipment is the New Orleans Police Department. Are they outfitted with boats? I wonder even they must be outfitted with some boats. Now after all of.
That, they have some boats, but there are a lot of stories of police officers bringing out their own boats, people gathering up fishing boats, people finding canoes, finding whatever was available. I think the department was certainly under equipped. They were not equipped for this type of problem. Right. They did prepared for hurricanes. I don't think anyone was anticipating eighty percent of the city being underwater, and so people were doing the best they could, including using their own fishing boats to try to go rescue people.
So when Henry's sister returns to Algiers and returns to the apartment, she finds everything wrecked wet, but nobody's panic Jeck because they don't know about the levies. Where is Henry? Is he there?
At this point, Henry is in a different apartment complex across the street. He stayed behind. He stayed in Algiers wrote it out there. By this point, on September second, now Patrece and her boyfriend Bernard have returned back home. Edna Glover has now been evacuated out. She needed to get out because she was running out of her own medicine, and so there was an increasing sense of Okay, we need to figure out a way out of this place. And on September second, the family had finally decided, all right, it's time for us to leave. We need to get out of here.
Now. How would they be able to do that if they didn't have enough cars to haul them out the first time?
So there was one car, a small compact Kia, and Henry then went to a Firestone Auto Parts star and stole a truck, and the plan was that they were going to evacuate the family.
Is this the case with Henry stealing the truck of just like there were no other options? I mean, I imagine that's what you would say, right Or is that the way that his family framed it. It's just like we're going to do anything we can to get out of here because it's life and death.
That is certainly the sense that I got from knowing them. Over that time period is they didn't know how to get out again, they're cut off from from radio communications. Now, people in government and law enforcement said, well, there's Algier's Points as evacuation point, not very far away. Why didn't they just walk there? Well, you know, that's easy to say after the fact. But the plan was Edna Henry's mother had already gone to Texas and the goal was to try to get the entire family together and go drive to met her. So between the truck and between the Kia, they were going to be able to evacuate together.
There were an awful lot of people I know who ended up in Houston, just because I was here during that time period. So yeah, so a lot of people were sure. So Edna's mom went to Texas, Did she go to Houston or that area?
I want to say she went to Houston as possible, they went to Dallas, but they went one of those two places.
Okay, So Henry has a truck and then they have this little tiny Kia. What happens next they all pile in and start to head out.
Well, Henry is going to gather up his stuff from his apartment and his plan is to come back and gather up everyone else's stuff, and then they're going to drive off together. But before they do that, as Henry is driving to his apartment, he runs into a family friend. That family friend says to him, Hey, we've got some stuff that we had just taken from a store, some suitcases, some other items that we're going to need for our evacuation. Can you go with your truck and pick them up in Henry, a good hearted guy, says sure, absolutely, no problem. In him and Bernard Calloway, who is his good friend and his sister's boyfriend, they go back to the strip mall with the truck to try to retrieve those items.
Okay, so do they make it that far? They make it all the way over to the strip mall.
They make it to the strip mall, they park the car, Henry sees the items that he's supposed to pick up. Bernard says, Hey, I got it. I'm going to go pick him up. He goes to the back and starts loading items up in the truck when they hear a voice that says something to the effect of leave now, and both Henry and Bernard take off running. Very Shortly after, a single shot fires through the air. Hitting Henry in the back. Henry collapses on the ground, and at that point Bernard is scrambling what to do. We need to get Henry help.
So does Bernard stay or does he run? And I don't know the right answer to that.
Bernard runs. He goes back to his apartment, He finds Patrese, Henry's sister, He finds Edward, Henry's brother, and says, we need to get help, because you've got to remember there are very few resources in this community at this point, and so the idea of how do you even get help for this man who has been shot? Bernard doesn't know what to do. So he gathers up Edward and he gathers up Patrese and they begin to come back to the Strip Mall to try to give Henry had help. In the meantime, Edward flags down a man named William Tanner. William Tanner is driving around in the neighborhood. He's trying to get gasoline for his car so that he can evacuate the city. But at this point all of the gas stations have been taken over by the police as well, and so Tanner doesn't know quite what to do. But Edward flags him down, drives over to the scene where Henry is bleeding out in the street, and they load up Henry. And so the three men Edward the brother, Bernard the best friend, and William Tanner, who we call the good Samaritan, the stranger who is helping this man in need. They load up Henry into his Chevy Malibu and they begin to go look for help.
That's incredible that William Tanner stopped. I mean, I don't know how many people would actually do that. So he just stopped for a stranger.
He doesn't know these guys. I mean, when I first heard this story and I first met William Tanner, I found that so hard to believe. How is it possible that he's stopped during this really, really tense period of unrest in the city to take a stranger who is bleeding profusely, load him in his car and try to find help. But that's what William Tanner does, and they try to go find help for Henry.
So what happens next. You've got poor Henry bouncing around in the back of this vehicle and they're desperately looking for something. The hospitals are they open or are their ears open?
Well? There's one hospital about fifteen minutes away in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, which is adjacent to this part of New Orleans. But at that time, the sheriff of Jefferson Parish has basically said we don't want any New Orleans riff raff come into town, and William Tanner, the Good Samaritan, said, there's no way we're going to be able to make it to the hospital in time to get Henry help. Not very far from the Strip Mall, there was also an elementary school, and in the days after Hurricane Katrina, this elementary school has been taken over by the New Orleans swat team. William Tanner, the Good Samaritan, the day before is driving around trying to figure out some gas and he sees what he believes to be medical supplies at the elementary school because that's where the swat team was based. On that very same day, he also jump started the car of a police officer who had been stranded, and so he believed that this would be a place that they could go and possibly find help for Henry Glover.
Okay, so tell me what happens next they head over there, and what ends up happening.
Well, they pull up to the elementary school and immediately are met by the SWAT team and other police officers who are armed to the teeth. The three non wounded men are taken out of the car handcuffed. Over the course of the next hour or two, they allege there beaten by the police, while Henry is left to bleed out in the back of the car.
So he is in the back of is it a police car or what car?
Is it? No, he's still in the back of Tanner's Chevy Malibu.
So they are arrested under what pretense? What is the charge?
They're not really charged with anything the police is claiming. They're trying to understand what's happening. There's so much unknown and so much uncertainty. You've got three men who come they show up. The police don't understand why they would possibly be at this elementary school, and they don't take too kindly to these civilians showing up at their home because at that point, not only is it their base, it's where they're keeping their armory, it's where they're keeping their cars, it's where they're keeping their boats, but it's also where everyone's living. So the swat team is about sixty people large at that time, and everyone is living at this elementary school, and so when the car pulls up, they're in the middle of this shift change. So some of the SWAT team is coming in. Some of the swat teams about to go out for the day, but they do not respond very well to these three men with the bleeding man in the back coming to their school.
So you have Patrice back at Bernard and her apartment waiting for her boyfriend and her brother to come back with supply so they can go. At what point, and I imagine it's pretty quick, does she realize something happened and it didn't go well.
Well, she doesn't know. She's wandering around trying to find out what happens. At some point she's still at the Strip Mall waiting for information, and other police officers show up at the Strip Mall. They're told to evacuate in not the nicest terms. They're told to get back to go away. And there was a belief at that time that it was a police officer who shot Henry. No one had seen who had shot Henry. No one knew for sure. But on the second floor of this strip Mall was a New Orleans Police Department substation where the fourth District, which policed this part of New Orleans, had an investigative office, So there was an idea that perhaps the police might have shot them. But when those accusations were made at the scene, Patrese and the civilians that had gathered nearby were threatened by the police and quickly evacuated and went back to their homes to wait for word about what to do next.
And at what point Bernard and William Tanner. When are they released or when does it become clear that they were not responsible for killing Henry Something else happened well.
The three men are detained at the school for about two hours. During the time period, what the three men say is they see an officer jump into the Chevy Malibu. This officer has two road flares and he drives off with Henry's body in the car, and he's followed by a truck. That's all they know is that they see the police driving off with Henry's body a few hours later. Initially, William Tanner is released. First, he sees the woman whose car he had jumped on the previous occasion, and this woman says, yeah, I know this guy, and the police let him go. So William Tanner leaves first, and he goes back and he tells patrese in the family about what had happened. A number of minutes after that, Edward and Bernard are also released with no charges. They're told that Henry's body is under investigation, but they're also told leave New Orleans now and never come back.
Do they have a point of contact at all? I guess about Henry? How are they meant to figure out what happened to their brother, to this man?
Well, they don't get any information. They do everything they can to try to locate what happened to Henry. They call the Morgue, they call the coroner's office. They're calling the police department. There's a headquarters, there's the fourth District station. They're trying to call everyone they can, but they're getting no answers about what happened to Henry.
At what point do they find out what actually happened after Henry was driven off dying or dead in this Chevy Malibu by a police officer.
Well, it's about seven months later that they learn that Henry's remains, his burnt remains are found in a Chevy Malibu on the levee, not far from the fourth District Police station. So about seven months later they learned for the first time Henry is in fact dead. His body has been burned. But they get no information from the police as to what happened or why.
What are they here? Just yeah, you know, a couple days later we found his body. Or are they even giving context on when it was discovered, under what circumstances it was discovered.
No, they're not getting any of that information. So Henry is killed on September second, his body isn't collected until September sixteenth, two weeks later. Part of that is because there just is no ability to deal with all of the human remains. As I mentioned, eighteen hundred people died in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The morgue was overwhelmed. There were not collection services to go pick up bodies, so it wasn't until federal resources began pouring in over the following weeks that the body was even collected. By the time Henry's body was collected, his skull was missing, very few identifiable pieces of his skeleton remains, but it was enough to identify him through DNA.
So obviously, when the family finds out seven months later, what happens next? What can the family do about this?
They just continue calling and calling and calling, and they don't get any answers, and eventually somewhat give up. They give up and they just accept the idea they probably will never know what happened to Henry?
Is this when the young federal prosecutor who specializes in civil rights cases finds the case on his desk and decides to pursue it.
Yes, So there was an investigative journalist named A. C. Thompson who worked for Pro Publica, and he wrote an article recounting William Tanner's account of these last hours of Henry. And so he tells William Tanner's story of rescuing this man who had been shod trying to get help, being beaten by the police, and how the police then drove off with Henry's body and they were the last ones to see him. So he publishes is this piece in the nation and it winds up on my desk as a rookie prosecutor at the DOJ at the time. My boss said, you know, I don't know if there's anything to it, but it's worth investigating, and so they sent me down from Washington down to New Orleans. I teamed up with a rookie FBI agent, a young African American woman named Ashley Johnson, who was also at the beginning of her career, and the two of us teamed up to try to figure out war in fact, the police involved with what happened.
Had you done anything on this scale before? I can't imagine you hadn't. If you were really this young rookie prosecutor, this must have been terrifying.
Well, I had done a lot of cases inside prisons. My office also investigated abuse that takes place in jails and prisons around the country, and so for the first two years of my time at DJ that's what I did. I traveled around to jails and Tennessee and Texas and North Carolina and investigated allegations of abuse. So I was familiar with the statutes I was used to invest getting law enforcement, but nothing of the scale that was involved here. And in all the many cases I investigated after this, I never investigated another one that was quite as complex and uncertain as this one.
Well, let's talk about that article that you initially read. I cannot believe after what he went through, that William Tanner was willing to talk about this case to a national outlet. That must have been terrifying for him. I can't imagine he wouldn't have been afraid. Don't you think of some sort of retribution from the police.
William Tanner is a very very special man. I don't know that I've met many people like them over the course of my life. He is a good Samaritan in heart. He seems to me as a man who feels no fear. Yeah, he's very eccentric. He's a fun guy to hang out with, and he wanted something to happen. Now. One of the things that also was a part of Tanner's incentive was Tanner had been paying down his car. So after his car gets taken and burned, he's still paying down the note and he goes to his insurance company and he says, the police stole my car, And what the insurance company tells him is, well, when the police take your car, it's not stealing. So Tanner continues to pay down the note on his car for three and a half years, and in two thousand and nine he'd finally paid off the note, which in his mind then gave him a little bit more freedom to talk about what happened to him. So he goes to Ac Thompson, he tells his story to him, and simultaneously he comes to the FBI and begins reporting what happened to him. Then and Tanner brings this case out of the shadows after three and a half years.
So you start to get involved, you and the FBI agent Ashley Johnson, and you all start to dig in. Do you have any reticence from the black community in Algiers when you start digging around with this case once again, or do people really want to talk about it? Despite I'm sure the ever present tensions with the police, we.
Did reticence from everyone. I mean, whether or not you're a civilian, whether or not you are a police officer, whether or not you saw wrongdoing. But we're totally innocent yourself, whether or not you were a co conspirator. All of those people wanted to keep the ghosts of Katrina locked and buried, and so Ashley and I were at a huge disadvantage. We were outsiders. Ashley's from Mobile, Alabama. I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. We were not in New Orleans in the aftermath of the storm. Time and time again, people would ask us were we are and we'd say no, and overwhelmingly they would say, well, if you weren't here, then you cannot understand. The message that we were getting was that you can't bring in your modern day justice to try to respond to the tragedy that was Katrina, and that we should best leave it alone post Katrina.
What is the relationship like between the people in Algiers and the police, particularly when the information comes out about Henry Glover being found in the burned out Chevy Malibu.
Well, you know, as the days pass after September second, there are even fewer people left, So the message is becoming more and more clear that you need to leave. The city is not coming back. So there's a period of months where there's very few people back. There aren't a whole lot of people asking questions. People knew about the burned out body behind the levee. We would meet scores and scores of people who had seen it. But what exactly happened and who was this man and why did it happen? I think we're murky to a lot of people. They might not have known his name, but a lot of people knew about the burned body behind the levee.
So you guys are being shut out your neutral which is great, but he really it would be probably more helpful to you to have an inside track. Where do you finally get a foothold in this case before both of your bosses say okay, well, you're not getting anywhere. You've got other stuff to do.
Well, you know the hardest part about this case. When we started, we didn't even know who to talk to. Normally, when you investigate a police case, it's quite easy to figure out who was there because the police document virtually everything they do. You've got radio calls, you've got logs, you've got reports. But in the aftermath of the storm, there was none of that. What we did know was who got paid for working during that time period, and so we had a list of about fifty names from the swat team. We had another fifty names from the fourth District, and we just tried to figure out, all right, we're gonna try to talk to every single one. That was not a very effective strategy because for the first many many people we talked to, we were getting nowhere A lot, a lot of the people telling us that, you know, this doesn't sound like it really happened. Eventually, an inside source inside NPD provided us with some names of people to talk to. We would ask, you know, who are these people and what are they gonna tell us? And the answer was, I'm not going to tell you. You just need to find them. And so Ashley and I went out and we began finding some of the people on this list. As we began to interview people, the story was emerging that on that day, on September second, there was an officer named David Warren. David Warren was a forty year old rookie officer. He had a number of degrees and a professional and business life before he became a police officer, but decided in his forties to go become a police officer, and that was not long before the storm hit. That day. He was partnered with another officer, a senior female officer who had about twenty five years on the experience of experience on the force named Linda Howard, and the two of them were partnered up. In our early interviews with people who spoke with Linda Howard, the suggestion was that David Warren had fired at this man for no good reason, that Linda was hysterical afterwards, that was trying to get information, but that she couldn't get any information. Slowly we interviewed more and more officers and began to expand our circle to the point that we met Linda Howard. I was really uncertain whether or not Linda Howard would tell us about the bad shooting that we were beginning to believe so from callaway, from Bernard's perspective, from Patrice Glover's perspective, the allegations was that he was shot from the second floor, Henry was on the ground level, that the gun was on the second level, that Henry was running away. I doubted that we would ever find a witness who would testify to that, but then we met Linda Howard. Linda Howard, after being initially reluctant to talk to Ashley and I, eventually met with us and said, no, David Warren used his personally own rifle. It was a sniper rifle that we'd later learned he used in shooting competitions of hundreds of yards away, and that he fired at Henry Glover as he was running for no reason. That Henry didn't pose a threat to either of them, but that David Warren fired anyways.
What motivated her as an officer with that many years twenty five years? I think you said, what motivated her to speak out? Because that must have put her in danger in multiple different ways.
No, I think of all the witnesses in the case, Linda Howard was probably one of the most vulnerable in terms of threats to her and the potential of harm to her in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. She knew that day that this was an unjustified shooting. It distraught her. She was telling people that day like Henry was well, she didn't know his name, Henry, but this man was killed for it for no reason. But in the immediate aftermath, no one does anything. They don't send crime scene, they don't send people to help her. And then later that evening when she sees the senior lieutenant, the number two for that district, and he asked her was it a good shot? And she shakes her head no, And no one ever asked her another question until Ashley and I show up a number of years later. So what happened to Linda? She sees this thing, she thinks it's terrible, and then it quickly gets the message from the rest of the police department that they're not going to do anything about it, so she sinks into her own silence for many years. I give a ton of credit to Ashley Johnson, the FBI agent, for being able to bond with a witness like Linda Howard. Linda Howard is a black woman. She was a black woman police officer in the eighties and nineties during some of the most abusive periods of n OPD. Saw a lot of bad stuff over those years, and Ashley Johnson is a rare character in the Federal peerau of investigation. She is a young black woman, sharp as attack, very skilled investigator, and is able to help Linda Howard feel at ease. I think Linda Howard wanted to get this off of her chest for many, many years and just didn't have the opportunity until we showed up.
Did Linda speculate at all on what was he thinking? What in his mind was happening when he picked up his own weapon and decided to pick this guy off. He didn't even know, you know.
I think it took her a long time to come up, you know, come to gripslie. I don't know that she did have any real theory of what happened, other than that he was quite twitchy. He was quick to hold his gun. This gun is a sig Sour assault rifle. It retailed I think for about eight thousand dollars at the time. He had a very high powered scope. And Linda would say, you know, that morning, he's walking around the Strip Mall holding up the gun, looking through the scope, kind of scanning. She didn't even tell us this for a number of weeks, but eventually she says, you know, earlier that morning, when we first got to the Strip Mall, there was another guy walking down the street about five hundred yards away, and Warren took the gun and fired in his direction. The guy, you know, surprised, crouches runs away and Linda Howerd's like, what are you doing? And David Warren said, wow, I was just trying to see something, and Linda is like, you can't do this. So she is very much on edge. She doesn't like the idea that she's working with this rookie that she does not know. Not only is he a rookie, but for his very brief policing career, he didn't even work in this area. He lived in this area and he was assigned to another district, but because that district was underwater, he was told to reports of the nearest district to his home, which is this district where Lynda Howard and Henry Glover aar.
So whatud we know about David Warren just as a person, as this the first time that anything not like this has happened. But I mean, what is his character like before the story unfolds?
Well, what we eventually learn is that he has an engineering degree, he has an MBA. He is running the family business. He's from Wisconsin originally but is an evangelical Christian. Gets introduced to the woman who becomes his wife, who's from Louisiana. They live in Wisconsin for a little bit, but she wants to move back down to New Orleans. They sell the family business, so he has a little bit more cash than normal. He loves guns. He is a guy who is a gun of you. I know, he's got about two dozen or so in his collection. He's been participating in all sorts of different use of force trainings and gun collections. And he teaches for the NRA and he really wants to be a cop, and so when he sells the business, they say, all right, well we're secure enough that you can go be a cop, and he goes off and becomes a police officer at forty years old.
So you and Ashley Johnson have Linda Howard who is still working for the police force or she retired by this point.
She's still working in the police department.
Wow, okay, she's there. She scared witless. I'm assuming by even telling you all this information, is that right? Does she ask for protection of some kind?
She does not. I mean, she keeps a low profile. I think it's only really knowing her over the years, and only in my more recent conversations with her, that she has really just unveiled how scary it was. I think I certainly underappreciated the risks she was facing in real time, but now with the benefit of hindsight, Yeah, it was absolutely scary. It was scary in two thousand and five, in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. She was living alone at the time. She was concerned that at any point someone can come by her house. Everyone knew where she lived. She didn't live very far from the headquarters from the fourth District station, so she definitely was afraid.
So you have Linda Howard, you have the accounts from brother Edward, the sister's boyfriend, Bernard, and William Tanner. They all seem to match up. And then you have his body, even though parts of it have been destroyed, and you have sort of these stories that are sketched together. And then Linda, of course is a reliable source. What else do you need to move forward with this case?
Well, we just end up picking up lots of little pieces of evidence. I mean, unlike any other case I ever had. Usually you can tell the whole story in two or three witnesses, right, There's usually two or three people that give you the narrative arc from beginning to end. This one we had to call over thirty witnesses to be able to piece it together because Linda Howard only knew what happened for the shooting, she didn't really know what happened next once they go to the school, then we have other witnesses who eventually corroborate that some of these officers beat up the men. Eventually we found a lot of photographs. This was a case where when we started investigating, I couldn't imagine that we would find photographs of any part of the crime. Remember, it takes place in two thousand and five. People didn't have cameras on their phone very often. Back then people were traveling with real film cameras, some of them had disposables. What we ended up finding over the course of our eighteen month investigation were scores of photos that were taken by different people at different parts. So we eventually found photographs of Henry lying in the back of William Tanner's car with a bright red circle on his back, clearly having bled out of his front. We found a number of pictures of his charred remains in the car by the levee at different stages. So we had photographs from September second where you can see Henry's skull in the back of the car, and then we have photographs from September sixteenth, two weeks later where that skull is missing. And so what surprised me were just how many different people took photographs over that's not none of which were a part of an official investigation. So these were pictures that people were taking, many of them were just trying to document this historic moment in New Orleans and documenting the many strange things that they saw in New Orleans. Some of them knew they were sitting on some pretty powerful evidence. There was one photograph that was in particular, showed up when Ashley and I were almost at a low point of our investigation. We had identified a number of people who were at the school, but no one would give us any information, and no one would even confirm that they were at the school until we found a photograph of offices who were guarding these three men in handcuffs, and for the very first time we had evidence of who those officers were. We had been hearing rumors that lieutenant named Dwayne Sherman had been involved in this, and that a junior officer named Greg McCrae had been the ones who had driven off with Henry's body. What this picture showed us was that not only were both Sherman and McCray present, but in the photograph you can see McCrae holding two road flares, exactly as William Tanner had said. I had never believed that part of William Tanner's story. People avan algia, Why didn't you believe it? It seemed crazy to me that if you were going to burn this guy's body, you would do it with road flares, or that anyone would have road flares on a bright morning, sunny morning. But when we got that picture and there was Greg McRae with those two road flares, it began to corroborate that, in fact, this was who drove off with Henry's body. Now that being said, we couldn't prove that, not feel like we had enough evidence to be able to bring those charges. We had plenty of good innuendo, we had plenty of circumstantial evidence. But it was only when Ashley and I were really just going through the list, interviewing every person whose name was on that list, that we then came across another officer named Joe Miish. Joe Miich had been on our list for a long time, but was a low enough priority because we didn't think he knew anything. But when we eventually talked to him, he became a crucial piece of evidence. He was standing by the levee as he observed a car driving down the levee. And for those of you've never seen one of these, it's a big mound of earth that is raised around the river. This particular part of the levee has a flat surface at the top, so you can drive a car along the top. And so he was dealing with a broken water Maine, trying to sort out a place where a helicopter could land when he sees this car driving and he says, it looks like it dropped off the face of the earth. It just disappears. So he's concerned about what happened to this car. He walks over to the levee and as he's getting there, black smoke is beginning to rise from behind the levee. He sees Greg McCrae. He knows Greg McCrae from having worked at the police department. He sees Dwayne Sherman driving this truck along the levee. And so for the very first time, not only did we have all the circumstantial evidence that Sherman and McCrae were involved in the burning, but now we had an eyewitness who put them at the scene at the same time period as the fire.
How long is this investigation that you and Ashley were involved with.
It was about eighteen months.
And at what point do the two of you say, Okay, we think we have enough. Maybe not for everybody, but we have eyewitnesses and people who are coming forward and we think we can patch together this case and who do you pursue?
Well, we indict five police officers. Those were David Warren for shooting Henry Glover. We charged Greg McCrae and Dwayne Sherman for the burning of Henry Glover's body, and then we charged two other officers as a part of other parts of the cover up that followed.
And is the main evidence these witnesses is that right.
Well, it's a combination of eyewitnesses, police officers and civilians. It's the photographs, it's other pieces of physical evidence that we gathered. But a lot of the things that you would normally expect in a homicide case, ballistics, a complete autopsy, crime scene, none of that existed. So it became very much a case of people telling the stories of what they witnessed firsthand, supported by some hard evidence. But it was an unusual case.
Did the police officers at the elementary school, so that was Dwayne Sherman and Greg McCrae. Did these guys know that a police officer had killed this man in the back of this car or what did they think happened? Because this is totally separate locations, right.
They have denied to this day that they knew that a police officer had shot Henry Glover. For those of you who read the book, you can sess out for yourself whether or not you think that's credible or not. But they have to this day denied that they knew that David Warren had shot Henry Glover. According to them, the body shows up at the school. They're trying to get answers from the men, they claim, the men don't give them any information. They hold them for a number of hours to try to get to the bottom of it, but they don't get any information. That's why they eventually allowed them to be released.
So you indict five, Can you give me the shorthand on what happens with these cases? Does everything end positively for you and Ashley?
With the story, we win some, we lose some. Some of the ones that we win we later lose. Depends how you think of winning and losing injustice in this whole thing. You know, I've come to a position after being a prosecutor for fifteen years that way too long. Often we think about the individual wrongdoing and holding that individual accountable as being justice what I've learned over the years is our system actually wasn't designed to achieve justice. What our system was designed to achieve his punishment. And so were there people punished for what happened to Henry? Some yes, some know. But what also happened in the aftermath of this case, as well as some other shootings involving police officers both before and after Hurricane Katrina, is that the New Orleans Police Department went under major, major reforms. Over twenty five officers lost their jobs as a result of these cases, and New Orleans entered into a consent degree with the Justice Department to radically rework how they police in New Orleans. So I think in terms of individual accountability, the story is somewhat mixed. In terms of being a vital first step for some much needed reforms in New Orleans, it was great, but there's still a long way to go.
Who did you ultimately end up getting, hopefully, David Warren.
Well. I mean, the thing is, we convicted David Warren in the first trial, a jury of twelve found that he was guilty of killing Henry Glover, and he was sentenced to I think twenty five years in prison. But he would eventually win a new trial on appeal, and so we had to try him again. The issue on appeal partly because of the point that you had raised earlier. We never had evidence that David Warren knew who burned the body. While we certainly had belief that the people who burned the body knew about the police shooting, we didn't have any evidence going the other way. And so what David Warren's attorney had argued all along was that being tried alongside the people who burned the body was unfairly prejudicial to David Warren. That where you have this man whose body burnt, well, of course the jury's going to come to a conclusion that it was unjustified. Why else would they cover it up. The Fifth Circuit, which is the federal appeals court that represents Mississippi and Texas and Louisiana. It's one of the most conservative in the nation, agreed with his attorney's argument that he should be tried separately, and we had to retried David Warren by himself. But this time in the second trial, we weren't allowed to talk about the burned body, or the beatings at Haben Elementary School, or all sorts of pieces of evidence that implicated other police officers and the cover up of the crime, And so we were left with a much shorter version of events where it was essentially Linda Howard's word against David Warren's word, and the question was, with twelve good people from Louisiana believe that was reasonable doubt?
Okay? What ultimately happens with Linda Howard, who I would hope at this point is retired.
She eventually retires not long after the retrial and is able to retire with her pension. She's one of the few officers who gets out of this intact. I got to see her during the course of writing the book. I hadn't seen her since the investigation. In the trials, he is trying to help kids. Part of her job she always liked was she volunteered as a police officer to train a young boys and girls coming from Algiers and coaching them in sports like volleyball, and continuing to serve her community and supporting the next generation of people so that they can hopefully have a better life.
And what about Henry's family? What happens with Patrice and his girlfriend, his daughter? All of these folks who just suffered so greatly by not having this man around.
I mean, they continued to suffer to this day. I just talked to Edna this week. I talked to Patrice fairly frequently, and whenever we talk about Henry, they can't help but cry and break down in tears. And we're almost twenty years since his death. For me, it was a tough one because, on the one hand, they didn't know anything when we started. We uncovered that not only was this loss horrific in taking place during this terrible, terrible period in their life, but it was long enforcement. It was the government who did this, and we uncovered it. And there's no doubt that David Warren killed Henry Glover like that is not in dispute, and it is not in dispute that Greg McCrae burned Henry Glover's body. But when you see the unevenness of the results and the lack of complete justice, it was incredibly debilitating for them. They are still low income black New Orleanians who are living on the margins society, who are struggling to make enough to feed their families and to pay their rents on time every month, and the system doesn't support those people. And so in addition to watching what happened to the people who did this to them, they're also continuing just to live a very hard life in New Orleans.
But Henry was not forgotten. And I know we've talked about justice, and I think, you know, the shining the light on an issue that you mentioned is more important than actually having some of these people behind bars. I mean, I certainly I wonder what would have happened this story had you not gotten that little file with an article in it and just thought you're going to take it to your boss and see what happens. I mean, this is, I know, a big investigation, but it was instigated by a journalist and by.
You, yeah, and by Ashley, and by William Tanner, and by people who are you know who stepped up, like Linda Howard and people like Joe Mice who had buried that thing for as long as he could and ultimately he eventually came clean. What really shocked me, and I think continues to shock me to this day, was how many people knew like this is not This was not a quiet cover up, Like two people saw it and then they just kept it to themselves for years. Dozens of dozens of people knew what happened to Henry Glover and either did nothing about it or actively helped cover it up. And so that is what has continuously stuck with me all these years. We are so inclined to just think these are bad people doing bad things, but this exists in the context of a culture, inside a culture that was willing to dehumanize people like Henry Glover and other low income black people in that community. It's about cultures and policing that protect their own, that are willing to hide the truth of wrongdoing when it's their own people. And it's about just general societal breakdown in not taking care of some of the most marginalized people in our communities.
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That Is Wicked, and American Sherlock, and Don't Forget. There are twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, Tenfold More Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and give them a listen if you haven't already. This has been an exactly write production. Our senior producer is Alexis Amrosi. Our Associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram at tenfold More Wicked and on Facebook at Wicked Words Pod.
