"The Mysterious Death of Charles C. Morgan: Conspiracies, Codes, and Cover-ups"

In this episode of the PIC True Crime Podcast, we unravel the baffling case of Charles C. Morgan, a seemingly ordinary escrow agent whose death sparked one of the most mysterious and complex true crime cases ever covered. With elements straight out of a spy thriller—government cover-ups, mafia hits, secret codes, mysterious phone calls, and cryptic clues left behind—Charles C. Morgan’s death in the Arizona desert in 1977 has fueled endless conspiracy theories. Was he a man caught between powerful forces, or was his untimely death something even more sinister?

Join Mike, Bree, and Heather as they take a deep dive into the bizarre details surrounding Morgan's disappearance and death, and the strange evidence he left behind—including a $2 bill inscribed with secret codes, a tooth hidden in his car, and the eerie involvement of a green-eyed woman. Strap in, put on your tinfoil hats, and prepare for a wild ride into one of the most tantalizing mysteries of the true crime world.

Transcript

Charles C Morgan (00:00)
The death of Charles C. Morgan is probably going to be one of the craziest cases we ever cover on this podcast. It's made of ingredients that every good conspiracy theory needs.

Government cover-ups, mafia, secret codes, hidden 007 type weapons, and hitman and mysterious green-eyed women leaving breadcrumbs from the shadows.

This is gonna be a wild ride. Strap in, put on your tinfoil hats, and let's get into it. The murder of Charles C. Morgan, one of the most tantalizing mysteries in the true crime world. If it's your first time with us, welcome. If you're returning viewer, welcome back. I'm Mike. I'm Bree And I'm Heather.

Before we start, I just want you all to know that Dad's the conspiracy theory nut of the family, and he's been looking forward to this one all week. He's been insufferable. Can you blame me? It's like X-Files meets Scooby-Doo. The insanity never ends in this one.

I can't wait to hear what you guys have to say in the theories. But

Let's not waste any time. Let's get into this waiting room spy novel.

Charles C Morgan (01:34)
Sadly, there isn't a lot known about Charles' early days.

All we know is that by the time of the events that took place in 1977, he was a 29 year old escrow agent who was happily married with four children living in Tucson, Arizona.

What the heck is an escrow agent? So if a property is being sold from one person to the next, the escrow agent holds on to the money or any other assets that are part of the transaction until all of the paperwork and other obligations are followed through by both parties.

So he's the middle man between large transactions, usually in real estate, selling houses, yachts, and pieces of land, that sort of thing.

Since he's the neutral party in this whole deal, he holds on to everything. Documents, money, and all of the paperwork. He only releases the funds when everything has gone through the books and the terms that the seller and buyer agree to. It just offers complete protection between major sales. It's almost like getting a lawyer that represents both parties and he gets to do all the tedious paperwork for everyone.

Sounds horribly boring. Just like Chuck.

He was a pretty vanilla dude and his job and his white picket fence life reflected that. He was the president of the company he worked for, so apparently he was pretty good at his job for a guy who wasn't even in his thirties yet.

But the escrow business is going to come up a bit later again. So keep this job on the back burner for now.

I was floored when I heard he was only 29 years old. When you look at his picture, he looks 40. It's the 70s. That beard and thick glasses, I had a few years.

I went to multiple multiple sources to confirm his age. I couldn't believe it either. He really does look 40. But moving on, Chuck, as everyone called him, was married to a woman named Ruth. Only the two oldest girls are mentioned because Charles dropped him off at school on his way to work on March 22nd, 1977.

The girls got to school just fine, but Chuck never reached his office. The people at the office weren't concerned enough to call his residence. He was a pretty reliable guy and everyone just assumed that he was sick or something. But when the evening came around and he didn't return home, Ruth was the one who called the police.

And you know the song by now. Do you want to guess what the police said?

Chuck was a grown man who had every right to go missing. Yup. I think it's time we made a theme song to go with that reaction from the police. How many times have we heard this now?

I would say in about 90 % of the cases when the adult goes missing I feel like. But in all fairness, he was just gone. No blood, or signs of a struggle, no nervousness or unusual behavior. If he wanted to, he had every right to go on a Tuesday joyride for a few drinks I suppose.

The only real red flag was that it would be out of character for him to disappear. Like I said, he was a pretty reliable guy and there was no indications that he ever suffered from depression or that he had a wild streak in him at all.

His marriage was a happy one and he was pretty involved with his children so Ruth had every reason to be worried. But instead she was forced to wait three days, undoubtedly calling everyone they knew to find out where her husband had gone all by herself.

But then on the third day, in the middle of the night, Chuck shows up at the door and let's say his appearance was rather alarming.

Besides looking a little worse for wear, he was wearing one shoe, he had a plastic cuff around one of his ankles and another cuff around one of his hands. Also, he was unable to speak at all.

This guy seems a little too vanilla to be vanilla. But let me just clear something up. Was it plastic handcuffs or zip ties? It was just regular zip ties.

and his inability to talk.

Well, according to Ruth, he motioned to his throat and when she asked him if he could speak, he shook his head no. Then she brought him a pen and paper and he wrote a very strange reason for his mutism.

And I quote Ruth here. He said that his throat had been painted with a hallucinogenic drug and that the drug would drive him irrevocably insane or destroy his nervous system and kill him.

I wanted to call a doctor or the police, but he was adamant that that would be signing a death warrant for the entire family."

He wrote to Ruth that she needed to move the car to hide it from view. He didn't want them to know that he made it home.

That's crazy. Yeah, and the crazy part is that Ruth never reported the apparent kidnapping. She spent the next week nursing him back to health. Whatever happened to him in those three days had severely weakened Charles, and he slowly regained his speech over the next week. He refused to say who had taken him, where he was, or what happened to him exactly. But he did disclose, or should I say he hinted,

that he worked for the federal government and that he had some sort of secret identity.

He said that he couldn't divulge more information the less Ruth knew the safer she would be. Okay, let's huddle here for a second before we continue. I think we all have a few questions that need to be answered.

I have a question. First, are there any toxins or poisons that can affect a person's voice?

He said it was painted on, not injected, so I'd assume it was applied topically on the outside or sprayed inside his throat. Is that even possible? It sounds a bit outrageous to me. Well, let me tell you, everything about this case is going to sound outrageous.

Actually, there are a few toxins that can affect the voice box and the muscles of the throat.

Pesticides, certain molds, heavy metals like lead and mercury, and botulinum toxin can cause paralysis of the larynx if it's applied directly. Botulinum is highly toxic. It's the same stuff they use in Botox. And if it gets into your bloodstream, even in the smallest amounts, it can kill you. Wait, did you say Botox? But we inject that straight into our lips and cheeks. How are people not dropping dead then? The amounts are minute, just enough to mildly paralyze

the muscles.

Theoretically, if the botulinum or whatever they used was applied in such a way that it could be dispersed into the bloodstream by the vibration of the vocal cords before the body absorbed and filtered it in small amounts,

Maybe it could be released into the blood too quickly, making it fatal. It's a wild theory that's out there and no one can prove it. And the same goes for all of the other options on the table. Even a street drug like meth can paralyze the vocal cords and be toxic under the right circumstances. What we can say for sure is that if someone had enough knowledge of chemistry and maybe a little background in the biological sciences, they'd be able to pull off something like this.

Or if you had the toxin and the know-how given to you from someone who did. Like a government agency? It's a stretch, but it is within the realm of possibilities.

What about this government agency he said he worked for or his fake identity? Can that be proven?

No, there's no proof that he was ever employed at any branch of government or that he used the fake identity for work he was doing for the Treasury Department. But this was the 70s, so it wouldn't have been too hard to create a fake identity, especially if you had the federal government's resources to help you.

But he did give two specifics during his wife's questioning. He said that he worked for the Treasury Department and that he had been working for them for two or three years. He mentioned they took his Treasury ID, who they were supposed to be. Chuck didn't say.

So for now, Chuck regained his strength and swore Ruth to silence and he went back to work. Dropping off the kids, coming home for dinner, everything was going on like nothing ever happened. And Ruth played along. She truly believed that someone took Chuck because of the secret work he was doing and her knowing as little as possible was safer for all of them.

And for a few months, everything seemed perfectly normal from outside at least. But Ruth said Chuck was secretly wearing a bulletproof vest under his clothes at all times.

He insisted that he drives his daughters to and from school and no one else. Also, he had an interesting conversation with his father during this time too. Chuck's father demanded to know answers. His son had been missing for three days. His daughter-in-law and granddaughters was beside themselves with worry and you can just imagine that he'd want answers.

Chuck just said that the less that everyone knew, the safer it was for all of them. He did not disclose his undercover job or that he'd been kidnapped to his father. But he did say one thing to his dad that he did not tell Ruth.

He said that he'd hidden a letter somewhere inside his house and if anything ever happened to him that his father was to help Ruth look for it inside the letter everything would be explained to Ruth

So his father dropped the subject after that for the next two months at least.

And then Chuck disappears off the face of the earth yet again. On June 7th, the events played out exactly like it did two months before. Again, it was a Tuesday. Chuck dropped off his girls at school and then just never arrived at work. There are no mentions on whether or not Ruth reported him missing or if any searches were launched to look for him. But this time, he was gone for nine days before there were any clues to what happened to him.

Ruth received a phone call and on the other side of the line was a woman.

The woman called her Ruthie, a name that only her husband and family called her. Then she said, Chuck is all right, Ecclesiastes 12 verse one through eight. And then the woman hung up without ever identifying herself. Ecclesiastes, like the book in the Bible? Exactly. Ruth looked it up. It's ominous, sure, but it doesn't really give any more clarity to the whole thing.

The entire passage is quite long and is mostly about remembering the creator in your younger years because old age brings worry and eventual death.

and that every institution and mighty people will fall eventually. The last three verses are interesting though. Here, let me read it to you. ‘Men are afraid of a high place and of terrors on the road. Remember him before the silver cord is broken and the golden bowl is crushed. Then the dust will return to the earth as it was and the spirit will return to God who gave i

Meaningless, says the teacher. Everything is meaningless.

Creepy! Very, but how is this supposed to explain anything? Maybe that death comes for everyone, or that the government and powerful people in high places need to meet their maker too?

Two days after that, and a full 11 days after Chuck went missing, his car was found 40 miles outside of Tucson, parked in the desert with a bullet hole in the back of his head. Bree, would you please give us a rundown of the crime scene?

Sure, hold on though Scully, this is about to get even more bizarre-o. Chuck was still wearing his bullet proof vest, the gunshot wound was fired at close range and the weapon in question, a .357 Magnum, was lying outside of the vehicle with no fingerprints on it at all. The gun belonged to Chuck and there was gunpowder residue on his left hand, yet Chuck was right handed.

It was determined by the coroner that Chuck had only been dead for about 12 hours, so that put his death sometime during the night time hours. The best kind of time to arrange a secret meeting. There was still plenty of ammunition still in their boxes, stowed all over the car. His belt buckle was not one that Ruth recognized when they showed it to her.

It was brand new and concealed inside the buckle was a small blade. It was a very covert spy style weapon. Inside the car was a pair of sunglasses that did not belong to Chuck and a folded piece of paper with a hand drawn map and directions written on it.

The handwriting was confirmed to match Chuck and the map led to the location of where the car and the body were found. and tucked under a seat wrapped in a handkerchief was a human tooth. The tooth was later confirmed to belong to Chuck and the wound in his mouth indicated that it was recently pulled.

Inside of Chuck's underwear, he'd pinned a single two dollar bill with the obvious intention of concealing it, just like he tried to hide the tooth.

For listeners who aren't from the US, the $2 bill is still in circulation.

It's not common to see them, so a lot of people think that this was a fake bill because it's so unusual to see. $2 bills are thought to be bad luck, so it's worth mentioning that there are some superstitions around it. But it was real $2 bill. It's what was on it that was interesting though. Chuck's handwriting was small and cramped because he had written

lot of things on that single bill.

starting with seven Spanish names written in alphabetical order starting at A all the way through to G

And I'm so sorry if I mispronounce these.

Acevedo Bejarano Cajero, Duarte, Encinas, Fuente, and Gradillas

Ecclesiastes 12 was written with arrows going from it to the serial number on the bill. The two arrows pointed at the numbers 1 and 8. So it's assumed that this is a reference to verses 1 through 8, just like the mysterious caller told Ruth a few days before the discovery.

On the back of the old bills there's a picture of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and he'd numbered some of the figures 1 through 7.

And finally, he made another hand drawn map that led to two towns between Tucson and Mexico.

Robles Junction and Solacity, both places are known for their smuggling operations. My goodness, that is a mouthful. And a handful. It's amazing that he managed to fit it all onto a single note. The writing was so tiny that I could barely make out any of the Spanish names. Speaking of which, we'll get into the details of the names and the towns a little later.

But for now, this crime scene isn't done with confusing surprises just yet. Two days after the body was found, a woman called into the Pima County Sheriff's Department. That's the department in Tucson that investigated Chuck's death.

She identified herself only by the name Green Eyes. Green Eyes said that she was the woman who phoned Ruth, telling her to look up the Bible verses. She said that she and Chuck met at a motel and he showed her a briefcase full of cash and he said that he was going to use it to buy himself out of a contract that the mob put on his head.

In other words, the mafia wanted him dead and he was going to pay off the hitman. Despite this tip from Green Eyes, the insanely weird crime scene, and the fact that Chuck was shot in the back of the head with his non-dominant hand and managed to wipe down the gun too, the police declared this was a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

We've got to be careful about using the S word here because some streaming platforms like to demonetize you if you do. So we'll have to get creative with our use of words.

Look, I read through the case before we sat down, but I did not realize that they had went straight to self-unaliving so quickly. That's just as suspicious as the rest of this damn circus, tooth, hidden belt buckle knives, and all.

Let's just take a second and share our thoughts here real quick before we go on to what comes out of the woodworks after this and the clues that he left behind and all that.

because I think we can all agree that this obviously wasn't done by Chuck himself.

Absolutely not.

Everything Chuck was doing was to preserve his life and not to take it out of this world. The bulletproof vest, the gun, the hidden blade, he was arming himself against an attack.

and the tooth, and the map that leads straight to where his body was found tells me he was afraid that 1. He wanted the car to be found if he went missing, and 2. He wanted the tooth to identify him in case his body went missing or was somehow rendered unidentifiable. The fact that he was foreseeing that there was a possibility that his body would disappear or be made unrecognizable

tells me that there's some truth to what Green Eyes said about the mob being involved. They were known for concealing their victims. This was the 70s and the mafia was still in its glory days.

I get the idea that Chuck was preparing to meet the mob, or whoever was after him by going off the pop culture references.

He was completely out of his league and used whatever tools he had at his disposal. And I bet most of that information probably came from what he saw on the TV.

The codes and maps are all so vague and besides the two maps don't lead to anywhere concrete. This guy obviously had no background in making codes and ciphers, but he sure tried to leave as many clues to the people involved and his location as possible without being detected by his killer or killers.

Even before he went missing the second time, the vest and his insistence on being the one to drop off his daughters at school himself.

These are all the actions of a man who's afraid for the safety of his family and he's trying to keep them and himself alive.

Yeah, if it were a self-job, why bother with a bulletproof vest and all the effort to put in as many clues as possible to help to identify him? Him being right-handed and the shot being fired from his left hand and at the back of the skull makes no sense. It's honestly not even the biggest red flag for me. The whole damn package screams that he was trying to stay alive.

Don't forget that the gun somehow managed to land outside of the car.

What did he raise from the dead long enough to wipe it clean and put it outside of the car before returning to the driver's seat?

Okay good, so we're all on the same page this was murdery.

Let's go on. There's still a lot that happens and we haven't even gotten into what we think Chuck's cryptic clues even mean yet.

A few days after the discovery of Chuck's remains, Ruth gets a knock on her door. Outside were two men dressed in suits. So let me guess.

Here comes the Men in Black.

Galaxy defenders.

Yes, yes, Mulder and Scully, get it. They say that they're FBI agents and that they need to search the home. Now Ruth is understandably distraught, confused, and probably doesn't even know what the state of the crime scene was yet. All she knows is that her husband is dead, she's a widow, and according to the police her husband went loony tunes and…

killed himself.

This poor woman's life has just fallen apart, so don't blame her too harshly for not thinking clearly here. The agents storm in and rip the house apart, searching for… something.

But they end up leaving the house in shambles and hinting that they didn't find what they were looking for. Ruth never bothered to ask their names or to see their identification.

I want to be really annoyed with her, but realistically, no one would have been alright in that situation.

And if this is the kind of conspiracy we think it is, then she was probably approached at a time when they knew that she'd be at her most emotionally frazzled and out of sorts.

She was probably more focused on keeping her young kids calm and watching her house be torn apart must have been a traumatizing experience all on its own.

And if Chuck did hide the letter he told his father about in the house, they wouldn't have let her in on the fact that they found it, now would they? I highly doubt that.

By the time Ruth's father-in-law told her about the letter, the agents had already ransacked the place. They combed the house themselves, but throughout the years, never found a thing. The family definitely didn't believe that Chuck did this. They've always, even until the present day, insisted that he was not unhinged or depressed, and he certainly didn't give into outrageous fantasies and delusions like the police implied he did.

But then came Don Deveroux.

Deveroux was a journalist who'd heard of the strange death in the Arizona desert. And back then, journalists were worth their cutthroat reputation. This was not the internet sleuth who stalks celebrities like we've got today. Deveroux was the real deal. He began to dig into the strange affair, starting with the investigation by the police.

He learned that the FBI did look into it. Several officers confirmed it, and the proof was in their files too. But as soon as it was declared a self-inflicted wound, they disappeared from the scene. So he called up the FBI head office, and using the Freedom of Information Act, he requested the case file. If this was a closed case, all the details should have been available to anyone who wanted to see it.

But the FBI office claimed that they'd never heard of Charles Morgan, and there were no files with his name on it.

Deveroux was positive that the FBI were on the scene. And just by being there, even if they did not deem the death worth their time, there would have been some record of them going to Arizona at least. The FBI was lying. He was sure of it. Then he called up Ruth. That's where he learned of Chuck's first disappearance, the unusual circumstances surrounding it, and the two agents' visit to her house.

He even joined in on searching for the supposed letter that Chuck had hid somewhere. But it's when he dug into Chuck's job that the real crumbs started falling out.

His lawyer and court records show that Chuck was going to testify in court on a money laundering case. Now, normally a guy with Chuck's job would be called in to testify that a sale took place, like a confirmation that a transaction took place between two parties. It wasn't necessarily a big deal.

Sort of like how a coroner might come in to go through an autopsy result or a mechanic that can explain to a judge or jury about what was broken on a vehicle that was involved in a case. It didn't necessarily raise red flags.

What did set alarm bells off was that Chuck had an attorney. And he also said that Chuck was working for the Treasury Department and that the FBI came to interview him after Chuck's death. He also looked at Chuck's transactions and paperwork at the office. Chuck was doing huge transactions involving gold and platinum.

The purchases all went through by means of buying and selling properties. And when I say huge, we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars. Deveroux thinks it could be as much as a billion dollars that crossed Chuck's desk. Big escrow agencies can do this. Well, sure. But if Chuck really was doing this much business, then where was all the money at? He was living a pretty regular life, no fancy cars.

no trips to Vegas. The family budgeted their groceries just like everybody else. Sure, the Morgans lived comfortably, but it was far cry from luxury.

Sounds like a money laundering scheme to me. Makes Green Eye's claims look legit.

Speaking of green eyes, Deveroux was able to confirm that too. Chuck was staying at a motel during his second disappearance and a woman visited him several times. The biggest shocker here is that they were caught on CCTV cameras.

CCTV in the 70s? No way.

It was obviously very grainy footage and the woman's features couldn't be made out. The image was so terrible that you can't even make out her height, weight, or what kind of clothes she was wearing. Identification wasn't going to be possible, but our guy definitely stayed at the motel and was meeting a woman on more than one occasion. But back to the money laundering theory. Most of Chuck's transactions were done with gold.

And he kept copies hidden of every single one of these transactions that went on for about four years.

Nothing about the transactions were technically illegal on their own, but they could have been part of a laundering scheme if they were traced back properly. But this wasn't going to be totally possible. Deveroux traced a few interesting names from those hidden transactions. Among them was Joseph Bonano, one of the last remaining OG mob bosses. Bonano was a seriously dangerous dude.

So we're probably looking at a mob hit then. Eh. Bonano wasn't the only name he unearthed. He says there were CIA agents, exiled Vietnamese officials, and a few people from the Department of Defense.

This is getting vey messy. Before you continue Heather, let me add a little additional information to clarify a few things. To put into perspective why this weird mix of characters might want to launder money through an escrow agent.

The corrupt CIA agents back then were known for getting into drug deals and stealing evidence pocketing in spoils for themselves.

A few dozen agents, both for the FBI and the CIA, were flushed out of their legal schemes throughout the 70s, all the way into the 90s. Apparently, the Department of Defense uses shell companies and real estate transactions to hide their money, Trail 2.

This goes deep into conspiracy territory, so I won't go into it too much. But the theory is that they fund other countries' wars by supplying them with weapons and financially aid uprisings and political leaders that they want in office for a takeover on US terms, without actually stepping into the battlefield.

It's a whole thing and I hate to say it, probably has some truth to it.

So the DOA could have definitely been a part of the laundering scheme.

And while Deveroux was running around finding all of this out, someone broke into Chuck's car. It was impounded after the murder and it was targeted right inside the police lot. His office was ransacked by someone during the night too.

I'm not sure exactly when this happened, but we can assume it was around the same time that Ruth got the house call from the two agents.

And it brings us to the first two theories on what happened and what Chuck was into. Because we've all agreed that he was not a madman who deluded himself into believing he lived in a spy movie like the police said, that line isn't fooling anyone, especially not Deveroux. And Deveroux made his career on cases like these. He can spot the difference between a loony and the real deal better than anyone.

First theory is that Chuck began pushing gold through properties for the mob and he got in deeper than he could handle.

The court appearance that he had to make made him a liability and the mob told him not to testify, but it sounds like he was being pressured by the authorities to testify anyway. It's not like he can tell them his life's in danger from the mob. That would make them aware that he was guilty of illegal activity too. And when he agreed to testify, they put a hit on him, like Green Eyes said, and tried to buy his way out of the hit.

and got killed anyway, and the guy got away with the cash. Second theory is that Chuck was approached by the mafia four years before his disappearance and he reported it, but the FBI or the CIA or whoever convinced him to play along with them for a while.

That way they could collect evidence on one of the mob's biggest crime families and eventually get enough on them to bring them to justice. But this second theory branches off into a few side quests because…

Why did the CIA and the DOA use him for their dirty work too? And why did they allow a civilian to work such a dangerous job for so long? Four years is a lot for a guy with no law enforcement background to put himself on the line.

Exactly. Say that the CIA and the DOA got wind of a middleman that they could launder their money through. Let Bonano slide because they had a billion other places that they could get Bonano anyways.

Besides, they just couldn't resist an opportunity that came at them so conveniently. So what if it was a civilian who wanted to do the right thing? It's not like it would be the first time.

So Chuck gets caught between two very deadly adversaries. One wants to kill him because he's being forced to testify and the others, the actual government that's supposed to be helping him, but they aren't committing to their end of the bargain.

so he takes matters into his own hands and tries to get out alive.

When the feds show up at the scene and call it self-inflicted gunshot wounds, they close the case because going deeper into it will expose them too. They then get their hands on the letter Chuck hid inside the house and maybe a few other incriminating documents and stuff this whole thing under the rug.

But Chuck left as many clues as he could, but he's no special agent or a code maker. So his message to us aren't making any sense.

He could have been trying to expose the mob, the feds, the CIA, or all of them. But the key to the puzzle lay in the letter that disappeared or some piece of information that went missing.

But where does Green Eyes come into all this?

She's probably connected to the mob. The authorities aren't above using informants to play middleman for them. But I don't think she worked for them for two reasons. One, this is more of a mob move than a fed one. They always have a middleman for any transaction or deal. Never will you see a big boss at a drug deal or a crime scene. Soldiers, prostitutes, homeless kids,

They've got a whole network of people on the ground passing messages and picking up packages.

Green Eyes was probably one of these middlemen and she was tasked with winning Chuck's trust. It wouldn't have been difficult. He wasn't exactly trained or equipped to smell a rat.

But she did agree to call his wife for him when he asked her to. Green Eyes might have known about the hit or some slivers of information here or there, but it's unlikely that she was let in on the whole plan.

 she was just a messenger who felt sorry for Ruth who had no idea what had happened to her husband

second reason I think she was a mob girl is because she phoned the sheriff's department.

If she was working for the FBI, she'd have given them the information and we'd have never heard of it. But she called the police, who I'm sorry to say are the small fries in this whole affair because that was her only option to help a dead guy out that she probably felt sorry for.

But what the hell does this have to do with the $2 bill in the tooth in the maps? Why the cryptic notes?

That's why I think it's a combination of both. And Chuck knew that the chances of him getting out are alive were slim, so he left clues to try to lead people to the mob bosses and the government people who were guilty.

Charles C Morgan (36:08)
Let's have a look at the $2 note. The map on it led to the two smuggling towns, further implicating the mafia, but the Spanish names make no sense. No way does the people involved just happen to have names that are conveniently ordered from A to G. Cryptoanalysts agree that this is probably a cipher, but without a key there's no way to crack it.

The numbering of the signers of the Declaration of Independence is interesting too. There are more than seven in the portrait, yet he only numbers seven of them. There are also seven Spanish names in this suspected cipher.

But this could be a clue that the names he wanted to expose reside inside the government because the portrait on the notes have some of the America's founding fathers on it. And this is also evidence that the names were part of the cipher. Maybe the supposed good guys were doing deals with the mob and Chuck God blindsided into being the middleman.

So then the only good guy would be Chuck. That means he was working for the government under the pretense that he was helping bring a criminal empire down. But it turns out they're laundering money too.

So they were just as corrupt and in his final moments on earth he was trying to expose everyone. He armed himself as best as he could, hoped the money could buy some miracle, get him out alive, and he pulled his own tooth just in case someone could not identify his body.

Something else that's very interesting happened 13 years after Chuck's murder. Unsolved Mysteries aired an episode on Chuck's bizarre death. In it, Ruth and Deveroux both sit down for interviews and they're pretty frank about their opinions. A detective that worked for the police department also made it clear that he thought this was a murder and also that Arizona was filled with laundering schemes just like this.

and that two of his own colleagues left the force because they were so afraid of the mob. This is definitely a problem in the state in the 70s.

The tips that came in after the show was aired led Deveroux to uncover a massive laundering scheme.

Another reporter reached out to Deveroux personally. The guy, Danny Cosalaro said he'd unearthed some evidence about Chuck pushing gold just before he died.

He was going to email the files to Deveroux, but before he got to it, he was found dead with his wrist slit in a hotel room. Police wrote it off as him killing himself. Then three months after the show aired, a man called Doug Johnson was shot outside of his office, execution style. Johnston worked just across the street from Deveroux's office as a graphic designer. He drove a car similar to Deveroux.

Wow, I mean, do you think that that was mistaken identity?

Looks like it. And Deveroux even got two separate sets of confirmation from informants. One tip came from inside the CIA and the other from an informant for Israeli intelligence. Both said that there was a known hit on Deveroux and that the death of Johnson was just a case of mistaken identity. Deveroux just got lucky. Johnson probably didn't feel all that lucky.

Since Deveroux was investigating more than one dangerous individual organization, I'd have written Johnston's death off as possibly a hit not related to Chuck at all. But, couple Johnson with the other reporter, Cosolero, it's too much of a coincidence someone wanted him to stop looking into Chuck.

Never mind Johnson and Deveroux, what about the Israeli intelligence? Are we having a competition to see how many government sectors we can fit into a single conspiracy? DOA, CIA, FBI, Israeli intelligence, Vietnam, it's getting pretty crowded in here.

There's no way to corroborate Deveroux's claims, but as far as I can tell, the guy's never published a false piece of information. I want to believe him,

But it's not clear if the hit came from the mob and the informants just got wind of it, or if the hit was put out by the CIA. But I think he was being intentionally vague about it. Call it a feeling or whatever, but I've been through so many articles and interviews that it's leaking out of my ears and every single time the wording is very unexplanatory.

The only interview that Deveroux mentions this tip officially is on the show. And I don't know, it just feels like he chose his words very carefully. The mob hated Deveroux's guts, so everyone would just assume that the hit came from them. But I don't know. I mean, it might have been the CIA.

I can't see how else the Israelis would have known about it otherwise.

Aman has information from every single corner of the world outside of the CIA. Israel has some of the very best intelligent networks.

They would have been aware of the mob problem, but by the 90s when the show came out, they weren't nearly as powerful as they were in the 70s.

Most of the major crime bosses were in jail and whole Sicilian houses had disappeared. What I mean is, Aman wouldn't have concerned themselves with the mafia business,

But if the CIA had a hit out for it on a civilian, well, that's a pretty interesting bit of gossip. And that would have made the rounds underground if it ever got out.

That's a good point. I was wondering about how Amon fit into all of this myself. And Deveroux had dozens of informants feeding him information. This guy had some serious connections.

Okay, so let's take this from the top. Even if you take out the $2 bill and the clues and hidden weapons and crazy stuff, the paper trail that Deveroux found proves that Chuck was aiding in money laundering. Arizona in the 70s was a hot spot for this kind of thing. Crooked law enforcement agents, mafia, cartels, everyone was making use of the lax laws in the state.

Whether or not Chuck was laundering money for someone isn't even a question. He absolutely was. The question is for who and if he did it willingly or not. And the clues he left behind was his attempt to expose these people because he knew he was probably going to die. So who was it and did Chuck walk into it willingly?

Okay, here's my take. I think Chuck got approached by the mob. He was probably threatened or coerced into it, so he reports it to the authorities, but they convince him to stay on. Chuck thinks he's fighting the good fight, the kind of work that brings criminal empires down, so he stays on the job, even though he's ill-equipped to deal with the criminal underworld.

But then the feds, the CIA, and everyone in between began doing exactly what the mob are doing. Now Chuck's in danger because the mob thinks he's a double agent and the authorities aren't helping because they are laundering money too. So he puts together a bunch of clues and tries to buy his way out of the mob hit on him.

But we all know how that goes. Chuck wanted to expose everyone, the agents and the mafia, whether he made it out or not.

He tried to do the right thing when he reported it in the first place, and later he tried to do the right thing again when they killed him.

The mob cleans up and the FBI comes in after searching his office, the car and his house to remove any evidence of their own money laundering that went through Chuck. They took the letter in the house and now we don't have a key to solve the code. When Deveroux begins to dig into it, his reporter buddy dies and there's a hit out on him. But this time it's the feds doing the killing. That's why Israeli intelligence got wind of it.

By 1993, everyone of note that were connected to the mob were dead or in jail. But the American government still has a lot to lose if anything gets out. So they try to clean it up.

I disagree. I don't think the government had as much to do with it as we think they did. Really? What about the agents at the house? The paper trail?

Wait, hold on to your tinfoil hat and hear me out. Chuck gets sucked into laundering money for the mob. Deveroux never disclosed what FBI or CIA agents were supposed to push cash through Chuck, so I'm not putting any faith into that. Not for the laundering part, anyway. He was mostly pushing gold. That's a mafia thing. They were known for it. Arizona was crawling with mafia in Cartel back then. The map to the two smuggling towns confirms that.

The seven characters he numbered and the seven names that were supposed to be a code, mafia names, like the men in high places mentioned in the Bible verse, probably seven individuals. Now, when Chuck tries to buy himself out of the hit, he does what you said, leaves several clues and arms himself as best he can. The key to the clues is in the house and the FBI agents that came to search the place aren't feds at all. They're mafia posing as feds.

put on a suit and get a fake badge, a distraught widow isn't going to ask too many questions. It wouldn't have been hard at all.

They search the house, break into the police car lot to search the car, and they break into Chuck's office, getting away with as much evidence as they can. Deveroux begins to dig, and they take out who they need to. The mafia might not be as strong as they once were, but they haven't exactly disappeared off the face of the earth either. They're still operational today. Israeli intelligence got wind of it because they know just about everything that goes on in the world.

Everything here screams mafia. It's their style and Chuck would have been way over his head with them. The only concrete hint of FBI, DOA or CIA involvement comes from Deveroux. He claims that the documents in the office indicate corrupt government agencies and the lawyer said that Chuck worked for the Treasury Department. But that's just word of mouth.

No official paper trail, no concrete documentation, just stuff people are saying, not proving. It's the mob, it's got to be. But the feds do come in, just not the way you're thinking. I think they corner Chuck four years ago when he started working with the mob. Under threat of imprisonment, he starts leaking the feds information.

So the mobs got him by the balls and the feds are threatening prison. Chuck's got no friends here. When they force him to testify, mafia law dictates that he's a traitor. Now Chuck's got a price on his head and the mob takes him out and the FBI turns up. They never bothered to register Chuck as an informant, even though he might have thought he was. They realized that they didn't do things by the book and they didn't offer their civilian informant any protections.

so they don't report any of it. And Charles C. Morgan genuinely isn't on any record when Deveroux asks for that information. Did the FBI do him dirty? Sure. But not by laundering money or anything like that. They just treated them like a stooge that could be easily frightened into compliance.

Leave it to Heather to use logic to destroy all of our government cover-up dreams. But that's actually a good point. Still, Green Eyes is kind of a sore spot for me.

I think we want Green Eyes to play a bigger part in this than she actually has. There are lots of shady people on the street who work in close contact with the mob, but they aren't necessarily mafia. Some people want to say she's the other woman, and that she somehow made Chuck believe someone was after him, and that she made off with the money, that sort of thing.

I think she was just low-level crook tasked with being the middleman to set up meetings.

And we forget about that first disappearance. We're so caught up with the weirdness of his death that the fact that he got away once should be a clue to the mob too. Really? How do you mean? Let's say they learn about Chuck testifying. They kidnap him and subject him to torture to figure out how much he told the FBI. They probably wanted to kill him after they got the information, but Chuck escapes before they can end him.

He can't go to the FBI because, like mom said, they aren't exactly his buddies either. He hopes that his silence is enough to convince them that he won't spill the beans, but they don't lift the bounty on his head, so he tries to buy his way out, leaving all those clues and conspiracy theory gold is born.

I think if it were government agency this would have been a lot cleaner. They wouldn't have allowed Chuck's body to ever be found and they certainly wouldn't have let a man they just kidnapped get away. With the resources they have at their disposal, no way they'd let that happen. I don't buy it. I truly think you and your mom are teaming up on me.

What's a little logic against that shiny cap on your head? You guys just couldn't let me have this one, could you? The FBI, CIA, or whoever could still be intertwined in this whole thing. They just covered their tracks better to make it look like the mob. Does that make you feel a little better? You know, I know you're mocking me, but I'll take it.

Green-Eyes and they were planning on running away together but she double crossed him and ran off with

They're honestly all so flimsy and a lot of it rests on the fact that Chuck lost his marbles. Which, all of us agree, isn't the case. But one thing's certain. Whoever Chuck was pushing gold and cash for is dangerous. They've killed Chuck, a reporter with information, and tried to kill another reporter. But ended up killing an innocent guy whose biggest crime was probably a speeding ticket.

Then they broke into the police station, Chuck's office, and even strong-armed their way into Ruth's house.

These were powerful people, and Chuck was trying to tell us who they were, probably to bring them all down.

And I really believe that the key to this whole confusing mess of a case lies with that letter that Chuck hid inside of his house. But sadly, that letter is probably long gone and will never, never know the truth. Or maybe Green Eyes is still alive and she can tell us what really happened.

I believe the truth is out there. Stop it. You couldn't sign off without one last X-Files reference, could you?

But don't let the maybes make you lose any sleep because we partners in crime will be back next week with another mysterious case that'll keep you guessing to the end.

Thank you for joining me and my PICs. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And we will see you next time with more True Crime