Gene Nail
GENE NAIL WAS A NEWS PAPER REPORTER DURING THE TIME OF GORDON KAHL'SDEATH IN ARKANSAS. He went on to investigate what he considered a cover-upand ended up quiting the news business behind his disillusionment. NAIL#11/10 GENE NAIL INTERVIEW: START @ 11:10:15 10/56 ...and so he'd go out and do a good story and then flush, it wasover and done with...I never learned to do that...I got involved with mystories. .... 11/45 ...when I was in college I never even though of investigative reporting...butI broke several stories... (story of college insurance scam) 16/27 ...I graduated from florida and worked in the state government,then I got disappointed in the work and went back into the journalism...cameback to the Democrat and was there when the GK incident occurred... 17/36 I remember reading the newspaper stories and all about the incidentin ND and then the ARK paper started printing more stories, then they thought he was inArk... during that period of time, at the Demmocrat we recieved a letterthat GK had written...being a writer I critiqued it, not just the content...later I had a chance to contact GK and things might have been different. The next thing I knew about was our front page story about him beingkilled in the shootout in Smithville. ...NAIL#11/1019/50 ...I was working for the ARK Democrat... we recieved a letter atthe paper between Feb and June from GK...I think this was the first one,and it tried to explain the rationale of what he'd done...it didn't makesense, because I didn't know him...someting that was interesting, but notenough to go on from there... 21/16 ... most of the papers I ahd worked for I worked in investigativereporting... 21/56 ..but I had the reign of the state, I worked on stories whereverthey came up...I remember the morning of JUne3...I picked up the paper andall of the stories dealt with what happened in Smithville... they were allsecond hand, no reporter had been there... all of them were second handstories. ...but outside of that, nothing made me feel uncomfortable aboutit. 24/00...apx...and so I read it, and set it aside... I guess it was amonth or so later, maybe even after the famed foot was found... some friendsof mine came to me and wanted me to get interested in it. ...It all soundedkind of stupid to me and kinnd of, sounded like they were a bunch of fringepeople... in the end, I told myself that I'd take a look at it so that theywould leave me alone... they thought that I was a professional... so I reallyexpected to just prove to them that all their hairbrained ideas were fullof water... 25/42 ...ed had been a source for me before and they usually turned outto be good stories...he kept telling me something was there and I said Ed,this story about flame-throwers and ...most people don't realize how thetrail they live...go thru records and learn a lot about you... most policedepts require a report every time a gun is fired... I started out with thereports... there was a lot of a paper trail that I started on. 27/50 ...you stories as time passes get cold and peolpe lose interestin them...they start on the front page... as follow ups come along theyget relegated to the back of the paper...the police know this and they delayreleasing...I really belived they wanted to sit on these autopsis...it wasclear 28/56 ...becasue it was clear we threatened to go to court..they keptsaying the investigation was over, but you know, Gordon was dead and therewas no investigation. There was no investigation of anything, there neverhas been an investigation of anything....why they didn't want it to comeout was that it clearly contradicted everything that happened up there. 30/28 ...well, in this case I knew that these reports were available,and internal reports that would be available, this was months after thisand they wouldn't let me have them..I only got one report and it was flawed...it was from the state police...31/45 ...one of the commanders told the st.police officers. they put em all in a room and told them to write up a report,they wanted one story...32/23 ...it's one thing when you ask all the witnessesto get together and agree on the story and that's essentially what the statepolice did. ... 32/33...they wrote up this little three page story and avoided all thequestions, but it at least gave them an official report of what happened... there was something that Dero knew that he hadn't said and I can't rememberwhat it was... END TAPE @ 11:30:00 NAIL#11/35 START @ 11:35:10 35/30 ... when I got the autopsy report, I had spent weeks in walnutridgegoing thru court files, ...the harboring cases were under way...I couldn'tget to Norma Ginter...Leonard stayed in Walnut ridge...I'd never met Leonardand I went up and talked to him..I'm not sure that talking to him was theturning point 36/28 ... you know there was some crucial times, I guess there was ahalf hour, you've probably run across this in your interviews. ...the policedestroyed all their radio logs which would prove times, there's a half hourdifference between when they say they came over the hill, which was 6:05, and the time when Leonard says they came over the hill...I'm inclinedto agree with Leonard who has no reason to change the time...He explainedhow he and NOrma and their guest had been watching the news, and he wentout to put his fishg tackle in the car and was starting to leave, and hesays that was 5:30 when the news was over and he couldn't have wasted morethan five minutes..there's exactly a five minute difference be when he andthe police say he came over the hill...depending on what happened duringthe half hour could be very crucial,,, because they wouldn't give you therecords that's why I would tend to believe one over the other, if one personhas no reason to lie or cover it up , why would you not belive him as opposedto somebody who gives you a different time and has a reasoon to...38/14 so when I talked to Leonard, Leonard helped create problems forme, I guess that's how I looked at it...where I was trying to solve poblems,he gave me more things to be resolved. 38/38 ....I don't believe until I actually got the autopsy report whichtook a lot of badgering, we threatened to sue em, talked to the Governor's...we did everything we could short of going to court, before they cavedin and gave it to us. ...38/58...When I got that report it just blew meaway. Because what it said was that two people who the FBI said shot eachother in a shootout, had both been shot in the back. and so that tellsme that they lied, everything was a lie. ...and then all the little peicestht didn't solve all the little pieces. ...there are still things thatI can't provbe, a ttheory that I developed solve most of those problems...but,if you take the story handed out by the FBI...39/41 ... alittle background might help, as a reporter I might have ajaundiced view of govt. anyway . most of the investigative story's concernthe operations of govt. or they deal with people who interface with govt.40/03 ...so if you tend to believe that you can trust govt., you don'tchallenge things like I do. so you need to have a little jaundiced viewto be a good reporter...and so that jaundiced view is how I looked at things,not always giving people the benefit of the doubt. 40/30 ...when I got that examiners report and it told me dirctly whatpeople had been telling for months. it was a lie. and so in some of myinitial interviews...Blasingame, I knew him, I'd known him all along, fromother stories and he didn't show a refusal to talk to me about it...so Iwent to him...to try to solve some problems...I said Jim, how do you accountfor the fact that GK was shot in the back of the head and he was killedin a shootout ...and then sheriff matthews was clearly shot on the armand the bullet had to come from the back , he wasn't shot in the back, buthe was clearly shot by a bullet that came from behind him...you quoted assaying these two guys killed each other in a shootout...and so he came upwith all kinds of gyrations, as to, some of the stories were , GK was hidingon top of the refrigerator and he shot Matthews as he entered the houseand then he wheeled around and shot him in the back of the head... you knowsome preposterous stories that wouldn't even if a guy was falling, fallingoff a building, you know and then he could be shot anywhere...and wherethe bullet went in and out...wouldn't make sense... 42/22 ...but to think that two guys who, one of them was killed instantaneously,when GK was shot, he didn't live one second ,,,...42/30... the bullet blewhis brains to smithereens. And to think that after he was shot that hedid anything is preposterous...and when Matthews was shot his arm was gone,now he was right handed , and he had a gun in his right and I understandthat he could have done something with his right handbut if a person gotshot to the trauma that he had to have been, the odds are that he fell down,in fact , all of the stories, I think Matthews fell down when GK was shot,because I think he was so suprised that somebody fired a shot... 43/13 ...and so to believe that these stories that they came out with,and then if there was a shootout, then what was Matthews doing in the house? When he was uspposedly, the first story that Blasingame gave out was thathe was shot as he was approaching the house, well , that has to be a clearlie becasue we know he was in the house,...Fitz. Hall, everybody admitsthat they went into the house. And also GK was shot at close range, sohe couldn't be shot from outside, so all these questions, even after I gotthe autopsy report it took me a long time to come up with an acceptabletheory as to what happened...I guess the thing that made matters worse forthe people involved with the thing, was that I kept getting lies, and thenpeople would make up more lies to cover these lies...and until there wasone crucial piece of evidence that I got that convinced me that I was right...44/16 ...well, at one point in time, along into my investigation,,, Ifound out that officers at the scene, about 9:30 by 9:30 had been dead forthree hours, Matthews had already been shot , taken to the hspital and mighthave been dead by this time, the house had been burned and the rain hadput it out...this was late at night, there was not level of excitment anylonger ...and yet the officers on the scene tried to get Gov. Clinton torelease a national guard helicopter to try and blow the house up...the housewas a concrete box... even a light explosive would have completely detroyedit... I believe they intended to destroy and another thing that enforcesthat in my mind is that they never did a crime scene search...the outsideof the house was police in utter detail, where evidence inside the houseyou know they'll admit, the FBI and Marshals service will admit, they neverdid an internal search of the house. which is kind of stupid ...they rarelywalk away from a crime scene without doing some type of an investigation...tome that enforces my belief that either right then or even later that theyplanned to blow that house up so that there would be no evidence insideof it... 49/09 ...there are alot of, there are a lot of funny stories that indicatehow far out of control things got...there is court testimony, when Jim Blasingamewas put on the stand and asked who was in charge...well, I was in charge...thenwhy did this happen? And he could explain nothing...and he wasn't reallyin charge , nobody was in charge, ...49/40...it was a scene gone crazy,police out of control, peple did the wrong thing and started covering upand all , but one of the key characters, interms of being and out and outliar, is FBI officer Jim Handley, at the time , Jim was the head of theARK FBI swat team, and to me a guy that heads up a swat team, has to havethe character and dispositon of a cold , calculating killer type , in otherwords , under stress, he has to be real good at stress...to me that 's whattype of swat team guy... 50/22 ...I'll tell you two funny stories , one of the funny stories thatI don't know any details of, was that there were two swat teams up there, there was the marshals swat tream, which had 12 to 15 guys on it and theFBI, which had 6 or 7 and Jim Handley was in charge of that... well beforethey came over the hill, they sent the marshals service swat team out tomake a loop and come on in and they got lost and never did find their way.and so here a large contingent of this great assault force, once they gotinto three feet of woods, you know they were totally lost, that's how asininethe whole thing was. Well, so Jim Handley, who's supposed to be this calculatingperson who can manage the stress associated with a swat team type situation. Leonard Ginter told me this first and other people have told me the samething, right out maybe thirty degrees off from the front door, there wasa stack of wood, some kind of diversion out there, that Jim and one otherofficer wer hiding behind, when quote the assault was made on the house.and then after everybody was out of the house Jim was sitting there witha machine gun, a milatary automatic rifle with some kind of cardboard boxfull of clips, loaded, he probalbly had, from what I'm told about a dozenof em, and to show you the coolness that he exhibited, here's the way Ginterexplained it... ...52/07 ...Jim would jump up from behind this diversion and just pointin the direction of the house and pull the trigger , BBBRRPPTTT, you knowhe was using long clips of thirty rounds, flaying his rifle , and when hewould run out, he would drop down, throw that one, grab another one, stickit in there and shoot it until he ran out of ammo....Leonard said that ifhe and his wife hadn't been handcuffed and laying on the ground when allthis firing was going, he'd a been over there laughing.... it was so preposterous,when there was nothing to be shooting at and yet that was the scene ...52/51 going back to the ammo, right there Handley had to shoot offa hundred rounds of ammo. You can look at the front of the house, and Icounted at one time over a hundred pockmarks on the house and that doesn'tinclude the shots that missed the house, even without exagerating, to saythat 300 rounds of ammo were shot towards the house, shows how out of controleverything was, even if it only lasted three or four minutes. to have thatmuch ammo expended when nobody had shot at them. Nobody had been in anydanger, somebody got scared and they just started shooting at this house...assume that 200 rounds were fired , there had to be empty casings allover the yard , becasue there were officers scattered all around the house,in fact there had to be one guy up in the woods, he's the guy that killedthe sheriff ...53/51 ...but you know that there wqas empty caseings all over theplace, and yet, the wades and others and Leonard himself have gone allover that property and not one empty casing by the law enforcement was foundon that property, so they took utter detail and care to make sure that theygot every cartridge from every one of their handguns, shotguns and automaticwepons to not leave any evidence of what happened out there , yet they neverdid it on the inside, to the best of my knowledge...54/33 ...there were only two shots fired on the inside of the house andwe have the casings from both of those. and they were fired I think by JimHall. And what the FBI call "Hot 38s" , and there were two ofthose, it's aluminum case, bought by the govt. , it can be shot in eithera 38 special or a 357 magnum, and Jim Hall was carrying a shortbarrel 357magnum and believe he was the one that fired it. and he never went backin and got it. I can understand why, because they burned the place andall before and Hall wouldn't have been able to find it. And all he wouldhave wanted would have been those two cases...and we found them and he didn't... 55/21 ...that had been fired ...they're called Hot-38s, but they wereshot from a 357 magnum because that's what Jim Hall had. and there onlytwo other officers in the room at that time,...Sheriff Matthews carrieda 41 magnum that was never trigger fired, it exploded from the heat ..andthen Ed Fitz. went in and ed had a shotgun and so nobody else had a handgunthat could have fired those , Leonard G. and GK didn't have one, so it couldn'tbe anyone else except Jim Hall... 56/06 ...not only is it contrary to, the little evidence that is available,whenever I do any investigative work, I remember once I did a story right 56/44 ...Public records are required by law to be kept...destroying recordsis only a misdeameanor, so they did that to cover up numerous felonies... 57/33 ...the first official version is real close to what the ARK Democratprinted on June 4...it went two men were killed in a shoot out as law enforcemtntofficials approached a house where a dangerous federal fugitive was hidingout...and it identified those two men as ND fugitive GKand Sheriff GeneMatthews,,,and it says as Matthews and other law enforcment officers wereapproaching the house that GK opened fired on them , mortally wounding thesheriff who later died in the hospital and GK died in the shoot out...andthen it said as officers fired on the house , it caught fire and ammo expodedand created a fire that burned the house down... ...58/35 ...so you can see everything I've told you can easily be proveda lie , there was no shoootout, I remember months after I proved there wasno shootout, TIME AND NEWSWEEK Magazines would do perspective type articlesand they still called it a shootout ...even thoug it was proven it wasn'tNAIL#11/3558/55...well there was no fire by teargas cannisters either, the firewas caused by law enforcement officers went to a neigbor and brought back5 gallons diesel and five gallons of gas and dumped it into the house andeven after they dumped it in they had problems getting it started, so allthat appeared in that first story was a lie, everything was a lie. 59/56 ...and it's certainly probably not the same explanation that I'vebeen given or the other people... 12:00;37 ...it travelled up the arm and into the armpit... 12/02/40 ...well at first Fahmy wouldn't discuss the autopsy report withme at all, after much badgering, he gave me the report but he wouldn't discussit with me. ... END TAPE @ 12:03:00 NAIL#12/34 START TAPE @ 12:34:40 I think let's go back and accept that what happened the house... 36/27 ...when gene M. walked in the door hapened in 15 seconds...andso it wasn't like there was a lot of time...the sheriff walked in and JimHall walked in and shoot...36/40......ed panicked and busted out the window,boom, boom, boom...when fitz opened fire, quite possible that Jim Matthewsran out of the house ...yelling the sheriff's been hit, the sheriff's beenhit..everybody believed that GK had shot the sheriff when he'd been hitby Ed fitz... 38/02 ...the entire incident took place in 5 to 15 seconds...the sheriff walked in and turned around, by then Jim Hall had alreadyfired a shot and blown the head off of Bill WAde... before the sheriff couldcome to grips with murder had been committed that a law inforcement officerhad blown Bill wade...... ed fitz was pumping shotgun into the window andhitting him... maybe even Jim Hall turned and shot the sheriff...all thisis happening within a matter of seconds...well when the sheriff had wentdown, after he had already told Jim H. that he'd shot the wrong person,here the two people had come in to cover him and they'd shot him...and allhe'd done is say you shot the wrong man...Jim Hall probably turned and ranout yelling the sheriff's been hit, the sheriff's been hit, but he doesn'tsay who's hit him, everybody outside presumes GK had hit him... everybodysitting out side just dumped on the house, shot all their ammo...now where...I'm convinced that Jim Hall wasn't shoooting... 40/40 ...I'll bet if the truth was known Jim Hall fired two shots fromhis revolver in the entire thing, whereas everybody else unloaded everything...A BIG WHAT IF THEORY THAT JIM HALL DIDN'T SHOOT HIS GUN BECAUSE HE KNEWGK WAS DEAD. 42/47 ...there is undisputed evidence that someobody or group of bodieswent into the house and did some engineering betwn the time that GK wasmurdered...and the time that the fire burned the house...43/10...somebodyhad to go in there and chop the hands and feet off, steal some teeth orput some teeth in...don't forget to talk about the shotgun...or do someother things... ...43/41 somebody had to go in there and arrange some stuff...eitherbefore or after Jim Hall ran out......44/34 I believe that the state police officer that was carrying himto the hospital is the one that put that on the air. because Sheriff Matthewstold him that... 45/01 ...in fact let me tell you something that makes me as suspiciousas the dickens... Sheriff Matthews was, I'm guessing, six feet beyoind thegarage door when he was shot, with his hands out, like this...the firstperson to get to him and take him somewhere, was guess who? Jim Hall. Idon't think Jim Hall wanted him to get to anybody else...now I don't thinkthat Jim Hall is a mean enough, or he was trying to make the sheriff die...Ithink he wanted to be there if the sheriff said anything, to accuse himof murdering Bill Wade...jim hall told me, he claimed that he helped himout of the house, which I don't believe he did. I believe that where thesheriff fell outside, that Jim picked him up and put him next to the garageuntil the police car came and got him. I dont believe that he got him outof the house...that's a lie, sheriff matthews was not bleeding when he cameout of the house there was no blood ...the only blood was outside wherehe was sitting. and I beleivie that when he came out and got shot , andI don't know that the person that shot him had anything to do with Jim Hall,quite conceivable that here was one of the state poilice, FBI snippers sittingup on the hill. They saw a guy walk out with his hands up in the air, hewas wearing a camoflage outfit...this guy had just heard 10 or 15 minutesof shots and they thought GK came walking out with his hands up and he justshot him... that's the best off stories, but the thing to dispute that isthat I believe that there was only one shot fired, that would lend credienceto the worse off stories, that says that gene matthews was murdered, inother words the person on the hill who shot the sheriff, knew who he wasshooting at and intended to kill him, he didn't shoot at the vest, he hada sniper, it's possible ...he knew exactly what he was doing, to shoot underthe vest...NAIL#12/3447/51 ...this is an atrocious story about our govt.. it's like an abusedchild story...something that people hate to believe is that parents whoare supposed to love their children can molest em and abuse them. and weas Americans who have spent 200 years trying to convince ourselves thatwe can trust our govt. ...can't readily accept the fact that the FBI andthe us Marshal's service whic is supposed to be the worse for integrettyin law enforcement in this country can murder people and then lie aboutit. this isn't an accident ...the best thing that could have happened up there is one person was murderedand the other was killed by accident. 48/45... the worse thing is that two people were murdered by cops andthey've lied about it and then they've gone to extensive means to destroyevidence which is felonys . and then if that's not bad enough to acceptabout our govt...then the courts and the whole judiciary and ..the fed courtsas well are aware of the charges...they know that they exist cause I'vepublished them in the newspapers...they're afraid of the truth to come out...if any one of them had the integrety.. POLICE FRATERNITY RAP... 50/30 ...proably, there's only about a dozen of em that know the truth...nobody,not one person has come forward and said, folks, I'm willing to be interviewed...that'swhat should disturb the American public about this story... NAIL'S DISTURBING STORIES OF HIS PROFESSIONAL DISILLLUSIONMENT. ...if my name goes on a story, it's my integrety...54/35 55/07 ...you have right to do it as a business man, to cheat em, butI'm not going to be a part of that...that's why I left a job in Tuscon...theeditor, I think he had reason's for the story not being printed...he allowedme to print the first 4 or 5 stories.... I knew that I had enough that theFBI had lied... well within a week or two of those stories broke, they saidthose stories show our govt. lying and cheating us... they realized whata slap in the face of the govt. these stories were... 57/40 ...at some point in time he told me I couldn't travel anymore...withina week he told me to drop the story...after a few weeks I went and toldhim what I thought happened...there was some reason why they wouldn't letme complete the story...and so I quit...I haven't gone back into the conventional...news...they burned my integrety. 13:00/15 ...some people went in that house, fully beliving the wrong personhad been murdered... their intent to destroy evidence...their intent wasto make the body unrecognizable...I think the teeth thing may have beendone after the fire, the hands and feet were cut off before the fire. 13;01/10 after ...another thing that was done I believe was that automaticweapon that GK was carrying with himNAIL4...now you have to remember that GK HAD FLOWN, from ND to ARK in feb...hehad remained hidden at an undisclosed location in western ark. for 2 or3 months before moving to Art Russell's and then the Ginters. ...so thereare a number of people...and I've talked to the previous people he stayedwith and he did not have a shotgun. In other words everything that he hadwas in a knapsack and the rifle he carried over his shoulder...if therewas a shotgun... everybody I talked with, none of these people told me theysaw him with a shotgun...after the house was torched, they found the remainsof a shotgun from ND...now I need to give a little background so this willmake sense...02/35 ...during the shooting in ND, there's a letter, proably not theonly letter he wrote...GK explained the shooting... Gordon walked over tothis wounded man...he had a shotgun right beside him and Gordon reacheddown and took the shotgun away from him... GK did not take the shotgun withhim... when the house was burned down the shotgun was found there. ..nowhere's what I believe happened... I know how to prove it... if I could getto US Marshal airplance records...I believe there's a guy named Kurfener...orderedsomeone to go back and get that shotgun that night. ...someone had beenmurdered here who they could not identify and some steps had been takento be sure he was misidenified...if they had just one piece of evidencethat this person had come from ND, then even if the house was blown up,and the only thing they found was a shotgun from ND, then everyone wouldbelieve that was GK wouldn't they? 05/06 ...see I believe at some point their full intention was to blowup the house and have this shotgun there, they burned the house and thenput the shotgun in later that night , the next morning, after the shotgunwas put in the house , they abandoned the house, never did a grid search...justabandoned it. ...I fully believe that somebody flew back to ND and END TAPE @ 13/05/40
|
A timeline of the life of Gordon Kahl, from early childhood interests, to his marriage to Joan Kahl, his decorated military experience,
his outspoken tax protest, the Medina shootout, and his unusual death in Arkansas in 1983.
|
VARIETY / Indie documaker Jeffrey F. Jackson sticks it to the IRS and the Feds in "Death & Taxes," a hard-hitting reinvestigation of the 1983 Gordon Kahl case, about which questions still linger. Jackson's unfazed, investigative reporting-style approach and inventive handling of familiar material make this a controversial item for fests and progressive webs. Non-U.S. viewers will also get a charge out of its conspiracy theme. read more
CHRONICLES MAGAZINE / Gordon Kahl was a simple farmer who became famous for not filing income tax returns. Imprisoned and hounded by IRS agents who never did prove he owed any amount of money, Kahl and his son were involved in a shootout with police. The son is still serving a prison sentence, but the father was surrounded and shot in Arkansas by police officers who mutilated and burned his body. read more
GUNS & AMMO / A new video documentary, Death & Taxes, details a case of government murderously out of control that was briefly mentioned in the October 1994 Guns & Ammo article "The Ugly Truth About Gun Control." Death & Taxes is the story of Gordon Kahl, a North Dakota farmer and decorated World War II veteran, and his apparent death at the hands of federal agents. read more
|
|
Now Available!This set of 6 DVD's comprises over 13 hours of uncut footage, including a 2+ hour prison interview with Yorie Kahl, and candid interviews with wife Joan Kahl. In this rich stockpile of research, you'll find many more threads than could reasonably be pursued in the final feature.
The Death & Taxes Miniseries DVD Set Includes...
01: Gordon Kahl Meets With Head North Dakota U.S. Marshal Bud Warren (60 min)
02: The Beginning: Gordon Kahl's military experience and views on a variety of subjects (93 min)
03: Gordon's Texas Tax Trial (90 min)
04: Medina Shootout (60 min)
05: Gordon Kahl Was...: A montage of over 25 people describing who Gordon Kahl was in their eyes. (50 min)
06: Mysterious Death In Arkansas (90 min)
07: Media Circus: Chronological portrayal of Gordon Kahl in the media (70 min)
08: Yorie Kahl Prison Interview (150 min)
09: Joan Kahl Uncut Interviews (120 min)
A little-known fact regarding Death & Taxes is the surprising connection to Timothy McVeigh and the ATF / Oklahoma City Bombing. Here's a clip of Jackson sharing the story during a director's commentary on his film Postal Worker.
The story of Gordon Kahl so captured the attention of mainstream America that it was turned into a highly-rated made-for-television movie titled
In The Line of Duty - Manhunt In The Dakotas.
DEATH & TAXES is the story of Gordon Kahl, a North Dakota farmer who became America's "most-wanted" fugitive. How had a WWII war hero become the target of one of the largest manhunts in FBI history?
|
|
The badly burned remains of Gordon Kahl, with an island of skin that shows he was in a prone position at the time of the fire.
Was Kahl a racist, gun-toting fanatic? Or a victim of an IRS policy of harassing vocal tax protestors into silence to keep the rest of us intimidated? Did Bill Clinton conspire to cover-up the torture and execution of Gordon Kahl in Arkansas? Did federal agents mutilate and burn the body to cover-up the murder of the wrong man?
DEATH & TAXES follows the trail of Gordon Kahl as his body is exhumed for a new autopsy. Building on newsreel clips covering two fiery shootouts and hundreds of interviews -- with IRS agents and federal prosecutors as well as Kahl's family and supporters -- D&T explores the myths and controversies surrounding a man who dared to challenge the federal income tax system. Some revile Kahl as a cop killer. Others revere him as an American patriot. Which was he?
|
|