Unmasking “Rex Feral,” Author of the Infamous Hit Man Manual

I. Ghosts

For nearly 30 years, Gayle McCool has had a recurring dream about three people she’s never met. She is in a quiet cul-de-sac, outside a grand brick house with a picket fence encircling the yard. Yellow police tape winds through the white wooden spikes. Two grown women and a young boy stand on the sidewalk, facing her. The boy calls out her name.

McCool forces herself to look at him and says, “But I thought you couldn’t talk. You were killed by someone who read my book.”

“I can talk now,” the boy says, “and even walk.” He stands and pushes his wheelchair, smiling as it tumbles down the street.

“It’s a miracle,” McCool says, and as she approaches she sees that both women have been shot directly through the eye. They join hands with the boy and vanish before McCool has a chance to recite the apology she’s memorized, so worn and familiar in her mind.

The ghosts haunting McCool are Trevor Horn; his nurse, Janice Saunders; and his mother, Mildred “Millie” Horn. They were, respectively, 8, 38, and 43 years old when they died. When Trevor was an infant, he was left profoundly disabled and quadriplegic after a hospital respirator failed and received about $2 million in a court settlement. Former Motown Records producer Lawrence Horn, Millie’s ex-husband and Trevor’s father, stood to inherit the money in the event of their deaths. Horn hired a self-proclaimed “street preacher” named James Perry to kill his ex-wife and son. Before dawn on March 3, 1993, Perry entered the Horn residence in suburban Maryland. Wielding an AR-7 rifle, a homemade silencer attached to the barrel, he first shot Saunders in the eye. Next, he found Trevor and suffocated him. At the piercing sound of his breathing monitor, Millie rushed to check on him. Perry shot her three times in the head, including through the eye. When police investigated, they discovered Perry had purchased a book titled Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors—a how-to murder guide by the pseudonymous “Rex Feral.”

In committing this triple murder, Perry had followed 22 of the book’s recommendations, including shooting his targets in the eye from a distance of three to six feet, far enough away to avoid blood splatter but close enough to ensure the kill. Throughout the ensuing criminal trials against Horn and Perry and a landmark First Amendment case against Hit Man’s publisher, Paladin Press, Rex Feral’s identity remained a closely guarded secret. For the first time, the author is revealing her real name and relating the story of how she came to write an infamous murder manual.

Rex Feral is Gayle McCool.

“This should never have happened,” she tells me. “Look at the hearts that broke and the negative impact it had on the world—not just mine. The fact that some little boy who didn’t know his own name is dead should not be a thing laid at my door as guilt by association. I am not strong enough to carry it.”

I first heard of Hit Man in May 1999, when I was a young journalist in Philadelphia. Paladin Press’s insurance company had just settled with the victims’ families for undisclosed millions, a decision that made international headlines. The case was unprecedented; never before had a publisher been accused of “aiding and abetting” murder through the publication of a book. Major media organizations that had rallied to Paladin’s defense—including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Society of Professional Journalists—now pondered the ramifications for free speech.

Lost in most of the discussion was Hit Man’s mysterious author. Only one detail about her life had come to light: She was a divorced mother of two living in a trailer park in Florida. I grew obsessed with her. How did this woman come to write a murder manual? What had happened in her life to bring her to that point?

I contacted attorney Rod Smolla, who had represented the victims’ families, and asked if he had any leads. He told me he had hundreds of documents related to the case, and that Rex Feral’s name had been redacted on all but one of them—a fortunate oversight. He wouldn’t tell me where in the files to locate it, but I was welcome to visit his office and look for it myself. I did, and after a week of searching, there it was: Gayle McCool. I discovered where she lived and wrote to her.

At first she was terrified. She had worried for years that someone would find her and her family. She imagined reporters knocking at her door, waiting outside her work, tracking down her parents, picking out her grandchildren at the playground, shouting ugly questions:

“Why did you write a book about how to commit murder?”

“What did you do to make your daughter a killer?”

“Did you know your great-grandmother is a murderer?”

She wrote back to me, demurring. “I just want to grow old in peace,” she said. “I want to sit on my front porch in my rocker and tell my grandkids stories about my life they are certain are fantastic lies.” Yet, she continued to reply to my emails, revealing more about her life each time, eventually confessing that she found the process cathartic. Often, she’d send 20-page emails prefaced with, “This is more for me than for you.”

Over the years, I visited her numerous times in Florida. I met her children and grandchildren. We spent long weekends painting her house and drinking cheap wine and smoking cigars, Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” on loop. In 2004 I took her to vote for the very first time (she cast her ballot for John Kerry and remains an ardent Democrat). I wrote a novel based on her life, changing only the locations and names. The response from publishers was unanimous: The story is so much stranger than fiction that it doesn’t work as fiction.

I put the novel in a drawer and told McCool to let me know when she was ready. Twenty-six years later, she reached out to tell me she finally is. “It was a terrible time but also the best time of my life,” she says. “I want to give it to you so I don’t have to carry it anymore.” During another conversation, she says she felt as though “that whole period of my life defines me,” and shares that, in its aftermath, she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. She is now 77 years old, a great-grandmother and cancer survivor, living in a tidy ranch house across the street from her partner of 10 years who, until now, had no inkling of her past—a past that includes not only a murder manual but a long romance with a rogue ex-cop who embodied the Rex Feral persona, evaded authorities for seven years, and according to FBI documents was suspected of being the Unabomber.

During the past few months, I interviewed McCool for a total of 60 hours, mostly in person, accumulating a 400-plus page transcript of our conversations. I spoke to her children and anyone I could find from her past. What follows is indeed stranger than fiction.

II. “The Most Beautiful Man I Had Ever Seen”

All McCool had ever wanted in life was a happy, normal family, with healthy children and an adoring husband, and a sense that she had control of her own world. Born Gayle Daniel in 1948 in Albany, Georgia, the oldest of four children and the only girl, she moved frequently as a child, following her father’s construction jobs to Alabama and South Carolina and back to Georgia, a lifestyle that prevented her from making close friends. In high school in Columbus, Georgia, she met a local boy named Ted McCool. He was her first boyfriend. Her father—a sometime Baptist deacon who was, Gayle says, “overprotective to a fault”—imposed strict rules. She was forbidden to go out on Sunday afternoon unless Ted took her to church in the morning and had a curfew of 11 p.m.

From the beginning, Gayle says, Ted isolated her from her friends. If she even tried to talk to them, he punched her legs and arms and then apologized profusely, explaining he wouldn’t have to hurt her if only she obeyed. Any attempt to break up with him was met with the same response. She told herself that he loved her too much. (Ted McCool did not respond to a detailed list of questions I sent him and declined to comment when I later reached him by phone.)

When she lost her virginity in his 1967 Mustang, she thought, “Is that all there is?” Soon afterward he proposed to her, but McCool didn’t want to get married. “I was too young and immature,” she says now, “but he said if I didn’t do it, he’ll tell my precious religious parents what a slut they had for a daughter.” His abuse escalated after the wedding and continued for the 13 years she stayed with him. She says he beat her with a shoe brush, with a broom, with his fists. He monitored her personal letters and phone calls to family and scrutinized every receipt in her purse. He began an affair with their neighbor, the only friend he’d allowed her to have.

After two of her brothers died tragically—one by drowning, the other murdered—he told her he’d felt sorrier when his sister’s dog died. When she suffered a miscarriage, she says he accused her of killing his baby. McCool eventually gave birth to a daughter, Tara, and a son, Timothy, and thought they, too, would be abused if she didn’t leave. Removing the children from this volatile situation was worth risking her own life. One night, Ted hurled a glass during dinner, shattering it into pieces. McCool looked at him and said, very calmly, “I’m divorcing you.”

She and Ted had been building a large dream home in Fort Myers, Florida, and McCool moved there alone. Ted harassed her—he banged on the door and tampered with her car and threatened to have her fired from her job at the post office—but she at last had some space to think and plan. She invited a friend, Laurie, to move in with her. One night, Laurie suggested they go out downtown. For McCool, the very idea was intimidating. She didn’t drink. She’d never even been to a bar. What would she wear? What would she do when everyone else was dancing? What would she say if someone spoke to her? Forty-five years later, McCool remembers the date: Saturday, May 17, 1980, a night that changed the trajectory of her life.

They sat at a table near the dance floor, and McCool’s eyes locked on one particular man—“the most beautiful man I had ever seen,” she says. “I was content to watch him perform just for me.” He let her watch him for what seemed like hours and then at last approached and asked her to dance. “I want to,” she told him, “but I can’t dance.” So instead he sat with her and held her hand and accepted her offer of a ride home. He left his sport coat in Laurie’s car, an inversion of Cinderella. “I felt like I had met my prince,” McCool says now. She remembers she couldn’t sleep at all that night, her heart thrumming at the possibility of seeing him again.

Richard Oliver Hance was blond and blue-eyed, strong and lithe—so different from Ted and unlike anyone she’d ever met. Six years her junior, he was from Yulee, Florida, where his father was a prominent businessman. He had dropped out of high school but had gotten his GED and worked as a carpet installer and salesman. McCool and Hance spent hours talking; she hadn’t realized how starved she’d been for conversation. He made her feel beautiful, something Ted had never done, and spoke to her instead of at her. He challenged her to change her narrative about herself. She wasn’t shy, he said gently. Rather, she wrongly believed everyone was watching her and cared what she said and did. At his urging, she went to a club alone to test his theory. “I did it,” she says, “and was surprised that people casually glanced up to see who came in the door and then went back to their business. He taught me lessons like that frequently, which only made me love him more.”

He seemed to know a bit about everything, opining on politics and current events and martial arts; he had a fifth-degree black belt in karate and briefly attended an institution called The Mercenary School in Dolomite, Alabama, where a Vietnam veteran taught combat skills. They read books together and playacted the scenes. Once, McCool says, they read a series featuring a male character with several wives. She bought a harem costume with a veil that covered her face. That night, she knelt before him, raised her arms in supplication, and waited for him to lift the veil.

“He got a big kick out of that,” she says. “We did it right there on the floor.”

III. “We Publish Only Nonfiction”

Over the next year, Hance enmeshed himself into McCool’s life, moving his belongings bit by bit into her home. She liked how he treated her children like tiny adults, encouraging them to think for themselves and make their own decisions. Even better, Ted seemed to be afraid of him. She quit her job at the post office and rented out the extra rooms to friends while Hance carpeted the garage, turning it into a dojo where he taught American Combat Karate. In July 1981 he gave an interview to a local newspaper about his background and technique. Calling himself a “Super Wimp,” he said most students learn karate for the same reason he did: losing one too many fights. “It’s defensive, they learn it to actually use it on somebody. That’s true of a gun too, and to me a gun is more dangerous than karate.”

One of Tara’s first memories is of watching Hance host bare-knuckle fight clubs on the weekends; after each battle the men, as a point of pride, smeared their blood on a sheet suspended from the wall. “All she saw was that she had friends,” Tara, now 50, says of her mother. “She had company.… I think that filling that gap gave her a little bit of blindness on other…things. She was very naive.” Timothy, 47, thinks that Hance himself was the blind spot. “He was the love of her life,” he wrote in an email. “The one that got away.”

Hance applied to become a police officer for the Cape Coral, Florida, force, claiming on his application that he’d taught karate to officers from several local police departments and narcotics squads as a public service. Early in his training, he was commended for his part in investigating a major burglary operation in the city, but later evaluation reports were negative. “Too lax in confronting suspects,” reads one. “Tends to be cold and indifferent to people and their problems.” Another notes that “he is only interested in major cases, especially Drug Pushers, and he has his own definite opinion as to how they should be treated.” Hance submitted his resignation on June 1, 1982, stating that he was “unwilling to compromise” his views.

One night McCool and Hance watched The Mechanic, the 1972 movie starring Charles Bronson as a veteran hit man. Afterward, Hance began singing a strange refrain: “I wanna be a hit man…. I wanna be a hit man….” The tune gave McCool an idea. She’d been taking fiction-writing classes and submitting short stories to women’s magazines with no luck. She began a new project, a comic story about a bumbling hit man named Albert Horatius Finnegan III, a.k.a. “Finny Finnegan.” At Hance’s urging, she submitted her work to Paladin Press, a Colorado-based publisher with a catalog of controversial titles, including The Death Dealer’s Manual, Be Your Own Undertaker: How to Dispose of a Dead Body, and Homemade C-4 (the last of which Timothy McVeigh purchased before blowing up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City). On January 4, Paladin editorial chairman Virginia Thomas sent a response that read, in part: “Since we publish only nonfiction, we cannot use this…. The idea is intriguing, as are some of the tactics you suggest…. Have you also considered writing nonfiction?”

McCool had long dreamed of being a writer, hoping to “touch a heart and change the world” through her fiction—and now she was considering writing a how-to murder manual. Hance was thrilled by the idea, arguing that the US government wrote books about killing people and theirs were “for real.” After talking with her father, she decided to try. “They were offering me a chance to write a book,” she says now. “I thought being a published writer would look good on my résumé, and I could use it to do more serious work in the future.”

She gleaned inspiration from movies and television but mostly from Hance, who kept a notebook of ideas. He provided technical details and practical suggestions—the hit man’s ideal handgun, how to make homemade silencers, the advice to shoot a mark from three feet away—while she imbued her narrator with an exaggerated machismo. “A woman recently asked how I could, in good conscience, write an instruction book on murder,” the preface begins. “ ‘How can you live with yourself if someone uses what you write to go out and take a human life?’ she whined. I am afraid she was quite offended by my answer. It is my opinion that the professional hit man fills a need in society and is, at times, the only alternative for ‘personal’ justice.”

She requested an indemnifying paragraph stating that Paladin would accept full legal and financial responsibility for any litigation that might arise from the “use or misuse” of the contents in the book. “I am not a hit man,” she wrote to Thomas. “I don’t even own a gun. But don’t tell anybody…. My main concern in offering this type of material for publication is the possibility of litigation from people who might misuse the materials in my books; the responsibility I might bear for the manufacturing of illegal silencers (aren’t the photographs proof?) in my home, and the protection of my true identity—not only from the reader, but more importantly, from the authorities…. As a divorced mother with two small children, you can understand my fear of being placed on one of ‘Big Brother’s’ lists or giving my ex-husband grounds for trying to take custody of the children.”

Still, she believed that no one “in their right mind” would take Hit Man seriously. “It became farcical to me, something out of a movie,” she says. “It didn’t seem real to me. What happened didn’t seem like a possibility until after it happened.”

McCool learned about the triple murder in 1997, four years after it happened, when a friend came over with a VHS tape recording of a segment on 60 Minutes titled “Murder by the Book.”

Mike Wallace began speaking in his sonorous voice, and McCool only caught certain words: Triple murder. Smothered in his bed. Execution style. A how-to manual on murder. The book itself was a weapon. The author is a woman.

“Turn it off,” she told her friend. “Please turn it off.”

Over the years she has thought often about what she would say to the families of Millie and Trevor Horn and Janice Saunders, and during our interviews she revisited the topic several times.

“I do deeply regret that my actions caused anyone pain and suffering,” she said on one occasion.

“ ‘I’m sorry’ sounds so lame,” she said on another. “I absolutely feel responsibility for what happened. How do you say sorry when someone is dead?”

The last time we discussed it, she did so in personal terms: “I think any kind of apology would be useless and make them mad, just like if the man who killed my brother came to me and apologized. It would outrage me after all these years.”

“She made a decision to do what she did,” says Tiffani Horn, Millie’s daughter and Trevor’s sister, who was in college at the time of the murders. “People have consequences for their actions.”

IV. King of the Wild Beasts

Paladin accepted Hit Man in the spring of 1983 and agreed to the indemnification. Thomas’s main request was that McCool choose a byline less “stereotyped” than her original idea, Rex Savage. After consulting with Hance, she proposed Rex Feral, ersatz Latin for “king of the wild beasts.”

One day around this time, McCool awakened to find Hance in the front yard talking to a police officer. When he came inside, he told her that someone had stolen a gun from his truck and he’d wanted to report it. He also said that he and a friend were going to Ohio for a few days to collect some money for another friend. When he returned, McCool recalls, he acted strangely—exhausted and withdrawn.

“What’s wrong?” she asked him.

He leapt up from the bed, pulled her face close to his, and whispered, “I killed a man in California, and I left a shell behind with my thumbprint on it.” He had lied: He hadn’t gone to Ohio but to the West Coast, and he’d reported his gun stolen as a preemptive measure in case authorities linked it to the crime.

McCool was gripped by paranoia. If she told anyone, including the police, about Hance’s crime, Ted would seek custody of Tara and Timothy. She didn’t know what to do, so she did nothing at all. The days passed. No one came knocking at their door. Like the book she’d written, Hance’s confession transformed into something that didn’t seem real. It was as though he operated on two different planes in her mind: the man who shared her home and children and protected her, and the man who embodied the Rex Feral persona, bringing their fictional creation to vivid, terrifying life. She loved Hance enough to stay and see which version of him would prevail.

In December 1983, soon after Hit Man was published, McCool received an envelope from Paladin Press. Inside was fan mail addressed to Rex Feral. The reader praised the book’s thoroughness and said he might be in need of Mr. Feral’s services soon—was he accepting any hit jobs at the moment? “[This] is not my real name,” the reader said in his sign-off, “but this is no joke.”

Horrified, McCool threw out the letter. It was the first of many.

That summer, while the kids were visiting their grandmother, McCool and Hance began working on a second book for Paladin, How to Rip Off a Drug Dealer, which advises how to relieve “dealers of their on-hand stock.” They gathered friends for a surreal photo shoot in the backyard, everyone wearing disguises and pointing guns and staging scenes, one woman posing with a knife held to her neck. McCool visited the local office of a member of Congress and asked if she could briefly borrow a government plaque that hung on the wall, explaining that she was working on a project and needed a clear image of it. The women at the front desk weren’t suspicious, allowing her to photograph it outside. With the photo of the seal, Hance made fake IDs that allowed him and his associates to impersonate DEA agents.

Bit by bit, day by day, this fictional world seeped into their reality. Hance and his friends plotted to rip off drug dealers. McCool knew it would be futile to try to dissuade him, but she found other ways to thwart his plans. Once, Hance mentioned a man who had come to Fort Myers on a boat carrying large quantities of cocaine. He drove McCool to the hotel where the man had purportedly checked in and told her to go ask the front desk if the man was still there. He waited outside, peering through the clear glass doors, as McCool approached the clerk.

“Excuse me,” she said. “Do you have yesterday’s paper?”

The man shook his head no.

She returned to Hance and told him the man had checked out.

She noticed that Hance and his friends often fell silent as soon as she entered a room. Sometimes. they went out to do a job and asked her to leave when they returned to divvy up their shares. In the summer of 1984, Hance and his accomplices embarked on a raiding spree through Hendry County, sometimes hitting several homes in one night, dressed in three-piece suits, carrying phony search warrants, and driving a car equipped with flashing blue lights. With guns drawn, they announced, “We’re cops and this is a dope raid,” handcuffing the residents before searching for drugs. Sometimes, they applied crazy glue to their fingertips to obscure any prints they might have left behind.

At around 2:30 a.m. on August 8, 1984, Hance and another man, Robert Macy, were driving from a job when their jeep broke down. A passing county sheriff’s deputy pulled over to assist them and noticed a .45-caliber handgun wrapped in a T-shirt in the driver’s seat. Trying to play it cool, the deputy didn’t mention the gun and instead asked both men for their IDs. When Hance pulled his license from his wallet, the deputy noticed another license behind it—this one bearing the name Randall Wayne Phelps, one of his aliases. When asked why he had two IDs, Hance explained that he had written a book and wanted a different name for his byline. A search of the vehicle revealed two more guns, ammunition, silencers, handcuffs, fake badges, a large amount of marijuana, and canisters of tear gas. Hance was charged with possession of marijuana and carrying a concealed firearm, and booked into the Lee County jail.

McCool panicked at the news. What if they linked Hance’s fingerprints to the murder in California? The following day, after a friend bailed him out, Hance told McCool his plan: He would drive to Atlanta in his truck and leave it at the airport to throw police off his trail. They had a brief goodbye, she remembers, “warm and fuzzy and heartfelt.” She was alone when a SWAT team surrounded her house, demanded entry, and scoured every room looking for Hance. They accompanied her to the police station and, she says, offered her immunity in exchange for information about him. She told them the truth: At that moment she had no idea where he was.

A few days later McCool moved temporarily to her parents’ house in Graceville, Florida, a seven-hour drive from Fort Myers, and then tried to get her children back from her mother-in-law. Ted’s mother had taken Tara and Timothy to Georgia and Alabama and back to Florida, and only returned them to McCool when police threatened to arrest her for kidnapping. Together, McCool and the children took the bus back to Graceville, where she was shocked to find Hance sitting in her parents’ kitchen, drinking coffee. Hance explained that he’d called McCool’s mother from the road. After her mother berated Hance for all of the trouble he’d caused, McCool confided that Ted was trying to gain full custody.

“I’d planned to go to Fort Myers, kill Ted, and get the kids back,” Hance told McCool.

“I have the kids,” she said, “and you don’t need to go to Fort Myers.”

Instead, McCool drove him to the bus station, praying that a passing cop wouldn’t see him in her car. She had no idea that Hance was also a suspect in the murder of James Chambers, an Ohio man who had come to Florida looking for work. A deputy sheriff discovered his car alongside Interstate 75, as though he’d been signaled to pull over, and its interior was soaked with blood. Someone had stolen his wallet and shot him three times in the head.

At the bus depot, McCool and Hance kissed goodbye, and he whispered a promise in her ear: “I will see you in seven years.”

If he kept his word, he would return before the end of 1991.

V. “Your Number One Fan”

Ten days before Hance’s deadline, McCool was in her office at the Graceville Villas apartments, where she worked as the property manager. After seven hard, lonely years, she at last felt settled. She had stopped dating men who resembled Hance. She had a steady job and good friends and children who seemed well-adjusted despite everything they’d endured. Some of the apartment tenants had gathered in her office, and McCool was chatting and laughing with them when the phone rang.

“Is this Gayle McCool?” a voice asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Who’s calling?”

“Richard.”

It had been so long since she’d heard his voice. She’d been expecting his return ever since receiving a carefully worded letter addressed to Rex Feral from a post office box in North Carolina. From the handwriting, she knew right away it was from Hance:

Dear Rex Feral,

I have admired your work for years. You are a brilliant writer and thinker. I would love to be your partner, and I intend to make that happen. I picture us traveling the country together, working side by side, taking care of the other two, witnessing all the beauty and craziness in the world. You awaken my mind in ways I never thought possible. Right now I am very alone, often cold and hungry. There are stretches of good days, sometimes weeks here, where I have enough to sustain me, but my heart and my mind are wasting away. I need to be with you, and when the time comes, I will be. Thank you, Rex, for making all my dreams come true.

Love,

Your number one fan

After work, at Hance’s direction, she drove to a convenience store about 20 minutes away, where a strange woman met her and led her down a dirt road to a trailer. He was waiting inside and looked just as she remembered. “You kept your hair long,” he said, and she wanted to say that she’d kept it long for herself, not for him. She had put her life on hold for him for seven years, sealed up tight in a jar, impenetrable, and she was not sure she should open that lid.

When he told her about his life on the run, bouncing around from Texas to Kansas to Arkansas to North Carolina to Georgia, making it sound like a grand adventure, she told him about the struggles she’d had while he was gone: a stint in jail; ugly custody battles; losing her children temporarily to foster care; losing jobs and losing friends and trying to circumvent her past—had he thought even once of the problems he’d left in his wake? Chastened, he confessed that he, too, had suffered while he was away. In 1987, while living in Lenexa, Kansas, he dated a woman, Elizabeth Nash, with a teenage son named Gregory. He befriended the kid and became his mentor, teaching him karate and survival skills. One day Gregory found some dynamite Hance kept under his porch and died in an explosion. “He felt sad about it,” McCool recalls. “He did have a conscience.”

According to FBI files, the event led authorities to suspect that Hance might be the Unabomber. One month after Gregory’s death, local police discovered that the man who had befriended Gregory was not Rex Reed, as he’d been calling himself, but Richard Hance, an “extremely dangerous” fugitive from the law. Nash, Gregory’s mother, had no knowledge of Hance’s history. On the day of the funeral, Hance rode with the family in the limousine, greeted well-wishers, and told reporters that Nash wasn’t ready to comment on the death of her son. He left town the next morning. “We had no reason to go after him,” one officer told The Kansas City Star. “He appeared very surprised” and “very concerned.”

Hance also told McCool of a more recent incident. One month earlier, he had been hired by a New Orleans drug dealer to kill a supplier, Henry Hodges. Traveling from Atlanta, he brought along his girlfriend, Vivian Christine Curtis (who went by Chris) and two of his martial arts students, Charlie Waters and Sirvoris Sutton, who believed they were attending a kickboxing tournament. While living in Atlanta, Hance used the alias Max Steele, and Waters and Sutton later claimed that they had no idea of Hance’s criminal history.

Hance told McCool that he backed out of the job when he learned that he was also supposed to kill Hodges’s girlfriend, as he didn’t “do” innocent women and children. But on November 17, 1991, New Orleans police found Hodges dead and his girlfriend mortally wounded from gunshot wounds to the head and arrested Waters and Sutton.

Waters and Sutton were both convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. They fought their sentences, alleging police misconduct. After pleading to amended lesser charges of manslaughter, Sutton was released in 2022 and Waters in 2024.

By the time police had arrested Waters and Sutton, Hance and Curtis had fled New Orleans. Police later arrested Curtis in Georgia (she was later sentenced to 30 months for her role), but Hance had made it safely back to Florida. With police still pursuing him, he chose a new alias and took McCool’s last name: Brian Lee McCool.

VI. New Hope, Florida

With this second chance, McCool hoped that Hance had finally outrun his past and was ready to retire the Rex Feral persona. He talked about buying a camper and traveling the country with her and Tara and Timothy, never waking up in the same place twice. But she wanted to settle down as a normal family—as normal as possible. She hoped he would be able to find the part of himself capable of fulfilling that dream.

They found a home in New Hope, Florida. The house was set back in the woods on the bank of a lake. One day, soon after they moved in, McCool saw Hance at the end of the dock, his head in his hands, crying.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked him.

“This is where I’ve come to die,” he said.

“What do you mean?” she said. “This is where we’ve come to live.”

Timothy was 14 when Hance returned. Being reacquainted with him felt like “meeting a hero,” he says now. During the seven years Hance was gone, McCool had shared stories about his genius and bravery, hoping her children wouldn’t forget him. One day Timothy brought Hance a pocket New Testament. Within two days he read it and brought it to McCool and asked, “Do you have any idea how much power is promised in these pages?”

Raised in a strict Baptist household, McCool had read the Bible numerous times. “I know it teaches lessons, but I never thought to look for any about power.”

It promised so much power, he continued, that even a sinner like him could repent and be granted what he needed to be right with God again. He could move mountains and heal people and walk on water.

“The FBI will love the media attention when you do the walking on water trick,” McCool said.

“I’ll have to work on that,” he said.

He began to sense God’s touch in every aspect of his life. One morning, he and McCool went to a local diner and were led to a booth next to five men in state trooper uniforms.

McCool worried that the officers would recognize him. “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea,” she whispered. “Let’s go someplace else.”

Quietly, Hance asked God, whom he called Dad, to “erect a shield” around him, and they ate without incident. From then on, he made this request every time they left the house or when he needed something specific. Seeking a new truck to replace the one he’d abandoned in Atlanta, he turned to Dad and asked for a vehicle no older than 1989, a Toyota or a Nissan with paint and tires intact, costing $2,500 or less. Three days later, McCool recalls, they spotted a truck fitting that description on the side of the road, a sign reading “SALE-$2500” propped up against the dashboard.

Hance couldn’t use his real name or Social Security number to find a legitimate job and began to manufacture methamphetamine in a backyard shed. A friend had taught him the process, and now Hance believed it was God’s will, giving him the knowledge and means he needed to support McCool and the children. He installed a large beaker and enlisted Timothy to help line the walls with plastic sheets. With Timothy as his assistant, Hance made two pounds at a time and gave it to a dealer friend, earning $2,000 for every ounce sold.

People started gathering regularly at the house. “We were almost never alone,” Timothy says now. “Passing a mirror covered in meth was ordinary.” Unlike Hance, McCool didn’t snort meth, but she sprinkled some in a glass of cola and sipped it, making it last all day long. She called it her “perky Pepsi.” She knew their visitors came for Hance’s drugs. He believed they were “lost” and that God had led them to their door.

One night Hance related an incident that occurred when McCool happened to be out. Two friends stopped by the house on their way to dinner, and Hance offered to lend one his gold crucifix to complement her dress. As soon as she lowered it around her neck, her skin raised up and twisted into dark knots that sizzled under the heat of the metal.

Hance raised a hand and said, “In the name of Jesus Christ, I cast you out of her!”

She thrashed and spat and screamed, “I fucked Jesus up the ass!”

Hance and the other friend struggled to restrain her. When she finally settled, she blinked her eyes and asked, “What happened?”

When these “healings” became more frequent, Hance grew suspicious of McCool; why was she missing every time the devil appeared? Was she somehow behind these demonic possessions?

“Do you think it’s possible,” McCool asked him, “that they’re just putting on a show for you? So that you’ll believe in your own power and give them more drugs?”

Sometimes, there seemed to be a reset in his mind, a brief return to rational thinking. “What’s happening to me?” he’d ask McCool in those moments, and she’d tell him, “You need to stop doing the drugs so you can get back to your basic self.” Only later did she realize that Hance was likely suffering from schizophrenia, a condition that ran in his family. Even when he became suspicious and irrational and erratic, she never feared him—she feared for him. He had often said that she should prioritize their relationship; the kids would one day grow up and leave her, but he would always be there, till death do they part. She needed to stay and see the experience through, she decided, no matter how it might end.

VII. “You’d Better Make Sure I’m Dead”

Timothy had grown terrified of Hance. He’d heard more stories from Hance’s past, including various murders for hire. Tara, at age 18, moved out and got her own apartment, but Timothy felt a duty to protect his mother. “It was a rotten thing to do,” McCool says now. “I didn’t realize at the time that he felt responsible, but looking back, I can see it was an awfully big responsibility on his shoulders.”

He tried to be a normal teenager, going to school every day and keeping his homelife secret from his classmates. One day, two local deputies visited his class to talk about law enforcement. “I sat at my desk biting my tongue, daydreaming about telling the officers that I was living with a wanted man who had been involved in murders and drugs,” he recalls. “I reasoned that they wouldn’t take it seriously, so I said nothing.”

One night when friends were visiting, they all passed a plate of meth as Hance opined about a future where money had no value and “preppers” would be the only survivors. During a lull in the conversation, Hance calmly said, “One day I’m gonna beat my wife until she doesn’t wiggle.”

Timothy, standing nearby, said, “If you ever hit my mother, I will kill you.”

“You’d better shoot me here or here,” Hance said, indicating his heart and his head. Then he laughed it off, and they resumed talking about the impending apocalypse.

A few days later Timothy came home from school to find Hance cleaning his guns in the living room.

“From now on, you are not a child but a man,” Hance said. “If you want a beer, you’re welcome to get one from the fridge. But if you try to shoot me, you’d better make sure I’m dead or else I’ll come after you.”

Timothy began keeping a .32 pistol underneath his pillow.

By then Hance and McCool were fighting about everything—the drugs, Hance’s “followers,” and even how to interpret the Bible. Without warning or reason his moods changed, often from one moment to the next. It seemed he had created and erased so many identities that his essential self was lost. McCool observed and cataloged all of his behavior, searching for the man she believed she knew, and—despite everything—still loved.

Sometimes, he called McCool “Chris.” When Hance took Timothy to shoot fish in a pond, he became sullen when the teenager hit more with a .32 pistol than he did with his big .45. Hance studied balled-up pieces of tinfoil to divine hidden pictures and messages. During the day he pushed a metal detector across the backyard, searching for long-buried treasure, and at night he laid the Bible across his eyes, claiming its contents seeped directly into his mind. One afternoon, when McCool played the Bible on cassette tape, he retrieved his gun and fired shots at the radio.

Every day, Timothy hoped his mother would leave Hance. One day, to his surprise, they did, renting an Airstream travel trailer at a campground, bringing nothing but a change of clothes. The campground office had a coin-operated pool table, and McCool fed it all of her money, trying to keep him entertained. The escape lasted only a few days before they returned to the house.

Soon afterward, Hance gave McCool a letter. Dated February 17, 1993, and occasionally inscrutable, it read:

I am not sure if I will be the one to give you this. I love you very much and am very sorry we could not finish together that which we started. The spirit is ready to go, and has made it known to me. When it is done, I will no longer be in charge but will be the child. “I hope” I have been through so much, that it’s hard to trust my own spirit. (sad) Yet I had no plan to turn back once started, no place left for me in this world. And I seem to just cause trouble where ever I go. There is money in the camera case and in my bag also in the hidden flap. It’s not much for 12 years, but it’s all there is. I love you + the kids. I had hoped to give you paradise for a while. Just couldn’t seem to get it right. I have to admit I am scared now that it is time.

McCool tried to reassure him that it wasn’t true, that his spirit was just fine on earth and that he wasn’t going anywhere. But privately, she was confused—was it the drugs talking, or was Hance actually receiving messages about his mortality? The following two weeks were the most peaceful they’d shared in a long time, but she could not dispel the fear of his death. When he surprised her with four dozen red roses, Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” blaring in the background, she focused on the first line of the song: “If I should stay, I would only be in your way.…”

Thirty-two years later, she still keeps those roses, now dried and brittle, on her kitchen windowsill.

VIII. “Nobody Ever Came Close”

On March 16, while lying in bed, McCool heard Hance call her name from the doorway.

“Your children should have always come first,” he told her. (“It was true,” she says now.)

The following day, Wednesday, March 17, McCool sat in the living room with Hance and Tara, who was visiting that afternoon. Unbeknownst to McCool, exactly two weeks earlier, a hired hit man 900 miles away used her book to murder a disabled boy, his mother, and his nurse. Timothy came home from school, bringing the mail in with him. He’d gotten new contact lenses, and Tara offered to help him put them in. Together, they went to the bathroom while McCool opened an envelope containing her credit card statement. She saw an unfamiliar charge for a few hundred dollars and knew exactly what had happened. Since there were no bookstores nearby, she’d given their friend her credit card number to buy a copy of the Gospel of Thomas during a trip to Atlanta. The friend kept her word and sent the book, but now she’d broken McCool’s trust by using the card for herself.

“That bitch,” McCool said.

“What?” Hance asked.

After McCool explained, Hance said, “I’ll pay it.”

His offer only enraged her further. She didn’t want him to pay. She wanted him to come to her defense, to agree that their friend was a bitch, to confront her on McCool’s behalf, to say anything that would indicate that he was on McCool’s side. But she knew he couldn’t, knew he wouldn’t. There were too many people who knew just enough about his past to tip off the authorities. There always would be. Finally, after 13 years, she was tired of it.

She picked up the phone.

“Don’t you dare call the cops and report this,” he warned. “I’d sooner die than go to jail.”

“I’m just calling the credit card company,” she said. They argued, their voices growing louder and their words uglier. Timothy crept to his bedroom to retrieve the gun from beneath his pillow, and together he and Tara walked to the living room. Someone had swept an arm across the table, sending everything crashing to the floor. Timothy placed the .32 behind a chair, out of Hance’s view.

McCool sat down and Hance loomed over her. Tara had never seen him so angry, screaming in her mother’s face, calling her horrid things, and she herself started crying and screaming at Hance: “You are not a man! A man would not act this way!” Hance punched McCool in the face—the first time he had ever hit her—and then with his left hand grabbed a batch of her hair like reins. Timothy will never forget what he saw next: “His right hand raised in the shape of a hand grasping a gun. He looked down at his pistol on the side table like a man pinching the air while looking for the remote.” He is going to kill her now, Timothy thought, and I will be next.

Timothy picked up his pistol from the floor and shot Hance—in the head from a distance of three feet.

McCool still thinks about Hance every day. “Nobody ever replaced him,” she says. “Nobody ever came close.” If she could say something to him now, it would be simple: “We screwed it up.”

But in that moment, before ignoring Tara’s plea to feed his body to the gators, before gathering the guns and drugs and throwing everything into the woods, before getting down on her knees for hours to scrub the bloodstains, she lay down next to him on the floor and said, “All I ever did was love you.”

As police in Maryland investigated the murders of Trevor and Millie Horn and Janice Saunders, police in Florida arrested Timothy and charged him with murder. A judge convicted him of manslaughter and sentenced him to complete a program at Associated Marine Institutes. For six months he ran laps, chopped logs, dug holes, played sports, and completed high school through their GED program. “I felt safe there,” he says. “I consider my childhood to be unique. I was given a lot of independence and responsibility at a young age, and I grew up faster than my peers. I never blamed anyone for what happened. It could have been worse.” He is now married to his childhood sweetheart and has children of his own.

Police also arrested McCool, charging her with drug trafficking and possession with intent to sell. While raiding her property, they seized more than 200 grams of methamphetamine and pronounced the lab to be one of the most sophisticated operations in the state. “She’s actually very gifted as far as her writing ability,” the Washington County sheriff said at the time. “Obviously, she had her mind on the wrong track, though.”

She spent six months in jail and learned she was going to become a grandmother when Tara came to visit, sharing the good news through the glass partition. In February 1994 the Florida state attorney dropped the trafficking charge, and McCool pleaded no contest to possession, receiving a sentence of five years’ probation and time served. When she heard about the triple murder, she asked Paladin Press to destroy all remaining copies of Hit Man. Paladin declined her request, but after its insurance company settled (against cofounder Peder Lund’s wishes), the publisher agreed to stop selling the book and hand over the remaining 700 copies. The press shut down after Lund’s death in 2017.

The book is available free of charge on the internet, although McCool still holds the rights. She never read Hit Man after she submitted it, she says, and keeps her lone copy in a wooden chest along with yellowed clippings about Hance, relics from her past life.

Sometimes, she still dreams of being a writer.