Elvis, Karate, Severed Heads & The President

[Yithian]

The Elvis Impersonator, the Karate Instructor, a Fridge Full of Severed Heads, and the Plot 2 Kill the President

Remember that crazy story about the dude in Mississippi who mailed ricin to Obama and then tried to frame some other dude in Mississippi for the crime? Well, as Wells Tower discovered when he traveled to Tupelo and started poking around, the story is a thousand times crazier than you thought - BY WELLS TOWER

Spend a week or two in Tupelo, Mississippi, and you begin to wonder if the air down here perhaps contains an element that causes dreams to ignite and burn hotter and stranger than elsewhere in the world. What are the dreams that catch fire in this town? They are dreams of rock ’n’ roll; of valor, metamorphosis, and ruination; sex and betrayal; of the government and shadowy forces; of the grand dream, American. The ether here is surely spiked with something. How else do we explain the dream of the poor hillbilly born in a shotgun shack in east Tupelo, who invented rock ’n’ roll and changed the world and died on the toilet at the age of 42? How else to understand a man like Kevin Curtis, one of northeastern Mississippi’s preeminent Elvis impersonators, whose life was nearly ruined by the sight of a severed head on a refrigerator shelf? How else to make sense of the story you are about to hear, the tale of Mr. Curtis and Everett Dutschke, two men who might have shared a lovely friendship but instead had a weird feud that ended in the attempted poisoning of the president of the United States?

Theirs is a story of human dismemberment and righteous causes, of martial arts and murder intrigues, sexual perversity, political conviction, and resentments dearly held. What lies behind Mr. Curtis and Mr. Dutschke’s spectacular collision? A lot of odd and complicated things. But in the simplest sense, perhaps it’s that these gentlemen simply had too many dreams in common, and in their particular America, there are only so many dreams to go around.

The feud makes history in the third week of April 2013. Spring has broken brightly, gently, but Kevin Curtis is lately being haunted by dark fancies and dreams. Kevin is sure someone is watching him. For the past few days, every time he looks in his rearview, he sees some guy in sunglasses tailing him in a Crown Victoria or an SUV. And is it just Kevin, or is that the chuddering of chopper blades high in the air above his home?

Curtis, 46, lives alone with his dog, Moo Cow, a Holstein-spotted Chihuahua–Jack Russell mix. Tonight, Wednesday, April 17, he and the dog are due at Kevin’s ex-wife Laura’s house for dinner with the kids. Out on his street, something weird is in the air. Kevin’s neighbors are the kind of people who tend to hide out in their houses, but tonight they’re out on their lawns, “pacing like ants.” He waves at a few of them, and they look at him queerly, like maybe they want to wave back but they’re afraid something bad might happen if they do.

With Moo Cow riding on his lap, Kevin slows his white Ford Escape to check his mailbox when all of a sudden—skreeeeeek! A whole fleet of cars and SUVs—maybe twenty, twenty-five—comes swarming in around him at eighty miles an hour. A frightening parade of G-men pours out of the cars. FBI, Homeland Security, local cops, Secret Service, Capitol Police. Rifles, pistols, machine guns, all of them aimed at Kevin Curtis and his dog. Kevin swivels in his seat. He figures a serial killer or somebody must be lamming it down the street behind him.


You know what really riles up law enforcement? Trying to poison the president. Just ask initial suspect Kevin Curtis, whose house was raided before he was released.

“Freeze! Do not move! Do not resist! We will shoot you!” an officer screams at Kevin.

Kevin is confused. “Me?”

“Shut up! Get out of the car and get on the ground!”

Holding Moo Cow in his arms, Kevin steps from his vehicle into a thicket of loaded guns.

He does not immediately get on the ground. “I’ve got my little dog, Moo Cow,” he explains to the G-men.

“Drop the dog! Drop the dog!”

“Can I just take her back inside and secure her?”

“Definitely not!”

He drops Moo Cow in the driver’s seat.

The agents cuff Kevin’s hands, shackle his feet, and latch his wrists to his waist.

“Am I being arrested?”

“Don’t ask questions. We’ll ask the questions.”

“What about my dog?”

Some guy with a machine gun goes to Kevin’s car, opens the door, and tries to take hold of the lapdog. Moo Cow spooks. She growls at the machine-gun guy, leaps, and hauls ass down the street.

“My dog! What about Moo Cow!” Kevin yells.

A hulking officer with arms like bowling pins smirks at Kevin through dark glasses. “Your dog will be fine,” he says.

This is not Kevin’s first tussle with law enforcement. He knows when he is being played false by men in uniform.

“Sir, can you please take off your sunglasses so I can see your eyes?” Kevin asks the officer.

“Excuse me?”

“I want to see your eyes when you tell me she’ll be fine,” Kevin says, “because I don’t think you give a damn about Moo Cow.”

With Moo Cow still on the loose, Kevin Curtis is hustled into a van bound for the Lafayette County jail in Oxford, where he will be held on suspicion of sending letters tainted with the poison ricin to a local judge, a Mississippi senator, and Barack H. Obama.

CONTINUED AT CONSIDERABLE LENGTH:
http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmak ... table=true

CONTINUED AT CONSIDERABLE LENGTH:
http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmak ... table=true

 

[EnolaGaia]

Update for closure ...

Curtis was framed by a martial arts instructor with whom he'd developed a running animosity. The year following the appearance of the above-cited story (2014) his mortal enemy was sentenced to 25 years in prison for being the real ricin mailer.

Mississippi martial arts instructor gets 25 years in ricin case

A man was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison on Monday for mailing ricin to President Obama and other officials in the latest turn through the legal maze involving a martial arts instructor, an Elvis impersonator and a plea deal that was again on after the defendant initially pleaded guilty and then changed his mind.

U.S. District Judge Sharion Aycock in Aberdeen, Miss., sentenced James Everett Dutschke, 41, to 25 years in prison to be followed by five years of supervised release after the taekwondo instructor decided not to withdraw his guilty plea after all. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.latimes.com/nation/nati...n-martial-arts-instructor-20140519-story.html