About Me | My Cousin Jerry

In direct examination by the state, Michigan State Police, Detroit Narcotics officer, deputy sergeant John T. Korzek recounted: At this time, a subject came out of the bar. He had pitch black hair; about five ten; stocky - build; and he had a long, black, leather coat on.

The prosecutor continued: Did you know that person?

To which Korzek responded: Yes, I later identified him as Jerry Woodby.

Korzek's account continued, and he described what happened next: He got into the car, and he reached —— he pointed —— up and grabbed me. And he well, he stuck a sawed-off shotgun in my neck area; and he said, "This is a sawed-off shotgun." He said, "If you even move," he said, "I'm going to waste you. He said, "Are you a narc? Are you a pig? Are you He said, And he said, a cop? Are you wired? And I said no. "Have you got a gun?" And I said yeah. "Well, where is it?"

Per Korzek's testimony, Korzek's gun was taken, as he was taunted with "This is just a sissy gun." The man he identified as Jerry Woodby is my third cousin. Jerry is on my dad's mom's side of the family. I found a court transcript featuring Korzek's testimony online a couple of years ago.

Many years before that, my father had told me about the time in about the early 1980s, that my cousin Jerry was "into some big money drug dealing", and what happened when Jerry and his business partner "found a wire on this guy that had come to do a drug deal. The guy was a DTF agent." According to my father "they pulled a gun on him, put him in a car, and took him out to the boonies to kill him."

This was just one of the many stories my father told me about my infamous cousin Jerry, who I never met. My father described him as a man whose main goal in life, from the time he was old enough to walk, was to hurt people. My father, and also my aunt, described Jerry as a man who had a never ceasing impulse to be violent. For him, hurting people was both a fix and a craving that never went away.

When my dad was 4 and Jerry was 6, Jerry tied my dad up and rolled him down a bank into a creek. As a child, Jerry would set nails and tacks on the floor around his sister's bed, so that she would step on them when she got up. There were weeds behind his house, that would give people a very painful sting, and Jerry would throw kids into those weeds.

Another notable story was the one about what happened when Jerry was sent to a reform school. He was 12 years old at the time. According to Dad, upon arriving at the reform school, the first thing that Jerry did was walk up to the biggest kid there and punch him so hard that Jerry broke his own wrist from the impact of the punch. Dad said that the warden of the reform school responded by swinging a Billy stick into Jerry's groin, with such force that Jerry's scrotum swelled up to the size of a grapefruit. It sounds like a terrible thing to do to a kid that young, but my assessment of the situation is that the warden knew the kind of temperament he was dealing with. He'd probably long before learned, the hard way, that with kids that mean, ordinary measures get you nowhere.

When I told my aunt this story, she said to me "oh, a belt wouldn't do a thing to Jerry. Jerry was used to getting whipped with a belt; Jerry was used to getting hit with switches. The warden did what he had to do." She also said that his dad, Jack, "would get drunk and wail the hell out of all of them" when Jerry was a child. When I was 28 years old, my aunt and I reconnected. At that time, I asked her about Dad's stories, just to see what she knows.

Dad's stories all checked out, in the end. None of them were lies, and I didn't expect that they were. Jerry died of an overdose about 3 years before my father died. Not long before Jerry's death, Dad said that Jerry had popped up out of the woodwork at his mother's door, where she lived in Texas. He told her that he would blow up her house if she didn't give him $10,000. I assume that he got it, because he ended up buying a camper and living out behind her house.

I vetted the story about the abduction and attempted murder of the Detroit Narcotics agent online. I found different references, and eventually the entire transcript of the agent's testimony. Dad mentioned a lot of details that checked out completely, like how they held the DTF agent's jacket up in court, to show how it had a bullet hole from him being shot at. The DTF agent had tripped Jerry, when Jerry and his partner met up with a third party to switch cars. The agent had been trained in martial arts. He got away, and the pack of men, including my cousin, were arrested. This was not before they fired shots at the agent, as he was running and his jacket was flailing in the wind.

Dad did mix up some things. In the actual events, Jerry wasn't there when a gun was first pulled on the agent. He and his partner, a man named James Threet, had apparently been suspicious of the guy ahead of time. They appear to have done their homework on this agent before the deal was to take place. What had been arranged was the purchase of about $200,000 worth of PCP precursor chemicals and an exchange involving a much smaller amount of PCP. The agent was in a car with James Threet, negotiating with James Threet, as James Threet drove. The agent started to act funny, and that must have been all James Threet needed.

According to the court testimony, the agent's request to not "go any further", was met with the car suddenly stopping and a gun being put in his face. James Threet told him that they were going to pick up someone else, and that, together, they were going to take a "trip to a house", where "we're going to give you a bath", and "if you're wired...you're a dead motherfucker." The guy he was picking up was my cousin Jerry.

Dad had told me that, at some point in my cousin's criminal career, he wore a leather trench coat, with a sawed-off shotgun on one side, an Uzi on the other side, and a 9mm in the back. I think this was the same time period he was talking about. When James Threet goes to the bar to get Jerry, Jerry is carrying a sawed-off shotgun. The court record makes no mention of any other guns, but I think he had just left his Uzi and his 9mm at home.

Following taking the agent's gun, Jerry got in the back seat and held his sawed-off shotgun on the agent, as James Threet "floored it", as the agent described it in his court testimony. As James Threet is speeding down the road, headed to "the boonies", to put it in Dad's words, both my cousin and James Threet taunt and threaten the agent. At one point, they tell him that his grave is already dug. They tell him where his wife and kids live, and that not only is he dead, but they're going to kill his wife and kids too. Things fly south, for the duo of madmen, when they meet a man named Keith Dopp to switch cars. They get out, the agent trips my cousin, and a Michigan State Police surveillance vehicle soon catches up with them.

James Threet fought his charges and was sentenced to well over 100 years in prison. I never looked up what happened to Keith Dopp. My cousin pled guilty, became a Pentecostal minister while in prison, and ended up only having to serve 5 years. When he reached the free world, he started a church, where he made quite a bit of money. According to my aunt "he was very charismatic in his preaching", and his charisma created a state of affairs in his church where "the men was giving him their money left and right, while he was screwing all their wives."

This story, of charismatic preaching, vetted another fact my father had given about Jerry. My father had told me "He had this..., I guess you would say 'charisma', where if you were in a restaurant, and he comes in, you'd think he's Elvis Presley as soon as he walks through the door." This sounds a little overly dramatic. My father did have a way of really gripping you with his narratives, but I think it's pretty close to the truth.

Dad also told me of one time that Jerry and another one of my cousins had participated in an arranged murder, of some man, in a gas station parking lot. That one didn't fail, and there were never any charges. Neither of my cousins was the trigger man. They just lured the guy there, and had him walking in between them, as, to put it in Dad's words, "someone came up and split the guy in the middle in half with a shotgun." Dad told me that he believed that Jerry had most likely killed a lot of people, and gotten away with all of it.

At the time Dad was telling me all of this, I had studied psychology for a nearly 20 years. I was very familiar with the technical language used to describe what psychology calls antisocial behavior. Jerry stuck out to me as a antisocial subtype that has been called, by a psychoanalyst named Otto Kernberg and others, the antisocial personality proper. According to these psychoanalysts, this subtype is the most extreme variant of a personality disorder called psychopathy.

My father wasn't interested in any scientific explanation. He had nothing against science, but his way of viewing life was infused with his beliefs in the supernatural, learned through his lifelong and very fanatical devotion to fundamentalist Christianity. Dad's explanation was "there has to be at least 100,000 devils in that man."

You can read the DTF agent's testimony here on Google Play. The agent's testimony starts at page 398. The case was eventually used, along with several other cases, as a precedent, in a Michigan Supreme Court decision concerning what does or does not constitute a criminal offense of kidnapping.

About my Life Ⅰ