The Boys on the Tracks
35:44 Share

For an ad-free listening experience, visit patreon.com slash crimehub. Sign up for a 7-day free trial and gain access to all my episodes completely ad-free. That's patreon.com slash crimehub. Now let's dive into the story.

Don Henry and Kevin Ives just wanted to go hunting. Instead, they stumbled upon a rabbit hole so deep that it linked them to names like Pablo Escobar, Barry Seal, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. It was August 23rd, 1987, shortly after 4:00 AM. A mile-long Union Pacific freight train was traveling north at 50 miles per hour. They were heading to Little Rock, Arkansas.

a route that took them through the sleepy town of Alexander, on the border of Pulaski and Saline counties. They'd just passed the Shoab Road crossing when the crew spotted something on the tracks. Two bodies were lying across the railroad. A green tarp covered their lower halves. The engineer sounded the horn while his crew engaged the emergency brake. At this speed, the move risked derailing the train, but as they say,

Nothing stops the speeding train. It roared over the bodies, shredding them to pieces. The mile-long train finally stopped and the crew got off to investigate. They walked back to find a horrifying scene. The bodies of 16-year-old Don Henry and 17-year-old Kevin Ives were scattered across the clearing. A hunting rifle was reduced to splinters. Police and paramedics arrived on the scene within minutes.

They bungled the investigation in as much time. Ignorance, laziness, and corruption led to one of the worst handled cases in American history. Evidence went missing, witnesses were assassinated, and those who dared to speak were killed under mysterious circumstances. Kevin and Don are better known by their nickname: "The Boys on the Tracks." You can even find the infamous site on Google Maps.

where the railroad passes over Crooked Creek and Alexander. The word "crooked" couldn't be more ironic. Authorities between Pulaski and Saline counties want you to believe that Kevin and Don smoked 20 marijuana cigarettes, passed out on the train tracks, and never heard the blaring horn. They want you to believe that Central Arkansas is a safe place where nothing bad ever happens.

There are no such things as drug running, secret CIA missions, Iranian arms deals, and US-backed operations to overthrow foreign governments. The boys on the tracks didn't get high and fall asleep on the railroad. Anybody who's ever smoked weed in their lives knows that's not how it works. The leading theory is that they stumbled upon something they shouldn't have: their discovery got them killed.

Their killers covered it up, and the political establishment in Arkansas at the time prevented crucial information from coming out. This, of course, has all been alleged over the years. As of 2024, nobody knows for sure what happened in the early morning hours of August 23rd, 1987. Those who do are keeping their mouths shut.

If the boys on the tracks taught them anything, it's that too much information is a death sentence. Part 1: Spotlighting Don Henry and Kevin Ives had been close friends for six months. They were your typical teenage Arkansas boys. They liked hunting, cars, and hanging out with their girlfriends. They spent most weekends going on double dates. They dabbled in marijuana, with some saying they got mixed up in harder drugs as well.

Don lived with his parents in a small trailer by the train tracks. It wasn't unusual for him and Kevin to hang out with the other neighborhood kids late at night and into the morning. Around midnight, as August 22 became the 23rd, Don woke his father to tell him that he and Kevin were going hunting. Curtis Henry told his son to be careful and to take one of his spotlights. Spotlighting is an illegal form of hunting in the United States.

It typically involves a moving vehicle like a four-wheeler, but one can also do it on foot. Here's how it works. The spotter wields a high-powered spotlight. They scan the darkness for glowing animal eyes. The light is so bright that it stuns anything looking right at it. All the shooter has to do is aim for the spot between the animal's glowing eyes. It's as easy a kill as you'll ever see. Hunting is supposed to be a sport. There must be some level of challenge.

That's why spotlighting and other unfair hunting practices are illegal. Of course, two teenagers spotlighting in central Arkansas rarely ruffled any feathers. Sometime between midnight and 4 a.m. on the 23rd, Don and Kevin wound up on the railroad tracks. The story of Howe has eluded us for over 35 years.

Did they shine their light on a doe-eyed deer? Or did they cross paths with a ruthless gang of drug dealers working for a higher power? The boys were supposed to be home early Sunday morning. When Curtis woke up and didn't see them, he worried something had gone wrong. He got in his car and began looking for his son and Kevin. He spotted a police patrol car and asked the officers if he'd seen the boys. He hadn't, but he wasn't telling Curtis the whole story.

He had seen the boys, at least what was left of them, but he didn't know who they were. About an hour later, Deputy Chuck Talent arrived at the Henry trailer with grim news. He told them about the bodies and the tracks. Curtis asked if they were wearing camouflage caps. Deputy Talent said they were. Curtis grabbed his camo cap and asked if it looked like this. Talent nodded.

Meanwhile, Kevin's father, Larry Ives, was in Poplar Bluff, Montana, when his boy was killed. He was a railroad man himself, having worked on the trains all his life. In fact, up until a few weeks before the accident, Larry was the engineer on the exact line where Kevin died. His replacement, Stephen Schroyer, saw the bodies that morning and hit the brakes. Part 2. Smoke Two Joints

The boys on the tracks case was a jumbled mess from the start. It all began with the existence, or nonexistence, of a green tarp. The 6,000 ton Union Pacific train featured a massive light on the nose. It allowed engineer Schroer to see the bodies and what he called a green tarp. The conductor, Jerry Tomlin, reported the same thing, that the first thing they saw was something between the rails which appeared to be partially covered with a green tarp.

Finally, the brakeman, Danny Delamar, backed up their story. The tarp covered their legs between the knee and upper thigh. Once they stopped the train and returned, they saw the same tarp by Crooked Creek. The impact must have picked it up and floated it toward the water. Tomlin even led Deputy Talent to the tarp and shined his flashlight on it. Somehow, the tarp disappeared. Nobody ever saw it again. The police claim it never existed.

Whatever the men saw was an optical illusion created by the light. They'd have you believe that all three men saw the same illusion in the exact same way. And it was such a good illusion that Tomlin could track it down to the water and show it to the police. Larry Ives had never seen any optical illusions in all his years of engineering. He drove the same train on the same route. If he'd seen something as strange as what they saw that night, he would have reported it.

Extreme optical illusions would make the railroad unsafe. Dr. Fahmy Malik was the state medical examiner overseeing Don and Kevin's case. After identifying them via dental records, Dr. Malik's next job was to determine a cause of death. Struck by a speeding train was the most obvious scenario. The question became, how did the boys end up on the tracks? A week had passed since the funeral, and all four parents arrived at Malik's office.

In his professional opinion, the boys suffered two accidental deaths due to THC intoxication. THC is the active ingredient in marijuana that gets you high. Malik believed the boys smoked so much weed that they passed out on the train tracks. They were in such a deep slumber that they never heard the screaming horn of the oncoming train. How much weed is too much weed? In Dr. Malik's opinion, about 20 joints.

He'd have you believe that Don and Kevin smoked 20 joints and fell asleep on the train tracks. The police didn't question Dr. Malik's theory, even though he had a history of falsifying records and using outdated lab equipment. Oddly, there were no records of the boys' bodies being held at the hospital either. According to the hospital clerk, it's why the families were never billed. All four parents believe the police deliberately mishandled the investigation from the start.

At first, they tried to tell each parent that the boys committed suicide. Curtis Henry knew it was BS. The morning before his death, he sat in the yard with Don. They talked about the upcoming deer season and some construction projects they had planned. Don was a happy kid. He never would have killed himself. Kevin was the same way. The ambulance crew's report further crippled the suicide angle.

The two EMS workers on the scene noted that Don and Kevin's blood was darker than usual, indicating a lack of oxygen. Based on their training, the boys had been dead long before the train hit them. Despite this, Dr. Malik stuck to his marijuana theory. The police stuck by his side. For the parents, it felt like the police were making one glaring mistake after another.

For example, after they'd cleared the crime scene, a cousin of either Don or Kevin found a severed foot near the tracks that the police had left behind. Six months after the accident, the ambulance driver came forward, saying she'd encountered three men in the woods while on her way to the scene. Two rode in a pickup truck while one walked on foot. But they all clearly knew each other. They said they were with the Alexander Fire Department and were trying to help.

The ambulance driver didn't know it then, but Alexander doesn't have a fire department. Another man, who was not in police uniform, was photographed handling what looked like Don's cherished .22 caliber hunting rifle. Police claim he was holding a long flashlight. For some unknown reason, Deputy Tallent used the end of the train as a reference point in his official report. So, when the train finally rolled away, his report became useless.

It would be like writing: "We found the body 20 paces from this rock" then taking the rock and throwing it into the woods. The police never tested the boy's clothes for foreign fibers either. Doing so would have proved or disproved the existence of the mysterious green tarp. The parents turned to a private investigator to learn more about their son's deaths. They also enlisted a medical examiner from Atlanta who exhumed the bodies for a second opinion.

His findings contradicted everything Dr. Malik said. Furthermore, he discovered a stab wound in Don's back and blunt force trauma to Kevin's head. Both wounds were unrelated to the train and were made long before it ever arrived. The police doubled down on Dr. Malik's findings. They rejected this Atlanta pathologist and even hired their own PI to dig up dirt on him. Instead of trying to discredit his findings, they tried to tear down his character.

All of this means one of two things must be true. The police were wholly incompetent or they were trying to cover something up. In either case, it was bad news for Don and Kevin. But Barry Ives knew they wouldn't get a fair investigation. "There's a big drug ring operating in Saline County," he said. "A lot of people in the know are involved. An investigation would mess up their little party." Everyone in Saline knew that drugs were running the town.

Dealers were pushing dangerous products like cocaine and crystal meth. Somehow, Don and Kevin got themselves involved. Either they dabbled in petty dealing or saw something they shouldn't have.

Know exactly what's in stock.

and connect with customers inline and online with marketing tools that work seamlessly with TikTok, Instagram and more. Need hardware? Shopify has you covered. Accept payments on your smartphone, transform your tablet into a sleek POS system, or go mobile with Shopify's POS Go, designed for durability and speed.

Transcription by CastingWords

Meet supply with Shopify. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash crimehub, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash crimehub to take your retail business to the next level today. shopify.com slash crimehub

This episode is brought to you by Acorns. Imagine if every purchase you made could help build your financial future effortlessly. Thanks to Acorns, this is possible. Acorns makes it easy to start automatically saving and investing for you, your kids, and your retirement. You don't need a lot of money or expertise to invest with Acorns.

In fact, you can get started with just your spare change. Acorns recommends an expert-built portfolio that fits you and your money goals, then automatically invests your money for you. And now, Acorns is putting their money into your future.

Open an Acorns Later IRA and get up to a 3% match on new contributions. That's extra money for your retirement. It's easy, stress-free, and in my honest opinion, a smart move. Start small, dream big.

Part 3. Ignorance is Bliss.

In her best-selling book on the case, true crime journalist Mara Leverett points to a man named James Calloway as a crucial person of interest. To most people, Calloway was a local used car salesman. To the seedy underworld of Saline County, Calloway was the hottest drug dealer in town. Calloway's daughter allegedly introduced Don and Kevin to one another. She grew up near Don and knew Kevin from school.

It's unclear what role, if any, Don and Kevin were playing in the Saline underworld. They were recreational marijuana users, though some reports claim they dabbled in harder substances. According to Don's sister, he'd tried LSD once. The boys were allegedly getting their hands on some cocaine too. Before they died, they told a few local kids they'd have some for sale.

If they were buying hard drugs, nobody knows for sure who their supplier was. It could have been James Callaway or somebody lower on the food chain. Six months after the accident, a grand jury overturned Dr. Malik's ruling of accidental death. As new information poured in, they changed it to probable homicide. Unsolved Mysteries aired a segment on the case in the fall of 1988.

The episode brought the Boys on the Tracks story into the national spotlight. Host Robert Stack was among the first public figures to say the boys saw something they shouldn't have seen, and it had to do with drugs. Two key figures at the time were Dan Harmon, the lawyer for the boys' families, and James Steed Jr., the sheriff of Saline County.

Steed always backed Dr. Malik, saying there was nothing on the tracks that night to suggest anything more than a freak accident. The parents challenged his position, but Steed was a powerful man in a corrupt system. So, Dan Harmon cut a deal. If the parents would support Steed's re-election campaign, he'd promise to investigate the case. But Steed lost the election.

Folks learned how he mishandled the boys' clothes, sending them to the Arkansas crime lab instead of the FBI, like he was supposed to. The case was stuck in bureaucratic mud again, and it was only about to get bloodier. Dan Harmon hired a man named Keith McCaskill to take aerial photos of the crime scene. Keith owned The Wagon Wheel, a popular bar on the Saline County line. He was a 44-year-old man, standing 6'2" and weighing 205 pounds.

He was a big guy who could hold his own in a fight. He was also a smooth talker, a talented eavesdropper, and a small-time drug dealer. Keith and Curtis Henry were good friends. "He knew everything," Curtis said of Keith. "And when he found something out, he'd tell me." The local cops knew Keith was using and selling speed, but he always provided enough information on other criminals for police to turn a blind eye.

It also turns out that Keith had a little dirt on his boss, Dan Harmon. Harmon was among the largest drug suppliers in town. While police did find evidence of drug use in Harmon's past, they couldn't find anything about the present. It's likely because Dan Harmon was the county's prosecuting attorney.

His connections kept him safe until 1997, when he was convicted of racketeering, conspiracy, extortion, and drug possession. It's unclear why Harmon took the Henry Ives case, if he was tangentially related to it. Perhaps it was a hide-in-plain-sight type of strategy. Or he thought fighting for Don and Kevin might keep the attention off of him. Or it was a way for him to get close to the investigation.

find out who was talking, and shut them up for good. Two days after Sheriff Steed lost the election, Keith McCaskill was found dead in his garage. He'd been stabbed 113 times. He was covered in defense wounds, indicating a fierce battle for his life. Whoever killed McCaskill must have been a hulking brute. That's why many were stunned when 19-year-old Shane Smith became the primary suspect.

Smith was 3 inches shorter and 20 pounds lighter. He had a lower than average IQ and no prior criminal history. Smith had been living across the street from McCaskill for 12 years. They were friends, with Smith mowing McCaskill's lawn and McCaskill selling him pieces from his coin collection. Smith told the police that he went to McCaskill's house that night to buy a silver tray. The next thing he knew, three masked men in suits forced themselves inside.

They were armed to the teeth and ordered McCaskill back into the garage. Smith stayed behind and listened to the struggle. The men then staged the scene to make it look like Smith killed him. They forced him onto McCaskill's body, put the knife in his hand, and took several pictures. According to Saline Police, Keith McCaskill's murder had nothing to do with the boys on the tracks case. Many around town believed the contrary, including the new sheriff, Larry Davis.

McCaskill had been worried for weeks that someone was following him. He had told another police officer that he feared for his life because he knew something about the train thing. Shane Smith was found guilty but then acquitted on appeal. To this day, the murder of Keith McCaskill remains unsolved. Next to die was George Collins, a 26-year-old man who was supposed to testify about the boy's death.

He was found dead in rural Nevada County, about 90 miles outside of Saline. He died from three shotgun blasts to the face. Nobody knows who pulled the trigger. Collins' murder got people looking at another strange death, branching off the railroad case. Keith Coney was a known troublemaker. He was a friend of Kevin and Don's and was called to testify before the same grand jury.

Kony died in the summer of 1988 during a violent motorcycle accident. He crashed head-on into an 18-wheeler on I-40. Rumor has it that Kony was running for his life when he hit the semi. His throat was allegedly slit, yet somehow he got on his bike and fled.

When he died, Coney was allegedly selling drugs for James Callaway. He was also committing petty B&Es with Greg Collins and a thief named Wade "Booney" Bearden. Coney, Collins, and Bearden were a drug-running, petty theft trio. They all turned state's witnesses and were all killed for their testimony. Bearden was the last to disappear. Police found his shirt floating in the Arkansas River after an anonymous caller said he'd been murdered.

Nobody ever saw or heard from Boonee Bearden again. In April 1989, 21-year-old Jeff Rhodes went missing from Saline County. Two weeks later, police found his charred remains in a dump outside of Benton. Someone had shot him in the head and mutilated his corpse with a knife. Before police found the body, Jeff's father had arrived in town to help with the search. He told reporters about a phone call he had with Jeff weeks before he went missing.

Jeff was scared and wanted to get out of town because he knew something about the Henry, Ives, and McCaskill murders. Another James Calloway associate died in the summer of 1989. Richard Winters sold drugs for Calloway and had been talking about Kevin and Don before he died. He allegedly admitted to beating and killing them himself. He died while trying to rob an illegal craps game in Saline County. Many believe Winters was set up.

as the target was ready with a 12-gauge shotgun when Winters barged in. The last killing finally sent James Calloway to jail. Police learned that he set up the robbery, but also supplied the 12-gauge shotgun that killed Richard Winters. Calloway wanted him dead. He may have wanted them all dead, but why? Part 4. Planes, Trains, and Cocaine

The 1980s were a wild time. Drugs were everywhere, and it seemed like you couldn't go a day without a new political scandal. Don and Kevin never thought their names would appear in the same sentence as Ronald Reagan, Pablo Escobar, Bill Clinton, and the phrase "Nicaraguan revolutionaries." Before he was president, Bill Clinton was the two-time governor of Arkansas,

He served from 1979 to 1981, skipped 1982, and then reigned as governor until 1992 when he was elected President of the United States. It's widely theorized that, while governor of Arkansas, Clinton was aware of large shipments of guns and drugs moving through the state, specifically the MENA International Airport. And it all came back to one man named Barry Seal.

Barry grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He was so infatuated with flying that, as a teenager, he obtained his student pilot's license. He was a fully certified private pilot by 17. Barry spent a few years in the Air Force before becoming a commercial pilot for Transworld Airlines, which was absorbed by American Airlines in 2001. And while Barry could have been a successful airline pilot, greed got the better of him.

He began smuggling small amounts of marijuana in 1976, before graduating to cocaine in '78. There was more money in blow, more if you worked for the cartel. By 1981, Barry was in deep with Pablo Escobar's Medellín cartel.

He was making upwards of $500,000 per flight, transporting cocaine between Colombia and the US. MENA International Airport in Arkansas was his base of operations. Barry would never land with a plane full of drugs though. When he crossed into US airspace, he'd fly low and toss the packages into remote areas of Louisiana and Arkansas. From there, Barry's ground team would pick them up and transport them to Florida.

According to reports, between 1981 and 1985, Barry's team smuggled nearly $5 billion worth of drugs through MENA. Of course, Barry couldn't stay off the DEA's radar for long. He was indicted in 1983 during an undercover DEA venture called Operation Screamer. 80 pilots, including Seal, were arrested for drug smuggling. Barry, however, was the best of them all.

Facing a heavy sentence, Barry cut a deal with the DEA. He'd become an undercover informant, using Colombian connections to relay information about the cartel. But the DEA wasn't the only federal agency Barry Seale worked for. Vice President George Bush and the CIA recognized his talents. There was an annoying civil war in Nicaragua that the US just had to get involved in. Barry Seale was the right guy for the job.

It's the early 1980s, America is still in a cold war with Russia, and anti-communist sentiment is stronger across the nation. It was no secret that the CIA, under Reagan, was helping train anti-communist groups around the world. One of the groups was the Contras, a US-backed rebellion against the Cuban-backed Sandinista government, who currently controlled Nicaragua.

In March 1985, President Reagan called the Contras "the moral equal of our founding fathers." This was strange praise from a man who had just signed an amendment outlawing US assistance to the Contras in Nicaragua. That's because rebel uprisings cost money, and the Contras made all their money off the cocaine trade, specifically smuggling drugs out of the country and into the United States.

The House of Representatives passed the Amendment 411-0, putting Reagan between a rock and a hard place. He wanted to keep funding the Contras, but doing so wouldn't look very good on his resume. Reagan signed the law with every intention of skirting it. Fast forward to 1985, when Hezbollah took seven Americans hostage in Lebanon.

Despite saying that he wouldn't negotiate with terrorists, Reagan instructed his inner circle to do whatever it took to get them back. So, National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane cut a deal. The US government would allocate $30 million to buy weapons. Those weapons would go to the Iranian-backed terrorist group in exchange for the hostages. However, more than half of that $30 million was secretly funneled to the Contras.

This is where Barry Seal came back into play. It was Barry's job to fly the money and guns into Nicaragua. Millions of dollars worth of weapons don't simply go unnoticed, especially at an international airport. That's why many suspect Governor Clinton knew what was happening and looked the other way.

In fact, eyewitness testimony from a member of Clinton's security team claimed to have participated in secret flights to Nicaragua in 1984. They said crates full of M16s went out, and millions of dollars worth of cocaine came back. In 2020, the FBI unsealed heavily redacted documents stating that Barry Seal used the MENA airport to smuggle drugs between 1981 and 1984.

but that's where it ends. Clinton's involvement in the Iran-Contra deal remains shrouded in conspiracy. Barry Seal was assassinated in a barrage of machine gun fire in 1986 outside of a Salvation Army center. It's believed Pablo Escobar ordered the hit after learning that Barry was working for the US government. But what does that have to do with the boys on the tracks? They were killed in 1987,

Barry Seal was dead, and the Iran-Contra Accord had blown up in Reagan's face. But that doesn't mean the drugs stopped flowing. Part 5: The Professional In March of 1987, five months before Don and Kevin were killed, Billy Jack Haynes wrestled Hercules in front of 93,000 screaming fans at WrestleMania III. But, according to Billy Jack, professional wrestling was just his side hustle.

The 6-foot-3-inch, 280-pound man made more money working security for drug gangs across the United States. The gig eventually brought him to Arkansas in August of 1987. According to Billy Jack, he was contacted by an Arkansas criminal politician and asked if he could provide muscle during an upcoming drug shipment. He claims he was hired to kill two corrupt police officers who were stealing drugs from the shipments.

He was ready to do it, but things didn't go as planned. When the shipment fell from the plane, Kevin and Don appeared through the trees, shining their spotlight on everyone involved. They ran, but the corrupt cops caught up with them. They dragged them back toward the drop site and beat them to death with their flashlights. Then, Billy Jack says, the cops dropped the bodies on the nearby tracks, knowing the train would roar through and rip them to pieces.

If what he says is true, then Billy Jack Haynes is the only person who was present at the drop and murders that's willing to talk about it. The timeline adds up. During the summer of '87, Billy Jack wasn't working on the day of the murders. He wrestled in Detroit on August 21st and didn't return to the ring until August 25th in San Francisco.

Unfortunately, Billy Jack's reputation is marred by wild accusations and a lifetime of drug abuse. He's made claims about wanting to kill Vince McMahon and said wrestling legend Stone Cold Steve Austin was responsible for the death of Rowdy Roddy Piper. He also claims he videotaped eight seconds of footage showing the train running over the boys.

It's unlikely that Billy Jack stood there with a 1987-style video camera and secretly recorded a double homicide, all while allegedly wearing a mask and gloves. To put the nail in Billy Jack's coffin, he was arrested in February 2024 for shooting his 85-year-old wife to death in Portland, Oregon. If Billy Jack did witness the murders of Don Henry and Kevin Ives, his life choices have railroaded his credibility.

Conclusion, nothing to see here. As of 2024, the boys on the tracks haven't given us any answers. Either nobody knows what happened that night or somebody knows and they don't plan on talking. Those who have come forward, like Billy Jack Haynes, have either been killed or discredited. Questioning Clinton's involvement is considered a wild right-wing conspiracy theory.

Saying that Reagan's Iran-Contra scandal had something to do with it is leftist propaganda. Suggesting that influential people abused their position to profit from the illegal drug trade is outright insane. Nobody would ever do that. Nothing bad ever happens in rural Arkansas. Kevin and Don got too high and thought the train tracks looked mighty comfortable.