Maximum John: The Assassination of Judge John Wood by Charles Harrelson

The assassination of Judge John Wood on the 29th of May 1979 was the first killing of a sitting United States federal judge in the 20th century, and the man who pulled the trigger was a Texas contract killer named Charles Harrelson. On that spring morning in San Antonio, Texas, the 63-year-old federal judge known to defence lawyers as "Maximum John", for the harsh sentences he handed drug traffickers, walked out of his home to drive to work and was shot once in the back with a high-powered rifle. Behind the killing was a quarter-of-a-million-dollar contract, paid by an El Paso drug kingpin named Jamiel Chagra who was about to be tried in Judge Wood's courtroom. And behind the trigger was Charles Harrelson, a charming, remorseless hitman who had already killed before, and who would, during a cocaine-fuelled six-hour highway standoff a year later, confess not only to killing the judge but to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a claim he later retracted and which the FBI dismissed entirely. In this episode of Crime at Bedtime, we tell the full story of the Charles Harrelson case: the murder of Judge John Wood, the three-year FBI investigation, the drug kingpin who ordered the hit, the wild false confession, and the strange twist that the killer's own son, Woody Harrelson, would grow up to become one of the most famous actors in Hollywood while his father spent the rest of his life in a Supermax cell. Settle in, get comfortable, and let us tell you the story of Maximum John.

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