Before I start the show today, just want to say to all the listeners who are joining us from

Better Southerner this week.

Hey y'all, welcome to the show.

We debuted on February 26th of 2019.

Exactly 43 years after the day, a judge sentenced Charles Wakefield Jr. to death in the South Carolina electric chair.

This is our 17th episode.

We've produced Murder etc with the intention of our listeners starting with episode one

titled January 31 1975 if you start there and work your way forward everything is going to make a

lot more sense or as much sense as any of the story can actually make.

Now here's episode 17. We're calling it Greenville. We have a problem. In 1975, there was a man in Greenville, South Carolina, named Thomas Ray Hamby, known to his friends simply as Ray.

If you met him, you'd remember him.

He's a pretty smart fellow, but he was, had a loose screw somewhere another.

If you talk to the people who remember Ray, they'll tell you,

Hamby didn't just walk that fine line between crazy and genius.

Ray Hamby was that line.

80 year old Leonard Brown was that line.

80-year-old Leonard Brown was a burglar-alarm entrepreneur and a two-time candidate for

sheriff in the 1970s, and of the thousands of things and hundreds of people he remembers.

Ray Hamby stands out because that's what Ray Hamby did.

He stood out.

Brown remembers Hamby inventing a device to help people protect their cars during the 1970s

gas crisis. So they had a lot of people stealing gas, you know, because the service

...