DIXIE MAFIA: GEORGIA Ep.6 | “Deadliest Man In Georgia”

As Officer Cody and the mayor chatted that morning in the first week of March, the start of the season was one month away. As it happened, Hank Aaron broke the record by hitting his 715th home run on April 8, 1974, exactly 32 days after Officer Bill Cody thought he might die. Just after 11 a.m., Cody's conversation with the mayor was interrupted by a call over Cody's car radio. A silent alarm from the National Bank of Walton County had been tripped, and an alert had been sent to the local police station. Armed, masked men were robbing the bank.

Cody jumped into his car and sped 50 yards down the road to a position just east of the bank's entrance. As he screeched to a stop, he looked up and saw two men in ski masks exiting the bank. One carried two canvas bags filled with money, and the other held a long-barrel shotgun. Without hesitation, the robber, with the shotgun aimed at Cody's car and fired. Buckshot, shattered the driver's side window and struck Cody.

He felt as if Hank Aaron himself had hit him on the side of the face with a Louisville Slugger. But he knew he had to return fire. He ducked, crawled across the front seats, and slid out the passenger side door. He fell to the ground and hid behind his car while the gunman continued to fire. Cody tried to reach his own shotgun but couldn't, so he returned fire with his service revolver.

He hopped up, fired all six shots, and then ducked down to reload. As he rammed the last bullet into an empty chamber and popped back up, the gunman dove into the back of a station wagon. that was the getaway car. Cody opened fire again as the station wagon peeled away from the bank. He started to get into his car to chase the robbers when one of the tellers who had run out of the bank grabbed his shoulder and asked if he was alright.

Only then did Officer Cody feel the blood that was beginning to soak his uniform and taste the blood that was beginning to fill his mouth and realize how badly he was wounded.

From Black Barrel Media, this is Infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this season we're going back to the story of the Dixie Mafia. Georgia is ground zero for stories of bootlegging, car theft, bank robbery, and murder. This is Episode 6, Deadliest Man in Georgia.

The immediate buildup to the Loganville bank. robbery was swift and savage. But in truth, the buildup had been happening for three years and it had always been savage. Between May of 1971 and July of 1972, 14 months, at least 11 people were killed. After the fact, their murders would all be associated with Billy Sunday Burt, whether there was proof or not.

Some, like the murders of Warren and Rosina Matthews in May of 1971,, were the result of robberies gone wrong. Some were payback, and many others were to silence witnesses who could be damaging to Billy Sunday Burt. Burt and three other men had been indicted on federal liquor charges in May of 1971.. People who were in positions to provide details to the authorities had an unfortunate habit of disappearing. Several would be found buried in the banks of the Mulberry River, north of Burt's hometown of Winder in Barrow County, Georgia.

The streak only ended when Burt was pulled over during a routine traffic stop and was discovered to have an illegal handgun in his possession. He went to jail for eight months, between 1972 and 1973, and it was no coincidence that the killing died down. When Burt got out in 1973, his partner, Billy Wayne Davis, named Burt's first target, Douglas County Sheriff Earl Lee.

Sheriff Lee had made life miserable for Davis while Burt was in jail. Lee couldn't arrest Davis because he didn't have proof of Davis' crimes, but he knew Davis was dirty. Billy Wayne Davis owned used car dealerships in Douglas County and Cobb County. They were legit businesses, but they were also money laundering facilities for Davis' criminal enterprises. Davis was suspected in robberies and murders, independently and together with Billy Sunday Burt, but again, Lee didn't have enough proof to make criminal charges hold up in court.

So, Sheriff Lee waged a one-man psyops war against Billy Wayne Davis. Lee made sure everyone in Douglas County knew that if they did business of any kind with Davis, they were helping a crook and funding organized crime. The campaign worked, and after nearly a year of frustration, Davis couldn't take it anymore. Burt had just been released from jail, and Davis hired Burt to assassinate Sheriff Lee. Burt initially pushed back.

Killing a high-profile county sheriff would bring a lot of heat, but he eventually agreed to do it. Burt set up outside the church where Lee attended mass every Sunday morning with his family, but Burt couldn't pull the trigger. Sheriff Lee was with his wife and four children, and Burt couldn't go through with the hit. He returned the money, and he and Davis moved on to other business. While Burt was in jail, Davis had organized several crimes, and now they moved forward with the first one, robbing drug dealers.

Davis knew a couple who smuggled drugs, specifically Black Beauty's, the street name for a powerful amphetamine. Burt had a cousin, 24-year-old Otis Riedling, who wanted in on the job. Davis was against it. At the time, Davis was 32 and Burt was 35, and they had been involved in crime since they were teenagers. Riedling was inexperienced, and he didn't seem to take the job seriously.

But Davis gave in, Riedling made the trip, and all three would regret it. The three men surprised the couple at their home and demanded the drugs. The couple swore they had nothing. Burt and Davis forced them to lie face down, and then Burt found the drugs. In his typical cold-blooded fashion, Burt shot the man and woman in the back of the head.

The executions shocked Otis Riedling. A few days later, Burt and Davis found out that Riedling had been acting erratically, and they confronted him. A few days after that, on November 4, 1973, Otis Riedling went missing. When his body was found years later, buried in the banks of Mulberry River, it would be clear that the cause of death was a single gunshot to the back of the head.

After the aborted assassination of Sheriff Lee and the murder of Otis Riedling, the partnership between Billy Sunday Burt and Billy Wayne Davis began to strain. Davis had no problem with the murder of the sheriff, but Burt did. Davis didn't want Otis Riedling to be involved in the drug robbery, but Burt insisted. And then, according to Burt, Davis had to be the one to kill Riedling. Otis was Burt's cousin, and Burt couldn't do the deed himself.

The partners kept working together, but they were on borrowed time. Four months, to be exact. During that time, they committed the murders that would quickly come back to haunt them, in a figurative way. The murders would haunt the rest of Georgia in an almost literal way because of their brutality. On the morning of December 23, 1973, 75-year-old Reed Fleming was scheduled to teach a Sunday school class, but he never showed up.

His son, Hugh, and his sister, Agnes, found his absence strange, and Agnes was concerned. She had called her brother's home twice the previous night, and neither Reed nor his wife, Lois, had answered. Missing a couple phone calls wasn't strange in and of itself, but in combination with missing Sunday school, it was worrisome.

After church services, Hugh drove to his parents' property, out on a country road in Jefferson County. Their home was near the small town of Wrens, and in the greater vicinity of the city of Augusta. Across from their house was the car repair shop, and used car dealership that Reed Fleming had operated for much of his life. Hugh Fleming drove up the driveway, parked, and walked toward the back door. He could tell it was unlocked.

As he pushed it open, he saw that the kitchen had been ransacked. Dishes had been pulled from cupboards and smashed, and all the cans and boxes had been pulled off the pantry shelves. As Hugh moved through the house, each room was worse than the last. Someone had been looking for something, and they had torn the place up to find it. As Hugh approached the master bedroom, he called out for his mother and father, but there was no response.

He opened the bedroom door and found a terrible sight. Reed Fleming was propped up against the bed, dead, with a coat hanger and the cord to a power drill wrapped around his neck. His head was turned to the side so that he was looking at his wife. Lois Fleming was draped over the bed, with her head hanging off the edge. She had also been strangled to death with a coat hanger, and her head was turned to face her husband.

Presumably, one or both had died, looking into each other's eyes.

The shocking and gruesome crime devastated the Fleming family and the community of Wrens, Georgia, and it only got worse as the police and crime lab reported their findings. Reed and Lois Fleming had been tied with strips from their bed sheets, and the marks on their necks showed evidence that the coat hangers had been tightened and loosened repeatedly. The couple had not died quickly. Additionally, blood-soaked wire cutters were found next to the bed. The cutters had been used to split one of Reed Fleming's fingernails down the middle.

Between the torture and the ransacking of the house, it was clear that someone believed the Flemings had something of great value. Hugh Fleming knew what it was. He told police that his father had stashed as much as $60,000 in mason jars around the property. Reed Fleming, as a child of the Great Depression, didn't trust banks. He had hidden his life savings in jars somewhere around the house.

There doesn't seem to be a clear answer as to whether or not the robbers found the money, but a second crime that same night may provide some insight. On the other side of town, another home had been ransacked and robbed. If the robbers had walked away from the Fleming home empty-handed, that may have been a motive for the second robbery. Or the robbers may have been successful at the Fleming home and wanted to make the night an even bigger score. Or maybe the two crimes were completely unrelated.

The police had no leads, and the investigation dragged on for months, until a bank robbery eight counties away, finally shed light on the Fleming murders and many others.

On March 6, 1974, three months after the Fleming murders, Billy Sunday Burt, Billy Wayne Davis, and Bobby Gene Gaddis drove up to the National Bank of Walton County in Loganville, Georgia. Between 10.30 and 11 a.m., Burt and Davis, wearing ski masks, ran into the bank. Burt leapt up onto the counter with a shotgun, while Davis went behind it and began loading money into canvas sacks. But despite the loud and scary blitz attack, an employee tripped the silent alarm. A short distance away, Loganville police officer Bill Cody lounged against his car and chatted with the town mayor about the chances of Hank Aaron becoming the new all-time home-run king.

Then Cody's car radio chirped with an announcement about the alarm. As he rushed to respond, Burt and Davis were already leaving the bank. They'd been in and out with lightning speed. As they exited the bank, Davis carried two sacks full of money and Burt covered him with the shotgun. Bobby Gene Gaddis waited behind the wheel of the station wagon that was their getaway car.

To throw off investigators, he was dressed as a woman. Davis made it to the car, threw in the sacks of money, and then jumped in behind them. But as Burt neared the vehicle, Cody's police car screamed up to the bank. Before the officer could get out, Burt opened fire with the shotgun.

The first blast shattered the driver's side window. Buckshot pellets and shards of broken glass peppered Officer Cody, but the buckshot did the most damage. The pellets tore into his shoulder and blood started flowing beneath his uniform. He tasted blood in his mouth and couldn't move his jaw. It had been broken by the force of the buckshot.

A pellet had lodged in the back of his throat and nearly severed his tongue. He laid flat on the front seat to get out of the line of fire and slid across to the passenger door. He opened it and dropped down behind his car. On the other side of the vehicle, Billy Sunday Burt kept firing. The windshield exploded over Cody's head, but despite his injuries, he jumped up and fired all six rounds from his revolver.

He crouched back down behind his car and reloaded his weapon. With Cody out of sight, Burt dove into the getaway car, and Bobby Gene Gattis hit the gas. When Cody stood up a second time and resumed firing, the station wagon was racing away from the scene. Moments later, Cody felt a new burst of pain in his shoulder as a bank teller ran up to him and tried to help. Cody slumped to the ground, and at that point, as the adrenaline started to wear off, he felt the extent of his injuries.

Officer Bill Cody survived the Loganville shootout. When he was able to talk again, he told reporters that he was lucky to be alive, which was certainly true. Few people, if any, exchanged gunfire with Billy Sunday Burt and lived to tell the tale.

Burt, Davis, and Gattis escaped Loganville with roughly $7,500.. That would be about $47,000 today. But beyond the amount of money, the number of robbers, and the station wagon as a getaway car, the police had few clues. Burt and Davis had worn ski masks to hide their faces, and Gattis seemed to have successfully hidden his identity with his disguise as a woman. After a few weeks, the case was considered cold.

But then, one of the tried-and-true methods for catching bank robbers happened for Georgia authorities. A woman in Douglas County, the home base of Billy Wayne Davis, tried to deposit some money at her bank. The serial numbers on the bills matched the ones that had been stolen from the National Bank of Walton County in Loganville. It was likely no surprise to Douglas County Sheriff Earl Lee that the woman who tried to deposit the money was the wife of Billy Wayne Davis, though the sequence of events was actually kind of funny. It was not a rookie mistake by a master criminal, with Davis sending his wife to deposit stolen money.

He never would have done that. He would have laundered it through one of his businesses. His wife had found the money stashed in one of the vehicles on Davis' used car lot. She figured her husband had just forgotten about it, and she took it to the bank to put it in their account. Within 24 hours, Billy Wayne Davis and his wife were in custody.

Sheriff Lee and the Solicitor General for the district convinced Davis that they had a strong case against him. Davis was looking at 25 years in prison for armed robbery, and that was all the motivation he needed to break the Dixie Mafia Code of Silence.

Billy Wayne Davis agreed to rat out his longtime partner, Billy Sunday Burt. In exchange, Davis received immunity from prosecution for the Loganville bank robbery and all the known murders except those of Reed and Lois Fleming. Davis claimed he had not participated in the murders of the Flemings. He said the killers were Billy Sunday Burt and Bobby Jean Gaddis. Davis stated that Burt admitted to torturing and killing the couple while robbing them.

Davis said Burt had joked about Reed Fleming, claiming to be hard of hearing, but his hearing improved as Burt tightened the coat hanger around his neck. Burt was arrested for the Loganville bank job and was then charged with burglary, armed robbery by use of offensive weapons, and two counts of murder in the first degree. If found guilty, he could be sentenced to death by electrocution. Burt was enraged. His closest ally had broken the first rule of Fight Club, never talk about Fight Club.

Burt acknowledged that he had been in Renz, Georgia on the night of the Fleming murders, but he said it was to commit a crime across town, which did actually happen. But prosecutors had bolstered Davis' statements with more eyewitness accounts from people who saw Burt that night. Billy Sunday Burt was cornered, and he swore that if he was going down, he was taking Billy Wayne Davis with him.

Burt was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for the Fleming murders, but he continued to deny his involvement. He did, however, begin admitting to crimes that involved Billy Wayne Davis in order to send Davis to prison as payback. Burt told the police where to find the body of Charles Sibley, the gambler who had crossed Davis. several years earlier. Burt told police that Davis paid him to kill Sibley, and Davis was charged with murder.

And then came the big one, the explosive confession, when Burt said there were seven men serving life sentences for murders they didn't commit. Burt told the truth about the murders of Warren and Rosina Matthews in May of 1971.. Burt explained how the struggle between Warren Matthews and Billy Wayne Davis led to the killings. Matthews had opened his garage door that morning and was about to get into his car when he was shocked to see three men in ski masks with guns. Matthews struggled with Davis and pulled off Davis' ski mask.

With Davis' face revealed, Matthews had to die. Burt admitted killing Warren Matthews, but he said Davis was the one who chased Rosina Matthews into the backyard and killed her.

Burt directed authorities to the spot where he had buried the murder weapons, as well as Rosina's gun, which they had taken from the scene. Unfortunately, the guns were never found, which would hurt Burt's confession and help Davis' claim of innocence. But that only mattered when the previous case fell apart, in one of the most embarrassing moments in Georgia law enforcement history.

The seven men in prison were there mostly on the back of the testimony of Debra Ann Kidd. She had been the girlfriend of one of the seven, and apparently she initially came forward because she was mad at her boyfriend. She spun a story where she and the seven men went to the Matthews' house to rob it, and then she, Debra, killed Rosina Matthews after a gunfight. But seemingly in a desperate effort to make a case, some investigators fed her details of the events and reportedly used a hypnotist to plant false memories. In addition, it was discovered that she was having an affair with a lawman who was both working the case and providing her with protective custody.

The whole thing was a giant mess. She recanted her testimony, and the seven men were released from prison.

It took another four years after that, until 1979, for the case to reach its thoroughly unsatisfying conclusion. Davis maintained his innocence, and without the murder weapons or any evidence at the scene of the crime or any witnesses, there was no proof he was ever there. It was Billy Sunday Burt's word against Billy Wayne Davis' word. And since the two lifelong criminals were now in a public feud, and Burt was already on death row for one murder, so it meant nothing for him to confess to another, his word wasn't enough to convict Davis. It's a near certainty that Burt and Davis were the killers, but to this day, no one has been convicted of the murders of Warren and Rosina Matthews.

When Billy Sunday Burt started talking, lawmen started finding bodies. He had revealed the location of the body of Charles Sibley, whose murder sent Billy Wayne Davis to prison for the rest of his life. In 1978, investigators found the body of Willie Hester, the third man involved in the Matthews murders. Like Sibley, Hester's body was buried in the banks of the Mulberry River. In 1979, investigators found the body of Donald Chancey, who had disappeared in 1972..

Burt confessed to shooting Chancey because he heard Chancey had given the police the locations of several of his whiskey stills. Burt was found guilty of the murder while he was already on death row. When lawmen started totaling up the number of murders that they believed were associated with Billy Sunday Burt, the number was staggering. Frank Thompson, the sheriff of Walton County, where the Loganville bank robbery happened, said in 1979, we have put together the facts that tie him to as many as 28 killings. He has said himself that he's killed more than 50 people.

In 1977, in the middle of Billy Sunday Burt's string of confessions, he wrote a letter to Sheriff Earl Lee of Douglas County that made a startling admission. Burt confessed to and explained the assassination plot against the sheriff. Burt said he stood 50 feet away from the sheriff that Sunday morning four years earlier, and could have shot him easily, but Burt couldn't go through with it. Over the next 20 years, the two men developed an unlikely friendship. But even after 1979, the confessions weren't done, and the number of murders rose.

There was renewed interest in the stories of Billy Sunday Burt and Billy Wayne Davis in 2019.. Burt's son, Shane, recalled a story that his father told him while Burt was in prison. In the story, Burt, Davis, Bobby, Jean Gaddis, and Charlie Reed traveled up to North Carolina in February 1972 and murdered a family of three. The victims were Bryce Durham, his wife Virginia, and their son Bobby. The details of the murders were eerily similar to the gory details of the murders of Reed and Lois Fleming.

The revelation of Shane Burt's story led to a confession from Billy Wayne Davis. At the time, Davis was 78 years old, and he had been in prison for 45 years. Investigators spent the next three years corroborating the stories, and by 2022, they were confident that Burt, Davis, Gaddis, and Reed had killed the Durham family. By that time, Billy Wayne Davis was the only one of the four who was still alive, and he passed away that same year in a Georgia prison medical facility at the age of 81..

Billy Sunday Burt developed Parkinson's disease in his later years, and he decided he didn't want to face that kind of a slow decline in prison. In 2017, at the age of 80,, he hanged himself with his bedsheets in the prison hospital.

Billy Sunday Burt is gone, but the Burt family is still prominent in the town of Winder in Barrow County, Georgia. Burt's eldest son, Billy Stonewall Burt, who goes by Stoney, wrote a book about his father called Rock Solid, The True Story of Georgia's Dixie Mafia. Stoney participated in hours of interviews for a podcast called In the Red Clay, which tells the in-depth story of Billy Sunday Burt. It's fantastic and highly recommended. At virtually the same time, Stoney and his son opened the Rock Solid Distillery in Winder, but after some legal struggles with the town and the family who owned the building that housed the distillery, the operation moved up the road to the Sugar Hill Distillery in Sugar Hill, Georgia.

Stoney doesn't hide from lawmen or revenue agents, like his father did, but he does make his legal moonshine with an old-time recipe that would probably be appreciated by the bootleggers of generations past.

When we revisit the Dixie Mafia, we'll tackle the stories of legendary Tennessee Sheriff Buford Pusser and notorious outlaw Kirksey Nix. But next up on Infamous America, it's the unsolved murder mystery story of the Zodiac Killer. At the same time, Billy Sunday Burt was terrorizing North Georgia, a killer with a love of ciphers was terrorizing the San Francisco Bay Area. That's next time on Infamous America.

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Additional research and writing by myself, with story editing by Jordana Houchins. Original music by Rob Vallier. I'm your host and producer, Chris Wimmer. Find us at our website, blackbarrelmedia.com or on our social media channels. We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram, and B Barrel Media on Twitter, and you can stream all of our episodes on YouTube.

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