John Jefferson
Carla Jo Ward (Greene County Jail).
One of the six defendants who were originally charged with abducting and killing a man has been sentenced for her role in the crime. Carla Jo Ward, 50, must spend 10 years in prison and five years on supervised release for kidnapping and unlawful transport of firearms, show federal records out of Missouri.
Prosecutors say the defendants all played a part in kidnapping the victim, Michael James Hall, 41, in 2020. He was tied up, cut, beaten, tortured with a blow torch, and then shot.
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It was all over a stolen vehicle.
“Let’s finish this,” one of the defendants, Freddie Lewis “Ol’ Boy” Tilton, 51, wrote in a text message to the victim. “… So why you trying to help a rat. You crossed a line there for you will be punished I would have had respect for you if you wodnt have got scared and ran dragjing the rv when you knew I was coming run little scared punk run I will find you you picked the right one.” [Grammar, spelling original]
Prosecutors have said that Tilton and James B. Gibson, 42, led the gruesome assault that began in Lawrence “Scary Larry” Vaughan’s home after Vaughan coaxed Hall to come over.
Vaughan did clean-up duty at the crime scene and hid other damage done at the site. The co-conspirators took Hall’s mangled corpse, wrapped it in plastic and transported it to another property owned by Russell Eugene Hurtt in Joplin, Missouri, court records show. When a report was made to police roughly two weeks after Hall’s kidnapping that a body may be on Hurtt’s property, police went there with a search warrant. Tilton was inside Hurtt’s home and started firing at officers who were outside and inspecting the area.
Tilton was apprehended by police after a brief standoff and he was swiftly arrested, although not for Hall’s murder.
Instead, police arrested Tilton for the kidnapping of a woman several days after the group had abducted Hall. Attorneys said Tilton and a man named Alvin Dale Boyer had kidnapped and beat the woman in a hotel room. She narrowly escaped with her life. Tilton and Boyer have been convicted for that second kidnapping.
Hall’s badly decomposed body was found by police on Tilton’s property on July 28, 2020.
Brandi Buchman contributed to this report.
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