June 11, 2026

S2 Ep26: Joshua Anderson And The Haunting Terror

S2 Ep26: Joshua Anderson And The Haunting Terror
S2 Ep26: Joshua Anderson And The Haunting Terror
Among Monsters Podcast | Chilling True Crime
S2 Ep26: Joshua Anderson And The Haunting Terror
In this episode of Among Monsters, we examine the case of Joshua Julius Anderson, a Tulsa, Oklahoma killer who was convicted in the murders of four people during a violent three-month spree between late 2006 and early 2007. Through verified facts, court records, and investigative details, we explore how a series of seemingly unrelated killings were ultimately connected to one young man whose actions left a lasting impact on an entire community
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North Tulsa, Oklahoma, the winner of two thousand and seven.

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The streets here were already hard. People knew that they

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knew which corners to avoid after dark, which houses to

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keep their distance from, which names made conversations go quiet.

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But what was happening that winter was something else. People

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were dying, not in a way the city could file

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away and forget, not spread out across years, the way

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most violence is. These deaths were stacked close together, days apart,

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sometimes hours, and they were happening within walking distance of

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one another. In a narrow strip of neighborhood just north

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of downtown, a thirty four year old man shot in

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the open, a thirty year old killed for the three

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dollars in his pocket, a young man gunned down in

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the street. And then, on a single cold February day,

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an elderly woman and her grown son murdered inside a

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home that was set on fire around their bodies. Five lives,

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one small map a few short months. The people who

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lived there had a word for the young man at

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the center of it. They called him the neighborhood bully.

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They said his name carefully if they said it at all.

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His name was Joshua Julius Anderson. He was nineteen years old,

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and before the winner was over, investigators would link him

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to one out of every three murders committed in the

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entire city of Tulsa that year. This is the story

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of how that happened and how it finally stopped. Welcome

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to among Monsters. I'm Maya Hanson. Today we're walking through

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the case of Joshua Julius Anderson, a convicted killer responsible

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for a string of murders in Tulsa, Oklahoma, between November

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of two thousand and six and February of two thousand

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and seven. The facts here are documented. They come from

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court records, police testimony, and contemporary news reporting from the

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Tulsa World and other outlets. Anderson was charged with four

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counts of first degree murder plus arson and assault with

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a dangerous weapon. He was arrested on February second, two

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thousand and seven. He confessed days later, and in two

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thousand and eight he was sentenced to four consecutive life

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terms without parole, plus an additional thirty five years. But

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the facts of this case are also in places almost

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impossible to sit with. The final crime, in particular, is

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among the most disturbing in Oklahoma's modern criminal history. I'm

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going to tell you what happened, plainly because the victims

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deserve the truth. I'm not going to dwell where dwelling

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would only be cruel. This is the story of the victims,

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the investigation, the arrest, and the fear that settled over

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one Tulsa neighborhood, and the day it finally lifted. Joshuva

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Julius Anderson was born on June seventeenth, nineteen eighty seven,

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in Oklahoma. Very little has been publicly documented about his

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early life. The details are thin, the kind of childhood

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that leaves almost no record until the trouble starts. And

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the trouble started early. When he was fifteen years old,

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police in Muskogee accused him of shooting at someone with

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the intent to kill. The warrant was recalled less than

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a month later, and the matter went away. No conviction,

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no clear resolution, just a teenager already connected to gunfire.

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In June of two thousand and five, when he was eighteen,

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the charges grew heavier. He was accused of kidnapping, of

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concealing stolen property, and of domestic assault and battery. As

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part of the plea deal. He admitted to kidnapping and

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the assault. The stolen property charge was dropped. He served

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ninety days in jail. A month after that, he was

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charged again, another shooting, another person hurt, and once more

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the case collapsed, this time because the witness testimony was

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considered too weak to hold. You can already see the

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pattern forming charges that appear, then dissolve witnesses who go quiet,

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cases that fall apart before they reach a courtroom. In

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a neighborhood where people are afraid, That's how it works.

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Fear is a kind of armor. If people are too

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frightened to testify, the system simply runs out of evidence.

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By the time Joshua Anderson reached his late teens, he

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and his older brother, A. C. Anderson, shared a house

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in a part of North Tussle no One for poverty,

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for drugs, and for violence, and in that neighborhood, Joshua

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had a reputation. Neighbors described him as someone who intimidated

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the people around him, someone you didn't cross, someone whose

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temper could turn a small dispute into something dangerous. They

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feared his name long before the murders began. What no

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one understood yet was just how far that fear could go.

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You have to understand the place where it happened. North

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Tulsa in those years was a community under strain. It

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had history, pride, families who had lived there for generations,

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but it also carried the weight of long neglect. Jobs

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were scarce, drugs moved openly, and violent crime had become

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a constant, low background hum. When violence is everywhere, something

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strange happens to how it is measured. A single murder

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in a quiet suburb becomes a headline that runs for weeks.

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The same murder in a neighborhood already drowning in crime

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can vanish into the paperwork. Another file, another case number,

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another grieving family that the wider city never hears about.

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That's part of what allowed Joshua Anderson to keep killing.

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His crimes didn't know themselves as the work of one man.

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They looked at first like the ordinary tragedy of a

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hard place. A shooting here, a robbery there, each one terrible,

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none of them obviously connected. And Anderson moved through that

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landscape like he had owned it. Witnesses said he ruled

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his stretch of the street through fear. He was in

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the plainest language that neighbors could find a bully, not

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a distant, shadowy figure, a young man they saw in daylight,

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a young man some of them knew by name and

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by face. That detail matters more than it might seem,

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because in this case, recognizing Joshua Anderson's face would turn

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out to be the most dangerous thing a person could do.

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For now, though the neighborhood simply endured him. People kept

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their heads down, They minded their business. They told themselves

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that if they stayed out of his way, they'd be fine.

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And here's the thing about that kind of survival logic.

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It works right up until the moment. It doesn't. It

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depends on the predator following rules, on there being some

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line he won't cross, some category of person they'll leave alone,

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the elderly, the unarmed, the ones who never wronged him.

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Joshua Anderson, it would turn out, recognized no such line.

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The killings that were coming wouldn't be confined to rival

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dealers or men who came at him with weapons. They

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would reach a sixty nine year old woman in her

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own home. There was no safe distance from him, no

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posture of submission that guaranteed protection. The neighborhood just didn't

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know that yet. Most of them stayed out of his

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way and were fine. Some of them weren't. The first

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murder linked to Joshua Anderson happened on November fifth, two

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thousand and six. The victim was Astario Telveas Junior. He

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was thirty four years old. According to court testimony, Taveas

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came into the neighborhood that day looking for drugs. He

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was carrying a knife. What exactly set it off is unclear,

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but a fight broke out, not with Joshua at first,

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but with his older brother Ac. The two of them

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went after Tobias. They beat him, and then Joshua escalated

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it into something that could never be taken back. He

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produced a double barreled shotgun. He fired once. A single

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shot struck Tobias twice, and it killed him. What Anderson

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did next tells you something about who he was. He

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looked down at the dead man, and he saw the knife.

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He took it, not as evidence, not to hide anything.

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He took it, by his own later account, simply because

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he liked the way it looked. Then he walked away

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from the body, shotgun still in his hands, and disappeared

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back into the neighborhood. For the Tulsa police, this looked

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like one more homicide in a city full of them.

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A confrontation, a drug connection, a shooting, the kind of

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case that, in a place like North Tulsa was painfully familiar.

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There was no reason yet to think it was the

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beginning of anything. A man had come looking for drugs,

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a fight had broken out, and a shotgun had ended it.

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In a city absorbing dozens of homicides a year, that

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story barely raised an eyebrow. It read as cause and effect,

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closed in the mind, if not on paper. But a

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man was dead, a family had lost a son, a brother.

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The staro Tavaias was a person with a life that mattered,

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reduced in an instant to a case file. And here

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is the part that should unsettle you. The thing that

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made this killing forgettable to the wider world was exactly

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the thing that made it safe for Joshua Anderson. He

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had learned by now that violence in this neighborhood didn't

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echo the way it would somewhere else. It got absorbed,

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it got filed. A killer paying attention could take a

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grim lesson from that, and Anderson was paying attention. The

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file went into a drawer with all the others. Months

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would pass before anyone connected it to what came next.

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As two thousand and turned into two thousand and seven,

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the homicides in Tulsa kept coming. For the detectives working

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those cases, the math was brutal. Every killing demanded time.

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Crime scenes had to be processed, witnesses had to be

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found and then convinced to talk, Evidence had to be

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gathered and tested, and there were only so many hours,

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so many investigators, so many resources to go around. So

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while detectives bent over one case, another one would land.

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This is the quiet truth about how serial offenders sometimes

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slip through. It isn't always that they're brilliant. Sometimes it's

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simply that the people hunting them are stretched too thin

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to see the shape of what's in front of them,

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and Joshua Andersen was particularly hard to see. Investigators look

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for patterns, a serial offender who targets a specific kind

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of victim, a constant method, a clear, repeated motive. Those

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threads are what let detectives connect one crime to another

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and say this is the same hand at work. Anderson

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offered almost none of that his victims didn't share a profile.

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They were different ages, different races, different backgrounds, a man

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here and an older woman there, some connected to drugs,

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some not. There was no single type, no obvious signature

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that would make the detectives stop and say, wait, these

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belong together. What connected his crimes wasn't a pattern in

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the usual sense. It was something simpler and colder. Most

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of them had seen his face. That was the thread.

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Robbery or a grudge or a dispute would put him

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in front of someone, and if that someone could later

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point at Joshua Anderson and name him, that person became

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a problem he intended to erase. But the police didn't

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know that yet, and in late January of two thousand

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and seven, the killing accelerated. On January twenty third, two

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thousand and seven, a twenty three year old man named

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Christopher Modrow crossed paths with the Anderson brothers. Modro, the

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accounts given in court, was looking for drugs. Joshua and

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Acey walked with him toward a dealer. It should have

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been an ordinary, forgettable errand in a neighborhood where such

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things happened every day. Instead, an argument broke out the

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details of what was set are lost, but the situation

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curled fast. At some point, Modro pulled on an ice pick,

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maybe to defend himself, maybe to threaten It didn't matter.

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Joshua Anderson drew a twenty two caliber revolver and shot

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Christopher Modro dead. Then he went through the dead man's pockets.

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He found three dollars. Three dollars. That was the hall,

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That was what a human life was worth that day

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in that place. To Joshua Anderson. He took it, climbed

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into his brother's car, and drove away from another body.

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Three dollars. It's a number that refuses to make sense.

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And maybe that's the point. We want murder to have

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a reason large enough to match the weight of it.

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We want a motive that, even if it's monstrous, at

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least explains the scale of the loss. There was no

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reason here large enough. There almost never is. A man

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was killed for the price of nothing, and his family

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was left to carry a grief that had no proportion

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to the cause. Christopher Modro's death landed on detectives' deaths

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as another homicide in a violent winter, and the very

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next day Joshua Andersen killed again. January twenty fourth, two

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thousand and seven, one day after Christopher Modro. This time

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the victim was twenty six year old David Gilbert. Earlier

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that day, according to witnesses, Anderson and Gilbert had gotten

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into it at a store, an altercation, the kind of

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small hot conflict that flares up and usually burns out.

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It didn't burn out, witnesses said. Joshua Anderson found David

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Gilbert and shot him to death. Not over money, this

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time over the argument over the disrespect, real or imagined revenge,

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plain and simple. A young man was killed because he

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had words with the wrong person in the wrong neighborhood.

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Of all the killings linked to Joshua Anderson, David Gilbert's

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is the one that sits in a kind of legal shadow,

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because Anderson was never actually charged with it. The evidence,

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in the end was judged insufficient to bring to trial.

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That's a hard thing to hold. Witnesses pointed to him.

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The killing fit everything else investigators came to understand about him.

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But fitting a pattern is not the same as proof

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beyond a reasonable doubt, and the system rightly demands proof.

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So David Gilbert became part of the story without ever

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becoming part of the verdict. The fifth name, the one

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the courts could never formally close his killing is why

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you'll sometimes hear that Anderson murdered four people, and sometimes

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here five. Four were proven in court. The fifth, David Gilbert,

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was witnessed but never charged either way. By the end

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of that January, three men were dead within blocks of

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one another, and somewhere in the Tulsa Homicide Unit, a

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quieter question was beginning to form. It's one thing to

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absorb a steady stream of unrelated killings in a high

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crime area. It's another thing when the scenes start sitting

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on top of each other on the map Tobias in November,

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Modro in late January, Gilbert the very next day. All

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of them clustered inside a stretch of North Tulsa barely

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a mile across. There were technical breadcrumbs too. Ballistics work

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tied a twenty two caliber weapon to the Modro shooting.

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The robberies looked optimistic, hurried the work of someone grabbing

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whatever was in the victim's pockets and on the streets.

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Among the informants police relied on in that part of

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the city, one name kept surfacing in connection with the violence.

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None of it was proof the sheer volume of gun

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crime in the area was its own kind of camel,

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and it would take more than a hunch to draw

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firm lines between separate cases, but the outline was there.

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The neighborhood was holding its breath, and it had every

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reason to What happened on February second, two thousand and

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seven is the reason this case is remembered. I'm going

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to tell it to you directly, and then I'm going

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to move on. The victims here were brutalized in ways

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that don't need to be turned into entertainment. But you

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should know what was done to them, because they deserved

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to be more than a footnote. It started with information.

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Ac Anderson told his younger brother that a man named

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Herbert Hobbs had money on him. Herbert was fifty one

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years old. He lived at a home on North Quaker Avenue,

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and on that day his elderly mother, sixty nine year

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old Rosemary Hobbs, was there with him. Joshua Anderson went

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to the house armed with a revolver. His intention, as

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he later described it, was robbery. He tied them up,

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a grown man and his elderly mother bound in their

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own home, He took their money, by most accounts, about

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three hundred dollars, and then instead of leaving, he stayed.

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What he did next was an act of cruelty so

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degrading that it stunned even a veteran investigator who later

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worked the case. Prosecutors would describe it at trial as

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a deliberate humiliation of two helpless people who had done

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nothing to him. Then he shot them, both Herbert and Rosemary,

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each shot in the head. Rosemary was shot multiple times,

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and before he left, he set the house on fire

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with their bodies inside, hoping the flames would erase what

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he'd done. There is one more detail that surfaced at trial.

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One all State once and not returned to prosecutors alleged

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that Anderson had consumed part of Rosemary Hobbs' remains. It

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became understandably the detailed the public would never forget. But

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I want to be careful not to let the most

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00:18:00.880 --> 00:18:05.640
lured moments swallow the people themselves. Because Rosemary Hobbs was

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00:18:05.680 --> 00:18:09.480
somebody's mother, Herbert Hobbs was somebody's son. They were a

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family together in a home on an ordinary winter day,

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and they were murdered for three hundred dollars, and the

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simple fact that they had seen the face of the

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man who robbed them. The fire was meant to be

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the end of the trial. Instead, it was the beginning

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of his. The Hobbs home burned on February second. It

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was a Friday. The bodies of Rosemary and Herbert Hobbes

296
00:18:33.000 --> 00:18:37.079
were found inside in a fire that investigators quickly concluded

297
00:18:37.200 --> 00:18:40.440
had been set deliberately, and on that very same day,

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Joshua Anderson was taken into custody. The arrest didn't come

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from the murders, at least not at first. Anderson was

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picked up in connection with a separate allegation, entirely a

301
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rape accusation that had nothing on its face to do

302
00:18:56.039 --> 00:18:59.839
with the killings. But once detectives had him, the larger

303
00:19:00.400 --> 00:19:04.160
began to come into focus, and it came into focus fast.

304
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By that point, investigators were no longer looking at isolated tragedies.

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00:19:09.640 --> 00:19:12.839
Bodies had been turning up within a single one mile

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radius since the previous November, different victims, different days, but

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the same small map. Tobias, Modro, Gilbert, and now two

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00:19:24.079 --> 00:19:28.240
more burned in a home on North Quaker. Five people

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gone inside a few hundred yards of one another, and

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the brothers Anderson living right in the middle of it.

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When detectives ran the numbers against the rest of the city,

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the results stopped them cold. These killings, concentrated in this

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one tiny pocket of Tulsa, accounted for roughly a third

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of every homicide in the entire city for that period,

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one small neighborhood, one reoccurring name. Over the days that

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followed the weekend arrest, the complaints began to stack up.

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It had started as a single, unrelated accusation grew into

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a list of first degree murder charges, each one a name,

319
00:20:08.440 --> 00:20:11.799
each one a scene that detectives were now connecting to

320
00:20:11.880 --> 00:20:15.039
the young man already sitting in their custody. The key

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00:20:15.079 --> 00:20:19.079
that unlocked the case wasn't forensics, It was family. A

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00:20:19.240 --> 00:20:23.720
c Anderson, Joshua's older brother was brought in for questioning,

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and in that interview room, Acy began to talk. He

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pointed at his younger brother. He told detectives that Joshua

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00:20:31.920 --> 00:20:35.440
was involved in the killings. It's worth pausing on the

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00:20:35.480 --> 00:20:40.160
strangeness of that. Through all of it, the fear, the silence,

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the witnesses who wouldn't speak, the thing that family cracked.

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The case open came from inside Joshua Anderson's own household,

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00:20:48.759 --> 00:20:51.839
the one person close enough to know choosing to tell.

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Detectives now had something they could use. They had a

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00:20:55.440 --> 00:20:58.960
name spoken by someone with intimate knowledge. They had a

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00:20:59.000 --> 00:21:02.359
cluster of killings in a single small area. They had

333
00:21:02.400 --> 00:21:05.559
a young man already in custody. What they needed now

334
00:21:05.720 --> 00:21:09.480
was for Joshua Anderson himself to talk, and getting there

335
00:21:09.680 --> 00:21:14.079
would take one carefully chosen moment. In an interrogation room

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00:21:14.400 --> 00:21:18.720
on February fifth, two thousand and seven, Tulsa detective Vic

337
00:21:19.160 --> 00:21:23.839
Rangolato sat down across from Joshua Anderson. He started with

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00:21:23.880 --> 00:21:28.880
the Hobbs murders, the double homicide on North Quaker. Anderson

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00:21:28.960 --> 00:21:34.920
gave him nothing. According to Rigaldo's later testimony, Anderson absolutely

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00:21:34.960 --> 00:21:38.400
denied knowing what the detective was even talking about. He

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00:21:38.480 --> 00:21:42.920
played it cold blank, as if the question itself were absurd.

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So the detective changed his approach. He didn't argue, he

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didn't push harder. He simply showed Joshua Anderson a piece

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00:21:50.960 --> 00:21:55.119
of videotape. On that tape was Ac Anderson, his own brother,

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00:21:55.240 --> 00:21:58.759
telling police that Joshua had done the killings. The effect,

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00:21:58.880 --> 00:22:05.359
Rigaldo said, was immediate. Anderson became visibly agitated, visibly upset.

347
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The cold mass cracked, and what broke through was in

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00:22:09.079 --> 00:22:13.519
guilt exactly. It was betrayal. He couldn't believe. He said

349
00:22:13.799 --> 00:22:16.319
that his own brother would tell on him, and then

350
00:22:16.359 --> 00:22:19.759
he made a choice that sealed his fate. If I'm

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00:22:19.799 --> 00:22:22.920
going to go down, he said, everybody is going down.

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He started to talk. Over the course of that interview,

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Joshua Anderson described his involvement in the killings four homicides

354
00:22:31.680 --> 00:22:36.480
across three different locations in Tulsa. He laid out details, methods,

355
00:22:36.640 --> 00:22:39.599
things that lined up with what investigators had found at

356
00:22:39.599 --> 00:22:44.480
the scenes, things that hadn't been made public. That coroboration mattered.

357
00:22:45.200 --> 00:22:49.440
It meant his confession wasn't just echoing his brother's words.

358
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He knew things only the killer could know. When he

359
00:22:52.200 --> 00:22:55.759
spoke about the Hobbs murders, he gave the detectives his

360
00:22:55.880 --> 00:23:00.200
motive in killing simple terms. He killed them, he indicated

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00:23:00.799 --> 00:23:04.519
because they had seen his face. At one point. By

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00:23:04.599 --> 00:23:08.519
Rigaldo's account, Anderson said he was already dead, that he

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00:23:08.599 --> 00:23:11.319
was ready for the penitentiary. It was the voice of

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00:23:11.359 --> 00:23:15.759
someone who had stopped expecting any other future. Those words

365
00:23:15.759 --> 00:23:18.359
spoken in that room would become the spine of the

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00:23:18.359 --> 00:23:21.200
case against him. They would also become the thing his

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00:23:21.359 --> 00:23:25.880
defense fought hardest to take away. Because a confession, once given,

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00:23:26.440 --> 00:23:30.119
is not automatically allowed to stand. It has to survive

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00:23:30.200 --> 00:23:34.480
scrutiny first, and that fight was coming before any jury

370
00:23:34.559 --> 00:23:38.400
was ever seated. There was a preliminary hearing. This is

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the stage where the court decides whether the state even

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00:23:41.279 --> 00:23:45.200
has enough to proceed, whether the evidence is sufficient to

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00:23:45.279 --> 00:23:49.039
send a defendant to trial at all. For Joshua Anderson,

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that hearing brought a detective named vic Rigaldo to the

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stand to lay out what Anderson had said in the

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00:23:55.799 --> 00:24:01.359
interrogation room. Anderson's chief public defender pushed back hard. He

377
00:24:01.440 --> 00:24:04.640
filed a motion to suppress, an attempt to keep his

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00:24:04.839 --> 00:24:08.440
client's statements out of the case entirely to argue that

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00:24:08.519 --> 00:24:12.519
the confession should never reach a jury's ears. Paulsa County

380
00:24:12.759 --> 00:24:18.400
Special Judge Cliff Smith denied that motion. The confession would stand,

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00:24:18.640 --> 00:24:22.599
and with it admitted, Smith ordered Joshua Anderson held for

382
00:24:22.680 --> 00:24:26.119
trial on four counts of first degree murder plus arson

383
00:24:26.240 --> 00:24:29.319
and assault with a dangerous weapon. It was at the

384
00:24:29.359 --> 00:24:33.759
same hearing that the chilling fragments of Anderson's own attitude

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00:24:33.920 --> 00:24:38.039
entered the record. He had told detectives, by Rigaldo's account,

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00:24:38.440 --> 00:24:41.240
that he was already dead, that he was ready for

387
00:24:41.279 --> 00:24:46.200
the penitentiary, a defendant in effect concealing his own future

388
00:24:46.319 --> 00:24:50.119
before the trial had even begun. The actual reckoning came

389
00:24:50.200 --> 00:24:53.160
in stages across the autumn of two thousand and eight.

390
00:24:53.680 --> 00:24:57.640
The first and most serious trial centered on the Hobbs murders.

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00:24:57.960 --> 00:25:01.279
It began on October twenty seven, second two thousand and eight,

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00:25:01.400 --> 00:25:06.720
in Tulsa County District Court before Judge Tom Gillert. Anderson

393
00:25:06.759 --> 00:25:09.920
faced two counts of first degree murder for Hubert and

394
00:25:10.039 --> 00:25:14.720
Rosemary Pops, plus a count of first degree arson for

395
00:25:14.839 --> 00:25:19.039
the fire. His defense argued the way defense attorneys must.

396
00:25:19.559 --> 00:25:22.519
His public defender pointed out what the state didn't have.

397
00:25:23.240 --> 00:25:27.160
No fingerprints tying him to the scene, no physical arson

398
00:25:27.240 --> 00:25:31.400
evidence laying the fire at his feet. The defense asked

399
00:25:31.440 --> 00:25:34.759
the jury to see the gaps to hold the prosecution

400
00:25:35.319 --> 00:25:39.119
to the higher bar the law demands. But the jury

401
00:25:39.160 --> 00:25:42.440
had heard the confession, they had watched and listened to

402
00:25:42.559 --> 00:25:47.240
Anderson and his own recorded words acknowledge what he'd done.

403
00:25:47.839 --> 00:25:51.319
They had heard the testimony that pieced the night together.

404
00:25:51.920 --> 00:25:55.400
After two days of trial and roughly two hours of deliberation,

405
00:25:55.680 --> 00:25:59.559
the jury returned its verdict guilty guilty on both counts

406
00:25:59.559 --> 00:26:03.079
of murder guilty of arson for the murders of Hubert

407
00:26:03.079 --> 00:26:07.319
and Rosemary Hobbs. The jury recommended two life sentences without

408
00:26:07.319 --> 00:26:11.119
the possibility of parole for the arson, an additional term

409
00:26:11.200 --> 00:26:14.480
of years. That was the first reckoning. The second came

410
00:26:14.519 --> 00:26:19.039
weeks later, on December eighth, two thousand and eight. Joshua

411
00:26:19.160 --> 00:26:23.319
Anderson stood again, this time for the killings of Gastaro

412
00:26:23.640 --> 00:26:27.880
Tveis and Christopher Modro. He did not fight those charges.

413
00:26:28.160 --> 00:26:31.359
He pleaded guilty to both murders, accepting two more life

414
00:26:31.440 --> 00:26:35.039
terms along with additional time for the assault charge tied

415
00:26:35.079 --> 00:26:38.640
to the violence. When the math was finished, it came

416
00:26:38.720 --> 00:26:42.799
to this four counts of first green murder, four consecutive

417
00:26:42.920 --> 00:26:47.319
life sentences without parole, plus thirty five years on top

418
00:26:47.880 --> 00:26:52.000
for the arson and the assault. Joshua Julius Anderson, by

419
00:26:52.039 --> 00:26:55.079
then twenty one years old, would spend the rest of

420
00:26:55.079 --> 00:26:58.920
his life in an Oklahoma prison with no road back out.

421
00:26:59.480 --> 00:27:02.599
There's one more thread to this case, and it's the

422
00:27:02.599 --> 00:27:06.160
one that left some of the victim's families uneasy. Given

423
00:27:06.240 --> 00:27:10.279
the sheer brutality, given five linked killings and the whoreor

424
00:27:10.319 --> 00:27:14.759
inside the Hobbs home, many people assumed prosecutors would pursue

425
00:27:14.759 --> 00:27:18.400
the death penalty. They didn't. The reason was a legal

426
00:27:18.480 --> 00:27:24.319
determination that Joshua Anderson was intellectually disabled. In the language

427
00:27:24.319 --> 00:27:27.799
of that era's court, he was found to be, in

428
00:27:27.839 --> 00:27:32.599
the legal sense, mentally retarded. That finding carried enormous weight

429
00:27:32.799 --> 00:27:36.400
because of the United States Supreme Court decision in the

430
00:27:36.400 --> 00:27:40.319
two thousand and two case of Atkins versus Virginia. The

431
00:27:40.400 --> 00:27:45.200
court ruled that executing a person with intellectual disability violates

432
00:27:45.240 --> 00:27:50.079
the Constitution's band on cruel and unusual punishment. It is

433
00:27:50.200 --> 00:27:54.359
under American law simply not permitted. So for once that

434
00:27:54.519 --> 00:27:58.200
determination was made about Anderson, the death penalty was off

435
00:27:58.240 --> 00:28:03.160
the table, not as mercy as constitutional requirement. For some,

436
00:28:03.920 --> 00:28:07.200
that was an unbearable outcome. They looked at what was

437
00:28:07.279 --> 00:28:11.440
done to the Hobbs family, to Devias, to Modro and

438
00:28:11.480 --> 00:28:15.359
they could not reconcile it with any limit on punishment.

439
00:28:15.799 --> 00:28:20.119
For others, it was the law working exactly as it should,

440
00:28:20.519 --> 00:28:25.039
even when the defendant is monstrous. Especially then, the protection

441
00:28:25.279 --> 00:28:29.200
isn't there because the worst offenders deserve our sympathy. It's

442
00:28:29.240 --> 00:28:32.599
there because a society that wants to call its justice

443
00:28:32.680 --> 00:28:36.279
fair has to apply its rules even to the people

444
00:28:36.440 --> 00:28:40.200
it would most like to make an exception for. Both

445
00:28:40.200 --> 00:28:44.279
of those reactions are human, both are honest. The law

446
00:28:44.319 --> 00:28:48.519
made its choice, and Joshua Anderson lives. But living in

447
00:28:48.559 --> 00:28:53.920
his case means something very specific. For consecutive life sentences

448
00:28:53.960 --> 00:28:57.400
without parole is not a number designed to ever be

449
00:28:57.519 --> 00:29:01.160
served out. It's a wall. It means there is no

450
00:29:01.319 --> 00:29:05.359
parole board in his future, no calendar counting down to

451
00:29:05.400 --> 00:29:09.759
a release date, no scenario short of a successful appeal

452
00:29:10.200 --> 00:29:13.440
that returns him to the street. He went into Oklahoma

453
00:29:13.559 --> 00:29:16.799
prison system as a young man in his twenties, and

454
00:29:16.880 --> 00:29:19.440
the sentence is built so that the only way he

455
00:29:19.559 --> 00:29:23.720
leaves is in a box. For the families, that knowledge

456
00:29:23.799 --> 00:29:27.359
is a complicated comfort. It is not the death penalty

457
00:29:27.559 --> 00:29:30.920
some of them wanted, but it is permanence. It means

458
00:29:30.960 --> 00:29:33.680
they will not spend the rest of their lives bracing

459
00:29:33.759 --> 00:29:36.960
for a parole hearing, rehearsing their grief in front of

460
00:29:37.000 --> 00:29:40.599
a board, fighting again and again to keep him where

461
00:29:40.640 --> 00:29:43.920
he is. He remains in the custody of the Oklahoma

462
00:29:44.000 --> 00:29:48.400
Department of Corrections, serving those four consecutive life terms with

463
00:29:48.480 --> 00:29:52.079
no possibility of parole. He will not be released when

464
00:29:52.160 --> 00:29:55.640
it was over. People did the arithmetic, and the number

465
00:29:55.799 --> 00:29:59.759
was staggering. By the time of his arrest, Joshua Anderson

466
00:29:59.799 --> 00:30:04.079
was connected to roughly one out of every three homicides

467
00:30:04.160 --> 00:30:07.359
in the entire city of Tulsa for that year, one

468
00:30:07.400 --> 00:30:12.200
young man, one small neighborhood, a third of the city's killings.

469
00:30:12.240 --> 00:30:16.000
And then, just as suddenly as it began, it stopped.

470
00:30:16.279 --> 00:30:19.720
The body stopped appearing on North Quaker and the streets

471
00:30:19.720 --> 00:30:22.920
around it. The neighborhood that had spent a winner holding

472
00:30:22.960 --> 00:30:26.759
its breath was finally able to taxail. But exhaling is

473
00:30:26.839 --> 00:30:30.960
not the same as healing. Five people were taken Tobias Junior,

474
00:30:31.519 --> 00:30:37.480
Christopher Modro, David Gilbert, Hubert Hobbes, and Rosemary Hobbs, men

475
00:30:37.519 --> 00:30:42.400
and women young and old, who had families, routines, ordinary

476
00:30:42.440 --> 00:30:46.079
mornings they expected to keep, having each of them reduced

477
00:30:46.079 --> 00:30:49.559
in moments to a name in a case file and

478
00:30:49.599 --> 00:30:52.599
a wound that their loved ones still carry say their

479
00:30:52.680 --> 00:30:55.759
names slowly, because the man who killed them counted on

480
00:30:55.920 --> 00:30:59.279
us not to. He chose victims in a place the

481
00:30:59.359 --> 00:31:03.039
wider city he had already learned to overlook. He counted

482
00:31:03.119 --> 00:31:06.759
on the noise of an overburdened neighborhood to swallow the

483
00:31:06.799 --> 00:31:10.680
sound of what he did. For a while, it nearly worked.

484
00:31:11.079 --> 00:31:14.039
It would be easy to make this story only about

485
00:31:14.079 --> 00:31:18.319
the monster at its center, about the bully, the confession,

486
00:31:18.799 --> 00:31:23.119
the unthinkable scene in the Hobbs home. He is, after all,

487
00:31:23.480 --> 00:31:26.799
why these names are gathered here. But the deeper truth

488
00:31:26.839 --> 00:31:29.920
of a case like this is quieter and harder. It's

489
00:31:29.960 --> 00:31:33.599
about how violence concentrates in the places we've decided to

490
00:31:33.640 --> 00:31:36.559
look away from. How fear can keep a whole neighborhood

491
00:31:36.640 --> 00:31:39.759
silent while one person turns it into a hunting ground.

492
00:31:40.119 --> 00:31:44.160
How the thread that finally caught him wasn't justice arriving

493
00:31:44.200 --> 00:31:48.880
from outside, but a brother in an interrogation room choosing

494
00:31:48.960 --> 00:31:52.839
to speak. Joshua Anderson will die in prison. The law

495
00:31:52.880 --> 00:31:55.759
made sure of that. What it could not do was

496
00:31:55.799 --> 00:31:59.799
give back the five lives that bought his i' Maya Hanson,

497
00:32:00.319 --> 00:32:04.839
And this has been among monsters,