Despite being charged with aggravated arson and insurance fraud, Paul Hicks took a plea deal and pleaded no contest to only a misdemeanor, never serving jail time.
Where this was said
At 27:20 · chapter starts 26:00
Terri Sweet, who had shared a phone with Paul and was McCune's prime candidate for the masked arsonist, died of alcohol-related causes the very day before McCune arranged to depose her. The mystery figure in the video would never be definitively identified. After McCune turned his findings over to police in 2019, Paul was charged with aggravated arson, insurance fraud, and perjury. But three years of legal delays culminated in a misdemeanor no-contest plea — no jail, no felony. For investigators working the Regina Hicks cold case, it was a devastating blow: they had hoped a felony conviction and prison sentence would loosen witnesses' tongues.
Despite a mountain of evidence — custom face masks, spoofed phone records, staged video — Paul Hicks never went to jail for the arson. After three years of legal delays he pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor. The investigators trying to solve Regina's murder were counting on a felony conviction to leverage new witnesses.
The Huron County coroner originally ruled Regina's death 'undetermined'; 24 years later investigators persuaded him to reclassify it as homicide, unlocking the murder case.
Before Uber, Kalanick built a peer-to-peer file-sharing system and was sued for a quarter of a trillion dollars by 33 major media companies.
CIA operative Edwin Wilson, part of the illegal arms network used by Oliver North, was sentenced to 52 years for supplying Libya with 10,000 machine guns and 20 tons of C4.
US prosecutors sought a 186-year prison sentence for Kim Dotcom, largely because of his financial support for WikiLeaks.
Mario Tabraue, a central figure in Monsters of God linked to drug trafficking and murder, was sentenced to over 100 years in prison but served only 12 years.
Zelig Williams disappeared on October 3rd, 2024 after leaving his mother's home in Columbia, South Carolina and has not been seen since.
Dateline: Missing in America Season 5 features six new unsolved missing-persons mysteries, hoping a listener may hold a crucial clue.
At a high school party, Strickland broke one victim's nose, jaw, and knocked out teeth requiring multiple reconstructive surgeries, resulting in two felony GBI charges.
Joyce LePage's murder has remained unsolved for 55 years despite active investigation from the start.
Joyce's own letter revealed that Mark Wadley had once stayed at a mental institution for trying to strangle people — a detail investigators apparently never followed up on.
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