Murder for Hire When an attempted murder landed Michael Koenig of Oak Orchard in prison, he hired a hitman to kill the two key witnesses to the shooting. But the hitman he contracted had other plans. Delaware Today, December 2002 Erik Carroll sat in the tiny room at the Sussex Correctional Institution chatting with his cellmate. Michael Koenig, then 29, was a small, scraggly looking guy whose usual dark five o'clock shadow was the only thing that made him look his age. Their conversation had started out light, but now the talking had stopped, and Carroll didn't know how to respond. Koenig had just offered him $20,000 in cash, plus some drugs and a 1983 Ford pickup truck. The bounty would be awarded if he could arrange the murders of two men Koenig had tried to kill less than a year before. The following chronology was compiled from court testimony and interviews with the victims and with Delaware State Police detectives: The First Attempted Murder The poorest and most densely populated areas in the working-class town of Oak Orchard, a few miles east of Millsboro, are its cramped trailer parks, which in recent years have attracted what Bill and Bonnie Flynn, owners of Oak Orchard West Mobile Homes, have considered "undesirable tenants," according to Sussex County court records. A State Police officer calls Oak Orchard West a "troubled community," with a history of nuisance crime and drug activity. Over the past two years, the Flynns have tried to force out undesirables by not renewing their leases or by allowing them to expire. Last year, Michael A. Koenig Jr. landed on the Flynns' "undesirable" list. Their lawyers, in court documents, allege that Koenig made threatening phone calls to the Flynns, and they subsequently refused to renew his lease. However, provisions in Delaware's Landlord-Tenant Code and the Mobile Home Lots and Leases Act prevented the Flynns from kicking him out immediately. As of July 30, 2001, Koenig's lease had not yet expired. It was a cooler-than-normal Monday evening, courtesy of some mid-day rain that had swept over Sussex County. Jim Fowle lay in his bedroom watching professional wrestling on TV with his 3-year-old niece. In the living room, Jim's brother David and his wife Christina sat watching TV. Christina rocked their 8-month-old son to sleep. The mobile home was a recent purchase. The Fowles had lived in Oak Orchard West for just five weeks, four days, and some odd hours. Shortly before 9:45 p.m., they heard the first gunshots. "David," Christina said. "Somebody's shooting." "Nah, it's your make-believe," he told her. But it wasn't. A bullet tore through the window screen of their mobile home, streaking through the living room and out the back window. It had zipped by just inches from where Christina held the baby. A few seconds later, the Fowles heard a tremendous crash as another bullet burst through the trailer wall and into a framed photograph of David and Christina that hung on the wall. It ricocheted off the ceiling of their tiny living room and embedded in their kitchen cabinet. The glasses inside the cabinet shattered. Then there was silence. Jim ran into the living room. David and Jim went outside onto their porch to look for the source of the gunshots, but didn't see anyone. Christina called 911. She also called her next-door neighbor, Scotty O'Reilly, who came to the house a few minutes later. Ten minutes went by. While Christina and her children stayed huddled inside, the brothers stood on the porch with O'Reilly, examining where the bullets busted through the mobile home. Then, out of the corner of his eye, David spotted two men walking through his small patch of freshly-mowed yard toward the porch. A pit bull tagged along at their heels. Neither of the Fowles recognized the two men. "Look at 'em," David whispered to the others. O'Reilly shined a flashlight in the direction of the men and saw what appeared to be a gun in one man's hand. "Watch his hand," David said. "Watch the dog." The man with the gun, still approaching, yelled to the pit bull, "Git 'em. Git 'em." Jim shouted at the two men, demanding that they get off the property. The man with the gun reached the first step of the porch. He had been drinking heavily, and earlier in the evening he had used marijuana and cocaine. Now he was angry and stood only four feet away from the Fowles. He looked up, pointed the gun at Jim, and fired twice at point-blank range. One bullet entered Jim's stomach. The other bullet hit his leg. Then, the man swung the gun toward O'Reilly and pulled the trigger. It clicked. The gun jammed. David and O'Reilly scrambled to pull Jim inside the house and control the bleeding. The man with the gun backed up, renegotiated the weapon, jammed a new magazine in it, and fired off several more shots, but none entered the Fowles' house. He fired off one round toward a neighbor's sliding glass door, shattering it, then fled to his own mobile home, just 100 feet behind the Fowles' trailer, with his friend and the pit bull. Police arrived at 10 p.m. and spotted the men cowering inside the trailer, but neither man would surrender. The police evacuated nearby mobile homes and the Delaware State Police Special Operations Response Team began to negotiate with the men. For nearly eight hours, State Police Det. Doug Hudson tried to get the men to surrender, with no success. At a little before 6 a.m., the State Police decided to force the men out. A canister of stun gas was hurled into the house. Moments later, police dragged Michael Koenig, the gunman, and his friend Willie Reynolds out of Koenig's mobile home and handcuffed them. Detectives searched the house. Dunked into the toilet tank in Koenig's bathroom was the .38 handgun used to shoot Jim Fowle. The Second Attempted Murder Pat Keys will kill you for the right price. He's a triple-check sort of hitman, the kind who isn't satisfied until every detail has been nailed down, every escape route memorized. If you can make the payments, he can make your problems disappear. It's an attractive sales pitch. Pat Keys knows Oak Orchard West. He drove through the mobile home community late one night in May, slowly idling down one winding street. He stared straight at the houses of the two men whom he had been contracted to kill. Inside, they and their families slept soundly, not knowing that David Fowle and his neighbor Scotty O'Reilly were the targets. It had started out as the usual prison talk — each cellmate asking, "So what are you in for?" Michael Koenig had spent the past eight months trying not to be in for anything. He was released from jail a week after the shooting, says State Police Det. Kelly Wells, who responded to the shooting. Koenig's bail was set low at his hearing, despite arguments by Wells, who insisted that Koenig still posed a risk to the victims. He remained free until he skipped his trial, which was scheduled for March 13, 2002. Police threatened to seize Koenig's father's house to pay the forfeited bail money. Under pressure from his family, Koenig gave himself up at the Sussex Superior Courthouse on April 5, 2002. Now, in the latter half of April, he sat in his cell with Carroll, who wanted to know what he was in for. Koenig told him bluntly that he was awaiting trial, set for May 2002, for shooting a man. There was no motive other than Koenig's bad temper and substance abuse problems. As their conversation continued, Carroll mentioned that in a few days, he would be getting out of prison. Koenig's ears perked up. Carroll's upcoming release was an opportunity for Koenig to have an ally outside the prison with the mobility to carry out a deadly plan. That's when Koenig made the offer. He'd pay Carroll $20,000, plus some drugs and a pickup truck, if he could arrange the murders of the two key witnesses set to testify in his upcoming attempted murder trial. Koenig slipped Carroll the telephone number of a close friend, who would serve as the contact person once Carroll got out of prison. The two cellmates agreed on a code name that Carroll would use when contacting the friend. The code name was "Pat Keys." A few days later, Carroll was released from Sussex Correctional Institute. *** Josh Cannon, then 24, drove to Georgetown from his home in Ocean View to visit his friend Michael Koenig at the Sussex Correctional Institution. Koenig, paranoid that the phone lines were tapped and that prison officials were listening, refused to talk on the telephone, so his friends had to visit him in person. Koenig and Cannon met in the visitation room. Koenig told Cannon that a man named Pat Keys would contact him in the next few days about carrying out the murders. Cannon agreed to help. A few days later, on Monday, April 29, he received the call. "This is Pat," the caller said. "I'm coming down to Delaware." Cannon was so excited to hear from the hitman that they arranged to meet that same night, in the parking lot of a McDonald's in South Bethany Beach. Cannon was already waiting when Keys pulled into the parking lot. Cannon climbed into the passenger seat of Keys' vehicle and the two drove to Millsboro, where they picked up another friend, Todd Hudson. The three men then drove to the Oak Orchard West mobile home park. The purpose of their dead-of-night excursion was to show the hitman where the targets lived. They directed Keys down the street and pointed to the mobile homes owned by Fowle and O'Reilly. They had identified Keys' targets. Now they wanted to know: Would Keys really go through with the killings? Keys slowly pulled his shirt up, revealing a gun tucked into his pants. That was all the men needed to know. Now it was time to talk payment. "How we gonna pay for this? What are we gonna do?" Keys asked the men. Cannon and Hudson glanced at each other. Keys could see that the men were getting antsy, now that they realized he was serious about carrying out the killings. They made excuses: They didn't have the money up front. They'd have to make a couple phone calls. Keys was getting impatient. "Tomorrow," he said. The next day, Cannon answered the phone and this time seemed a little less excited to hear from Keys. Keys wanted to meet in Rehoboth Beach to receive the payment. Cannon, now scared about what he had gotten himself into, refused to meet with the hitman. What's more, he told Keys that all he could offer was the pickup truck. No money, no drugs. The two men haggled over the phone, and finally, Cannon told Keys that he'd arrange for another friend to drop the pickup truck off at the parking lot of Hocker's Grocery Store in Clarksville. A few hours later, Shannon Wolf pulled out of her trailer park in Ocean View in a beat-up 1983 pickup truck with the back windows blown out. Inside the truck sat her two children, now ages 5 and 9. Wolf had a lot at stake in this truck. Koenig was her fiancé and the father of her children. If the hit could be carried out successfully, their family might stay together. If not, Koenig might be in prison for years. She drove a quarter-mile to the north side of Hocker's Grocery Store and parked the truck in the parking lot with the keys still in the ignition. She and the children walked into the pharmacy, and after a few minutes, they exited the store and Wolf guided her children across a field toward her trailer park. A few moments later, Cannon received a telephone call from Keys. "Hey, I don't know where this place is, where the truck is. I can't find it," he said to Cannon. "Can you just meet me at the McDonald's and show me? You don't have to go there — just drive me by the place?" Cannon agreed. Within a half hour, he pulled into the McDonald's parking lot, and there stood Keys, the triple-check hitman. Cannon walked over to greet him. That's when Keys tackled him. *** "Pat Keys" was the name Eric Carroll, Michael Koenig's cellmate, said he'd go by. But what does Eric Carroll look like? Is he black or white, tall or short, skinny or muscular? You don't know. And neither did Josh Cannon. When the two cellmates first talked about the murder of the two witnesses, Carroll said he was soon to be released from the Sussex Correctional Institution, and that was true. But Carroll wasn't going far. He knew he would immediately be sent to Maryland to serve jailtime for other charges. Yet he played along with Koenig, discussing the murder as if he would soon be a free man, accepting the phone number of Josh Cannon and promising to contact Cannon under the alias "Pat Keys." But if Carroll was in prison the whole time (and he was), then there must have been another man walking around free, a man who knew about the murder plot, knew Cannon's phone number, and who went by the name Pat Keys. Cannon — having never met Koenig's cellmate — had no idea that he was making murder-for-hire arrangements with an imposter. On Tuesday, April 30, 2002, that imposter wrestled Cannon to the ground and handcuffed him. At the same time, Delaware State Police officers swarmed the houses of Hudson and Wolf and arrested them as co-conspirators. The Twist Several days after Carroll was released from prison in Delaware and transported to Maryland, the Delaware State Police received a call from the Maryland Department of Corrections. Carroll had informed prison officials that his former cellmate was planning to kill two witnesses in his upcoming trial. When the State Police questioned Carroll, he told them about the hitman plot and gave them a phone number — Josh Cannon's phone number. Koenig was right to have been paranoid about prison officials listening in on him: There were wire taps, just not where he expected. As soon as the State Police got wind of the murder plot, they wire-tapped the prison visitation room. They were listening the day Koenig passed on the name Pat Keys to his friend. At that point, an undercover officer stepped in and posed as Keys. The initial phone call to Cannon, the ride-along with Cannon and Hudson — it was all an undercover State Police officer posing as Eric Carroll posing as Pat Keys. Cannon and Hudson were charged with criminal solicitation. Wolf was charged with criminal conspiracy. All three were jailed after failing to post bail. The day after their arrests, Koenig was also charged as part of the conspiracy. In August all four co-defendants pled guilty as part of a plea agreement, with Koenig facing 18 years to life in prison. On Oct. 4, 2002, Koenig was sentenced in Sussex County Superior Court to 49 years in jail. Cannon and Hudson each received a five-year sentence, and Wolf was sentenced to two years. All of the co-defendants were ordered to have no contact with each other or with any of the victims. The Epilogue David Fowle can't wait to move out of Oak Orchard West. He just started seeing a psychiatrist, and he's had two heart attacks since the shooting; he attributes them to stress over the ordeal. "I have a reminder in the wall," he says, pointing to the bullet hole behind his TV. "I have a reminder in the ceiling. I have a reminder every day of what happened last year." Jim Fowle also has a reminder: a scar on his stomach from where the bullet entered below his rib cage. He is now back to work — he's a bail loader for the Crowell Papermill in Newport — but each day when he wakes up, he has to look at that scar. David, a heating and air-conditioning repairman, wants to stay in the area so he can keep his job, but by the time any of the four murder-for-hire participants are released from prison, the Fowles want to have long since left Oak Orchard West. The police have offered to help his family move, he says, but right now, he's not too happy with the police. "I should've had the right to know," David Fowle says. "I should've had the right to know, and then I could've gotten the kids and [Christina] out of here." But the Fowles didn't find out about the intended murders or the undercover operation until after Wolf, Cannon and Hudson had been arrested and jailed. In fact, less than a day after the State Police phoned David to tell him about the arrests, the story ran in local papers. David says the police should have taken stronger measures to protect his family from Cannon and Hudson, who knew where they lived and wanted them dead. The State Police defends its management of the case. Det. Doug Hudson (no relation to Todd Hudson) says because of the covert nature of the investigation and the risk to undercover detectives, the potential victims would only have been alerted if they were in imminent danger. Since neither Cannon nor Todd Hudson planned to carry out the murders themselves, police didn't perceive them as an imminent threat. O'Reilly, the other intended victim, says Koenig disrupted not only his life, but also the lives of his three children. "I can't understand it," he says. "My book said to turn the other cheek, and I did — and he slapped that one too." David Fowle's yard is still well-kept. It doesn't get much traffic, though. There's a small "No Trespassing" sign near the edge of the property, about 15 feet from the trailer. Neither the Fowles' children nor O'Reilly's children are allowed outside to play. Shaun Gallagher is Delaware Today's managing editor.