This is a rerun of the episode that originally ran on February 6, 2025 with a newly recorded introduction with new information about the traffic stop that led to Matthew Huttle's death. Sources:https://www.indystar.com/story/news/crime/2025/02/27/body-cam-footage-jan-6-defendants-traffic-stop-shooting-death-released-matthew-huttle-jasper-county/80731312007/https://www.in.gov/sheriffs/jasper/files/Jasper-County-OIS-Final-Report.pdfSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
I know I left you with a bit of a cliffhanger last week, and I'm so sorry I don't have the second half of that story for you this week.
I thought maybe it was the subject matter giving me a stomach ache at first.
But I spent half of this week laid up with a stomach virus, and...
There was just no way to write that story the way I wanted to in the time that I had left after I finished puking.
That'll have to wait until next week.
So we've got a rerun this week, but don't switch it off just yet.
We do have a little update to the episode for you here at the top.
The episode originally ran a month ago, so it may still be fresh in your mind.
It's the story of Matthew Huddle, the January 6th writer who was shot and killed during a traffic stop.
We have some of those answers now.
Here's where I left things a month ago.
It's unwise to speculate about the altercation that may have occurred in the minutes before Huddle was shot and killed by a Jasper County Sheriff's deputy.
I don't know what happened there on the side of Indiana State Road 14.
We don't know what was said or why things escalated.
Or where exactly the deputy saw the gun.
But I do know that Matthew Huddle was due back in court next week for a status conference on a stack of still unresolved felony cases for driving without a license.
Just days after getting his federal pardon, he was probably happy for his Uncle Dale.
But he'd already done his federal time, and now he was looking down the barrel at another stay in the county jail.
And when those blue lights came on behind him, he probably knew that this would be yet another felony charge.
After the episode originally aired, I saw some listeners expressing displeasure, disgust even, that I'd framed his story as a tragic one.
I'm not here how to tell you how you should feel.
That's your business.
But for me, his story...
Is sad.
He wasn't an evil man.
I wouldn't go as far as to say he was a good man.
He had a slew of DUIs.
He had some history of domestic violence allegations and a stint in jail for child abuse.
He stormed the Capitol.
He owed a lot of child support.
I don't think he's a person I would have liked.
But he was also a man who struggled with alcohol addiction.
And regardless of what he'd done, his death left two children without any chance of ever reconciling with their father.
And for me, at least, there's never any peace in knowing a person's life ended violently, particularly when the cause of death was a bullet from a police officer's gun.
I have to believe that people can change, that redemption and atonement are always possible for those who sincerely strive.
To earn that.
But a dead man cannot make amends.
That possibility is gone now.
And that makes it a tragedy, in my mind.
But however you feel about the way things ended for Matthew Huddle, we do at least have some answers now that the Jasper County Sheriff's Office has released the body camera footage of the traffic stop that led to the fatal shooting.
And it is, for the most part, exactly what I thought it would be.
The deputy stopped Huddle for speeding, but with his pending felony cases for driving without a license, getting caught doing it again would lead to even more felony charges and even more jail time.
And he couldn't bear the thought of it.
The footage of the traffic stop shows it was, all things considered, going fairly well in the beginning.
Hello.
How you doing?
Good, how are you today?
Pretty well.
The reason I'm pulling yours is for 70 and a 55. Any reason for going that fast today?
No, sir.
I'm just keeping up with traffic.
Okay, okay.
Fair enough.
You got your license and registration on you?
Can I put it in parts?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Huddle had been pulled over for speeding.
The deputy was in good spirits, and he wasn't approaching the car confrontationally.
I just want to let you know that I'm a January 6th defendant.
What do you mean?
I stormed the Capitol.
I'm waiting on my pardon.
Really?
Yeah, and I can't really afford to get into any trouble right now.
Okay, I understand.
I am driving without a license right now.
Okay, so why are you doing that then?
And early in the interaction, as he's producing his identification for the officer, Huddle raises the issue of his ongoing legal problems.
He told the deputy he was still working on getting his license back, but...
I'm actually not entirely sure that's true.
He had filed a case back in 2022 seeking the reinstatement of his license, but court records show he'd withdrawn that petition voluntarily in early 2023, probably because he was preoccupied during that time with his federal criminal case.
I can't find any indication he'd filed a renewed petition to have his license reinstated after he wrapped up his federal case.
But the officer's demeanor Doesn't really change.
He's keeping things light, chatting with Huddle about the dog in the backseat of the van, and then he returned to the cruiser with Huddle's documents.
And at this point, he knows he's going to be making an arrest.
Whatever comes back from dispatch, Huddle has already told the officer that he's driving without a license.
So he radios for animal control to meet him on the scene to take Huddle's dog.
And he walks back to the minivan, and he asks Huddle to step out of the car.
And as the two men stand behind Huddle's van, the deputy explains that he is going to have to place him under arrest.
Okay, so today you're getting off of the verbal warning for the speed.
However, you're a habitual traffic violator.
I know.
Which means that you are at a felony status for driving while suspended.
Uh-huh.
So today you are going to come with me.
Well, I can't, I can't.
You're going to have to, okay?
You're going to come with me today, all right?
No, I can't go to jail for this, sir.
You're going to have to come.
Can I get a ride?
No.
And at this point, Huddle looks visibly distressed.
He looks very anxious.
He's picking at his cuticles, and he's trying to find some way out of this situation.
And the officer explains that there's really nothing he can do.
Maybe if this were a misdemeanor, they could find some other resolution, but there's no wiggle room here.
Because it's a felony.
And as the officer starts to ask him to turn around and put his hands behind his back, Huddle makes a break for it, back to the driver's door of his van.
As Huddle crawls into the vehicle, the deputy is inches behind him, saying, Don't you do it, buddy!
And he's reaching for him and grabbing at his jacket.
And the officer begins to shout, No, no, no!
And the video at this point is obscured by a large, pixelated rectangle.
You don't see Huddle reach for the gun.
But it seems like it may have been in the glove compartment or somewhere on the passenger side, maybe on the floor.
And you hear Huddle say, I'm shooting myself.
The deputy cries out again, No, no, no!
It's just ten seconds.
From the time Huddle is scrambling back into the front seat of the van, To the sound of the five shots from the deputy's gun as he's retreating backwards away from the door, it's just ten seconds.
And you can't see most of what's actually happening.
You can't see where Huddle pulled the gun from or where he was pointing it once it was in his hand.
And that's all that was said.
Huddle says he's going to shoot himself.
And the deputy shouts no over and over again.
And then it's over.
The state police investigation into the incident has concluded, and it was presented to the Clinton County Prosecutor's Office for independent review.
They found the deputy's actions were legally justifiable under Indiana state law, and no charges will be filed.
Matthew Huddle is dead.
We can't know if he would have shot himself or the officer.
We can't know if he would have appeared in court two weeks after that traffic stop for his still-pending felony cases.
We can't know if he would have made amends, paid his child support, tried to be a better father, or tried to find a place in the right-wing media ecosystem that has now made him a martyr.
We'll never know.
Because he died there on the side of State Road 14. That's the end of his story.
And here's the episode where I tried to tell the beginning of it.
I'll be back next week with a new episode of Weird Little Guys.
On January 26, 2025, Matthew Huddle died.
That much we know for certain.
Usually I tell you a story that's old enough that the ink is not only dry, That's not the case today.
As I'm writing this, there are still questions left unanswered.
There is a state police investigation into an officer-involved shooting still underway.
But Matthew Huddle is dead.
That much we know.
Just days before he died, He'd gotten some long-awaited good news.
His uncle Dale was coming home.
Both men were among the nearly 1,600 people pardoned by Donald Trump in one of his first actions after being sworn in as president.
Matthew had already served his six-month sentence.
But when the pardons came through, Dale Huddle was just a few months into a two-and-a-half-year term at a prison in Illinois.
On the afternoon that he died...
Matthew Huddle was driving somewhere in Jasper County, Indiana.
I don't know where he was going, but I do know he wasn't supposed to be driving.
And according to the Jasper County Sheriff, he was speeding.
I can only assume that the altercation that allegedly ensued began after the sheriff's deputy discovered that Huddle did not have a valid driver's license.
The deputy claims Huddle resisted when he tried to place him under arrest.
And it was during this altercation that the sheriff says the deputy discovered that Huddle was in possession of a firearm, which he was not legally allowed to have.
The final moments of Matthew Huddle's life will, eventually, be settled in some sort of official report.
Maybe they'll release the deputy's body-worn camera footage.
Maybe his family will file a lawsuit.
The final page hasn't been written yet.
I don't have the answers.
All I have is a sad story about a man who believed in nothing and died on the side of Indiana State Road 14.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
Weird Little Guys At noon, On January 6, 2021, President Donald Trump took the stage at the Ellipse, a generally unremarkable patch of grass between the White House and the Washington Monument.
More than 50,000 of his supporters had been standing out in the cold all morning, waiting to hear from him.
For months, he'd stoked the fires of a growing conspiracy.
The election had been stolen.
He gave speeches, held rallies, fired off late-night tweets, and filed lawsuits.
For those who wanted to believe, there seemed to be mountains of evidence of a deep and systemic rot.
But the lawsuits were failing.
The votes were counted, and time was running out.
Today was the day that Congress would have the final say in the 2020 election, and less than two miles away, legislators were taking their seats in the Capitol building.
The crowd at the Ellipse had come from all over the country to be a part of history.
And as their president spoke, many of them heard the permission they'd been waiting for.
And we fight.
We fight like hell.
And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.
This profound corruption would have to be excised by force before this grave injustice could be done.
He'd all but confirmed that for them.
And then, in the final seconds of his speech, before he was played off the stage by his favorite song, the Village People's Gay Anthem, YMCA, he gave the crowd their marching orders.
So, let's walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.
I want to thank you all.
God bless you and God bless America.
Thank you all for being here.
This is incredible.
Thank you very much.
Some in that crowd, perhaps anticipating the instructions he would give at the end of his hour-long speech, never even heard him say that line.
They'd already started walking the mile and a half to their final destination that day, the Capitol building.
You almost certainly already know.
How that day ended.
Even if you live in a cave in the woods without access to the internet, you can't possibly have escaped this news.
Thousands of Trump supporters descended on the United States Capitol building.
They tore down police barricades.
They engaged in a pitched battle with the Capitol police on the steps outside.
And some of them forced their way into the building.
People died.
United States Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick passed away on January 7th after suffering a series of strokes.
His cause of death was eventually ruled to be natural causes, though several neurologists have argued that the events of the prior day almost certainly contributed to his death.
QAnon believer Ashley Babbitt was shot as she forced her way into the building through a broken window.
Roseanne Boylan was trampled by the stampeding crowd.
Though her official cause of death was ruled to be an amphetamine overdose.
And Kevin Greeson had a heart attack on the Capitol grounds.
This week, as I was combing back through my own videos of that afternoon, I discovered that I had captured the moment that I realized I was watching a man die.
Over the roar of the crowd, you can hear someone next to me say, They've been giving him chest compressions for way too long.
And then there's my own voice.
I know it's my voice, but I don't remember saying it.
From years in the past, I heard myself say, he's going to die.
And a few minutes after that, I saw his dead body being carried away.
Surely other people saw him too, but no one seemed to react at all to the sight of a corpse making its way through the crowd.
Over the last four years, federal charges were filed against nearly 1,600 members of that crowd.
Nearly 1,300 had been convicted, with another 300 cases still open as of the four-year anniversary of the riot.
Those cases will never go to trial, though.
Because last month, hours after being sworn in as president for the second time, Donald Trump issued a blanket pardon.
Pardoning almost every single one of them, with the small exception of a handful of rioters who only had their sentences commuted.
There are those who would rewrite the story of that day.
People who would tell you that it was a peaceful protest, that they were patriots and tourists, that they couldn't have known that their conduct was unlawful.
I'm not sure there's anything I can do to change anyone's mind.
The evidence to the contrary is readily available, but it's never seemed to matter.
I could tell you that I saw a man, eyes red with pepper spray and wide with wild determination, pry a metal drain grate out of the ground with the end of an American flagpole before pressing back into the fray with his newly acquired weapon.
I could tell you I saw a man with a literal pitchfork sprinting down the Capitol lawn.
I could spend the next year covering a different January 6th rioter every week, painstakingly tracking their affiliations with militias and white supremacist street gangs.
But I don't really want to.
There's plenty of media about the men who were there that day.
Whole books have been written about them.
Work.
There are some weird little guys who ended up there that day that I'll get to.
But I can't bear the thought of returning to that well for too many stories.
Because a lot of those stories are kind of the same.
While the seditious conspiracy at the heart of the violence was cooked up by Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, Men with an ideological commitment to violence and ties to organized groups dedicated to carrying it out.
Most of the crowd was made up of men far too ordinary to be considered a weird little guy.
And maybe that in itself is a subject worth exploring.
How could an ordinary man end up crawling over broken glass on his way to break into a senator's office?
How could a realtor from the suburbs step over a woman's dead body in his haste to physically confront a member of Congress?
How did men with Back the Blue bumper stickers on their brand new Ford pickup trucks end up fist-fighting cops on the steps of the Capitol?
I don't think I'm equipped to answer that.
But I can try to tell you the sad story of how one of them ended up dead.
Matthew Huddle did not vote for Donald Trump in the 2020 election.
Perhaps he would have.
It's impossible to say.
But he'd lost his right to vote years ago, after his first felony conviction.
He struggled with alcohol addiction for his entire adult life, racking up charges for driving while intoxicated at a pretty alarming rate.
And he was back in jail for yet another DUI in November of 2020. He was fresh off this stint in the county jail when his uncle Dale asked him for a favor.
He needed a ride to Washington, D.C. The reason given in the court documents is that Dale, at 69 years old, had poor eyesight and, quote, should not drive, especially at night.
But I'm not sure how to square that with the knowledge that Dale was, at that time, In Matthew's own words, though, he had nothing better to do at the time.
So he agreed.
According to his defense attorney, Matt is not a true believer in any political movement.
He cannot legally vote, and he knows very little about politics and does not follow it.
He is somewhat distrustful of the government in general, but he did not know if the 2020 election was stolen or not.
So he claims he was only there that day as something to do, a favor for his uncle.
And he thought maybe it would be a historic event that he could document through photos and video.
And he did.
He took quite a bit of video that day, recording himself as he and his uncle made their way down the National Mall after listening to Trump's speech at the Ellipse.
As the Capitol came into view, Matthew Huddle says aloud to no one in particular, We're going to see if we can get inside.
But moments later, he turns to his uncle Dale and says, He's not sure they're going to be able to get close because of the police presence.
His uncle replies, quote, I think we ought to bum rush the Capitol building.
Arrest them all.
We've got enough people to do that.
And Matthew agrees they could try to get close.
By 2 p.m., they were deep within the mass of rioters at the base of the steps at the west entrance of the Capitol.
Police on the steps were firing flashbangs and tear gas canisters, trying to keep the crowd at bay.
In his video, as described in the court filings, Matthew is surprised by the flashbangs and asks if the cops are shooting a cannon.
I didn't manage to dig up the video evidence filed in his case, but based on the description of flashbangs and scattered chants of USA, USA, and it being shortly after 2pm, here's my best guess at that exact moment and it being shortly after 2pm, here's my best guess at that Yes,
that is my little squeal of surprise at the sound that is my little squeal of surprise at the sound of the flashbangs.
I was having a weird afternoon.
And it was chaotic.
At this point, the crowd was starting to press forward and engage with the officers.
No longer a mere observer of history, Matthew Huddle joined them.
He and his Uncle Dale fought their way to the front of the crowd, where rioters were tearing down the bike racks that had been set out in a...
As officers struggled to keep the metal bike racks out of the hands of the men who were trying to seize them as weapons, Dale Huddle lunged forward, jabbing his wooden flagpole into an officer's stomach, knocking him off his feet.
During the battle on the stairs, Dale is seen in an officer's body-worn camera footage screaming at them, saying things like, look back there, there's a million of us.
You think you could stop us?
And it's going to get real ugly if you don't let us in, man.
It's going to get real ugly.
We're coming in.
And at some point, he turns to his nephew and points up at the Capitol building.
And he says, we're going in the front door.
But Dale Huddle never did make it inside.
The men got separated on the steps.
The officers who'd been trying to hold them at bay retreated under attack.
Giving Matthew Huddle an opening to run up the stairs.
But Dale stayed behind and kept fighting.
Instead of taking his chance to climb the steps and actually go inside, he followed the retreating officers, continuing the attack.
Another video shows the old man, red-faced with tears streaming from his eyes from pepper spray unloaded by a rioter behind him, and he's charging toward an officer trying to rip his gas mask off.
And then he tries to wrench the baton out of another officer's hands.
With his uncle preferring to stay behind and fight, Matthew followed the crowd through the now-open doors on the Upper West Terrace.
In his own video, he says, we're going in, as he crosses the threshold.
And for 16 minutes, he just wandered around in there.
He didn't hurt anyone.
Steal anything.
He didn't break anything.
He really was just kind of wandering around.
It's hard to square the reality of the situation with his behavior.
On one hand, you have to assume he knew what he was doing was wrong.
He hadn't actually engaged in any of the violence outside, but...
He knew full well he was only standing inside that building because men like his uncle had fought their way through a police line to clear the path to the stairs.
But once he's inside, he's trying to chat up the cops.
He sidles up to one officer and casually asks him, has this ever happened to you guys before?
He briefly joined in with a group of guys just marching around chanting USA, USA.
Another rioter asked him if he knew what floor the legislators were on.
And oddly, considering he claimed to know nothing about the situation he'd found himself in that day, he answered confidently.
The third floor.
And then he thought for a moment and turned to a nearby police officer and asked the cop if the legislators had already gone down to the basement.
And by that point, The Senate chambers had indeed been evacuated through the underground tunnels.
And as the group piles into the elevator, leaving Huddle behind, he turns back to his phone, which is still recording, and he narrates into his video, they went up, third floor, to the offices.
He would later tell the FBI that when he told that group of rioters they should head up to the third floor, He was actually trying to divert them away from members of Congress, who he assumed were already being evacuated through the underground tunnels.
Either way, though, that is a curious level of insight into the building's floor plans for a man who said he was just somebody else's ride.
After getting maced again, the novelty of being inside the building seemed to have been wearing off.
Officers were relatively futilely, Trying to convince people to leave, trying to direct them down a hallway and towards an exit.
And Huddle says into his video that he has a bad feeling about that, that it might be a trap.
So he found his way to a different exit.
Outside, he found his Uncle Dale again, and the two men just hung around outside on the Capitol grounds for a few hours.
And then they went home.
In the days after the huddles returned home to Indiana, the FBI set to work identifying the rioters.
Those who had assaulted federal officers were, understandably, a high priority, and the Bureau released images of those suspects, each identified by the letters AFO, for assault on a federal officer, and given a unique number.
Just three months after the riot, photos of AFO-299 went up on the FBI's website.
Over the next few months, more than a dozen tips came in about AFO-299, but none of them were right.
It sounds like it was facial recognition that got Dale Huddle.
The charging documents just say that law enforcement databases were used to match the images to his passport photos.
And by August, FBI agents were watching Dale Huddle.
They surveilled him at his home and his workplace several times in late 2021. In March of 2022, they approached his boss, who identified Dale in several photos from the riot, and provided records showing he'd taken off work the week of January 6, 2021. Both Matthew and Dale Huddle were eventually charged and arrested in November of 2022. Dale was picked up in the parking lot on his way into work one morning, and Matthew was...
For reasons not entirely clear to me, arrested in Boise, Idaho.
And both men would, eventually, take plea agreements, just like over a thousand other of the approximately 1,300 January 6th defendants who'd been convicted before those blanket pardons.
Matthew pled guilty to a single misdemeanor count of entering and remaining in a restricted building, and was sentenced to six months.
He finished serving that sentence in July of 2024. Dale pled guilty to a single felony count of assaulting an officer with a dangerous weapon, specifically for jabbing that officer with his flagpole during the struggle on the stairs.
He was sentenced to 30 months in July of 2024, meaning he was one of about 200 January 6th defendants who were actually still in federal custody at the time of the pardons.
And like I said, almost everyone who was convicted pled guilty.
Actually going to trial in a federal criminal case is pretty rare.
A fact we've talked about before in other episodes.
It's not really a good system.
There's a lot of pressure to take a plea deal, and that may not always be fair.
In Dale's case, though, I think the plea was absolutely the right call.
A few days after his arrest, after he'd been released on bond, A CBS News reporter from Chicago knocked on his door.
In a conversation that lasted more than seven minutes, much to his attorney's dismay, I'm sure, the reporter pulled out a printed copy of the criminal complaint.
You know, they're saying that this is you.
That, you know, you have a flagpole and that you're...
Assaulting an officer.
Well, you know, they were trying to take the pole from me, the flag from me.
As you can see, they're bent over backwards, trying to get the pole away.
That's what looks like an attack.
It was not that, though.
Okay, so you're saying in court you'd like to see video played?
Absolutely.
I want to see testimony and body cams as well.
But you agree this is you?
Absolutely.
Okay.
I'm not ashamed of being there.
It was our duty as patriots.
First of all, never admit to a crime on camera.
Even if you don't think you're guilty of it, don't say you did it.
Don't talk to the reporter.
And second of all, I'm not sure they were trying to take my flag is a great defense given the context here.
Even if this picture did show an officer trying to take Dale's flagpole away from him, it's not like he was taking candy from a baby.
Dale Huddle was not the only man out there that day using his American flag as a deeply ironic weapon.
I'll link the criminal complaint in the show notes, and you can see the picture they're talking about on the second page.
The officer is leaning back, almost as if he could be engaging in a sort of tug-of-war over the flagpole, but Dale's right about one thing.
Pictures can be deceiving.
The officer isn't leaning back.
He's falling down.
Because an old man poked him hard in the torso with a big stick.
And while Matthew's lawyers had argued that their client had no real opinion on the 2020 election one way or the other, that he'd simply found himself there, Dale's lawyers did have to concede that he was a true believer.
In that on-camera interview right after his arrest, he told the reporter that He still believed the election had been stolen, and he believed he'd been following a lawful order from his president.
And do you believe that Trump invited you there and that he wanted you to overthrow?
He invited us to go down there, as you've seen on film.
Let your voices be heard.
Okay.
But do you think he encouraged violence?
Well, I sat there or stood there with half a million people listening to his speech.
And in that speech, both Giuliani and himself said we were going to have to fight like hell to save our country.
Okay?
Now, whether it was a figure of speech or not, it wasn't taken that way.
Right.
You didn't take it as a figure of speech.
No.
So they couldn't really say that he didn't mean it.
And instead they argued that he'd been tricked.
He was 70 years old in 2021. He was a blue-collar worker who didn't even own a computer.
From the defense sentencing memo, He is not knowledgeable about the internet.
He was not aware that Facebook and other social media platforms use machine learning algorithms to individualize ads and to dictate content based on previous clicks.
Mr. Huddle believed that the news he was reading was covering the general scope of mainstream media and that it was a representation of current events.
From his viewpoint, the vast majority of the media agreed that the democratic process had been undermined by fraud.
And I don't doubt that he and many men just like him have absolutely rotted their brains on Facebook clickbait right-wing news.
I have no trouble believing that he was trapped in a cycle of seeing nothing but memes where a minion in a MAGA hat is spreading election misinformation or links to stories on sites called PatriotWinNews.biz with headlines like Deep State Destroyed!
New Election Lawsuit!
Bombshell!
Rocks!
DC Swamp!
I have a separate email account where I get 100 emails that look like that every single day.
I know exactly what his Facebook feed looked like.
So that part's probably true.
But I wish that the government, with their vast investigative resources, had dug into a curious incident in Dale's past.
Because I don't think this was the first time that Dale Huddle got worked up about the need to go to war with the government.
Now, to be clear, Dale Huddle had no criminal history.
That's true.
The government didn't miss something that egregious.
And I'm even willing to believe the defense memo is being truthful when they say that at 70 years old, Dale wasn't a member of any extremist groups.
But I found a picture.
A single photograph taken on November 14, 2000. And if I had the kinds of resources that the government has, I would have tried to find out more about this picture.
It's just one picture in the newspaper snapped by an Associated Press photographer, and it's a picture of Dale Huddle with a flag.
Unlike the photo of Dale using an American flag as a weapon on January 6th, this photo shows a slightly younger Dale Huddle, and he's trying to figure out how to affix his Gadsden flag, you know, the one with the snake that doesn't want to be stepped on, and he's trying to affix it to the window of a church.
November 14, 2000, was the first day of a 92-day standoff with U.S. Marshals at the Indianapolis Baptist Temple.
After years of litigation, a federal judge had finally given the order for the church to vacate the premises.
For 17 years, the Indianapolis Baptist Temple, under Pastor Greg Dixon, had not been paying its taxes.
You're probably saying, wait, I thought churches were tax-exempt.
And they are, that's true.
Churches are, generally speaking, automatically exempt from federal income tax.
But if they have paid employees, they still have to withhold and remit employment tax.
And the Indianapolis Baptist Temple had been refusing to do that since 1984. And so by the year 2000, they owed the IRS over $6 million.
And this was an intentional, deliberate act.
They didn't forget that they had to do payroll tax.
They didn't make a mistake.
The church had originally been incorporated in 1950. And for almost 34 years, the church had a valid employer identification number.
They filed paperwork with the state to keep their corporate entity in good standing.
They paid employment taxes to the federal government.
He's been the pastor of the church since 1955, changed his mind.
He transferred all of the church's assets into an unincorporated religious society.
And then he changed the corporation's name, which had previously been Indianapolis Baptist Temple.
He changed it to Not a Church Incorporated.
And so the church itself no longer exists on paper at all.
And Dixon is using this not-a-church corporate entity to run a group called the American Coalition for Unregistered Churches.
It would later be known as the Unregistered Baptist Fellowship.
Greg Dixon believed that doing business with the federal government was against his religion, and Having to do things like tell the IRS that your church would like to be recognized as a 501c3 tax-exempt entity or filing paperwork with the state Actually contravenes the authority of Christ, and if you make him do it, you're violating his religious liberty.
The unregistered church movement wasn't just refusing to pay their taxes.
They wanted to avoid almost any contact with the government.
Churches shouldn't have to abide by building codes or zoning laws or get fire inspections.
Babies shouldn't have birth certificates.
A wedding shouldn't involve a marriage license.
In fact, no one should have any kind of license.
Many of the articles I found about this movement make sure to add that they do believe that they can use the United States Postal Service, but it is a sin to use zip codes.
The almost complete overlap of guys who don't want to pay their taxes and guys who are willing to take up arms against the government is something I'll surely explore in depth in an episode dedicated to some character in the tax protester movement.
But the reason for it is probably pretty obvious.
And Pastor Greg Dixon wasn't just refusing to pay his taxes.
He wanted war.
In 1992, Greg Dixon gave a speech at an event nicknamed the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous.
After the siege at Ruby Ridge, a Christian identity preacher in Colorado put out the call.
The disparate elements of the radical right needed to put their heads together and come up with a strategy.
Klansmen, neo-Nazis, anti-Semitic pastors, militia leaders, neo-Confederates, tax protesters, bigots and anti-government extremists of all stripes convened in Colorado.
And all the big names were there.
William Luther Pierce from National Alliance, Richard Butler from Aryan Nations, Louis Beam, Kirk Lyons, James Wickstrom.
As Kathleen Blue wrote in her book Bring the War Home, The militia movement as we know it today, quote, emerged from the leaders, organizations, and tactics of white power organization.
And this meeting is widely regarded as the birthplace of the modern American militia movement.
And so, at the Rocky Mountain rendezvous, just before Louis Beam's speech about leaderless resistance, Pastor Greg Dixon took the stage to call for the establishment of Christian militias, declaring, We are at war.
And Greg Dixon was hardly new to organized racism.
In the 1970s, his church had hosted meetings of a group called Americans for America, a KKK-affiliated organization that opposed school integration.
Indiana's Grand Dragon, Bill Cheney, was a member of the congregation.
But in the early 90s, he was at the bleeding edge of a new frontier in white power.
All that to say, this old picture of Dale Huddle outside of a church might sound terribly innocuous.
Maybe that's his church, and maybe he didn't know why his pastor wasn't paying his taxes.
But it was not.
Dale Huddle isn't even Baptist.
He grew up Lutheran, but has been a member of a non-denominational megachurch called the Family Christian Center since 1988, ever since his mother died.
No, Dale Huddle had no direct connection to this church that I can find.
But a call had been put out.
In September of 2000, after years in court, a judge gave the order.
They had until noon on November 14th to get out of the building.
The government was taking possession of the property, and U.S. Marshals were authorized to use force if necessary.
Michigan militia leader Norman Olson ordered militias around the country to do their duty and defend the church, telling his followers that this was going to be Waco Part 2. Charlie Puckett of the Kentucky militia was there on November 14th as congregants waited for the U.S. Marshals to arrive.
And with news crews rolling in the parking lot, Pastor Dixon asked the contingent of Klansmen who showed up to support him to maybe stay outside the church.
But he didn't ask them to leave or disavow their support.
And that's when this photo was taken.
On November 14th, 2000. Parking lot full of Klansmen.
Militia men standing by.
And Dale Huddle is outside the Indianapolis Baptist Temple trying to figure out how to hang a Gadsden flag on the windows.
He'd driven two hours from his home in Crown Point.
And there was no Facebook in 2000. He didn't see a meme that convinced him to go to Indianapolis.
There's no indication that he was a member of any of the militia or Klan groups that were there that day, but it does seem quite possible that he got the same message they did about showing up for Waco Part 2. And just so this thread isn't left hanging, the big crowd that showed up on day one of the standoff got...
U.S. Marshals obviously did not want Waco Park, too, so they just kept their distance and waited them out.
It took three months, but in February of 2001, they did seize the building.
No one was injured, but Greg Dixon was carried out on a stretcher because he refused to walk.
So that's a rather lengthy aside just to contextualize a single 25-year-old photograph that doesn't prove anything at all.
but it left me wondering...
If the U.S. Marshals had taken a heavier-handed approach at the Indianapolis Baptist Temple, would I be looking at two photos, 20 years apart, of Dale Huddle trying to skewer a cop with a flagpole?
His lawyers argued that he was just a confused old man who didn't know how to use the internet, and he got tricked into believing he needed to go to D.C. to stop the steal.
But the possibility that, 20 years earlier, some militia newsletter tricked him into thinking he needed to stop a different theft, that of church property by the IRS, really changes the story for me.
Back in 2021, though, after the riot at the Capitol, Matthew Huddle was just living his life as usual.
Matthew Huddle's life as usual involved getting charged three separate times between July and November for driving with his suspended license.
As a habitual offender whose driving privileges had been revoked after repeated DUIs, each new offense of this kind was a felony.
In August of that year, his son's mother died of a drug overdose.
He filed for bankruptcy that same week and...
Filings show he owed more than $13,000 in child support to a different woman, the mother of his daughter.
Neither of those children were in Matthew's custody.
After his conviction in his January 6th case, his lawyers wrote that he had a, quote, I hope that's true.
And even if it's not, my heart breaks for a teenage boy who lost his mother to an overdose in 2021. He saw his father go to prison in 2023, and then he lost his father entirely just last month.
But great is the only word used there to describe a relationship that I suspect may have been more complicated than that.
In 2009, Matthew Huddle flew into a rage after his son, who was just three years old at the time, had what court records describe as a bathroom accident.
It's a very normal thing for a three-year-old to do.
At that age, you're still sending a change of pants with them to school just in case.
What's not normal, though, is beating a toddler so severely that he can't sit down for a week.
And the court records call it a spanking.
But nothing I could find offered me any kind of explanation for how a spanking could leave bruises on a child's neck.
After Huddle died last week, several articles I read about his death quoted an attorney who had been representing him in his DUI cases for nearly 20 years.
And his lawyer says that the man he'd known was not violent.
I don't know what else you call this.
I guess in that lawyer's defense, it does look like he'd hired a different attorney when he was charged with beating his son and his son's mother.
After Matthew Huddle pled guilty in 2023 to that single misdemeanor charge of entering and remaining in a restricted building on January 6th, his lawyers asked for a sentence of probation with no jail time.
They cited his lack of ideological motivation for being there, his need to be there for his children, and his tragic backstory and struggle with alcoholism.
And there is a strange and tragic backstory here, but...
They don't actually get into it in this court filing.
This part I pieced together from state court records, old newspapers, and Facebook posts.
After serving his sentence for beating his son, he was released from jail in 2013, and he very quickly took up with a new girlfriend.
Based on the apparent age of a photo of their daughter that he posted online in 2015, she had to have been pregnant with Huddle's child before she ended her marriage to another man.
I have said this before.
It comes up often, oddly.
But I don't care about that.
Her infidelity is between her, her husband, and her boyfriend.
I only mention it because of a curious coincidence of dates.
The same week her divorce was finalized, someone shot Matthew Huddle.
There's a single mention in the local newspaper in February 2015, just a few days after his daughter's mother finalized her divorce, that Huddle had been shot in what was only described as, quote, an incident between family members.
And the article quotes an officer who says that no one was taken into custody at this time and he wouldn't say how the shooter was related to the victim.
I couldn't find any court records that indicated the charges were ever filed against anyone, but I could only check the names I thought of as suspects, so it's a bit of a needle in a haystack.
Whoever it was, though, someone close to him shot Matthew in the back of the knee and left him with a lifelong injury.
And three years later, in 2018, he was asleep in his bed when he woke up to two men beating him with baseball bats and hammers.
The local newspaper reported the attack was motivated by a child custody dispute.
One of the assailants, Kurt Falkenberg, was in a relationship with the mother of Huddle's son.
The other man was Falkenberg's uncle, Jeffrey Martin, though the two men were only a few years apart in age.
And the men focused their blows on Huddle's left leg.
Because they knew he had a metal rod in there from the surgeries he'd gotten after getting shot in the leg in his last domestic dispute.
Much like the story of Matthew and Dale Huddle, this story of a very stupid crime committed by an uncle and a nephew ends tragically.
As Falkenberg and Martin fled the scene, they crashed.
Falkenberg, who had been driving, was pronounced dead at the scene.
Officers responding to the car accident, which put another driver in the hospital with two broken legs, found an open bottle of whiskey in Falkenberg's car, and they eventually found Jeffrey Martin passed out drunk in a creek bed on the side of the road.
The following year, in 2019, Matthew Huddle was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver.
20 years of alcoholism had finally caught up to him.
The DUI he got that summer was the one that put him back in jail until shortly before he drove to Washington, D.C. in January of 2021. Now, I've read a lot of sentencing memos.
That's the document filed at the end of a case, after a guilty plea or a guilty verdict, where each side makes their case one last time.
Not about guilt or innocence now, that's settled, but about what they think the punishment should be.
And we have an adversarial court system.
Everyone is technically, ethically bound, to be honest, and the purpose of the courts is supposed to be to seek the truth, but really everyone is there to win.
To have their version of the truth ruled to be the most true.
So I'm really used to seeing a defense attorney's sob story and a prosecutor's exaggeration.
But I wonder, maybe...
If Matthew Huddle's lawyers really were telling a mostly true story.
He didn't vote.
He couldn't.
His family doesn't seem very political.
No one in his family has ever donated so much as a dollar to any federal election.
And he did have a long history of making spectacularly bad decisions and finding himself in some really outlandishly bad situations.
I mean, he got his legs broken in two unrelated domestic disputes.
That doesn't even sound possible.
So maybe Matthew Huddle is the only January 6th defendant who really did end up there by accident, with no ideological motivation or violent intent.
Plenty of them claimed that in court, and it never really rings true.
But maybe for Matthew Huddle, wandering into the Capitol that day was just the same kind of criminal accident.
Often finding himself in.
Like driving away without paying for a tank of gas because he was too drunk to figure out how to operate the payment system, but somehow not too drunk to drive.
When I first saw the news that a recently pardoned January 6th defendant had been shot and killed while resisting arrest during a traffic stop, I can't say that I was surprised.
But I was wrong in my initial assumption.
I figured a guy who found himself on that trajectory would be, I don't know, a sovereign citizen, a guy who'd done real violence at the Capitol, a guy who had violent plans for the future.
Surely those two facts about his life, being at the Capitol that day and dying the way that he did, surely those two facts would be directly related.
But I'm not sure they are.
It's unwise to speculate about the altercation that may have occurred in the minutes before Huddle was shot and killed by a Jasper County Sheriff's deputy.
I don't know what happened there on the side of Indiana State Road 14. We don't know what was said, or why things escalated, or where exactly the deputy saw the gun.
But I do know that Matthew Huddle was due back in court next week for a status conference on a stack of still-unresolved felony cases for driving without a license.
Just days after getting his federal pardon, he was probably happy for his Uncle Dale.
But he'd already done his federal time, and now he was looking down the barrel at another stay in the county jail.
And when those blue lights came on behind him, he probably knew that this would be yet another felony charge.
He had a long list of state charges.
A federal pardon did nothing for him.
In the end, it...
Didn't matter who the president was.
But I guess it never really did matter to Matthew.
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's research written and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagin...
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at weirdlittleguyspodcast at gmail.com.
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