Two keys to an under-construction jail in Nashville went missing. Would it lead to havoc?

Editor's note from The Tennessean, part of the Paste BN Network: This story has been updated to correct information about when the subject of the story was released on bond in December 1987 and to more accurately describe the 37 mm launcher found as part of the investigation.

This is the first of a four-part series detailing the chase to catch the man who infiltrated a jail under construction in Nashville.

The man hell-bent on mayhem dressed as a painter.

Yellow hard hat. Fluorescent yellow vest. Purple gloves. He wore a gray long-sleeve T-shirt, which covered an upper-arm jailhouse tattoo. He carried a black cooler with a red handle.

His face was partially covered by a white painter's mask, the kind that shielded only his nose and mouth. This was pre-pandemic, so it was weird he would be wearing the mask upon getting out of his car.

But so many details about this man would become weird as his story became known.

The man carried a gallon bucket, which held, among the paint supplies, bolt cutters.

Listen to this story

And he wore thin, wire-rimmed glasses.

It was Jan. 4, 2020, when the man posing as a painter left his car in the parking lot and approached Nashville's new, $200 million Downtown Detention Center. The state-of-the-art jail facility was 10 days from opening. Workers (some of them legitimate painters with hard hats, vests and buckets) were scrambling to put the finishing touches on the place before the grand-opening handshakes and congratulations.

That red carpet event would not happen as planned.

A delayed opening, however, proved to be the least of Davidson County Sheriff Daron Hall's fears. Hall had overseen the construction of the new jail, and he would also oversee the race to catch this man in the mask and glasses. Hall would eventually call him an "evil genius" after the details of his intricate and absolutely outside-the-box plan to cause havoc inside the jail became known. This man, Hall would later discover, had amassed a cache of weapons at another site, including more than a dozen pistols, shotguns and assault rifles.

And one 37 mm launcher that shoots flares, gas and smoke rounds.

It wasn't the masked man's first time sneaking into the under-construction jail. Just after Christmas in 2019, surveillance cameras had captured his image, lurking from room to room, including the control center where the keys were kept.

Two keys were missing.

A select few of the new DDC officers had been warned about this masked man with glasses. Better to keep that number smaller than to cause a panic.

Who steals keys that would only work inside a jail that had yet to house any inmates?

They didn't know this man's name. All they had was a video image. On Jan. 4, 2020, they had known about him for almost a week, but he had proven as elusive as a vampire.

Cory Witkus, a staff supervisor who provides security for the exterior of the jails, was working in the DDC lobby that day when the masked man got out of his car and approached the facility. Witkus watched as he walked confidently through the front door.

Witkus felt the shock of recognition.

"It was mainly the kind of face and the glasses," Witkus said.

Though he couldn't see weapons, Witkus assumed the man was armed and dangerous. Witkus was, like all jail officers in Davidson County, unarmed.

He asked himself, "Is this HIM?"

"My adrenaline spiked at that time," he said.

The staff supervisor immediately remembered the plan. If you see this man, DON'T LET HIM INSIDE THE JAIL. You need to trap him by leading him outside to the loading dock area ... without letting him know he is being trapped. They didn't want a bloody standoff in the jail before the place had the chance to open.

Here's the other problem Witkus faced. He and his supervisors had no idea who they were dealing with.

They didn't know the depths of the plan he may have been working on since as far back as 2015, which was the same year plans to build the new jail were publicly announced.

And they certainly didn't know they were confronting a man, who, years before, had earned himself a nickname in prison.

The other inmates, impressed by his intellect, had called him by the smartest name they knew.

"Einstein."

'What kind of weirdo?'

Daron Hall may have been hungover when he first heard about an unauthorized masked man sneaking around inside the Downtown Detention Center.

He had been in Pensacola, Florida, with his buddies, an annual trip that had started 35 years ago to watch college football. Hall, a former scholarship football player at Western Kentucky University, had gone south with a few of his former college teammates to see the 1986 Sugar Bowl (the University of Tennessee beat Miami, 35-7). He and his boys vowed to do it every year.

They've kept it up, adding wives and children along the way.

Hall was in Pensacola when he got a call about missing jail keys. Hall will never forget his reaction.

"I said, 'What kind of weirdo would do that?'" Hall said.

Answering that question, over the next few years, would become Hall's obsession.

He hustled back to Nashville, and he got there just in time for the confrontation between Witkus and the masked man in the lobby of the new jail.

Hall said he was stunned when he found out what happened next, when he learned Einstein's true identity and when he found out what truly had been happening inside his jail. Somehow stunned doesn't seem strong enough description.

Gobsmacked is more like it.

Chasing Einstein: Explore the series

Part 1: Two keys to an under-construction jail in Nashville went missing. Would it lead to havoc?

Part 2: A razor in his shoe. A makeshift ice pick. Nashville criminal 'learned his trade in jail'

Part 3: Could Einstein be captured in the jail without knowing it was a trap? What happened next

Part 4: Einstein gives shocking explanation for breaking into new downtown Nashville jail

A kid obsessed with criminal justice

Hall was raised in Nashville almost literally in the shadows of a detention center that housed people other jails couldn't hold. It had been called an asylum "for the criminally insane," Hall said. It would later be called the Lois DeBerry Special Needs Facility.

Fascinated by criminal justice as a child, Hall almost went to jail in 1978 when he was 14.

That was the year his parents got him a police scanner for his birthday. Those devices were popular among cop-ophiles who liked to listen to official radio calls.

One night, a young Hall heard law enforcement voices on the scanner talking about a "burglary in progress" not far from his house. It was 2:30 a.m. So, he snuck out of his house, got in his mom's 1965 Mustang convertible (which he had never driven), popped the clutch like he'd seen his mother do and drove as best he could to the crime scene.

"I have the lights off, and I'm hitting the brakes every two seconds," he said.

He had the best intentions, he said.

He was going to help the cops find this burglar.

Hall parked near the burglary address and sat there with his radio scanner in his lap. That's when he heard another call. This one was about a stolen car, a '65 Mustang.

What he didn't know was that police had seen him sitting in the car at the crime scene. They had run his plates.

"And I realize I'm the guy they're looking for," he said. Suddenly, he was surrounded by police. "I knew I was in big trouble," he said.

When the house burglar got away, the police focused on the car thief, the 14-year-old kid.

Hall explained that he was there to help. It seemed like hours. He kept telling and re-telling his story. Scanner, burglary, popped clutch, looking for the suspect. Finally, a police officer got in the Mustang and drove Hall home.

The officer "told me how stupid I was" and let him go into his house. He snuck back to bed without his parents knowing anything had happened.

He laughs heartily about it now.

Bodies in the back of the van

Hall was a better football player at Antioch High School than he was a student. Hall said he was disinterested in everything that involved reading, writing and arithmetic, except for one thing: "Helter Skelter."

The only book he remembers caring about was the seminal true crime story of the murderous Manson family's misdeeds in Southern California.

For Hall it posed an unanswerable question. How did a little hippie guy compel young people to murder for him? He wanted to, but could not, understand the criminal mind.

"I didn't understand it, so I feared it," Hall said.

He played wide receiver and punter at Antioch High, and got a football scholarship to Western Kentucky (he never saw the field as a player in college). It was there he started taking criminal justice courses.

Hall always seemed to find himself in interesting and strange predicaments − like the time he took a temporary summer job and was asked to make a delivery from Vanderbilt to Fisk University. All he had to do was load up the back of a van, drive it across Nashville and unload it.

Easy peasy.

Hall knew something wasn't right when he was asked to change into medical scrubs for this delivery.

His fears were confirmed when he was given a gurney and told to go pull naked cadavers (in clear plastic bags) from the medical unit. He had to stack the bodies in the crate, roll them to the van and then stack them in the van. More than one of the bodies fell off the gurney as he was rolling toward the van. He had to hoist them, by himself, back onto the gurney.

Hall said he was so creeped out, he couldn't look down at the bodies as he was moving them.

"You can't un-see things," he said, still wincing, all these years later.

Then, once 20 bodies were in the U-Haul, he was driving on West End when the back doors of the van swung open.

"I thought if these bodies fly out the back, this is going to be national news," Hall said.

Thankfully, the bodies stayed still.

He completed the delivery. 

Shootout at The Coin Purse

1987 was the year Einstein first went to jail.

He was 18, and a recent graduate of the Tennessee Preparatory School, which had been open since 1885 and housed "abused, neglected and unprivileged" children. His parents were overseas, and he was living with his grandmother.

Years later, a former girlfriend of Einstein's would tell The Tennessean, part of the Paste BN Network, that he had received a nice inheritance.

"He told me that when he graduated (high school) ... he had inherited a large amount of money," said Monte McCoin of Nashville. She also told this story to the sheriff during Hall's investigation. "He invested everything he had into a frozen yogurt franchise.

"And he lost everything he had."

In need of cash, he turned to other methods of making money.

On Nov. 2, 1987, he tried to rob The Coin Purse, which sold collectible coins. Einstein walked into the store wearing a wig and fake moustache.

He got into a shootout with the store owner. Einstein was smart, but he wasn't good with a gun. He missed all six shots he fired. The store owner was a better shot, hitting the would-be robber in the left hand.

The teenager went to jail that first time with a bandaged hand.

But because it was his first offense, and he was the only person injured, he spent only a short time in jail.

He was given bond and released on Dec. 18, 1987.

Hall became an incarceration star

Hall's first year working in the Davidson County correctional system was 1988. Fresh out of college, he worked as an intake specialist, interviewing people who were coming into the jail.

Hall didn't cross paths with Einstein.

Yet.

Hall rose quickly through the incarceration administration ranks.

He became director of counseling, an assistant administrator in the Sheriff's office, jail program director and chief deputy sheriff.

In 2002, at age 38, he ran for the office of Davidson County Sheriff. He won the election by 26 points, becoming the youngest sheriff in county history.

As sheriff, he oversaw all three detention centers in Davidson County.

While Hall was a rising incarceration star, Einstein was going back to jail. He did a nine-year stretch for a probation violation involving a gun.

It was there, in the 1990s, while confined in Clifton, Tennessee, Einstein set his sights on the inner workings of the prison system.

Read part 2: A razor in his shoe. A makeshift ice pick. Nashville criminal 'learned his trade in jail'

Chasing Einstein: Explore the series

Part 1: Two keys to an under-construction jail in Nashville went missing. Would it lead to havoc?

Part 2: A razor in his shoe. A makeshift ice pick. Nashville criminal 'learned his trade in jail'

Part 3: Could Einstein be captured in the jail without knowing it was a trap? What happened next

Part 4: Einstein gives shocking explanation for breaking into new downtown Nashville jail