When the Hit Man Starts Talking

TLC (Teaching and Learning College)

When the Hit Man Starts Talking

July 08, 2025 at 03:30PM
illustration of bald man with glasses on top and a city landscape with the silhouette of a man on the bottom

David Howard | The Atavist Magazine | June 2025 | 1,562 words (6 minutes)

This is an excerpt from issue no. 164, “Conversations with a Hit Man.”


The killer is happy to see us. That’s the first thing we notice when we spot Larry Thompson halfway across the visitation room of the David Wade Correctional Center. He rises from a chair and waves, his face unfurling into an avuncular grin. Our separate journeys to this prison in Homer, Louisiana—me from Maine, and Myron Fuller from the mountains of Utah—afforded plenty of time to set expectations, and neither of us anticipated a Norman Rockwell greeting. I pictured a menacing scene bathed in the neo-noir lighting of The Silence of the Lambs. And Fuller? He long believed that the next time he and Thompson saw each other would be through gun sights.

The visitation room Warden Jerry Goodwin escorted us into is large, square, and filled with cafeteria-style tables. It’s December 2021. Lights on a small artificial Christmas tree wink, at once cheery and monstrously sad. Vending machines line one wall, glowing sentinels filled with bags of junk food. During normal visiting hours, the chatter of reunited families animates the room. But Fuller is a retired FBI agent with an illustrious career, I’m an experienced journalist, and Thompson is a model inmate, his vast criminal history notwithstanding. As such, Goodwin has granted us special privileges: an open-ended block of time, and a dedicated room with no bars or glass partitions, just a bored-looking guard at a nearby desk.

“Larry,” Fuller says.

“Good to see you,” Thompson drawls. The two old adversaries take chairs facing each other across six feet of wood laminate. I perch on a bench halfway between them and fan out the objects I’ve been permitted: notepad, pen, digital recorder.

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At 78, Thompson is 18 years into an 80-year prison sentence for attempted first-degree murder and aggravated burglary. (A 35-year federal term theoretically begins after that.) One morning in 2003, Larry and his son Larry Neal Thompson Jr., along with four other men, robbed an Intertrust Armored Services car. They were spotted by a witness—a rare event in Thompson’s long criminal career—and a cop chased their escape van. One of the men shot an AK-47 through the officer’s window, wounding him. A massive manhunt ensued, and after several hours all six of the perpetrators were caught. They were subsequently convicted. Then, in 2014, Thompson confessed to four murders for hire in exchange for a reduced prison term for his son. (That deal never went through, because the official who overseeing it died before it could be finalized.) Thompson was later transferred to Wade from the maximum-security Louisiana State Penitentiary—better known as Angola.

Seated before us, he wears the standard-issue uniform: blue jeans and a light-blue chambray shirt. His hangdog blue eyes are framed by gaffer-taped tortoiseshell glasses that rest atop his prominent nose. His hands are missing parts of two fingers. “This one I cut off with an electric drill,” he’ll tell us later, holding up the stump of his left index finger. Then he’ll wave the remains of his right ring finger. “My dog bit me on this one.”

The warden tells us goodbye, then turns to Thompson. “Behave yourself,” he says, not unpleasantly. Goodwin hesitates for a beat, as if he wants to say something to us or is curious about why we’re here. Cops come to interview prisoners all the time, of course, but he doesn’t see many 79-year-old retired FBI agents dropping in on one of his more notorious inmates.

Fuller shakes Goodwin’s hand and thanks him. The truth, as best Fuller can grasp it himself, is that he’s hoping to dislodge a few ghosts from his psyche. He enjoyed an illustrious 31-year career in the bureau, with one notable exception: his tenure running the office in Shreveport, Louisiana, from 1981 to 1985.

What went wrong? Only everything. Crooked cops. Investigations that inexplicably faceplanted. Political interference. Wiseguys and one particularly ethically challenged attorney. And, most prominently, a murder Fuller believes he could have prevented: Maria Marshall, a mother of three. It was a hired job; her husband, saddled with debt, wanted to collect the life insurance. The hit man was Larry Thompson.

Soon after that crime, Fuller decided to prematurely end his Louisiana interlude. He left angry, frustrated, and defeated. When he crossed into Mississippi on his way to FBI headquarters in Washington, he climbed out of his car, walked back to the state line, and emptied his bladder onto the far side of it.

Fuller now has what looks like a retiree’s idyllic life. He travels to Europe with his wife. He plays golf, hikes with his dogs, and skis Utah powder. But some part of him can’t leave Shreveport behind. And in small, sleepless hours, he finds himself absorbed in long-ago memories.

Recently, he decided that four decades was enough time to stew in regret. He located Thompson in an online registry, sent him a letter, and then connected with him by phone. Thompson agreed to a visit. Fuller invited me along because we’d built a rapport when I interviewed him for a book, and we both sensed that it would make for a good story.

So Fuller is here now, he guesses, to confront his past, to see if certain elements of his former life might finally be pinned down and examined. He can’t change what happened, but maybe it’s possible to understand how it all went sideways.


They have certain things in common, the hit man and the agent. Both arrived at their twilight years looking strikingly similar: They have bald heads and are slender, fit, and just under six feet tall. And long ago, both were raised on the wrong side of the poverty line in the Deep South.

Born in 1941, Fuller grew up on a subsistence cotton farm near Beebe, Arkansas. His family didn’t have electricity until he was seven. One morning when he was twelve, his father overfilled the woodstove and burned the house down. The insurance had lapsed, and all that was left as the family stood in the snow that morning was the equipment in the barn and the underwear they’d slept in.

After a stretch of teenage fecklessness, Fuller earned a degree in school administration and was offered a job in Colorado that would make him the state’s youngest principal. His wife, Patricia, was pregnant at the time, and it felt as if he’d punched his ticket into stable adulthood. But before they could move to Colorado, Patricia was abruptly taken by a mysterious fever; their unborn daughter died with her. Fuller turned down the Colorado job and spent the next several months reeling. He was still trying to figure out how to put his life back together when he played golf one day with an acquaintance who was about to apply for a job at the FBI. Fuller thought the work sounded interesting and soon applied himself.

As a young agent in New York City, he developed a knack for talking with criminals, including a con man named Mel Weinberg. Other agents had dismissed Weinberg as a habitual liar looking to pare down his prison sentence, but Fuller saw potential. They teamed up for the notorious Abscam investigation, which swept up seven members of Congress for taking bribes. (Bradley Cooper plays a caricature of Fuller in American Hustle, the film loosely based on the case.)

While still riding high from the Abscam probe, Fuller was offered the job in Shreveport. Here was an opportunity to return to the South—a fraught, complex place, but home nonetheless. His marching orders couldn’t have been plainer. “There’s something wrong down there,” his boss told him, referring to Shreveport. “Go fix that fucking place.” Fuller had heard that the city’s police department was riddled with corruption. The FBI should have been all over it, but Fuller saw no evidence of that.

On their first night in town, he and his second wife, Dawn, dined with agent Jim Smith, the interim boss. Curiously, Smith told him that everything was under control and that Fuller could look forward to spending afternoons playing golf. “You just come down here, enjoy yourself, and wait for your next promotion,” he said.

Fuller soon began receiving anonymous tips about dirty cops in town. One tipster even warned, “You have a corrupt agent in your office.” This rattled him, but he pushed forward. He looked for an avenue to start investigating the Shreveport police. Before long, Fuller says, his boss called to inform him that he must be doing something right, because Louisiana congressman Buddy Roemer had complained that Fuller was being too “aggressive.”

Roemer’s feathers weren’t the only ones ruffled. Local contacts told Fuller’s office that they’d heard rumors: Someone was going to plant a bomb under his car; someone was planning to throw acid in his face. Even his successes were followed by setbacks: He took down a mob-connected illegal gambling operation, but the U.S. attorney shuttered his police probe. No one wanted to rock the boat. They wanted him to play more golf.

Then, in 1984, an informant revealed that a contract had been taken out on the life of a blond woman. That was all the FBI could glean. Several weeks later, two New Jersey–based detectives walked into Fuller’s office. They were investigating a murder at a picnic area north of Atlantic City, and their suspect was Larry Thompson. “Wait a minute,” Fuller asked. “Is the victim by any chance blond?”



from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/07/08/hit-man-shreveport-cold-case/
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