moved to Cleveland, it got progressively out of control,” he said. His father sometimes beat his mother, who felt so trapped that she ultimately informed on him to the police. It was her kids’ one shot, Georgia Metcalf believed, for a peaceful life.
As a child, Metcalf knew his father loved him. Even then he understood that drugs were the primary driver of his family’s instability. “I had seen my father nodding out into the spaghetti, and Mom was like, ‘Daddy’s sick,’” he recalled. When the antidrug rhetoric of the mid-1980s emerged, he was an immediate convert, buying into the “This is your brain on drugs” ad campaign that featured the searing egg in the iron skillet. To this day, a six-pack of beer would expire in his refrigerator before it would occur to him to drink all six.
“We stood in the cheese line,” Metcalf recalled of growing up in Chapmanville, where his mother worked two, sometimes three jobs before becoming one of the county’s first female coal miners. The Salvation Army Santa Claus came to their house with Christmas gifts. When his mom died, in 2015, mourners recalled how she had always stood up for the little guy, filling out black-lung benefit forms for her co-workers and threatening to sue the company when she caught a coal-mine manager throwing her and another woman’s job applications in the trash.
Asked if he was made fun of as a kid, Metcalf laughed. “Are you kidding? My grandmother chewed tobacco! Everyone at my school was in the same boat. No one had any money.”
Chapmanville was, in retrospect, another perfect breeding ground for the opioid epidemic, with OxyContin moving in just as most of the mines were shutting down in the late 1990s, and the only viable economic option—beyond disability and illicit drug sales—was joining the military, one that Metcalf took. He chose the Air Force because the recruiter promised he’d have a job in law enforcement waiting for him when he got out. Playing cops and robbers as a kid, he’d always insisted on being the cop.
“I distinctly remember teachers skipping entire chapters in textbooks because ‘you will not need this when you are working in the mines,’” he told me in late 2016. It took precisely one visit to an active low-coal mine for Metcalf to understand that his future wasn’t at the bottom of one.
The next county over, in tiny Kermit, West Virginia, Charleston Gazette-Mail reporter Eric Eyre had just won a Pulitzer for pointing out that Big Pharma shipped nearly nine million hydrocodone pills to a single pharmacy in a town of just 392 people, giving Mingo County the fourth-highest prescription opioid death rate of any county in America. Metcalf had seen it coming as early as 1997. Out of the country at the time, he was serving in the Air Force and hated the thought of missing his ten-year high school reunion, though the turnout was dismal.
The chief organizer, a drug user, had absconded with the class-reunion funds.
“When everybody showed up, she wasn’t there, and neither was the party,” he said.
*
By arresting Jones, Metcalf was not only doing his job; he was atoning for the sins of his father. His wife, though, was starting to complain about his obsession with Jones—he routinely worked till midnight or later, leaving her stranded at home with their four kids. With every new conspiracy chart, he promised he’d request a desk job “after this case.”
“I spent one Thanksgiving on the hood of a car,” doing surveillance work, he said. He did not want to end up like Lutz, who’d recently split with his fiancée, partly due to conflicts over work.
A former Air Force military police officer, his wife, Jessica, understood the life. She’d witnessed how enraged Metcalf had been after arresting a user-dealer in a traffic stop and finding heroin tucked into his baby girl’s shoe, the smell of marijuana blanketing the inside of the car.
But their kids were another story. One night in the middle of the FUBI case, Jessica drove them to the task force headquarters to see Metcalf, and his youngest daughter asked him plaintively, “Daddy, is this where you live?”
He renewed his promise to his wife: After this case…
“Ronnie Jones was a predator, and the people in Woodstock were sheep to him,” Metcalf said. His desire wasn’t just to be a big-time heroin dealer, Metcalf believed. It was also “about money. Control. Manipulation. He created a market that didn’t exist before, then he manipulated it to increase his profits. And