‘I am so afraid of these policemen’: How an Alabama police force spiraled out of control

There’s a fog rolling through Hanceville. It seeps out at night from the fields and the creeks, dancing in headlights after dark. It floats over the banks of the Black Warrior River, which snakes through the state but withers and dies north of town. It drifts towards the hills of the Tennessee Valley, which unfurls across the South but stops just shy of this neck of the woods. It settles in at this time of year, thick enough to hide one neighbor from the next. But Evelyn remembers brighter days. She used to carry lemonade to Hanceville’s police officers when the Alabama sun hung white-hot overhead, Evelyn tells CNN.

She’d take cookies each Thanksgiving – peanut butter and fudge, she says, a recipe perfected through the years. She’s the proud daughter of a cop: she says her father policed Birmingham during the civil rights protests of the 1960s. “I’d tell them how much I appreciated what they did,” Evelyn tells CNN. “Until I found out who they were.” Evelyn, who asked CNN not to publish her last name to protect her family’s privacy, says Hanceville’s officers harassed her for months over a family dispute. She says they stopped her from entering her house in an effort to resolve the issue, causing her to live for several weeks in her car.

In reports she filed at the county sheriff’s office, she said she was verbally abused by officers, becoming the “laughing stock” of Hanceville’s Police Department. Whenever she saw a police car, she knew it meant trouble. Then, during a mental health evaluation carried out by officers in 2021, Evelyn says a group of cops “(came) up from behind me, threw me face-first down on the gravel, got on my back and kept me in a chokehold.” “I’d catch my breath just a little bit. I couldn’t scream,” she says, her register faltering. “All I could do was just try to stay alive.” She wasn’t accused of wrongdoing; she says officers were there to ensure her wellbeing.

But in a police report filed after the incident, she said officers called her a “piece of sh*t.” She tells CNN: “I was told to sit down, shut up.” Police and city leaders declined to comment on her claims when approached by CNN. And that’s how Evelyn thought her story would end: a terrifying personal ordeal, filed away among all the private injustices, big and small, that populate every street in every town in the country. But then, on a sweltering Alabama afternoon in the summer of 2024, somebody snuck into the police department’s evidence room. A few minutes later, they were dead.

Their body was surrounded by officers in the building, but it lay undiscovered all afternoon, all evening and most of the next morning. For nearly a day, nothing happened. And then a yell rang out. A “something’s wrong” yell. The kind of yell that sears itself into your memory: a yell with a before and an after. That yell would, ultimately, mark the end of Hanceville’s police department. Months later, five officers were arrested on misconduct charges. A grand jury likened the force to a criminal organization. Dozens of criminal cases were thrown out of court. Suspicion and shame drenched Hanceville like the fog that creeps down Main Street.

And the town, shocked into action, abolished its entire police force. This months-long CNN investigation reveals the depths of the debacle. It exposes how a warring hierarchy and a bevy of ethical and misconduct concerns pushed Hanceville to the brink. It is the result of dozens of interviews with former police officers, dispatchers, city officials and members of the community, as well as county and state authorities. Many were speaking publicly about these events for the first time, and some asked to remain anonymous to discuss the scandal freely. This is a cautionary tale. What happened in Hanceville lays bare the dangers of power and neglect.

It has exposed a rift within law enforcement, pitting modernizers against an old guard whose approach has long set the tone in the South. And it has provoked an almighty battle over blame, redemption, and whether the damage can be undone. Hanceville, home to around 3,000 people, is now the unlikely site of a bold experiment in American policing. It has lured David Thompson, a seasoned, big-city cop, out of retirement. His job is to clean up the mess. And to him, this is bigger than one small town. “Hanceville is going to be an example, one way or the other,” he tells CNN, his necktie fluttering in the breeze as storm clouds conspire overhead.

He stares at the town’s hollowed-out department, and onwards, into an abyss. “There are a lot more Hancevilles out there that have not had a crisis develop yet,” he says. “They’re going to have a crisis develop. It’s just a matter of when it happens.” Before its fall into notoriety, Hanceville was four-and-a-half square miles of nowhere. There’s one unloved hotel and little else to see from Highway 31, the road that rips through town and runs far, far north, all the way to Lake Michigan. Cullman, a larger city up the road, has long overshadowed it. Both were once “sundown towns” — places where Black people were warned not to stay out after dark.

The Ku Klux Klan maintained a shadowy presence in Hanceville well into the second half of the 20th century; KKK meetings took place in some homes and hideaways here as recently as the 1980s. That reputation lingered. “I had a couple of friends that told me about this place before I came out here … ‘You don’t wanna go through Hanceville’,” Erik “Du-Bee” Williams, the pitmaster at Hanceville’s barbecue joint, tells CNN. He’s never had any run-ins with police here, but he says he’d heard the stories. “They called it HanceVegas … what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” Nothing he’s saying is funny, which gives his broad, infectious smile a tinge of defiance.

For a while Williams took the advice, he says, skirting Hanceville to drive the long route to Birmingham. But eventually, he took his chances. He accepted a job here last summer. He looks across the road, to City Hall, where Hanceville’s officers were based. The department is a ghost town now, tape plastered over the entrance. In a way, it feels like he’s won. Evelyn, like so many of her neighbors, owns a chapter in this tale. She flicks open the locks on her briefcase. Papers spill out like a stream bursting its banks: incident reports, medical documents and letters to lawyers, some coffee-stained, their corners tatted. Each one is an artifact of her toxic relationship with her town.

“I used to trust everybody,” Evelyn says, her pursed lips battling a smile, as she remembers the person she used to be. Evelyn no longer knows that woman; she was lost somewhere in the mist. “I do not trust people, as a general rule,” she says now. “There’s some people in Hanceville I think are good people. But I watch them pretty close.” I used to trust everybody. You hear that sentence a lot in Hanceville. In the past year, their silence broken by the abolition of the police force, residents have started trading stories. “I am so afraid of these policemen,” a woman told Hanceville’s officials during a packed city council meeting last year, days after the force was shut down.

Others turned their ire on the city’s leadership. “The buck has to stop somewhere, and it stops right here with all of you,” one resident said. This is a city by law, but a small town by habit; the scandal upended friendships and decades-old loyalties. Now suspicion spreads from the second the sun sweeps in over the railroad tracks each morning to the moment it dips down into Smith Lake, the deepest, darkest reservoir in Alabama.

The unlikely face of the saga belonged briefly to Brian Campbell, a 73-year-old man who said an officer threw his knee into his back and wrestled him to the ground during a 2023 arrest on domestic violence charges that he denied (officers said Campbell resisted arrest). Campbell’s bladder and prostate cancer had left him incontinent; he told CNN he couldn’t use the bathroom at the station, so was forced to urinate on himself, his sodden clothes taken from him and dumped in a plastic bag. He claimed he saw feces smeared on the wall of the jail cell. He complained to the mayor at the time, whom he’d gone to church with for decades.

But his speech at the council meeting, in which he first publicly recited his claims, was watched online tens of millions of times; he told CNN he’s received calls of condolences from across the country, and one from Australia. Campbell’s wife, who had advanced Alzheimer’s, died while Campbell was contesting the charges, prompting them to be dropped. Weeks later, his daughter, who had a spinal defect, passed away, too. And finally, the charges dismissed but his family gone, Campbell won a miserable kind of freedom. Less than a mile from Campbell’s home, inside City Hall, dysfunction was infecting the police department.

Its demise was complicated, tragic, and has remained mostly untold, until now. “I saw a real big decline the last five or six years,” Michelle Allen, the department’s police records and dispatch supervisor, tells CNN. “It just kept going downhill.” “After I had been training at Hanceville for about six months, I started to see just how dysfunctional and toxic the environment was,” Suzanne Drew, a dispatcher, adds. “I was an untrained, 56 years-old grandmother who was responsible for an extremely unsafe and hostile jail and dispatch environment.” The department had around two dozen staff, former employees said, more than half of whom were officers.

Employees worked across departments: the chief worked investigations; the dispatchers watched the jail. “We couldn’t hear the radio traffic or the phone ringing when we were in the back of the jail, alone,” Drew says. “I would be forced to choose between the 911 phone ringing, my officers, and my inmates. Who was I to make any type of decision on whose safety should come above another person’s?” “They should’ve condemned the jail and stopped holding the inmates a long time ago,” says Rashan Fulenwider, a dispatch supervisor. She says she was left to administer medication to inmates, with no medical training.

According to a 2020 municipal report, the jail was “always at capacity” and often had to reject new inmates. Inmates were served oatmeal and frozen meals, and employees were told to give them just one blanket, multiple sources said. An employee told CNN they saw a colleague scream at an inmate with a mental health condition: “You’re a worthless piece of sh*t. You should go kill yourself.” They’d see the same struggling inmates, in and out of jail, time after time. “We would have some officers that just were not people persons,” Josh Howell, the former police chief, admits wearily, in a park on the outskirts of town.

He says he tried improving standards, but weeks after his departure in 2024, the department fell apart. Howell says he took the job home with him, flicking on his officers’ GPS when he woke up in the middle of the night. Once, he says, he spotted an officer working an unauthorized second job in Birmingham. Over time, some officers showed a boastful disdain for parts of the population they were expected to protect. Allen says one officer “would like to piss (residents) off on purpose.” CNN reviewed a years-long log of private texts in which a few cops traded racist, sexist and homophobic comments. Two White officers frequently used the n-word in the exchanges.

When Cullman County appointed a Black deputy sheriff, a Hanceville officer called him a “typical n****r.” Another officer sent a colleague a meme labeled “Black Monopoly:” it showed a Monopoly board, where every square was labeled “Go to Jail.” Meanwhile, the department was operating on a shoestring budget, employees complained, repeatedly requesting funds from Hanceville’s city council. Just $4,000 annually was made available for training, Howell says. In April 2024, Drew quit. “I do not feel safe nor properly equipped to safely do my job,” she wrote in her resignation email, which she shared with CNN.

Technologically, the department lagged behind better-funded agencies, several employees said. Officers were responsible for uploading their own bodycam footage to a shared computer. “Anybody (could) erase it. And that did happen,” Allen adds. Howell’s predecessor as chief, Bob Long, would ask staff how to attach a file to an email before his retirement in 2023, Allen says. Long told CNN that “things weren’t perfect” during his stint, and didn’t dispute Allen’s email claim. “We were a small town with limited funds, (but) we had a good group of men and women and a good department,” he said over text message. “However, I have acknowledged there is no excuse for the way it ended.

It did not and would not have happened on my watch.” On occasion, seized drugs earmarked for testing at a state laboratory never made it there, a source with knowledge of the subsequent investigation told CNN. When county investigators later requested evidence logs from Hanceville, it returned just one piece of paper with a handful of scrawled entries, the source added. After the department was cleared out, a used rape kit was found inside a filing cabinet, two sources with knowledge of the department said. Then, starting in late 2023, three events turned a cold war between the police and the city into an open conflict.

First, Hanceville’s mayor, Kenneth Nail, pleaded guilty to 15 misdemeanor corruption charges after the Alabama Ethics Commission found he had city inmates and employees work on his home while they were in custody or on duty. As part of a plea deal, Nail had to resign and pay fines, and he was barred from holding office while on probation. Jim Sawyer, a gentlemanly preacher and city council member whose public service had been winding towards a peaceful conclusion, was asked to replace him. “Which I did – reluctantly,” he tells CNN in his well-manicured, sun-lit front yard, setting down a leaf blower to talk. “I was enjoying retirement,” Sawyer says. Retirement would have to wait.

Next, consumed by stress, Howell had a heart attack. He resigned a few months later, in April 2024, taking a job patrolling a nearby community college, but says he felt like he was “letting a lot of people down.” The same week Howell resigned, his deputy chief, Adam Hadder, was dismissed. Neither were accused of wrongdoing; both Howell and Hadder say they are victims of a drawn-out campaign by the city administration to purge police leadership, a claim that the city clerk, Tania Wilcox, rejects. “I have not targeted anyone or any employees,” Wilcox told CNN.

Police leaders and council members were barely on speaking terms: “There was fights between the police department and (Wilcox) … it was a horrible environment,” Steven Gravlee, Hanceville’s former municipal judge, tells CNN. He oversaw court proceedings inside City Hall on Mondays. “There was so much anger up there,” he says. Hadder’s departure was pivotal, according to his colleagues. He had chain of custody over the evidence room: Following his exit, Hadder says there was no process for logging evidence.

Hadder would eventually sue Sawyer, Wilcox and the city for wrongful termination; his lawsuit claimed he had never been disciplined or written up in nearly a decade of service at Hanceville, but that Sawyer told Hadder he must resign immediately due to “tensions with Tania (Wilcox).” The defendants denied the allegations, and the parties jointly agreed to dismiss the case. Amid the chaos, Sawyer told an officer to move evidence to another room. But there was an obvious problem with the new location: It had a gaping hole in the wall. A drop-box was to be installed, but nobody knew when. Evidence was being taken to a room that wasn’t secure. “Everybody knew there was a hole there,” Allen says.

“All that evidence is crap. It means nothing.” That hole eventually became the defining image of Hanceville’s decline. Sawyer says he gave the order to move the evidence after seeing two things that disturbed him. The existing room was overflowing: “It was just a mess. It was a shambles.” And in the corner of Hadder’s old office, unguarded and unaccounted for, was a loose pile of guns. But Hadder says the department’s downfall essentially hinged on Sawyer’s order. He says he implored city officials to let him take an inventory in a fiery conversation after his departure. He warned them: “These cases could get dismissed. Some innocent person could be found guilty,” Hadder tells CNN.

This wouldn’t be Hadder’s last appearance in this story. But for now, his parting words were ominous. “I literally used the words, ‘someone could possibly die,’” he says. A few weeks later, he’d be proven right. As the Alabama summer intensified and temperatures reached triple figures, dispatchers noticed something strange with one of their colleagues, Christopher Willingham. “He could barely walk … he was losing feeling in his hands,” Fulenwider says. Willingham’s speech was slurred, Allen adds. And she claimed that her Adderall, prescribed to treat ADHD, was missing from her purse. This was Willingham’s second stint at Hanceville.

A former officer, he’d been injured in the line of duty and struggled with dependency on his pain medication, two colleagues said; Willingham transferred to dispatch, then was fired after colleagues concluded he was taking medication from the jail, the colleagues said. But he was later rehired, a decision that Allen couldn’t understand. “He had no business being hired back,” she says. Willingham’s widow declined to be interviewed or to comment on these claims for this story. It was one of those too-damn-hot Alabama afternoons that sticks your shirt to your back and dampens your brow.

Willingham returned from lunch, then went from his secluded office to the locked evidence room, which he was not authorized to enter, multiple sources with knowledge of the events told CNN. He pushed a broom through the hole and opened the door, grabbed a fistful of drugs and returned to his desk, the sources said. He used them. He overdosed. He died. His wife drove around the building after Willingham failed to return home, according to Allen, who says she saw surveillance footage of her visit. Inside, his body was slumped in his chair. It remained there, undiscovered, all night. The next morning, Allen says she checked on Willingham. “He had his head laid back,” she recalls.

“I can’t tell you how many times we would walk in there and he’d be asleep.” There was a camera in Willingham’s office, but it was off-kilter, so he wasn’t visible, multiple sources said. But something didn’t feel right. She asked Jason Marlin, the new police chief following Howell’s departure, to check on Willingham. “A few minutes later, I hear people running full-force up the stairs, screaming my name,” she recalls. “So, I knew he was dead.” A coroner would later conclude he died from the combined toxic effects of six drugs, including a dangerously high level of fentanyl, and ruled his death accidental.

Marlin burst through the building yelling, according to several people working there that morning. He couldn’t feel a pulse on Willingham and told Fulenwider to call 911. “I am 911,” she replied. Minutes later, Howell received a call: The department wanted him to lead the investigation into Willingham’s death. He accepted the request, and didn’t consider it a conflict of interest – he was a licensed investigator – but two local officials told CNN they considered Howell’s presence inappropriate. When he arrived, he found chaos. Employees stood outside, in tears. Inside, Willingham was stiff. “It wasn’t full rigor mortis, but it was getting there.

You could tell that he had been there (a while),” Howell says. Howell toured his old department, where he never thought he’d return. He saw the hole in the evidence room and the guns in his former assistant’s office. “I was shocked,” he tells CNN. He insists he’d never witnessed any of it; that he’d never even stepped inside Hadder’s office. “That hole in the wall has been a big issue,” Sawyer admits. “Everybody is wondering why the mayor let that happen.” He’s lived in Hanceville for 70 of his 76 years, but this is the first interview he’s given about the scandal that tainted his time in local politics.

“Let’s face it,” he says, his words filtered through a disarmingly charming Southern drawl. “Who would have ever even thought of somebody taking a broom, putting it through the hole in the wall, being able to jiggle the door lock up, and (getting) in there?” “God is my witness: I never had one clue,” he says. “My conscience is clean.” The investigations ticked on – the district attorney’s office probed the department, while state investigators audited its evidence room. Inside, they found more than 200 undocumented evidence packages.

Seventy-eight envelopes and bags had been torn open, and investigators estimated that 10 different drug substances were missing from the evidence room, including 216 grams of methamphetamines and 67 oxycodone pills, according to their report. They found 25 more packages of evidence in temporary holding lockers, some dating back 18 years. The label on one package said it contained $983 in seized cash — but the package was unsealed, and no money was inside. For months, officers kept working, but things felt different: everyone knew bad news was coming. Last February, the reckoning arrived: A county grand jury returned indictments against five officers, and one officer’s spouse.

Their trials are set for this year, starting in the spring; all six have pleaded not guilty, and CNN has reached out to their attorneys to request comment. Marlin, the chief, was charged with evidence tampering and failing to report ethics crimes allegedly committed by two of his officers. Jason Wilbanks was charged with computer tampering, evidence tampering, using his office for personal gain, and soliciting to commit a drug crime.; According to the indictment, Wilbanks removed or mishandled items from the evidence room, and accessed private information about two people from the department’s computer systems, which he allegedly provided to two unnamed co-conspirators.

He also allegedly used a department-issued phone to solicit controlled substances and traveled to a hospital while on duty to receive illegally distributed steroid injections. William Shellnutt faces a tampering charge; the indictment against him alleges he mishandled or removed evidence. The grand jury’s findings were more damning still, each one striking the town while it was down. It recommended the Hanceville police force be “immediately abolished,” and replaced by another agency. “The Hanceville Police Department is a particular and ongoing threat to public safety,” it wrote.

“There is a rampant culture of corruption … (the force) has recently operated as more of a criminal enterprise than a law enforcement agency.” The department “abused public trust by its failure of oversight, lack of leadership and negligent training and hiring,” the grand jury added. The blows kept coming. The department “failed to account for, preserve and maintain evidence, and in doing so has failed crime victims.” Its evidence was unusable: the same grand jury later decided to dismiss 58 felony cases, mostly for alleged drug or weapons-related offenses, stretching back to 2018.

“We have zero confidence in the Hanceville Police Department’s ability to maintain a jail or to meet basic health and safety needs,” the grand jury wrote. And finally, a devastating coda: “The death of former Hanceville dispatcher Chris Willingham is the direct result of Hanceville Police Department’s negligence, lack of procedure, general incompetence, and disregard for human life.” Hanceville, suddenly, became perhaps the most notorious small town in Alabama. At a hastily organized city council meeting, Sawyer announced a remarkable decision: Hanceville would abolish its troubled police force.

Everyone – officers, dispatchers, and administrators who were uninvolved in the charges – was dismissed. The ensuing months were torturous. ”You just feel like the whole thing falls apart on your watch,” Sawyer says. He’d struggle to sleep more than four hours a night, a new anxiety forcing him awake every time. ”What if we have a tragedy? What if we have a school bombing?” For the former employees, the backlash was devastating. “There’s good people that now have a tarnished reputation,” Drew says. They kept hearing the same question, either explicitly or in sideways glances and uncomfortable silences: How could you not have known?

Allen hasn’t found another law enforcement posting; she says she’s picked up odd jobs, including driving for DoorDash, and is planning to leave Hanceville. The dispatchers considered Willingham a friend, but those feelings are complicated now. Allen says his death “opened Pandora’s box” and ultimately cost them their livelihoods. Despite the damning grand jury recommendations, the indictments, the town’s fury and embarrassment – they see this as a tragic, personal tale. “I believe Chris (Willingham) is at fault for all of it,” Fulenwider tells CNN.

“If it hadn’t been for the decision that he made, we would still be here.” The day Hanceville’s police department was eliminated, a switch was flicked in a dispatch center at the county sheriff’s office in Cullman. It’s dark but stimulating in there; screens flicker with word of fights and car wrecks from across the county. But when the Hanceville scandal erupted, things turned bleaker still. A county dispatcher says Hanceville residents placed call after furious call, taking out their frustrations with law enforcement. “They just rang 911 to cuss us out.” “(People) would call and try to make drug deals,” the dispatcher tells CNN.

They’d get several a day: “They would say, ‘Just get me something out of the evidence locker.’ ” She thinks, and hopes, that they were misguided pranks. CNN agreed not to use the names of Cullman County’s dispatchers and captains at the request of Sheriff Matt Gentry, who cited privacy concerns. Cullman County dispatchers answer around 80,000 calls annually. Last February, they stepped in to cover Hanceville, too, adding about another 8,000. Deputies patrolled Hanceville on overtime, but they’d return exhausted. “I could just see on their faces – they were getting beat down,” a captain says. “They were dragging (their bodies).” So, Gentry gave Hanceville some difficult news.

“We can sustain this for a little bit,” he tells CNN, recapping that exchange. “But we’re gonna work our guys to death.” Gentry doesn’t run from stereotypes. He’s barrel-chested, folksy and authoritative; one of his two boys, Walker, is named after the Texas Ranger, and his picture is on the wall of a local restaurant, where he and his son ate 33 pounds of crawfish. He’s talking in an office overflowing with memorabilia – rifles; footballs; a signed portrait of Heisman-winning Auburn running back Bo Jackson; a photograph with Donald Trump, from a rally in Cullman in 2021, where Gentry says one of his captains retrieved a Big Mac for the president.

And he’s reflexively defensive of law enforcement. The scandal in Hanceville didn’t shake that faith: If anything, he sees it as a success story. “It wasn’t citizens that did this,” he says. “It was good law enforcement, coming in, working a case and bringing to justice bad law enforcement.” Gentry rejects the notion that there are more Hancevilles out there, their scandals hidden for now. “Law enforcement doesn’t tolerate bad law enforcement.” Hanceville and its county have an occasionally awkward relationship. Gentry invoices Hanceville for his team’s overtime, but tensions are showing.

In October, during their final meeting before the end of their terms, Hanceville’s departing city administration had a lengthy discussion about whether to pay the bills, without a formalized contract. At a council meeting last month, a business owner told Hanceville’s leaders her laundromat had been burglarized and vandalized several times in the past year. “When we had the police department before, we had absolutely zero issues,” she said. “Now Cullman tells us that they are just stretched too thin. Once, they didn’t show up at all.” “We need some help.” Hanceville’s new mayor was tasked with mending that alliance.

There’s stuff in Campbell’s workspace, too – and “stuff” is the proper way to describe it – but it’s in boxes and piles, a jungle of files and photographs lying unhung. He’d been in office mere days when he welcomed CNN into city hall. “I couldn’t tell you where everything’s at yet,” he said. Campbell never thought he’d run for mayor. “It’s one of those things that starts as a joke,” the pastor-turned-politician tells CNN, his accented sentences spilling out like syrup. “Then my wife and I talked about it, and she said: ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’” Campbell, it turned out, was serious.

He won the election partially on a promise to restore Hanceville’s trust in authorities, beating Bob Long, the former police chief, at the ballot box. But the victory came with a great loss: Campbell’s wife died suddenly while he was campaigning. “She was my right hand,” Campbell says. After her death, he “started not to run,” he says, until his daughters convinced him to finish the race. The scandal looms over him; he works, every day, in the building once shared with the police. Upstairs, behind a locked door, the force dragged the town into infamy. Campbell’s first dilemma is whether to learn from the past, or shut it out.

“There’s not a lot of secrets that can be kept in a small town,” Campbell says in an unhurried, porch-swing rhythm. “If something happens, it’s gonna be talked about.” He wants the talking to stop. “I’m not going up there.” His eyes are fierce now, the air suddenly still as he parses his words. “I don’t mean to seem cold,” he says. “What’s done is done.” He and Gentry share that outlook: neither wants to dredge up painful memories. What’s the point? “Ain’t nothing I can do about yesterday,” Campbell says. Campbell wanted to focus on tomorrow.

But tomorrow would never come: Before this story is over, the political convulsions that have gripped Hanceville in recent years would claim another victim, and Campbell would no longer be mayor. When news spread of the debacle in Hanceville, David Thompson wasn’t just disappointed. “It was an embarrassment to the whole profession,” he says. It was the same embarrassment Gentry felt, but it came in a different shade. There is inward-looking anger in Thompson’s voice, halfway between rebuke and lament. He’s tired: Tired of the scandals. Tired of apologizing for his colleagues. Tired of the way things have always been done.

Thompson was a retired commander with the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office, a department responsible for around 450,000 residents. But Hanceville sought an experienced officer to lead the rebuild, and Thompson, six years out of the game, accepted the challenge. There are problems spilling from every desk drawer he opens. But to him, all of the town’s problems stemmed from one pivotal source. “(Hanceville) would hire people at the cheapest rate they could, which means they were getting employees that had troubled histories in other places,” he says. “It set the standard very, very low.

And then things sort of got out of control.” There’s a name for these troubled officers, who skip from agency to agency after getting dismissed: “wandering cops.” But Thompson has a harsher term. He calls them “stray dogs.” It’s impossible to know how many of America’s 650,000 police officers are wandering cops. But they follow patterns: “They stay mostly within their states and are hired primarily by smaller, poorer departments than those they left,” according to a report by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. After George Floyd’s killing, Alabama created a database to track allegations against police.

But the legislation kept that data hidden from public view, so agencies can hire wandering cops in secret – and small-town budgets create a powerful incentive to do so. The grand jury would ultimately lambast Hanceville’s hiring as “negligent.” The department was staffed in part by a revolving ensemble of wandering cops; it was a place where “stray dogs” found a home. Jason Wilbanks and Cody Kelso — two of the officers eventually indicted — had been fired by the Cullman County Sheriff’s Office for conduct Gentry considered unbecoming of their office.; Wilbanks served on Gentry’s Drug Task Force, according to a news report on his hire in Hanceville, while Kelso, a deputy, handled a K9 trained in detecting narcotics, according to an archived version of the sheriff’s office website.

Gentry declined to comment on the specific reasons for their dismissals, but acknowledged that on three occasions, he terminated officers because “their values were not the same as ours,” before seeing them find work in Hanceville. He said his office usually did not get a call for a reference. “(Hanceville) had this ‘second chance’ mentality,” a former department employee there told CNN. “They would hire police officers (who) really should not have been allowed to be hired.” Allen said she noticed a mantra take hold: “We just need bodies.” Howell blames his budget.

He says he’d vet applicants with only a phone call to their previous agency and a scan of their social media profiles, and admits he was barely familiar with new officers who joined his department. “I didn’t know them,” he says. But residents noticed. “We have a history of hiring low-integrity people,” a woman angrily told city council members in a public meeting last year. And over time, the rest of the state clocked it, too. “Most law enforcement officers realized that if you needed a job and you had the credentials, you could always work (in Hanceville),” Thompson says. “If you work at many multiple agencies, there’s a reason why you’re changing jobs.

Either you’re leaving a job for slightly more pay, or you’re running from a problem.” Landon Cordell was halfway to his truck when a yell – an angry one – sliced through the air behind him. Tuscaloosa, 2005. The weather was calm but the night was restless; it was Saturday in a college town. The riffs of a country band trickled from a packed club and into the parking lot, a rock’s throw from Alabama’s hulking college football stadium. But Cordell was tired. He was young, just 24, but in that bar, in that town, at that time of night, he didn’t feel it. He wanted to go home. Cordell turned around; this wasn’t the sort of yell you can walk away from.

Three men were heading towards him, and he recognized the one in the middle. It was a narcotics cop who, Cordell says, was “known as a hothead.” “He was known for roughing people up,” says Cordell, who lived in nearby Walker County, where the officer was a deputy. “He just had a bad rep.” He says the officer had pulled him over weeks earlier, and his mother, who struggled with addiction, had been arrested by him, too. “It was a small town,” he explains: everyone knew everyone. The officer’s name was Adam Hadder. Hadder and his friends, agents with Alabama’s liquor-control body, took issue with Cordell, who says they had objected to him talking to a woman they knew inside the club.

Cordell says he had merely asked the woman for a lighter, but there was no time to explain any of that. Hadder “didn’t say anything, nothing, just straight up just (pushed) me back,” Cordell tells CNN, 20 years later in a mom-and-pop diner in Hanceville the lunch rush winding down behind him. Cordell says he tried fighting back but he was outnumbered, and his mind couldn’t catch up to what was happening. As he tried to free an arm, the fist of one of Hadder’s friends thundered into the back of his head, Cordell says. “It felt like a brick … I went straight down, head first, on the pavement.” Hadder and his friend pummeled him with kicks, Cordell alleges.

It lasted around 15 seconds, but felt like all night. Then, “all of a sudden, it stopped,” he says. The trio fled; Cordell staggered to his feet, blood gushing from his face. In a phone interview, Hadder acknowledged the fight took place, but he said he acted in self-defense. “Tuscaloosa was a prime example of me being my own worst enemy,” Hadder said. He recalls the fight as “a bad decision by all parties.” Cordell was hospitalized; for weeks, he couldn’t work or drive. He still has a scar on his lip, and says it was days until he could see: His eyes had been swollen shut. But in a way, they were finally opened to the world.

He told himself: “I’ve got to get out.” For a while, Cordell succeeded. He joined the Army, served in Iraq and Afghanistan, then trained to become a Black Hawk pilot. But life found a way to drag him back to Walker County. Days after getting his pilot’s license, he says he fell asleep at the wheel. His car careered into a ditch: the accident shattered his vertebrae and ended his airborne service before it could begin. Something else had been nagging at him, too. Cordell wanted closure for the incident in Tuscaloosa – so he pressed charges. Hadder was indicted by a grand jury on two counts of assault.

A trial resulted in a hung jury and Hadder’s acquittal, but in 2012, a civil court found Hadder liable for the attack and ordered him to pay Cordell $20,000. Hadder’s own journey from that Tuscaloosa parking lot was turbulent. Three years after the incident involving Cordell, a prisoner claimed he was assaulted, choked and Tazed by Hadder while on day release for a family reunion at a Waffle House. Hadder said he was making a lawful arrest; a legal complaint by the inmate was dismissed because it was filed after the two-year statute of limitations. Then, in 2012, a process server sued Hadder, claiming he was assaulted and wrongfully arrested while trying to serve a subpoena.

His lawsuit claimed that Hadder handcuffed him, shouting: “You are f**king stupid” and “This is f**king Walker County.” Hadder told CNN he didn’t know the man was serving him a subpoena, and had again acted to protect himself; the case was ultimately settled, the process server’s attorney told CNN. Hadder was fired by Walker County in 2012. After a due process hearing, the county found he “used profane, vulgar, insolent and abusive language toward citizens of Walker County, exercised bad judgment in and about carrying out his duties as deputy sheriff and abused his authority.” Hadder told a local newspaper after the hearing that “the scummy local politics of Walker County have claimed their latest victim.” When he spoke with CNN, his view remained largely unchanged.

But Hadder’s career didn’t end there. It flourished, a few towns up the road, in Hanceville. Hadder applied to work in Hanceville in 2017. He didn’t list anyone from the Walker County Sheriff’s Office as a reference, according to his job application, which was viewed by CNN. He got the job, and over the ensuing seven years he’d make friends and enemies. His presence echoed the tensions of the town and within law enforcement itself; the battle between the past and the future. “(Hadder) had a different way of policing: the older style,” his former chief Howell says.

“There were just certain things that me and Adam did not agree on.” He wasn’t comfortable with Hadder’s presence in his team, he adds, saying Hadder “didn’t believe” in getting to know his community – a claim Hadder rejects. Howell tells CNN that he twice asked Mayor Sawyer to dismiss Hadder, but was told to find a way to get along with him. Fulenwider, the former dispatcher, respected Hadder. But she tells CNN that residents were wise to follow a lesson when interacting with him: “Don’t cross his path.” Hadder told CNN he would hire an officer who had a similar background to his: “I would like to think I would give someone a second chance.” And he had pockets of vocal support.

“Hadder’s a bulldog,” former judge Gravlee tells CNN. “There’s been a lot of bad stuff said about him in the past, but if I’m out on the street and I got people coming at me, I don’t want anybody else but him with me.” But during a phone call with CNN, Hadder accepted that the profession has shifted dramatically in his 27 years as a cop. For decades the old guard has held the line in the South, but the drumbeat of change grew like a fight song on a college football field. “Where I fit into that, I don’t know,” he said. Asked whether he’d approach his career differently today than when he started in 1997, he took a beat.

“I think I would do about the same things along the same lines,” he said. “I would try to put bad guys in jail.” Meanwhile, Cordell’s story wasn’t quite finished. In 2017 he says he was pulled over on a traffic stop, and spent an evening in a cell in Hanceville. “There were four of us in one tiny room,” he recalls. “It’s pretty disgusting … there’s rot on the walls, the floor’s dirty.” Then he heard a yell: “Cordell, let’s go.” It was the voice that preceded a fight twelve years earlier, in a dingy parking lot in Tuscaloosa. Cordell shot his cellmates a desperate look. “Are you kidding me?” he thought. “This guy?” But this interaction was different.

Cordell says the pair spoke for hours in Hadder’s office, before Cordell was released. This Hadder was older, friendly. He believes they felt a strange kinship. “We squashed our beef,” he says. Today, Cordell reflects on his beating stoically. His eyes are steely, his face weathered by each bruising chapter of his life. “There’s thousands of cops across the South, and across the country, who’ve done the same thing.” He says he’s seen it happen to friends, time after time, the officers usually going unpunished. “They call it the ‘good old boy’ system,” he adds. “I don’t know if you’ll ever change it.” David Thompson wants to change it.

Thompson is big, brash and a bundle of contradictions: He’s an Auburn fan in Crimson Tide territory. He’s a big-time cop in a small town. He listens to Frank Sinatra as he hurls his truck over curbs and corners. His energy is upbeat in a place where everyone seems beaten down. He’s learned some things in his time. He’ll never sit in a restaurant booth, so his arms are always free to draw his weapon. But he’s seen the national discourse shift around policing, too. When he grew up in the 1970s, the TV show “CHiPs” inspired Thompson to become an officer. By the time he retired, law enforcement’s image had been tarnished by a series of high-profile deaths at the hands of police.

“It used to be something people want to do, and now it’s not.” His task – to rebuild Hanceville’s force – is a mammoth effort, in a town blighted by betrayal. But this isn’t just about Hanceville. His solutions could echo in cash-strapped departments across the nation. Hanceville is a warning of how bad things can get. It might also offer a roadmap for their recovery. “I’ve noticed a slippage in our standards,” he says. Understatement isn’t a color Thompson wears well, but he makes an occasional show of trying it on. Until he doesn’t. “Police are their own worst enemies,” he says, an incredulous smile plastered across his face.

“We do the dumbest things.” Thompson is trying to answer a question that rarely gets asked: How do you build a police force from the ground up? His answer is ambitious and old-fashioned. He says he’d change the department’s name and hire older officers who are disinterested in retirement and motivated by anger over what happened here. He’d pay them well, and tell them to make as many traffic stops as possible, then let drivers go with a warning – forgoing a revenue source, but building better relations. Formal uniforms would be required; cargo pants strictly prohibited. “The community does not trust law enforcement at all,” he says.

“You’ve got to rebuild that trust from the ground up.” Thompson wants an annual budget of $1.7 million to make it happen, about $200,000 more than the previous budget, with savings made by outsourcing jailing and dispatching. He considers it money well spent: response times would be around three minutes, compared to about 20 when waiting on the county. Hanceville, sandwiched between Huntsville and Birmingham, “is in a great position to grow,” Thompson says. But only if it bets on itself. That’s one future for Hanceville: a note of hope on which to end this grim story.

But there’s another possibility: Thompson’s plan could become another broken promise, and the awkward arrangement with Cullman County could continue indefinitely. If that happens, the culprits would be familiar: a lack of money, and a lack of will. Hanceville, whose annual budget is $6.5 million, is reluctant to find the $200,000 required. “I’ve never been in politics (before),” Campbell, the mayor, tells CNN. “(But) when you start talking about taxation, people don’t like that.” Asked whether he believes Thompson’s plan will be implemented, Campbell lifts his shoulders and furrows his brow. “I don’t think we can,” he says.

“Can’t afford it.” For months after presenting his vision to Hanceville’s leaders, Thompson heard nothing. He waited as an old administration departed and a new one was sworn in. He waited while Campbell found his way around his office. And then, tired of waiting, he delivered the first of two final twists in this story. “You spoke to the new mayor?” he asks CNN, barreling away from Hanceville in his truck, the town slipping from his rearview mirror. “Did he tell you I resigned?” Thompson offered his notice late last year as the city mulled its next move.

“I didn’t want to take their money for doing nothing.” Then, after CNN visited Hanceville and days before this story was published, the mayor followed suit. He had been in the job mere weeks, but said the sting of his wife’s death led him to make the decision. His exit was immediate; he has been replaced by the mayor pro tem, just as Sawyer replaced Nail before the collapse of the police force, and the council will decide whether to hold a special election later this month. “I believed I could help address the issues that have brought significant attention and challenge to Hanceville,” Campbell wrote in his resignation letter.

“I believed that staying busy and serving our community would help me process my grief.” “I have come to realize that this belief was mistaken.” Hanceville, once again, has no mayor. It has no cops. And it may not have the money to hire them. Many of Hanceville’s residents told CNN, virtually without exception, that they want an improved local force. Thompson has handed them a blueprint to follow. But this town is teetering between the wreckage and the recovery. The scandal has scarred everyone, at least by association. And Hanceville’s fate is as murky as the fog that pours in at night, blotting out buildings and blackening the road ahead.

A hole in the wall exposed this force, but its foundations had been rotten for some time. Spend a day here, and you’ll hear it all. It was the officers’ fault: They were bad apples. It was the city’s fault: There wasn’t enough money. It was the leadership’s fault: How could they not have known? It was Willingham’s fault: He alone brought down the department. Each pointed finger leads to another. The uncomfortable truth is that they may all be right. The poisonous forces that combined to thrust Evelyn’s face into the gravel outside her home were years in the making. There were many of them: burnout, underfunding, secrecy, mistrust. Those same forces led to a knee in Brian Campbell’s back.

They allowed Chris Willingham to pick up a broom, unlock a door and grab a fistful of drugs. They taught Erik “Du-Bee” Williams to drive the long way home, and Landon Cordell to shrug at the injustice of it all. Together they festered under a dangerous cloak of secrecy. Then they all came crashing down. And a new battle began: a fight for Hanceville’s future.