Speaker 2: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Stabbin' Stylists podcast. I'm Randa. And I'm Ashley. We are just two stylists who love true crime and hair, and we're gonna tell you about both. This is a true crime podcast. These stories may be disturbing to some. Listener discretion is [00:01:00] advised.

Ashley: Trigger warning: This episode contains graphic crime

today I am going to do one that is very specialized and localized to Cleveland, but if you're in any of the Cleveland groups, anytime a crime gets brought up this one is always mentioned in the comments. This one, this episode is about Cecil Kaywood.

From here in Cleveland, Tennessee, and he was 48 years old. He was the owner of the Jolly Cab company. He was the owner, but he also drove the cabs. Okay. So do you know how many cabs they had? I am not sure, but I think it was like more than one. Okay. I think it was like a company. Okay. So he took fares and deliveries.

And this is something that I hadn't thought about before is interesting, but cabs in like areas like this, not [00:02:00] big cities, the cab drivers were the delivery drivers. Okay. So when I started not saying this about Cecil, okay. Wood, I'm not saying this about cil. Okay. Wood. But when I started looking into that, a lot of the times, liquor and alcohol, yeah, they were, alcohol would get moved around, would be cab drivers.

And that comes up later in his case as like maybe an idea and like people throw, how do you think we got Nas called? But people like throw that around in the comments, but nothing says that. Like necessarily Yeah, no links are present. He may or may not have been either way. He might have been on the up and up.

You don't know. We don't know. So he had five daughters. And at the time the youngest was only three years old. Oh. So he had, little kids and it was March 22nd, 19 6, 19 64, A Sunday night. Okay. He was working his regular shift and the last he was seen around was around 10:00 PM. At that point, he was delivering sandwiches to a home on Georgetown Pike.

It always [00:03:00] surprises me when you're talking about like the sixties. How late they did things. Yeah. Sometimes I'm like, see, I would've thought y'all would've been in bed. Nope. Delivering sandwich. But I, I was, hey, midnight hours still existed, yeah. The woman he delivered to actually later told investigators that he was alone.

Nothing was weird. It just, everything was cool. But that night he did not return home and by early the next morning, they had called the police. 'cause this was not Cecil, to just not show up like this. Yeah. So shortly before noon, the following day, his bloodstained taxi cab was discovered.

Abandoned in Northeast Bradley County by a farmer named William Dodson. He had been out checking his fences and the vehicle had been left in a ditch. Hmm. There was noticeably blood in the side, particularly on the front seat confirming that he was probably [00:04:00] driving while he was attacked.

Hmm. Dotson calls, the police and there's, they start searching that wooded area because the cab's right here. Yeah. Where's he at? Is he right here? So in a thick thicket, about 200 yards away from the cab is where they found his body coroner. Ben Cox determined that he had been shot in the head.

Both his face and wrist had been slashed with a knife. Oh my. And the injuries were severe and indicated a violent and elaborate killing. So for what though? At this point? Nobody knows, and it's still never really even completely like to rob him. Question mark Of what a co. The $5 that was for the sandwich, one of the most significant discoveries is that Kaywood still had $199 and 14 cents in cash in his [00:05:00] pockets.

That's $200 in 1964 cash. That was a lot of money. Yeah, and it was still in his pockets at the time. So the Sheriff, Sam Cannon, stated that robbery didn't appear to be a motive, and so that kind of made the whole thing even more disturbing because why? For what? So they're investigating people trying to determine like if there was anybody else that saw him last, like after the 10:00 PM Yeah.

Trying to get the timeline. And they're pursuing as many leads as they can. At one point, they examined a separate bloodstained vehicle. Discovered abandoned on West Church Street between Gay Street and Market Street. The Bradley, it had the car, had a Bradley County license plate. Invisible blood smears on the front seat.

But it is found in a different area of town. And the sheriff and the TBI. So even the TBI we're investigating at this point. Okay. They examined the vehicle and [00:06:00] it was res registered to a Floyd Hamilton. But the officers learned that Hamilton had actually moved away from Cleveland a year earlier.

Floyd, this is the weird thing. After verifying his whereabouts, investigators determined that the abandoned car was not connected to Kay Wood's murder. And Rud out ruled out as evidence. But what hap what was going on with the car? Like he might have moved a year ago, but you found his car that was abandoned with blood in it.

So for, for why though? Yeah, like that's one damn weird coincidence. 1960s of it. All right. Yeah, that's weird. Like why? That's just really weird. So they offered a thousand dollars reward and then the state actually added another 2000, so like $3,000 in 1965.

So by October, 1965, which was a whole 18 months [00:07:00] later, it took him 18 months to get to this result. They got information from an informant. They didn't even figure this out on their own. An informant had to tell them and they interrogated a man named cy Walden. He was an 18-year-old guy at the time.

He confessed that him and his uncles, which were John. Edward and O Odyssey, literally spelled O-D-D-I-S-Y, all committed the crime together and the plan was that they were gonna rob Cecil and that. When they had entered his cab, he was instructed to take them to a designated point outside of Cleveland, so they were going to pick up a package.

When they got to the destination, Edward and Odyssey, each shot Cecil Kaywood in the head and Odyssey proceeded to rob [00:08:00] him. When Cecil gave Ev of what? Because the, he still had the cash, I'm guessing that was maybe personal money in his pockets and they did get like some from his cab teal.

That's all I can figure.. When he still gave evidence of being alive, Odyssey also slashed his wrist, so they just, abandoned the cab, threw him out, and they were picked up by John, which was, he knew where to come after.

Edward Odyssey and Cy, they were all the three that were in the cab, and John was the one that came and picked them up, but he rolled on all of them. Oh, okay. So the next morning they went and they rounded 'em all up. They got 'em all. They were each interrogated. And John actually signed a confession saying that he came and picked them up and told them everything that he knew [00:09:00] about it.

The next morning, Odyssey and Edward both ended up confessing. So pretty quickly once found out, they all just, they figure out they gotta confess. Yes, they were all convicted and Edward and Odyssey were the primary attackers. They were sentenced to life in prison. The other two were convicted and they got 20 years in one day.

Why one day, I have no clue. They had actually given them polygraph tests after they were arrested and after, everything had been confessed. Okay. And the test all said that they were truthful, but that never was even brought up in court because they didn't need it at that point. So they. We, we still, it never tells how much money these men got, that they even got money.

I don't understand why they did this. I don't [00:10:00] either. And people say that he, that Cecil was like the nicest guy ever. Everybody has such nice things to say about him. I don't know what the plan is. I don't know if they ended up getting money out of his till and didn't think to check his pockets.

Also, I. I don't, I don't know. It sounds like y'all just wanted to kill somebody in that odyssey. He just sounds mean. Yeah. For no reason. Slash the man's face and wrist after like you had a gun. This sounds morbid, but why would you not shoot him again? Why did you purposely do like something like that?

That's weird. Yeah. This, this seems like he wanted to kill somebody. Yeah. So that is one that like lives, what do you have to pick? The delivery guy? I know. Probably just thought it wasn't easy and like you said, it was out late. There can't be that many people that were out late. Wild behavior because Cleveland in 1964 didn't have the infrastructure that we do now [00:11:00] either.

Speaker: So.

Ashley: Yeah. Weird wild behavior. Weird. But this one's talked about all the time in Cleveland groups. You mentioned murders in Cleveland, Tennessee. Cecil. Yeah. The older ones. This is one they remember. So this is one that I've always seen, and they probably remember it because it seems so senseless.

Yeah. Literally for no reason. And that's what people say, like people were sent to jail for it, but like we still don't really know why, why, why they did this. So that's the story of Cecil Cawood in Cleveland, Tennessee.

Randa: Don't whistle in the woods at night. Bye, y'all.