Rick Kincaid talks with his friend Danny Ray Terry about Rick’s work as a bounty hunter. Rick remembers one of the funnier hunts he conducted as well as one of his most difficult — a case that caused Rick to end his bounty-hunting career for good.
Originally aired July 7, 2006, on NPR’s Morning Edition.
Danny Ray Terry (DRT) and Rick Kincaid (RK)
DRT: How many folks do you figure that you’ve picked up?
RK: There’s probably three or four hundred people that I’ve chased down and locked up. Most of what bounty hunting is about is just a matter of finding them. They don’t want to go, but once they get caught, they’re usually pretty easy to get along with. We’ve built up a good reputation as some real hard-nosed bounty hunters. Some fellers would find out we’re chasing them, they’d just go put themselves in jail. Probably one of the more funnier bounty hunts that I ever did it wasn’t a very high paying job, it became a matter of principle to catch this young feller. He really wasn’t in all that much trouble and I think I was only getting about three hundred dollars to pick him up. But every time we’d go to his house, he’d take off out that back door and hit them woods and we just couldn’t catch him. After three or four times of going out to this young man’s house to pick him up, he always ran on us, we decided one night that we were going to get him. So we went to Walmart and bought some cup hooks and went over by my uncle’s house and picked up an old net. We strapped that thing around the front porch of his house and beat on the back door and he took off out the front and got tangled up in that net and we got him in jail by three-o’clock in the morning.
DRT: One of the easiest catches you’ve had…
RK: Probably so, yes sir.
DRT: What about one of the toughest catches you’ve had? What would you have to say that was?
RK: Probably was on a hundred thousand dollar jump bond and when we started chasing the old boy it was aggravated kidnapping. However, once we got the job and signed the contract to go find him, we found out he was a big time methamphetamine drug dealer so we figured out then we were against more than we had originally bargained for. And actually the night we got him, the sheriff’s department was supposed to hit the house about the same time I did, I went in first and unbeknownst to me, they were about ten minutes behind me. We didn’t know that was a drug lab and I walked right in the middle of it. They took me down and began to beat me pretty good. They broke my jaw and knocked out a couple of my teeth with some old pliers. And then they began to pull the teeth out as I wouldn’t answer questions. Of course I couldn’t answer the questions because I was in too much pain. So I was sure proud to see when the sheriffs department did break in there and get me out of that. I figured that was going to be the end of it there. And that was the night I retired from bounty hunting. I walked down the road to where my wife was sitting in a van. And I told her that was about as close to death as I wanted to get.
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