Written by Mark Enochs

One of the places we never get to see in Dead Man’s Line is the inside of Tony’s apartment where he restrained Dick Hall in one way or another for three days. Here is a diagram (thank you, Kirk McCollough, for creating that) that we adapted from a court document that showing the layout of Tony’s third-floor Crestwood Village apartment (whose orange brick exterior today still looks much like it did in ’77). We’ve pointed out a few important spots that show the extent to which Tony had thought out the kidnapping. Unlike a psychotic episode or a crime of passion, this was not a spur-of-the-moment decision or a spontaneous outburst of anger.

Little known fact: In the weeks leading up to the kidnapping, Tony rearranged the interior of his apartment to match one of the Meridian Mortgage offices, presumably that of M. L. Hall, Dick Hall’s father. Tony then practiced his plan to get a sense of how much space he’d have to work in and determine the best way to exit the office with his hostage in tow. He eventually decided that he’d have to bring a second gun with him to force Hall to comply while Tony rigged up the .12-gauge shotgun. 

Another little-known sign of premeditation: On several occasions in January 1977 whenever he’d visit the Meridian Mortgage office, Tony made it known that he was going to have an operation on his arm, a ruse of course that would allow him to conceal a handgun in the sling he wore over his arm on the day of the kidnapping.

Points of interest in the apartment diagram include:

• Bedroom window and balcony with sliding glass door. These are the two places SWAT snipers aimed at initially, but they had to abandon this tactic once they saw the wires and keys in the windows, indicating that these access points were wired to explode.
• Wires, tape, and keys. Tony used tape, straws, and keys to make it look like his balcony door was rigged to blow up. This also made it difficult to see inside the apartment. In reality, Tony had run a wire from the curtains to his homemade incendiary device in the middle of the apartment. The tactic worked, effectively taking the snipers out of the equation.
• Tony’s table. On several occasions, Tony and Dick Hall sat at the table for periods of time. On the second night after having taken the rig off Hall, Tony angrily reattached the gun, and the two fell asleep at the table, both surprised that the gun hadn’t gone off in their sleep.
• Supplies. Prepared for a lengthy standoff, Tony had stocked up enough groceries to last him at least a week.
• Front door. With the window and balcony rendered inaccessible, the front door was the only way in and out of the apartment, and here too, wires ran from the door to the incendiary device.
• Incendiary device. While Kiritsis was bluffing about rigging his apartment with dynamite, he did set up a kind of Rube Goldberg contraption consisting of jugs of gasoline, a padlock, a nylon rope, and a burning candle. If law enforcement tried to storm the apartment, Tony would pull the nylon rope, which would release the padlock, which would fall onto a glass jug full of gas. Once the fumes made contact with the lit candle, the resulting fire would eventually cause a second jug of gasoline to explode.
• Bathroom. On a few occasions, Tony took the cable off Dick Hall and chained him to the toilet.
• Wall breach. The Army bomb squad out of Ft. Benjamin Harrison had considered penetrating the wall from the apartment next to Tony’s to gain entry. Tony happened to catch wind of the plan on WIBC, went berserk, and that was the end of the wall breach idea.