Arsonist wrote witness from prison that he would torch her home. Then the feds stepped in.
When Clint Cole set fire to a house in 2015, a Rutherford County woman was a witness to the flames.
Her testimony a year later helped put the habitual felon away for almost 10 years.
Five years into his sentence, Cole sent his former accuser a letter from his cell in Alexander Correctional Institution. He reminded the woman that he’d be out of prison soon and that he planned to look her up — and her daughter, too. Staying true to his criminal conviction, Cole vowed in another letter to burn down her house.
“When I get to Spindale, I am going to come give you a visit when no body (sic) else is around. We have some things to discuss, it is going to be worth the wait,” he wrote in January 2020. “You are going to wish that you would not have stuck your nose were (sic) it did’nt (sic) belong.”
Last week, a judge decided that a longer stay behind bars is right where Cole belongs.
Chief U.S. District Judge Martin Reidinger of Asheville sentenced Cole to two years in federal prison for the crime of mailing threatening communications, a charge the 55-year-old pleaded guilty to on Dec. 22.
Reidinger made Cole’s new sentence “consecutive,” meaning it will begin when his state prison term ends.
The mother and daughter Cole threatened are identified in the case files by their initials only, which the Observer has chosen not to use to protect their privacy.
N.C. prison records show that Cole has a criminal record dating back to the 1980s. He was sentenced as a habitual offender in 2016 in Rutherford County to nine years and 10 months for two second-degree arson convictions and is currently being held in an undisclosed location.
Prosecutors say Cole is from Caroleen, a small unincorporated community southeast of Forest City and about 60 miles from Charlotte.
Cole was scheduled to be freed in two years. Now, Reidinger has doubled his wait.
Threats to witnesses
Defendants commonly reach out to witnesses before trial in hopes of persuading them to drop or alter their testimony.
Sometimes they take more extreme measures. In one of western North Carolina’s most notorious crimes over the last decade, members of a Charlotte cell of United Blood Nation ordered a hit on two Pineville merchants to keep one of them from testifying about the gang’s attempted robbery of their mattress store. The couple was fatally shot in their Lake Wylie home in 2014.
Last year, another Alexander Correctional inmate — this one from Gaston County — had 30 months added to his already lengthy sentence after he sent a letter threatening to kill his judge, his prosecutor and his jury from his 2001 trial.
Cole’s taunting letters are of a similar vein, promising violent reprisals against the witness, her boyfriend and her daughter.
“When will I get to Spindale? You will never know until it is to (sic) late,” he wrote in 2020. “I will be there before you know it. It will be to (sic) late when you look up & I am already in the house.”
He signed the letter, “Clint.”
He offered a postscript: “... If l have too (sic) I will hang around the store until I see (your daughter) & that will be the last time you see her. LOL.”
In Reidinger’s courtroom last week, according to one observer, no one was laughing.
This story was originally published April 25, 2022 at 10:58 AM.
