NC woman charged with making kidnapping threats and putting bounties on officials
An Asheville-area woman who describes herself as a soldier in a faux legal war against North Carolina officials has been charged by federal prosecutors with making interstate kidnapping threats.
The FBI arrested and jailed Darris Moody of Waynesville on Sept. 7, charging her with faxing or posting phony court notices that accuse her targets of treason, corruption and environmental crimes, federal documents show.
The orders from the nonexistent “U.S. Environmental District Court” also placed bounties of $10,000 and up on the heads of the accused and called for citizen’s arrests.
According to the website for a group that calls itself the “Peoples’ Bureau of Investigation,” hundreds of elected officials, government employees and private individuals have been served with the mailings nationwide.
In all, the website’s list of purported targets includes about 70 North Carolinians, including 11 current or former Mecklenburg County judges, The Charlotte Observer has previously reported.
All are accused of poorly defined acts of treason, “Deep State” corruption, as well as environmental crimes that include the poisoning of public water supplies.
Moody is charged with violating the Interstate Communications Act. If convicted, she faces up to five years in prison. Her identity and arrest were first reported by the Smoky Mountain News.
Over the protests of Moody’s federal prosecutor, U.S. Magistrate Judge Carleton Metcalf of Asheville released Moody from custody Monday on an unsecured $25,000 bond, placing her on home detention and ordering her to wear electronic monitoring. Her next court appearance has not been scheduled.
Moody, a one-time real estate appraiser, could not be reached for comment on Tuesday. Her attorney, Sean Devereux of Asheville, said he welcomed Metcalf’s decision to free his client, contending that Moody is neither a flight risk nor a threat to public safety.
Whether her actions posed an actual threat remains unclear. But they come at a time when government officials, particularly those in the criminal justice system, have become the targets of increasingly volatile rhetoric and isolated acts of violence, most recently from the right.
“In the past, this might be considered more of an annoyance,” Superior Court Judge Lisa Bell of Charlotte, a Republican whose name appears on the PBI database, previously told the Observer.
“But in light of what’s going on today, there’s the realization that there may be things we need to be afraid of that we don’t even know we need to be afraid of. It’s the unknown that’s so concerning.”
The PBI website has been linked to Tim Dever, who operates an arcade company in a Chicago suburb. Dever’s Facebook page includes the PBI logo. His LinkedIn account describes him as a CEO and a “freedom fighting cereal (sic) entrepreneur.”
Dever did not respond to an Observer email Tuesday seeking comment.
‘The government’s fired’
According to an FBI affidavit unsealed last week after her arrest, Moody’s activities were focused on Haywood County, due west of Asheville.
In June, she faxed court orders known as writs of execution to Haywood Sheriff Greg Christopher and one of his deputies that listed their alleged crimes and included the officers’ personal information, the affidavit alleges. The fax headers revealed that Moody had sent the documents, the FBI says.
During the same time period, two Haywood County commissioners, the district attorney, and the CEO and chief nursing officer of the Haywood Regional Medical Center received similar writs. Again, the faxes included Moody’s name, the affidavit claims.
All the writs appeared to have been downloaded from the PBI website, the affidavit says. All the names of the Haywood County targets have been posted on the site’s database.
As of Sept. 1, some 55 persons living in the Western District of North Carolina, which covers the western third of the state, had been served with the writs, the FBI claims.
Twice in July, according to the affidavit, Moody went to the U.S. Post Office in Waynesville to post written notices of her targets’ names and alleged crimes on a bulletin board.
In August, she was filing false documents inside the Register of Deeds Office in the Haywood County Courthouse when she got into an argument with one of the commissioners she had faxed in June, the affidavit claims.
Afterward, Moody phoned an employee she knew from the deeds office. According to the affidavit, Moody’s voicemails carried a dystopian, anti-government bent.
Moody warned the employee that every additional day she spent in her job, she was committing more crimes.
“I have a higher jurisdiction than all of you in government,” she said, according to the affidavit. “And, I have, um, power to serve papers. And the government’s fired.”
Five days before her arrest, Moody emailed a Haywood sheriff’s deputy, saying she had been “jumped by the elected officials in the courthouse” and that her identity as the source of the writs had now been revealed. She said she remained undaunted.
“I will continue to fight for our freedoms back in this county and I will continue to only bow to God,” she wrote, according to the affidavit.
“... (I)f my house gets blown up, so be it. Soldiers must be willing to sacrifice their lives for their country’s freedom. And I am.”
This story was originally published September 14, 2022 at 6:10 AM.
