Who is Rex Feral?
In 2019, the Hit Man podcast investigated the story of Lawrence Horn, implicated in a murder for hire plot. The murderer, James Perry, used a book called Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors by “Rex Feral” to plan and execute the murders. Perry and Horn went to prison, and the surviving victims eventually sued the book’s publisher, Paladin Press, who settled the matter out of court for an undisclosed sum, once an appeals court found that Paladin was not protected by the first amendment when publishing material like this. The podcast told the story of the murders and sought the real identity of the book’s anonymous author, Rex Feral.
I was extremely curious. My first search for Rex Feral led directly to the name of a candidate: “Gail McCool.” No mystery, just right there in the Miami Herald. Still, I wanted to know if this was the podcast’s candidate for Rex Feral.
As initially released, episode seven of the podcast provided sufficient context clues to follow the path directly to McCool in other ways. The episode described the death of a teenager in Lenexa, Kansas in April of 1987, and a dangerous man connected to the death. Again searching in newspapers, it was simple enough to discover that the man in Kansas was Richard Oliver Hance—the same man mentioned in the Miami Herald article.
When I searched for other mentions of Hance, McCool’s name popped up as well. I discovered that she had been arrested in connection with some of his crimes, and indeed that it was her son who shot and killed Hance–in self-defense–in Florida 1993. This seemed like enough evidence. But there was one more piece to confirm everything (well, two).
Researching Rex Feral, I found the writer Karen Abbott. She describes how she went down the rabbithole herself, found out who the real author was, contacted her, and even worked on an unpublished book about McCool, whom she described as a friend. However, the book never came to fruition. When Abbott wrote another on a different subject, the acknowledgments include a thanks to Gayle McCool. Confirmation.
Having gotten that far, I contacted the podcaster to let them know that unless they wanted other listeners to discover who their candidate for the author was, they should remove some specific context clues from their reporting in episode seven. They did, which proved to me I had been right all along.
In the fall of 2025 Gayle McCool decided to shed her anonymity and that whole story can be read in Vanity Fair.