Masons Made Him Do It

Cops in Asheville, North Carolina have arrested a 70-year-old man and charged him with a series of hotel robberies. Jack Meredith Martin is suspected of stealing $100,000 worth of jewelry in April from a room at a local Holiday Inn Express, along with a string of other hotel robberies in which he allegedly used forged key cards to break into rooms.

Martin was tried and convicted of murder in the murder of one man and wounding of another in 2005, but was acquitted in a retrial and released after spending 56 months in prison. He had represented himself in the first trial, but lawyered up for the appeal.

So why did Martin claim he was originally convicted in the murder trial? You guessed correctly.

He claimed there was a "Masonic conspiracy" to convict him.

From Jury Finds Martin Not Guilty on the North Carolina Mountain Politics website:

Martin has for a long time expressed concerns about the involvement of Freemasons in his case and has said he felt there was a Masonic conspiracy to convict him. Motions in his second trial sought to keep Masons from being jurors.

When asked on Thursday if Masons were excluded from the second trial, Martin said, “I wouldn’t say that they were kept out. I think I have some good evidence that Greenway is a Mason, and a few other people still in the area. I talked about compassing, which went over the head of a lot of people. What that word means is to contrive, plot and scheme among themselves. That was going on during the first trial. At this trial there may have been some, but I didn’t see it.”

So I suspect the Freemasons also conspired to make him illegally break into hotel rooms, point guns at victims, steal cash and jewelry, and engage in second-degree kidnapping over the last year.