Jon Hamm's American Hostage is a true story — and the real ending changed American law
Tony Kiritsis held a shotgun to a man's head for 63 hours, much of it on live radio and television, and a jury found him not guilty.
American Hostage premiered on MGM+ on September 20, and its eight-episode run ends November 1. Shawn Ryan and Eileen Myers created it from the 2022 scripted podcast of the same name. Jon Hamm, who voiced Indianapolis news director Fred Heckman on the podcast, plays him again on screen. Giovanni Ribisi plays Kiritsis, Kristoffer Polaha plays his hostage, Dick Hall, and Mireille Enos plays Heckman's wife, Barbara.
What really happened
The dispute started with land. In 1973, Kiritsis borrowed $110,000 from Meridian Mortgage to buy 17 acres in Indianapolis, which he planned to turn into a shopping center. He fell behind on the payments, and he came to believe his broker, Richard "Dick" Hall, and Hall's father wanted the land for themselves.
What followed took less than three days:
- February 8, 1977 — Kiritsis walks into Hall's office and takes him hostage. He wires a sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun to the back of Hall's head, with the wire running from the trigger to Hall's neck, so the gun would fire if police shot Kiritsis or Hall tried to run.
- February 9 — around 6:30 a.m., Kiritsis calls Fred Heckman, news director of radio station WIBC. The station decides to put the interview on the air live, even though it can't bleep his language.
- February 10 — the FBI brings Heckman in to help with negotiations. That evening, Kiritsis walks Hall out of his apartment complex and holds an impromptu press conference that runs more than 30 minutes, calling himself "a goddamned national hero." He releases Hall, fires the shotgun into the air to prove it was loaded, and is arrested.
John H. Blair's photograph of the standoff won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography.
What the series adds
The show keeps the standoff as it happened. Some of what surrounds it is invented or stretched:
- The friendship between Heckman's wife, Barbara, and Hall's wife, Ibby.
- Ben Hairston, the journalist played by William Jackson Harper who questions Heckman's role.
- The bond between Heckman and Kiritsis, drawn out over eight episodes.
Myers has been open about what she was building.
"We felt we were kind of telling a love story between these two men," Myers told Emmy magazine.
The same events also reached theaters this year, in Gus Van Sant's Dead Man's Wire, with Bill Skarsgård as Kiritsis. That film renames the broadcaster: Colman Domingo plays a radio host called Fred Temple.
The verdict
Kiritsis was charged with kidnapping, armed robbery and armed extortion, and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Under Indiana law at the time, once a defendant raised insanity, prosecutors had to prove he was sane beyond a reasonable doubt. Psychiatrists described Kiritsis as psychotic and delusional during the standoff.
"All we had to do was raise a reasonable doubt in the jury's mind," Kiritsis's co-counsel Richard Kiefer told The Indiana Lawyer.
On October 21, 1977, the jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity. He was committed to a state mental hospital instead of prison.
How it changed the law
Indiana moved fast. At its very next session, in 1978, the General Assembly flipped the burden: a defendant pleading insanity now had to prove it, by a preponderance of the evidence. In 1981, Indiana also adopted a new verdict, "guilty but mentally ill," becoming the second state to do so after Michigan, though that law is usually tied to a different Indiana case, the trial of Steven Judy.
The rest of the country followed after a second insanity verdict, in a far bigger case:
- 1982 — John Hinckley Jr. was found not guilty by reason of insanity for shooting President Reagan. By late that year, six states had a guilty-but-mentally-ill verdict, and others moved to tighten or abolish the insanity defense.
- 1984 — Congress passed the Insanity Defense Reform Act, which put the burden of proving insanity on the defendant in federal cases.
Kiritsis spent 11 years in state institutions. He was released in January 1988, after the state couldn't prove he was still a danger, and died at home in Indianapolis on January 28, 2005, at 72. Dick Hall published his own account, Kiritsis & Me: Enduring 63 Hours at Gunpoint, in 2017, and died in 2022.
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