Gerald Hemp, Jerry Whittier and the Cocaine Plane in the Smokies

Smoky Mountain Files · Unsolved

On July 10, 1984, Gerald Lyle Hemp left a minimum-security work-release center in Lantana, Florida, for a dentist appointment.

He kept the appointment.

He never returned.

Hemp was serving a 40-year Tennessee sentence. Less than two years earlier, authorities had captured him under another name. Three years before that, a twin-engine airplane carrying more than 600 pounds of cocaine had landed at a small Sevier County airport.

But in Gatlinburg, some people remembered him as neither a prisoner nor Gerald Hemp. They knew him as Jerry.

Three years earlier: A plane in the mountains

The airport was not in downtown Gatlinburg. It sat outside Sevierville, north of the tourist strip and the entrance to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The original runway had been built in 1966. When Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge took over its operation in early 1982, the field had three hangars, 15 airplanes and a 4,500-foot runway.^[2]

That scale matters. On March 23, 1981, a Beechcraft Queen Air arrived there after a route contemporary reports traced from Colombia through Florida. It was a twin-engine propeller airplane, not a commercial jet, and it had come down at night.^[3]

The next day, Tennessee Bureau of Investigation agents found the cocaine.

One early report placed the load at 613 pounds. Other contemporary coverage and later court reporting used 614. The one-pound discrepancy has followed the case for decades, but it does not change its scale: a little more than 600 pounds of nearly pure Colombian cocaine had reached Sevier County aboard a private airplane.^[4][5]

Law enforcement supplied an estimated street value of more than $200 million. That figure assumed the cocaine would be diluted and divided for sale; it was not a wholesale invoice. The physical weight is the firmer fact.

Clarence Dennis Newell was identified as the pilot. Charles Leslie Kageler Jr. was identified as the copilot. Investigators believed Kageler's father, Charles Leslie Kageler Sr., and Hemp were waiting at the airport. By the time agents understood what had landed in Sevier County, the four men connected to it had scattered.

The timing made another detail difficult to dismiss. Hemp and the elder Kageler had been discussing a lease of the airport with local officials. In the same year the county voted to close the field, the men later accused of arranging the cocaine flight had been trying to establish a legitimate foothold there.^[2][3]

The airplane stayed behind. The identities around it began to come apart.

The man Gatlinburg called Jerry

Federal authorities knew him as Gerald Lyle Hemp. The current U.S. Marshals file also lists George Baker, Scott Brady and Ronald Carlson. In Gatlinburg, he had presented himself as Jerry Whittier.^[1]

That name is the emotional center of the story. The federal file describes a cocaine case and an escape. Local memories describe a sociable man who spent time around the old Open Hearth and appeared to have money to spare.

Two readers separately told TheSmokyMountains.com that Jerry bought bicycles for children at a Sevierville home. One remembered helping with a Christmas event and receiving an unusually large tip. Another said the home's founder was his great-grandmother and remembered visiting Hemp after his arrest. These are firsthand local recollections, not findings from a court record. We have not located a receipt, event program or contemporary photograph that independently proves the bicycle purchase.

The distinction is important, but so is preserving the memory. Oral history can tell us how a person was experienced by a community. It cannot, by itself, settle a disputed date, ownership claim or criminal allegation.

The same Facebook discussion produced an immediate contradiction over a house above Gatlinburg. Some commenters connected Hemp to a property remembered as the “cocaine castle.” Others who said they knew the people or properties involved rejected the claim. No deed reviewed for this story establishes that Hemp owned the building people usually mean.

Gatlinburg therefore remembered two men in the same body: the apparently generous Jerry Whittier and the fugitive named in the airport case. The warrant used one name. The town used another.

The men who scattered

The airport investigation did not freeze after the four men fled.

Authorities arrested Newell in May 1981. They arrested the younger Kageler in June. At his trial that fall, Kageler Jr. said his father had described the South American trip as a weapons run for anti-Communist fighters. He maintained that he did not understand the cargo was cocaine until the flight was underway. Prosecutors argued that he knowingly joined an illegal operation, and the jury convicted him.^[4]

That testimony matters because it shows that the arms-running explanation did not originate with social media or with later fascination over Iran-Contra. A version of it was already in a Tennessee courtroom in 1981.

The elder Kageler never reached a courtroom in this case.

On June 21, 1982, his body was recovered several miles off Jupiter Beach, Florida. A Palm Beach County investigator described a severe bruise to the head, and later law-enforcement reporting treated the death as an apparent killing.^[6]

One associate was dead. Hemp was still missing.

Guns, cocaine and the story from the witness stand

Hemp later gave his own version. During his Tennessee trial, he maintained that his aviation work involved supplying weapons to anti-Communist causes in Central and South America and denied knowingly participating in the cocaine shipment.^[8]

The claim has gained power with time because it preceded the public Iran-Contra disclosures. Readers now look backward and see a familiar pattern: private airplanes, Central America, weapons and cocaine moving through the same historical period.

That resemblance is not proof.

The records reviewed for this article contain no declassified assignment, payment record, personnel file or corroborating government document showing that Hemp worked for the CIA. The documented statement is that an arms-running defense was made. The undocumented leap is that the defense was true.

The difference between those two sentences is where responsible history lives.

George Baker is arrested

On September 30, 1982, authorities arrested Hemp in Pompano Beach, Florida. He was living under the name George Baker—the same alias that remains on his federal fugitive profile.^[5]

He was returned to Sevier County and convicted. The sentence totaled 40 years. Tennessee appellate records show his case moving through the courts in 1984.^[7]

Yet Hemp did not remain in Tennessee. He was transferred into the Florida prison system and placed at a minimum-security work-release center in Lantana. The public sources reviewed here do not supply a satisfactory reason why a man convicted in such a large interstate cocaine case received that placement.

Gerald Hemp had finally been caught. Less than two years later, he was permitted to leave custody without an escort.

The appointment he kept

On July 10, 1984, Hemp signed out for a dentist appointment in town.

He arrived at the dentist's office. Whatever escape plan existed did not require him to skip the appointment. The break in the record comes afterward: he did not return to the Lantana center.^[6]

The federal warrant date on the current Marshals profile is July 10, 1984—the same day he walked away.^[1]

Later accounts produced sightings, theories about powerful assistance and speculation that Hemp reached South America. None supplies the missing document: an arrest record, a verified death certificate or a body conclusively identified as his.

The last public event that can be stated without qualification remains almost absurdly simple. He went to the dentist. Then he disappeared.

Wanted, four decades later

The current U.S. Marshals profile is brief. It lists Hemp as wanted for cocaine and escape in the Northern District of Florida. It describes him as 5 feet 10 inches tall, historically 210 pounds, with blue eyes and brown hair. It does not declare him alive. It does not declare him dead.^[1]

Based on the age reported in 1985, Hemp would now be in his late 80s. Death is plausible. So is the possibility that he lived for years under another identity before dying somewhere the warrant never reached.

Until a reliable record closes that gap, the legal answer is the same one printed in the federal file: wanted.

The case file: What is proven—and what is rumor

What the mountains may still be holding

The most useful new evidence may not be hidden in a federal vault. It may be sitting in Sevier County photo albums and storage boxes: a snapshot from the Open Hearth, a charity program, an airport document, a business card bearing one of Hemp's names or a property record that settles an old argument.

That is why this story remains open. The mystery is not an invitation to turn every rumor into fact. It is an invitation to find the record that moves a claim from one column of the case file to another.

Sources and reporting notes

This account was independently reconstructed from federal records, contemporary newspaper dispatches, Tennessee appellate references, the airport's official history, later archival reporting and reader-submitted oral histories. No wording or quotations were taken from the July 2026 Knox News article that prompted this investigation.

The Washington Post source below has an unrelated headline because Hemp appeared in that report as a person Alexandria detectives hoped to interview. Its law-enforcement reporting independently documents his Florida transfer, Lantana placement, dentist appointment and disappearance.

1. U.S. Marshals Service: Gerald Lyle Hemp fugitive profile
2. Gatlinburg–Pigeon Forge Airport: Official airport history
3. The Pampa News, June 29, 1981: airport, flight and lease reporting
4. The Midland Reporter-Telegram, November 16, 1981: Kageler trial and weapons-run testimony
5. Panama City News Herald, October 1, 1982: Hemp arrest report
6. The Washington Post, June 16, 1985: law-enforcement account of the transfer, escape and Kageler death
7. Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals reference to Hemp's 1984 appeal
8. Jim Balloch archival report, January 3, 2010: Hemp's Gatlinburg identity and trial defense

Oral-history file: Reader recollections supplied to TheSmokyMountains.com in July 2026 are retained by the publisher. They are labeled as recollections unless supported by an independent document or additional firsthand evidence.

Corrections: We update Smoky Mountain Files when stronger records become available. Send documented corrections through the contact page with the source of the correction.