From Bank Robber to Shaman

Steve Hupp was a stone-cold career criminal. And by his own admission, he was “damn good at it,” too. “I was a bank robber, a car thief and a lot of other stuff,” he told me over the phone in his characteristic Kentucky drawl. “I was the worst kind of offender you could face because you would never know I was coming, and you usually didn’t know I was there till I was gone.

I’m not tatted up; I know how to speak eloquently; I’ve been through all kinds of classes. There was nothing off my radar. And that’s what made me hard to catch, because I did not have a specialty.” But in 1999, at the age of 34, Hupp's luck ran out and he was arrested. Although, he could not have known it at the time, this run-in with the law was just the first in a fateful series of events that would end up turning his world upside down… Continue reading