The Great Johnny Cash Christmas Robbery and Kidnapping

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In his autobiography, Johnny Cash explains how he’s part gypsy, and part homebody. That’s why he kept multiple homes in multiple places throughout his life, and lived at them according to a rhythm that would be foreign to most people, but was natural to him. He had his famous house on Old Hickory Lake just north of Nashville, a farm at Bon Aqua even further outside of Nashville, a house in Port Richey, Florida inherited from his wife June Carter’s parents, as well as hotels and his bus that he spent many evenings in every year. Then there was his estate in Jamaica called Cinnamon Hill.

Cash says about the island paradise, “Jamaica has renewed me more times than I can count. Partly it’s the isolation. It’s not Nashville, or Tennessee, or even the United States, and the Jamaican telephone system has its own mysterious schedule beyond the influence of even the most important people. Sometimes it decides I just don’t need it. Usually it’s right.”

Cash went on to say that Jamaica reminded him of his childhood, from the lushness of the vegetation, to the purity of the air, to the brilliant stars at night. He talked about how thankful he was for his walks along the jungle trails and the smells of the flowers, and picking bananas right off the the tree when they’re perfectly ripe.

He also mentions as he reminisces in his autobiography, “I look toward the front gate and see a guard walking the perimeter, one of our regulars, a wiry, grim-looking character toting a nickel-plated Remington 12-gauge. All I can say about him is that I’m glad he’s on my side.”

This alludes to the more sinister side of Jamaica, and Cash’s experiences at Cinnamon Hill. This is the story of the Christmas kidnapping and robbery of Johnny Cash and his family.

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Cinnamon Hill is an estate that was first built on the Jamaican island in 1734, and was part of a sugar plantation where thousands of slaves worked. With limestone walls four feet thick, and massive solid mahogany doors, it was built to sustain the worst of hurricanes that regularly ravage Jamaica, and has successfully beaten back dozens of storms over the decades. It even survived the multiple slave revolts in Jamaica, and the general uprising in 1831 when most of the other estates on the island were destroyed. Surrounding the grounds now where the sugar fields and slaves shacks once were is a world-famous golf course.

Cinnamon Hill is nearby Jamaica’s largest old estate called Rose Hall, which was owned by Delaware businessman and politician John Rollins. Rollins was close friends with Johnny Cash, and took him by Cinnamon Hill on a tour of the property in 1974 when Rollins owned Cinnamon Hill as well. Cash immediately fell in love with the Cinnamon Hill estate, and decided he wanted to fix it up and turn it into a home for his family. Rollins didn’t want to sell it, but Cash fixed it up anyway at his own expense, wanting to spend Christmas there in 1974. Then after Cash had already done so much work to the place, he strong armed Rollins, who eventually gave in, and sold Cinnamon Hill to Cash.

The estate had seen many stately and famous residents over the years, and housed many important moments. The original owner was Edward Barrett, who was an ancestor of famous poet Elizabeth Barrett-Browning of “How do I love thee. Let me count the ways” fame. Elizabeth Barrett-Browning had lived at Cinnamon Hill in her era as well. Cash wrote much of his autobiography in the house, as well as multiple songs. Cash’s good friend and evangelist Billy Graham also wrote parts of three books there when the house was on loan to him from Cash.

Another interesting tidbit about Cinnamon Hill according to all previous and current owners, as well as local lore, is that the estate is credibly haunted. When Waylon Jennings and wife Jessi Colter stayed at the house one evening, they swore they heard strange noises. But they were later explained away as tree limbs brushing against the roof. This was child’s play compared to the stuff Johnny Cash swears he witnessed first hand.

Cash recalls, “Mysterious figures have been seen—a woman, and young boy—at various times by various people over the years. Once, a woman appeared in the dining room when six of us were present. We all saw her. She came through the door leading to the kitchen, a person in her early thirties, I’d say, wearing a full-length white dress, and proceeded across the room toward the double doors in the opposite wall, which were closed and locked. She went through them without opening them, and then, from the other side, she knocked rat-tat-tat, rat-tat.”

Cash goes on to say that they’ve never had any trouble with the ghosts. They never meant anyone any harm, and he and his family were never scared of them. Cash says, “The only really frightening story about Cinnamon Hill belongs in the realm of the living and serves to remind me that some of them are much more dangerous than all the dead put together.”

It happened on Christmas Day 1982 at 6:00 pm, just as Johnny Cash, members of his family, and distinguished guests had sat down for Christmas dinner, and were bowing their heads to say the blessing. At that moment, three men came rushing in through the three separate entrances to the house, all wearying pantyhose over their heads to conceal their identity. One had a knife, another had a hatchet, and the third had a gun. They all appeared to be relatively young, with the ringleader probably in his early 20s, and the other two just teenagers.

Along with Johnny Cash and his wife June Carter, the couple’s son John Carter Cash was there, as was John Carter’s friend Doug Caldwell, Cash’s sister Reba Hancock and her husband Chuck Hussey, along with Cash’s friend and archeologist Ray Fremmer. Also in the house was the cook and her stepdaughter, a local maid, as well as a household manager from Tennessee there for the Holiday. There were no guards. At the time, they didn’t even lock the doors of the house. The armed men ordered everyone to lay face down on the ground while they yelled, “Somebody’s going to die here tonight!”

While some of the women fainted or began to act hysterical, Johnny Cash tried to remain cool-minded. The robbers demanded a million dollars, which Cash explained they did not have on their person, and the government wouldn’t allow them to bring onto the island. Shortly after making everyone remove their jewelry and watches, the man with the gun put the gun against the head of John Carter’s friend Doug Caldwell and said, “Everybody do as I say, or John Carter is going to die!” Then when everyone was ordered to their feet, the gunman figured out he had the wrong kid, and then moved over to point the gun at John Carter.

For the next two hours, the intruders went through the entire house, room to room, dragging everyone with them, and removing any valuable items from each room. According to Cash, the intruders were strangely tidy, not tossing the house, but carefully going through things to remove the valuables. By the time they got to the master bedroom, the gunman became downright cordial.

Johnny Cash asked him to please remove the gun from his son’s head. The gunman responded, “Don’t worry about it, man.” While the other two men went through the bedroom and the gunman was standing on the bed—still holding the gun to John Carter’s head—he asked the 11-year-old boy, “What do you do down here? What do you like to do in Jamaica? Do you snorkel?”

Apparently, John Carter Cash was the coolest guy of the whole kidnapped party. The gunman asked him at one point, “Do you want a feel of my gun?” at which John Carter replied, “No, sir. I don’t play with guns. I have a lot of respect for them. They’re very dangerous.” The gunman replied, “Hey, I like you man.” John Carter would later recall the harrowing incident by saying rather nonchalantly, “Yeah, that was quite a night!”

Once the robbers had bagged all of their loot, the incident was far from over. So that they could make a clean getaway, the armed men ordered everyone into the basement, which caused a renewed round of crying and concern from the women in the party. Everyone was barricaded in the basement, but before the men left, they slipped a plate of Christmas turkey under the door. Seemingly unfazed and super hungry at that point, John Carter and his friend Doug preceded to devour the plate of turkey as the others attempted to break down the barricaded door.

One of the details that Johnny Cash leaves out of his account, perhaps due to humility, is how the robbers also stole 175 pairs of shoes that he and June had purchased to give to children at the local orphanage. The shoes, along with an estimated $35,000-$50,000 in cash and jewelry were loaded into Cash’s Range Rover, and driven off. Only as the robber kidnappers were driving away did they hear the dogs outside barking. There was a theory that the intruders might have worked on or been to the property before. That’s potentially how they entered undetected.

After about two hours, Cash and Chuck Hussey were able to break down the barricaded door to the basement. In Johnny Cash’s account, they then called the police. But in press accounts, some workers from Cinnamon Hill took the property’s other Range Rover into Montego Bay to alert authorities. Either way, what would happen next would weigh on the conscience of Johnny Cash just as much as the robbery and kidnapping itself.

The stories of what happened afterwards vary, perhaps because information and verification in the incident was somewhat scarce. Having a prominent American robbed and kidnapped in Jamaica would have been terrible PR for the tourism industry on the island, and because of his charity work, Cash was well-regarded by most locals. What we know for sure is that the three men who perpetrated the robbery all ended up dead.

According to Cash, the robber with the gun was caught that night and killed while resisting arrest. The other two men were caught in a robbery a few weeks later in Kingston. Then while in prison, the two men were supplied with a ladder for a work project. When they promptly tried to use the ladder to escape, they were shot and killed by the guards just outside of the jail’s walls, with the insinuation by Cash being that the boys were lured into trying to escape so they could be killed.

Other accounts say all three men were part of a terrorist group whose leader had been killed a week before the robbery. The man with the gun was killed the night of the robbery, but the others were caught a week later at the Montego Bay airport trying to take a flight to Miami to fence the goods stolen from Cinnamon Hill. Either way, Cash took his assurances of “swift justice” by local authorities to mean there would be no fair trial or rehabilitation. And there wasn’t. All three men ended up dead.

The Prime Minister of Jamaica was very upset over the robbery, and especially worried that Johnny Cash would use the incident to leave the island and never return. So the Prime Minister ordered armed units from the Jamaican Defense Force to surround the house until Johnny Cash was ready to return to the United States. At the time, the island was suffering from political struggles and what Cash called “ganja wars” that regularly resulted in violence, even if the violence regularly avoided tourist areas to not chase away American dollars.

Cash said about the incident in his Autobiography:

How do I feel about it? What’s my emotional response to the fact (or at least the distinct possibility) that the desperate junkie boys who threatened and traumatized my family and might easily have killed us all (perhaps never intending any such thing) were executed for their act or murdered, or shot down like dogs, have it how you will?

I’m out of answers. My only certainties are that I grieve for desperate young men and the societies that produce and suffer so many of them, and I felt that I knew those boys. We had a kinship, they and I: I knew how they thought, I knew how they needed. They were like me.

Johnny Cash was of course referring to his own battles with substance abuse, and with the law. After all, he’d once been arrested himself trying to transport 1,100 pills across the United States border from Mexico, among multiple other infractions throughout his life. Cash had also battled with substance abuse much of his days, including seeking treatment at the Betty Ford Clinic.

The incident exacerbated Johnny Cash’s reliance on sleeping pills, and he started carrying a gun for the first time. Cash was heavily conflicted about the matter for many years, but eventually hired 24-hour armed security, and put the incident in the past. Johnny Cash refused use the incident as an excuse to abandon Cinnamon Hill, or Jamaica.

Cash said later, “Today I can look back and see that some good came from it all. When I take my walks and golf-cart rides down to the sea, I’m often stopped by local people who greet me warmly, and I can’t count how many times I’ve heard gratitude for my decision to stay in Jamaica. And since the robbery I’ve been more involved in Jamaican life in various ways that have been very good for me. Today I feel truly at home in this beautiful country, and I love and admire its proud and kindly people.”

Johnny and June owned Cinnamon Hill for the rest of their lives. When Johnny Cash passed away in 2003, Jamaica sent an emissary to represent the island nation at the remembrance.

Today, the Cinnamon Hill estate is back in the ownership of the family of Johnny Cash’s friend John Rollins who Cash purchased it from. It is open weekdays for tours, and the interior is frozen in time to when Johnny Cash lived there, with family photos, a 560-pound crocodile Johnny helped catch, and a pair of Johnny Cash’s work boots on prominent display.

Christmas is a time of giving, and a time of gratefulness. But many have endured harrowing experiences around the Holidays, which often exacerbates the trauma, and makes the memories stick deeper into the psyche. But few had a Christmas story to tell like Johnny Cash. And just like Johnny did, it’s all a story we can draw deeper lessons from.

Sources:

Cash: The Autobiography – Johnny Cash (with Patrick Carr) – 2003

St. Petersburg Times – Jan. 5th, 1982 – “Johnny Cash robbery: ‘Everything, or the boy dies‘”

rosehall.com/cinnamonhill