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Pilot found guilty of being felon in possession of firearm
LINCOLN, Neb. — The armed Tennessee felon whose wife schemed to kidnap Furnas County Sheriff Kurt Kapperman after he helped arrest her husband will be sentenced in Nebraska on Dec. 7 after he was found guilty Thursday of being a felon in possession of weapons.
United States Attorney Joe Kelly announced Thursday in Lincoln that Michael Wayne Parsons, 57 years old, formerly of Arlington, Tenn., was convicted by a federal jury of being a felon in possession of a firearm.
According to the District Court of Nebraska, Parsons has claimed to be a citizen and an official of the “country of Chilcotin” in Canada and not subject to the laws of the United States. He was, however, still expected in court in Tipton County, Tennessee in January 2017 to face charges of being a felon in possession of weapons. His record includes theft, burglary, aggravated kidnapping and aggravated assault.
When Parsons didn’t show up in court and a warrant was issued for his arrest, law enforcement used his cell phone to locate him and his single-engine plane at the airport north of Arapahoe, Neb., where he had stopped en route to Montana and supposedly on to Canada. He was arrested by local, state and federal officials with an LAR 14 assault rifle and several hundred rounds of ammunition. He was extradited to Tennessee in March 2017.
Following Parsons’ arrest, another individual, identified then as “S.H.,” issued orders demanding his release from jail. S.H. indicated she was “The Chief Justice of the Universal Court of the T’shilhqot’n Nation” in British Columbia, Canada. Parsons claimed he was an ambassador and associate chief justice of the “country of Chilcotin.”
On Sept. 1, 2017, back in Tennessee, Parsons was sentenced to three years in prison for missing his January court date.
Also in Tennessee on Sept. 1, Parsons’ wife, Patricia, pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting solicitation to kidnap the Nebraska sheriff who helped arrest her husband, as well as a Tennessee judge. On Dec. 1, 2017, Pat Parsons was sentenced to 60 months in federal prison for her part in a scheme to kidnap Sheriff Kapperman and Judge Joe Walker III, the presiding judge in Tipton County, Tenn.
According to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Western District of Tennessee, facts revealed during Pat Parsons’ plea hearing in September 2017 indicated that from February 2017 through May 2017, Pat Parsons conspired with Suzanne Holland (the “SH” in the “orders,” also known as Zsuzsanna Hegedus), the self-appointed “Chief Justice of the Universal Supreme Court of the Tsilhqot’in Nation” in British Columbia, to kidnap Sheriff Kapperman and Judge Walker and to take them to Canada to face “criminal charges.”
The final negotiated price for the kidnapping contract was $250,000, including an initial payment of $5,000. However, in lieu of that initial payment, parties agreed to the trade of the Parsonses’ Corvette with mechanical problems, and later, instead of the Corvette, a 1991 Ford Ranger pickup.
In the meantime, back in Nebraska, Anthony Todd Weverka of Arapahoe, then 55 years old, was charged with misprision of felony (the deliberate concealment of one’s knowledge of a felony or treasonable act), charging that Weverka knew of the existence of felony offenses by Mike and Pat Parsons and the plans to kidnap Sheriff Kapperman, that he provided assistance to the Parsonses, that he failed to disclose his knowledge of the details of the plot to law enforcement and that he made false statements to the sheriff.
In December 2017, Weverka entered into a pretrial diversion agreement with the United States Attorney’s Office, admitting that he had committed the offense charged in the indictment and that he agreed to certain terms and conditions that, if satisfied, would result in the dismissal of the charges pending against him.
The length of his term of probation is 18 months and the agreement requires him to complete 50 hours of community service.
The Parsonses’ cases have involved the Furnas County Sheriff’s Office, the Nebraska State Patrol, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, Tennessee law enforcement, the FBI and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.