The Sad Ham* Shooting

*Ok, it's CB radio but you damn well know if it was ham radio the outcome woulda been the same.

What is a “sad ham?” It’s an amateur radio operator, a “ham,” who is officious, condescending, and loves to yak on about their bowel movements, surgeries, or other mundane details of the senior citizen’s life. These losers, who often monopolize the air and discourage new users from getting involved have given ham radio a bad name. But could they be driven to kill?
Sad hams are the bane of amateur radio: officious, condescending, and obsessed with filling the airwaves with tales of surgeries and mundane trivia. These crusty operators monopolize frequencies, scare off newcomers, and—on rare occasions—take their grievances to shocking extremes. Just ask Walter and Vivian Langley.
 
One Southern California man, Walter Langley, and his wife Vivian of Camarillo made the mistake of not taking the high road. An evening of escalating miscalculations added up to a near-fatal confrontation with police.

CB is the little step-brother of ham radio. It doesn’t require a license and was wildly popular in the era before cell phones. It’s in the early 1990s that our story takes us to where one elderly couple who were crazy about talking into a microphone brings us to the subject of sad radio operators willing to pull guns over their hobby.
 
“Someone is using their CB radio wrong” and “they’re screwing up my TV reception” sounds like a nuisance call from someone who belongs in the looney bin, like Camarillo State Mental Hospital that wasn’t far away. Dispatch received a complaint from a citizen that his neighbor had a “high powered transmitter” and was interfering with his TV reception. When the reporting party confronted the neighbor, he had a shotgun pulled on him, or so he said.
 
Walter Langley was a CB operator and was well known locally for using an overpowered transmitter. It was so powerful, that back in the days of analog over-the-air TV, this caused interference with neighbors’ TV sets, radios, and phones. Now licensed amateur operators are allowed to cause harmful interference as licensed radio takes priority, but it’s always been considered a very unfriendly thing to do in the ham community.
 
CB radio, due to the ease of entry (no license and radios require no programming) along with the lack of FCC policing has made it into a notorious wildland of profanity, bizarre transmissions, and in some cases too congested to use. Illegally amplified transmitters capable of reaching across states have long been popular. Langley’s signal was so powerful that it was “blaring over the televisions, everything,” and could be heard clearly 10 miles away—not really all that special but the emphasis is enough to tell you it was overdriven.
 
This couple were not some clueless old people with no technical knowledge. Mr. and Mrs. Langley were avid CB radio users, their interest reaching back over 30 years. The night of July 6, 1991, they keyed up around 8 PM using sideband Channel 38. Mrs. Langley took offense when “young punks” kept cutting her off, using obscene language and playing music. Finally, she had enough and warned them “You are asking for it!”
 
None of this was a new occurrence. According to the couple, young people frequently engaged in this kind of thing. But the Langleys’ wanted revenge. Vivian, who went by the callsign “Little Rock Gal,” and her husband switched over to Channel 22 and started to play music to “get back” at the people who had interrupted her.
 
CB users can be territorial. They have channels that they prefer, in this case, 22 was a favorite of the “punks.” Apparently, at the time there was a group of young CBers who used their radios to play hide and seek. Mrs. Langley decided to hold the mic open and play music over the air. This is called a “lock up” and prevents anyone else from using the channel unless they have a more powerful signal. Mrs. Langley admitted she did this for about an hour.
 
Nobody likes a sad ham who is jamming his neighbors. Other local residents, possibly hams, tracked down the source of the interference to Langley. Because Camarillo was a fairly small town and many of the regular CB users knew each other, it was easy for this pre-Twitter “flame war” to happen in meatspace.

One CBer stopped by to entreaty the couple. Langley was not receptive and became hostile and verbally abusive.  Around 9 PM, a man who drove a red pickup, know to her as “Music Man” drove by. At some point, Walter said that he “didn’t care about TV reception and that he would key his radio all weekend long to get even.”  
 
Words were exchanged throughout the evening, with one of the visitors calling Langley a “dirty name,” perhaps another antagonist that supposedly had the callsign of “Dr. Magnum.”

Walter decided to open the garage and wait with a shotgun to see if anyone else would come by the house to confront them. One of the CBer’s who came by the house said they did so to ask Langley to turn down the wattage on his transmitter, which would reduce interference. He was confronted in the street by Langley who held a shotgun, who then threatened to kill the CBer.
 
It’s at this point that Langley allegedly brandished a shotgun at one of his rivals, though there was some question about what exactly happened. With tensions at an explosive point, Ventura County deputies from the Camarillo station responded to a “man with a gun call.”  
 
When uniformed deputies arrived, Langley claimed he didn’t know they were police. He was elderly and had health problems. After a long night of being antagonized, perhaps he assumed that the “punks” were putting one over on him. In the darkness, the deputies called out to Walter, who says didn’t believe them.
 
He replied to the deputies. “You sons of a bitches, I’m tired of you guys telling me what to do, I’ll sh—t and k—ll you bastards!” The suspect racked the slide, chambering a round, and raised the shotgun towards the deputies. In response, Langley was shot before he could fire on the approaching deputy.

What appears to have happened is Langley must not have seen the deputies, who were approaching cautiously because he did have a gun, after all. Langley, up late at night after hours of harassment, obviously felt that one of his harassers was going to physically confront him. But it has to be noted that he was the one who introduced a shotgun into a fairly silly, non-violent matter where his and his wife’s hands were just as dirty as those who annoyed him.
 
He survived the shooting and was not prosecuted as he was considered elderly, infirm, and the only charge misdemeanor brandishing. Walter lived another decade and a half, dying in 2007, Vivian in 2011. The deputies were cleared of any wrongdoing and the shoot justified. So remember the next time you confront a sad ham, there’s a non-zero chance he pulls a gun on you!

All photos and information taken from Ventura County Sheriff's public case files.