MARCUS PARKS
Oh and I'm burping so much because my lungs are putting the air into the wrong place, they're putting all the air into my stomach.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that's how we're going to begin. I think that's important for the audience to know that Marcus does have four stomachs like a cow.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely. Technically I think it's on you, you're the CEO of your body. You've got to send a memo to your lungs, tell them to stop putting air in the wrong spots. You're burping up here.
MARCUS PARKS
Ever since the fucking long COVID strike things have never gotten back on track. But I gotta answers!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
goddamn you mitochondria!
MARCUS PARKS
It's the mitochondria.
BEN KISSEL
Fantastic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now today's episode is way much... Because the last time I had a bath disaster is when I sharted thinking it was a fart. And that's just a snippet of some of the incredible content that you're going to get today.
BEN KISSEL
Really fantastic. Welcome to The Last Podcast on the Left everyone. Ben hanging out with the newly burpy but also understanding why so burpy Marcus and of course the shart man himself, Henry Zebrowski. Baths.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Shart man! Shart man!
BEN KISSEL
Baths, not something you often hear three men talk about but today we're gonna talk about the Bath School massacre. Isn't that exciting? I also want to put a little caveat, if by any chance there's some horrible news that takes place between now and when this episode airs, we didn't know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We didn't know.
BEN KISSEL
And I'm sorry that every fucking horrible thing happens every single week in this country. Today we are covering the Bath School massacre. Leave us alone, stop committing acts of violence.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
At least this one's old and at least Marcus you changed it to the Bath School massacre and not because people keep calling it, every source I looked it up when I was researching, called it the Bath School disaster.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it's like no, no, no, it's not dropping the wedding cake. You know what I mean? It's 50 dead children.
BEN KISSEL
Okay. Again, let's get into this historical piece of American present.
MARCUS PARKS
So the Bath School massacre was a school bombing perpetrated in 1925 by a man named Andrew Kehoe in the small town of Bath, Michigan. It still to this day holds the record as the deadliest school massacre in American history.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Kobe!
MARCUS PARKS
Jesus Christ. Kehoe managed to murder 42 people including 35 children in a matter of hours by blowing up a school, firebombing his own ranch, and turning his truck into IED.
BEN KISSEL
Jeez.
MARCUS PARKS
This marks the Bath School massacre as one of if not the first modern style American mass murder.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And all it took was good old fashioned American tax-based grievances.
BEN KISSEL
Of course. Ingenuity in some ways brutal.
MARCUS PARKS
Now when I say modern style, I'm using the modifier to differentiate it from the dozens if not hundreds of massacres that occurred previously in America like Wounded Knee and Sand Creek, stuff that involved indigenous tribes. Similarly it also differentiates Bath from massacres of civilians during the Civil War, like what transpired during Bleeding Kansas or the racially motivated 1921 massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, that was when they blew up Black Wall Street, right?
MARCUS PARKS
Yep.
BEN KISSEL
Also I do think that they could probably... Bleeding Knee, it's a bit of a G-rated term for what took place.
MARCUS PARKS
Wounded Knee.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well there's Wounded Knee.
BEN KISSEL
Wounded Knee. It's even worse! They should just say it was bloody. Bruised Kneecap. It was a brutal massacre, they're like it's kind of like when you skin your elbow.
MARCUS PARKS
No, Wounded Knee is what it was called before the massacre. It would be like calling it the Chicago massacre. Wounded Knee, that was just what the place was called.
BEN KISSEL
Well they should have renamed it. Great Knees.
MARCUS PARKS
By contrast, the Bath School disaster, the Bath School massacre, see I almost said disaster.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
The Bath School massacre was perpetrated by a true lone wolf without any sort of outside influence, no help whatsoever, and no real point. Nor was this a spur of the moment crime. It was meticulously planned and executed over a series of months by a single man as an outlet for his ridiculously elevated frustrations.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is hard to say if there is a greater, more powerful force in the universe other than nefarious patience because that's what this entire story is about, is that you can prepare... And this is not one of those trying to make you too scared moments but it's just the truth is that you can prepare for many things but it's very difficult to prepare against a motivated person that is unendingly patient in his ability and if he's in his goal for vengeance.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely. This is why I only hang out with people with ADHD at all times in different ways. You both have it in certain ways. I can see it in your eyes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Me? Ping-ping-ping-ping-ping. You just see my eyeballs. I thought that was maybe the four espressos I had today to feel like a normal person.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely. People with patience, they're just waiting for you to fall asleep.
MARCUS PARKS
To the point of frustration, the prime motivator behind this catastrophic event is so incredibly mundane that it boggles the mind. Andrew Kehoe, the perpetrator, wasn't standing up for a political belief or an ideology like Timothy McVeigh or Ted Kaczynski nor was he mentally I'll like so many of America's modern mass murderers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He wasn't mentally well! It's not like he was crushing it.
MARCUS PARKS
No, he wasn't crushing it. But put simply, Andrew Kehoe was quite possibly the biggest asshole of the 20th century.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Close.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean he's one of them, he's in the top. I would put him top 10.
BEN KISSEL
Watch out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Right? Because you still got Hitler.
BEN KISSEL
Winston. What about Winston Churchill? He was mean.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know, everyone got mad at him now. They're all mad at him now but not back when he was fucking digging their butts out of the trenches in WWII.
BEN KISSEL
He was taking naps at 3PM.
MARCUS PARKS
Well I'm talking petty asshole. Because that's the thing, calling Hitler an asshole is a little small, it's not quite big enough. This is the biggest local asshole of the 20th century.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Gotcha.
MARCUS PARKS
Let's put it that way. His motivation for blowing up a school with an explosion that could have killed more than 250 people, this was an opposition to a yearly tax to pay for the school he blew up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah it's because he didn't have kids and he was real mad that he had to pay for a school that he didn't have kids to go to. Can't you see that, Marcus? Don't you understand this?
BEN KISSEL
I don't think he's thinking about the greater whole because if the kids aren't in school because he just recently blew it up now they're in his yard. So it's actually best to have them in a school where they get an education and maybe they could become plumbers or something. I don't know if he really understands how taxes work because it's gonna be really expensive to rebuild the school he blew up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well he wasn't planning to see the rebuild.
BEN KISSEL
Oh I see.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And this was a raise, it was something like $15 a month.
MARCUS PARKS
It was $150 a year but we'll get into the cost later on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now of course it is a little more complicated than just being pissed off over a new tax but not by much. As it was quoted in Harold Schechter's book 'The Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Mass Killer', Andrew Kehoe was what you'd call a collector of injustice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. I have found that my collection has been getting pretty large. So I do need to start selling these off like at a yard sale.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, put some on Etsy, would ya?
MARCUS PARKS
These collectors indiscriminately kill in public after long deliberation, prepared with a powerful arsenal but no real escape plan. They're paranoid, driven by strong feelings of anger and resentment and they're eternally wounded narcissism is nurtured by a retreat into a fantasy life of violence and revenge that eventually becomes reality. Now our main source today is 'The Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Mass Killer' by the patron saint of American true crime, Harold Schechter, who produced an incredible read here as he always does.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah I know he's like a friend too but when it comes down to it, there is truly no one better in the world of true crime.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because he also sets all of the context in a way that... Because I'm reading it, you go through and it's like why are we here? Why are we talking about dog bowls? But then he wraps it all the way around. He's very good.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely. That's the Marcus Parks effect, that's what you've gleaned from Harold Schechter's amazing work. Focus on the innocuous, make the mind bored, and then boom, look at all these dead children.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All of a sudden you've got true crime up inside of you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You didn't know.
BEN KISSEL
Did you read Schechter's book in the voice that you do of Harold Schechter?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Muppet voice) It's the birth of the modern mass killer. But he knows, he knows.
MARCUS PARKS
He knows.
BEN KISSEL
He likes it now.
MARCUS PARKS
But if you're more in the mood for a compilation of old school American true crime steeped in fascinating history, especially if you want to cleanse your palate from the recent overexposure of the American serial killer, check out Harold's newest book 'Butcher's Work' which covers four incl incredible stories of lesser known historical true crime events.
BEN KISSEL
And you're gonna love the forward by Guy Fieri. The way that he breaks down what these butchers did. Absolutely out of bounds. Out of bounds.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Out of bounds. That's where there are bounds but some descriptions, they are outside of them.
MARCUS PARKS
So without further ado, let's get into the Bath School massacre, starting with its perpetrator, Andrew Kehoe. Now Kehoe was the son of an Irish immigrant named Philip who was a prime example of an immigrant success story. But he also fathered a truly Catholic amount of children. Three boys and six girls, two of which became nuns.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, dude.
BEN KISSEL
Dang.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's like you get a gold in the Catholic children olympics. You're slinging that much juice, man? And two of them are nuns? That's fucking crazy.
BEN KISSEL
I think you guys both are mispronouncing the word lesbians.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. I did that bit. That's my bit.
BEN KISSEL
I took it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, in Wolf of Wall Street. That's right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you remember.
BEN KISSEL
Oh no kidding?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
2012!
BEN KISSEL
I remember that sea otter. I remember when you were sea otter.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I do too. I fucking do too.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, I know you do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's over.
MARCUS PARKS
How often do you remember it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean the thing is that if I could get paid money for gifs, I would be a multi multimillionaire. But you don't.
BEN KISSEL
it would be great.
MARCUS PARKS
But Kehoe however was the first of those three boys born after the six girls on February 1, 1872. While little is known about his early life, what we do know is that he showed an early aptitude for tinkering, working with electrical devices on the family farm.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah because this was the golden age of electricity.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which is kind of fun because it's like you had electricity wars. I love them. One day we'll get to that. I don't know if that's boring.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't know if we need to get into AC vs DC, Edison vs Tesla. He killed an elephant.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think Tesla's cool.
MARCUS PARKS
Tesla's super cool.
BEN KISSEL
He did kill that elephant, yes indeed.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't know. It might be a little out of bounds for us.
BEN KISSEL
Whoa! That's gangster.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
My question is that do you think that anything of this has to do... Because his father was very, very old when he had him. Do you think that's got anything to do with the old come?
BEN KISSEL
I've been told that the male ejaculate stays young forever.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Because we constantly remake it all the time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cool.
BEN KISSEL
So there you go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what my balls are doing right now.
MARCUS PARKS
Well these electric powered contraptions were Kehoe's main companions because the few people who knew Kehoe in his youth described him as an unsociable isolated loner. The only real socializing in Kehoe's life came in the form of communal gatherings known as farmer's clubs.
BEN KISSEL
Uh oh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is kind of fun.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Formed as a way to bring isolated farmers together in a time when the country's population was more rural than urban, farmer's clubs were made up of anywhere between 20 and 25 families who would all gather once a month for meals, music recitals, and sketch comedy performances.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yay! Everybody's favorite! You show up for dinner and then oh good, there's comedy.
BEN KISSEL
That's great. Oh I love this performance by Michael Ian Black. I love being a farmer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Dude, do you remember? I remember one time Murderfist got asked to do a show in a Chinese restaurant and we did, this was an LA thing. And then I came out and I was nude, we did boardroom, our boardroom sketch.
BEN KISSEL
Fantastic, in a restaurant.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The look of people-
BEN KISSEL
Who ordered the dumplings?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just me, frogman bodied with my fucking dick and balls like in my hands as people are eating stuff. Man, they were not happy. No one was.
BEN KISSEL
That's great. I love that fun farmers experience.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We did it to silence.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But the funny thing is Henry is that you're talking about that as if someone forced you to go out there naked.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh no, no, we were booked. No, no, we were excited. We're like this is gonna be big.
MARCUS PARKS
I know you were booked but-
BEN KISSEL
To be fair Marcus if you're booked, you're forced.
MARCUS PARKS
Well I know you're booked but didn't Murderfist have 12 hours of sketch material to choose from?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We were trying to entertain these people.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah well true, true.
MARCUS PARKS
Well as it went, these comedy sketches at the farmer's clubs were the one thing that could bring future mass murderer Andrew Kehoe out of his shell. Cribbing routines from books like Dick's Diverting Dialogues and Martine's Droll Dialogues and Laughable Recitations-
BEN KISSEL
Nice.
MARCUS PARKS
Kehoe would take the stage month after month, acting out skits that mostly featured racial stereotypes of black people, Jewish people, and Irishmen.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Times change, humor changes. Okay? What is funny at one point, it does not hold as true later on.
BEN KISSEL
Here check out this joke. Women want to vote.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What a farce! Wow. But I also believe the reason why everyone said he was some shitty little kid and he was a loner and he was cold. And I do think that when he was performing at these farmer's clubs, it served his own purposes. You know what I mean?
MARCUS PARKS
What purposes?
BEN KISSEL
Make 'em laugh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's something about he had this idea that he was this perfect child or his father probably rised them up. I do think in some way socially, this is how sociopaths read rooms, right? They understand that certain things are like you do this to be cool.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah, sketch comedy. Yeah, you do that to be cool. Everyone's always thought that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But you be entertaining to be like no, I'm normal, I'm a normal person.
BEN KISSEL
And I know you've done more research than I but I will say this, I'll push back just ever so. Catholic dads, not exactly uplifting.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
BEN KISSEL
For the most part the Catholic religion is brutal to children.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very dour.
MARCUS PARKS
Sometimes they are. If you've got the Irish Catholic dad though, he can be quite full of mirth and merriment.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, once he's got the wine in him.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
MARCUS PARKS
Well, let's go through. Let's just give an example of one of the non racist routines that Andrew Kehoe did. In this one, two men named Bones and Johnson share a humorous dialogue. Ben?
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Would you please play the part of Bones?
BEN KISSEL
Yes. Do I have any direction at all?
MARCUS PARKS
Your direction is that you're a man who has a question to ask.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Question.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. And you're not in blackface.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
You are asking and then you are expecting a reply. And then you shall say more words to that reply.
BEN KISSEL
That's good because now I know where to go with Mclaughlin. Mclaughlin and group, question! It's an old PBS show.
MARCUS PARKS
All right. So you're Bones, Henry you're Johnson.
BEN KISSEL
I'm Bones.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm Johnson?
MARCUS PARKS
You're Johnson.
BEN KISSEL
Johnson! Okay, here we go. Have you ever heard who was the oldest woman?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, I have not. But I suppose Eve was no spring chicken when she died.
BEN KISSEL
Very likely not. But she wasn't the oldest woman for all that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Indeed? Who do you say was older?
BEN KISSEL
Well the oldest woman that I ever heard of was Anne-tiquity.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Kissel, it is really not beyond what you do now.
BEN KISSEL
Anne-tiquity.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You could have written that yourself.
MARCUS PARKS
Anne-tiquity. Her last name was Tiquity, her first name is Anne.
BEN KISSEL
Anne Tiquity. Well that's great.
MARCUS PARKS
She's the oldest woman that he ever heard of, Bones.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a pretty big dill.
BEN KISSEL
It is a pretty big dill and if I'm hanging out at this farmer's meeting, this farmer's party, this might be a good way to romance a gal. She's laughing, you're laughing. Next thing you know you have a roll in the hay.
MARCUS PARKS
It's possible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's possible.
BEN KISSEL
It's possible. Comedy brings people together or violently divides them.
MARCUS PARKS
Now shortly after Andrew's mother died when he was 18, Andrew's father took another wife, number three, because Philip's first wife had also died. And it's a fairly common occurrence, it's not like he's killing wives. This just happened, wives dropped like flies back then.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they just get sick, they get caught in threshing machines, they get fucking hit by carriages.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's difficult to be a wife.
BEN KISSEL
That's why it was all a farce. This whole oh til death do us part in the marriage thing. Because they knew it could happen in five months. Nowadays we live so long, it's quite, quite... It's long!
MARCUS PARKS
Well after his father remarried though, Andrew left home. Although there's not a clear record of what he did for the next 8 years. Pretty much what we know is that in 1900 a census record showed that Kehoe lived in a boarding house in Ann Arbor, Michigan where he worked as a dairyman. Although I don't really know what a dairyman is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You fluff the utters.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, you want to fluff the udders.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it makes them give more milk.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely. Basically any single thing that you see, you have to attempt to milk and find out if there's milk in it. I mean he was probably the one that found the teat on the almond and was the first one to suck a little milk out of one of those.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's making no sense.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Kehoe also spent time in St. Louis working as an electrician for a city park which of course greatly increased his knowledge of electrical wiring. But it's in St. Louis that we see one of the old mass murderer cliches rear its ugly head once again. Where before Andrew Kehoe seemed to be a harmless loner who liked tinkering with electronics and enjoyed performing comedy sketches now and then, he changed when he suffered a serious head injury that left him semi conscious for two months.
BEN KISSEL
Uh oh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's really interesting how so many of these sources, I mean Harold does, he says it more so, but the other ones, they don't equate that as being the thing that really probably made his impulse control truly unhinged. Because we now know in hindsight how often these types of what seem to be crazy over the top murder scenarios come from head injuries.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, the brain has a lot to do with it, doesn't it?
MARCUS PARKS
Well there was nothing wrong with Andrew Kehoe's impulse control.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Bo.
MARCUS PARKS
In fact he probably had the most impulse control out of anyone we've ever covered.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was almost the opposite. It's kind of the problem.
MARCUS PARKS
I think what it did is that it just disconnected him from empathy. His empathy just completely and totally died. And it happens again and again.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what I use Starbucks for.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS
Well after that head injury, Kehoe moved back in with his father and stepmother. She had just given birth to a child of her own named Irene. Shortly after Andrew returned, he inexplicably killed Irene's cat and things only got worse from there or so the rumors say.
BEN KISSEL
Hold on a second, I'm not doing any victim blaming here. But they gave an infant a cat?
MARCUS PARKS
No, the girl was... He'd been gone for 8 years. She'd given birth to the child.
BEN KISSEL
Okay. So she was ready to have a cat.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, she's cat ready.
MARCUS PARKS
She was ready to have a cat, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Okay. Because otherwise this infant is not gonna be able to take care of a cat.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Also pets were different then, you didn't have to do all these things. Pets came in and out.
BEN KISSEL
You know what I'm gonna say though? I think the cat has lived a lifestyle the same since the Victorian era.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Pretty much.
BEN KISSEL
There's a cat at my place. I named it Meowbert and it just hangs out, it's a cat.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's an outside cat. It's just a farmhouse and this is a farm cat.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's how I see them.
MARCUS PARKS
You see a farm cat like three times a week. Now as we established, one of Kehoe's implements of death was fire, although simply lighting a match didn't seem to give him the same charge as creating a chain of events. And he had to seem smart when he did it. See at the turn of the 20th century gas stoves were new appliances and were therefore extremely dangerous.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well there's something about them because they used to call them gasoline stoves.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And there's something about it being a gasoline stove. Remember Dr. Gasoline, your wrestling character?
BEN KISSEL
Dr. Gasoline!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Dr. Gasoline!
MARCUS PARKS
Dr. Gasoline! Yeah, my wrestling alter ego.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But there seems to be something more sinister because also what's funny, because when Schechter lays out all the like, 'The most nefarious invention of all mankind!' As soon as the gasoline stove came out, a bunch of people died using it.
BEN KISSEL
Jeez.
MARCUS PARKS
Between April and July of 1895 in Chicago alone, 11 people were killed when their gas stoves exploded. And these were 11 separate incidences. From Schechter's research he was able to find such alarming newspaper headlines as 'Death From Gasoline Stove', 'Baby Burned to Death by Gasoline Stove'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Interesting.
MARCUS PARKS
And 'Gasoline Stove Brings Death and Destruction.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'll take two!
BEN KISSEL
My god. But you should see the way it cooks a chicken parm. I think it's worth it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. I mean there was one, I love this little advertisement. 'By using a gasoline stove, a working man's wife can rest in bed from 1-2 hours longer each morning and in half an hour before rising, have hot coffee and a warm breakfast for her husband without raising the temperature of the cook room 1/8 of a degree. For 10 cents she can do the whole day's cooking.'
BEN KISSEL
Wow. Isn't that absolutely fantastic? And that's the era of chivalry.
MARCUS PARKS
Well as a public service, newspapers therefore printed precautions to keep people from blowing themselves up. Here's a couple of examples. 'Don't fill the tank when the burners are lit. Don't light the burners after the pipes have leaked gas over everything.'
BEN KISSEL
But then again if you're even thinking about doing either of those things, just do it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's already done. No, the final tip is the best one.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. 'Don't try to operate the stove if you don't thoroughly understand it.'
BEN KISSEL
There we go, perfect.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean we still got labels on like hair dryers like 'don't use in shower' because we are an impetuous group, Americans.
BEN KISSEL
Legal. Legal.
MARCUS PARKS
But from what it seems, Andrew Kehoe's stepmother Frances either didn't follow that last bit of advice or if you believe the rumors, she was set up to fail by her increasingly violent stepson. See on September 17, 1911, Frances put a match to the stove and the stove immediately exploded. That set Frances on fire from head to toe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, dude.
MARCUS PARKS
Reportedly, Andrew rushed to the kitchen and stood over her, watching her burn in either shock or fascination before he finally fetched a pail of water. This of course was the wrong move or the right move for Kehoe if you believe the rumors that he was behind the explosion.
BEN KISSEL
Now to be fair he would not have known that you just want to put a little baking soda on there, a little flour. He didn't know, that may have just been an accident.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
No? Maybe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She was engulfed in burning gasoline.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what I mean? It was done already. She was a screaming... It was the scene from Hereditary in the house.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Oh man.
MARCUS PARKS
When he doused his stepmother in water it caused the burning oil to spread and the flames quote "liquefied what little skin she had left".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, dude. And then did you see the tale of when he goes to the neighbors? So he goes over there being like, 'Hey, you might want to call a doctor.'
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they're all like yeah, okay. And then he leaves. As he turns around to leave, he comes back and he's like actually you all should call for a priest as well. And then walked back.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was real nonchalant.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Well it doesn't seem like he had an emotional connection with his dad's third wife perhaps.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think that's generous.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. By the time emergency services arrived, Frances was quote "little more than a blackened lump". She died in agony a few hours later and her death certificate listed the cause of death as burn from a gasoline stove.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just the scene that Schechter sets up with the father coming in because he's so old at this point that he has two canes. He comes in to see his literal flaming wife, right, she finally burns out.
BEN KISSEL
Jeez.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they're so far from a hospital because they're out in the middle of fucking nowhere. Can you imagine that they just have to lift her up and flop her on a bed and just wait. And she's just sitting there going like (groaning).
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god, it's like the end of Child's Play when he comes back all burned.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
But she's not a doll, she's a woman.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep. Now it was assumed at the time that the death of Kehoe's stepmother was an accident. But after Kehoe murdered 45 people with bombs of his own making, it was rumored perhaps sensationally as I'm doing right now, that Andrew had rigged the stove to explode while Frances was out gathering nuts with her daughter.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think after you kill 45 children with self-made explosives, it's okay to maybe look at some of his previous life with a critical eye.
BEN KISSEL
Well absolutely. It does sort of change the perspective a little bit. Stand up comedian for example, there's one very famous one who was recently incarcerated who's now out who's blind, you guys know who I'm talking about.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ghost Dad!
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, Ghost Dad. There's a few bits he did in the 70s involving drugs and doing certain things to women.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
People going to sleep.
BEN KISSEL
And people were like oh now that's good humor. But then in hindsight it just seemed like a confession.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now by this point in Andrew's life he was actually much older than you'd think he'd be because most mass murderers tend to skew towards the younger side.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See, remember that guys. Grandma Moses learned to paint when she was 70 years old, you can do whatever you want, it's not too late.
BEN KISSEL
That's fantastic.
MARCUS PARKS
Well if I could compare Kehoe to anyone I'd say he shared a lot in common with Stephen Paddock who killed 60 concertgoers and injured over 800 more in Las Vegas in 2017 when he was 64 years old.
BEN KISSEL
Fucking Stephen Paddock man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And again, like a sphinx, we have no clue why he did it, it's still a mystery. With this case I think a lot of Marvin Heemeyer. Even though Marvin Hemeyer, our Killdozer guy, right, again in a way that was so much more peaceful than explosives.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Killdozer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But we didn't really know how the Killdozer was gonna play out and also it was called the Killdozer.
BEN KISSEL
I mean it was a pretty cool name. It was apt. Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was pretty cool.
BEN KISSEL
But man, Stephen Paddock, if we ever do that one dude, I got some inside information from a bartender from Mandalay Bay. Scary day believe it or not for them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You should tell the police. If you have inside information you should call the police.
BEN KISSEL
Oh the police were there. Their experience was fricking nuts.
MARCUS PARKS
Well what all three of these people share is patience. Absolutely. I mean Stephen Paddock, when you look at the video of him patiently moving all those weapons into that room, how much preparation went into that, how much scouting, how much planning. Andrew Kehoe is much the same. And the Killdozer guy. How long did it take him to build that Killdozer?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think it took a full year.
BEN KISSEL
And then he would sleep there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
He built himself into it. Yeah, it took a long time.
MARCUS PARKS
But when Andrew Kehoe's stepmother died he was 39. And just a year later he married a so- called old maid, a 37 year old named Ellen Agnes Price, called Nellie by those who knew her. And after the marriage Andrew continued working his father's farm while Nellie did her best to help take care of Andrew's stepsister Irene. But it's around the time of Andrew's marriage to Nellie that Kehoe's grievances towards society began to accumulate in the smallest of ways. And those grievances usually had to do with either Kehoe's own selfishness or his own incompetence.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You really can't put it more close to the fact that he was just a fucking prick and an absolute asshole.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
See a new church was being built in Andrew Kehoe's town and to defray costs, donations were solicited from congregants like Kehoe who was asked to contribute the hefty 1912 sum of $400.
BEN KISSEL
That's a lot of money!
MARCUS PARKS
It's like $3000 in today's money.
BEN KISSEL
Burn down the church!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Truly. Of all of his grievances this is the only one I agree with because you're like he obviously was not a man of the church.
MARCUS PARKS
Well he went to church at the time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah because societally he had to.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You had to put up appearances.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah but he could have just said no. He could have even offered to donate less. That was probably what he was expected to do. The priest is shooting for the moon, ask for $400, get $50. But instead Kehoe shouted the priest asking for donations off his property, he threatened physical violence, and never returned to church for the rest of his life.
BEN KISSEL
Every goddamn episode when we cover one of these horrible people there's always a moment where I relate.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's the only time.
BEN KISSEL
Get off my lawn!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Get off my lawn!
BEN KISSEL
Otherwise get on my lawn for the most part but unless you're a money gouging priest, get off my lawn!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, dude. If I could have seen him pull that priest up by the back of his pants and throw him out. Then again if that's where this ended you'd be like he's cranky.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Sure.
MARCUS PARKS
After that the disappointments, which were all Kehoe's fault, came hard and fast. He bought 8 steers from a neighbor and put them out to pasture. But because Andrew didn't know what he was doing, he turned him out on a field full of wet clover. Now has anyone who's seen the second season of Yellowstone knows-
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just me, my uncle Ken, this one guy at the Greyhound bus station who was talking about it and he was just like, 'My kids won't answer the phone but Kevin Costner is a hell of a lead.'
BEN KISSEL
That's right.
MARCUS PARKS
I got curious when they started filming at the Four Sixes ranch which is like 30 minutes north from where I grew up. And you know what I watched it and boy did I get some insane memories and the slightest bit of PTSD when they showed that ranch because that just brought me back home to that ugly, ugly land immediately.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah. Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
But from that second season, if you've seen it you know that cows-
BEN KISSEL
And our audience has.
MARCUS PARKS
It's a fine show.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's fairly popular.
BEN KISSEL
No I know it's a very good show.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. It's just a bunch of insane violence. But eating certain types of clover can be deadly to cattle because it causes a deceptively whimsical sounding disease called Ruminal tympany.
BEN KISSEL
You've been talking about too many diseases bro, that didn't sound whimsical at all man. That sounded real sad.
MARCUS PARKS
Ruminal tympany!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ruminal tympany. It does sound like one of your noise albums.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, that's true.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it does. It sounds like a George Montalba organ album. But it's also known as frothy bloat.
BEN KISSEL
See now that's whimsical.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I order a frothy bloat.
MARCUS PARKS
But Andrew didn't know this and two of his steers died of frothy bloat as a result. But he still tried blaming the neighbor who sold him the steers, demanding half of his payment back. The neighbor of course refused so Kehoe, convinced he'd been cheated because Kehoe always was convinced that he'd been cheated, he stopped speaking to the neighbor altogether.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's a hardliner.
BEN KISSEL
I guess so.
MARCUS PARKS
Now in 1917, 10 years before the massacre, Nellie's uncle died and left behind an 80 acre farm in Bath, Michigan where Kehoe would commit his unforgivable crimes. But Nellie and Andrew didn't inherit the property. Instead they had to buy it for $12,000, half of which was paid up front and half was taken care of by his $6000 mortgage that had a monthly payment system of $360. Now while that seems like an inconsequential detail, it will play a massive role in the massacre to come.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. And in many since which you'll find out with every mass killing and family annihilation a lot of times has to do with mortgage.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Absolutely. Money's in the lie.
MARCUS PARKS
Now in some ways Andrew wasn't a total villain in Bath Township or at least not at first. Since Bath was Nellie's hometown, she soon joined the Ladies Friday Afternoon Club.
BEN KISSEL
We meet every Wednesday at night.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's funny.
BEN KISSEL
Okay? You got it, right?
MARCUS PARKS
And the Ladies Friday Afternoon Club allowed the husbands to join a meeting once a year.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yay, thanks for the invite.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's how it is.
MARCUS PARKS
There Andrew was known as a witty performer who was put in charge of putting on annual plays for the ladies.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All right, you guys ready to see another sketch about the Chinese?
BEN KISSEL
Here we go. Here's one, it's called magic you can fill in the slur.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I love those old you fill in the slur ones.
BEN KISSEL
You fill in the slur.
MARCUS PARKS
Well in fact Kehoe was described as highly sociable even though he was also known to be a highly distant person who enjoyed setting himself apart from others. He regarded himself as superior to the rest of Bath because of his self education, despite the fact that he was a farmer with middling to low success at best.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What was it? The idea that someone said in America that one of our main problems is that everybody thinks that they're a debased millionaire?
MARCUS PARKS
No, it's that there are no poor people in America, just temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
LOL, ROFL.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But he was one of those guys that was always like I'm different, I'm a little different than everybody else, I'm more in control. I am obviously a genius. What was it, frothy bloat?
BEN KISSEL
Frothy bloat.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
More like frothy float, I'm going to make a new savory dessert that I'm going to love.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he was that type of guy.
BEN KISSEL
So he was a performer making them laugh.
MARCUS PARKS
Well that's the ironic thing about it is that he's there in Bath, Michigan, he's in a rural community, he's saying my god, I'm so much more superior to all of you other people. And meanwhile everyone else in town is better at the job that everyone in the town does than him. And yet he says he's superior.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's almost like it's because he's bad at it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well in an eerie similarity to family annihilator John List who used to mow his lawn in a three piece suit, Andrew Kehoe would plow his fields neatly groomed and dressed in a business suit, a vest, and polished shoes.
BEN KISSEL
It's stupid.
MARCUS PARKS
As if dressing above his station somehow set him apart from the so-called plebeians who toiled in the dirt wearing appropriate clothing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's just because it goes from being funny to haunting. Same thing with the John List thing is that him going in the suit. At first you think it's laughter but again after you kill 45 children with fucking improvised explosive devices-
MARCUS PARKS
35 children, 7 adults.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. You you start to realize oh that's pathological.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That guy is in full business attire out there? Because it's hot as fuck.
BEN KISSEL
There's some kind of sociopathy to it. I remember I met the second or maybe the wealthiest man in Brooklyn, he owns all of Brooklyn, Steiner Studios, everything. You would walk past him, he's covered in stains, he wears nothing but sweatpants. The man looks so unbelievably disheveled, he looks like the dude from A Confederacy of Dunces. One of the richest people ever. I wonder what is that? Why do you think people... Is it the duality? We talked about that sometimes with secular humanism and stuff, do you think is it the presentation and then knowing that but secretly I'm super rich?
MARCUS PARKS
Well actually I think what it is is that it's it's all right here because part of Kehoe's inability to get ahead was the fact that he was constantly getting in his own way by paying attention to shit that didn't matter.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's all the social shit.
MARCUS PARKS
The Brooklyn billionaire that you're talking about, he's focused on his business.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
True.
MARCUS PARKS
He's focused on making money. He doesn't give a shit what he looks like.
BEN KISSEL
I will say this, the wife that he would go eat at Carmine's with was very focused on her looks.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what you want, that's the whole point!
BEN KISSEL
Because when I first met him I was like what? What is happening? And then I walked into my former boss's office and he's just sitting there and I was like you let this guy in here, huh? And that's when I found out the real truth. It was shocking.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But that's the thing about Andrew Kehoe. If his hands got too greasy which happens all the time in farm work especially when you're working with tractors, you're just constantly covered in grease, he would rush home to wash up. If he got a smudge of dirt or even a small sweat stand on his shirt, he'd run home and change. And he kept his barn cleaner than most people in Bath Township kept their houses.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's all a ruse, man.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's really just again it's something within, I think the term is the pathological narcissist or something. You're looking at the gap between you and everybody else and so you what you do is you fill it with all this other nonsense without acknowledging that there was a distinct gap in your abilities to be successful.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I think a big part of it is that it's the thing that we talked about in the the Aleister Crowley episodes, if you're going against your nature. Because that's the thing, this motherfucker should never have been a farmer. Ever. He should have been an electrician. It's almost like he just became a farmer through some sort of stubbornness.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was from his father or whatever. He came upon this land and again it was something about that, it's him pretending to be something that he's not.
BEN KISSEL
He should have just built a comedy club it sounds like.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But besides his unreasonably fastidious nature, Kehoe was also known to be casually cruel. In March of 1920 he shot a neighbor's dog for burying a bone beside his fence and coldly told the owner that he did so in a tone that suggested the act was entirely justified. Another time a neighbor went to Kehoe's farm to find Andrew driving his horses beyond their physical limits. And that night Kehoe beat one of his horses to death because he was frustrated that it wasn't doing what he wanted them to do.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my.
MARCUS PARKS
And that I think is Andrew Kehoe in a nutshell, he's trying to force something that is impossible and when that doesn't happen he gets violent.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, he gets violent. Because that's what the dude was saying in that incident. He was looking at the him hit this horse and he was like nobody who knows what your relationship to a horse should be would be treating this horse like this.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because as a farmer, from what I've heard and what you guys, the way you describe your love of the animals on your farm, it's very familial.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh my god, we adore them. Oh yeah, especially a horse. Jesus Christ, of course. Of course.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, that's not gonna want to treat a horse. Now here, just help me unzip my pants.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let me show you.
BEN KISSEL
This is actually how you're gonna wanna treat a horse.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A horse's clit is actually on its dick. Oh I don't know if you wanna do that.
BEN KISSEL
As a horse I'm not sure which one is better or worse. Either way it's not easy to be a horse here on this here horny farm.
MARCUS PARKS
Just like the rest of America, Bath, Michigan was modernizing during the time that Kehoe was failing at farm work. But the modernization of Bath would in fact become the focal point for Kehoe's frustrations. See rural schools in towns like Bath used to be single room buildings where one person would be responsible for teaching every kid from first grade all the way up til eighth grade. And when the kid got through eighth grade he was expected to begin a life of toil in the fields just like his daddy had done and his daddy's daddy had done before him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yup. Finally somebody making some sense. Him child was grown, he's supposed to dig up rocks in the field and go to a war and then get shot in the head. He ain't supposed to be learning all these things about hugging and being with others. There ain't no others who could be with me.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS
But after WWI the country became far more mobile and connected and a push was made to build larger schools in rural areas to bring country kids up to speed with their city counterparts. This was of course met with opposition from country folk who have always seemed to have a bit of a problem with education.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because you don't understand when I'm out with horse, it's simple. I've got horse, I got soon to be dead wife, I've got gasoline stove. And that's all that matters in this life. Now you mean to tell me I got to go to college and make things complicated like Avril Lavigne?
BEN KISSEL
Well that's a little stereotypical of the American farmer, is it not, Henry Thomas Zebrowski, the consumer of much meat?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is the time period. Now farming is very difficult.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's extraordinarily difficult. No, it takes a lot to be a farmer and it takes a lot to be a rancher. But back then, I mean from the perspective Henry was just going from, it's not even I don't want to go to college, I don't want my kids to go to college. These people couldn't see why anyone needed anything higher than an eighth grade education.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Simple.
MARCUS PARKS
But when it came to Andrew Kehoe, the major sticking point was the other side of the argument because in order to build these larger schools, counties had to considerably raise the taxes.
BEN KISSEL
Uh oh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
In Bath it took two years of arguing before it was finally decided that maybe providing a high school education to the kids might be beneficial and a handsome two story brick school was built overlooking the town. Bath then hired a superintendent named Emory Huyck who had a solid reputation as an educator and he had the ability to exercise authority with ease. But what Huyck didn't count on was an increasingly irritable local sourpuss named Andrew Kehoe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It really is like the mayor of Gotham just living his life saying like oh Gotham is gonna be great without realizing that like the Joker is there.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's the secretary getting more and more mad. Because that dude was really... I will say he only kind of tried to be nice. He showed his true colors pretty early as soon as he got in.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
If you're a CEO of a large company, go to the mailroom, go there right now, look people in the eyes because you never know what day it's gonna be when that mail is finally one letter too much and they start going crazy. We got a friend who works in a mailroom and well I'm just happy he's hanging in there.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. If I could compare him to anybody, see the Joker, you immediately know something's wrong. It's more of a slow burn.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's the face paint.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what's difficult.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that's difficult. He's more of a, I don't know, the Riddler possibly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. Hs in that world. Because again, we now know Andrew Kehoe's a fucking lord of mayhem, he's trying to fucking bring chaos to the fold. And again it's about taxes.
MARCUS PARKS
It's about taxes. Now things were admittedly hard for farmers in the early '20s when the Bath School was being built, the Great Depression had hit farmers before anyone else, 10 years before the stock market crash in 1929. And for Kehoe in particular his crop yields barely covered his expenses. Therefore, I will give him this, a new tax was understandably worrisome.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But you're saying the term understandably worrisome.
MARCUS PARKS
Worrisome.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which is very different than I'm gonna make a series of explosives over a year. I mean that's the thing. It's just what are we coming at this with?
MARCUS PARKS
Well see to pay for the school a man of Kehoe's means had to pay an extra yearly tax of $150. That's $2300 in today's money. That's no small sum.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're right.
BEN KISSEL
No.
MARCUS PARKS
And in addition, Kehoe was also behind on his mortgage payments which we'll get to the reasons why he was behind on his fucking mortgage payments later on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah man. He's an asshole.
BEN KISSEL
He spends a lot of money trying to build bombs I think.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He did.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he did. But if we do a little math here to bring things back to the land of reason, the school tax amounted to just 3.4% of Kehoe's yearly mortgage. And if he believed in his community, it would have been an inconvenient sacrifice sure, but a possible one. But as Kehoe put it, he didn't have any fucking kids. So why should he have to pay for anyone else's fucking kids?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's why sometimes I go to a public park. I park on top of the slide. And if those kids want to come up there, they gotta subscribe our podcast on their parents phones.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because that's how this goes. I go one at a time just being like I don't got kids but I got a podcast.
MARCUS PARKS
So despite the fact that Kehoe was childless, he technically addressed his grievance the way you're supposed to do it here in America. He ran for school board treasurer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm running for treasurer! I will gain power over the purse. I will be lord of the coin. And then but guess what man? You know what, you think that. Treasurers don't got a lot of power at all.
BEN KISSEL
Well it's tough to say.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean he won and he spent his tenure doing everything he could to make sure the school got as little funding as possible.
BEN KISSEL
There you go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He McConnell'd it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He got in there and he was like I'mma gum up the works, I'm gonna fuck all of y'all up. And technically that's the American way.
MARCUS PARKS
In particular Kehoe focused his ire on Superintendent Huyck, fighting every request for textbooks and encyclopedias and playground equipment that came across his desk. Fuck the kids, fuck the children again and again and again. In addition, Kehoe took 100 bucks out of Huyck's yearly raise.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just to tell him to go fuck himself.
MARCUS PARKS
And he removed a week from Huyck's two week annual vacation just out of fucking spite.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just to say fuck you. This is just, oh god, you see so many of these guys, they're everywhere.
MARCUS PARKS
And to make things even more acrimonious, Kehoe more often than not forgot to deliver Huyck's paycheck and Huyck would have to chase Kehoe down just to get paid every week.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See I just see these tiny little shades in me because it's one of those, I drive like a demon on my own time. But if you tailgate me, I will find myself doing the thing where I slow down, right, and I slow down and I'll stop traffic on the whole fucking week.
BEN KISSEL
It's very unsafe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'll stop up the whole street, I don't care. And as they're trying to get around me, I make sure I'm boxing them in, back and forth.
BEN KISSEL
Right, you're trying to play games with people's lives who are just trying to get to work or to the grocery store. Maybe they have children in the backseat of their own van. But you have a grievance with some random person.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If you want to play games, you gotta find out if you're playing the same games or if someone else is gonna show up with a new game with more complex rules than you ever thought and now you're not playing your game anymore, you're involved in somebody else's game.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah buddy. I can just see this all ending horribly for you.
MARCUS PARKS
Boy. I just can't wait to move to LA where I can deal with all kinds of people like you.
BEN KISSEL
No, Henry is unique. Henry is unique.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, I am not unique. I am not unique because I've had it done to me. And the cycle of abuse continues.
BEN KISSEL
It is. It's the little cars that do it Marcus, don't worry. They don't mess with a Subaru, they know you're a working man.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah, they know a man in an Outback had got places to go. I understand. I know the respect that a Subaru Outback gets on the highway.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're gonna get scissored to death by a bunch of prison lesbians so fast.
BEN KISSEL
It's a great day.
MARCUS PARKS
Now of course all of the shenanigans that Andrew Kehoe was going forth with, it all sounds extremely petty. And according to the experiences of someone very close to me who was once on a small town school board, it's all pretty par for the course.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But while Kehoe was constantly fighting the tide of the taxes, certain events fell into place that would eventually coincide with his increasingly murderous hatred and his increasing resentment towards the community. During the winter of 1925, two years before the massacre, the school somehow got infested with bees.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah dude. Yeah, ultimate chaos, baby.
BEN KISSEL
Wait a second. All right, it does not get infested with bees. Who brought the bees? What teacher thought it'd be fun to have bee day?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know.
BEN KISSEL
How the fuck did the bees get in the school?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
As you'll see, it might have been Kehoe.
MARCUS PARKS
Kehoe volunteered to help and slaughtered every bee in sight.
BEN KISSEL
He's like Dale from King of the Hill?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They literally brought him in, they were like we have this bee problem, we don't know what to do. And Kehoe was like I'll solve your bee problem. They're like all right. And then they were like no more bees, I guess somehow Kehoe figured it out. He's like yeah, I got a tiny gun.
MARCUS PARKS
But since Kehoe was so efficient, the school board made him an unofficial handyman and gave him unlimited access to the building.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I'm gonna check out the infrastructure. Looking fragile, I like it.
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed. So he went from... Now is he still the treasurer?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
BEN KISSEL
So he's the treasurer and now the handyman.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
Seemingly enjoying this new avenue of power, Kehoe spent the next two years doing electrical repairs, plumbing, and tiling for the school.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Tiling and plumbing and electrical repairs, isn't it wonderful what I do for the school? All day long. Ah yes, ah your precious wiring. Ah see that light? Just fixed it. You can thank your treasurer, Andrew Kehoe.
BEN KISSEL
Well thank you. It seems like you're doing good stuff at this point.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh I'm doing great stuff.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. You seem totally hinged, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And this is all while he became intimately familiar with the ins and outs of the building.
BEN KISSEL
Uh oh.
MARCUS PARKS
Now while we don't know for sure how his nefarious plans came to be formed, but it seems like the more time Kehoe spent in the building the more it became apparent to him that all he really wanted to do was burn the whole goddamn thing to the ground.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey there mister janitor with one arm, and this is true, there was a one-armed janitor that they hired that was very bad, that was one of his sticking points was that they had a one- armed janitor that they hired because they were trying to be nice.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then he fought against the guy being hired because he wasn't technically very good at his job.
BEN KISSEL
Oh come on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But then he kept whittling his salary down every year, right, he was fucking with this guy.
BEN KISSEL
What an asshole!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's an asshole.
BEN KISSEL
This guy's messing with other people's money.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know at some point he's just like, 'I see you're doing a new paint job on the front of the school, seems nice. Have you ever thought about using flickers of orange and red?'
BEN KISSEL
It's pathetic with this man is doing.
MARCUS PARKS
It's awful. He's just the least community minded person on earth.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
45 children, 7 adults.
MARCUS PARKS
35 children, 7 adults.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm just saying when we say least community minded, he literally tried to kill the community.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
He was an elected official so he's not the least community minded.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He did it to kill the community.
BEN KISSEL
Oh right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Again the American way.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah. He's trying to eat it from the inside. But the thing was Andrew Kehoe was given the means to enact such a plan when the DuPont Company and the US government realized that they still had a shitload of high explosives left over from WWI and it's just sitting there being unprofitable.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sitting there!
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like sheep in your field.
BEN KISSEL
Who cares?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The thing about your explosives, they can't just be sitting there, right? You gotta get out of the explosives, you gotta get money.
BEN KISSEL
You really do. That's great.
MARCUS PARKS
So the Department of Agriculture began distributing a low grade explosive named Pyrotol made from high grade explosives and they sold it to farmers as a relatively safe and inexpensive way to clear fields of tree stumps and boulders. Every farmer was allowed to purchase 1000 lbs of Pyrotol each. And in 1925, two years before the Bath School massacre and right around the time he was given complete access to the school, Andrew Kehoe bought 500 lbs of the stuff.
BEN KISSEL
Just one sticking point, Mr. DuPont.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah?
BEN KISSEL
You say it's limited small amounts of explosives. But if they buy a shitload of them, then doesn't it make it a lot of explosives?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, it makes it a good customer!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well at around the same time, Andrew Kehoe's life quickly started sliding down the outhouse hole.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I gotta board up that hole.
BEN KISSEL
Oh good day.
MARCUS PARKS
Well based off his school board experience he'd been serving as the town clerk as a fill in before the next election.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the thing, it was from a runoff, dude. He just slipped in. He was never really going to be this thing but now they had to officially elect him.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
So he's basically a custodian, he's the electrician, he's the treasurer, and now he's also the clerk?
MARCUS PARKS
Yup. And he'd fully been expected to be re-elected. But he didn't even get a nomination.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh it's fine! It's fine. Don't elect me.
BEN KISSEL
It's cause he kept on fucking everybody's salary over!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's no reason to think about electing me. Come on, give me free time.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's exactly what I need, hours and days of free thinking time and journaling time and planning time.
BEN KISSEL
If anything he's Two-Face.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Former government official turn bad.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah and you don't know it's all gonna explode until the bullet hits the bone. He then tried running for Justice of the Peace instead but didn't even come close to getting elected.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't need to be elected. I have access to the school!
BEN KISSEL
It seems like he really needed to be elected.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is the best news I've had all week!
BEN KISSEL
He should have campaigned on if you don't elect me, I'm blowing up the school.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It would have worked.
MARCUS PARKS
At the same time his wife Nellie's health was rapidly failing, which resulted in a pile of increasingly expensive medical bills.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Keep coughing, Nellie! I love the sounds of the coins falling out of my pockets.
MARCUS PARKS
Furthermore Kehoe hadn't made a mortgage payment in four years, partly because the depression was lowering the price of his crop but mostly he hadn't paid the mortgage out of principle.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Out of principle.
MARCUS PARKS
Because he'd come to decide that he'd been sold the farm at an unfair price.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And this is the thing I just want to tell our audience again, remember this all right. Just because you think it's correct, it's so difficult to tell the bank. Because you know how many times I've been on the line with the bank saying like you have the computer, all you have to do is to go in there and change it on the big computer.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then they're like my hands are tied. It's like literally I know that they're not, I know that they're open because you're holding the phone to your face.
BEN KISSEL
Well we don't know. These employers are getting pretty rude to their employees. They may have their hands tied.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, they might.
BEN KISSEL
But I will say this, you do have a little bit of power. Don't pay back your Amex bill, let's say it's $20,000-$30,000. But when they really want the money you say I'll give you $2000 right now. And then you can do it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It works.
BEN KISSEL
It does happen sometimes.
MARCUS PARKS
Well incredibly Kehoe also tried blaming the missed payments on the school tax, even though it was again $150 a year, while Kehoe's mortgage payments were $360 a month. Now there's no telling what specifically set Kehoe on the road to murder because as we said it really wasn't just one thing. All we know is that starting in late 1926, his collection of grievances piled up high enough where his fantasies of revenge began to form into a terrifyingly patient plan for mass murder.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's something about that. Again it's the patience. Him, BTK, Unabomber, Stephen Paddock. There's just something about how these are all combined. I don't know why for me it makes it so much more... We hate to use the word evil but there's something about that where the amount of detail that goes into it...
BEN KISSEL
Yes. Because right now there could be somebody plotting.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're right.
BEN KISSEL
It's scary.
MARCUS PARKS
There is somebody plotting right now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There literally is.
MARCUS PARKS
There's probably thousands of people plotting right now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that's why we were telling you we're the good ones. All right? We're on your side.
BEN KISSEL
Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're here to listen, we're here to listen.
BEN KISSEL
Also if you are plotting right now, get the new PS5, Gotham Knights, it's supposed to be good. I got the PS4. They're already screwing me out of my games! Oh I have a grievance.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Look at this. Look how it's already beginning.
BEN KISSEL
I have a grievance.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You see? He gets me now.
MARCUS PARKS
You have a grievance?
BEN KISSEL
Yes because they're forcing me to buy the PS5.
MARCUS PARKS
Well my grievance is that God of War could have been a lot more impressive if they didn't have to keep making them for the fucking PS4 but that's a different grievance altogether.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I can't wait for you to move to Los Angeles. Must have you slightly closer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The plan begins.
MARCUS PARKS
But that's also a supply chain issue, I understand that people weren't able to get hold of the PS5. I understand that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We all know. It's bigger than us.
MARCUS PARKS
I understand that, I'm glad you're able to also enjoy God of War, Ben. I'm glad. And also Gotham Knights is supposed to suck.
BEN KISSEL
Well just wait when you wake up and indeed your PS5 has become my PS4.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa! He's so sneaky.
BEN KISSEL
Whoa.
MARCUS PARKS
Well in November of that year, seven months before the massacre, Kehoe bought a truck for the first time in his life and drove to Lansing, Michigan. There alone and without witnesses he bought two boxes of dynamite and a bunch of blasting caps from the Hercules Powder Company.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(whistling) Yum, yum, yum. Having a fun day with my fun little treats. Hello, two boxes of your finest dynamite please.
BEN KISSEL
Interesting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm going to blow up the school!
BEN KISSEL
What was that? Earmuffs here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm gonna flow up to a pool and enjoy myself at a hotel, a fancy hotel.
BEN KISSEL
Fantastic. You can tell us anything. We don't listen to our customers as to why they need all this dynamite.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Thank you, sir.
MARCUS PARKS
Well by January Kehoe was experimenting with explosives at night. And when a neighbor asked him why he was blowing shit up at midnight, Kehoe explicitly told him that he was experimenting with timers and he'd wired an explosive to go off by alarm clock.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's real. That's how scary.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's scary. Because they're showing up there like why are you blowing up stuff? He's like just seeing if I could figure out how to blow something up from far away. Yeah, I kind of want to do I at a specific time as well.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's not for farming.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And they just go, cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cool.
BEN KISSEL
Kind of a red flag there. I put a little red flag, it just rose up.
MARCUS PARKS
Well once those experiments started bearing results, Andrew Kehoe obviously made a decision. By early spring neighbors noticed that Kehoe's farm equipment, usually in pristine condition, had fallen into disrepair and his crops were left to rot in the fields.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. I was out with the corn the other day and I said fuck it. You know what I mean?
BEN KISSEL
Fuck that corn. Experimental farming.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See you soon!
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
See unbeknownst to the town, Kehoe had abandoned the business of farming completely to focus solely on becoming the mad bomber of Bath.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Charge me for for the school, charge me for the church.
MARCUS PARKS
In May of 1927 the final piece of the puzzle fell into place when Kehoe bought something called a hotshot battery. Used mostly to provide a spark to fire up hand cranked car engines, the hotshot battery also worked exceedingly well as an ignition device or at least that was Andrew Kehoe's hope. The same week Kehoe bought the hotshot batteries he had an odd exchange with the school bus driver. Usually when Kehoe distributed paychecks as school board treasurer, he did so without a word. But on that day Kehoe gave a bitter chuckle as he handed over the check, saying quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You better keep that. It may be the last you ever get. All right, see you soon!
BEN KISSEL
More great comedy.
MARCUS PARKS
Soon after the bus driver exchange, a teacher at the Bath School saw Kehoe unloading several large crates from his truck into the school. But the teacher who obviously had no frame of reference for a school bombing, decided that Kehoe was probably just unloading potatoes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, these aren't potatoes, these are explosives.
BEN KISSEL
Oh okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Explosive potatoes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure, say whatever you want.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
There was also the janitor who noticed that the crawl space trap doors were being kept open and unlocked for weeks at a time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, maybe you couldn't lift it up with your one arm. But I can do it with my two arms. And I do that there because I'm planning something.
BEN KISSEL
It seems like there was a lot of evidence that he was indeed planning something.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a lot of innocuous stuff that again you don't understand until everything blows up.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
There's no frame of reference for this shit. It never crosses someone's mind that he's gonna blow up the school.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
It never crosses someone's mind that they're going to kill children. It just doesn't compute, man. But this, all these crawl spaces being left unlocked, this was the work of Andrew Kehoe who had spent weeks wiring the entire building to explode on the last day of school.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god, that's crazy.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the school year was set to end on May 18th and early that morning Kehoe drove to town to send a wooden crate to Lansing, Michigan that had the words Pyrotol, high explosives, dangerous, crossed off with black chalk.
BEN KISSEL
Oh it's fine then. Then it's fine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's just fucking wild.
BEN KISSEL
See they're X'd off so it's no big deal.
MARCUS PARKS
And after sending the package Kehoe was stopped by a fellow school board member who told Kehoe that the water pump at the school needed fixing immediately. Kehoe of course begged off, saying there wasn't enough time to fix it before school started. Then Kehoe very quickly disappeared.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well he did the thing where he's like well you know there's no way I can fix it right now, school starts soon at 9:25. And the guy was like it's 8:15. And he's like yeah, I gotta go.
BEN KISSEL
Well it's the last day of school, I think maybe those kids can go without water for just one day.
MARCUS PARKS
The reason why Kehoe wanted to stay far away from school was because he'd set an alarm clock in the basement to go off at 9:45, 15 minutes after classes began on the last day of school. And when that clock hit 9:45 Andrew Kehoe's explosives went boom.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS
Before anyone could react, the north wing of the school collapsed starting with the roof and the second floor room holding the fifth graders came crashing down on the next, which crushed a first floor room full of sixth graders.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS
An entire brick wall of the room holding the second graders on the second floor collapsed as well. But by some insane stroke of luck, the teacher had succumbed to a request from her students to read them a story on the other side of the room and all of them were therefore spared.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
But just as the first set of explosives set up by Andrew Kehoe were going off at the school, a utility worker named Oscar Bush noticed that the Kehoe farmhouse was on fire. Bush ran into the house to see if anyone needed saving but was instead met with a bundle of dynamite.
BEN KISSEL
Oh no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah dude, this sent shivers up my spine. He walked in, he saw the bundles of dynamite. They pulled him out, they pulled out the dynamite but then all of a sudden it's just boom, boom, boom.
BEN KISSEL
Jeez.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
As the other structures started blowing up.
BEN KISSEL
So scary.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. As Bush and his neighbors who'd shown up to help quickly fled, because they didn't get all the dynamite out, there were 18 sticks in there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
BEN KISSEL
Jeez.
MARCUS PARKS
Andrew Kehoe's farmhouse exploded along with the sheep house, the barn, the tool shed, and the hog house. And as those neighbors watched, Andrew Kehoe came driving through the smoke like a ghost and told everyone that they'd better get themselves to the school. Kehoe then sped off towards town.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's fucking scary as fuck in this scene.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because he literally was like, 'I like you guys. All right? I like all you guys.' They're watching his home explode as he's smiling at them just being like see you at the school.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS
Well he tells them to get to the school because Kehoe's got one more thing to do. Now back at the school the entire north wing was in ruins but that had been the only part of the T-shaped building that had collapsed. But because it was more of a collapse than an Oklahoma City type explosion, dozens of the school's youngest children could be heard calling from under the wreckage. They had not been killed by the blast. The biggest obstacle was that many were trapped under the heavy roof that had collapsed above them. So Rescuers could see arms, legs, and heads of still living children sticking out from the rubble, covered in dust, plaster, and blood. And while some were rescued, those who didn't make it, including a girl who'd been crushed from the waist up by a piece of masonry and a boy whose head had been severed by a fallen beam, they were laid on a grassy knoll that came to be known as Hospital Hill.
BEN KISSEL
Dang.
MARCUS PARKS
To try and remove the roof, a rescuer named Monty Ellsworth drove out to his farm to fetch some rope and that's when he saw Andrew Kehoe driving in the opposite direction towards the school. From what Ellsworth could make out, Kehoe's face was quote "contorted into a ghastly grin like the rictus of a corpse." Ellsworth said that Kehoe's smile was so wide and so large that he could see both rows of his teeth.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's just not a fun smile.
BEN KISSEL
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Again it's me going 5 MPH in the 40 mile zone. It's that look of like I'll bring the fucking world down around me if I have to.
BEN KISSEL
Yes, I do like that you're comparing yourself to this man while you drive, Henry. That's safe for all of us here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Ellsworth returned to the wreckage just in time to catch up with Kehoe who was driving up to the scene for his final act of terror. One witness said that the first person noticed Kehoe was Superintendent Huyck, who was holding the body of a dead child when he spotted his nemesis. Huyck handed the body to a woman standing next to him and walked up to Kehoe's truck, either because Kehoe summoned him or because Huyck knew something that no one else had yet figured out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like on some level, because they've been at each other's throats for so long, he was like you got something to do with this.
MARCUS PARKS
Well he probably looked over and saw that fucking smile.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And once there, Huyck put a foot on the running board and leaned in the window. A short conversation began, followed by a struggle that one witness said was a fight for control of a handgun. Another witness said that Huyck was trying to prevent Kehoe from flipping a switch. But either way Huyck failed. By gunshot or by switch, Andrew Kehoe activated another bomb that caused his truck to explode, shredding both men into pieces that were flung so far that parts were found hanging in tree branches a block away.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god. Jeez!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean that's terrible but it's metal too.
BEN KISSEL
It's crazy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He got blown to pieces.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. The only identifiable piece of Kehoe's body was part of his skull, recognized by the gray hair still attached. By way of trajectory it was also surmised that the intestines lodged in the steering column of the truck's wreckage also belonged to Kehoe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Damn. And if you look at pictures of Kehoe, he looks like an old tiny bank manager. That's how he kind of dressed. He had the big thick white hair and an imperious face.
BEN KISSEL
That's insane.
MARCUS PARKS
As far as Huyck went, his body was quote "reduced to a terrible hunk of blood and bone and hair." God I fucking love Schechter's writing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And the only thing that allowed people to identify his body was the remains of the checkered sports coat he'd been wearing that day. However Huyck and Kehoe were far from the only casualties in the car bombing. Kehoe had loaded the bed of his truck with scrap metal, nuts, bolts, nails, and farm implements which in effect turned his vehicle into a gigantic shrapnel grenade.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know what made him think of that besides everything, besides just thinking of every single possible way to cause as much chaos as possible. Because that's one of the first people doing that. Am I correct? To use shrapnel bombs like they do now?
MARCUS PARKS
Back then it really wasn't known, in terrorist bombings throughout history, especially modern terrorist car bombings, this is textbook.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's textbook.
MARCUS PARKS
And he was one of the first people to do it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They should stop printing the textbook.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I don't think we need to know.
MARCUS PARKS
Well two men named Glenn Smith and Nelson McFarren were standing nearby and while McFarren was killed in the blast instantly, Smith had his leg blown on off at the thigh and died later at the hospital. A block away a woman named Anna Perrone was hit by shrapnel that tore out her eye and blew off part of her skull. And while she did survive, the following surgery saw the removal of 62 pieces of shattered bone from her brain.
BEN KISSEL
Jeez.
MARCUS PARKS
Now there were plenty more casualties but the most tragic by far was 8 year old Cleo Clayton who'd escaped the school bombing unharmed but had his stomach torn out and his spine shattered by a large bolt from Kehoe's last act of evil.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
God.
MARCUS PARKS
15 minutes later the authorities showed up en masse, and this by the way, this is before the fucking fire department even showed up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah man.
MARCUS PARKS
It's like the fucking the place blows up, it collapses, people are trying to dig kids out, Kehoe shows up and explodes the fucking car. It's like 15 minutes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like 15 minutes, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And while most of the authorities focused on rescuing the children, the Sheriff's Department investigated the basement where the blast originated where they discovered that the massacre could have been far worse. They immediately saw several unexploded sticks of Pyrotol jutting out from the broken plaster that had fallen from the ceiling and a wire was running from the explosives to an unknown source. Rescue operations were halted while the policemen bravely followed the wires. Connected to various hotshot batteries were over 306 of Pyrotol, 10 burlap sacks of gunpowder, and 204 sticks of dynamite planted throughout the building between the ceiling of the basement and the first floor of the school.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is where you have to sort of thank the fact that most terrorist acts are ended and stopped by incompetence because they don't know how to do it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's just an amateur rigging it all up. So he fucked it up.
MARCUS PARKS
Columbine was the same way. There were a lot of explosives in Columbine that didn't go off.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Now no one knows exactly why Kehoe's explosive devices failed. But if he had succeeded in detonating all 504 lbs of explosives, he would have easily killed all 250 children in addition to all of the teachers and anyone unlucky enough to be near the building. That was his goal.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He would have vaporized the building. He would have vaporized the whole thing. It would have turned it all into rubble.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep. But before the day was even out, the lookie-loos came in full force. Along with the understandable throng of journalists, thousands of just regular folks swarmed the town to take in the carnage, so many that a line of cars 2 miles long trailed out of town.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Why true crime now?
BEN KISSEL
Why now?
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah, true crime now, it's so tasteless.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's so tasteless.
MARCUS PARKS
Hundreds of people surrounded the scene to gawk at the gore same day.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
One of them was so brazen that he walked up to the wreckage of Kehoe's truck and snipped a section of intestine from the steering wheel and put it in a jar of alcohol.
BEN KISSEL
Oh man!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's kinda fun.
MARCUS PARKS
My god, true crime is so tasteless these days.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's so fun though honestly. That's cool.
BEN KISSEL
I don't know. Now I'm going to save this for later. What do you even do with it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS
Souvenir, man!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Souvenir.
MARCUS PARKS
That's what it's all about.
BEN KISSEL
Souvenir, okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's in somebody's attic or somebody threw it out thinking that it was some foreskin.
MARCUS PARKS
But there was the possibility of one more bomb from Andrew Kehoe. Remember he'd mailed a crate that morning before the bombing which had accidentally actually been mailed to Laingsburg, Michigan instead of Lansing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Post office at it again.
BEN KISSEL
Come on.
MARCUS PARKS
But instead of explosives, authorities found a passive aggressive collection of documents and account books showing off Kehoe's talents as a bookkeeper, complete with a resignation letter that said quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"I am leaving the school board and turning over to you all my accounts."
MARCUS PARKS
Just had to show how fucking smart he was one last time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
One last little one.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
How smart he was at such a mundane task.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And just being bitter as fuck. It's his BTK cereal boxes.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's that style of like and I'm being funny about it.
BEN KISSEL
I'm resigning. Wow, what an asshole.
MARCUS PARKS
Eventually though someone thought to inquire about just where the hell Andrew Kehoe's wife Nellie was. It was assumed that she died in the explosion at the Kehoe farm and when the debris from the fire cooled down the next day, those suspicions were confirmed. Andrew Kehoe's wife had been his first victim when he crushed her skull with a blunt object.
BEN KISSEL
Jeez.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Remember she was about to be dead. You know what I mean? She was sick.
MARCUS PARKS
Probably had tuberculosis, they thought.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
But again, that was another one of his grievances that he had to deal with the sick wife who was dying.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. It's was a burden to him.
MARCUS PARKS
But that's the thing, it wasn't even that she was sick. It wasn't even that she was sick. That wasn't even what bothered him. What bothered him is that it was costing him money.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Her corpse had been lashed to a two wheel hog cart and piled with family silverware, Nellie's jewelry, bills from her frequent hospital stays, and their marriage license. He then doused the whole thing with kerosene and lit it on fire.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah man. Overkill.
BEN KISSEL
Jeez.
MARCUS PARKS
And it was even further than that. He murdered his two remaining horses by binding their legs with wire before burning down the barn.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
God.
MARCUS PARKS
And he destroyed a young grove of trees by stripping off a band of bark around the base of each one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that took hours. It takes hours to do it.
BEN KISSEL
What? My god.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes. And to make sure no one benefited from his death, he dynamited all of his farm equipment.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
BEN KISSEL
Well there you go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Pure asshole.
BEN KISSEL
That's the final insult.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Pure, pure asshole.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. The only thing that wasn't destroyed was the henhouse but that only survived because Andrew Kehoe's incendiary device hadn't worked on that building. By looking at the apparatus, investigators discovered that Kehoe had destroyed everything on his farm all at once by connecting firebombs to a single electrical switch.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See what I would have done is that you steal one of those chickens, bill those chickens as Andrew Kehoe's miracle chickens.
BEN KISSEL
Flip it and reverse it, the miracle chicken.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They undetonated, how's the term, their bomb, right, and saved themselves. Ultimate hostage negotiating chickens.
BEN KISSEL
That's a miracle. What you're eating right there is actually a miracle egg.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a miracle chicken, yeah. It's a miracle it tastes so good, right? We killed it. Snapped its neck.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But perhaps what truly places Andrew Kehoe in the whiny dickhead hall of fame was what he painted on a sign at the edge of his property. Stenciled and crude black paint, Kehoe had written "criminals are made not born."
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah dude.
BEN KISSEL
What if I just killed this guy again? I want to put him back together and then I want to kill him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well no, it's the same thing as Marvin Heemeyer said. It's the whole sometimes a reasonable man is driven to do unreasonable things.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah buddy, I've seen some recent Tik Tok videos of people saying that mostly while they're in their car wearing very stupid hats with long beards.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very much so.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, of course he's implying that it was the people of Bath who had driven him to such madness.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You did this to me. If it wasn't for the Batman there would be no reason for me to be here.
MARCUS PARKS
Now one question that may be going through your head at this point is why the fuck haven't you heard about 35 children and 7 adults being murdered by a libertarian madman in a school bombing before now.
BEN KISSEL
Well let's not put any political credence into anything that he said.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's pretty close.
MARCUS PARKS
He murdered these people because he didn't want to pay taxes.
BEN KISSEL
The libertarian party is in total and complete under shambles. But I would say he held political office which by nature then cancels out any libertarianism if that would be...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, so winning an election.
BEN KISSEL
Because you have to be so anti government.
MARCUS PARKS
If holding office cancels out libertarian, why is there even a libertarian party?
BEN KISSEL
Buddy, the libertarian party, it's like oh wow. The libertarian party is the school, right, and now it's in shambles and it's covered in blood.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is for free water bottles. You get your face on a poster which they love. And it's how you meet other unwashed men in a conference room.
MARCUS PARKS
Well as to why you've never heard about this, the answer is as simple as Michael Jackson.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hee-hee. Again I'm just so happy to send so many more children up to heaven so I could see them there.
BEN KISSEL
They wouldn't even be of that... Michael!
MARCUS PARKS
All right. By the way you overshot your fucking Michael Jackson quota last week by like nine jokes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Come on!
BEN KISSEL
So many jokes. So many Michael Jackson jokes that were just uncalled for.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Y'all don't know.
MARCUS PARKS
Well I didn't bring up Michael so you could make more pedophile jokes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know what to say.
BEN KISSEL
Well then why did you bring him up, Marcus?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He shouldn't have done it. Criminals are made not born. He should not have molested those children and I wouldn't have to do this content.
MARCUS PARKS
Well just as Michael Jackson's death swept away the 2009 Iranian election protests just when America was finally starting to pay attention to something in the Middle East that didn't directly involve us, so too did the Bath School massacre disappear from the headlines when Charles Lindbergh made the first solo transatlantic flight in history.
BEN KISSEL
You telling me a flight sucked up all the oxygen for this?
MARCUS PARKS
I mean it's a big deal.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He literally sucked it up.
MARCUS PARKS
The first transatlantic solo flight in history, it was as big of a deal as the moon landing. I mean it was insane that somebody had managed to do this.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it was great. And it gave the pilot the confidence to be an American nazi later on. And that's what it takes is that type of confidence.
MARCUS PARKS
It's true, he did.
BEN KISSEL
The death of Michael Jackson did cover up a lot of things including Farrah Fawcett's death and sometimes we need to honor Farrah, don't we?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think about her every time I masturbate.
BEN KISSEL
All right, okay.
MARCUS PARKS
So instead of being a point of national mourning or possibly a point of national conversation, Bath became a local macabre tourist destination.
BEN KISSEL
What?
MARCUS PARKS
The summer of 1927 saw the descent of an estimated 85,000 tragedy tourists who were described by journalists as quote "sniffing like ghouls at this town of dead children."
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean I have spent an inordinate amount of time in front of OJ's old house but I don't go close.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. No, I know, it's bizarre. This didn't happen like 9/11, I'm thinking of 9/11, that was an explosion. I don't think there was that kind of tourism, was there?
MARCUS PARKS
For Columbine?
BEN KISSEL
Columbine I don't think there was.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oklahoma City bombing was a little bit but it wasn't more macabre.
BEN KISSEL
Was there a little bit?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is just a different time period again.
BEN KISSEL
This is crazy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's local.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, I know my dad went and saw the ruins of Oklahoma City but that was just because he happened to be in town and was curious. I mean hell, I went and looked when I first came to New York for the first time in 2002, I went and looked at the hole, the 9/11 hole.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, of course.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, people are curious. But this is beyond.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
A local cobbler said that tourists would fight for parking spaces near the house that lost the most children.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS
Then they would trot down to the schoolhouse to carry away bricks and write their names on blackboards in the same rooms where children had been killed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Technically this the incredible beginning to a horror movie that hasn't happened yet.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Surprisingly one of the first responders on the scene, Monty Ellsworth, profited off the disaster by putting together a commemorative booklet that he sold to tourists for a $1.50 a piece.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's called It's A School No More and you show up here, it used to be a school, now it's dirt. By this book, it's $1.50. You'll learn everything you need to know about how a school can turn to dirt.
BEN KISSEL
Jeez. I mean it just makes me think that they could have just offset the school taxes with something like a good magazine sale, a book sale.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're talking again sensible, you're talking about sensible building, community building, an awareness.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well in the book curious readers could find a brief history of the school, a wildly inaccurate biography of Andrew Kehoe, a personal account of the explosion, and a reminiscence by a 15 year old survivor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I didn't like it, she says.
MARCUS PARKS
Now as far as how the rest of the country reacted to Bath, most of the people who actually remembered it and talked about it were the worst people our country had to offer and they all tried to use it to further their own agendas, just like the worst people our country has to offer do today any time there's a tragedy.
BEN KISSEL
What? Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We ain't never done changed, bro.
MARCUS PARKS
A local minister tried blaming the massacre on the sins of modern society, the KKK tried blaming it on Kehoe being Catholic.
BEN KISSEL
That's the craziest part about the KKK, that's when they were so unbelievably racist. If you were catholic you weren't in.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Even Catholics they hated.
BEN KISSEL
Who was in? I don't understand how did they even get enough to collectively have a group?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS
White and protestant, man. There was a lot of them, there are quite a few just white protestant people. And eugenicists tried saying the Kehoe possessed a Neanderthalic hereditary taint that caused him to commit these atrocities.
BEN KISSEL
Wait, they're blaming the perineum on this? Is that what they're saying?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a stain.
BEN KISSEL
The skin flat between the balls and the asshole?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He would also say stain but taint is better.
MARCUS PARKS
Taint. I like taint a lot more.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my. What we need to do is start arming the building, you see. Actually that's what happened, that's what he did. Oh never mind. Oh god.
MARCUS PARKS
Well as far as the media went the Lansing State Journal tried introducing the term Kehoed to mean an act of mass slaughter.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS
It's like calling an act of domestic terrorism McVeighed or calling a school shooting pulling a Harris.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You just got juiced! Remember? You just got juiced.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, you got juiced.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS
Thankfully though Kehoed never caught on. And similarly the Bath School massacre never caught on either. It was soon overshadowed by a gas leak explosion that killed 300 children in New London, Texas 10 years later.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Man, it's never talking about what you used to work on, it's always what are you working on next.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I guess so.
MARCUS PARKS
And it was mentioned only briefly during the coverage of the Columbine and Sandy Hook massacres. By the time of Uvalde however, the media could then reference Columbine and Sandy Hook and Parkland and Virginia Tech and Santa Fe and Roseburg and a dozen other school massacres with double digit casualty counts.
BEN KISSEL
And those are just the massacres that take place at schools.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that's only school massacres.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
But even though it is largely forgotten, the Bath School massacre remains the deadliest mass murder of children in United States history. And please, if you feel your hatred and negativity building like Andrew Kehoe's, find some sort of outlet before it reaches this level.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS
Because the sooner you address it, the smaller the explosion will be when it all finally gets to be too much just as it does for all of us at some point in our lives.
BEN KISSEL
And that is one of the reasons why the only thing he did good was run for local office and then he did a horrible job at said office but he did technically-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He tried to make his difference, right.
BEN KISSEL
But I think he did it out of pure vengeance. And as we learned from the aforementioned The Batman, in the beginning he says I'm vengeance but at the end one of Riddler's cronies says I'm vengeance. And then the Batman realizes he also needs to help.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See, Robert Pattinson does teach.
BEN KISSEL
I love Robert Pattinson.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I would also say build a Killdozer but as an artistic project.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Spend a year building a Killdozer, you can write a fun funny manifesto about how you want there to be free gummy worms for everybody, right?
BEN KISSEL
Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Do something fun and then you drive it in the local parade.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then what you get then is the fun tension of is he going to use it to kill everybody today?
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But you can say no, I'm like god, you can get your god fix by saying I choose to spare all of you.
BEN KISSEL
We didn't even talk about parade massacres.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We didn't.
MARCUS PARKS
Nope. Or office massacres or concert massacres or any of the others.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well I don't like a bit of this.
BEN KISSEL
I don't like it at all. Sports massacres.
MARCUS PARKS
And that's it, that's the Bath School massacre.
BEN KISSEL
All right. Thank you for shedding some light on that horrific fucking story.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very scary.
BEN KISSEL
My god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And a long time ago but it's still right around the corner. So again check in with your local loners, bring them some muffins, just say hi, you know what I mean?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah but then they're just not gonna like the muffins. They're gonna be like chocolate chip? They don't know I'm trying to lose weight.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I try.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And if you feel your hatred and negativity building and building and building, address it. Talk about it, work on it.
BEN KISSEL
Play Call of Duty. Just play Call of Duty like what all the kids do now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Become a radio host.
MARCUS PARKS
Work on it. Address it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, talk into a microphone. It helps.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Do something else besides killing 35 children.
BEN KISSEL
Don't spread your hate into microphones either because it turns out there's a lot of morons out there that take you way too serious.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They weaponized it.
BEN KISSEL
All right everyone. Just when you thought the era of American violence was something fresh, hip, and new, turns out it's the oldest, the old grand old flag itself.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep, it really is.
BEN KISSEL
So that's not reassuring at all.
MARCUS PARKS
And are you mighty...
BEN KISSEL
I'm mighty proud of that ragged old flag.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sometimes we all got to take a good hard look at it and say you did bad today, flag. But November 18/19 we're coming to Grand Rapids and Indianapolis. But because Marcus Parks really is suffering from his long COVID thing, we want him to be healthy.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Kissel and I are gonna be doing the show. Just boys.
BEN KISSEL
Just the boys.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just two little boys doing these shows. We want you to know up front but we're gonna be bringing some special guests because it takes more than one person to replace Marcus Parks.
BEN KISSEL
We will.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it's gonna be the same exact, we're gonna have fun.
BEN KISSEL
We're gonna have a great-
MARCUS PARKS
They're gonna do great. You guys are gonna fucking kill it. Thanks to everyone for being patient about it and being and being understanding about me taking care of myself and taking care of my health.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You've been working so hard.
MARCUS PARKS
I gotta put a pause on live performance for a little while.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes because Europe was really, really difficult. We had a lot of fun but by the end we're all wiped out. But now we're back in the pocket. Thank you guys for being fucking cool. And next week we're getting back to our roots.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very excited. We're doing some interesting stuff involving some of our favorite characters of all time.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Fantastic. And of course we'll be covering, oh what was an old TV show? Happy Days. That fantastic fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're covering the show Happy Days.
BEN KISSEL
We're gonna cover Fonzie. What did he do? And why was he in his 40s and hanging out in high school? All right everyone, if you aren't feeling well out there, hang in there please and just keep on doing the best you can. Thank you all so much for listening. We can't wait to see you on the road. And again thanks for supporting the show so much all over the network.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We love you.
BEN KISSEL
Hail yourselves!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hail Satan!
MARCUS PARKS
Hail Gein!
BEN KISSEL
Really nailed that one. (high pitched) Hail Gein!
MARCUS PARKS
Hail Gein!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Won't you spare a hail me? Wouldn't you please spare a hail me?
BEN KISSEL
That's nice.
MARCUS PARKS
That's nice.