An Old Timey Podcast - 64: The Bath School Disaster (Part 2)

Episode Date: July 23, 2025

To this day, the Bath School Disaster of 1927 remains the deadliest mass murder in a school in American history, yet it isn’t often discussed. In this episode, Norm covers May 18, 1927, when school board member Andrew Kehoe set off a series of explosions that killed 38 children, 6 adults, and injured at least 58 others. That act of domestic terrorism forever changed the small community of Bath, Michigan.Remember, kids, history hoes always cite their sources! For this episode, Norm pulled from: Bath School Museum. “Bath School Museum.” https://bathschoolmuseum.org/.Bernstein, Arnie. Bath Massacre: America’s First School Bombing. The University of Michigan Press, 2009.“Merrian Josephine Cushman Vail (1913-2013) - Find...” Accessed July 17, 2025. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/6056318/merrian_josephine-vail.Parker, Grant. Mayday. Liberty Press, 1980.Schechter, Harold. Maniac: The Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Mass Killer. Little A, 2021.Are you enjoying An Old Timey Podcast? Then please leave us a 5-star rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts!Are you *really* enjoying An Old Timey Podcast? Well, calm down, history ho! You can get more of us on Patreon at patreon.com/oldtimeypodcast. At the $5 level, you’ll get a monthly bonus episode (with video!), access to our 90’s style chat room, plus the entire back catalog of bonus episodes from Kristin’s previous podcast, Let’s Go To Court.

Hear ye, hear ye. You are listening to an old-timey podcast. I'm Norman Caruso. And I'm Kristen Caruso. And on this episode, it's part two and the finale of my series on the Baff School Disaster. Okay. I don't know how to start this, because I like for us to start these episodes kind of light and happy. But this one's going to be a rough one. It will be rough. Should we save the light stuff for later? What light stuff? I don't have light stuff. Do you have light stuff? I do have one important piece of information I'd like to share with our history hose. Give us something light before we get into the horrible stuff. Folks, if you're on the $10 tier, you've probably already noticed that... Why are you so serious with this light piece of information? My baby caterpillar, aka my little mustache is gone. I have shaved my mustache that I was so proud of in part one of this series.

You didn't seem proud at all. You seemed to have no confidence in it. I guess I don't recall. But let me tell you what happened. Your father, Kristen, my father-in-law, got on the World Wide Web and made fun of me. Okay? It did. And there were many comments.

One of them, the funniest, was he looks like my 13-year-old son. Yeah, to be clear, my dad took a screenshot of all. our podcast recording and was like, hey, anyone who's not at the $10 level on Patreon and can't see the video, let me help you out and show you how bad Norm's mustache is. In all seriousness, I had actually shaved it before he posted that. We went out to eat last week and the waiter just had a phenomenal mustache. And I just looked at mine in the mirror and just thought, I just can't grow one right now and that's okay. And Kristen reminded me that, hey, you got a great head of hair. Flompe that.

Show that off. Yeah, here's my thing, Norm, with you always. Because it seems like every couple years, you're like, I'm going to grow facial hair. And then you get really bummed out because the crop doesn't harvest how it's supposed to. I don't know farming terms. Kristen, you're talking to the guy that rubbed a potato on his taste as a teenager to try and spur hair growth. Well, the Internet lied to you on that one. But I'm just saying, like, you've got so many great attributes.

I think especially that a lot of dudes would want, like, you're six foot one. Oh. Hey? Whoa. You've got a full head of beautiful hair. And yeah, when you try to grow a mustache, it looks like a baby caterpillar. You know, you can't have everything in life. No one's perfect.

I appreciate the kind words. But yes, I did decide. I did decide to shave. Kristen, do you have a Patreon plug for us? I do. But first, before we get into that, I want to just let the listeners know that I have not shaved my mustache. And I won't. I won't.

Thank you. Thank you for being so honest. Yeah. Yeah. No problem. The people at the $10 level know. And speaking of which, join our Patreon, won't you? Do you want to support this sexy independent podcast where we sometimes have mustaches and sometimes don't?

Well, head on over to patreon.com slash old-timey podcast. Once there, you'll find bonus episodes. Norm has informed me that this month's bonus episode is going to be right up my alley, which I have taken to mean is going to be stupid. Yep. I'm very excited. Also on Patreon, you get ad-free episodes, video episodes. You get to play trivia with us every month.

You get a card and stickers with our little autographs. What more could you want? There's more stuff, but who has the time? We've got to get to the story. Head on over to patreon.com slash old-timey podcast. Thank you very much. And with that, let's begin our episode. All right. Yeah, I guess I don't really need to give out a warning. This is going to be a rough episode. This is probably the roughest episode I've ever done. It is. It's tough. It was tough to research and write this one.

I'll tell you that. But I think it's important we talk about it. Yeah. Before we get into today's episode, we have to recap, part one. Oh, wait, wait, wait. What? I have a mistakes of shame. Oh, you certainly do. Okay. Mistakes of shame!

Kristen, in our last episode, I talked about Andrew Kehoe and how he grew up in the small farming town of Tocomza, Michigan. That town was named after the famous Shawnee Chief and Warrior. However, apparently, it is not pronounced Tacumza, Michigan. Uh-huh. Like the name of the Shawnee Chief and Warrior. They pronounce it. This seems kind of like a defensive apology. I am extremely defensive.

They pronounce it to come see Michigan. I guess I need to come see the town for myself to learn more about it. This has been another incredibly shameful segment of mistakes of shame. That little joke made me fall more in love with you. Is that what did it? You know, the other night, I was trying to tell you, like, the different characters that I think make up your personality. And to me, I think you're a solid 8% Hank Hill. And that little joke just really spoke to me on a Hank Hill level.

And I appreciate it. Well, thank you, Kristen. That's very kind of you to say. You know, our relationship was really teetering on the rock. So I'm glad this joke kind of came in and, you know, course corrected things. Absolutely. Yeah. Okay.

Now let's get into the episode. Okay. Ready? That was really creepy. We learned about the man responsible for the Bath school disaster, Andrew Kehoe. Andrew Kehoe grew up on a farm in To Come See, Michigan. As a kid, he had a fascination with all things electrical. He liked to tinker with gizmos and gadgets.

And as a result, he became very mechanically skilled. he seemed destined to become an electrician or an engineer. But it didn't happen. When Andrew was 18 years old, his mom passed away, and his father, Philip Kehoe, was aging and having a tough time running the farm. As a result, Andrew Kehoe worked on the family farm for the next several years. Soon, his father remarried a much younger woman, Francis Wilder. Andrew was not a fan of his new stepmother.

She was closer to his age than his father's. So Andrew Kehoe left the farm to try and make it out on his own. He found jobs all around the Midwest as a lineman, an electrician, a dairyman. While working in St. Louis, he apparently suffered a pretty significant head injury. Andrew Kehoe did eventually recover, but his siblings claimed the accident changed him. Eventually, Andrew Kehoe was forced to move back home, and there a series of events changed his life. First, his stepmother, Francis, burned to death in a horrible gas stove accident. Of course, after the Bath School disaster, people wondered if that truly was an accident.

Then Andrew Kehoe fell in love and married a woman named Nellie Price, who came from a very prominent family in Lansing, Michigan. And finally, Andrew's father, Philip Kehoe, died. He left his entire farm to his son. But the Keohos didn't stay long on the family farm because Nellie's rich uncle passed away and left a significant estate, including an 80-acre farm in the small town of Bath, Michigan. The Kehos purchased the farm from the estate and agreed to make monthly mortgage payments. residents of Bath, Michigan welcome their new neighbors.

They remembered Nellie, she had grown up there. The Kehoe seemed social, friendly, always willing to lend a helping hand. However, Andrew Kehoe exhibited odd behavior at times. He was irritable, cruel to animals, egotistical. He also really enjoyed clearing his fields using explosives, like dynamite and pyrotol. Neighbors especially noticed how fired up he got about taxes. specifically a new property tax that was paying for the brand spanking new, Bath Consolidated School.

But it wasn't just the property tax. Andrew Kehoe thought the school board was corrupt. It was filled with nepotism, secrecy, wasteful spending. In his eyes, something had to be done. So in 1924, Andrew Kehoe ran for the school board campaigning on fiscal responsibility, and he won. In the following years, he had a long, drawn-out battle with the school's superintendent, a young, ambitious leader named Emery Hike.

Kehoe campaigned to slash hike salary bonuses in vacation time. He questioned every little purchase like new books or playground equipment. He even tried to get Emery Hike banned from school board meetings. Eventually, other board members and Bath residents got tired of Andrew Kehoe's overbearing ways. Because of this, Andrew Kehoe was slowly losing his political power in Bath. But that wasn't the only problem. bills were piling up. The Keoh's got a foreclosure notice.

Nellie was sick with an unknown illness that had her in and out of hospitals. All of this led Andrew Kehoe to believe that everybody and everything was against him. And he began secretly plotting a horrible plan, one that would change the lives of just about everybody in Bath, Michigan. And that is where we will pick up our story today. I hate this man so much. Oh, just you wait, Kristen. I know.

I'm coming in. with a real hot take. I hate a murderer. Well, you were really fired up last week about his school board antics. Well. As a former education reporter. Well, yeah. I mean, this guy drives me nuts. A man who runs for school board but has no interest in education, no real interest in his community. He's just mad because he got a tax bill that he didn't want to pay.

Which, by the way, he never did. So, yeah, I just... We actually got a few comments agreeing with you, Kristen, from mothers who have to deal with people on the school board who truly don't actually give a shit about schools. And they agreed with your take of, hey, if you don't have a kid, if you don't have any educational experience, why are you on the school board? Yeah, it's funny because I know it's not like a super hot take or anything. but actually covering some of these school boards, you'd be surprised how many people can't really tell you why they want to be on a school board.

That's just shocking. Shocking. It reminds me there's an episode of Veep where Julia Louis-Dreyfus has to explain why she wants to be president. And she's like, huh? I mean, there's... She can't explain it. Yeah, and she's like, oh, someone else has to write that for me.

But there are a lot of people who I think use these positions as just kind of like, oh, here's a way I can become a little more prominent in my community. Here's a way where I can maybe control something a little bit. Maybe this is a stepping stone to some other ambition I have. You know what it is? What? Sounds like someone struggling for power. Thank you, Norm.

I wondered why you kept looking at the soundboard when I was like, does he have a school board clip? No, he does not. No, Gordon Ramsey. I've got a Gordon Ramsey quote for just about every situation. Okay. You ready to get into this episode? Yeah. All right, Kristen. So at the end of our last episode, I mentioned that Andrew Kehoe bought

500 pounds of an explosive called Piratol. Kehoe claimed it was for farming and even told a neighbor he'd sell him any extra that he didn't use. But when that neighbor came knocking on his door to purchase some, Andrew Kehoe lied and said, oh, I used it all. In reality, he was saving it for something far more sinister. And in the following months, Andrew Kehoe continued to plot his attack. In November of 1926, he purchased his very own automobile, a Ford pickup truck. And it's funny, when I was researching his plotting and like buying all this stuff, initially I was like, where's he getting all this money from?

But then I remembered, oh, he doesn't pay taxes and he doesn't make mortgage payments. Right. And I'm sure the school board was a paid position. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it is amazing what you can purchase when you don't pay any of your bills. We should all try it sometime.

It's not a bad idea. So now Andrew Kehoe no longer needed to rely on his neighbors for rides into town. He was free to come and go whenever he wanted and go wherever he wanted. Soon after buying that vehicle, he drove to Lansing, Michigan, and he purchased several large boxes of dynamite, along with blasting caps. And neighbors often noticed Andrew Keyes. driving home with boxes in the bed of his truck. But they didn't know what was in those boxes. I mean, that wouldn't seem suspicious.

Well, of course not. The next month in December of 1926, Andrew Kehoe drove to Lansing and purchased a Winchester rifle, along with 100 rounds of ammunition. You know, many bath residents owned a gun. It was a rural farming community, after all. And Andrew Kehoe often practiced shooting on his property. So that probably didn't seem out of the ordinary either. It would have seemed weird if he didn't own a gun.

Right. Later that month, families around Bath celebrated the holiday season. Kids were excited to be on break from school. They were opening presents on Christmas. They were playing in the snow. And on New Year's Eve, families stayed up late to ring in the new year. But when midnight struck, residents were startled by loud explosions. Lots of them.

And these explosions were rattling windows and homes. You know, these were clearly not firewings. works. Right. And in the following days, neighbors started gossiping. They're like, what do you think those explosions were? And then one man finally was like, oh, that was Andrew Kehoe. He was setting off some explosives around midnight. I saw him out the next morning. He was looking at his chimney to see if it was still there. I guess he was just ringing in the new year. Looking at his chimney to see if it was still there. A neighbor said he saw him kind of inspecting his chimney the morning after. Yeah. A few days later, another neighbor,

paid a visit to Andrew Kehoe and commented, Hey, I heard you were shooting off some of that piratol on New Year's Eve. You know, people around town are talking about it. Andrew Kehoe replied, yeah, I set some out and I wired it up to an alarm clock, and I set it for midnight. And then Andrew Kehoe chuckled and said, I guess that jarred him up. Oh. To neighbors, Andrew Kehoe was celebrating the New Year in his own odd, unique way.

To Andrew Kehoe, he was practicing. As the spring of 1927 came, farmers around Bath planted crops for the season. Well, farmers except Andrew Kehoe. His advanced farming machinery sat dormant by the barn. His crops rotted in the fields. Neighbors noticed other oddities, too. He had lines of copper wire running to all of his outbuildings. And people assumed it was for electricity.

Then he was also stacking tons of straw into his chicken coop, which was weird because Andrew Kehoe didn't have any chickens. And people thought, well, maybe he's just using that building for storage. Neighbors were growing worried, but they also knew that Nellie Kehoe was sick. You know, things were probably falling by the wayside. That would make sense. I mean, you would almost feel sorry for him. Yeah.

Like things must be tough at home. He must be in a caretaking role right now. And so he doesn't have time to tend to his crops. Absolutely. And, yeah, maybe he's struggling right now because his wife is sick and in and out of hospitals all the time. Yeah. And the Kiho's were making frequent trips to Lansing. You know, sometimes it was to take Nellie to the hospital, but other times, Andrew was making more purchases. In early May of 1927, he bought a hot shot battery. It was a device that provided a jolt of

electricity to start up a dead engine on a vehicle. And when he wasn't in Lansing, Andrew Kehoe was carrying out his duties for the school board. In early May, he handed out paychecks to employees, like he usually did. When he handed the check to the bus. driver, it accidentally fell on the floor of the bus. And as the driver picked it up, Andrew Kehoe gave out a laugh and he said, you better keep that. That may be the last you'll ever get. The driver laughed it off as a joke. Right. But later on, that comment stuck with him. What an awful thing to say. Besides Andrew Kehoe's increasingly odd behavior, Bath residents also noted strange things happening around town, although no one at the time knew they all involved Andrew Kehoe.

One night in early May at around 2 a.m., a woman who lived near the bath consolidated school, woke up to a pickup truck pulling into the parking lot. The woman watched as a man started unloading crates into the school. She assumed he was delivering potatoes or something for the cafeteria. But then she wondered, why would someone be delivering potatoes at 2 a.m.? You know, that was certainly strange, but like, what else could it be? So she just went back to bed. Yeah.

And then the school janitor, a man named Frank Smith, who is not the one-arm janitor I mentioned in part one. Yeah, the man who had one arm and therefore freaking Andrew wanted to cut his salary? Correct. Yeah. Yeah, I guess he was no longer working for the school. They had a new janitor. His name was Frank Smith. Well, Frank Smith noticed that a trap door to the crawl space of the school was left wide open.

Frank Smith had recently been down there to fix a water pipe. And so he thought, damn, I guess I just left the door open. Right. So he shut it. But then the next week, it was open again. And that was weird to him because he hadn't been down there. You know, people usually don't go into the crawl space. It's kind of a tight squeeze.

Yeah. But he just shut the doors again and moved on. It is funny how everything you've mentioned so far, I wouldn't think twice about, especially because this is a time before people even thought. about, well, I'm sure people didn't think a lot about domestic terrorism, but specifically at a school. It just wasn't even something people would conceive of at this time. Yeah, I don't think so. And so... Especially in a very small town where everyone kind of knows each other. Right, right. You wouldn't think something so nefarious was happening. No, and so it would definitely

seem odd to have a crawl space door open. I mean, you couldn't pay me to go down into a crawl space, and I feel like a lot of people probably agree. There might be snakes there, Norm. Oh, there's definitely snakes. Yeah, exactly. And so, yeah, you wouldn't have anything nefarious in your mind. And there also wouldn't be a really logical reason why someone would be down there. And the thing about the potatoes, I mean, I don't know.

That is odd to see someone making a delivery at 2 a.m. But I guess I would also kind of figure, well, well, this school was probably, pretty small to be serving lunch or breakfast. Yeah, I don't think they served breakfast. I'm applying modern day stuff to this story, aren't I? Speaking of nefarious in basements, I was over... What? I was over at your sister's house, like, a week or two ago.

I was doing some work on their bathroom. Uh-huh. And I had to go down to the basement. By that, he means taking a shit. Thank you. I had to go down to the basement to grab something. Uh-huh. And I think our little nephew, Henry, left his rubber snake down there.

I about shit myself when I turned the corner. Yeah. I was like, you went and did some work in their downstairs bathroom too, huh? Well, I emptied my drawers into their downstairs bathroom. No, rubber snakes should also be illegal, in addition to snakes themselves being illegal. Well, our little nephew thinks it's hilarious how much you are afraid of snakes. But I got to say, that spooked me when I turned the corner. I was like, whew.

I was sweating. Yeah. Real bad. Anyway, on Saturday, May 14th, 1927, construction crews working on a bridge near Bath, arrived at work to find that a huge quantity of dynamite was missing. Authorities had no leads, but soon enough, it would become pretty obvious who did it.

Yeah. On Monday, May 16th, 1927, a first grade teacher at the Bath Consolidated School called Andrew Kehoe with a request. She wanted to have an... end of the year picnic for her students. And she thought a shady grove on his property would be like the perfect spot to have a picnic. Yeah. Andrew Kehoe was like, yeah, sure, but you should probably have that picnic right away, maybe even tomorrow. The teacher didn't really understand the urgency

of it all. Right. After the bath school bombing, a neighbor commented, I suppose he wanted the children to have a little fun before he killed them. No, he was toying with her, just like he toyed with the bus driver. He was having fun making these remarks to people. Yeah, I think he felt powerful. Yeah, in his head, he felt extremely powerful how he could like fuck with people like this.

Yes. Yes. That same Monday, Andrew Kehoe drove to Lansing to pick up his wife, Nellie. Nellie had been staying with her sister, Elizabeth Price, for the past two weeks after being in the hospital. The next day, on Tuesday, May 17th, Elizabeth Price called the Kehoe House

to check up on Nellie. But no one answered the phone. Elizabeth kept calling, but still, no answer. A little later, Elizabeth's phone rang, and it was Andrew Kehoe. And he asked, hey, have you been trying to get us on the telephone? Elizabeth replied, yeah, I just wanted to see how Nellie was doing. Andrew replied that Nellie wasn't home. Elizabeth was very surprised by that. So she was like, well, where is she? Andrew said, Nellie's over in Jackson. She was lonely, and, you know, we have some old friends by the name of Vost who live over there. Give me a break.

So Nelly wanted to go stay with them. You know, I thought that would be a good thing for her. Elizabeth was surprised. Nellie had never mentioned the Vosts before, and she hadn't even been back in bath for 24 hours. Well, and she was very sick. Yeah. You know what I don't want to do when I'm very sick?

Go hang with your friends. Yeah. And not in your home. And evidently not very good friends. if my sister doesn't know who they are. Right. Yeah, Elizabeth had never heard of this family before. Of course.

Elizabeth asked, well, how long's Nellie going to be staying with them? Andrew replied, I'm picking her up on Thursday. And that was the end of the conversation. The day before the attack, the Bath Consolidated School held a PTA meeting. Several attendees noticed Andrew Kehoe was there, standing in front of the school, alone, just looking at the building. Andrew Kehoe was regularly at the school. You know, he fixed things for them. He was on the school board, so it wasn't like shocking to see him there. But he seemed transfixed, lost in thought. More than likely, he was ensuring that everything was set up and ready to go for the next day.

Wednesday, May 18th, 1927 began with some light rain and a thunderstorm, an ominous start to the day. But it was an exciting day for students of the Bath Consolidated School, because it was the last day of school. seniors didn't have class. They were practicing their graduation ceremony. Some students were exempt from final exams, and they got the day off. But for some 250 students, it was a school day. All across Bath, families woke their kids up to get ready for school and maybe had to pull on some toe hairs for the kids who refused to wake up.

Norman? Right, Kristen? What story are you trying to tell, Norman? I'm trying to coax you into telling a story. that's what podcasters do professional podcasters okay okay everybody just so you know well if you've been listening for a while you know I am not an early bird and certainly when I was a child I really hated getting up early for school and my mother tried several tactics all of them very rude she several times threatened just to take me to school in my pajamas

and I did have some kick-ass pajamas, but it was like a big... You still do. It was a big sleep shirt, and it had one of the seven dwarfs on it. It was sleepy. That was the dwarf. But I didn't want to go to second grade

just in that shirt, so I did get up. And in later years, when I developed hair on my toes as a young woman does, she would pull on my toe hair to wake me up. Did it work?

Oh, yeah, it worked. So what's the problem? She about got kicks. Oh, like a donkey. You're like a donkey bucking around. I was like a beautiful donkey. A beautiful donkey. I just want to make sure that when people hear that story, they know that my mom is the problem in it.

And she is the one who we should all be upset with. Gotcha. Okay. Yeah. Did you ever try faking being sick? Oh, of course. You know, whenever I tried to fake being sick, my mom would say, all right, let's take your temperature. Yeah.

And she would bust out the thermometer, but it did not go in my mouth. Where'd it go, Norm? It went in my butt. And the first time it happened, it stunned me. And I never faked being sick again because I knew. That's quite a penalty for faking being sick. You will be anally probed. I mean, you can take someone's temperature that way.

It's pretty accurate, too. I mean, when we. really think about it, are the mouth and the anus really that different? If you really think about it. Let's all sit and think for a moment. You know, one takes in food, the other kicks out food. Uh-huh. Yeah, we all know the difference, Norm. I feel like I'm in the process of writing a Jerry Seinfeld stand-up right now.

Whoops. Has anyone ever noticed how the mouth and the anus are the same? Doop-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. Norm, we support you in this endeavor. We're rooting for you to really flesh this joke out a little bit. Yeah. Maybe I should get into some stand-up comedy. I'd be pretty terrible at it.

Oh, wow. Oh, my God. That's that confidence we love. I was going to say, male comedians tend to be really confident, so you're going to have to work on that first. I'm bringing a whole new breed of male comedians. Hi. Hi, I'm sorry you guys have to listen to me. I promise I'll be quick.

I don't have a lot to say. As you can see, I can't even grow a mustache, so you'll probably hate that. this? Too accurate. Too real. We should get back to our story. Oh, okay. Okay.

So yes, all across Bath, families were waking up their kids, getting ready for school. Maybe they were pulling on their toe hairs. I don't know. One family getting ready was the Cushmans. The Cushmans had two kids, 13-year-old Josephine, who was a freshman, and 7-year-old Ralph. He was a third grader. Each kid would have very different days. Little Ralphie had to go to school.

He was pretty upset about it. Summer vacation was literally the next day, and all he wanted to do was play baseball with his little buddies. Josephine had the day off. She had gotten good enough grades to skip final exams. As he headed out the door, Ralph turned and yelled, Goodbye, Mama. Josephine caught up with him, and together they walked to school.

Even though Josephine was off that day, she always walked her little brother to school. Meanwhile, across town, a Ford pickup truck race toward the train depot, gravel dust kicking up into the air. It was Andrew Kehoe, and he was dropping off a package before the trains left. He carried with him a box, about 12 inches high, 12 inches wide, 18 inches long, and it weighed around 24 pounds. It was a repurposed box. When the station agent accepted the package, he noticed old lettering had been crossed off,

but he could still make out the words, pyratol, high explosives. dangerous. Its destination, an insurance agent in Lansing who held a $6,000 bond on the Bath Consolidated School. After dropping off the package, Andrew Kehoe headed back to his pickup truck when he ran into the local blacksmith and a fellow school board member, Albert Detloff. Albert Detloff made small talk. Oh, hey, Andrew, how's it going? Yeah, just bought some duck eggs from my neighbor. By the way, do you remember when the next school board meeting is? because I just can't remember. I don't think I wrote it down.

Andrew Kehoe seemed uneasy, distracted. And he muttered, it's tomorrow, the 19th. Oh, no, actually, wait, it's actually Friday, the 20th. Albert Detloff was like, oh, thanks. Hey, are you busy right now? The water pump at the school, it's not working. Would you mind coming with me to check it out? Andrew Kehoe nervously agreed.

As the two men walked to the school, Andrew Kehoe whipped out his pocket. watch and checked the time. 8.25 a.m. He exclaimed, oh, look at the time. School's about to begin in five minutes. I don't think we have time to look at the water pump.

Puzzled Albert Detloff checked his own watch. 7.25 a.m. And he showed it to Andrew Kehoe. He's like, we've got more than an hour. So why did each man have such different times? It was an example of the many time mishaps during the early 20th century. Daylight saving time and time zones. had put a wrench in synchronized time across the state of Michigan.

Norman, all your episodes are coming together. Finally, it's paying off. You can learn more about that in my two-part series on Daylight Saving Time. Okay, this is so fascinating. I just assumed Andrew Kehoe was making that up, just trying to create an excuse for why they should leave. That's very possible, but the Bath Consolidated School, it operated on central time, but the town of Bath operated on Eastern time.

Oh, Lord. So they had a one hour difference. Yeah, yeah, okay. Anyway, Andrew Kehoe, he hesitated, he thought it over, and then he was nervously like, okay, yeah, I guess we do have time. And so the two men kept walking to school. In the basement, Andrew Kehoe, Albert Detloff, and janitor Frank Smith, eyeballed the water pump, wondering what the problem was.

Detloff and Smith spitballed ideas. And as they conversed, Andrew Kehoe interrupted them and exclaimed, you know, I'm in an awful hurry. He turned around and stormed off. Which had to have been highly unusual for him because he wanted to be such a little helpy helper all the time around the school. Yes, and he was mechanically skilled, and he could have probably offered some pretty good advice on like, how do we get this water pump working again?

Right. Well, Frank Smith and Albert Detloff were like, huh, wonder what's up with him. Anyway, let's go find the repair man, see if we can get this fixed. So the two men left to school to go find him. But once outside, Albert Detloff noticed that Andrew Kehoe's pickup truck was now gone. He was racing home. A little later in the morning, Ralph Cushman and his big sister, Josephine, arrived at the Bath Consolidated School. They were a little early, so Josephine offered to sit with Ralph until the bell rang.

Ralph was like, no, no. He did not want to be seen hanging out with his sister like he's a big old baby. Yeah. That'd be so embarrassing. So Josephine was like, okay, that's all right. I'll see you at lunchtime. And with that, Josephine left. She was headed to the woods.

She was meeting up with some friends to hang out and pick wildflowers. At 8.30 a.m. Central time, the bell rang. Students and teachers made their way into classrooms. Some teachers got started handing out exams right away. Others, like 20-year-old teacher Hazel Weatherby, always liked to begin by reading aloud a story. It was a fun way to start the day. Her third and fourth graders always appreciated it.

One student later recalled, when she got to an exciting part, she would stop and make us wait until the next morning to find out what happened next. Oh. Something I like to do on this podcast. Well, yeah, we love a cliffhanger. Mm-hmm. You ever seen that movie cliffhanger with Sylvester Stallone? I am not as well-versed in Sylvester Stallone films as you are, my dear. It's a classic.

It's where we get the word cliffhanger from, Kristen. I doubt that. Yeah, that's true. there are some scene in that movie that he paid like a million dollars for like one stunt it was like a guy going across two planes on like a wire a million bucks for that stunt that's a man dedicated to his craft right there everyone i don't know if you can tell but norm really likes sylvester still love i'm just i'm a big fan of his movies the rocky series is like one of my favorites. It's weird that we have a poster of him in our bedroom. Do we? As a married couple.

Well, we know we don't. But normally. I had to think about it. How did you say, do we? I had to think, I didn't think what was in our bedroom. I was like, why, do we? We have so many posters. We have just posters all over this house.

It's like a 16-year-old boy's bedroom all over this house. Yeah. The problem is trying to remember which. posters we have in the bedroom. Well, I know you have your Daddy's Home 2 poster in your office starring Mel Gibson, your favorite actor. Oh, yeah, sure.

So yeah, Hazel Weatherby really loved leaving cliffhangers. But, you know, today was the last day of school. And so Miss Weatherby was finally going to finish the story. On the other side of the school, Superintendent Emery Hike was

procturing final exams for ninth graders in the school's assembly room. And in the basement, Janitor Frank Smith and a repairman got to work fixing the water pump. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to anyone, a hidden alarm clock in the basement ticked away. Tick, tick, tick, tick. Then at 8.45 a.m., it happened. A hot shot car battery attached to an alarm clock ignited a spark. The spark traveled along a series of wires, heating up.

The hot electrical current ignited blasting caps at the end of the end of the end of. the wires, setting off hundreds of pounds of dynamite and piratol underneath the north wing of the Bath Consolidated School. It was a massive explosion. It sent the walls and roof several feet into the air, as if some higher power had literally picked them up. In a flash, students and teachers were blasted into the air, thrown against walls, flew out of the windows. As the roof and walls landed on the ground, the north wing of the school caved in on itself. The second floor crashed down on top of the first floor. Wood, metal, and glass splinters shot in every direction.

Plaster dust engulfed the area in a huge dust cloud. 20-year-old teacher, Hazel Weatherby, ran to her students and covered them from the collapsing walls, as if it was instinctual. In the assembly room, Superintendent Emery Hike steadied himself as walls shook and the hardwood floor splintered. Ceiling lights swayed and crashed to the ground. In the basement, the blast threw. the water pump repairman against the wall. Janitor Frank Smith collapsed and slowly stood up yelling, For God's sake, what happened?

Even outside of the school, people felt the blast. Nearby building windows shattered. And as she picked flowers in the woods, Josephine Cushman and her friends heard the explosion as tree branches rattled violently. They quickly ran into town to see what was going on. It sounded like it came from the school. As they made their way there,

their fears were confirmed. A man ran out of the gas station and yelled, Hurry up! The school has blown up! Josephine's stomach sank. All she could think was, oh my God, Ralph. Some residents got confused, though, when they noticed smoke coming from another part of town, specifically at the Kehoe Farm.

A couple of workers from the power company who were working on electrical poles, they were the first to notice it. They were completely unaware of the school explosion. So they piled into their vehicles and they sped toward the Kehoe Farm. And neighbors slowly made their way there too. At the Kehoe Farm, the farmhouse was on fire. Smoke poured out of the south side of the building.

Power company workers rushed in yelling, Is anyone in there? There was no answer. People started running in and saving whatever they could before the fire got worse. They pulled out a sofa, pulled out a table, they pulled out a bunch of chairs. But while removing furniture, one worker spotted something in the corner of the living room. It was a bundle of dynamite. He picked it up and he threw it out of the house.

And then they found more dynamite and more dynamite. Workers ran out. One yelled, there's enough dynamite in here to blow up the county. Oh, my God. They ran out just in time. More explosions went off, slamming the workers against their vehicles. Just then, a woman ran to the crowd. and yelled, the school's been blown up.

At that point, everybody there was basically like, okay, fuck this farm. Let's go to the school. Right. Many of them had kids there. Of course. So they pretty much all left. Around that same time, a bath resident named Sidney Howell and his two sons arrived at the Kehoe property.

They had heard those explosions and they saw the smoke and they wondered what was going on. By that point, every building on the Kehoe property was on fire. the house, the barn, the chicken coop, the corn crib, and as the Howl stood there watching the blaze, a Ford pickup truck raced by and screeched to a halt. It was Andrew Kehoe. Sidney Howell said Kehoe looked, quote, rather wild-eyed.

Kehoe leaned out of his window and said, boys, you are my friends, and you better get out of here. You better go down to the school. Wow. And then Andrew Kehoe sped off toward the bath consolidated school. What do you make of that?

Well, could be a couple things. Could be that he, for whatever reason, genuinely liked them and didn't want them to go into his home and be harmed. Yeah, and I should mention that Sidney Howell and Andrew Kehoe were neighbors and friends, so they knew each other. Another thought I have is that Nellie's body is in the house, and he is planning to blow up the house to hide that. Well, although he's doing this to the school, why would you hide anything at this point?

I don't know. I don't really know what to make of that. My take was always that he was friends with Sidney Howell and he had no weird grudge against him. So he was like, I don't want you to be harmed in all this. You didn't wrong me. It's hard to find logic, you know, because it's like, well, did the first graders do you harm? Did the second graders do your harm? Of course not.

Yeah. And maybe there's just not going to be a logical answer to it. Back at the school, there was an eerie silence after the north wing of the building collapsed. And then a symphony of screams. As the dust cleared, Bath residents could not believe what they saw. Author Arne Bernstein described the scene as, quote, as if a giant hand had smashed the North Wing's roof into the ground. The remainder of the school looked untouched, minus some broken windows,

but pinned under the rubble were dozens of elementary school children and several teachers, many screaming and moaning for help. People rushed over to clear the rubble bare-handed, but that collapsed roof pinned many of those children down, Only their legs or arms or head were sticking out. Bodies were scattered all over the place. One little girl was hanging by her heels from debris, like a rag doll suspended in midair.

Some children had miraculously survived, walking out of the debris covered in plaster dust, looking like ghosts. Others had been blasted out of the building and somehow survived the fall. After the explosion, Superintendent Emery Hike and several students had escaped onto the roof of the building for safety. From there, he saw quite a view. Several students panicked and started jumping to the ground.

A few broke their legs from the fall. Emery Hike pleaded with them, stop, be patient. Help was coming. Emery Hike immediately took charge. He yelled for axes to clear debris and ladders to get students down from the floor. the roof. When a ladder arrived, he ensured every student got down safely before getting down himself. Then he notified state authorities. There was an explosion at the Bath School. An immediate aid was required. Send anyone you can. And then he got to work, helping clear rubble to search for victims.

He demonstrated incredible leadership. Many residents said Emery Hike was a calming presence that day. More and more bath residents poured into the area to help. Parents arrived in a panic, desperately picking through the rubble and crying out for their children. Josephine Cushman was there too. She was looking for any sign of her little brother, Ralph. And slowly bodies were recovered. A temporary morgue was set up on the lawn of the school. Bodies lined in a row.

Blankets placed over the bodies, only their feet exposed. parents anxiously checked underneath the blankets, seeing if they could recognize their child. Soon the Lansing Fire Department arrived on the scene, and the fire chief immediately headed for the basement to determine what happened. The leading theory at the time was that the boiler had accidentally exploded. Of course. I mean, you would never expect what actually happened. Nope. Well, maybe these days you might, but. Yeah, that's a good point.

Meanwhile, rescue workers had grabbed an old telephone pole, and they were using it to pry up the collapsed roof, trying to free some of those trapped victims. As rescue efforts continued, a Ford pickup truck screeched to a stop in front of the school, and out came the driver, Andrew Kehoe. Kehoe yelled out for Superintendent Emery Hike. Hike, who was assisting with the rescue, paused and ran over. He probably thought Andrew Kehoe was there to help. Of course. Words were exchanged. What was said is kind of a mystery.

But then with horror, Emery Hike yelled out, You know something about this, don't you? Oh, my God. At that point, Andrew Kehoe pulled something out. Some say it was a rifle. Others thought it was a pistol or some sort of switch. The two men grappled with each other and wrestled. And then another explosion went off,

this time from inside Andrew Kehoe's truck. In an instant, Emory Hike and Andrew Kehoe's bodies were ripped apart. People screamed. Smoke and blood and metal shards went everywhere. Gasoline fumes and the smell of death filled the air. When the smoke cleared, all that remained was the chassis and motor of Andrew Kehoe's truck. A pile of intestines were lodged in the steering wheel. And there was no sign of Emory Hike or Andrew Kehoe.

That explosion had also killed people standing nearby, including 74-year-old retired farmer Nelson McFerrin and 33-year-old postmaster Glenn Smith. They had been at the scene helping with search and rescue. Then there were more screams. People had been hit with shards of metal from the blast. Andrew Kehoe's truck had been loaded with metal. Random nuts and bolts. Essentially, Andrew had turned his truck into a giant grenade. One piece of metal hit eight-year-old Cleo Clayton, who had managed to survive the school explosion.

The shrapnel lodged into his spine and stomach, and he died shortly after. Immediately after that blast, several residents ran and grabbed the principal of the school and urged him to get out of there. They got Mr. Hike. They're going to get you, one person yelled. There was confusion all around. Josephine Cushman saw the metal flying everywhere, and in a panic, she thought, that for whatever reason Bath was under attack from like an airplane or something. Honestly, I can see how someone would think that. The absolute terror of this, the school exploding is bad enough, but the natural thought would be this is a terrible accident.

Yeah. But then there's another explosion nearby, or I guess at the Kehoe farm, had there been an explosion or was it just smoke they were seeing? No, Andrew Kehoe set off explosives there too. Okay, so there's an explosion there, and then he pulls up in a truck, and there's another explosion. You wouldn't know what to think. Yeah. But you would think that nowhere was safe. Right.

Another resident thought, like, a mortar shell hit the school. Like, it was some, like, army training exercise gone wrong, and they had bombed the school accidentally. Yeah. People wondered, what the hell just happened? What is going on? Yeah. They got their answer moments later. Someone spotted a pile of remains in a nearby ditch.

Among those remains were strands of gray hair, along with a shirt pocket and some documents. Incredibly, they had survived the blast. Inside was a driver's license in a bank book that belonged to Andrew Kehoe. Then someone found a chunk of torso, had a piece of a checkered sport coat, and that was Emery Hike. Emory Hike's wife, Ethel, stumbled in disbelief. As locals tried to console her, she could only mutter, My husband is dead. A chaotic scene was made even more chaotic.

Shortly after Andrew Kehoe's suicidal attack, Josephine Cushman's parents arrived in a panic. They had been informed that Ralph had broken a leg, but he was okay. But when they were taken to see him, it was a case of mistaken identity. Ralph was still missing. Mrs. Cushman turned to her daughter and said, Where's Ralph?

He hasn't come out of the school yet, replied Josephine. At that moment, Josephine felt a really sharp pain in her leg. And she looked down and was surprised to see the sight of blood. A piece of shrapnel from the truck explosion had lodged into her leg right above the knee. Meanwhile, the Lansing Fire Chief had discovered the cause of that explosion, dynamite and pyritol. and there was more of it. There was way more of it.

They had uncovered more than 500 pounds of explosives in the basement of the school. That had not yet. That had not gone off. Oh, my God. 300 sticks of unexploded pyrotol, 10 sacks of gunpowder, 204 sticks of dynamite. All of it was connected up with wires, hot shot batteries, and alarm clocks. The fire chief rushed out and ordered everyone to, get away, rescue efforts would have to be paused while authorities disarmed the bombs. And that had

to have been brutal for some of those parents. All of those parents. That had to be terrible. Just knowing that my kids in that rubble probably screaming for help and they can't get to them. It would be pure chaos. It was only then that people realized Andrew Kehoe had planned to blow the entire school up. It more than likely would have killed everyone in the building, but by some miracle, only the explosives in the north wing had gone off. More than likely, a short and an electrical wire had saved an untold number of lives. At around 10 a.m., news of the bombing hit most of Lansing. People were now pouring into bath. Many were there to help. Doctors, nurses, farmers, even the National Guard showed up. Some people were newspaper reporters and photographers.

Others were macabre tourists, eager to get a glimpse at the carnage. Rescue workers continued to uncover bodies. Among them was 20-year-old teacher Hazel Weatherby. She was dead, covered in a pile of bricks. Wrapped in her arms were two children, also dead. Sixth grade teacher Eva Gubbins was miraculously alive. A concrete beam had pinned her legs and trapped her against an iron radiator. Next to her lay a lifeless boy.

The concrete beam had crushed him. Gubbins recalled that all she could do was close her eyes and scream for help. The Cushman continued searching for Ralph. Mrs. Cushman peaked under every blanket in the temporary morgue, but Ralph was not there. Soon, County Prosecutor William Searle arrived at the scene, and he immediately stood. started an investigation. But for the residents of Bath, this was no longer a mystery. The man responsible was Andrew Kehoe, and he was dead. Still, William Searle had work to do, and to carry out his work, he ordered that the temporary morgue be moved to the community hall. Rescue workers

needed as much space as possible to clear the rubble. Injured victims were sent to nearby Lansing hospitals, and families were ordered to wait at the community hall for news about their loved ones. So the Cushmans made their way there. And then William Searle got to work. He found six residents to serve as jurors and began talking to witnesses. And he would soon learn the whole story. He was doing something called an inquest.

Yeah, okay. Yeah. I'd never heard of that before. Well, it was interesting when you said he found jurors. And I was like, what are you talking about? But okay. My apologies, yeah. He was doing an inquest.

Yeah. And specifically, he found. six jurors who did not have children. He didn't want any emotion involved in the story, but I don't know how you could not be emotional. I was going to say, I've been tearing up this whole time. Even from, you know, even if you just lived in bath and you were alone. Well, you can't be impartial. Yeah.

We'll have this inquest done by bitchy black cats. You there, the guy that watches kitchen nightmares for 14 hours a day and has no children. We want you on this. jury. Back at the Kehoe farm, everything was on fire. Andrew Kehoe had set up an extremely elaborate wiring and explosive system to ensure that nothing remained. Huge amounts of straw all around the property ensured the fire spread and stayed active. Firefighters said it was just too dangerous to try and put it out. They couldn't save anything. And in the end, all that remained was a brick chimney. But there remained one important question.

Where was Nellie Kehoe, Andrew's wife? Her sisters sure did want to know. They had not heard anything about Nellie since Monday night, when Andrew claimed she was staying with friends known as the Vosts in Jackson, Michigan. Now the Price sisters got the news about a horrible explosion in Bath, carried out by Andrew Kehoe. The Price Sisters quickly contacted estate attorney Joseph Dunback, who we learned about in part one.

Yeah. And they said, help, we're trying to find Nellie. Dunback was quickly able to locate the Vost family in Jackson, Michigan, and he drove the sisters out to see them. This is a real family? Real family. I thought this was a George Glass made-up situation. Yeah, I could see how you would think that. But when they arrived at the Vosts, they got the bad news. Nellie was not there. In fact, the Voss had no idea what they were talking about. They hadn't seen the Keohos in a long time. Okay. The Price sisters next made their way to bath to ask if anyone had seen Nellie, but no one had.

The sisters were now convinced Nellie was still on that farm somewhere. That afternoon, Governor Fred Green arrived on the scene. He promised full state support, medical supplies, money for all the funerals, and more. He even rolled up his sleeves and started picking through the rubble with everybody. Police were busy looking for more evidence. They were tracking down that mysterious package Andrew Kehoe had sent off that morning. Oh my gosh, I hadn't even thought about that.

They feared there were more explosives inside of it. They also combed through the town looking for more dynamite in piratol. They checked under Emery Hikes House. Luckily, they didn't find anything. Meanwhile, the Cushman's waited for any update on Ralph. Josephine and her mother paced back and forth. She remembered it as the longest day of her life.

Yeah. And then someone came running up. You're wanted at the community hall. Josephine and her mother ran over. And there, Mr. Cushman was waiting with the news. They had found a body. And it was Ralph. When they examined Little Ralph,

Josephine said it looked like his head had exploded. His chin was gone. Metal shards covered his skin. rescue workers said they had found Ralph still sitting at his desk next to a classmate. That night, Ralph's body was moved to a nearby funeral home. Josephine and her family wanted to spend the night with him, but they couldn't get to the funeral home. There were now thousands of vehicles in bath. There were rescue workers, emergency vehicles.

There were those curious tourists everywhere. And so the Cushman's eventually gave up and just went home. Yeah. Do you want a tissue? I can't believe we came in here knowing this was the story and we didn't bring tissues. Hang on, I'm going to grab some. Okay. The next morning, Thursday, May 19th, 1927 brought news.

Authorities had finally tracked down that mysterious package. When they opened the box, they found ledger books, along with a note written by Kehoe. Oh, my God. It read partially, Dear sir, I am leaving the school board and turning over to you all of my accounts. They are all in this box. Due to an uncash check,

the bank had 22 cents more than my books showed when I took them over. Sincerely yours, Andrew Philip Kehoe. And that was it. I don't know what to say. Authorities were relieved that it wasn't explosives, but unfortunately they found something far worse at the Kehoe farm.

That morning two policemen were taking a smoke break near the chicken coop or what remained of the chicken coop when they noticed a pile of something tied to a makeshift cart. As they inspected it,

it became clear what it was. It was the charred remains of Nellie Kehoe. Near the cart was a box containing some personal items like jewelry, some medical bills, and a marriage license.

It's unclear, or how many people had walked by that cart in the past 24 hours and not noticed, but who could blame them? Nellie's body was so badly burned and torn apart that it could have been mistaken for a pile of burnt wood. On her skull was a large crack in the back of her head. Investigators believed Andrew Keough had picked up Nellie from the hospital on Monday, bludgeoned her to death, and then set her body in the cart. The explosions and the fire would take care of the rest. Police found more gruesome sights on the property.

In the barn were the charred skeletal remains of several horses, who had been trapped in the barn, unable to escape the fire. Kehoe had tied their legs up with copper wire. Wow. And then finally, at the edge of the farm, the police found a small, homemade, stenciled sign attached to the fence. It was Andrew Kehoe's final, pathetic, bullshit message to the world. It read, criminals are made, not born.

Oh, shut up. Shut up. Oh, look what you made me do. Murder children. What's eerie is, I believe, the Virginia Tech Shooter said something very similar after he committed his horrible act. Wouldn't it be terrible for us to take responsibility for our own actions? Yeah, as such bullshit. Well, and it's funny because, of course, we all want answers in situations like this,

but what are we really expecting? Yeah. And I guess we should expect something like that. Just pure bullshit. For a man to, like, do something this horrible, like, it doesn't shock me that you'd find something like this. Of course. Yeah.

By the way, this was extremely difficult to research and write. And the entire time I kept thinking, I don't know how you did a true crime podcast. It's hard. Well, that's why I, when I thought of let's go to court, I wanted to do court cases because I knew there are light cases and there are more serious cases. You know, there's a range. It allowed you to be more free with your topic selection. Right. Like you did an episode on like a dry cleaner stole a guy's pants or like.

Allegedly stole, yeah. They lost a pair of his pants and he sued them for and he sued them for like $87 million or something. Yeah. Which is one of my favorite episodes by the way. Oh, thank you. So yeah. And, you know, I came on there and did a story of the, you know, the Royals mascot shooting hot dogs at a man. That was a very serious case.

Yeah. But like stuff like this is just. unspeakable. It's just horrible. I mean, it says something that we've both been crying in this episode. I think, and maybe we'll talk about this more at the end, to me there's something so overwhelming about a crime like this because there are so many victims. In a way, it can be harder to get people to feel the impact or understand because when you have so many, victims, they can kind of become nameless and faceless. Yeah.

And so I appreciate that you kind of zeroed in on this one family. Of course, it's, it's terrible to think about that. But that's, I'm sure that story rings true for a lot of the families who went through this. And I'm sure there were families who lost all of their children in this. Yeah. It's very difficult. And like, I'm still not done with the story. Well, and yeah.

And I mean, you've been in a head. the last few days, understandably, just because it's really, really heavy. Yeah. It's so interesting because I've talked about Hitler and the Holocaust and, you know, John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. But I think it's because of the children in this one. Of course. Like specifically the children, it's kind of zeroed in on them. And I think that's what's disturbing to me.

And they're at a place where they should be safe. Right. Yeah. They should always be safe at school. Yeah. And then this fucking crazy asshole leaves a sign that says criminals are made, not born. I think the other thing is like, it's also funny. This case is so old-timey.

It's like almost 100 years old. But hearing it and here he comes driving up to the scene of his own crime in his pickup truck. Yep. And I just sitting here nearly 100 years later, I'm like, I want to kill him with my bare hands. Yeah. Or truly. Yeah. Zooming around town, checking out all the destruction he caused.

After days of saying cryptic things to God knows how many people, I mean, we know of two of them. But you know he did this more than twice. Absolutely. I just can't imagine being a parent of one of these children or being a member of this community and the guy's dead. The guy's dead. Yeah. What do you do with all that? trauma and anger.

It was all dumped on you. Yeah. Yeah. And the guy who is going to answer for it is gone. Right. Because he killed himself. Yeah. And that poor superintendent, the one guy who was willing to stand up to him.

I shouldn't say the one guy. I don't know that. But it just. That was his like arch nemesis. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Andrew Kehoe hated Emory Hike.

Yeah. He was just a jealous little baby. Emery Hike was a good man and a good leader. Right. Right. Yep. That weekend, many Bath families held funerals for their children who died in the explosion. There was talk of conducting a mass funeral for all of the victims, but that was next.

One newspaper wrote, the concentrated sorrow of the community would be too appalling. So instead, they held funerals in shifts. You would have to. Yeah. Well, and here's the other thing. There's only one funeral home in Bath. Of course. They could not handle all of these dead bodies.

Of course. So many were sent to Lansing to be taken care of. So funerals were going to be held in shifts. Everyone pitched into help. You know, residents volunteered as pallbearers. Families attended each other's funerals, even if they didn't know each other. Of course, yeah. The local reverend conducted the ceremonies.

even while dealing with the loss of his eight-year-old daughter who had died in the explosion. But it wasn't all smooth sailing. Some families had trouble getting to their own child's funeral due to traffic. As news of the horrific massacre spread across the country, thousands and thousands of people came to Bath. They wanted to explore the Kehoe property or sneak a piece of rubble from the Bath School, a souvenir. That's one of the strange things to me about a lot of these old-timey crimes is, and I don't know if it's, you know, you didn't have TV back then, so you couldn't watch anything from afar.

Yeah. But yeah, people would show up and, yeah, they would take souvenirs. Yeah. Souvenirs from crime scenes, souvenirs of terrible things. But that was really common. Yeah. I remember we went to the Hair Museum in Independence, Missouri. Yes. And it's no longer there.

No longer there. Fantastic museum. The lady was quite a character. Yeah. But she claimed to have a lock of Abraham Lincoln's hair after he was assassinated. At first I was like, that's bullshit. There's no way someone would have Abraham Lincoln's hair. But then I thought about it and I was like, oh yeah, people did that shit.

They like broke into tombs and coffins and crime scenes and stole stuff as souvenirs. Well, actually, future topic, someone tried to dig up Abraham Lincoln. They did? Several times, yeah. Oh, wow, I had no idea. They had to move his body and stuff and like concreted into the ground. Yeah. It's funny you're mentioning the criminal element of it, but that was another thing people did back then because, again, you didn't always have a photo of your loved one, but a lock of their hair, it never changes color, it never changes texture.

It's a piece of them. Yeah, and I didn't know that. I didn't know that either until we went to that very weird museum. And yet, people would take the hair of their loved ones and make art out of it. Beautiful art, too. Well, I'm sure some of it sucked. Fillagree and flowers. Yeah, if I had your hair, I'd be doing like a smiley face. In memory. It's because she often smiled. It's not because I'm bad at arm.

Yeah. This is what she looked like. No, it's funny. I look back on that and I'm like, I really doubt that was actually Abraham Lincoln's actual hair. I do too. But you know somebody has locks of his hair. Yeah. Somewhere. I doubt it is, it's his hair as well, but it did make me rethink it because I was like, wait a minute, yeah, people did this shit all the time back then. Absolutely. So, yeah, people were coming into Bath by the thousands trying to get souvenirs. Some people had no shame at all and knocked on victims' doors to ask questions about what happened.

My God. On Sunday alone, it was estimated that 85,000 people drove through bath. Eventually the police had had enough. They shut down the roads and told everyone to go home. You know, it's funny. I just realized I'm talking kind of condescendingly about, oh, the way it was back then. But now I'm wondering, maybe the reason things have changed isn't like technology letting us see stuff from afar. But maybe it's just that emergency response efforts have learned from stuff like this.

Absolutely. where, yeah, maybe they shut down some roads. Maybe they tape some stuff off. And maybe that's why you don't see this as much anymore. I wonder when police tape was invented. I act like tape is the thing. Tape is what keeps us civil to each other. There's got to be a way to keep people out of this specific area.

The only answer is caution tape. There's no time to build a fence. What do we do? That weekend, the Price family buried Nellie at the family plot in the Mount Hope Cemetery in Lansing, Michigan. More than 100 friends and family attended the ceremony while nosy photographers tried to snap pictures. Several scuffles broke out during that funeral. Scuffles between... Family and photographers.

Okay. Andrew Kehoe's remains were put in a cheap pine coffin purchased by his sister, and he was buried in an unmarked location at the Mount Rest Cemetery in nearby St. John's, Michigan. He deserves a wood like cheap pine. Speaking as a woodworker. That is such a Norman Caruso insult. Meanwhile, county prosecutor William Searle finished up his inquest. He has spent more than two days speaking with 55 witnesses and examining evidence.

The six-man jury concluded that Andrew Kehoe was solely responsible for the attack. He killed his wife. He blew up the school. He destroyed his own property. And then drove to the school and blew up his truck, killing himself and several others, including Superintendent Emery Hike. I know this is a ridiculous point to make. But I just want it to be clear.

That was not his property. He destroyed. Very good point, Kristen. It's not really. No, it's not really a good point because who cares. But I do just think that was not. That was not his own property. The Price family property.

Yes, there we go. Some Bath residents wondered if janitor Frank Smith had been an accomplice. Oh. How could he have not noticed all those explosives and wires in the basement of the school? But he was cleared of any wrongdoing. They determined Andrew Kehoe had acted alone. Okay, it's funny. I just reacted like, how could they think that?

But was he down there when the explosives were all there? He was, but he was in the water pump room, which was kind of on like the opposite side of the basement. Okay. So he felt the explosion and he got knocked down. But he didn't see all of the explosives and all of the evidence. No. And the other thing is that like Andrew Kehoe was an electrician. He knew how to run wire.

It probably looked like any other electrical wire in that basement. Yeah. He knew every corner of that basement, every area of crawl space. And I read one source that said Andrew Kehoe used like long sticks to kind of hide dynamite back in a, back in a corner between Joyce where like no one would see it. Right. Unless you shined a flashlight in a very specific area. Right. Okay.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. did anything. But a burning question still remained. Why? Why did this happen? How could someone do

such a horrible thing? It seemed like everyone had an opinion. Newspaper said Andrew Kehoe did it because he was just angry about property taxes and losing his home. Okay, well, if that's the case, then we should all be terrified because I think a lot of people are in that position. Yeah, I thought that was ridiculous. One Reverend, bled, claimed, quote, the hazards of modern civilization. The nervous and mental strain of our high-speed living are all taking a mortal toll. Even the freaking Ku Klux Klan weighed in. What?

They said Andrew Kehoe did it because he was Catholic. Oh. Duh. And what? All Catholics are going to blow up schools? Yeah, the KKK don't like Roman Catholics. And he killed those poor innocent Protestant children, you know. Okay.

Well, I'm glad the KKK took time to weigh in. Yeah. I always like to get their opinions and stuff. Bath resident Sidney Howell, who Andrew Kehoe had warned to leave his property on the day of the attack, later said that Kehoe had undergone a sort of Jekyll and Hyde transformation. Sidney Howell claimed Andrew Kehoe had gone insane. That wasn't the Andrew Kehoe I know. And this terrible tragedy may have just been a huge accident.

It was almost as if Sidney Howell was defending Andrew Kehoe. The sheriff warned Sidney Howell to watch his mouth. Yeah. Sydney Howled shot back arguing free speech. Oh, boy. But that does not mean freedom from consequences. Victims of the disaster did not appreciate Sidney Howell's hot scorching take. One tried to choke him out.

I was literally just saying a minute ago, I wanted to kill this guy with my bare hands. I can't imagine actually being in this community and you have nowhere for your anger to go. But all of a sudden, this guy's friend starts talking about how maybe it was an accident. Yeah. How on earth could this be an accident? He said some bullshit like, oh, Andrew just meant to hurt the school board. he just wanted to bomb the school board because, you know, they were pushing him out and the bomb just went off at the wrong time. It was supposed to go off during that PTA meeting.

Why is he saying that stuff? Yeah, well, that's why the sheriff was like, shut up. Like, watch your mouth. I would also be wondering what were you told ahead of time? Was it more than just, hey, don't hang out near the house? Sydney Howell did testify for the inquest, and people said he kept, like, it's like he couldn't accept. what Andrew Kehoe had done. He, despite overwhelming evidence,

he kept trying to spin it in another way. And he was like the only person to do that. Yeah. And of course, yeah, a victim of the disaster tried to choke him out. Yeah. And soon Sidney Howell moved away from Bath. Probably for the best.

Yeah. Psychologists also weighed in. At the time, they believed Andrew Kehoe was a manic depressive, aka bipolar. And he did what he did as a sort of escape from his depression. Psychology's come a long way, Kristen.

Author Arnie Bernstein wrote that modern psychologists might consider Andrew Kehoe a psychopath. Yeah. Which is a somewhat controversial term. I think a lot of psychologists think that that term is too subjective. Okay. It's just kind of thrown out willy-nilly when, like, somebody does something awful, like, oh, he's a psychopath. That's why he did it. Right.

It is an actual term in psychology, though. Bernstein said Andrew Kehoe lacked remorse. He lacked empathy. He skirted responsibility. He had an overinflated sense of self-worth. He lied all the time. He was manipulative. He was superficial.

He seemed to lack long-term goals. But ultimately, Arnie Bernstein concludes that the real why burned to ash with the farm. What do you mean the real why burned to ash? Arnie Bernstein is arguing that we will never know why he actually did it. Yeah, I understand. But what at the farm would have told us the truth? You know, I don't know. I mean, maybe he's like, oh, Andrew Kehoe had a journal where he wrote down his things.

Or, you know, I'm sure Nellie knew stuff. I think that was an abusive relationship. Well, Norm, of course, of course. It's a hot take coming from you. I think there are some problems in that relationship. I think this man who murdered his wife was abusive. In situations like these, I always wish I knew more about psychology because I want the answers, too. And there's this part of me that's like, well, if only he was still alive, then we could know.

But that's not necessarily true. Because first of all, he doesn't have the answers for why he behaved this way. He was made to be a criminal. Didn't you remember the sign he left? Taxes make us bad people. That's the thing. And you do wonder, have we come far enough now that if someone were to interview him back then, would we even have the right answer now? Probably not. Yeah. It's really tough with historical figures trying to like understand their psyche. Terrible stuff happens now and we can't say why a person does what they do. Yeah. To be honest, I just don't know enough about psychologists. to be like, well, I think he definitely was bipolar. Well, damn it, Norm, I was expecting you to have a PhD in psychology, just in time for this episode.

I tried. You know me. Did you go down some rabbit holes? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I looked into, you know, I think it's called psychopathy, you know, psychopath. Yeah. And I looked into bipolar and I like just learn more about it. But yeah, I just don't know enough.

So it's kind of uncomfortable to kind of talk about. Yeah. historical figures and like diagnosing them with something because like I don't know. I do like what that author did of like here's what we know. We know he didn't have remorse. We know he was manipulative. We know that he felt entitled. You know, that stuff maybe someday somebody can do something with that information.

Yeah. And then I read some comments from other psychologists who were like, yeah, psychopath, that's a thing. But that doesn't necessarily make somebody violent. Right. I think that's why it's so important to be careful with labels. Yeah. Because Andrew Kehoe may fit into one category, but there might be a lot of other people who also fit into that category.

And we shouldn't necessarily be afraid of those people or suspect that they're going to do what he did. Yeah. He did something shocking, to this day, shocking. Yes. In total, the Bath School disaster took the lives of 45 people. 38 children, five adults, and the Kiho's. I also want to say that I know this is commonly referred to as the Bath School disaster. I think after doing this episode, I prefer Bath School Massacre.

I do too. Because disaster sounds like an accident. Absolutely. Disaster sounds like an act of God almost. Right. And that's most certainly not what happened here. Yeah. It was mass murder.

Yeah. 58 children and adults were injured, some permanently. And you might think something like the Bath School disaster would take up headlines for weeks or even months. Right. Headlines like maniac blows up school and tax-crazed farmer sets off huge blast. Those were actual headlines, by the way. But the headlines only lasted two days because on May 20th, 1927, two days after the bombing, Michigan native Charles Lindberg

completed his solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean. Oh. And as a result, the Bath school disaster shrank from the headlines. The residents of Bath somehow moved on.

Back then, there were no grief counselors available to help the children make sense of what happened to them, which is really sad. Yeah. Life just simply went on for these victims. And they had to do it while dealing with a constant stream of tourists.

One bath resident said tourists were, quote, like a swarm of flies around Carrion. Another resident, Monty Ellsworth, took advantage of the situation by selling a pamphlet, entitled The Bath School Disaster. The price, $1.50, just for inflation, about $25. Monty Ellsworth, who knew Andrew Kehoe and lived about a quarter of a mile away, claimed, Everything in this book is the truth to the best of my ability. And while it does contain some errors and questionable stories, it also has a lot of information on the day of the attack and recovery efforts and a lot more. A lot of people kind of shit on this pamphlet. Yeah.

And yeah, it was made for questionable reasons. But it's also, I think, a pretty important historical document because it was written maybe weeks after what happened. Well, context. Mm-hmm. You know, I mean, it is, it is a fascinating document, I'm sure, from a historical perspective. Yes. And you obviously have to take into account, okay, this was created for tourists by someone in that community. So you have to take that into account.

But at the same time, that would offer a perspective that very few other people can offer. Right. As someone who is living in the community. Yeah. Yes. During the summer of 1927, the bad. consolidated school lay dormant in ruins. Graduation ceremonies were canceled. In June, Michigan Senator James Cousins visited Bath and promised to personally fund rebuilding the school.

It would cost between $80,000 to $100,000, just for inflation about $1.6 million. Some residents thought they should just tear down the school, but building an entirely new school was very expensive. And Senator Cousins' offer to rebuild everything on his own dime was very gracious, and so the school board ultimately accepted the deal. As construction got underway that fall, crews uncovered even more dynamite and pyratol hidden in the school. Oh.

Construction had to be delayed as authorities safely cleared it out. While the school was being rebuilt, children went back to school and made. and makeshift classrooms all over Bath in grocery stores, barbershops, barns, garages, anywhere they could fit kids. They had a class. But for some children,

going back to school was just too painful. Many families left Bath to start a new life somewhere else. One resident said Bath felt like a ghost town for several years after the disaster. I'm sure. And I mean,

you've wiped out a community's children. Yeah. That just does unspeakable damage to a place. Be very hard to stay. Yeah. The Cushman's decided to stay. But Josephine struggled.

She had survivors' guilt. Yeah. Why had she survived? What if she had stayed with Ralph that morning before class? She blamed herself for leaving him, you know? She had survivors' guilt probably before that was even a term. And that's so hard when you're dealing with something and you don't even have the words for it. Yeah.

And she was 13. Yeah. The Cushman's tried to move on. They donated all of Ralph's clothes. But when Josephine noticed a child in bath wearing her little brothers donated clothes, it broke her. Yeah. After that, Josephine's parents decided it would be best if she went to school. somewhere else. So they sent Josephine to live and to go to school with her cousins in Holt,

Michigan, about 20 miles from Bath. It started off okay, but the weekly commutes became too much for Josephine. After a while, she just really missed her friends and her classmates, you know, other survivors. Yeah. I bet she was asked a lot of questions by the kids in Holt. And yeah, you've been through this horrible thing, but at least back home people know. And they understand and I can talk to them. Yeah, or not talk to them. Yeah. Well, and she had friends.

She probably had been with her friends for her whole life, you know. She got her first chance when she attended a get-together with some friends in Bath. And Josephine loved it. It was exactly what she needed. And her parents noticed that too. and so they all agreed that Josephine should go back to school in Bath. Josephine later said that it felt like, quote, a terrible burden had been lifted from her.

On August 18, 1928, little over a year after the bombings, the James Cousins Agricultural School opened for students in Bath. At the entrance of the school stood a bronze statue of a 10-year-old girl holding a cat. It was a memorial to the victims of the Bath School disaster, funded by a coin drive carried out by school children all across Michigan. Author Arnie Bernstein described the statue as, quote, representing all children, the face of the future, a rebirth of hope, the powerful strength of human resilience. While the Bath School had been reborn, the Kehoe property remained vacant. residents were told to stay away from it for fear of hidden dynamite. Sure.

Eventually, the Price family donated the land to a Catholic charity. Later, several different farmers purchased the property, but none of those farmers were able to do much with the land. One farmer commented that he could always feel his heart in his throat whenever he worked. Meanwhile, the children of the Bath school disaster grew up. They got jobs as factory workers, soldiers during World War II, teachers. One survivor, Bethel T. Hart, became a teacher at the rebuilt Bath School. And that must have been really hard. Sometimes sick pranksters would call into the school with bomb threats.

Oh my God. Bethel Tihart students always remembered her crying as she walked her class outside to safety. By 1975, new schools had been built to better serve. the growing bath community, and as a result, the James Cousins Agricultural School was torn down. Today, the site of the Bath Consolidated School is located in the James Cousins Memorial Park. A white cupola from the original building sits there, along with a plaque listing all of the victims of the Bath School disaster, and the town regularly holds candlelight vigils every year on May 18th to honor the victims.

In 1977, on the 50th anniversary of the Bath School disaster, the class of 1927 finally got that graduation ceremony. Oh. Six women and three men attended. In March of 1985, the Bath School Museum officially opened inside the Bath Middle School. It contains many relics from the day. A flag, a wall clock. frozen with the time of 8.45 a.m., newspaper stories, photographs, and that bronze statue of

the girl holding a cat. In the 1990s, a new farmer purchased the Kehoe property and began excavating it to make a natural waterway. He didn't find any dynamite, just a few bricks from the original farmhouse. He unceremoniously threw them all away. Yeah. The rest of the world may have forgotten about what happened in back. Michigan on May 18, 1927, but not anyone who lived through it. After graduating high school, Josephine Cushman remained in the area. She got married. She had five daughters, two sons. She lived a full and happy life. Of course, every now and then, new stories like the Oklahoma

City bombing or the Columbine shooting brought her back to that terrible day. Nevertheless, she carried on. and every year on May 18th, the anniversary of the bombing, Josephine Cushman visited her little brother's grave. Josephine would kneel at the headstone and lay some red flowers. Then she kissed her fingertips and placed them on Ralph's name, whispering, Ralphie, I'm here. Josephine Cushman passed away in 2013 at the age of 100. Oh, my gosh.

her obituary rightfully declared that she, quote, prove the human spirit can be very resilient, even under the most horrible circumstances. And that's the story of the Bath School disaster. Well told. Thank you. I do want to mention, for anyone listening, I highly recommend, please make a donation to the Bath School Museum.

We are going to make a donation here at an old-timey podcast. They're trying to raise funds to have their own building. Yeah. Because right now it's still in the middle school. Sure. I'm sure they don't need a bunch of people coming into the middle school. Just the kids. Kids only.

So, yeah. If you have the funds to spare, please make a donation to the Bath School Museum. That was a tough one. That was terrible. Yeah. It really was. And, you know, we were thinking of going up to Lansing, Michigan soon. Yeah.

I think when we do, we should definitely pay a visit to Bath and, you know, visit the memorial and maybe check out the museum. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Still amazes me. I just had never heard of that story. Yeah. Yeah.

I remember when you, I mean, when you first brought it up, it sounded vaguely familiar, but only vaguely. Ooh, I don't know that I could have covered that, Norm. That was so upsetting. Yeah. Tough story, but an important story. Yeah. That should be remembered. Kristen, do you have anything lighthearted and fun to wrap up this episode?

No. Nothing? No, not a damn thing. Nothing? No. In fact, it's funny that you would even say that to me right now. Why? Because what could I possibly say?

Oh, man. I don't know. What are you watching on TV right now? Oh, my gosh, Norm. No, I tell you what, I appreciate you telling this story. I hope the listeners, you know, appreciate hearing it. Not too many jokes in that script. Now, here's a funny thing was everyone, before we sat down and started recording

norm was like, just so you know, I don't have any jokes in this. And I was like, of course you don't. This is the terrible episode. But yeah, you did feel the need to warn me that you hadn't found a way to lighten this story up, which. Yeah, and even like. I don't think I needed that warning. Well, and usually, like, I put sounds in my story. Yeah.

But nothing was appropriate for the story. Except the plaque alert. That was it. Well, in that, you know, Gordon Ramsey clip, we can always. Oh, absolutely. Sounds like someone struggling for power. That one comes in handy for the serious stories. Well, should we just wrap this up?

I think we just, we just wrap it up. Yeah. Everybody, thank you for listening. Yeah, thank you very much. Kristen, hopefully our next topic. What we got for the next topic? You don't want to know. It's really sad.

everybody is july just depression month i here's the truth i have thought about setting my current topic aside so that i can cover something light because you know it just otherwise this is going to be real heavy listen this is the perfect time to sign up for our patreon patreon patreon dot com social tini pittas i'm telling you this month's bonus episode is going to be real stupid. Okay. Okay. Yeah.

We do love a silly stupid story on this podcast. Yep. It's just real depressing on the main feed at the moment. I'm telling you, yeah, the bonus episode is going to be really fun and silly. I'm giving it my Norm, non-threatening guarantee. Stamp it. Oh, okay. Well, Norm, you know what they say about history hoes?

We always cite our sources. That's right. For this episode, I got my information from The Books, Bath Massacre, America's First School Bombing by Arnie Bernstein. Maniac, the Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Mass Killer, by Harold Schechter, and Mayday, the History of a Village Holocaust by Grant Parker. That's all for this episode. Thank you for listening to an old-timey podcast. Please give us a five-star review wherever you listen to podcasts, and while you're at it, subscribe. support us on Patreon at patreon.com slash old-timey podcast.

Join the Reddit community, our slash old-timey podcast. Follow us on Facebook and YouTube and Instagram at Old Timey Podcast. You can also follow us individually on Instagram. She is the lovely Kristen Pitts-Karuso. Hello. I go by Gaming Historian. And until next time, Tudaloo, Tata, and Cheerio. Bye.