Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 511: The Bath School Massacre - The Biggest A**hole of the 20th Century

Episode Date: November 5, 2022

This week the boys shed light on the often overlooked story of The Bath School Massacre and we learn the tale of Andrew Kehoe, the orchestrator of the series of violent planned explosions that took the lives of 35 children and 12 others from a small Michigan Township in 1927. (Trigger Warning: This episode contains descriptions of murder & violence against children.)

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. And that's how we're going to begin. That's important for the audience to know that Marcus does have four stomachs like a cow. 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. Ever since the fucking long COVID strike, things have never gotten back on track. Now I've got to start. But I got answers. God damn you, mitochondria! It's the mitochondria. Now today's episode is way much because the last time I had a bath disaster is when I

sharded thinking it was a fart. That's just the snippet of some of the incredible content that you're going to get today. 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 sharp man himself, Henry Zabrowski, baths. Sharp man. Sharp man.

Baths, not something you often hear three men talk about. But today we're going to 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. 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. At least this one's old. And at least Marcus, you changed into the bath school massacre and not like because people keep calling it every source I looked it up when I was researching called it the bath school disaster. And it's like, no, no, no, it's not dropping the wedding cake. You know what I mean?

It's 50 dead children. Okay, again, let's get into this historical piece of American present. 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. Kobe. Kehoe. 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 an IED. Jeez. This marks the bath school massacre as one of, if not the first modern style American mass murder. And all it took was good old fashioned American tax based grievances. Of course, ingenuity in some ways, brutal. 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. Oh, yeah. That was when they blew up Black Wall Street, right? Yep.

By contract. I do think that they could probably bleeding knee. It's a bit of a G rated term for what took place. Wounded knee. Wounded knee. Wounded knee. It's even worse. They didn't 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. No, wounded knee is what it was called before the massacre. It was just like it would be like calling it the Chicago massacre. Wounded knee. That was just what the place was called. Well, they should have renamed it. Great knees.

By contrast, the bath school disaster, the bath school massacres, he almost said disaster. 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. 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 it's 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. 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. I thought that was maybe the four espressos I had today to feel like a normal person.

Absolutely. People with patience, they're just waiting for you to fall asleep. 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 ill like so many of America's modern mass murderers. He wasn't mentally well.

It's not like he was crushing it. No, he wasn't crushing it. But simply, Andrew Kehoe was quite possibly the biggest asshole of the 20th century. Close. I mean, he's one of them. He's in the top. I would put in top ten. Watch out.

Because you still got, you got Hitler. What about Winston Churchill? He was mean. 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 WW2. He was taking naps at 3 p.m.

Well, I'm talking petty asshole. I mean, because that's what they're calling Hitler an asshole. It's a little small. It's not quite big enough. This is just, this is the biggest local asshole of the 20th century. 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 in opposition to a yearly tax to pay for the school he blew up. Yeah, it's because he didn't have kids. 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? I don't understand this. 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 going to be really expensive to rebuild the school he built up. He wasn't planning to see the rebate. Oh, yeah. And this is like a raise in something like $15 a month. It was $150 a year, but we'll get into the cost later on. 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 Schecter'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. Yeah, I have found that my collection has been getting pretty large. So I do need to start putting them. I need to start selling these off like in a yard sale. Yeah, put some on Etsy, would you? Well, 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 their 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 Schecter, who produced an incredible read here as he always does. 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, because he also sets all of the context in a way that are like, because when I'm reading it, you go through it and you're like, 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. Absolutely, that's the Marcus Parks effect. That's what you've gleaned from Harold Schecter's amazing work.

Focus on the innocuous, make the mind bored, and then boom, look at all these dead children. Also, you got true crime up inside of you. Yeah, you didn't know. Did you read Schecter's book and the voice that you do of Harold Schecter? Mom. No. That's The Birth of the Modern Mass Killer. But he knows.

He knows. He likes it now. 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 incredible stories of lesser known historical true crime events. And you're going to love the forward by Guy Fieri. The way that he breaks down what these Butchers did, absolutely out of bounds.

Out of bounds. There are bounds, but some descriptions, they are outside of them. So without further ado, let's get into the Bath School Massacre, starting with its perpetrator, Andrew Kehoe. 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.

Yeah, dude. You get a golds in the Catholic Children Olympics. If you're slinging that much juice, man, and two of them are nuns. I think you guys both are mispronouncing the word lesbians. Yeah, I did that bit. That's my bit. Yeah. And Wolf of Wall Street.

That's right. You remember? I remember when you were sea otter. I do too. I fucking do too. Yeah. Yeah, I know you do. It's over.

But how often do you remember it? I mean, the thing is that if I could get paid money for gifts, I would be a multi-multi-millionaire. That'd be great. But you don't. That'd be great. 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. Yeah, because this was the golden age of electricity. Yeah. Which is kind of fun because it's like, you had like electricity wars. I love that. Like one day we'll get to that. I don't know if that's boring. I don't know if we could get an AC versus DC, Edison versus Tesla.

I don't think. I mean, yeah, he killed an elephant. He killed an elephant. Tesla's super cool. He did kill that elephant. I don't know. It might be a little out of bounds for us. Whoa.

That's gangster. My question is, 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 it's got anything to do with the old calm? I mean, I've been told that the male ejaculate stays young forever. Wow. Because we constantly remake it all the time. Cool.

So there you go. That's what my balls are doing right now. Well, these electric powered contraptions were Keeho's main companions because the few people who knew Keeho and his youth described him as an unsociable, isolated loner, the only real socializing in Keeho's life came in the form of communal gatherings known as farmers clubs. No. This is kind of fun.

Yeah. Formed as a way to bring isolated farmers together in a time when the country's population was more rural than urban, farmers 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. Yay. Everybody's favorite. You show up for dinner and then, oh, good. There's comedy.

That's great. Oh, I love this performance by Michael Ian Black. I love being a farmer. Dude, do you remember that I remember one time, Murdofus got asked to do a show in a Chinese restaurant and we did, this is an LA thing and then I came out and I was nude. We did boardroom, a boardroom sketch, nothing always meant to keep us sitting. The look of people who ordered the dumplings, just like me, frogman, bodied with my fucking dick and poles like in my hands as people are eating stuff, man, they were not happy.

No one was. That's great. I love that fun farmers experience. We did it to silence. But the funny thing is, Henry, is that you're talking about that as if someone forced you to go out there and say, oh, no, we were booked. No, no, no, we were excited. I know you were booked because if you're booked, you're forced.

I know you're booked, but didn't Murdofus have 12 hours of sketch material to choose from? We were trying to entertain these people. Yeah, well, true, true. Well as it went, these comedy sketches at the Farmers Clubs were the one thing that could bring future mass murderer Andrew Kehoe out of his shell, cripping routines from books like Dick's diverting dialogues and Martin's droll dialogues and laughable recitations. Nice.

Kehoe would take the stage month after month, acting out skits that mostly featured racial stereotypes of black people, Jewish people and Irish men. Times change, humor changes. Okay, when it's funny at one point, it does not hold as true later on. Here, check out this joke, women want to vote. But I also believe the reason why everyone said he was some shitty little kid and he was a loner and he was a loner and he was cold. And I do think that when he was performing at these Farmers Clubs, it served his own

purposes. You know what I mean? What purposes? Make a laugh. Make a laugh. There's something about he had this idea that he was this perfect child or his father probably raised him 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. This is what you do. You do that to be cool. Everyone's always thought that. We be entertaining to be like, no, I'm normal. I'm a normal person. 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.

For the most part, the Catholic religion is brutal to children. Very down. Sometimes they are. If you've got the Irish Catholic dad, though, he could be quite full of mirth and merriment. Yeah. Once he's got the wine in him. All right. 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. Yes. Please play the part of Bones. Yes. Do I have any direction at all? Your direction is that you're a man who has a question to ask.

You have made a question, but you're not in blackface. Remember that. You're not in blackface. You are asking a question, and then you are expecting a reply, and then you shall say more words to that reply. That's good. I'm going to go with McLaughlin, McLaughlin and group question. It's an old PBS show.

All right. So your bones, your bones, Henry, you're Johnson. I'm Johnson. You're Johnson. Johnson. Okay. Here we go. Have you ever heard who was the oldest woman?

No, I have not, but I suppose he was no spring chicken when she died. Very likely not, but she wasn't the oldest woman for all that. Indeed. Who do you say was older? Well, the oldest woman that I ever heard of was Anne Tickwitty. Kissel, it is really not beyond what you do now. That is truly, you could have written that yourself. Anne Tickwitty.

Her last name was Tickwitty, her first name is Anne, and she's the oldest woman that he ever heard of. To be honest with you, Anne, it is a pretty big deal, 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've got a roll in the hay. It's possible.

It's possible. Comedy brings people together or violently divides them. 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 drop like flies back. They just get sick, they get caught in brushing machines, they get fucking hit by carriages. It's difficult to be a wife.

That's why it was all a farce. This whole, oh, till 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, and it's long. Here's father remarried though, Andrew left home, although there's not a clear record of what he did for the next eight 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 dairy man, although I don't

really know what a dairy man is. You fluff the udders. Yeah, you want to fluff the udders. It makes them give more milk. 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.

He's making no sense. 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.

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 to like being the thing that really probably made his impulse control truly unhinged, because could we now know in hindsight how often like these types of like weird cre- would seem to be crazy over the top murder scenarios come from head injuries? Yeah. The brain has a lot to do with it, doesn't it? Well, there was nothing wrong with Andrew Kehoe's impulse control.

In fact, he probably had the most impulse control out of any one we've ever covered. It's kind of the problem. I think all it is, what it did is that it just disconnected him from empathy. His empathy just completely and totally died and it happens again and again. That's what I use Starbucks for. Absolutely. Well, after that head injury, Kehoe moved back in with his father and stepmother. She'd 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. Hold on a second. I'm not, I'm not doing any victim blaming here, but they give an infant a cat? No, the girl was, he'd been gone for eight years. Okay. So she was ready to have a cat. Yeah.

Okay. Cause yeah. Otherwise this infant's not going to be able to take care of her. Oh, so pets were different then. You didn't have to do all these things. Pets came in and out. You know what? I'm going to say though, I think the cat has lived a lifestyle the same since the Victorian

era. Pretty much. There's a new cat. There's a cat at my place. I named it Meowbert and it just hangs out as if he's a cat. Yeah. Yeah. It's an outside cat.

It's just a farm. And this is a farm cat. You see a farm cat like three times a week. 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. 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.

Well, there's something about them hitting the, cause they used to call them gasoline stoves. Yeah. There's something about it being a gasoline stove. Like you remember Dr. Gasoline, you're wrestling? Gasoline. Yeah. Dr. Gasoline.

Gasoline. Yeah. My wrestling alter ego. There seems to be something like more sinister. Cause it's also, it's funny cause when, when Shector lays out all the like, the most nefarious invention in all mankind, as soon as the gasoline stove came out, a bunch of people died. Yeah.

She's using it. In July of 1895 in Chicago alone, 11 people were killed when their gas stoves exploded and these were 11 separate incidences from Shector's research. He was able to find such alarming newspaper headlines as death from gasoline stove. Baby burned to death by gasoline stove and gasoline stove brings death and destruction. I'll take two. My God. I should see the way it cooks a chicken parm.

I think it's worth it. 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 one to two hours longer each morning and then half an hour before rising, have hot coffee and a warm breakfast for her husband without raising the temperature of the cook room one eighth of a degree for 10 cents. She can do the whole day's cooking.

Isn't that absolutely fantastic. And that's the era of chivalry 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 of leaked gas over everything. I don't. But then again, if you're even thinking about doing either of those things, just do it.

The final tip is the best one. Don't try to operate the stove if you don't thoroughly understand it. There we go. I mean, we still got labels on like hairdryers, like don't use in shower because we are an impetuous group of Americans. Legal. Legal. 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 steps son. See, on September 17th, 1911, Frances put a match to the stove and the stove immediately exploded. That set Frances on fire from head to toe and 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. Now, to be fair, he would not have known that you just want to put a little baking soda on there or a little flour. I mean, he did. No, that may have just been an accident. She was engulfed in burning gasoline. Yeah. You know what I mean?

It was it was done already. She was a screaming. It was the scene from hereditary. Yeah. In that one. Oh, man. 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.

Yeah, dude. And then did you see the tale of when he goes to the neighbor? So he goes over and you're like, Hey, yeah, no one called a doctor. And they're all like, yeah, okay. And then he leaves as he turns around to leave and he comes back. He's like, actually, you also should call for a priest as well and then walk back and you're just like, it was real nonchalant. Well, it doesn't seem like he had an emotional connection with his dad's third wife.

I think that's generous. Yeah. By the time emergency services arrived, Francis 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. You know what? The scene that Schecter 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 like literal flaming wife, right? She finally burns out and they're so far from a hospital cause they're out in the middle of fucking nowhere that they just like, can you imagine that you just have to lift? They just have to lift her up and flop her on a bed and just wait. And she's just sitting there going like, Oh, my God, it's like the end of child's play when he comes back all burned, but she's not a doll. She's a woman. Nope.

No. Yes. Yep. No, 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 Francis was out gathering nuts with her daughter. 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. 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. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Ghost dad. Yeah. Ghost dad. There's a few bits he did in the seventies involving drugs and doing certain things to women. People going to sleep. And people were like, Oh, no, that's good humor.

But then in hindsight, it just seemed like a confession. 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. See, you remember that guys? Grandma Moses learned to paint when she was 70 years old. You could do whatever you want. It's not too late.

That's fantastic. Well, if I could compare Keeho to anyone, I'd say he shared a lot in common with Stephen Paddock, who killed 60 concert goers and injured over 800 more in Las Vegas in 27 when he was 64 years old. Yes. Fucking Stephen Paddock, man. And again, like a spank. We have no clue why he did it.

How would like, it's still a mystery. I think I, with this case, I think a lot of Marvin Heemire, even though Marvin Heemire from the killdozer, the killdozer or our killdozer guy, right? Like again, in a way that was so much more peaceful than explosives. Yeah. We also do know how we didn't really know how the killdozer was going to play out. And also it was called the killdozers. I mean, it was a pretty cool name.

It was pretty cool. It was pretty cool. We'll talk about you man. Stephen, if we ever do that one, dude, I got some inside information from a bartender in Mandalay Bay. Scary day, believe it or not. You shouldn't tell the police. If you have inside information, you should call the police.

They were, oh, the police were, the police was there. The police were there. Their experience was freaking nuts. 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 of those weapons into that room, how much preparation went into that? How much scouting?

How much planning? I mean, Andrew Kehoe is much the same. And the killdozer guy, how long did it take him to build that killdozer? I think it, I think it took him a full year. And then he would sleep there after he built himself into it. Yeah, it took a long time. Have you started shopping for the holidays yet? Those crazy crowds at the mall are only going to get worse.

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Well 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 Nelly by those who knew her. And after the marriage Andrew continued working his father's farm while Nelly did her best to help take care of Andrew's step-sister Irene. But it's around the time of Andrew's marriage to Nelly 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.

You really can't put it more close to the fact that he was just a fucking prick and an absolute asshole. Right. 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. Woo, that is, that's a lot of money. I mean, this is the only one I burned down the church, truly, of all of his grievances.

This is the only one I agree with because you're like, he barely, he obviously was not a man of the church. Well, he went to church at the time. Yeah, because decidedly he had to. He like, you had to put up appearances. Yeah, but he could have just said no. He could have even offered to donate less. He was, 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. Every goddamn episode when we cover one of these horrible people, there's always a moment where I relate. It's the only time. Get off my lawn.

Get off my lawn. Get on my lawn for the most part, but unless you're a money gouging priest, get off my lawn. Yeah, dude. If I could have seen him pull that priest up by the back of his pants and throw him out. And that's where this ended, you'd be like, just he's cranky. Yeah, sure.

Well, after that, the disappointments, which were all Kehoe's fault, came hard and fast. He bought eight steers from a neighbor and put them out to pasture. But because Andrew didn't know what he was doing, he turned them out on a field full of wet clover. Now, as anyone who's seen the second season of Yellowstone knows. Oh, just me, my uncle Ken. There's one guy at the Greyhound bus station who was talking about it and he was like, my kids won't answer the phone, but Kevin Costner is the hell of a lead.

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 a slightest bit of PTSD when they showed that ranch because that just brought me back home to that ugly, ugly land immediately. Okay. But from that second season, if you've seen it, you know that our audience has. It's a fine show.

It's a fine show. It's fairly popular. 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 tympani. You've been talking about too many diseases, bro. That didn't sound whimsical at all, man.

That sounded real sad. It sounds like a ruminal tympani. It just sounds like one of your noise albums. Yeah. That's true. Yeah. It does. It sounds like a George Montalbaugh and Oregon album, but it's also known as frothy bloat.

You know, that's whimsical. Yeah. I'd order a frothy bloat. 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 all together. He's a hardliner. I guess so. Now, 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 a $6,000 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. Yeah. And in many, since, what you'll find out with every mass killing and family annihilation, a lot of times has to do with mortgage. Absolutely. Money's in the line. 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. We meet every Wednesday at night. That's funny. You got it, right? And the Ladies Friday Afternoon Club allowed the husbands to join a meeting once a year. There. Oh, yeah.

Oh, Leigh. Yay. Thanks for the invite. Yes, how it is. There Andrew was known as a witty performer who was put in charge of putting on annual plays for the ladies. All right. You guys ready to see another sketch about the Chinese?

Here we go. Here's what it's called magic. You can fill in the slur. I love those old, you fill in the slur one. You fill in the slur. 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. What was it the idea that someone said in America that like one of our main problems that everybody thinks that they were the based millionaire? No, it's that, you know, that there are no poor people in America just temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Yes. Oh, wow. Ruffle.

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. Float? Float? What was it? Frothy bloat?

Frothy bloat. I'm going to make a new savory dessert that everybody's going to love. And he was that type of guy. So he was a performer making them laugh? 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. It's almost like it's because he's bad at it. 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 as if dressing above his station somehow set him apart from the so-called plebeians who toiled in the dirt wearing appropriate clothing.

It's just because it goes from being funny to haunting. Same thing with the John List thing is that him going in the suits, like you get first, you think it's laughter. But again, after you kill 45 children with fucking improvised explosive devices, 35 children, seven adults. Yeah. You you start to look, you start to realize like, oh, that's like pathological. Like you guys in full like that full business attire out there is hot as fuck.

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, every other. 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 Confederacy of Dunces, one of the richest people ever.

I wonder what what is that? Why do you think people is it the duality? We talk about that sometimes with like, you know, secular humanism and stuff. Do you think is it the presentation and then knowing that like, but secretly I'm super rich? Well, I think 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.

It's all the social shit. The Brooklyn billionaire that you're talking about. He's focused on his business. Yeah. He's focused on what he's focused on making money. He doesn't give a shit what he looks like. I will say this, the wife that he would go eat at Carmine's with was very focused on her looks.

Yeah. Because I was always like, 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 the sky in here, huh? And that's what I found out the real truth. It was. Oh yeah. 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 and a new shirt. He'd run home and change. And he kept his barn cleaner than most people in Bath Township kept their houses. It's all ruse, man.

It's really just, it's again, I think it's something within, I think the term is the pathological narcissist or like it's something, you're looking at the gap between you and everybody else. And so what you do is you fill it with all those other nonsense without acknowledging that there was a distinct gap in your abilities to be successful. Yeah, I mean, I think a big part of it is that it's the thing that we talked about in the Alistair Crowley episodes, you know, 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. You know, it's almost like he just became a farmer through some sort of stubbornness. We gave it, it was through, it was from his father or whatever like you came, he came upon this land. And again, it was something about that. It's him pretending to be something that he's not. He should have just built a comedy club. It sounds like.

Oh 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. Oh my.

I mean, this is that. 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. Yeah. He gets violent. Because that's what the dude was saying in that, in that incidence, you're looking at the, him hit this horse and he was like, nobody who knows like what your relationship

to a horse should be would be treating this horse like this because that's a farmer because how from what I've heard in what you guys, the way you describe your love of the animals on your farm, it's very familial. Like a horse, Jesus Christ, of course. Yeah. That's not how you're going to want to treat a horse now here. Just help me unzip my pants. Let me show you.

This is actually how you're going to want to treat a horse. A horse's clit is actually on its dick. I don't know if you want to do that. 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 year or to farm. 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 1st grade all the way up to 8th grade. And when the kid got through 8th 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. Finally, somebody making some sense, him child was a goat, he's supposed to dig up rocks in the fields and then 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 other ins, there ain't no other ins who can play with me.

Absolutely. But after World War I, the country became far more mobile and connected and a push was made to build larger schools and rural areas to bring country kids up to speed with their city counterparts. This was of course met with opposition from country folk who've always seemed to have a bit of a problem with education. Because you don't understand, when I'm out with horse, it's simple, I 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 gotta go to college and make things complicated like Avril Lavigne? Well that's a little stereotypical of the American farmer, is it not Henry Thomas Sobrowski, the consumer of much meat. This is the time period, now farming is very difficult. 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. 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. 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 Emery Hewick, who had a solid reputation as an educator and he had the ability to exercise authority with ease.

But what Hewick didn't count on was an increasingly irritable local sourpus named Andrew Kehoe. It really is like the mayor of Gotham did not live in his life saying like, oh, Gotham is going to be great without realizing that like the Joker is working in the fucking, like he's there, like he's the secretary, you know, getting more and more mad. Because that dude was really, because, you know, he never, I will say he only kind of tried to be nice. He showed his true colors pretty early as soon as he got in. Yeah.

If you're a CEO of a large company, go to the mail room, go there right now, look people in the eyes, because you never know what day it is going to be when that mail is finally one letter too much and they start going crazy. We got a friend who works in the mail room and well, I'm just happy he's hanging in there. Yeah, if I could compare him to any better, the Joker, you immediately know something's wrong. It's more of a slow burn. It's the face paint.

Yeah. That's difficult. Yeah. Yeah, that's, that's a difficult. He's more of a, I don't know, like a Riddler. Oh yeah. He's in it. He's, he's of like, he's in that world because again, he's just now, we now know Andrew Kehoe's

fucking a lot of him is trying to fucking bring chaos to the fold and again, it's about taxes. 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 crashed 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.

But you're saying the term understandably worrisome, which is very different than I'm going to make a series of explosives of over a year. I mean, that's the thing. It's just, you know, what are we coming at this for? Well, see, to pay for the school, a man of Kehoe's means had to pay an extra yearly tax of 150 bucks. That's $2,300 in today's money. That's no small sum.

You're right. 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. He's an asshole. He spends a lot of money trying to build bombs, I think. He did. 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? 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 got to subscribe our podcast on their parents' phones, because that's how this goes.

I go one at a time, he's being like, I don't got kids, but I got a podcast. 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. 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?

Well, you know what? You think that the treasurers don't got a lot of power at all. Well, it's tough to say. I mean, he won, and he spent his tenure doing everything he could to make sure the school got as little funding as possible. Oh, he mcconnelled it. He got in there and he was like, I'm going to gum up the works. I'm going to be like, I'm going to fuck all y'all up.

And I mean, you know, technically this, that's the American way. In particular, Kehoe focused his ire on Superintendent Hewitt fighting every request for textbooks and cyclopedias and playground equipment that came across his desk. Fuck the kids. Fuck the children again and again and again. In addition, Kehoe took a hundred bucks out of Hewitt's yearly raise. Just tell him to go fuck himself. And he removed a week from Hewitt's two-week annual vacation just out of fucking spice.

Just to say fuck you. This is just, oh God, you see so many of these guys. They're everywhere. And to make things even more acrimonious, Kehoe, more often than not, forgot to deliver Hewitt's paycheck. And Hewitt would have to chase Kehoe down just to get paid every week. 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 just, I'll stop traffic on the whole fucking week. I'll stop it on 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. Right. 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 grief, a grievance with some random person. If you just want to play games, you got to find out if you're playing the same games or if someone else is going to 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.

Yeah, buddy. I can just see this all ending horribly for me. Boy, I just can't wait to move to LA where I can deal with all kinds of people like you. No, Henry's unique. No, I am not unique. I'm not unique because I've had it done to me. And this cycle of abuse continues. It is.

It's the little cars that do it, Marcus. Don't worry. They don't mess with the Subaru. They know you're a working man. Oh, yeah. They know when out. They know a man in an outback's got places to go. I understand.

I know the respect that a Subaru outback gets on the high road. You're going to get scissored to death by a bunch of prison lesbians so fast. We have no clue. It's a great day. It's a great day. Now, of course, all of the shenanigans that Andrew Kehoe is 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. 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. All right, it does not get infested with bees. Who brought the bees?

What teacher thought it'd be fun to have me day? How did the bees get in the school? As you'll see, it might have been Kehoe. Kehoe volunteered to help and slaughtered every bee in sight. But since it was like Dale from King of the Hill, they really brought him in. They were like, who's going to? We have this bee problem. Don't know what to do.

And Kehoe's 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. But since Kehoe was so efficient, the school board made him an unofficial handyman and gave him unlimited access to the building. Yeah, I want to take out the infrastructure looking fragile.

I like it. Yes, indeed. So he went from now. Is he still the treasurer? Yeah. So he's the treasurer and now the handyman. Seemingly enjoying this new avenue of power, Kehoe spent the next two years doing electrical repairs, plumbing, and tiling for the school.

Tiling and plumbing and electrical repairs, isn't it wonderful what I do for the school? It's like all day long, ah, yes, ah, you're precious wiring, ah, see that light? Just fixed it. You can thank your treasurer and your Kehoe. Well, thank you. It seems like you're doing good stuff at this point. Oh, I'm doing great stuff. Yeah, you seem totally hinged, yeah.

And this is all while he became intimately familiar with the ins and outs of the building. Uh-oh. 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. Hey there, Mr. Janitor with One Arm, and this is true. There was a One Arm Janitor that they hired that was very bad. That was one of his sticking points, is that they had a One Arm Janitor that they hired

because they were trying to be nice, and then he fought against the guy being hired because he wasn't technically very good at his job, but then he kept whittling his salary down every year, right? He was fucking with this guy. What a asshole. This guy's messing with other people's money. You know, at some point, he's like, see you're doing a new paint job and the front of the school seems nice.

Have you ever thought about using flickers of orange and red? It's pathetic what this man is doing. It's awful. He's just the least community-minded person on earth. 45 children, seven adults. I'm just saying, when we just say, when we say least community-minded, he literally tried to kill the community. He was an elected official, so he's not the least community-minded, he's just dying to

kill the community. He literally, again, the American way. 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 World War I, and it's just sitting there being unprofitable. Wow. It's like sheep in your field.

The thing about your explosives is they can't just be sitting there, right? You gotta get wool out of their explosives. You really do. That's great. So, the Department of Agriculture began distributing a low-grade explosive named Pyritol 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 1,000 pounds of Pyritol 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 pounds of the stuff. Just one sticking point, Mr. DuPont, 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? No, it makes it a good customer. Well, at around the same time, Andrew Kehoe's life quickly started sliding down the outhouse hole. I gotta board up that hole.

Oh, good day. Well, based off his school board experience, he'd been serving as the town clerk as a fill-in before the next election. 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. So, he's basically a custodian.

He's the electrician. He's the treasurer, and now he's also the clerk. Yep. And he'd fully been expected to be reelected, but he didn't even get a nomination. Oh, it's fine. That's fine. Don't elect me. It's because you kept on fucking everybody's salary over.

Yeah. There's no reason to think about electing me. Come on. Give me free time. That's exactly what I need, hours and days of free thinking time, and journaling time, and planning time. If anything, he's two-faced. Former government official turned bad.

Yeah, and you don't know it's all going to 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. I don't need to be elected. I have access to the school. It seems like he really needed to be elected. This is the best news I've had all week. He should have campaigned on, if you don't elect me, I'm blowing up the school.

It wouldn't work. At the same time, his wife, Nellie's health was rapidly failing, which resulted in a pile of increasingly expensive medical bills. Keep coughing, Nellie. I love the sounds of the coins falling out of my pockets. 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.

Because he'd come to decide that he'd been sold the farm at an unfair price. And this is the thing, I just want to tell our audience again, remember this, 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. 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.

Well, we don't know. These employers are getting pretty rude to their employees. They may have their hands tied. Yeah, they might. But I will say this, you do have a little bit of power. Don't pay back, oh, your Mx bill. Let's say it's 20, 30 grand. But when they really want the money, you say, I'll give you two grand right now.

And then you can do it. So it does happen sometimes. Well, incredibly, Keeho also tried blaming the missed payments on the school tax, even though it was, again, $150 a year while Keeho's mortgage payments were $360 a month. Now, there's no telling what specifically set Keeho 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. It's something about that, again, it's the patients, him, BTK, Unabomber, Steven Paddock. Just something about that, how these are all combined. I don't know why for me, it makes it so much more like, you know, we don't hate to use the word evil. But like, there's something about that where like the amount of detail that goes into it. Yes, because right now there could be somebody plotting. Fair, you're right.

It's scary. There is somebody plotting. There literally is. There's probably thousands of people plotting right now. And that's why we were telling you, we're the good ones, all right? We're on your side. Sure. And we're here to listen.

We're here to listen. 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. Look at this. I have a grievance. I have a grievance.

You see, he gets me. You have a grievance? No. Yes, because they're forcing me to buy the PS5. Well, my grievance is that Gotham War could have been a lot more impressive if they didn't have to keep making it for the fucking PS4, but that's a different grievance altogether. Yeah. Can't wait for you to move to Los Angeles.

Let's have you slightly closer. The plan begins. But that's also a supply chain issue. I understand that people weren't able to get old of the PS5. We all know. I understand that. I understand that. I understand that.

There are people that also enjoy God of War, Ben. I'm glad. And also Gotham Knights is supposed to... Well, just wait when you wake up and indeed your PS5 has become my PS4. Whoa. He's so sneaky. Whoa. Life from your grave.

Hi. I'm Jackie Zabrowski. And I'm MJ. And I'm holding from the Page 7 podcast, and we're going on to Earth. That's right. We're touring all up in this motherfucking country. Sick cursing, so whatever, Jackie. Just say the filthy F word already.

And we will say the filthy F word when we come to your town. That's right. We're coming to Texas, the Midwest, the Northeast, and then right back here in Cali, baby. For ticket links and more details, visit lastpodcastnetwork.com. That's right. Lastpodcastnetwork.com. Page 7 and Wizard and the Bruiser present. Release the Butthole Cut.

Wait. That's really what we're calling the tour? Absolutely. Release the Butthole Cut. For more information, go to lastpodcastnetwork.com. 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. Interesting. I'm going to blow up the school. What was that? Ear muffs. I'm going to blow up to a pool and enjoy myself at a hotel, a fancy hotel. Fantastic. You can tell us anything.

We don't listen to our customers as to why they need all this dynamite. Thank you, sir. 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. I just like that. This is a, it's real. This is how scary.

I mean, he's, he's scary because they're showing up. They're like, why are you blowing stuff? He's like, just seeing if I could figure out how to blow something up from far away. Yeah. They're like, I kind of want to do it at a specific time. It's not for farming. Yeah. And they just go, cool.

Cool. Kind of a red flag there. I put a little red flag of a red flag. It just rose up. 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. Yep.

I said, I tried to, I was out with the corn the other day and I said, fuck it. Fuck that corn experimental farming. See you soon. Wow. See unbeknownst to the town, Kehoe had abandoned the business of farming completely to focus solely on becoming the mad bomber of Bath. Charge me for the school. Charge me for the church.

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, you better keep that. It may be the last you ever get. See you soon. Great comedy. 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. No, these aren't potatoes. These are explosives. Oh, it's explosive potatoes. Sure, say whatever you want. Okay. There was also the janitor, who noticed that the crawl space trap doors were being kept open and unlocked for weeks at a time.

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. It seems like there was a lot of evidence that he was indeed planning something. It's a lot of innocuous stuff that, again, you don't understand until everything blows up. There's no frame of reference for this shit. It never crosses someone's mind that he's going to blow up the school.

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. Oh my God, that's crazy. 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, piratol, high explosives, dangerous, crossed off with black chalk.

Oh, it's fine then. Then it's fine. It's just fucking wild. They're x'd off, so it's no big deal. 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, bagged off, saying there wasn't enough time to fix it before school started.

Then Kehoe very quickly disappeared. Well, he did the thing where he's like, well, you know, there's no way I can fix it right now. You know, school starts soon at 9.25. And the guy was like, it's 8.15. And he's like, yeah, I gotta go. Well, it's the last day of school. I think maybe those kids can go without water for just one day.

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. 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. Oh my God. 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. Wow. But just as the first set of explosives set up by Andrew Kehoe or 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. Yeah, dude. He 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.

Geez. The other structures started blowing up. So scary. 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. Geez. 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. He's fucking scary. Oh my God. Because he looked at me like, I like you guys. I like all you guys.

It was really fun. They're watching his home explode as he's smiling at them. Just being like, see you at the school. Oh my God. 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. 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. For 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.

It's just not a fun smile. He's like, again, it's me going five miles per hour in the 40-mile zone. It's that look of, like, I'll bring the whole fucking world down around me if I have to. Yes, I do like that you're comparing yourself to this man while you drive, Henry. That's safe for all of us here. 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 to notice Kehoe was Superintendent Hewick, who was holding the body of a dead child when he spotted his nemesis. Hewick handed the body to a woman standing next to him and walked up to Kehoe's truck, either because Kehoe summoned him or because Hewick knew something that no one else had yet figured out. 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. Well, he probably looked over and saw that fucking smile.

Yeah. And once there, Hewick 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 Hewick was trying to prevent Kehoe from flipping a switch. But either way, Hewick 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. I mean, that's fucking, it's terrible, but it's metal too. Like just the idea of like, he's just getting, he got blown to pieces. 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.

Damn. And if you look at pictures of Kehoe, he looks like an old-timey bank manager. That's how he kind of dressed. He had like the big, thick white hair and the imperious face. That's insane. As far as Hewick went, his body was, quote, reduced to a terrible hunk of blood and bone and hair. God, I love, I fucking love Schechter's writing.

Yeah, it's good. 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, Hewick 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. I don't know what made him think of that besides everything,

besides just like thinking of every single possible way to be, to cause as much chaos as possible. Because that was like, that's one of the first of people doing that. Am I correct? Like, did people use shrapnel bombs like they do now? Oh, I mean, not back then. It really wasn't known as, I mean, that was a real, I mean, in terrorist bombings throughout history,

especially modern terrorist car bombings, this is textbook. Yeah, it's textbook. And he was one of the first people to do it. I should stop printing the textbook. Yeah, I don't, I don't think we need to know. Well, two men named Glenn Smith and Nelson McFerrin were standing nearby. And while McFerrin was killed in the blast instantly, Smith had his leg blown off at the thigh and died later at the hospital.

A block away, a woman named Anna Perone 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. Geez. Now, there were plenty more casualties, but the most tragic by far was eight-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. God. 15 minutes later, the authority showed up en masse. And this, by the way, this is before the fucking fire department even showed up. Yeah, man. The fucking, the place blows up. It collapses.

People are trying to dig kids out. Kehoe shows up and explodes the fucking, it explodes the car. It's like 15 minutes. It's like 15 minutes. Yeah. 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 piratol 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 piratol, 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. 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. He's just an amateur rigging it all up, so he fucked it up. Columbine was the same way. There were a lot of explosives in Columbine that didn't go off. Now, no one knows exactly why Kehoe's explosive devices failed,

but if he'd succeeded in detonating all 504 pounds 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. He would have vaporized the building. He would have vaporized the whole thing. He would have turned it all into rubble. But before the day was even out, the lucky lose 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 two miles long trailed out of town. Why true crime now? Why now? Oh yeah, true crime now. It's so tasteless. It's so tasteless.

Hundreds of people surrounded the scene to gawk at the gore. Same day. Wow. 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. It's kind of fun. My God, true crime.

So tasteless these days. It's so fun though, honestly. That's cool. I'll take one of those. I don't know. Now I'm going to save this for later. What do you even do with it? I don't know.

Souvenir, man. That's what it's all about. Souvenir. It's in somebody's attic where somebody threw it out thinking that it was some foreskin. 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 Lanesburg, Michigan, instead of Lansing. Post office added it again.

Come on. 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, I am leaving the school board and turning over to you all my accounts. Just had to show how fucking smart he was one last time. One last little one. One last little speech.

How smart he was at such a mundane task. And just being bitter as fuck. It's his BTK cereal boxes. It's that style of life. And I'm being funny about it. And I'm resigning. Wow, what an asshole. Finally, 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. Remember, she was about to be dead. Yeah, I mean, she was sick. Probably had tuberculosis, they thought. But again, that was another one of his grievances. That he had to deal with this sick wife who was dying and caught.

But that's the thing. It was a burden to him. 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. Yes. 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. Yeah, man. Overkill. Oh, and it weaned further than that. He murdered his two remaining horses by binding their legs with wire before burning down the barn. And he destroyed a young grove of trees by stripping off a band of bark around the base of each one. And that took hours. That takes hours to do it.

Yes. My God. And to make sure no one benefited from his death, he dynamited all of his farm equipment. Yup. Well, there you go. That's the final insult. Pure, pure ass. The only thing that wasn't destroyed was the hen house.

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 fire bombs to a single electrical switch. See, what I would have done is that you still want those chickens, fill those chickens, is Andrew Kehoe's miracle chickens. That little thing who figured out how to flip it and reverse it, the miracle chicken. They undedicated. How's the term? They're bomb, right? And save themselves.

Ultimate hostage negotiating chickens. That's a miracle leg. What you're eating right there is actually a miracle leg. A miracle chicken. Yeah. It's a miracle. It tastes so good, right? We killed it.

But perhaps what truly places Andrew Kehoe in the whiny dickhead Hall of Fame was what he'd painted on a sign at the edge of his property. Stinciled in crude black paint Kehoe had written, criminals are made, not born. Yeah. I'm like, what if I just kill this guy again? I want to put him back together and then I want to kill him. Well, no, it's the same thing as Marvin Heemeyer had said. It's all sometimes a reasonable man is driven to do unreasonable things. Yeah, buddy, I've seen some recent TikTok videos of people saying that mostly well they're in their car.

Very much so. We're in very stupid hats with long beards. Yeah. Of course, he's implying that it was the people of Bath who had driven him to such madness. You did this to me. If it wasn't for the Batman, there would be no reason for me to be here. 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 seven adults being murdered by a libertarian man? By a libertarian madman in a school bombing before now?

Well, let's not put any political credence in anything that he says. He's pretty close. I feel like if he was truly liberal. These people, because he didn't want to pay taxes. I mean, I don't even know the libertarian party's in total and completely under shambles. But I would say he held political office, which by nature then cancels out any libertarianism if that would indeed be. Winning an election. Because you have to be so anti-government.

If holding office cancels out libertarian, why is there even a libertarian party? Buddy, the libertarian party, it's like if, oh wow, the libertarian party is the school, right? And now it's in shambles and it's covered in blood and it's full of... It is for free water bottles. You get your face on a poster, which they love. And then I mean, it's how you meet other unwashed men in a conference room. Well, as to why you've never heard about this, the answer is as simple as Michael Jackson. I'm just so happy to send so many more children up to heaven so I can see them there.

Well, they wouldn't even be of that age. Michael! By the way, you overshot your fucking Michael Jackson quota last week by like nine jokes. So many jokes, so many Michael Jackson jokes that we're just uncalled for. Y'all don't know. Well, I didn't bring up Michael Jackson so you could make more pedophile jokes. I don't know what to say. Well then why did you bring them up, Marcus?

He should have done it. Criminals are made not born. He should have not have molested those children and I would have to do this content. Uh-huh. Well, just as Michael Jackson's death swept away the 2009 Iranian election protest 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. You told me a flight of a flight sucked up all the oxygen for this? He literally sucked it up.

I mean, flying across 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. And it gave the pilot the confidence to be an American Nazi later on. And that's what it takes. That's what he takes, is that type of confidence. 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? I think about her every time I masturbate. All right, okay.

So instead of being a point of national mourning or possibly a point of national conversation, Bath became a local macabre tourist destination. What? 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. I mean, I have spent an inordinate amount of time in front of OJ's old house, but I don't go close. Yeah. No, I know. It's bizarre. This didn't happen like 9-11.

I'm thinking 9-11. That was an explosion. I can't, I don't think there was that kind of tourism. The Columbine? Columbine, I don't think there was. Oklahoma City bombing was a little bit, but it wasn't a little bit. It wasn't as, this is just a different time period. Again, it's crazy.

Like it's local. Yeah, I know my dad went and like saw the ruins of Oklahoma City, but that was just because he was in town. He happened to be in town and was, you know, curious. I mean, how I went and looked when I first came to New York for the first time in like 2002, I went and looked at the whole 11 hole. I mean, yeah, people are curious, but this, this is beyond a local collar said that tourists would fight for parking spaces near the house that lost the most children. Oh my God. 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. Technically, this is a, this is the incredible beginning to a horror movie.

Yeah. That hasn't happened yet. Yeah. 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 $1.50 apiece. It's called, it's a school no more. And you show up here and used to be a school. Now it's dirt. You buy this book.

It's $1.50. You'll learn everything you need to know about how a school can turn to dirt. 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. You're talking, again, sensible. You're talking about sensible building, community building and awareness. So in the booklet, 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. I didn't like it. She says.

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. What? The worst people our country has to offer due to today, anytime there's a tragedy. We ain't never done change, bro. A local minister tried blaming the massacre on the sins of modern society. The KKK tried blaming it on Kehoe being Catholic. That's the craziest part about the KKK.

That's when they were so unbelievably racist. If you were Catholic, they weren't it. Who was it? How did they even get enough to collectively have it? I don't know. White and Protestant, man. There was a lot of them. There are quite a few just white Protestant people.

And Eugenicists tried saying that Kehoe possessed a neanderthalic hereditary taint that caused him to commit these atrocities. Wait, they're blaming the perinium on this? Is that what they're saying? The skin flap between the balls and the asshole. You'd also say stain, but taint is better. Taint. I like taint a lot more. 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. Well, as far as the media went, the Lansing State Journal tried introducing the term Kehoe to mean an act of mass slaughter. Oh my God, that's not... It's like calling an act of domestic terrorism like McVeid, or calling a school shooting like Pullin' a Harris. You just got juiced.

You ever? I do. You just got juiced. Yeah, you got juiced. Thankfully, the Kehoe 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. Man, it's never what are you...

It's never talking about what you used to work on. It's always what are you working on next? Yeah. I guess so. And it was mentioned only briefly during the coverage of the Columbine and Sandy Hook massacres. By the time of Uvaldi, 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. And those are just the massacres that take place at schools.

Yeah, that's only school massacres. 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. 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. And that is one of the reasons why the only thing he did good was run for local office and then if he did a horrible job at said office, but he did technically... He tried to make his difference. But I think he did it out of pure vengeance.

And as we learn 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. See, Robert Pattinson does teach. I love Robert Pattinson. And I would also say, build a kill-dozer, but as an artistic project, like build one, spend a year building a kill-dozer. You can write a fun, funny manifesto about how you want there to be free gummy worms for everybody, right? Do something like fun.

And then you drive it in a local parade. And then what you get then is the fun tension of, is he going to use it to kill everybody today? But you could say, like, no, I'm like God. You can get your God fix by saying, I choose to spare all of you. We didn't even talk about parade massacres. We did. Or office massacres or concert massacres or anything. Well, I don't like a bit of this.

I don't like it at all, sports massacres. And that's it. That's the Bat school massacre. Amen. Well, thank you for shedding some light on that horrific fucking story. Very scary. But a long time ago, but it's still right around the corner. So again, check in with your local loners.

Bring them some, like, muffins. Just say hi. You know what I mean? Yeah, but then they're just not going to like the muffins. You're going to be like, juggling chip. I feel like I trust you. I trust you. Yeah.

And if you feel your hatred and negativity building and building and building, address it. Talk about it. Work on it. Play Call of Duty. Just play Call of Duty like what all the kids do now. Become a radio. Work on it.

Address it. Yeah. Talk it to a microphone. It helps. Do something else besides, you know, killing 35 children. Don't spread your hate into microphones either because it turns out there's a lot of morons out there. They weaponize.

They take you way too seriously. All right, everyone. Just when you thought the era of American violence was something fresh, hip and new, turns out as the old is the old grand old flag itself. Yep. It really is. It's not reassuring at all. And are you mighty?

I'm mighty proud of that regular old flag. Sometimes we all got to take a good hard look at it and say, I'm going to, you did bad today flag. Um, but November 18, 19th, we're coming to Grand Rapids in Minneapolis, but because Marcus Parks really is suffering from his long COVID thing. We want him to be healthy. We're a kissle and I are going to be moved. You're going to be doing the show.

Just boys. Right. Just two, two little boys are doing these shows. We want you to know upfront, but we're going to be bringing some special guests because it takes more than one person to replace Marcus Parks, but it's going to be the same exact. We're going to have fun. We're going to do.

They're going to do. They're going to do great. They're going to do fucking. You guys are going to fucking kill it. Thanks to everyone for being patient about him. And understanding about, you know, me taking care of myself and taking care of my health. You've been working so hard. I got to put a pause on live performance for a little while.

Yes. Cause Europe was really, really difficult. We had a lot of fun, but by the end we were all wiped out, but now we're back in the pocket. Thank you guys for being fucking cool. And next week we're getting to some, we're getting back to our roots. Absolutely. We're going to get some, we're going to do some interesting stuff about, and then involving some of our favorite characters of all time.

Oh, yeah. Fantastic. And of course we'll be covering who, what was an old TV show? Happy days. That, that fantastic. Covering the show. Happy. We're going to 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. I 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. We love yourselves.

Hail Satan. Hail again. Oh, we're really nailed that one. Hail King. Hail again. Hail again. Hail. Watch, won't you spare a hail knee?

Oh. Won't you please spare, spare a hail knee for the soil? That's nice. That's nice. This show is made possible by listeners like you. Thanks to our ad sponsors, you can support our shows by supporting them. For more shows like the one you just listened to, go to lastpodcastnetwork.com.