The Binge Crimes: Deadly Fortune - 19 Days | 1. March 2nd, 2018

Episode Date: April 1, 2024

When a package mysteriously explodes on the front porch of a suburban home in Northeast Austin, killing homeowner and father Anthony Stephan House, authorities are mystified. Bombings of this type are incredibly rare and law enforcement has – at best – flimsy theories about motives and suspects. This darkly strange incident fades from the headlines as the annual South by Southwest Festival ramps up. From Campside Media, Pegalo Pictures and Sony Music Entertainment, this is Season 6 of Witnessed: 19 Days Unlock all episodes of Witnessed: 19 Days, ad-free, right now by subscribing to The Binge. Plus, get binge access to brand new stories dropping on the first of every month — that’s all episodes, all at once, all ad-free. Just click ‘Subscribe’ on the top of the Witnessed: 19 Days show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts and @campside_media Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're listening to Witness 19 days. Before you dive in, if you want to listen to the whole story uninterrupted, you can. Unlock the entire season ad-free right now with a subscription to The Binge. That's all episodes, all at once. Unlock your listening now by clicking subscribe

at the top of The Witness show page on Apple Podcasts or visit getthebinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast contains descriptions of violence and harsh language. Listener discretion is advised. Campsite Media. The Binge. Pick a little picture. Every day in America, almost 60 million packages are delivered.

There was a time, and not that long ago, when we had to go to a store to buy things. Getting food or clothes, electronics, tools, gadgets, that took some physical effort. You had to leave the house. Now you just click and anything you want, almost anything you can imagine, will appear on your doorstep. It would be magical if it weren't so routine. In the past decade, package shipping in the US has more than doubled, from around $10 billion a year to almost $22 billion. In the early hours of March 2, 2018, a package was left on the stoop of a little red brick

house in Harris Ridge, a neighborhood in the northeast part of Austin, Texas. There didn't seem to be anything unusual about it, just another cardboard box by another front door. So it's where Weird Meets Western, the Rodeo Austin is writing again, the concerts, carnivals, and of course... The home was owned by a man named Anthony Stephan House. He was married with an eight-year-old daughter. He grew up around Austin, played football, ran track,

graduated with a degree in finance from Texas State just a few miles down the road. He'd been a senior project manager for a Texas company, and he'd just started his own investment fund. Come summer, he was going to mentor local kids. The thing is, House didn't order whatever was in that package. It showed up on his porch before dawn. A plain box. Routine. But when we think something's routine, we don't see the threat. From Sony Music Entertainment, Campside Media, and Pegalo Pictures, this is Witnessed, 19 Days. I'm your host, Sean Flynn. Part 1, March 2, 2018.

Okay, tell me exactly what happened. My next-door neighbor's down with his face down and blood everywhere. I heard the explosion. There's a smoke alarm. There's blood everywhere. Okay, so there was an explosion then. I think so. I'm probably different than most people. I've been in military. I did combat deployments. So I'm not going to say I'm desensitized, but I have a stress inoculation to the situations that I run into. Josh Oihus was a technician with the Austin Police Department's bomb squad. He was relatively new and one of the first to get the call that day.

I was laying in bed and it was really early in the morning, so it was probably close to when I was about to get up anyways. And my pager went off and I looked over at the pager. It said, bomb exploded. This wasn't Josh's first rodeo. Before he was a cop, he was a Navy SEAL. Served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He'd seen a lot, been through a lot.

But this call, it felt like a mistake. And I was like, what? Like, there's no way. I just didn't believe, you know, what it was saying. A bomb tech knows better than anyone just how rare bombings actually are, which is extremely rare. In 2017, the year before, there were a total of 335 bombing incidents in the entire country.

That's according to the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. And of those 335 incidents, nearly half involved fireworks. Fatal bombings are almost unheard of. Those bombings killed 16 people that year, 17 if you count the bomber who blew himself up. And that's in a country of 350 million people with 17,000 criminal homicides that year. So I get up, start getting ready. We had take-home vehicles, so I start throwing all my stuff in the car. And as I'm driving there, we're all in a text thread. So we're like texting each other, like, what's the deal with this? Trying to figure out what's going on.

The closer I'm getting, I'm like, this seems pretty real. This is real deal. Something really did just happen. Josh wasn't the only one who was caught off guard. The way our on-call systems work, we get a page out that the on-call bomb tech needs to respond to whichever address it is. One of the other people on that text thread was Rob Nunez, the bomb squad's senior commander.

So when that incident happened, the information that I received was that there was a bombing. It was at somebody's house, and a person was deceased. The bomb had actually killed somebody. Rob had joined the department as a patrol officer, but after 9-11, Austin police doubled the size of the bomb squad, and for Rob, it was an opportunity to do something different. Rob was as seasoned as they come. He'd seen everything a bomb tech could see,

except what he saw on March 2nd. For all my time on the bomb squad, at that time, it was like 16 or 17 years of being a full-time bomb tech. And responding to a lot of different scenes, we've had people make bombs. We've had bombs explode. We've had people kill themselves from bombs.

People place bombs to try and kill people. We've recovered explosives. We've detonated explosives. But we have never had a call to where a package was placed by someone with the intent to kill them, and then that package detonate and kill that person. Rob was used to working with federal agencies, so when something outside the norm came up, he made a phone call. My name is Christopher Combs.

I was the FBI special agent in charge for FBI San Antonio that covers Austin. The morning of the first bomb in, the Austin bomb squad called us and said, they're rolling out to an explosive device that just detonated. So I remember saying to him, are you sure? Like, is this confirmed or is this just a report? And he said, no, this is the real deal. For Chris, this kind of work was in his blood. He was raised Irish Catholic in New York, and the family business was either cop or firefighter. The Austin FBI office was very busy. It's one of the largest sub-offices that the FBI has. The main headquarters for this part of Texas is in San Antonio, but the Austin office was so large that we actually had an assistant special agent in charge up there because we had over 200 people.

So on any given day, the Austin office is going at about 100%. I stayed in San Antonio, had full faith in the team in Austin. They went to the scene and tried to figure out what exactly has happened here. Because again, this is a very rare event. You know, if you have a bombing, you're looking around, is there a political affiliated something? Is there an abortion clinic, a bank? But this was a street with just houses. So that was, again, very strange. Josh Oihus had a long drive from his house to the scene of the bombing. By the time he got there, the victim's body had already been packed into an ambulance,

and reporters were posted outside the yellow police tape. Still, Josh was a SEAL who'd seen a lot of combat. He was cautious, deliberate. I parked my car probably about 100 yards away, because I was worried about secondary devices i did not want to set off something else that somebody had put out so before i went up to the scene i started checking around all the cars all the houses i'm looking at containers in the area that would be big enough to hold something that could threaten our safety. So once we eliminated things, I could see like smaller packages.

I know roughly what the standoff is for those and we can keep people out of there. But a car is another story. There was one instance where a guy had blown up an abortion clinic and then he put another device to get the first responders after they came. So I didn't want to be, you know, the moth to a flame if you're trying to maximize damage. It's definitely in the playbook. Here's Rob Nunez, the bomb squad commander. Our primary role as a bomb tech is saving lives. Take an explosive device and make it stop from going off. At the point where something has already gone off and exploded,

then our job transfers into what they call a post-blast investigation, investigating the scene where a bomb has gone off. When a bomb detonates, every piece and part of that device is still there. It's just in a lot of really tiny pieces. Our job is to get in there and collect all those little tiny pieces and then put that device back together and figure out how that thing functioned.

And then within that process of putting this thing back together, we're collecting evidence to try and link that device to a suspect. Anthony Stephan House lived on a quiet street in a leafy middle-class neighborhood just northeast of downtown Austin. It could have been almost any street in America. Yet Rob and Josh, as they moved toward the house, they couldn't square what they saw with where they were. In law enforcement, we get pretty good over the years of compartmentalizing things and at this point the victim had been removed

but it was not a good scene to see or look at it appeared like the device had exploded on the front porch there was pieces of pipe you know like metal fragments just thrown out into the road 45 yards or so so So a pretty good blast. The door had a lot of damage to it, the front door, so it looked like maybe the front door was closed when it went off or it was at least partially closed. And then there was blood all over the front steps. That was kind of just like dripping down the steps.

Very reminiscent of somebody stepping on an IUD, not using the same delivery devices and the same hardware but very similar it was definitely like a war zone and this was only the beginning I love when the sponsors of our programs are selling products I already use. And that's why I'm very happy to say that Quince is a sponsor of the show. Finding the perfect gift can be really overwhelming, especially at this time of year. I like to give people things that they actually want. And so this year, check out Quince. It's a perfect spot for timeless gifts made from premium materials. I absolutely love the iconic Mongolian cashmere sweaters. I have them

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And give all our honest and unfiltered thoughts always. Listen to Lipstick on the Rim now on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts. March 2nd, 2018. A local father and ex-athlete named Anthony Stephan House had been killed by a bomb inside a package that had detonated on his front porch. An event that's both horrifying and almost unheard of. But at this point, there are still fundamental questions. Had someone delivered that bomb to specifically kill House?

Or was it meant for someone else? Or did House build the device and accidentally blow himself up? The scene was a haystack of unknowns. And it was the investigator's job to find the needles. From the fragmentation out in the front yard, in the road, it's a pipe bomb. You know, we realize it's galvanized pipe. We would expect to find things like that in the person's vehicle or in the car or, you know, receipts. If somebody's buying a foot section of galvanized pipe that's threaded on both ends,

you know, there's really only one use for that. We're looking for any types of accelerants, electronic stuff, fusing systems, powders, anything that the person would want to confine and put in that pipe to make it a weapon. Meanwhile, as Rob Nunez took in the devastation on House's front porch, he immediately clocked an investigational advantage. As we approached on this scene,

the position and where it detonated and where the victim was was relatively contained. He was on his front porch, but we believe he was facing the wall. And between the victim and the wall, it contained a lot of the components and didn't allow those components to travel very far. So on the initial approach to the scene, as we're clearing, just right away, we're able to see several components of the bomb. And within a few minutes, we were able to almost reconstruct exactly how this thing

functioned. We knew when this happened, the victim's daughter was inside. And one of her statements is that she heard her dad say, oh shit, right before the detonation. That detail was key because it immediately suggested how the bomb was constructed and how it detonated. So we knew where the device exploded. We could see evidence on the wall that it detonated about knee level. And we could see components of a mousetrap on the scene. That's not more bomb squad lingo. Rob is referring to

an actual mousetrap, the spring-loaded kind, which can be used as a detonator for these improvised explosives. When the bomb is sitting on the porch, the trap is set, like it's waiting for a mouse. When the package is lifted up, it's like the mouse grabbing the cheese. The trap is sprung, and the bomb goes off. That would have given Anthony Steffenhaus

just enough time to recognize something very bad was happening. And that mouse trap told them something else, something critical, something critical. That the bomb wasn't sent through the mail or a delivery service. That mousetrap trigger had to be set when the bomb was placed on the porch, which means the bomber had to put it there. All of those details were quickly shared with the local FBI office.

For Chris Combs, that information was setting off alarms. To have a device that's motion-activated, that someone could safely bring to his house, put on his porch without functioning, and then it only functioned when it was designed to function when somebody else picked it up, that's concerning because it shows a level of expertise. It shows a level of complexity to the explosive device.

So this probably isn't a bunch of kids. So within the first two, three hours, we're puzzled, like, this is not normal. Something is off here. Beyond the police tape, local reporters were beginning to ask questions. So to give a bit of context on the breaking news of that first bomb, it was definitely one of, if not the biggest event that had happened. That's Jason Puckett, a reporter for KVUE24, or KVUE, Austin's ABC affiliate. You know, Austin has crime. It's a major city, but there's nothing major really typically,

especially not in 2018. It was a relatively safe city. So a package bomb that killed someone was huge. You don't have any more information in those moments than what APD is giving you and what you can gather from talking to neighbors. And a lot of the neighbors in those moments than what APD is giving you and what you can gather from talking to neighbors. And a lot of the neighbors in those immediate aftermaths don't specifically want to talk

until they've been given like a go-ahead from APD. Austin police were understandably withholding a lot of details from the scene, and there was still a lot they didn't know. But the lack of answers is frustrating for reporters, and for the public, it can be scary. Austin Police Chief Brian Manley did his best to mitigate. We have no reason to believe this is anything beyond an isolated incident that took place at this resident,

and no reason to believe that this is in any way linked to a terrorist act, but we are not making any assumptions. While we really leaned into that for that first day or two, it slowly becomes less and less of the main focus newscast-wise when you can't give more information to it other than to just tell people, yeah, it's being investigated. And we internally within the newsroom, to peel back the curtain a little bit, we had a million questions about this. This was definitely out of the norm. But all we'd heard from APD so far was a little bit about potential leads they were following down, you know, the basics. Austin is best known as the capital of the Lone Star State, and an unlikely one at that,

as it is a wildly liberal enclave in a state known for its stubborn, almost belligerent conservatism. The blueberry in the tomato soup, as ex-governor and failed presidential candidate Rick Perry once put it. I grew up in Austin. I was born and raised here. My parents moved here in 1981. That's freelance journalist and native Austinite David Leffler, who's written for the likes of Texas Monthly and The Washington Post. Talk to anyone who's grown up here and they'll describe this like very romanticized, sleepy little college town where you have kind of outlaw country folks running around. Austin had always been a good time.

Live music, great barbecue, fabulous river. Even its own style of celebrities like Matthew McConaughey and Ethan Hawke. But it had been kind of a sleepy place until the 2000s. Even its own style of celebrities, like Matthew McConaughey and Ethan Hawke. But it had been kind of a sleepy place until the 2000s. Between the year 2000 and 2018, the population of the metropolitan area had more than doubled, from just under a million people to nearly two million. 56 laps ahead of us here in Austin. It's lights out and away we go.

Even Formula One made Austin a stop on their world circuit between places like Qatar and Brazil. And then there was South by Southwest, an annual festival of music and film and technology and ideas, an immense cultural event. It was scheduled to begin one week after a mysterious bombing in a quiet neighborhood. Jason Puckett explains. I was actually covering South by Southwest that year,

and South by was an awesome experience for people who aren't familiar. It's just this sort of big tech entertainment media convention. It's hard to pin down because it also has a huge live music segment and tons of celebrities and artists from across the country just pour into Austin, Texas. And the downtown area just becomes this even crazier but fun place with pop-up festivals. And it's just this really cool place where you can walk around and see amazing things going on. According to South by Southwest's own economic impact analysis, more than 50,000 hotel room nights were booked at the 2017 conference. And just about every available home, condo, and apartment in the metro area was transformed into an overpriced short-term rental.

Official event attendance in 2017 surpassed 285,000, and the amount of money added to the Austin economy over those nine days totaled more than $345 million. And that doesn't include the rough valuation the conference puts on the worldwide media coverage associated with South By, which they credit with, quote, strengthening Austin's core identity and heightening the city's global profile. That coverage in 2017, according to the organizers, was worth a whopping $572 million. All of this, the attendance, the hotel rooms, the economic impact, the global media coverage, would be even bigger at the 2018 South By. Simply put, South By Southwest is a critically important economic driver for the city. A large percentage of Austin businesses and locals depend on it for their livelihoods.

Here's Laurel White, manager at Fair Market, a popular live music venue on the east side of town. Some businesses would say they made like 25 to 30 percent of their revenue from that one period. And I do still think that the revenue possibilities from that week, just given the name notoriety and the brands that want to activate and be present here, is really significant. And with South by Southwest, the city's biggest annual economic driver, just a week away, there was significant pressure on the Austin police, the FBI, and the ATF to explain why a father with no criminal background had been killed by a package bomb. What they needed, what they didn't have yet, was a theory. Any theory.

Chris Combs from the FBI. By the end of the first day, there was a huddle between Austin police, the FBI, the ATF, to kind of see where are we? Where do we think this is going? Do we have any plausible leads? Obviously, this is getting a lot of media attention right away because an explosion is a very rare occurrence. One of the things that started to lead us was on that same street, a number of houses down the block, a house that looks almost identical to the victim's house, had a truck in the driveway almost identical to the victim's truck, was actually a house where a drug raid had occurred a few days earlier. So our initial suspicion was, hey, maybe the drug cartel was mad that the house got hit and they lost their load and they lost their cash.

Maybe they came to bomb that drug house and they just got the wrong house. Because it really looked the same. If you stood there and you didn't know what you were doing, it was the first time on your block, very plausible that you would have picked the wrong address. And that was really the best explanation we had. We didn't think that that guy had any other reason

that he would be bombed. So Austin Police had that drug case and Austin Police is a very, very good police department. Good detectives, good homicide, good bomb techs.

And they said, hey, we think it's related to that. We can handle this because of our faith in them and the fact that we work together every day. I made the decision like, hey, if you don't need the FBI, then we're going to pull out. We're going to support you. But you be the lead on this. Yeah, it's a bombing and that's a federal violation.

But you already have a case that's well down the road. You know, we're just going to support you. So that was the decision at the end of that first day. And talking about the media and how do we communicate this to the public, Austin Police was the lead. Austin pretty much said, hey, we believe this is an isolated event. We're investigating it. We have the support of the FBI, and we're going to move forward.

But for residents of the neighborhood, none of that was reassuring. One of those residents was University of Texas Associate Professor of Psychology Jermaine Awad. We were terrified. Everybody in Austin was terrified. And specifically, my family lived five minutes away from the first bombing. And so it felt like it was in our neighborhood, and we were scared. Despite these concerns from the community, there wasn't much the authorities could do

but build upon the existing theories based on the evidence they had. It was, at that point, a complete mystery. No real leads, just those theories. As local reporter Jason Puckett remembers, You know, when APD looks at a crime and they go, okay, we're following these four leads, it sort of gives you this idea that they're on top of it. They're investigating it. They have some ideas of where it's going. And you might have questions about those leads, but it's not

your first instinct to step back and go, Austin's now in the middle of something bigger than that. So with nothing else to report from the police or the friends and family of the victim, the bombing churned out of the news cycle over the next day or two. The headlines shifted to other local tragedies and the coming lucrative excitement of the 2018 South by Southwest conference. It was more just like, wow, I cannot believe that happened. What a tragic loss for the family. I'm glad we were able to sort of reassure the city that this may not be a bigger thing at that point.

It was literally a thought we had. And then how do we start trying to get back to normalcy? How do we act normal beyond that? Over the next week, the dust began to settle from the mysterious bombing that killed Anthony Stephan House. Homicide investigators were doing their best to chase down what few theories they had, and they hoped off of those, some suspects would emerge. Josh Oihus and the rest of the Austin bomb squad had turned over what they'd gathered at the scene to federal investigators with the ATF, the agency that processes the aftermath of bombings. At this point, Josh, the bomb squad, the homicide cops,

the FBI, they've got very little to work with. Obviously, it's super weird. We spend a lot of time talking about, you know, what we're going to do, how we're going to handle these types of things and fielding calls from all the other bomb squads. We enter a report into a national database when there's a bombing like that. So then that kind of sends up a flag across the country that people will start trying to get in touch with you and see what it was, what you have, and all that stuff. We also went and looked at some of the mail delivery places around there. The victim's family had ordered stuff from UPS or FedEx

or something like that. So we went through some of those places. The postal inspector ended up kind of heading that side of it up. And he believed at the time that it was something related to the victim and there was no further threat. So we were kind of like, okay, you know, that was a one-off type deal, and it seems like it's resolved, or whatever prosecution stuff that's going to happen doesn't involve us. Of course, there were plenty of people who couldn't get back to normal. Anthony Steffenhaus' father would later say he was, quote,

plagued by how he was selected and why. Those were the same questions that Chris Combs of the FBI was asking himself and the rest of his team. Right away, you got to figure out who's the victim, because that's how you get to perpetrators. So really, on any criminal case, the first thing you do is identify the victim, and then you start looking through their life. Why would somebody bomb this house? Why would they want to kill this man? Who else lives there?

So you start unraveling that story. You start looking at the neighborhood to say, what's in this neighborhood? Is there something missing? Interview all the neighbors. Who is this guy? Why would somebody mail or leave a package at his house? And at the beginning, we're still trying to figure out how does that package get there? A lot of times, it's very quickly figured out who the person is. Hey, okay, that's why. Somebody tried to blow him up for this reason. But here, that's not what happened. We're running the name

through everything. We don't see a clear reason why somebody would leave an explosive device there. If the investigators are struggling to explain what happened, the media, several steps removed from the actual investigation, they're just spinning their wheels. It's really tough, I think, to be a journalist and be trained to be skeptical first and to be questioning, especially of authority, because the police are running such a close-to-the-chest investigation. It makes you feel like you can't do your job because all you can do is sort of give this message of, here's what we know. Authorities are urging people to remain calm, which the minute you say that and you're also a resident of that town and you understand innately the lack of information and the fear and frustration people are feeling, it just makes you feel kind of hypocritical, kind

of like, what am I doing right now? Why are we even re-repeating this? But the least we could do was sort of maybe trim out some of the BS that was out there. The city began to turn the page. The bombing, mysterious, terrible, seemed to be a one-off, a fluke, something in the past. Attention turned to the future, to the nine days of Hollywood movie premieres and intimate indie concerts, speeches by luminaries and open bar parties, and the hundreds of millions of dollars to be made at South by Southwest.

But in a dim room in a far corner of Austin, a bomber's still working, building, crafting, getting better, preparing to strike again, to paralyze this city with fear. For 19 days. I do remember when it went off. I was like, okay, we have a big problem on our hands now. And then almost immediately, like right in front of me was parts of a device. And as soon as Rob and I walked in the door, we're like, whoa. It showed us that this was not going to stop. It showed us the complexity is getting worse. It makes you realize that things are the next level.

That's all to come on this season of Witnessed. To be continued... of this show, but you'll get binge access to an entire network of other great true crime and investigative podcasts, all ad-free. Plus, on the first of every month, subscribers get a binge drop of a brand new series that's all episodes, all at once. Unlock your listening now by clicking subscribe at the top of the Witness Show page on Apple Podcasts, or visit getthebinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. This episode of Witnessed, 19 Days, was reported and produced by Eli Kouros and Joshua Schaefer of Pegalo Pictures and Alvin Cowan. Executive produced by Josh Dean, Vanessa Grigoriadis, Adam Hoff, Ashley Ann Krigbaum, and Matthew Scher

of Campside Media. Hosted and co-produced by me, Sean Flynn, co-produced by Brian Haas, and co-produced by David Leffler. Written by Alvin Cowan and Eli Khoras. Edited by Joshua Schaefer, with episode assembly by Christy William Schaefer. Original series theme by Kevin Ignatius of DOS Tapes. Interviews recorded by Nicholas Sinakis, Eli Kors, and Alvin Cowan.

Sound mix by Craig Plackey. Production legal by Sean Fawcett of Raymond Legal PC, and fair use legal by Sarah Burns and Diana Palacios of Davis Wright Tremaine. Please rate and leave us a review if you like what you've heard, and thanks again for listening.