July 25, 2024 • 50 mins
The Killdozer rampage is one of those stories you just couldn't make up. Yet it happened. And we're here to tell you the story.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck
and Jerry's here too, and it's just the three of
us rampaging away in podcast land. That's stuff you should know.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
In case you didn't know well before we get started,
I think we should mention that there are still tickets
available for our show's coming up very soon in Chicago
on August seventh and Minneapolis on August eighth.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Yeah, it's gonna be pretty great. We're going to be
at the Auditorium in Chicago and we're going to be
at the State Theater in Minneapolis, and there are tickets
left and you can come see us. It's a great show.
We've gotten great feedback so far. Only like two people
have been like that sucked. Everybody else is like that,
it's pretty great. And you can go to stuff youshould
Know dot com and click on the tour page tour button,
(00:58):
and you can also go to link tree, slash sysk Live,
and both of those places will take you to sites
where you can buy legitimate tickets to come see us.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Yeah, and those are both great cities for us. We
love going to Chicago and Minneapolis. I know it's been
a little while for Minneapolis, but we've had always had
great shows there.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
Yeah, and we're not promoting Indianapolis because Indianapolis sold out,
so we'll see them as well. But you can't come
in if you haven't already bought your tickets. I'm sorry.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Yeah. Well, you know, it's a Midwestern themed show, so
sort of Chicago adjacent, really Indianapolis adjacent. So they got
on it. They want to hear about their people.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
That's right. So yeah, come see us at the beginning
of August.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
You guys, all right back to it?
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Right?
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Good one?
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Oh you think so?
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (01:48):
Okay, thanks.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
I appreciate you letting us do this one first because,
like I just announced to you, Yeah, I just watched
the documentary on this topic, Tread Tread, directed by Paul Solette.
Let's it's solet who knows we go with?
Speaker 1 (02:07):
So?
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Did you watch it?
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Yes? I have, Actually I've seen it. I saw a
few years back. I haven't seen I didn't watch it
recently for this For.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Some reason, I think we covered this in like a
video or something like how do I know about this?
Speaker 1 (02:21):
It was pretty big news, and I mean it's become
an Internet legend. Maybe we did do like an Internet
round up on it or something like that on the
tenth anniversary. Maybe I don't know.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Yeah, that feels about right, But I guess we should
say what we're talking about.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Eh, sure, Oh, I'll do that then. Okay, So for
those of you who don't know, we're talking about an
event that took place in two thousand and four in
a little town called Granby, Colorado, about fifty miles west
of Denver, population two thousand ish. I think at the
time it's a small town, yeah, but it wasn't, you know,
(02:54):
an economically depressed town. It's like sixteen miles away from
the entrance to Rocky Mounta National Park. They're skiing around there,
so there's tourists. There's also rural ranchers that come into
shopping Granby. It's fine. It's just a cute, quinte small
mountain town like South Park basically.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
That's right. And it remained that way until June fourth,
two thousand and four, when a lot of this town
was destroyed by a man in a bulldozer that had
ended up being dubbed later on as the kill Dozer.
And we'll get to that later, right, But it was
a muffler shop owner, a fifty two year old guy
(03:36):
named Marvin he Meyer, Marv he Meyer, and he had
beefs with the town. He had beefs with people in
the town. We're going to go over all that stuff.
So he built or modified rather a gigantic bulldozer into
basically a tank and destroyed the places of the people
(03:58):
he had beefs with. More.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Yeah, I left all that out of my introduction, so
I'm glad you filled it in. Yeah, you said it
was like a tank essentially in some ways, as we'll see,
it was actually superior to a tank. It was crazy
what this guy built. And if you have the time
and you're not driving right now, just go look up
killdozer and get a load of this modified bulldozer that
(04:22):
Marv he Meyer created. So, Chuck, I say, let's just
dive in. That was a pretty good little setup. Let's
talk about Marv he Meyern who he was. He was
known around town as Marv the muffler man, right.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
That's right, because he owned a muffler shop. Previous to that,
he was in the Air Force. Served in the Air Force,
was stationed in Colorado at Lowry Air Force Base, liked Colorado,
decided to literally set up shop there. And this is
in the early nineties. He moved to Grand Lake near Granby,
and you know, pretty soon he got he started getting
(04:58):
his feathers ruffled, ruffling feathers in the town kind of
right away, it seems like, starting with having a beef
against the local newspaper, the sky High News.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Yeah, so they introduced the concept of legalized gambling in
Grand Lake, which is pretty near grand By, and the
town was very evenly divided on it. The local newspaper,
the sky High News or one of the local newspapers
is another one in Grand Lake, came out very heavily
against legalized gambling. Marv was very heavily in favor of gambling,
(05:34):
so much so that he edited, i think two editions
of a newspaper that was created just to tout the
benefits of legalized gambling. And so he lost. Like the
I think they voted in the area, they voted four
to one against legalizing gambling, and it was a bitter defeat.
I think to Marv, he seemed like the kind of
(05:55):
person who did not accept defeat very well and that
it just trigged Stewing in him.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Yeah, that's fair to say, I think. And that was
in nineteen ninety two. That same year is when he
bought some property that would be sort of at the
center of his next dispute. It was a couple of
acres in western Granby. He bought it at public auction
and foreclosure for a little more than forty grand, which
turned out to be a great deal. The guy had
a really good knack for finding good deals on stuff.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Yeah, what's funny that you remember the savings and loan scandal. Yeah,
he actually bought it from the FDIC because it was
a failed savings and loan bank in town.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Yeah, including that big bulldozer that he would end up
getting a great deal on.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
So that was a savings and loan bulldozer.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
He had a nose for a deal. So he ended
up setting up his Mountain View muffler shop. There was
apparently a great welder stuff that he brought into the
Air Force. It seems like was just really good on
machines and motors and engines and welding, and worked for
a uffler shop for many years and finally was like,
I'm going to open up my own shop as this
(07:05):
is happening. There's another local family and this is one
of the two two main families that he had beefs with,
the dough Chef family, in particular the patriarch I guess
of that family, Cody Dochef with his wife Susie and
their son Joe, had a concrete factory and they were
(07:26):
trying to expand this factory, so they bought up they
wanted this property that Marv had bought. They bought up
a bunch of land around it still needed more space,
and tried to buy Marv's parcel from him that he
paid forty two thousand dollars for and initially they had
an agreement for two hundred and fifty grand which would
(07:47):
have been a really nice take on that land deal
for Marv.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
It would have for sure. And apparently the dough Chefs
were at that auction that Marv bought it at and
he outbid them, so yeah, they were very interested in
this parcel of land. He agreed to that two hundred
and fifty thousand dollars deal later on, I think that
was eight years later, so that is a pretty significant
increase in your investment. And then but he changed his mind,
(08:13):
he decided that though land was worth more than two
hundred and fifty grand, apparently kept getting appraisals on it.
So it's not like he was just saying, like, no,
it's worth a billion dollars, right. He supposedly got appraisals
and was like, this land is worth more than two
hundred and fifty grand. Now, so he said, He said,
he backed out of the deal. I don't know how
(08:33):
much how far the deal had gotten, but he definitely
backed out of an agreement to sell it for two
hundred and fifty grand.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
Yeah, he ended up asking four hundred. The dough chefs
came up with three point fifty, and he said, now
I want four to fifty again, he said, because of
another reappraisal. I don't I'm not sure about all that stuff, Like,
I mean, I'm just basing off kind of what I
saw in the documentary and research. I hadn't seen the
(09:00):
appraisals or anything, So I don't know if Marv was
just like jacking this thing up or not. Who knows.
But while this is happening, at least, you know, one
of the things we have left to kind of piece
us all together is the series of audio tapes that
he made on cassette that he mailed to his brother.
So the documentary features a lot of those, you know,
(09:20):
just firsthand accounts from Marv detailing what's going on. And
one of the things he just he didn't like the
dough chefs. He said that Cody Docheff, and I guess
this was after he had backed out of I'm not
sure if it was after he backed out or not,
but Cody Docheff at one point basically accosted him in
a restaurant and that was one of their first exchanges
(09:41):
about this. And Cody Docheff was known as a real
hot head in town and Marv you should hear the
words that he calls him on those audio tapes. He
did not like this guy.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
Right, that appraisal thing. That's a really good example of
the squishiness I guess of this story. It's really difficult
to pin down because, yeah, was he just jacking the
price up because he didn't like the doe Cheffs. Did
he really think that the land was worth that? Did
he really get appraisals? You don't know, But that kind
(10:12):
of thing completely changes the complexion of it. If he
was getting appraisals and the doe Cheffs wouldn't pay the
appraised value. That's pretty reasonable. If he was lying about
the appraisals and he was just jacking the price up
on the doe Cheffs, that kind of makes him look
like a jerk. And so that just something that small
can make a story like this totally due a one
(10:33):
point eighty. And this story is filled with those little
kind of details that have either gotten overlooked at it
or blown out in proportion.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
Yeah. Absolutely, So they the dough Chefs end up buying
some other land, a business park, and they said, hey,
you give us the land where your muffler shop is,
and we'll give you the prime lot that's right on
the highway, this frontage land where muffler shop is going
to do a lot better, get a lot more attention.
(11:03):
And he said, all right, I'll take that deal, but
you've got to build this muffler shop for me, and
that a really expensive one and really kind of highend
muffler shop, I guess because that brought it up to
about a million bucks. And they said, no, you know
that muffler shop. Boy, how long were you waiting on
that one?
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Good thirty seconds.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
Oh boy, I hope most people get that one. At least.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
It doesn't matter as long as you've got it. Friend,
Oh I got it.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
So they said no deal, and he said, all right,
then you basically started a war with me, and I'm
gonna I'm going to do everything I can to fight
the city to make sure that you're not able to
open up that cement factory that you want to open up,
and apparently got a lot of people on the side.
(11:54):
There was a lot of opposition in the town that
back to Marv against this expansion of the cement or
concrete factory.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
Yeah. So what I don't understand is was there opposition
before Marv started this kind of grassroots campaign against it?
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Okay, Yeah, so he didn't just drum that up out
of thin air, like not everybody was happy about a
concrete batch creating plant like this is almost in downtown Gramby.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
Yeah, there was opposition, but it seems like he really
fueled the fire.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
Okay, Yeah, so now you have war between essentially what
amounts to two hotheads who are neighbors, and a concrete
plant is not like a tidy, quiet neighbor to be
next to, right, So I'm sure that every sound and
every clank and every bit of like dust that blew
his way just made him less and less happy. And
(12:47):
I guess I don't know. Also, if you said that
they were buying up the land around him, so ultimately
his muffler shop was the only little piece of parcel
left and they were literally building a concrete plant owned
his muffler shop. And one of the things if somebody
tells you this, they don't know what they're talking about,
and stop listening to them about this. If they tell
(13:08):
you that when the dough Chets bought the land up
around him, that they cut off access from the road
to Marv's muffler shop, basically created an island legally out
of his muffler shop, that's wrong. That's not correct. He
always had access and everyone always had access in and
out of his muffler shop. That's a really big point
that a lot of people basically say, See, the guy
(13:29):
had no choice, he couldn't he couldn't run a business
like that, and that's just not true.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Yeah, that is not true, but that's something you see
a lot online. So thanks for clearing that up.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Sure you got anything else, what else you want me, Clear.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Up, I got a pimple on my shoulder here, No
take care of them.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Why did you say that?
Speaker 2 (13:51):
Oh I don't. I don't get pimples. So Marv is
he's got another problem that's also brewing. So you've got
this problem with the dough chefs. Then you have the
second issue with the sewer line. In order. His property
wasn't hooked up to a sewer line. You've got to
get hooked up to a sewer line if you're going
(14:13):
to be in compliance. They kind of look the other
way for many many years when he didn't because it was,
you know, small town western Colorado. It was sort of
the wild West, and people would just sort of turn
a blind eye if someone was making do on their own,
which he was doing. But he also didn't have a
septic tank, so he started dumping sewage into his concrete mixer,
(14:37):
a concrete mixing tank, big violation. Then when that filled up,
he started pumping it into the irrigation ditch on the property.
All he had to do was pay a little bit
of money at one point to hook up to some
neighboring sewer lines. But he basically thought that's over the town. Yeah,
(15:01):
that's the town holding me over a barrel. You shouldn't
have a resident or a business have to pay for
their own sewer line, which is a public utility.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Okay, So I don't know, like the town overlooked this
for a good decade, maybe twelve years something like that.
That he was pooping and peeing I guess into a
bucket or something and dumping it into a cement mixer,
even if they had a line up to the cemt mixer. Yes,
that's a huge health code violation. Right. So when that
(15:30):
concrete plant was built, they ran a sewer line to it, right,
and that made it way easier and way less expensive
for Marv Hemeyer to connect his muffler shop to that
sewer line that's now being run from the road to
this concrete plant next door. Then it would to have
(15:50):
the city run it from the road to just his
muffler shop. The problem was this is the Dochef's sewer
line and it was on their land and for him
to tap into it, he needed to pay them. So
they came back with an offer. They said, look, man,
if you drop all these lawsuits and all this campaign
against us, we will we will let you will give
(16:12):
you an easement, a maintenance easement to connect to our
sewer line from your muffler shop free of charge. That
will be your little strip of land onto our land,
connecting your muffler shop to the main line. You'll be
in compliance, we won't have this lawsuit against us anymore,
and we'll just call it a day. And I don't
believe Marv ever made good on that.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
No, he didn't want to do it. He was done
with him by that point, basically, so he was like,
screw this. I'm not hooking up to your sewer line.
I'm not paying the maybe as high as eighty grand
to run the four hundred feet to the main sewer line.
And so he wanted to sell the place. He's like,
(16:52):
I'm getting out, I'm getting out of this muffler shop
and I'm going to move. And the town then said, well, hey,
now that we know about all this, you can't even
sell this thing without a sewer line. So, all of
a sudden, he was caught between a rock and a
hard place there with this sewer connection. He refuses to
do it. He ends up being fined one hundred dollars
(17:13):
a day because of this sewage issue and other violations.
That were going on, like more than thirty three hundred bucks.
When he wrote the check to the town, he put
in the memo, it's for the Cowards and Liars Department.
So this is kind of where things were. This guy
is fighting back against the town. He's fighting against these people.
(17:34):
Whether or not you think it's fair that you have
to pay for your own sewer line or not, it's
the way it was. They weren't singling him out to
try and screw him over anything. That was just how
it works. I mean, I've had to replace sewer lines
and it stinks. It's the worst thing to have to
pay for.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
It stinks literally and figuratively.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
As a homeowner, it wrecks your yard or your property.
It wrecks it's it's awful because it's not. It's just
it's expensive. Have you ever had to do it? It
just writing that check. I've had to do it a
couple of times. It's awful. In the meantime, we need
to introduce another family, because he ended up having two
(18:16):
beefs with two prominent families, the do Chefs and then
the Thompson family, who were had been there forever thereby
owned tons and tons of the land in the town.
A guy named the elder Dick Thompson was on the
county board and then became mayor for a while back
when he was going through all this stuff in the nineties,
(18:37):
and then he passed away, and he took up this
beef with his two sons, basically saying like, you owe
me money because of all this stuff that your dad
and the town board made me go through.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
One thing that I couldn't find, and it's one of
those things that could change the complexion of the whole stories.
At what point did the sewer thing that the city
overlooked for a decade or so become a thing? You know?
Was it connected to the concrete plant? I don't know.
It's just just something that sticks out to me. Yeah,
(19:09):
So I guess what he did ultimately was he shut
down his muffler shop in two thousand and two and
he held an auction. He auctioned off all of his equipment.
He sold his property to a local trash company for
four hundred thousand, which I think what the highest he
had asked the dough Chuffs for for it. But he said,
I want to Lisa, this big old metal shed in
(19:29):
the back. I got to keep a place to keep
my bulldozer, because it's basically the only thing that no
one bought in the auction of my stuff. So I'm
just going to keep it back here and this will
be my little workshop. That's part of the deal. And
they shook on it, and that's the setup starting around
two thousand and two.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
Yeah, And I'm also not sure how he was able
to sell that stuff or sell it given that he
didn't put in the sewer line, because in the documentary
they said that the new owners this trash company, like
within forty eight hours had the sewer line hooked up.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
I mean, I think the city was like, whoever, like,
this thing can't change hands without somebody agreeing that they're
going to put maybe the one And that's what I think.
You could probably work that into a legal document.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
Probably. So should we take a break.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Yeah, we'll take a break and go find out.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
All right. We'll be right back after this with more
on the killdozer rampage.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
All right. So remember Marvy Myer's gotten out of the
muffler business, but he's known around town as an excellent welder,
I mean, just a superior welder. And when he leased
that little maintenance shed. We'll probably not mate little. But
when he leased the big maintenance shed in the back
of the property that he had sold to the trash company,
(21:13):
he used it to modify the bulldozer that would later
become the killdozer. To start out with, it was a
sixty ton Komatsu D three P fifty five a bulldozer, right,
and I mean just as it came out of the
package it was sixty tons. This guy added at least
another twenty tons of reinforcement to it.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Yeah, it was. It's not like a little front loader
that you know your landscape person has brought over if
you've ever had your yard done or something dingo. This
is this was a very, very very large bulldozer, which
you can tell and when you see footage when there
are other bulldozers trying to stop it, and this Kamatsu
(21:57):
is is clearly clearly larger.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
Right.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
So he buys this thing at auction in California, has
it shipped in July two thousand and two, and starting
at the beginning of two thousand and three, And this
is one of the craziest parts of this whole story
to me, is that this wasn't a guy that got
mad and like had a plan and it sort of
fizzles out after a week or two when you're like,
all right, well, you know, maybe I'll just watch the
(22:21):
Broncos game and let cooler heads prevail. Like he spent
a year dedicated to this project with this idea, like
planning this thing and equipping this thing. He set up
a cot in a blanket and had a fridge. He
was basically living in this shed basically full time, working
(22:43):
on this thing at night so that people, you know,
this company that bought it, this trash company, they're all
around the place, right, Like an insurance adjuster came to
inspect the shed because it was on the property of
the trash company. He had it behind a tarp and
made up some story about how he was working on
some equipment like air conditioning for some professor, and like
(23:03):
no one ever looked behind it. It fit by an
inch on either side. And he thought this was all
God telling him all these little things that happened that
where he didn't get caught beforehand. He thought was God saying,
this is your mission.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
Right, Marv he Meyer is a great example of why
we need wives.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
Right. Well, he had a girlfriend for a long time,
and she was all over the documentary. It sounded like
she was Australian or from New Zealand maybe, but Tricia McDonald. Yeah,
that was kind of one of the sadder parts is
that she seemed like she really liked him, and she
was like, I kind of had no idea that he
was that angry and it was going this far.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
Yeah, if I remember correctly, she had a little bit
of self blame maybe going on, or at least wondering
how things could have turned out differently.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
Well, I think their breakup beforehand might have been one
of the last draws too, and so she may have
felt bad about that.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
Oh, that's another one too. So in addition to his
muffler shop being completely cut off from access to the
main road, he also caught his fiance in bed with
another man. It's another dumb thing you'll find on the
internet from people who don't know what they're talking about. Too. Oh,
he chalked up to explaining him snapping.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Oh. One thing I did forget to mention is that
four hundred grand het. He was I guess savvy enough
to know that they could come after that money afterward, Yeah,
to help give people. So he while his father was
still alive. His dad died shortly before, which was another
last straw apparently, but he had given the money to
his father, who then gave the money to his sister
(24:40):
and brother. So it was like two people removed and untouchable.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
I guess, oh wow, yeah, that is pretty savvy.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
So he's got this kill dozer that he's putting together.
Let's talk a little bit about that. Like I said,
it was a sixty ton bulldozer, just a big, big boy.
But on top of that, he he took sheets of
steel and separated them by about twelve inches and poured
concrete in the in the space between the two. So
(25:11):
he made twelve inch on either side twelve inches of
steel with concrete in the middle. Plates that he created,
essentially a superstructure that he later before his rampage, right
before his rampage lowered on top of the Komatsu itself.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
Yeah, sealing him in there. He also had gun ports.
He had a fifty cow rifle, which is if you
just look up what a fifty caliber round looks like,
it's very large and destructive, a three eight semi automatic,
and then a twenty two long rifle. He also had
a three point fifty seven revolver inside, and he had
(25:53):
five video cameras mounted on the outside feeding three monitors
on the inside, and these lenses were protected by three
inch lexand bulletproof plastic basically. So the small little tiny
ports that were even on this thing were because they
tried eventually shooting into these were only like two by
(26:16):
three inches. So even these sharpshooters were having a hard
time getting a bullet in there, and even if they did,
it wasn't it was not effective anyway.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
Yeah, there were so many layers of this plastic bulletproof
like cladding. I guess that like, even if they broke
some of the layers, there was still more layers to
go through. It was nuts. But there's something I want
everybody to make note of. He put in those three
gun ports. Like you said, it's really important because one
of the things that a lot of people use to
(26:45):
defend Marv is that he was all he wanted was
property destruction. That's all he was intent on. And there's
no way to explain away those three gun ports otherwise
they don't jibe at that narrative at all. Certainly changes
the complexion of things too.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, as far as like folk hero who
just wanted to direct the business who wrecked his Yeah,
you don't go in there with a fifty.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Cal no, and I mean you can. He didn't even
need to defend himself. They couldn't get through this the plating,
the cladding, And even if he did need to defend himself,
he certainly didn't need three guns. So there was basically
no reason for those guns to be there aside from
shooting people.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Yeah, absolutely they would later obviously, he, like I said,
he mailed those tapes to his brother right before the attack.
They ended up finding a list afterward with sort of
like a hit list for the buildings he wanted to wreck. Obviously,
the Doe Chefs and the Thompson's were on that list,
(27:50):
as was the church in town, the Catholic church. That
is because on the tapes he was, or at least
in this one part, he was very anti Catholic, called
Catholic cowards, and the Thompsons were Catholic, and that was
one of his big beats.
Speaker 1 (28:03):
Gotcha. So again that Dozer Manifesto, they make an amazing
use of his actual tapes to let him just kind
of present himself and like you said that he apparently
believed that God was at the very least looking the
other way and kind of tacitly condoning this mission, if not,
(28:24):
you know, blessing the mission by all those ways that
you had said, like people overlooking the dozer, the fact
that the dozer was the one thing that he wasn't
able to sell at auction. He even said that God
told him to take take the winner off, put this
whole thing off for a year, essentially, and he did.
He also went on at length about the town that
(28:46):
he was dealing with and gave his side of the
story quite clearly, and he said that they use mafia
type tactics against him. And there's this line from his
tapes that this is like the people who consider him
a folk hero point to it said, or he said,
I was always willing to be reasonable until I had
to be unreasonable. Sometimes reasonable men must do unreasonable things.
(29:11):
And it's a just a sweeping thing to say, because
it completely explains away everything he does after that point,
and it completely gives him an alibi up to that point.
He's saying, I know what I'm doing, wrecking the town.
That's an unreasonable thing, but I have every reason to
do this. I have a very reasonable reason to do
(29:33):
this very unreasonable thing. It's really it's a very I
don't know, it's just nuts how well it encapsulates everything.
He just kind of lets him off the hook.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
Yeah, totally. He had also been hassling the paper for
not covering his story, like he was like, no one's
even writing about my beaf with the sewer line and
all this stuff. And so they ended up giving him
a free ad. They were like, oh, jeez, this guy,
how about we give you an ad. They came out
and photographed him and gave him a you know, an
(30:03):
ad for his muffler shop, which it turns out wasn't
enough to appease him. As we'll see, the end of
his lease was coming up. He had gone through that breakup,
his dad had just died, and so it was it
was game time. Basically. On June fourth, two thousand and four,
he uh, like we said, he sealed himself in that
(30:24):
cockpit kind of like couldn't get out, basically, and to
what looks like this a bulldozer meets ay the what
were those crawlers called in Star Wars where the Jahwa's
traded out of it kind of looked like that.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
Yeah, I don't remember what they're called. I just remember built.
It was based on a brutalist hotel in Morocco that
George Lucas saw exactly. And you don't need to write
in everybody, we can go look it up later.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
Well, you know what it's called John at two pm
and this was you know, when you see footage of
this thing or watching the documentary, it's this thing goes
four or five miles an hour, So it's a it's
a different kind of rampage. It's a slow motion rampage
going through town. But this thing was unstoppable, was the issue.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
Yeah, that, I mean, that's a really great way to
describe it. They, as we'll see, couldn't come up with
anything to put an end to this. I say, before
we really get underway with the rampage, we take our
final break and come back and tell everybody just what happened.
What do you think?
Speaker 2 (31:31):
All right, let's do it. All right, So the rampage starts. Obviously,
(32:05):
the first people he's going to go after are the
dough chefs and that concrete plant. When he gets there,
they quickly realize what's going on. Cody Dochef is like,
that's Marv he Meyer in there, and cops are like,
are you sure, how do you know? And he's like,
trust me, it's Marv he Meyer. He tries to stop it.
(32:26):
He tries shooting a revolver at this thing, which is
just a joke. I guess that's just the first sort
of reaction is like shoot it. Yea in western Colorado
at least, so hey, no shade there by the way,
But he starts shooting at this thing. He's he's literally
(32:47):
getting in his own This is Cody dochev getting in
his own little front end loader and driving at it.
He gets he rams aside of it, and he's trying
to lift it up off of the ground because basically
they're like, we can't. You know, they've tried shooting into
it already. They know that's not going to work, so
they want to disable those treads. If you can disable
a tank's treads, then you're in business. So they thought
(33:08):
if they could lift it off the ground, that might work.
They thought if they jammed this huge steel pole into
the treads, that that might you know, get stuck or
throw something out of whack. None of that works, and
when Cody doe Chef rams this thing and tries to
pick it up, his wheels come off the ground. He
hits the front windshield and gets knocked out cold and
(33:29):
awakes to bullet fire coming his way.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
Yeah. That was one thing that MARKI Meyer did was
he took aim and shot at Cody Deutcheff's his front
end loader, and there were bullet holes from the fifty
caliber in the bucket of the front end loader. Astoundingly,
he didn't hit Cody Dochef and he, I guess left
the cement plan at this time and started moving toward
(33:54):
the town. And one of the ways that he got
to the town was busting through a concrete road barrier,
a pair of them that I believe some highway patrolmen
were hiding behind, and they got out of the way just
in time because that killed those who went right through
those concrete barriers on its way to downtown Gramby.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
Yeah, and he didn't have to go that way. So
that was another instance where he he literally turned left
and headed right toward those guys. And these are cops.
They're bringing in forest service people, they're bringing in larger guns.
They ended up firing about two hundred shots at this thing,
but again they're just firing it at hard and steel
(34:33):
and so nothing is doing any good. Cody Docheff also
tried to climb up on top of it, but Marp
and I shouldn't be laughing here, but this is the
one part I thought was kind of funny. Marp thought
of that too, and he greased this thing up with
like axle grease, and so Cody Docheff is slipping off
of this thing. Eventually. There is a guy, a deputy
(34:56):
named Glenn Trainor, who climbed up on top of the
building and jumped right on top of the thing, and
he rode this thing around town. There's footage of this
guy riding this kill dozer around town trying to disable
it from above.
Speaker 1 (35:10):
Yeah, under Sheriff Glenn Trainer is typically referred to as
one of the big heroes of the day just for trying.
Nobody was successful, but a lot of people tried, and
he definitely risked life and limb essentially to try to
disable this thing. He found what he thought was a
weak point into the engine and shot into it a
bunch of times. Turns out it was a cover for
(35:32):
the air conditioner that Marv had put onto the bulldozer.
He also got a flashbran grenade, dropped it down the
exhaust pipe. It blew up. It did absolutely nothing, and
despite yeah being greased, Glenn Trainor hung on until Marv
he Meyer got the killdozer to the town hall building,
(35:53):
and Glenn Trainor saw quite clearly he was going to
be taken along with this thirteen foot tall, eighty ton
bold Those are right into town hall and he would
not fare very well in that circumstance. So he jumped
off and rolled onto the grass from that thirteen foot height.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
Yeah, so he's out of there safely. Like you said,
he goes after the town hall. It has a local
library in there where who knows whether he knows this
or not, but there were a bunch of kids in
there in a reading program, including the eleven year old
daughter of the mayor at the time, so they're huddling
in the basement. The town has issued a reverse nine
(36:32):
to one one call to basically where they call every
single resident in town at once and say, you know,
shelter in place, or in this case, calling the people
at the library saying get out of there. He then
turns on the bank the Liberty Bank branch, because obviously
(36:52):
he had problems with the banking system there. He then
turns on the newspaper and the Patrick Brower, the editor
the that he'd been you know, having his newspaper beef with,
is running out the back door as he is collapsing
this building. You know, he gets out in the nick
of time as he's collapsing the building.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
Yeah, and frequently in interviews, Patrick Brower points out that
had he tripped and fall and he'd be dead, it
was that close. Yeah, it does seem to have been
that kind of experience for people on the ground during
this rampage. Somebody would run in shouting like get out,
get out, and probably didn't even have time to say
what the heck was coming when the killdozer would come
crashing through the front of the building, not the front door,
(37:34):
not a side door. It would come right through the
front wall or the side wall. And one of the
things that people pointed out who were there was that
he would he would come crashing through the front wall
and it would take out like, you know, the front wall,
but the roof would still be thinking. So he back
up and he'd go after a corner of the building,
so like he was trying to demolish these buildings, he
(37:54):
was making a pretty great attempt at it, and toward
the end of the rampage he got pretty good at
taking building out in a couple of swipes.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
No, absolutely, So then you know this is a small town.
When he makes a turn toward a thing, they kind
of have a pretty good idea of where he's going
because of the well known beef. So after he destroys
the newspaper building, he makes a turn and everyone's like
he's going after the Thompsons. He ends up Thelma Thompson,
(38:24):
eighty two year old widow of former mayor Dick Thompson,
was literally asleep taking a nap thirty minutes before her
house is just gone because they get her out of there.
He completely destroys her house and then turns toward their business,
which is the Thompson and Sons excavating business and services,
(38:47):
and starts destroying those buildings.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Yeah, he cost them a good million and a half
dollars I saw to rebuild again, despite the people he
had the beef with not even being alive any longer.
But it's how much he hated the Thompson family after
that The next thing he did, this is a really
really critical thing that he did that really kind of
takes away a lot of sympathy I had for him.
(39:11):
He took out. He drove up to the propane company,
a local propane company, and uses fifty caliber rifle to
shoot at propane tanks for small ones, then big ones.
He tried to shoot in an electrical transformer so that
the sparks, ostensibly so the sparks would ignite the propane.
When he shot a propane tank open and the whole
thing would blow up. And that would have been significant.
(39:32):
Had this propane company blown up. I saw an estimate
that everyone within a half mile radius would have been
in danger. The blast would have been that big. Yeah,
this is downtown. It was as densely packed as the
town of Gramby could be, So half a mile radius
is you know, that was a significant thing. And the
(39:53):
reason why Patrick Brower points this out, and I tend
to agree with him. He takes issue with people who
are like these were all just warning shots. He just
wanted to destroy property. He just wanted to blow up
the propane company so that he could destroy more property.
He wasn't trying to kill anybody, And Patrick Brower was like,
this is no, this is not true. The reason he
didn't kill anybody was because the way that he had
(40:15):
mounted the rifles was so kluegy that he had almost
no chance whatsoever of shooting anybody. Those bulletproof class sights
that you were talking about, like the two by three
inch sights, or they weren't near the guns. The guns
weren't mounted right by them. The video cameras that he
was using to kind of drive around with they weren't
in line with the guns either, So when he was
(40:37):
aiming the gun, he had to do some sort of
weird mental topography to kind of figure out what he
was looking at in relation to the gun and try
to shoot that way. And Patrick Brower's point is that's
why no one was shot to death. That's why those
propaane tanks didn't blow up, that's why the electrical transformer
didn't blow up because he missed, not because he was
(40:58):
just firing warning shots. Because he missed. And if those
guns had been mounted more I guess efficiently, it could
have been a totally different outcome from this whole event.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
Yeah, for sure. He also, I mean, most of those
bullets didn't even make it out of his own vehicle
because the way he had the big fifty cow mounted,
it ended up hitting his own armor. So you see
like shooting toward this propane thing, and immediately these shots
are just sort of exploding because I think they were
(41:34):
some special kind of round or something, and they were
sort of exploding at you know, into his own tank.
So yeah, and then who knows if he even knew
what was going on, Like, no one knows what he
could even see inside that thing. So the machines damaged.
At this point, all the anti freeze has dumped out.
There's white smoke just pouring from this thing. There's hydraulic
(41:57):
fluid leaking all over the place, and it's pretty clear
that like the last gasp is happening. So he heads
down to Gambles of Granby hardware store. There was a
guy on the town board there related to the hardware
store that approved the concrete plant, and so they were
on the list. And you see this thing chugging along.
(42:20):
It's on its last legs. Somehow remarkably had not failed
up into that point. Yeah, Like I can't believe at
some point it didn't. Those treads didn't. I guess that's
why the bulldozer there there's you know, it's like a tank.
It's it's supposed to do that, so it was doing
it well. But what he didn't know was that there
was a basement in that hardware store, and eventually that
right front tread slipped down just a couple of feet
(42:44):
just enough into that basement to where the tread had
nothing against it and it was just spinning. So it
was finally stopped.
Speaker 1 (42:53):
Yeah, people were walking alongside of this thing for a
lot of the time, so there were people within earshot
at this point, and there suddenly comes a muffled gunshot
from inside the pull the kill dozer, and people were like, well,
I'm pretty sure that if that's Marv he Meyer who's
in there, he's no longer with us, and they were correct.
(43:16):
They the next day they tried to blow a hole
into the kill dozer, and do you remember at the outset,
I said that it was probably superior to a tank.
The reason I said that is because the swat team
who was creating this explosive charge to try to breach it,
they consulted with some explosive experts who told them what
charge to create to blow a hole in the side
(43:38):
of a tank and it didn't work. Yeah, the explosive
charge that could blow a hole in a tank did
not blow a hole in the kill dozer. That's how
thick and well welded this superstructure over the bulldozer was.
Speaker 2 (43:54):
So nobody was killed or injured in this thing, which
was remarkable considering what was happening. It was a little
over two hours, up to seven million dollars in damage.
I think eleven of the thirteen buildings were occupied at
the time, and like you said, people were literally running
out the back door for a lot of these and
(44:16):
that was it. You know, the guy ends up, you know,
they take this tank apart, and they didn't want any
memory of it in town, so they take it apart,
get rid of the parts. I think one of them
ended up staying with the Thompson family, like one small part, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:32):
A trunion I think, something that connects the bucket to
the rest of the dozer that had broken off when
he came crashing through their house.
Speaker 2 (44:40):
Yeah. But aside from that, people basically wanted to forget
about it, and with the help of you know, insurance
and everything, they ended up rebuilding everything. Not that it
wasn't at great personal cost as well, of course, but
Marv was gone and they were really eager to move
on for the most part as it.
Speaker 1 (45:00):
Yeah, Casey Farrell, who owned Gamble's hardware store, it took
him seven years because his store was insured, but it
wasn't insured for the kind of money it takes to
rebuild after a dozer rampage. But I guess the Denver
Post visited a year after on the anniversary of it
to do a story, and they found that most of
the buildings had either been rebuilt or were in the
process of rebuilding. And I believe the mayor at the
(45:23):
time this, I guess this would have been a year after.
A guy named Ted Wang. He said that the whole
rampage had actually inspired the town to become tighter as
a community, Like more people became involved in local politics,
and the town just kind of like took pride in
its own resurrection and rebuilding itself brick from brick, which
is essentially I guess, the opposite of what Marvy Meyer
(45:44):
would have wanted from his rampage.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
Yeah, you know, probably, And you know the narrative that
you hinted at early was still lives on for a
lot of people. A lot of people think this guy's
a folk hero, probably not surprisingly a lot of those
people on the very far right of the political spectrum,
and say, you know, this was a guy taking down,
you know, his local government that was being he was
(46:08):
a victim of his local government, and he was taking
them out, you know, doing what we all want to
do on any given day. And people still celebrate June
fourth is Killedozer Day in some of those circles.
Speaker 1 (46:21):
Yeah, And so, you know, doing research on this, I
just got less and less sympathetic with the guy and
really just came to dislike him. And then I came
across that Dozer Manifesto webcomic by mister V and just
reading some of it, I was like, well, I'm not
exactly sure how I think about this whole thing, and
(46:41):
I think I don't have enough information about what really
went on in that town or didn't go on to
decide one way or another, and get I don't think
that matters, But I just thought it was interesting that
I had an about face. I guess, yeah, I find
it interesting when I think of my thoughts.
Speaker 2 (47:03):
There was no one is quite sure who came up
with the name kill Dozer in terms of this case,
but there was obviously the band kill Dozer got to
shout them out from Madison, Wisconsin, Okay, and they may have.
I think they were the early eighties where they before
or after the movie, because when they're a movie as well.
Speaker 1 (47:23):
There was a movie called kill Dozer from nineteen seventy four.
It was the ABC Suspense Saturday Suspense TV movie that
was based on a nineteen forty four short story by
fantasy writer Theodore Sturgeon.
Speaker 2 (47:36):
Okay, so I bet kill Those are the band named
themselves after. That would be mine, I would think.
Speaker 1 (47:40):
But yeah, I don't understand why. It's like, well, where
did the name come from? Like kill those? Like you
would just look at that thing and be like, that's
a kill dozer without ever hearing that word together. It's
not like some great mystery like that's a kill dozer.
That's just what you call that thing. Humans have some
sort of innate genetic understanding of seeing that thing and
(48:01):
knowing that it's a kill dozer without ever seeing that
word before.
Speaker 2 (48:06):
Yeah, though it didn't kill, No.
Speaker 1 (48:08):
It didn't. That's a great point. So it's a I
guess destroy dozer is a better one, yeah, or a bulldozer.
Oh yeah. If you want to know more about kill Dozer,
there's plenty of stuff to read and watch on the internet.
Just be wary. Hopefully we've armed you with a little
bit of info to measure against. And since I said that,
(48:30):
it's time of course for a listener mail.
Speaker 2 (48:33):
Yeah, and watch Tread You can rent it. I think
it's free on two V and some other stuff.
Speaker 1 (48:39):
But it is really well done. It's a great documentary.
Speaker 2 (48:43):
Well, he does these recreations that I guess are CGI,
but it looked to me like I was like, man,
did they actually build another kill dozer replica to shoot
the stuff?
Speaker 1 (48:54):
Yeah? It was one of those few documentaries that had
one hundred and fifty million dollar budget.
Speaker 2 (48:59):
Not sure, but it looked good. And it's only like
ninety eight minutes long or less than that eighty eight
minutes ninety It's it's definitely worth seeing, all right, Listener Mail.
Dangers of Whistling. Hey, guys, just finish that episode. And
I thought you were going to mention the one thing
about not whistling in a theater. Not one hundred percent
sure of the veracity of the history of this, but
(49:19):
old theater. Legend has it that early stage hands were
also sailors and or dock workers who communicated in whistles,
and therefore, if you were a casual bystander whistling in
a theater, you could actually cause an accident through miscommunication.
As with some of other superstitions in the theater, this
one is based more on safety than anything else, and
I always find it fascinating. The concept of bad luck
(49:42):
was apparently effective for early safety compliance. Thanks for keeping
me entertained on my long LA commutes. And that is
from Claudia, who was a stage hand in Los Angeles.
Speaker 1 (49:52):
Awesome. Thanks a lot, Claudia. I feel like we talked
about that. It came across it in research or something
like that. I don't know if it was related to
whistling or what, but had to do with salty sea
dogs moonlighting as stage hands for the theater.
Speaker 2 (50:06):
Oh I remember that? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (50:08):
All right, Well, thanks Claudia for getting in touch. And
if you want to be like Claudia and share something
awesome and interesting with us, we'd love that you can
wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send
it on its way to stuff. Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (50:26):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck
and Jerry's here too, and it's just the three of
us rampaging away in podcast land. That's stuff you should know.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
In case you didn't know well before we get started,
I think we should mention that there are still tickets
available for our show's coming up very soon in Chicago
on August seventh and Minneapolis on August eighth.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Yeah, it's gonna be pretty great. We're going to be
at the Auditorium in Chicago and we're going to be
at the State Theater in Minneapolis, and there are tickets
left and you can come see us. It's a great show.
We've gotten great feedback so far. Only like two people
have been like that sucked. Everybody else is like that,
it's pretty great. And you can go to stuff youshould
Know dot com and click on the tour page tour button,
(00:58):
and you can also go to link tree, slash sysk Live,
and both of those places will take you to sites
where you can buy legitimate tickets to come see us.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Yeah, and those are both great cities for us. We
love going to Chicago and Minneapolis. I know it's been
a little while for Minneapolis, but we've had always had
great shows there.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
Yeah, and we're not promoting Indianapolis because Indianapolis sold out,
so we'll see them as well. But you can't come
in if you haven't already bought your tickets. I'm sorry.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Yeah. Well, you know, it's a Midwestern themed show, so
sort of Chicago adjacent, really Indianapolis adjacent. So they got
on it. They want to hear about their people.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
That's right. So yeah, come see us at the beginning
of August.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
You guys, all right back to it?
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Right?
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Good one?
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Oh you think so?
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (01:48):
Okay, thanks.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
I appreciate you letting us do this one first because,
like I just announced to you, Yeah, I just watched
the documentary on this topic, Tread Tread, directed by Paul Solette.
Let's it's solet who knows we go with?
Speaker 1 (02:07):
So?
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Did you watch it?
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Yes? I have, Actually I've seen it. I saw a
few years back. I haven't seen I didn't watch it
recently for this For.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Some reason, I think we covered this in like a
video or something like how do I know about this?
Speaker 1 (02:21):
It was pretty big news, and I mean it's become
an Internet legend. Maybe we did do like an Internet
round up on it or something like that on the
tenth anniversary. Maybe I don't know.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Yeah, that feels about right, But I guess we should
say what we're talking about.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Eh, sure, Oh, I'll do that then. Okay, So for
those of you who don't know, we're talking about an
event that took place in two thousand and four in
a little town called Granby, Colorado, about fifty miles west
of Denver, population two thousand ish. I think at the
time it's a small town, yeah, but it wasn't, you know,
(02:54):
an economically depressed town. It's like sixteen miles away from
the entrance to Rocky Mounta National Park. They're skiing around there,
so there's tourists. There's also rural ranchers that come into
shopping Granby. It's fine. It's just a cute, quinte small
mountain town like South Park basically.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
That's right. And it remained that way until June fourth,
two thousand and four, when a lot of this town
was destroyed by a man in a bulldozer that had
ended up being dubbed later on as the kill Dozer.
And we'll get to that later, right, But it was
a muffler shop owner, a fifty two year old guy
(03:36):
named Marvin he Meyer, Marv he Meyer, and he had
beefs with the town. He had beefs with people in
the town. We're going to go over all that stuff.
So he built or modified rather a gigantic bulldozer into
basically a tank and destroyed the places of the people
(03:58):
he had beefs with. More.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Yeah, I left all that out of my introduction, so
I'm glad you filled it in. Yeah, you said it
was like a tank essentially in some ways, as we'll see,
it was actually superior to a tank. It was crazy
what this guy built. And if you have the time
and you're not driving right now, just go look up
killdozer and get a load of this modified bulldozer that
(04:22):
Marv he Meyer created. So, Chuck, I say, let's just
dive in. That was a pretty good little setup. Let's
talk about Marv he Meyern who he was. He was
known around town as Marv the muffler man, right.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
That's right, because he owned a muffler shop. Previous to that,
he was in the Air Force. Served in the Air Force,
was stationed in Colorado at Lowry Air Force Base, liked Colorado,
decided to literally set up shop there. And this is
in the early nineties. He moved to Grand Lake near Granby,
and you know, pretty soon he got he started getting
(04:58):
his feathers ruffled, ruffling feathers in the town kind of
right away, it seems like, starting with having a beef
against the local newspaper, the sky High News.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Yeah, so they introduced the concept of legalized gambling in
Grand Lake, which is pretty near grand By, and the
town was very evenly divided on it. The local newspaper,
the sky High News or one of the local newspapers
is another one in Grand Lake, came out very heavily
against legalized gambling. Marv was very heavily in favor of gambling,
(05:34):
so much so that he edited, i think two editions
of a newspaper that was created just to tout the
benefits of legalized gambling. And so he lost. Like the
I think they voted in the area, they voted four
to one against legalizing gambling, and it was a bitter defeat.
I think to Marv, he seemed like the kind of
(05:55):
person who did not accept defeat very well and that
it just trigged Stewing in him.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Yeah, that's fair to say, I think. And that was
in nineteen ninety two. That same year is when he
bought some property that would be sort of at the
center of his next dispute. It was a couple of
acres in western Granby. He bought it at public auction
and foreclosure for a little more than forty grand, which
turned out to be a great deal. The guy had
a really good knack for finding good deals on stuff.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Yeah, what's funny that you remember the savings and loan scandal. Yeah,
he actually bought it from the FDIC because it was
a failed savings and loan bank in town.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Yeah, including that big bulldozer that he would end up
getting a great deal on.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
So that was a savings and loan bulldozer.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
He had a nose for a deal. So he ended
up setting up his Mountain View muffler shop. There was
apparently a great welder stuff that he brought into the
Air Force. It seems like was just really good on
machines and motors and engines and welding, and worked for
a uffler shop for many years and finally was like,
I'm going to open up my own shop as this
(07:05):
is happening. There's another local family and this is one
of the two two main families that he had beefs with,
the dough Chef family, in particular the patriarch I guess
of that family, Cody Dochef with his wife Susie and
their son Joe, had a concrete factory and they were
(07:26):
trying to expand this factory, so they bought up they
wanted this property that Marv had bought. They bought up
a bunch of land around it still needed more space,
and tried to buy Marv's parcel from him that he
paid forty two thousand dollars for and initially they had
an agreement for two hundred and fifty grand which would
(07:47):
have been a really nice take on that land deal
for Marv.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
It would have for sure. And apparently the dough Chefs
were at that auction that Marv bought it at and
he outbid them, so yeah, they were very interested in
this parcel of land. He agreed to that two hundred
and fifty thousand dollars deal later on, I think that
was eight years later, so that is a pretty significant
increase in your investment. And then but he changed his mind,
(08:13):
he decided that though land was worth more than two
hundred and fifty grand, apparently kept getting appraisals on it.
So it's not like he was just saying, like, no,
it's worth a billion dollars, right. He supposedly got appraisals
and was like, this land is worth more than two
hundred and fifty grand. Now, so he said, He said,
he backed out of the deal. I don't know how
(08:33):
much how far the deal had gotten, but he definitely
backed out of an agreement to sell it for two
hundred and fifty grand.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
Yeah, he ended up asking four hundred. The dough chefs
came up with three point fifty, and he said, now
I want four to fifty again, he said, because of
another reappraisal. I don't I'm not sure about all that stuff, Like,
I mean, I'm just basing off kind of what I
saw in the documentary and research. I hadn't seen the
(09:00):
appraisals or anything, So I don't know if Marv was
just like jacking this thing up or not. Who knows.
But while this is happening, at least, you know, one
of the things we have left to kind of piece
us all together is the series of audio tapes that
he made on cassette that he mailed to his brother.
So the documentary features a lot of those, you know,
(09:20):
just firsthand accounts from Marv detailing what's going on. And
one of the things he just he didn't like the
dough chefs. He said that Cody Docheff, and I guess
this was after he had backed out of I'm not
sure if it was after he backed out or not,
but Cody Docheff at one point basically accosted him in
a restaurant and that was one of their first exchanges
(09:41):
about this. And Cody Docheff was known as a real
hot head in town and Marv you should hear the
words that he calls him on those audio tapes. He
did not like this guy.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
Right, that appraisal thing. That's a really good example of
the squishiness I guess of this story. It's really difficult
to pin down because, yeah, was he just jacking the
price up because he didn't like the doe Cheffs. Did
he really think that the land was worth that? Did
he really get appraisals? You don't know, But that kind
(10:12):
of thing completely changes the complexion of it. If he
was getting appraisals and the doe Cheffs wouldn't pay the
appraised value. That's pretty reasonable. If he was lying about
the appraisals and he was just jacking the price up
on the doe Cheffs, that kind of makes him look
like a jerk. And so that just something that small
can make a story like this totally due a one
(10:33):
point eighty. And this story is filled with those little
kind of details that have either gotten overlooked at it
or blown out in proportion.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
Yeah. Absolutely, So they the dough Chefs end up buying
some other land, a business park, and they said, hey,
you give us the land where your muffler shop is,
and we'll give you the prime lot that's right on
the highway, this frontage land where muffler shop is going
to do a lot better, get a lot more attention.
(11:03):
And he said, all right, I'll take that deal, but
you've got to build this muffler shop for me, and
that a really expensive one and really kind of highend
muffler shop, I guess because that brought it up to
about a million bucks. And they said, no, you know
that muffler shop. Boy, how long were you waiting on
that one?
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Good thirty seconds.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
Oh boy, I hope most people get that one. At least.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
It doesn't matter as long as you've got it. Friend,
Oh I got it.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
So they said no deal, and he said, all right,
then you basically started a war with me, and I'm
gonna I'm going to do everything I can to fight
the city to make sure that you're not able to
open up that cement factory that you want to open up,
and apparently got a lot of people on the side.
(11:54):
There was a lot of opposition in the town that
back to Marv against this expansion of the cement or
concrete factory.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
Yeah. So what I don't understand is was there opposition
before Marv started this kind of grassroots campaign against it?
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Okay, Yeah, so he didn't just drum that up out
of thin air, like not everybody was happy about a
concrete batch creating plant like this is almost in downtown Gramby.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
Yeah, there was opposition, but it seems like he really
fueled the fire.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
Okay, Yeah, so now you have war between essentially what
amounts to two hotheads who are neighbors, and a concrete
plant is not like a tidy, quiet neighbor to be
next to, right, So I'm sure that every sound and
every clank and every bit of like dust that blew
his way just made him less and less happy. And
(12:47):
I guess I don't know. Also, if you said that
they were buying up the land around him, so ultimately
his muffler shop was the only little piece of parcel
left and they were literally building a concrete plant owned
his muffler shop. And one of the things if somebody
tells you this, they don't know what they're talking about,
and stop listening to them about this. If they tell
(13:08):
you that when the dough Chets bought the land up
around him, that they cut off access from the road
to Marv's muffler shop, basically created an island legally out
of his muffler shop, that's wrong. That's not correct. He
always had access and everyone always had access in and
out of his muffler shop. That's a really big point
that a lot of people basically say, See, the guy
(13:29):
had no choice, he couldn't he couldn't run a business
like that, and that's just not true.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Yeah, that is not true, but that's something you see
a lot online. So thanks for clearing that up.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Sure you got anything else, what else you want me, Clear.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Up, I got a pimple on my shoulder here, No
take care of them.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Why did you say that?
Speaker 2 (13:51):
Oh I don't. I don't get pimples. So Marv is
he's got another problem that's also brewing. So you've got
this problem with the dough chefs. Then you have the
second issue with the sewer line. In order. His property
wasn't hooked up to a sewer line. You've got to
get hooked up to a sewer line if you're going
(14:13):
to be in compliance. They kind of look the other
way for many many years when he didn't because it was,
you know, small town western Colorado. It was sort of
the wild West, and people would just sort of turn
a blind eye if someone was making do on their own,
which he was doing. But he also didn't have a
septic tank, so he started dumping sewage into his concrete mixer,
(14:37):
a concrete mixing tank, big violation. Then when that filled up,
he started pumping it into the irrigation ditch on the property.
All he had to do was pay a little bit
of money at one point to hook up to some
neighboring sewer lines. But he basically thought that's over the town. Yeah,
(15:01):
that's the town holding me over a barrel. You shouldn't
have a resident or a business have to pay for
their own sewer line, which is a public utility.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Okay, So I don't know, like the town overlooked this
for a good decade, maybe twelve years something like that.
That he was pooping and peeing I guess into a
bucket or something and dumping it into a cement mixer,
even if they had a line up to the cemt mixer. Yes,
that's a huge health code violation. Right. So when that
(15:30):
concrete plant was built, they ran a sewer line to it, right,
and that made it way easier and way less expensive
for Marv Hemeyer to connect his muffler shop to that
sewer line that's now being run from the road to
this concrete plant next door. Then it would to have
(15:50):
the city run it from the road to just his
muffler shop. The problem was this is the Dochef's sewer
line and it was on their land and for him
to tap into it, he needed to pay them. So
they came back with an offer. They said, look, man,
if you drop all these lawsuits and all this campaign
against us, we will we will let you will give
(16:12):
you an easement, a maintenance easement to connect to our
sewer line from your muffler shop free of charge. That
will be your little strip of land onto our land,
connecting your muffler shop to the main line. You'll be
in compliance, we won't have this lawsuit against us anymore,
and we'll just call it a day. And I don't
believe Marv ever made good on that.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
No, he didn't want to do it. He was done
with him by that point, basically, so he was like,
screw this. I'm not hooking up to your sewer line.
I'm not paying the maybe as high as eighty grand
to run the four hundred feet to the main sewer line.
And so he wanted to sell the place. He's like,
(16:52):
I'm getting out, I'm getting out of this muffler shop
and I'm going to move. And the town then said, well, hey,
now that we know about all this, you can't even
sell this thing without a sewer line. So, all of
a sudden, he was caught between a rock and a
hard place there with this sewer connection. He refuses to
do it. He ends up being fined one hundred dollars
(17:13):
a day because of this sewage issue and other violations.
That were going on, like more than thirty three hundred bucks.
When he wrote the check to the town, he put
in the memo, it's for the Cowards and Liars Department.
So this is kind of where things were. This guy
is fighting back against the town. He's fighting against these people.
(17:34):
Whether or not you think it's fair that you have
to pay for your own sewer line or not, it's
the way it was. They weren't singling him out to
try and screw him over anything. That was just how
it works. I mean, I've had to replace sewer lines
and it stinks. It's the worst thing to have to
pay for.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
It stinks literally and figuratively.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
As a homeowner, it wrecks your yard or your property.
It wrecks it's it's awful because it's not. It's just
it's expensive. Have you ever had to do it? It
just writing that check. I've had to do it a
couple of times. It's awful. In the meantime, we need
to introduce another family, because he ended up having two
(18:16):
beefs with two prominent families, the do Chefs and then
the Thompson family, who were had been there forever thereby
owned tons and tons of the land in the town.
A guy named the elder Dick Thompson was on the
county board and then became mayor for a while back
when he was going through all this stuff in the nineties,
(18:37):
and then he passed away, and he took up this
beef with his two sons, basically saying like, you owe
me money because of all this stuff that your dad
and the town board made me go through.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
One thing that I couldn't find, and it's one of
those things that could change the complexion of the whole stories.
At what point did the sewer thing that the city
overlooked for a decade or so become a thing? You know?
Was it connected to the concrete plant? I don't know.
It's just just something that sticks out to me. Yeah,
(19:09):
So I guess what he did ultimately was he shut
down his muffler shop in two thousand and two and
he held an auction. He auctioned off all of his equipment.
He sold his property to a local trash company for
four hundred thousand, which I think what the highest he
had asked the dough Chuffs for for it. But he said,
I want to Lisa, this big old metal shed in
(19:29):
the back. I got to keep a place to keep
my bulldozer, because it's basically the only thing that no
one bought in the auction of my stuff. So I'm
just going to keep it back here and this will
be my little workshop. That's part of the deal. And
they shook on it, and that's the setup starting around
two thousand and two.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
Yeah, And I'm also not sure how he was able
to sell that stuff or sell it given that he
didn't put in the sewer line, because in the documentary
they said that the new owners this trash company, like
within forty eight hours had the sewer line hooked up.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
I mean, I think the city was like, whoever, like,
this thing can't change hands without somebody agreeing that they're
going to put maybe the one And that's what I think.
You could probably work that into a legal document.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
Probably. So should we take a break.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Yeah, we'll take a break and go find out.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
All right. We'll be right back after this with more
on the killdozer rampage.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
All right. So remember Marvy Myer's gotten out of the
muffler business, but he's known around town as an excellent welder,
I mean, just a superior welder. And when he leased
that little maintenance shed. We'll probably not mate little. But
when he leased the big maintenance shed in the back
of the property that he had sold to the trash company,
(21:13):
he used it to modify the bulldozer that would later
become the killdozer. To start out with, it was a
sixty ton Komatsu D three P fifty five a bulldozer, right,
and I mean just as it came out of the
package it was sixty tons. This guy added at least
another twenty tons of reinforcement to it.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Yeah, it was. It's not like a little front loader
that you know your landscape person has brought over if
you've ever had your yard done or something dingo. This
is this was a very, very very large bulldozer, which
you can tell and when you see footage when there
are other bulldozers trying to stop it, and this Kamatsu
(21:57):
is is clearly clearly larger.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
Right.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
So he buys this thing at auction in California, has
it shipped in July two thousand and two, and starting
at the beginning of two thousand and three, And this
is one of the craziest parts of this whole story
to me, is that this wasn't a guy that got
mad and like had a plan and it sort of
fizzles out after a week or two when you're like,
all right, well, you know, maybe I'll just watch the
(22:21):
Broncos game and let cooler heads prevail. Like he spent
a year dedicated to this project with this idea, like
planning this thing and equipping this thing. He set up
a cot in a blanket and had a fridge. He
was basically living in this shed basically full time, working
(22:43):
on this thing at night so that people, you know,
this company that bought it, this trash company, they're all
around the place, right, Like an insurance adjuster came to
inspect the shed because it was on the property of
the trash company. He had it behind a tarp and
made up some story about how he was working on
some equipment like air conditioning for some professor, and like
(23:03):
no one ever looked behind it. It fit by an
inch on either side. And he thought this was all
God telling him all these little things that happened that
where he didn't get caught beforehand. He thought was God saying,
this is your mission.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
Right, Marv he Meyer is a great example of why
we need wives.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
Right. Well, he had a girlfriend for a long time,
and she was all over the documentary. It sounded like
she was Australian or from New Zealand maybe, but Tricia McDonald. Yeah,
that was kind of one of the sadder parts is
that she seemed like she really liked him, and she
was like, I kind of had no idea that he
was that angry and it was going this far.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
Yeah, if I remember correctly, she had a little bit
of self blame maybe going on, or at least wondering
how things could have turned out differently.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
Well, I think their breakup beforehand might have been one
of the last draws too, and so she may have
felt bad about that.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
Oh, that's another one too. So in addition to his
muffler shop being completely cut off from access to the
main road, he also caught his fiance in bed with
another man. It's another dumb thing you'll find on the
internet from people who don't know what they're talking about. Too. Oh,
he chalked up to explaining him snapping.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Oh. One thing I did forget to mention is that
four hundred grand het. He was I guess savvy enough
to know that they could come after that money afterward, Yeah,
to help give people. So he while his father was
still alive. His dad died shortly before, which was another
last straw apparently, but he had given the money to
his father, who then gave the money to his sister
(24:40):
and brother. So it was like two people removed and untouchable.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
I guess, oh wow, yeah, that is pretty savvy.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
So he's got this kill dozer that he's putting together.
Let's talk a little bit about that. Like I said,
it was a sixty ton bulldozer, just a big, big boy.
But on top of that, he he took sheets of
steel and separated them by about twelve inches and poured
concrete in the in the space between the two. So
(25:11):
he made twelve inch on either side twelve inches of
steel with concrete in the middle. Plates that he created,
essentially a superstructure that he later before his rampage, right
before his rampage lowered on top of the Komatsu itself.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
Yeah, sealing him in there. He also had gun ports.
He had a fifty cow rifle, which is if you
just look up what a fifty caliber round looks like,
it's very large and destructive, a three eight semi automatic,
and then a twenty two long rifle. He also had
a three point fifty seven revolver inside, and he had
(25:53):
five video cameras mounted on the outside feeding three monitors
on the inside, and these lenses were protected by three
inch lexand bulletproof plastic basically. So the small little tiny
ports that were even on this thing were because they
tried eventually shooting into these were only like two by
(26:16):
three inches. So even these sharpshooters were having a hard
time getting a bullet in there, and even if they did,
it wasn't it was not effective anyway.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
Yeah, there were so many layers of this plastic bulletproof
like cladding. I guess that like, even if they broke
some of the layers, there was still more layers to
go through. It was nuts. But there's something I want
everybody to make note of. He put in those three
gun ports. Like you said, it's really important because one
of the things that a lot of people use to
(26:45):
defend Marv is that he was all he wanted was
property destruction. That's all he was intent on. And there's
no way to explain away those three gun ports otherwise
they don't jibe at that narrative at all. Certainly changes
the complexion of things too.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, as far as like folk hero who
just wanted to direct the business who wrecked his Yeah,
you don't go in there with a fifty.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Cal no, and I mean you can. He didn't even
need to defend himself. They couldn't get through this the plating,
the cladding, And even if he did need to defend himself,
he certainly didn't need three guns. So there was basically
no reason for those guns to be there aside from
shooting people.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Yeah, absolutely they would later obviously, he, like I said,
he mailed those tapes to his brother right before the attack.
They ended up finding a list afterward with sort of
like a hit list for the buildings he wanted to wreck. Obviously,
the Doe Chefs and the Thompson's were on that list,
(27:50):
as was the church in town, the Catholic church. That
is because on the tapes he was, or at least
in this one part, he was very anti Catholic, called
Catholic cowards, and the Thompsons were Catholic, and that was
one of his big beats.
Speaker 1 (28:03):
Gotcha. So again that Dozer Manifesto, they make an amazing
use of his actual tapes to let him just kind
of present himself and like you said that he apparently
believed that God was at the very least looking the
other way and kind of tacitly condoning this mission, if not,
(28:24):
you know, blessing the mission by all those ways that
you had said, like people overlooking the dozer, the fact
that the dozer was the one thing that he wasn't
able to sell at auction. He even said that God
told him to take take the winner off, put this
whole thing off for a year, essentially, and he did.
He also went on at length about the town that
(28:46):
he was dealing with and gave his side of the
story quite clearly, and he said that they use mafia
type tactics against him. And there's this line from his
tapes that this is like the people who consider him
a folk hero point to it said, or he said,
I was always willing to be reasonable until I had
to be unreasonable. Sometimes reasonable men must do unreasonable things.
(29:11):
And it's a just a sweeping thing to say, because
it completely explains away everything he does after that point,
and it completely gives him an alibi up to that point.
He's saying, I know what I'm doing, wrecking the town.
That's an unreasonable thing, but I have every reason to
do this. I have a very reasonable reason to do
(29:33):
this very unreasonable thing. It's really it's a very I
don't know, it's just nuts how well it encapsulates everything.
He just kind of lets him off the hook.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
Yeah, totally. He had also been hassling the paper for
not covering his story, like he was like, no one's
even writing about my beaf with the sewer line and
all this stuff. And so they ended up giving him
a free ad. They were like, oh, jeez, this guy,
how about we give you an ad. They came out
and photographed him and gave him a you know, an
(30:03):
ad for his muffler shop, which it turns out wasn't
enough to appease him. As we'll see, the end of
his lease was coming up. He had gone through that breakup,
his dad had just died, and so it was it
was game time. Basically. On June fourth, two thousand and four,
he uh, like we said, he sealed himself in that
(30:24):
cockpit kind of like couldn't get out, basically, and to
what looks like this a bulldozer meets ay the what
were those crawlers called in Star Wars where the Jahwa's
traded out of it kind of looked like that.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
Yeah, I don't remember what they're called. I just remember built.
It was based on a brutalist hotel in Morocco that
George Lucas saw exactly. And you don't need to write
in everybody, we can go look it up later.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
Well, you know what it's called John at two pm
and this was you know, when you see footage of
this thing or watching the documentary, it's this thing goes
four or five miles an hour, So it's a it's
a different kind of rampage. It's a slow motion rampage
going through town. But this thing was unstoppable, was the issue.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
Yeah, that, I mean, that's a really great way to
describe it. They, as we'll see, couldn't come up with
anything to put an end to this. I say, before
we really get underway with the rampage, we take our
final break and come back and tell everybody just what happened.
What do you think?
Speaker 2 (31:31):
All right, let's do it. All right, So the rampage starts. Obviously,
(32:05):
the first people he's going to go after are the
dough chefs and that concrete plant. When he gets there,
they quickly realize what's going on. Cody Dochef is like,
that's Marv he Meyer in there, and cops are like,
are you sure, how do you know? And he's like,
trust me, it's Marv he Meyer. He tries to stop it.
(32:26):
He tries shooting a revolver at this thing, which is
just a joke. I guess that's just the first sort
of reaction is like shoot it. Yea in western Colorado
at least, so hey, no shade there by the way,
But he starts shooting at this thing. He's he's literally
(32:47):
getting in his own This is Cody dochev getting in
his own little front end loader and driving at it.
He gets he rams aside of it, and he's trying
to lift it up off of the ground because basically
they're like, we can't. You know, they've tried shooting into
it already. They know that's not going to work, so
they want to disable those treads. If you can disable
a tank's treads, then you're in business. So they thought
(33:08):
if they could lift it off the ground, that might work.
They thought if they jammed this huge steel pole into
the treads, that that might you know, get stuck or
throw something out of whack. None of that works, and
when Cody doe Chef rams this thing and tries to
pick it up, his wheels come off the ground. He
hits the front windshield and gets knocked out cold and
(33:29):
awakes to bullet fire coming his way.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
Yeah. That was one thing that MARKI Meyer did was
he took aim and shot at Cody Deutcheff's his front
end loader, and there were bullet holes from the fifty
caliber in the bucket of the front end loader. Astoundingly,
he didn't hit Cody Dochef and he, I guess left
the cement plan at this time and started moving toward
(33:54):
the town. And one of the ways that he got
to the town was busting through a concrete road barrier,
a pair of them that I believe some highway patrolmen
were hiding behind, and they got out of the way just
in time because that killed those who went right through
those concrete barriers on its way to downtown Gramby.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
Yeah, and he didn't have to go that way. So
that was another instance where he he literally turned left
and headed right toward those guys. And these are cops.
They're bringing in forest service people, they're bringing in larger guns.
They ended up firing about two hundred shots at this thing,
but again they're just firing it at hard and steel
(34:33):
and so nothing is doing any good. Cody Docheff also
tried to climb up on top of it, but Marp
and I shouldn't be laughing here, but this is the
one part I thought was kind of funny. Marp thought
of that too, and he greased this thing up with
like axle grease, and so Cody Docheff is slipping off
of this thing. Eventually. There is a guy, a deputy
(34:56):
named Glenn Trainor, who climbed up on top of the
building and jumped right on top of the thing, and
he rode this thing around town. There's footage of this
guy riding this kill dozer around town trying to disable
it from above.
Speaker 1 (35:10):
Yeah, under Sheriff Glenn Trainer is typically referred to as
one of the big heroes of the day just for trying.
Nobody was successful, but a lot of people tried, and
he definitely risked life and limb essentially to try to
disable this thing. He found what he thought was a
weak point into the engine and shot into it a
bunch of times. Turns out it was a cover for
(35:32):
the air conditioner that Marv had put onto the bulldozer.
He also got a flashbran grenade, dropped it down the
exhaust pipe. It blew up. It did absolutely nothing, and
despite yeah being greased, Glenn Trainor hung on until Marv
he Meyer got the killdozer to the town hall building,
(35:53):
and Glenn Trainor saw quite clearly he was going to
be taken along with this thirteen foot tall, eighty ton
bold Those are right into town hall and he would
not fare very well in that circumstance. So he jumped
off and rolled onto the grass from that thirteen foot height.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
Yeah, so he's out of there safely. Like you said,
he goes after the town hall. It has a local
library in there where who knows whether he knows this
or not, but there were a bunch of kids in
there in a reading program, including the eleven year old
daughter of the mayor at the time, so they're huddling
in the basement. The town has issued a reverse nine
(36:32):
to one one call to basically where they call every
single resident in town at once and say, you know,
shelter in place, or in this case, calling the people
at the library saying get out of there. He then
turns on the bank the Liberty Bank branch, because obviously
(36:52):
he had problems with the banking system there. He then
turns on the newspaper and the Patrick Brower, the editor
the that he'd been you know, having his newspaper beef with,
is running out the back door as he is collapsing
this building. You know, he gets out in the nick
of time as he's collapsing the building.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
Yeah, and frequently in interviews, Patrick Brower points out that
had he tripped and fall and he'd be dead, it
was that close. Yeah, it does seem to have been
that kind of experience for people on the ground during
this rampage. Somebody would run in shouting like get out,
get out, and probably didn't even have time to say
what the heck was coming when the killdozer would come
crashing through the front of the building, not the front door,
(37:34):
not a side door. It would come right through the
front wall or the side wall. And one of the
things that people pointed out who were there was that
he would he would come crashing through the front wall
and it would take out like, you know, the front wall,
but the roof would still be thinking. So he back
up and he'd go after a corner of the building,
so like he was trying to demolish these buildings, he
(37:54):
was making a pretty great attempt at it, and toward
the end of the rampage he got pretty good at
taking building out in a couple of swipes.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
No, absolutely, So then you know this is a small town.
When he makes a turn toward a thing, they kind
of have a pretty good idea of where he's going
because of the well known beef. So after he destroys
the newspaper building, he makes a turn and everyone's like
he's going after the Thompsons. He ends up Thelma Thompson,
(38:24):
eighty two year old widow of former mayor Dick Thompson,
was literally asleep taking a nap thirty minutes before her
house is just gone because they get her out of there.
He completely destroys her house and then turns toward their business,
which is the Thompson and Sons excavating business and services,
(38:47):
and starts destroying those buildings.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Yeah, he cost them a good million and a half
dollars I saw to rebuild again, despite the people he
had the beef with not even being alive any longer.
But it's how much he hated the Thompson family after
that The next thing he did, this is a really
really critical thing that he did that really kind of
takes away a lot of sympathy I had for him.
(39:11):
He took out. He drove up to the propane company,
a local propane company, and uses fifty caliber rifle to
shoot at propane tanks for small ones, then big ones.
He tried to shoot in an electrical transformer so that
the sparks, ostensibly so the sparks would ignite the propane.
When he shot a propane tank open and the whole
thing would blow up. And that would have been significant.
(39:32):
Had this propane company blown up. I saw an estimate
that everyone within a half mile radius would have been
in danger. The blast would have been that big. Yeah,
this is downtown. It was as densely packed as the
town of Gramby could be, So half a mile radius
is you know, that was a significant thing. And the
(39:53):
reason why Patrick Brower points this out, and I tend
to agree with him. He takes issue with people who
are like these were all just warning shots. He just
wanted to destroy property. He just wanted to blow up
the propane company so that he could destroy more property.
He wasn't trying to kill anybody, And Patrick Brower was like,
this is no, this is not true. The reason he
didn't kill anybody was because the way that he had
(40:15):
mounted the rifles was so kluegy that he had almost
no chance whatsoever of shooting anybody. Those bulletproof class sights
that you were talking about, like the two by three
inch sights, or they weren't near the guns. The guns
weren't mounted right by them. The video cameras that he
was using to kind of drive around with they weren't
in line with the guns either, So when he was
(40:37):
aiming the gun, he had to do some sort of
weird mental topography to kind of figure out what he
was looking at in relation to the gun and try
to shoot that way. And Patrick Brower's point is that's
why no one was shot to death. That's why those
propaane tanks didn't blow up, that's why the electrical transformer
didn't blow up because he missed, not because he was
(40:58):
just firing warning shots. Because he missed. And if those
guns had been mounted more I guess efficiently, it could
have been a totally different outcome from this whole event.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
Yeah, for sure. He also, I mean, most of those
bullets didn't even make it out of his own vehicle
because the way he had the big fifty cow mounted,
it ended up hitting his own armor. So you see
like shooting toward this propane thing, and immediately these shots
are just sort of exploding because I think they were
(41:34):
some special kind of round or something, and they were
sort of exploding at you know, into his own tank.
So yeah, and then who knows if he even knew
what was going on, Like, no one knows what he
could even see inside that thing. So the machines damaged.
At this point, all the anti freeze has dumped out.
There's white smoke just pouring from this thing. There's hydraulic
(41:57):
fluid leaking all over the place, and it's pretty clear
that like the last gasp is happening. So he heads
down to Gambles of Granby hardware store. There was a
guy on the town board there related to the hardware
store that approved the concrete plant, and so they were
on the list. And you see this thing chugging along.
(42:20):
It's on its last legs. Somehow remarkably had not failed
up into that point. Yeah, Like I can't believe at
some point it didn't. Those treads didn't. I guess that's
why the bulldozer there there's you know, it's like a tank.
It's it's supposed to do that, so it was doing
it well. But what he didn't know was that there
was a basement in that hardware store, and eventually that
right front tread slipped down just a couple of feet
(42:44):
just enough into that basement to where the tread had
nothing against it and it was just spinning. So it
was finally stopped.
Speaker 1 (42:53):
Yeah, people were walking alongside of this thing for a
lot of the time, so there were people within earshot
at this point, and there suddenly comes a muffled gunshot
from inside the pull the kill dozer, and people were like, well,
I'm pretty sure that if that's Marv he Meyer who's
in there, he's no longer with us, and they were correct.
(43:16):
They the next day they tried to blow a hole
into the kill dozer, and do you remember at the outset,
I said that it was probably superior to a tank.
The reason I said that is because the swat team
who was creating this explosive charge to try to breach it,
they consulted with some explosive experts who told them what
charge to create to blow a hole in the side
(43:38):
of a tank and it didn't work. Yeah, the explosive
charge that could blow a hole in a tank did
not blow a hole in the kill dozer. That's how
thick and well welded this superstructure over the bulldozer was.
Speaker 2 (43:54):
So nobody was killed or injured in this thing, which
was remarkable considering what was happening. It was a little
over two hours, up to seven million dollars in damage.
I think eleven of the thirteen buildings were occupied at
the time, and like you said, people were literally running
out the back door for a lot of these and
(44:16):
that was it. You know, the guy ends up, you know,
they take this tank apart, and they didn't want any
memory of it in town, so they take it apart,
get rid of the parts. I think one of them
ended up staying with the Thompson family, like one small part, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:32):
A trunion I think, something that connects the bucket to
the rest of the dozer that had broken off when
he came crashing through their house.
Speaker 2 (44:40):
Yeah. But aside from that, people basically wanted to forget
about it, and with the help of you know, insurance
and everything, they ended up rebuilding everything. Not that it
wasn't at great personal cost as well, of course, but
Marv was gone and they were really eager to move
on for the most part as it.
Speaker 1 (45:00):
Yeah, Casey Farrell, who owned Gamble's hardware store, it took
him seven years because his store was insured, but it
wasn't insured for the kind of money it takes to
rebuild after a dozer rampage. But I guess the Denver
Post visited a year after on the anniversary of it
to do a story, and they found that most of
the buildings had either been rebuilt or were in the
process of rebuilding. And I believe the mayor at the
(45:23):
time this, I guess this would have been a year after.
A guy named Ted Wang. He said that the whole
rampage had actually inspired the town to become tighter as
a community, Like more people became involved in local politics,
and the town just kind of like took pride in
its own resurrection and rebuilding itself brick from brick, which
is essentially I guess, the opposite of what Marvy Meyer
(45:44):
would have wanted from his rampage.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
Yeah, you know, probably, And you know the narrative that
you hinted at early was still lives on for a
lot of people. A lot of people think this guy's
a folk hero, probably not surprisingly a lot of those
people on the very far right of the political spectrum,
and say, you know, this was a guy taking down,
you know, his local government that was being he was
(46:08):
a victim of his local government, and he was taking
them out, you know, doing what we all want to
do on any given day. And people still celebrate June
fourth is Killedozer Day in some of those circles.
Speaker 1 (46:21):
Yeah, And so, you know, doing research on this, I
just got less and less sympathetic with the guy and
really just came to dislike him. And then I came
across that Dozer Manifesto webcomic by mister V and just
reading some of it, I was like, well, I'm not
exactly sure how I think about this whole thing, and
(46:41):
I think I don't have enough information about what really
went on in that town or didn't go on to
decide one way or another, and get I don't think
that matters, But I just thought it was interesting that
I had an about face. I guess, yeah, I find
it interesting when I think of my thoughts.
Speaker 2 (47:03):
There was no one is quite sure who came up
with the name kill Dozer in terms of this case,
but there was obviously the band kill Dozer got to
shout them out from Madison, Wisconsin, Okay, and they may have.
I think they were the early eighties where they before
or after the movie, because when they're a movie as well.
Speaker 1 (47:23):
There was a movie called kill Dozer from nineteen seventy four.
It was the ABC Suspense Saturday Suspense TV movie that
was based on a nineteen forty four short story by
fantasy writer Theodore Sturgeon.
Speaker 2 (47:36):
Okay, so I bet kill Those are the band named
themselves after. That would be mine, I would think.
Speaker 1 (47:40):
But yeah, I don't understand why. It's like, well, where
did the name come from? Like kill those? Like you
would just look at that thing and be like, that's
a kill dozer without ever hearing that word together. It's
not like some great mystery like that's a kill dozer.
That's just what you call that thing. Humans have some
sort of innate genetic understanding of seeing that thing and
(48:01):
knowing that it's a kill dozer without ever seeing that
word before.
Speaker 2 (48:06):
Yeah, though it didn't kill, No.
Speaker 1 (48:08):
It didn't. That's a great point. So it's a I
guess destroy dozer is a better one, yeah, or a bulldozer.
Oh yeah. If you want to know more about kill Dozer,
there's plenty of stuff to read and watch on the internet.
Just be wary. Hopefully we've armed you with a little
bit of info to measure against. And since I said that,
(48:30):
it's time of course for a listener mail.
Speaker 2 (48:33):
Yeah, and watch Tread You can rent it. I think
it's free on two V and some other stuff.
Speaker 1 (48:39):
But it is really well done. It's a great documentary.
Speaker 2 (48:43):
Well, he does these recreations that I guess are CGI,
but it looked to me like I was like, man,
did they actually build another kill dozer replica to shoot
the stuff?
Speaker 1 (48:54):
Yeah? It was one of those few documentaries that had
one hundred and fifty million dollar budget.
Speaker 2 (48:59):
Not sure, but it looked good. And it's only like
ninety eight minutes long or less than that eighty eight
minutes ninety It's it's definitely worth seeing, all right, Listener Mail.
Dangers of Whistling. Hey, guys, just finish that episode. And
I thought you were going to mention the one thing
about not whistling in a theater. Not one hundred percent
sure of the veracity of the history of this, but
(49:19):
old theater. Legend has it that early stage hands were
also sailors and or dock workers who communicated in whistles,
and therefore, if you were a casual bystander whistling in
a theater, you could actually cause an accident through miscommunication.
As with some of other superstitions in the theater, this
one is based more on safety than anything else, and
I always find it fascinating. The concept of bad luck
(49:42):
was apparently effective for early safety compliance. Thanks for keeping
me entertained on my long LA commutes. And that is
from Claudia, who was a stage hand in Los Angeles.
Speaker 1 (49:52):
Awesome. Thanks a lot, Claudia. I feel like we talked
about that. It came across it in research or something
like that. I don't know if it was related to
whistling or what, but had to do with salty sea
dogs moonlighting as stage hands for the theater.
Speaker 2 (50:06):
Oh I remember that? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (50:08):
All right, Well, thanks Claudia for getting in touch. And
if you want to be like Claudia and share something
awesome and interesting with us, we'd love that you can
wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send
it on its way to stuff. Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (50:26):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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