August 15, 2024 • 52 mins
When someone left a bomb at a Civil War reenactment event in 2017, it looked like antifascist activists were out for revenge after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. A mysterious letter writer claiming to be an antifascist collective took credit for the bomb and threatened even more violence to come if Civil War reenactments weren't called off. But the bomber wasn't antifa - it was a spurned Confederate re-enactor.
Sources:
https://qz.com/1800988/antifa-falsely-accused-of-threatening-civil-war-group https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2020/02/12/civil-war-reenactor-antifa-threats/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/civil-war-reenactment-in-virginia-canceled-amid-worries-over-violence/2017/08/18/633b71d8-844a-11e7-b359-15a3617c767b_story.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/we-wanted-to-send-a-message-reenactors-stage-civil-war-battle-despite-threat/2017/10/15/77dd0348-b1c4-11e7-a908-a3470754bbb9_story.html https://www.winchesterstar.com/news/frederick_county/increased-security-planned-for-battle-of-cedar-creek-event/article_aec48f2e-c708-5b7d-8679-1ca677e96f3d.html https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/65406287/united-states-v-drake/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Coozo Media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
On October fourteenth, twenty seventeen, the Battle of Cedar Greek
was happening all over again. Originally fought on October nineteenth,
eighteen sixty four, the crushing defeat meant Confederate troops could
no longer maneuver through the Shenandoah Valley to march on Washington,
and the Union victory was the last minute boost for
Lincoln's reelection campaign one hundred and fifty three years later,
(00:29):
as reenactors in Middletown, Virginia milled around in their historically
accurate wool uniforms and replica weaponry waiting for the battle
to begin, one of them found an alarming anachronism in
the sutler's tent, a pipe bomb. I'm Mollykonger, and this
is weird, little guys. The Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation has
(01:05):
held their annual re enactment of the battle since nineteen ninety,
but twenty seventeen was a politically fraught time in America.
On August twelfth, twenty seventeen, the United the Right rally
in Charlesville, Virginia ended when a young rally attendee who
kept a framed picture of Adolf Hitler on his nightstand,
ran his car through a crowd of peaceful protesters marching
on a closed street. He injured dozens and killed Heather Hire.
(01:30):
Images of the crowd that day, with rally attendees carrying
Confederate flags and swastikas side by side, flooded the national consciousness.
Most Americans heard the word antifa for the first time.
That week, the national conversation about Confederate monuments, which had
been simmering all year, boiled over. The city council in Baltimore, Maryland,
(01:52):
voted to remove their Confederate statues just two days later.
The same week, the mayor of Lexington, Kentucky, asked his
city council to approve the rows removal of the statues
at their courthouse. The Confederate monument in Hollywood Forever Cemetery
in LA was removed overnight. From Florida to California, Confederate
monuments were removed, toppled, and vandalized. No one wanted to
(02:14):
be the next Charlottesville. Six days after the rally, officials
in Manassas, a small city outside of DC about two
hours north of Charlottesville, announced they were calling off the
annual Civil War Reenactment Weekend scheduled for the end of August.
The Washington Posts reported that the reenactors themselves were worried
the quote racially charged atmosphere around the country over whether
(02:35):
to remove Civil War monuments would lead to violence. So
the concern was not whether it was appropriate to continue
celebrating the Confederacy in the wake of the deadly rally,
but rather anxiety about the possibility that Antifa America's new
black clad boogeyman would target these events. And these growing
(02:56):
fears of persecution from the radical left were confirmed on
September twenty third, when the Cedar Greek Battlefield Foundation received
an ominous letter in the mail. Instead of a return haddress,
the envelope bore a symbol that was fresh in their minds,
a black circle containing a black flag overlaying a red flag.
(03:17):
It was from Antifa. The letter inside read, you.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
Need to cancel your coming up celebration of the Civil
War on October thirteen, fourteen fifteen, twenty seventeen. If you
choose to continue with this farce of history that clearly
celebrates the war to keep African Americans in chains, then
we have no choice but to come in protest. We
will come and disrupt and cause problems for all those
who attend the atrocity of history. Several hundred of our
(03:45):
supporters will attend and slash tires, block traffic, harassed patrons
and reenactors. We will make Charlottesville look like a Sunday picnic.
Many of us have dogs, so we'll bring dog feces
to throw on people. We will also throw cups of
human urine. We might resort to actually firing guns into
the camps and at the re enactors. We will put
poison in the water. We will use noise to disrupt
(04:08):
the battles in sleep. These events must stop. Our local
organizer tells us he is ready to go. You have
been warned. Now. If it is not called off, we
will destroy you. You have less than one month to
issue a cancelation notice to it asap.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Days before the event in October, the Cedar Creek Battlefield
Foundation did announce publicly that they had received a threatening letter,
but that the event would go on with increased security,
and the details of the threat were not released, but
speculation immediately turned to the culture war, and after the
bomb was discovered, The National Review wrote The simplest and
most logical explanation is that this is a new, violent
(04:49):
extension of the effort to remove Confederate statues. The Federalists
lamented that history itself was becoming another casualty in the
culture war. The threatening letters continue for over a year,
becoming increasingly gruesome and terrifyingly specific, targeting members of the
board at Cedar Creek and their family members. Cedar Creek
(05:10):
had to cancel the reenactment in twenty eighteen after one
director of the foundation resigned in fear for his family
safety when the letter writer threatened to put a bomb
under his mother's car. The new director started getting threats
of sexual violence against her young daughters. The mayor of
Gettysburg received a letter threatening to bomb the annual Gettysburg
Remembrance Day parade. Would Antifa stop at nothing to destroy history?
(05:36):
But it wasn't Antifa. It wasn't Antifa at all.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
It was Gerald.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
Gerald Leonard Drake born in nineteen fifty eight in Michigan,
loves the Civil War. In nineteen ninety six, his hometown paper,
The port here In Times, Harold wrote an article about
his dedication to reenactment. He'd gotten a second job to
save up the ten thousand dollars it would cost him
to try and sport Judith his five hundred and twenty
five pound replica Civil War canon from Michigan to Columbus,
(06:06):
Georgia for the Chattahoochee Heritage Festival. Judith the Canon was
named after his wife, Judy, who would file for divorce
the following year. When he married his third wife, Donna
in twenty ten, they took wedding photos in Civil War
era address at the historic Adams County Courthouse in Gettysburg.
They got two cats and named them Shiloh and Musket.
(06:31):
But the world was changing. The world of eighteen sixty
falls further away every day, no matter how historically accurate
the brass buttons on your coat are. In twenty eleven,
he posted a thread on a Civil War reenactment forum
about a living history event he'd recently participated in a
tour group. Was appalled that the re enactors, role playing
(06:51):
as soldiers reading aloud letters from home, read a letter
describing the brutal whipping of an enslaved person that was
riddled with racial slurs. Though he felt that the event
itself went well, he wrote that shit hit the fan afterwards,
and the liberals in the group had a bitch session
about appropriate language.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
I guess what I'm asking here is, as living historians
and reenactors, aren't we supposed to do as good of
a job and impression of our ancestors as we possibly can.
We used to get praise and accolades for doing a
great first person impression. Let me know if anyone else
is having this kind of trouble for being the best
you can be.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Surprisingly, even in twenty eleven, fellow users on the Civil
War message board disagreed with Gerald their reenactment groups is
committed as they were to historical accuracy, did not use
the N word. One user, whose profile bears the badge
for Member of the Year wrote that he is quote
careful to avoid certain language in terms, always realizing that
(07:55):
my performance is in the present century to modern day
folks who live in the present would not understand the customs, practices,
and language of the nineteenth century with any real clarity.
Another user, a former moderator of the forum, replied to
a comment from Drake that he was looking for a
less PC group, wrote that he can't imagine there is
any group out there that would condone that kind of language,
(08:17):
and all this achieves is bad publicity for reenactors, adding
that those tourists surely all went home that day and
told their friends about the racists they saw at the event.
A year later, Drake posted again in the same Civil
War forum, complaining that people are getting too hung up
on safety, writing remember when reenacting used to be fun
(08:38):
and mourning the old days when battle reenactments were more
like real battle Again. Fellow reenactors pushed back, with one
veteran reenactor writing that he did indeed remember those days.
He'd once had a costume ruined and gotten pretty serious
burns when another reenactor shot him with a replica shotgun.
Even in his chosen community of Civil War reenactors, Gerald
(09:01):
was living in a version of the past that was
becoming increasingly lonely. In October of twenty fourteen, things really
started to fall apart. His third marriage was on the rocks,
and after what sounds like a pretty petty dispute, Gerald
was kicked out of his Civil War reenactment unit. As
a volunteer at the Cedar Creek Battlefield. He'd heard a
(09:22):
rumor that someone was planning to sneak into the reenactment
without paying the registration fee. Gerald and his friend and
fellow reenactor Daryl, found this to be an outrageous offense
and decided to print up flyers letting everyone know that
Duffy Miller wasn't going to pay his entry fee and
anyone who sees him should stop him. Duffy Miller, as
(09:43):
it turns out, was their unit commander, and he was
not pleased to see the posters. He kicks Gerald and
Daryl out of the unit. Jerald continued volunteering at Cedar Creek,
but it seems this incident was the end of his
love for reenacting.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
Now.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
I can't find exactly how much it cost to register
for the event in twenty fourteen, but the twenty twenty
four registration fee is thirty five dollars, and I know
from the forum post that's actually been increased in the
last couple of years to cover the new security measures
that they have to have, so you have to assume
it was much less ten years ago. So the inciting
(10:21):
incident for this entire debacle was a couple of old
guys fighting about twenty bucks and the sanctity of Confederate reenactment.
I guess, so what's a guy to do now? First
they stop letting him say the N word, You're not
even allowed to shoot each other anymore, and now he's
kicked out of his unit Entirely a hobby he'd loved
(10:42):
since the early nineties was being ruined. They weren't saying
like wokeness back then, But I think if this happened today,
Gerald would say that it was being ruined by woke
He'd been left by three wives and now his own
civil war unit didn't want him around. But he continued
volunteering at Cedar Creek. He retired, He built and painted
(11:05):
little models, got into model rockets, He traveled the world,
and he posted a lot, and apparently he held on
to his anger about that incident at the twenty fourteen
Cedar Creek reenactment. I spent a lot of time combing
through hundreds of pages of court documents, years and years
(11:25):
of his posts on forums, But I can't quite sort
out what the catalyst was in twenty seventeen. Why did
he wait three years to put that bomb at Cedar Creek.
Maybe he saw the news about the Manassas reenactment getting canceled.
Out of fear of political violence at the wake up
Unite the Right and just got an idea because within
(11:46):
weeks of that news story, Gerald started writing letters. After
his first letter to the Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation in September,
he followed up by placing an actual bomb at the
event in October. The reenactment community is pretty small, and
the pipe bomb was big news, but a rumor was
(12:09):
going around on Facebook that a teenager had been arrested
for the original letter, and then that was sort of conflated.
As you know, people are posting and reposting and talking
about the post that they saw. It was conflated to
the idea that someone had been arrested for the bomb,
and the rumor was very quickly disproven. No one was
arrested replacing the bomb in the vendor's tent, but the
(12:30):
letter writer was frustrated. If they thought the culprit had
been apprehended, they wouldn't be afraid anymore. John Buchheister, a
vendor at the event who told a reporter that he
was present when the bomb was found, was one of
the posters in that Facebook rumor mill and there's nothing
malicious here. He just reposted something that someone else had
said that the would be bomber had been apprehended. I
(12:54):
think there was a lot of relief in believing that,
so a lot of people were posting it. But I
guess our letter writer saw John Buchheister's post, because on
November thirteenth, twenty seventeen, he opened a letter addressed to
his home in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Like the first letter, the
envelope was printed with the ANTIFA symbol in place of
a return address. Inside a typed letter read.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
Thank you so much for putting on Facebook that a
teenager was arrested for the threat to see her creek.
It was so much easier to bring in a bomb.
Do something like this again for us. We are coming
to the Gettysburg parade and speech. Thank you again for
all your help in the last terror event.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
That same week, a local newspaper in Gettysburg received a
letter threatening the upcoming Gettysburg Remembrance Day parade. The letter
threatened to drive trucks through the crowd at the parade,
a troubling callback to the still recent vehicular murderer Unite
the Right, and threatened to put sharpshooters in windows and
on rooftops. The letter writer ended the note by giving
(14:00):
a detailed description of the bomb at Cedar Creek quote
for proof that we did the Cedar Creek terror attack.
But just as Cedar Creek had not canceled when they
were threatened, the Gettysburg Rememberance Day parade was not canceled
that year, but the route was significantly shortened to allow
for a heavy police presence. As Chris Anders, a Republican
(14:21):
political activist, wrote on Facebook, apparently Antifa and other hate
groups are headed to try and cause problems this Saturday
at the annual Remembrance Day parade, but he wrote that
he would be marching with his brothers in Gray rather
than giving in to terrorists. There are nearly one hundred
comments on this Facebook post, mostly agreeing that Dantifa must
be stopped or offering questionable safety tips, like advising that
(14:45):
you should use a wool scarf to protect yourself from teargas.
I have to assume that would only make things worse.
I feel like wool is very absorbent. But one loan commenter,
a reenactor from New England who rides with the First
Main Cavalry, got a different theory. He wrote, I bet
(15:05):
you five dollars that the perpetrator is a reenactor or
former reenactor. No offense to anyone, but no one knows
about rem Day beyond reenactors and locals. For it to
be a target, someone would have to be aware of it,
and there are plenty of other high profile, low security
events with bigger crowd numbers to choose. From his comment,
(15:26):
drew ire from the victimized confederates obsessed with the idea
of a massive conspiracy from the radical left. He was,
of course correct. And now here's where things start to
(15:50):
get really weird. Just some truly inexplicable behavior with deep
weird roots. I mean, I guess that's the show, right,
This guy's weird. But here's where it takes its super
weird turn. Gerald is retired at this point, and when
he's not traveling, he's volunteering. He's still volunteering at Cedar
Creek even though he doesn't reenact anymore, but he's also
(16:12):
volunteering at sky Meadows State Park. It's not entirely clear
why a registered sex offender was allowed to volunteer at
the state park alongside a high school student, but that's
what it says in the affidavit. So I guess that
one fell through the cracks at sky Meadows because while
he did successfully petition to get himself removed from the
sex offender registry in twenty twenty one, in twenty eighteen,
(16:34):
the background check required for volunteers at state parks would
have shown that he was a registered sex offender for
a two thousand and four conviction in Ohio for sexual
imposition and child endangerment. And again, I'll be so clear
with you right up front, there's no allegation that Drake
was involved in any inappropriate sexual conduct as a volunteer anywhere,
(16:58):
not at the state park, not anywhere in the time
period of these events. There's no allegation that he's touching
any children or engaging in any inappropriate sexual conduct. But
I'm not just telling you he's a registered sex offender
to sort of point and laugh at that. As a circumstance,
these things intersect. So in twenty eighteen, he's volunteering at
(17:21):
the park with this teenage boy, and one afternoon in
February they're volunteering together. They're shooting the shit fill in
the time and Gerald, who is sixty at this point,
is telling this teenage boy about his hobby of Civil
war reenactment, which is very tragically in decline. The topic
of the twenty seventeen reenactment at Cedar Creek comes up.
(17:41):
I have to assume Gerald brought it up, because why
would the seventeen year old boy have brought that up?
But Gerald is telling the kid about some funny articles
about that twenty seventeen event. He later emailed the teenager
what appeared to be photographs of newspaper clippings about the bombing.
These these articles, the bomb went off. The articles he
(18:04):
emails this teenager contained details of the bomb actually killing people,
with more deaths caused by subsequent sniper fire. But we
know the bomb didn't really go off. No one got shot,
no one got hurt, nothing really happened. The articles he
showed his young friend were completely fake. The federal agents
(18:27):
investigating the case wrote that attempts to locate sources for
these fake newspaper clippings turned up nothing. I mean, not
even anything online showing these fake articles. Just nothing.
Speaker 3 (18:38):
There's nothing.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
He must have made them himself, and that's where his
sex offender status ties back in. In two thousand and three,
he was indicted in Auglaize County, Ohio for gross sexual imposition,
and shortly after he's indicted, someone starts sending weird letters
to the Auglaize County prosecutor. The letters were made to
(19:00):
appear as though they were sent by a member of
the police department in Drake's hometown of Port here On, Michigan,
and they appeared to prove that Drake's second wife was
a child abuser. The letter writer sent a forged polygraph
report on Michigan State Police letterhead and a forged notarized
statement from Drake's estranged wife, and when his home was
(19:21):
eventually searched, police found a doctored page from the local newspaper.
He had taken an actual newspaper and manually altered it
with a false news story about his estranged second wife, Susan,
pleading guilty to child abuse and endangerment. No such news
story ever existed, and I can find no evidence that
Susan was ever charged with such a crime. Maybe a
(19:44):
more thorough journalist would have pushed harder for the details here,
but court cases involving sexual abuse of a minor tend
to be completely closed. Those documents are sealed unless someone
was sitting in those hearings, and there's local news reports
about the testimony. You're just you're not to find it,
and short of reaching out to the parties involved, there's
(20:04):
no way for me to know exactly what led to
Gerald Drake being convicted of sexual imposition and child endangerment
or why he tried to frame his strange wife for it.
But I can tell you that after his conviction there's
a note on the docket that the judge prohibited Drake
from contacting his second ex wife and her minor daughter
from a prior marriage. So I think we can get
(20:26):
the gist of the situation without me asking a young
woman why her stepdad, a man now in prison for
making a bomb, was court ordered to stay away from
her when she was ten. Take from that way you
will the relevant kernel of that story, though, is those
fake newspaper articles. In two thousand and three, he's manually
(20:47):
cutting and pasting by hand and xeroxing his creations to
disguise the alterations. He's arts and craftsing his way into
an alternate reality where his ex wife is the one
in endangering children, not him, And in twenty eighteen he's
doing it again. He's making fake newspaper clippings about what
he wishes were real. He's showing this teenage boy a
(21:08):
reality where the bomb did go off and the people
who snubbed him died. And while he was in jail
for that sex offense a short eight months in Ohio
County jail, he made another art project of sorts. In
September two thousand four, the Auglais County Sheriff's office reached
out to the FBI Field office in Cleveland. Gerald had
(21:30):
been trying to make friends in jail by showing off
his knowledge of explosives. He produced eight pages of hand
drawn diagrams and instructions for creating a pipe bomb, a
CO two cartridge bomb, a Coleman fuel bomb, a propane
tank bomb, and diagrams about how to modify the kind
of inert grenades you can buy as antiques or at
the Army surplus store and how to turn them back
(21:53):
into live grenades. And the diagram of the pipe bomb
he drew in jail in two thousand and four. He's
remarkably similar to the device he made in twenty seventeen.
It doesn't appear that anything ever came of the incident.
In the jail back in two thousand and four, you know,
the sheriff's office contact of the FBI, and they said, Hey,
we've got these weird drawings. What do you guys think
(22:14):
about this. There's no indication that there was follow up
from there, but apparently they held on to them. Those
drawings remained in a filing cabinet somewhere in Ohio for
twenty years. It's kind of surprising that they still had
those drawings in twenty nineteen, but they are included in
the affidavit for the search warrant. So in the spring
(22:35):
of twenty eighteen, he seems pretty content with his hobbies.
He's making fake newspaper articles about his bomb going off
and showing them to a kid he volunteers with based
on his eBay review history. He's painting miniature models of
Godzilla and Frankenstein, both five stars from Gerald, and he's
getting into model rocketry. In March, he took a solo
(22:56):
vacation to Amsterdam. His trip Advisor count provides a pretty
robust log of his travels. He wasn't a big fan
of the Jewish History Museum, titling his review not really
for Gentiles, and writing that he felt shorted by the
lack of artifacts from the death camps at the Holocaust Museum.
He felt that it had been quote scrubbed of shock
(23:17):
due to the new PC way all museums are going.
He felt the same way about the Dutch Resistance Museum,
writing if you were looking for the story of the
full account of atrocities done on the citizens, well this
display doesn't have it. It Like many museums today have
had to lighten up on their truth so as not
to offend anyone. He did, however, really enjoy the Museum
(23:41):
of Prostitution and his visit to the Red Light District.
In a later post on a forum for sex doll owners,
he boasted that he is familiar with the female condoms
he uses to keep his dolls clean because he's used
them in European brothels. And for what it's worth, the
Anne frank House got his seal of approval as a
World War II history buff the Ripley's Believe It or
(24:01):
Not Museum, and he was deeply upset that his hostel
did not provide a traditional American breakfast with quote hot meats.
I don't know why you would expect a cheap hostel
in Amsterdam to have American breakfast, but he was not
satisfied and just as an aside about his trip Advisor reviews,
(24:21):
I think that was my favorite thing about researching this.
He loves to review the cell site location data in
one of the search warrant affidavits shows that he likely
dropped off that very first threat letter at a USPS
dropbox in a strip mall near the Dulles Airport just
before boarding an Air France flight from DC to Madrid
on September twenty first, twenty seventeen. So while his letter
(24:44):
threatening to throw piss and shit at Civil War reenactors
was making its way to Cedar Creek, he was on
his way to Spain. He hated the bullfighting, but he
raved about the burger king on Plaza de Castilla. Apparently
the burger king at home is always getting his order wrong.
He had to go all the way to Spain to
get his whopper with no onions and no pickles. The
(25:06):
burger king in his hometown only gets four stars from
gerald And Since visiting Italy in April twenty seventeen, he
rated four different Italian restaurants in Winchester, Virginia, based on
how the pizza measures up to the pizza in Rome
is given out two just like Romes, and two were
failures according to Gerald, So maybe he's done. Maybe it's
(25:29):
out of his system. Three threatening letters and one bomb
that didn't go off, and then he's back to his hobbies.
But on June nineteenth, twenty eighteen, his local newspaper ran
a story about the upcoming reenactment at Cedar Creek. The
event was just four months away and the board of
directors wanted everyone to know that the reenactment weekend would
have additional security after the incident the year before. Days
(25:51):
after the paper ran that story, a pair of identical
letters were mailed to the newspaper, the Winchester Star, and
the Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation. The first letters, the envelopes
had a symbol where the return address should be, but
for some reason, these letters had a version of the
anti fascist symbol with the red flag on top and
the black flag behind, which is reversed from the original letters.
(26:12):
I think he probably just downloaded a new image and
didn't notice that it was different. I don't think he
realized he was signaling a preference for anarchism over communism.
Or vice versa. You know, both versions of that symbol
exist and are perfectly real and valid and are used
by different people, but they are in fact different symbols
and do mean something slightly different. I don't think Gerald
(26:33):
knew that. And this time both letters were addressed to
Joe Derezo, the president of the foundation's board, and they
threatened to kill his mother with a car bomb if
he didn't call off the reenactment in October. Dereza later
told agents that he took the threat seriously enough that
he began checking underneath his mother's car for explosive devices.
But the language in the letters was odd and oddly specific.
(26:58):
Though the Winchester Star art didn't actually mention what those
increased security measures would be, the letter writer seemed to know.
One of the private discussions the board had was about
banning spectators from bringing bags of any kind to the event,
but they were worried that this would be an issue
for people like parents with diaper bags. The letter writer
(27:21):
said there were quote many ways for us to sneak
in a surprise, specifically mentioning putting a bomb inside of
a diaper bag, and the board had also quietly been
in contact with the local sheriff's office about providing metal detectors,
and the letter writer seemed to know this too, boasting
that he'd already outsmarted their security.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
We now have plastic bombs, so metal detectors are useless.
We have found a man that's going to pose as
an enactor to drive in some kind of fertilizer bomb.
We have coolers, thermoses, water bottles, all made into small IEDs.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
In the completely real and very serious way that real
Antifa terror cells sign off their terrorism threat letters, the
letter writer explained why the bomb didn't work in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 3 (28:12):
We are the ones that did it to you last year.
We used a bad bomb guy. His mercury switch and
rocket launch wire didn't work on the pipe bomb covered
in nuts. Just so you know we are real and returning. Yeah,
just so you know we're real. Okay, it's such a
weird mess, but silly or not, the letters recipient was
(28:33):
terrified they were threatening to blow up his mom, and
there really was a real bomb the year before, so
you know he's not bluffing. You already know he really
can build a bomb, so you can't laugh it off
while it's happening, but in hindsight, what a goofy hass
sign off. Just so you know, we had a bad
(28:53):
bomb guy last year, but we're very real and we
fixed that. Okay, We're real.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
A sixth letter, the third in this second batch, was
sent to John Bucheister, that vendor in Pennsylvania who had
spoken to the media about being there when the bomb
was discovered in twenty seventeen. He'd gotten a letter in
the first batch too, thanking him for spreading that rumor
that someone had been arrested for placing the bomb. Confusingly,
the letter he got in July twenty eighteen was addressed
(29:21):
to Joe, just like the letter sent to Joe Derezo
the same week, and it seemed to be speaking to
Joe Derezzo asking for him to call off the event,
which presumably Derezo could do as president of the board.
But John Buchheister is just a guy in Pennsylvania who
sells antiques and Civil War reproductions. This letter, like the others,
(29:43):
threatened to kill Derezo's mother.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
Since we can't seem to get you to stop this
celebration of a war to keep men in chains, maybe
if we go after your volunteers that help out. You
will stop this. I like the idea of burning your
mother alive in a car bomb.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
Days after these letters were received, the Foundation announced on
July third, twenty eighteen, they were calling off the reenactment
in October. You know, they got that letter in twenty
seventeen and they decided we're going to soldier On, We're
going to have the event, And then there was a
real bomb. People were really in danger. So when they
got this second set of letters in the middle of
(30:22):
twenty eighteen, they decided, we got to call it off.
It's not safe. What if the bomb goes off this year.
We know this guy's not bluffing, we know he got
a bomb in the tent last year. We can't risk it.
And on the Civil War Talk Forum, that online forum
where Gerald's been posting for years, reactions were mixed.
Speaker 3 (30:42):
A lot of.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
Users agreed that it was the right thing to do.
It's just not worth the risk people bring their children,
their families. Others didn't think it was right to let
the terrorists win, with one poster noting that he never
stopped going to NASCAR races after nine to eleven. I
don't know that NASCAR was like a big target for
al Qaida. But he's been carrying that weight for years,
(31:03):
I guess. But some posters were starting to ask questions
like why Cedar Creek and why only Cedar Creek. It's
not the largest or most high profile reenactment, even in
just the immediate area. I mean, I don't know if
you've ever spent time in Virginia, but most of that
part of Virginia just is a hippl war battlefield every
(31:25):
town has. When every town has a plaque and Cedar
Creek was a Union victory, wouldn't these people be happier
targeting or reenactment of a Confederate win. And then, after
pages and pages of going back and forth about this
decision on the forum, Gerald himself weighed in.
Speaker 3 (31:45):
I volunteer at Cedar Creek. From what we have been told,
and this is not for general release. The foundation has
received threats of bodily harm to the board members. They're
families and everyone that helps out. Then there is the
very high cost of security. It is It's sad that
we live in a world with such a hostile climate
to the Confederacy ANDPS has taken battle flags out of
all its stores and statues are being taken down. Here
(32:08):
in Virginia, schools, streets, parks, anything named about the Confederacy
is being changed. I do not know if they will
officially announce the reason or reasons for this decision. Last
year they refused to say much, and rumors were all
over the place. We all need to maybe send some
money to the foundation for expenses, as this was their
only way of raising funds. With the fall of so
(32:29):
many Confederate symbols and events going by the wayside, I
now can feel what my ancestors did when the actual
Confederacy fell.
Speaker 2 (32:39):
So he is victim and perpetrator here lingering in the
comment section, watching his fellow Civil War enthusiasts argue about
how the community should respond to what he has done.
It's like in every police procedural drama where the killer
returns to the scene of the crime just to take
in the aftermath, and again, just as sudden as the
(33:00):
letters began, they stopped again. He got what he wanted.
The event was canceled in October, just before the now
(33:22):
canceled event would have been approaching, Joe Derezo resigned as
head of the foundation's board. He didn't feel the board
was taking the threat seriously enough, although it's unclear what
discussions were taking place behind closed doors because there'd been
no threats in several months and the event was already canceled,
so I don't know what prompted him to resign just
then In October and the local paper, The Winchester Star,
(33:45):
ran an article about Derezo's resignation, and like clockwork, a
few days after the article ran, the letter started up again.
The foundation got a letter addressed to Derezzo, who again
had just resigned, saying we're sorry to see you go,
and moving on to threatening the foundation's new acting director,
Jeanette Schaefer. And I'm sorry it gets gross here. I mean,
(34:10):
none of this was good, but it gets gross again.
I'm always on the fence about repeating things like this, right,
Like is this just for shock value? Does this add
information to the story? Do you need to know exactly
what he said in order for the story to make sense?
But given his prior conviction for a crime of a
sexual nature involving a young girl, I think it does matter.
(34:33):
He wasn't just saying whatever he thought would be the
scariest and the nastiest like this kind of ties back
into his own past. The letter writer told Derezo that
his quote pretty mother and bald headed dad, we're safe
now that he'd resigned. But quote if Jeanette Schaeffer thinks
she is safe, well she is right, but her children
(34:56):
are not. If she puts together a reenactment to celebrate
being men in chains, we will come after her girls.
We have a convicted rapist that would love to introduce
them to his penis. There are letters that are a
lot more graphic than this when it comes to the
sexual threats to those girls. It's in the court record.
(35:20):
If you're interested in that, I don't see the value
in proceeding further. You get it at this point. But again,
even though these letters are obviously very frightening, there's something
off about them. The letter writer seems to know way
too much about the specific inner workings of the Cedar
(35:42):
Creek Battlefield Foundation. He knows a lot about the personal
lives of these individuals and the way that they interact
in this space, and the way they run this organization,
which again is not large. This is not a massive,
significant operation. This is a pretty small, regional annual event.
(36:03):
One of the letters in this patch threatened to shoot
a man named Pat as he opens up the visitor
center in the morning, and members of the board told
federal investigators that since those threats in June, the visitor
center was only open on a limited basis and not
many people knew about that. You'd have to be really
close to the operation to know that Pat, who's the
board's only full time employee, sometimes opened up the visitor
(36:27):
center in the morning alone. And the letter tried to
cast blame on a rat in the organization, claiming that
their inside knowledge came from a man named Sean Mowbray.
But Mowbray hadn't been a volunteer with the organization since
twenty fourteen. But in twenty fourteen, Mowbray was at the
center of that dispute that got Gerald kicked out of
(36:48):
his re enactment unit. And it's not just the letters
that seemed to be escalating in intensity the same way
he sent that letter threatening to rape those girls, Drake
posted on the subredit for his hometown of Winchester, Virginia,
asking for recommendations for a good lawyer. He owned a
lot of antique and reproduction firearms, and was an enthusiastic
(37:09):
hobbyist in black powder weapons. But he wanted a real gun,
a gun that shoots real bullets, and when he went
to buy one, the store refused to sell him anything
after pulling a background check. Now, his own account of
the situation is sort of murky and one sided, and
some of the details I've been able to verify indicate
(37:30):
that he's not telling the truth. But it appears that
despite having no felony record, that's true, his conviction for
child endangerment comes up on his record as a domestic
violence conviction, so they wouldn't sell him a gun because
of that. There's no information in any of the hundreds
of pages of court documents I read that gives me
(37:51):
any real insight into why he may have wanted to
buy a gun that week in particular. But if I
were one of the people who had gotten one of
those lefts, that timing would take my breath away. He
also traveled to Paris that October, somehow squeezing it into
his busy schedule of threatening letters. He loved the Louver
(38:13):
and Notre Dumb, noting in his review that the movie
The Hunchback of Notre Dame really doesn't do it justice,
and he visited several notable World War II historical sites.
He'd boasted on Reddit earlier that month that he was
thinking of getting into World War II re enacting because
the Civil War scene was dying out. McDonald's and Five
(38:33):
Guys in Paris both got four stars from Gerald, with
run review saying seeing McDonald's in Paris was like seeing
an old friend to me. Cheap and consistent food that
is the same flavor around the world. Fair enough, But
when he got home it was back to business, firing
off a letter to the mayor of Gettysburg on Halloween,
(38:54):
again threatening to bomb the annual parade. The letter demanded
that the mayor quote sold the flying of Confederate flags
and post it on Facebook, then we will leave you alone.
Don't and someone is going to die. The ninth and
final letter was sent to the Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation
after the embattled organization announced in December twenty eighteen that
(39:16):
they would be holding the reenactment in twenty nineteen. This
letter was addressed to Pat, the foundation's only full time employee,
that guy that opens the visitor center sometimes. The letter
asked him, would you like to bury, your sister, your brother.
We could also just kill you when you sit alone
in the visitor center. We have a guy that likes
(39:39):
to rape, we could send him to visit your sister.
What followed were some sexual threats against the director's daughter
that really aren't fit to repeat. I mean, they're gross.
It's definitely the most specific letter in terms of the
actions being threatened and the particular victims being threatened in
a way that feels specific enough to be alarming. What
(40:02):
makes a quote unquote true threat in the eyes of
the law is kind of a moving target. You never
really know where the line is where a federal prosecutor
is going to say, I'm taking that one to a
grand jury. But in my experience reading cases like this,
mailing someone a letter that tells them exactly when, where,
and how you plan to kill them, that's usually pretty serious.
(40:25):
The law does not like to see that. But by
this time, the Feds already know it's Gerald. By the
time Pat is reading this absolutely unhinged letter threatening to
rape and kill his sister, the FBI has already gotten
Gerald's phone records from Sprint. They've been conducting physical surveillance
with an FBI agent following him to his storage unit
(40:48):
and then returning later with a bomb dog to sniff
around the door, and again suddenly the letter stopped. But
this time there's no explanation. When the letters stopped before,
it was because he got something that he wanted, but
this time they just stop. In a letter to the
(41:08):
court before his sentencing, Gerald claims he came to his
senses sometime in December twenty eighteen and realized that what
he was doing was wrong. It seems a little bit
more likely to me that one of the FBI agents
following him around said something to him, and that's not uncommon.
I've read plenty of threatening communications cases where the agent
(41:30):
writing the affidavit describes his first conversation with a guy
about threatening to behead a senator or something. Sometimes they'll
come to a guy's door and say, hey, did you
post this? Because you can't do that, don't do it again.
And the only reason we're reading the affidavit is because
the guy didn't stop posting. So the next conversation had
(41:51):
a very different tone. And I don't know if that's
what happened here. It doesn't say. And for as insanely
detailed as the documents supporting these search warrants are There's
some really important details missing right here. If they were
following him around in November of twenty eighteen, while these
letters are still being sent, why wasn't he arrested until
(42:12):
twenty twenty two. It's clear they spent all of twenty
nineteen investigating the case. There are search weren't applications here
for his phone, his storage unit, his house, his Google account,
and warrant served on his cell phone provider for his
cell location data. The warrants were executed at various times
throughout twenty nineteen, with the physical search of his home
(42:32):
and his storage unit happening in October twenty nineteen, and
they have him dead to rights. The cell site location
data puts him at the mailboxes where the letters were
mailed on the days that they were mailed. For some
of the letters, he drove out of state to mail them,
far from his home. So we have the GPS coordinates
showing him leaving his home in Winchester, Virginia, driving to
(42:55):
a strip mall in Pennsylvania where there's a USPS drop box,
and then coming back home. And we know that on
the days that he did that, the letter was picked
up at that mailbox and processed at that sorting facility,
so it's there's not a lot of other explanations for
why he's driving to these mailboxes on these days. And
(43:15):
they found the image file for that Antifa logo that
was printed on the envelopes on a thumb drive in
his house. We have drone footage from the twenty seventeen
reenactment showing his car approaching the area where the bomb
was found shortly before it was placed there. But they
gathered all of this evidence, I mean more evidence than
I've ever seen laid out in documentation like this. I
(43:36):
mean pages and pages of maps showing his GPS coordinates
on the days the letters were mailed.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
And they gathered all.
Speaker 2 (43:44):
This evidence and they did nothing with it. The documents
associated with all of these search warrants were sealed. That's normal.
Usually you keep that sealed until the arrest is made.
So nobody knew that his house had been searched except Gerald.
Sue Gerald knew. I think he had to know. But
after six months, the ceiling order expired. That can happen.
(44:08):
I think in most cases they're sort of set to
auto expire after a certain amount of time. But you'll
see in cases where they haven't made a move yet,
the prosecutor will apply to continue ceiling. It's not uncommon.
I think in this case they must have forgotten to
file a motion to continue the ceiling. That's the only
explanation I can think of for why they would let
(44:30):
these warrants get unsealed when they weren't ready to charge him.
But the ceiling order expired and somebody noticed immediately, because
the very same day, Justin Rolick wrote an article for
Courts with the headline disgruntled Civil War reenactor allegedly framed
Antifa by fabricating threats against his unit. Journalists don't write
(44:54):
their own headlines, but somebody's got to do something about that.
That's a mouthful. Next, the Washington Post ran an article
with the headline, a Civil war reenactment group got threats
from Antifa. It was a disgruntled actor. FBI says again
the headlines, what are we doing, folks? But even after
these two articles ran in February of twenty twenty, the
(45:17):
case sat still. Well, because I can't say that because
there was no case. He hadn't been charged. He did
retain an attorney at this point, and she told The
Washington Post that he had no idea why he was
being investigated, which like comee yes, you doo, yeah you do.
And it wasn't until September of twenty twenty two, just
(45:41):
days before the five year statute of limitations would run
out for that first letter sent in September twenty seventeen,
that Gerald Drake was indicted by a federal grand jury.
The last bit of his Internet activity I can find
before his arrest on October six, twenty twenty two, is
a post he made the afternoon before He spent a
few hours lying to post on a forum for sext
(46:01):
all enthusiasts, with his final message being praised for a
customer service representative named Patrice at a Canadian company called
sex Doll Queen. Patrese always answers his emails and once
sent him a free sex doll head as compensation after
ups damaged the case his doll arrived in. There's no
(46:21):
explanation for the nearly three years between solving the case
and arresting the perpetrator. And maybe it's like those cases
I mentioned before where they give a guy a talking
to and they say, you know, if I have to
come back. It's game over. But you know, just knock
it off. But I've seen cases like that, and usually
(46:42):
it's mentioned there will be some sort of incident that
brings the agent back to his door. But there's no
indication here of any new conduct, certainly no charged conduct
in the years between the search warrant and the arrest warrant. Right,
So if they did all this work, they search his house,
you know, hypothetically they say to him, hey, Bud, knock
(47:04):
it off, or we have to charge you. If that
had happened, you would assume that there would be some
new incident, but there's not. Maybe it was a change
in office priorities, or somebody wanted this one close specifically,
And there was some turnover in the US Attorney's office
in Virginia's Western District during that time period, but nothing
(47:25):
that really coincides with this timeline. The assistant US attorney
whose name is on that warrant in twenty nineteen left
to become a judge. In March of twenty twenty one,
the US Attorney in the Western District left to become
a judge. In March twenty twenty, the current US attorney
was sworn in in October twenty twenty one, And that's
a lot of in and out, but none of that
(47:46):
does anything to explain how this case got lost. From
October twenty nineteen to September of twenty twenty two, I
spent way too much time, like browsing press releases and
looking at LinkedIn pages and trying to sort of track
the paw patterns in the federal indictments coming out of
this office to try to make these pieces fit together,
and they just don't. They don't. There's no obvious rationale
(48:09):
for this timeline, and I don't expect they're going to
tell us. Drake pled guilty in April twenty twenty three
in an agreement that dropped most of the charges. He
only had to plead guilty to one count of possessing
an unregistered explosive device and one count of stalking. The
stalking count was specifically regarding the letter sent to Joe Derezo.
(48:30):
Accounts related to the letters sent to everybody else were
dropped in exchange. And that's normal. This is really common.
Data published by the Pew Research Center last year shows
nearly ninety percent of people charged with the federal crime
just plead guilty, they take plea agreements. Eight percent of
(48:51):
cases end up dismissed, leaving only two point three percent
of people charged with the federal crime who actually take
their case to trial. The system desperately needs people to
plead guilty, which is a huge motivator for overcharging. Right
you say to a guy, hey, we got you on
twenty counts. You're going away for one hundred and ten years,
(49:14):
but hey, maybe we can make a deal for twenty years,
and then you've saved the United States government the cost
of a trial. It's not a great setup overall, right,
that our justice system requires that we not actually pursue justice,
because if everyone actually pursued justice in the form of
the jury trial you're entitled to, the system would collapse.
(49:35):
I mean it would fall apart instantly. Just something to
think about. So when you look at this and you
see that most of these charges got dropped, it's not
because they didn't think they could prove those charges at trial.
They just didn't want to pay for a trial. And
nine years in prison is enough. So yes, technically he
(49:56):
is only guilty legally of build the bomb and sending
the letters to Joe Derezo threatening to blow up his mom,
the letters threatening to rape Pat's sister and Jeanette's daughters
are among those dropped counts. So in the eyes of
the federal government, he is not guilty on those counts,
not because he was acquitted, he was not found not guilty,
(50:20):
but he is not guilty of them in the sense
that he was not prosecuted for those they were dropped.
Common sense and hundreds of pages of court documents lays
out a pretty convincing case that can lead you to
your own conclusion. But the law is what the law is.
He is not guilty of those things. He's currently serving
(50:41):
his nine year sentence at the Federal Correctional Institute in Myeland, Michigan.
He asked for a placement in Michigan to be closer
to his son. He'll be seventy two when he's released
in twenty thirty. The government has not yet responded to
his motion to seal certain case documents related to the
dropped counts. He wrote a letter from prison in December
twenty twenty three that certain information in his indictment has
(51:05):
caused problems for him when other inmates check his paperwork.
He doesn't get specific, but I assume the threats of
graphic sexual violence aren't exactly helping him win friends and
influence people, even if those counts were dropped in the
plea agreement. Again, he's not guilty of those things, but
it's in the indictment. So in the end, it turns
(51:29):
out Antifa never threatened to pour cups of piss on
Confederate War reenactors or drive a car through the Gettysburg Grade.
It's just Gerald, a weird little guy who's Maddie got
kicked out of his Civil War club.
Speaker 1 (51:45):
Weird little Guys the production of cool Zone Media. Or
more from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia dot com,
or check us out on the iHeartRadio app or wherever
you get your podcasts.
Coozo Media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
On October fourteenth, twenty seventeen, the Battle of Cedar Greek
was happening all over again. Originally fought on October nineteenth,
eighteen sixty four, the crushing defeat meant Confederate troops could
no longer maneuver through the Shenandoah Valley to march on Washington,
and the Union victory was the last minute boost for
Lincoln's reelection campaign one hundred and fifty three years later,
(00:29):
as reenactors in Middletown, Virginia milled around in their historically
accurate wool uniforms and replica weaponry waiting for the battle
to begin, one of them found an alarming anachronism in
the sutler's tent, a pipe bomb. I'm Mollykonger, and this
is weird, little guys. The Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation has
(01:05):
held their annual re enactment of the battle since nineteen ninety,
but twenty seventeen was a politically fraught time in America.
On August twelfth, twenty seventeen, the United the Right rally
in Charlesville, Virginia ended when a young rally attendee who
kept a framed picture of Adolf Hitler on his nightstand,
ran his car through a crowd of peaceful protesters marching
on a closed street. He injured dozens and killed Heather Hire.
(01:30):
Images of the crowd that day, with rally attendees carrying
Confederate flags and swastikas side by side, flooded the national consciousness.
Most Americans heard the word antifa for the first time.
That week, the national conversation about Confederate monuments, which had
been simmering all year, boiled over. The city council in Baltimore, Maryland,
(01:52):
voted to remove their Confederate statues just two days later.
The same week, the mayor of Lexington, Kentucky, asked his
city council to approve the rows removal of the statues
at their courthouse. The Confederate monument in Hollywood Forever Cemetery
in LA was removed overnight. From Florida to California, Confederate
monuments were removed, toppled, and vandalized. No one wanted to
(02:14):
be the next Charlottesville. Six days after the rally, officials
in Manassas, a small city outside of DC about two
hours north of Charlottesville, announced they were calling off the
annual Civil War Reenactment Weekend scheduled for the end of August.
The Washington Posts reported that the reenactors themselves were worried
the quote racially charged atmosphere around the country over whether
(02:35):
to remove Civil War monuments would lead to violence. So
the concern was not whether it was appropriate to continue
celebrating the Confederacy in the wake of the deadly rally,
but rather anxiety about the possibility that Antifa America's new
black clad boogeyman would target these events. And these growing
(02:56):
fears of persecution from the radical left were confirmed on
September twenty third, when the Cedar Greek Battlefield Foundation received
an ominous letter in the mail. Instead of a return haddress,
the envelope bore a symbol that was fresh in their minds,
a black circle containing a black flag overlaying a red flag.
(03:17):
It was from Antifa. The letter inside read, you.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
Need to cancel your coming up celebration of the Civil
War on October thirteen, fourteen fifteen, twenty seventeen. If you
choose to continue with this farce of history that clearly
celebrates the war to keep African Americans in chains, then
we have no choice but to come in protest. We
will come and disrupt and cause problems for all those
who attend the atrocity of history. Several hundred of our
(03:45):
supporters will attend and slash tires, block traffic, harassed patrons
and reenactors. We will make Charlottesville look like a Sunday picnic.
Many of us have dogs, so we'll bring dog feces
to throw on people. We will also throw cups of
human urine. We might resort to actually firing guns into
the camps and at the re enactors. We will put
poison in the water. We will use noise to disrupt
(04:08):
the battles in sleep. These events must stop. Our local
organizer tells us he is ready to go. You have
been warned. Now. If it is not called off, we
will destroy you. You have less than one month to
issue a cancelation notice to it asap.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Days before the event in October, the Cedar Creek Battlefield
Foundation did announce publicly that they had received a threatening letter,
but that the event would go on with increased security,
and the details of the threat were not released, but
speculation immediately turned to the culture war, and after the
bomb was discovered, The National Review wrote The simplest and
most logical explanation is that this is a new, violent
(04:49):
extension of the effort to remove Confederate statues. The Federalists
lamented that history itself was becoming another casualty in the
culture war. The threatening letters continue for over a year,
becoming increasingly gruesome and terrifyingly specific, targeting members of the
board at Cedar Creek and their family members. Cedar Creek
(05:10):
had to cancel the reenactment in twenty eighteen after one
director of the foundation resigned in fear for his family
safety when the letter writer threatened to put a bomb
under his mother's car. The new director started getting threats
of sexual violence against her young daughters. The mayor of
Gettysburg received a letter threatening to bomb the annual Gettysburg
Remembrance Day parade. Would Antifa stop at nothing to destroy history?
(05:36):
But it wasn't Antifa. It wasn't Antifa at all.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
It was Gerald.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
Gerald Leonard Drake born in nineteen fifty eight in Michigan,
loves the Civil War. In nineteen ninety six, his hometown paper,
The port here In Times, Harold wrote an article about
his dedication to reenactment. He'd gotten a second job to
save up the ten thousand dollars it would cost him
to try and sport Judith his five hundred and twenty
five pound replica Civil War canon from Michigan to Columbus,
(06:06):
Georgia for the Chattahoochee Heritage Festival. Judith the Canon was
named after his wife, Judy, who would file for divorce
the following year. When he married his third wife, Donna
in twenty ten, they took wedding photos in Civil War
era address at the historic Adams County Courthouse in Gettysburg.
They got two cats and named them Shiloh and Musket.
(06:31):
But the world was changing. The world of eighteen sixty
falls further away every day, no matter how historically accurate
the brass buttons on your coat are. In twenty eleven,
he posted a thread on a Civil War reenactment forum
about a living history event he'd recently participated in a
tour group. Was appalled that the re enactors, role playing
(06:51):
as soldiers reading aloud letters from home, read a letter
describing the brutal whipping of an enslaved person that was
riddled with racial slurs. Though he felt that the event
itself went well, he wrote that shit hit the fan afterwards,
and the liberals in the group had a bitch session
about appropriate language.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
I guess what I'm asking here is, as living historians
and reenactors, aren't we supposed to do as good of
a job and impression of our ancestors as we possibly can.
We used to get praise and accolades for doing a
great first person impression. Let me know if anyone else
is having this kind of trouble for being the best
you can be.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Surprisingly, even in twenty eleven, fellow users on the Civil
War message board disagreed with Gerald their reenactment groups is
committed as they were to historical accuracy, did not use
the N word. One user, whose profile bears the badge
for Member of the Year wrote that he is quote
careful to avoid certain language in terms, always realizing that
(07:55):
my performance is in the present century to modern day
folks who live in the present would not understand the customs, practices,
and language of the nineteenth century with any real clarity.
Another user, a former moderator of the forum, replied to
a comment from Drake that he was looking for a
less PC group, wrote that he can't imagine there is
any group out there that would condone that kind of language,
(08:17):
and all this achieves is bad publicity for reenactors, adding
that those tourists surely all went home that day and
told their friends about the racists they saw at the event.
A year later, Drake posted again in the same Civil
War forum, complaining that people are getting too hung up
on safety, writing remember when reenacting used to be fun
(08:38):
and mourning the old days when battle reenactments were more
like real battle Again. Fellow reenactors pushed back, with one
veteran reenactor writing that he did indeed remember those days.
He'd once had a costume ruined and gotten pretty serious
burns when another reenactor shot him with a replica shotgun.
Even in his chosen community of Civil War reenactors, Gerald
(09:01):
was living in a version of the past that was
becoming increasingly lonely. In October of twenty fourteen, things really
started to fall apart. His third marriage was on the rocks,
and after what sounds like a pretty petty dispute, Gerald
was kicked out of his Civil War reenactment unit. As
a volunteer at the Cedar Creek Battlefield. He'd heard a
(09:22):
rumor that someone was planning to sneak into the reenactment
without paying the registration fee. Gerald and his friend and
fellow reenactor Daryl, found this to be an outrageous offense
and decided to print up flyers letting everyone know that
Duffy Miller wasn't going to pay his entry fee and
anyone who sees him should stop him. Duffy Miller, as
(09:43):
it turns out, was their unit commander, and he was
not pleased to see the posters. He kicks Gerald and
Daryl out of the unit. Jerald continued volunteering at Cedar Creek,
but it seems this incident was the end of his
love for reenacting.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
Now.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
I can't find exactly how much it cost to register
for the event in twenty fourteen, but the twenty twenty
four registration fee is thirty five dollars, and I know
from the forum post that's actually been increased in the
last couple of years to cover the new security measures
that they have to have, so you have to assume
it was much less ten years ago. So the inciting
(10:21):
incident for this entire debacle was a couple of old
guys fighting about twenty bucks and the sanctity of Confederate reenactment.
I guess, so what's a guy to do now? First
they stop letting him say the N word, You're not
even allowed to shoot each other anymore, and now he's
kicked out of his unit Entirely a hobby he'd loved
(10:42):
since the early nineties was being ruined. They weren't saying
like wokeness back then, But I think if this happened today,
Gerald would say that it was being ruined by woke
He'd been left by three wives and now his own
civil war unit didn't want him around. But he continued
volunteering at Cedar Creek. He retired, He built and painted
(11:05):
little models, got into model rockets, He traveled the world,
and he posted a lot, and apparently he held on
to his anger about that incident at the twenty fourteen
Cedar Creek reenactment. I spent a lot of time combing
through hundreds of pages of court documents, years and years
(11:25):
of his posts on forums, But I can't quite sort
out what the catalyst was in twenty seventeen. Why did
he wait three years to put that bomb at Cedar Creek.
Maybe he saw the news about the Manassas reenactment getting canceled.
Out of fear of political violence at the wake up
Unite the Right and just got an idea because within
(11:46):
weeks of that news story, Gerald started writing letters. After
his first letter to the Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation in September,
he followed up by placing an actual bomb at the
event in October. The reenactment community is pretty small, and
the pipe bomb was big news, but a rumor was
(12:09):
going around on Facebook that a teenager had been arrested
for the original letter, and then that was sort of conflated.
As you know, people are posting and reposting and talking
about the post that they saw. It was conflated to
the idea that someone had been arrested for the bomb,
and the rumor was very quickly disproven. No one was
arrested replacing the bomb in the vendor's tent, but the
(12:30):
letter writer was frustrated. If they thought the culprit had
been apprehended, they wouldn't be afraid anymore. John Buchheister, a
vendor at the event who told a reporter that he
was present when the bomb was found, was one of
the posters in that Facebook rumor mill and there's nothing
malicious here. He just reposted something that someone else had
said that the would be bomber had been apprehended. I
(12:54):
think there was a lot of relief in believing that,
so a lot of people were posting it. But I
guess our letter writer saw John Buchheister's post, because on
November thirteenth, twenty seventeen, he opened a letter addressed to
his home in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Like the first letter, the
envelope was printed with the ANTIFA symbol in place of
a return address. Inside a typed letter read.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
Thank you so much for putting on Facebook that a
teenager was arrested for the threat to see her creek.
It was so much easier to bring in a bomb.
Do something like this again for us. We are coming
to the Gettysburg parade and speech. Thank you again for
all your help in the last terror event.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
That same week, a local newspaper in Gettysburg received a
letter threatening the upcoming Gettysburg Remembrance Day parade. The letter
threatened to drive trucks through the crowd at the parade,
a troubling callback to the still recent vehicular murderer Unite
the Right, and threatened to put sharpshooters in windows and
on rooftops. The letter writer ended the note by giving
(14:00):
a detailed description of the bomb at Cedar Creek quote
for proof that we did the Cedar Creek terror attack.
But just as Cedar Creek had not canceled when they
were threatened, the Gettysburg Rememberance Day parade was not canceled
that year, but the route was significantly shortened to allow
for a heavy police presence. As Chris Anders, a Republican
(14:21):
political activist, wrote on Facebook, apparently Antifa and other hate
groups are headed to try and cause problems this Saturday
at the annual Remembrance Day parade, but he wrote that
he would be marching with his brothers in Gray rather
than giving in to terrorists. There are nearly one hundred
comments on this Facebook post, mostly agreeing that Dantifa must
be stopped or offering questionable safety tips, like advising that
(14:45):
you should use a wool scarf to protect yourself from teargas.
I have to assume that would only make things worse.
I feel like wool is very absorbent. But one loan commenter,
a reenactor from New England who rides with the First
Main Cavalry, got a different theory. He wrote, I bet
(15:05):
you five dollars that the perpetrator is a reenactor or
former reenactor. No offense to anyone, but no one knows
about rem Day beyond reenactors and locals. For it to
be a target, someone would have to be aware of it,
and there are plenty of other high profile, low security
events with bigger crowd numbers to choose. From his comment,
(15:26):
drew ire from the victimized confederates obsessed with the idea
of a massive conspiracy from the radical left. He was,
of course correct. And now here's where things start to
(15:50):
get really weird. Just some truly inexplicable behavior with deep
weird roots. I mean, I guess that's the show, right,
This guy's weird. But here's where it takes its super
weird turn. Gerald is retired at this point, and when
he's not traveling, he's volunteering. He's still volunteering at Cedar
Creek even though he doesn't reenact anymore, but he's also
(16:12):
volunteering at sky Meadows State Park. It's not entirely clear
why a registered sex offender was allowed to volunteer at
the state park alongside a high school student, but that's
what it says in the affidavit. So I guess that
one fell through the cracks at sky Meadows because while
he did successfully petition to get himself removed from the
sex offender registry in twenty twenty one, in twenty eighteen,
(16:34):
the background check required for volunteers at state parks would
have shown that he was a registered sex offender for
a two thousand and four conviction in Ohio for sexual
imposition and child endangerment. And again, I'll be so clear
with you right up front, there's no allegation that Drake
was involved in any inappropriate sexual conduct as a volunteer anywhere,
(16:58):
not at the state park, not anywhere in the time
period of these events. There's no allegation that he's touching
any children or engaging in any inappropriate sexual conduct. But
I'm not just telling you he's a registered sex offender
to sort of point and laugh at that. As a circumstance,
these things intersect. So in twenty eighteen, he's volunteering at
(17:21):
the park with this teenage boy, and one afternoon in
February they're volunteering together. They're shooting the shit fill in
the time and Gerald, who is sixty at this point,
is telling this teenage boy about his hobby of Civil
war reenactment, which is very tragically in decline. The topic
of the twenty seventeen reenactment at Cedar Creek comes up.
(17:41):
I have to assume Gerald brought it up, because why
would the seventeen year old boy have brought that up?
But Gerald is telling the kid about some funny articles
about that twenty seventeen event. He later emailed the teenager
what appeared to be photographs of newspaper clippings about the bombing.
These these articles, the bomb went off. The articles he
(18:04):
emails this teenager contained details of the bomb actually killing people,
with more deaths caused by subsequent sniper fire. But we
know the bomb didn't really go off. No one got shot,
no one got hurt, nothing really happened. The articles he
showed his young friend were completely fake. The federal agents
(18:27):
investigating the case wrote that attempts to locate sources for
these fake newspaper clippings turned up nothing. I mean, not
even anything online showing these fake articles. Just nothing.
Speaker 3 (18:38):
There's nothing.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
He must have made them himself, and that's where his
sex offender status ties back in. In two thousand and three,
he was indicted in Auglaize County, Ohio for gross sexual imposition,
and shortly after he's indicted, someone starts sending weird letters
to the Auglaize County prosecutor. The letters were made to
(19:00):
appear as though they were sent by a member of
the police department in Drake's hometown of Port here On, Michigan,
and they appeared to prove that Drake's second wife was
a child abuser. The letter writer sent a forged polygraph
report on Michigan State Police letterhead and a forged notarized
statement from Drake's estranged wife, and when his home was
(19:21):
eventually searched, police found a doctored page from the local newspaper.
He had taken an actual newspaper and manually altered it
with a false news story about his estranged second wife, Susan,
pleading guilty to child abuse and endangerment. No such news
story ever existed, and I can find no evidence that
Susan was ever charged with such a crime. Maybe a
(19:44):
more thorough journalist would have pushed harder for the details here,
but court cases involving sexual abuse of a minor tend
to be completely closed. Those documents are sealed unless someone
was sitting in those hearings, and there's local news reports
about the testimony. You're just you're not to find it,
and short of reaching out to the parties involved, there's
(20:04):
no way for me to know exactly what led to
Gerald Drake being convicted of sexual imposition and child endangerment
or why he tried to frame his strange wife for it.
But I can tell you that after his conviction there's
a note on the docket that the judge prohibited Drake
from contacting his second ex wife and her minor daughter
from a prior marriage. So I think we can get
(20:26):
the gist of the situation without me asking a young
woman why her stepdad, a man now in prison for
making a bomb, was court ordered to stay away from
her when she was ten. Take from that way you
will the relevant kernel of that story, though, is those
fake newspaper articles. In two thousand and three, he's manually
(20:47):
cutting and pasting by hand and xeroxing his creations to
disguise the alterations. He's arts and craftsing his way into
an alternate reality where his ex wife is the one
in endangering children, not him, And in twenty eighteen he's
doing it again. He's making fake newspaper clippings about what
he wishes were real. He's showing this teenage boy a
(21:08):
reality where the bomb did go off and the people
who snubbed him died. And while he was in jail
for that sex offense a short eight months in Ohio
County jail, he made another art project of sorts. In
September two thousand four, the Auglais County Sheriff's office reached
out to the FBI Field office in Cleveland. Gerald had
(21:30):
been trying to make friends in jail by showing off
his knowledge of explosives. He produced eight pages of hand
drawn diagrams and instructions for creating a pipe bomb, a
CO two cartridge bomb, a Coleman fuel bomb, a propane
tank bomb, and diagrams about how to modify the kind
of inert grenades you can buy as antiques or at
the Army surplus store and how to turn them back
(21:53):
into live grenades. And the diagram of the pipe bomb
he drew in jail in two thousand and four. He's
remarkably similar to the device he made in twenty seventeen.
It doesn't appear that anything ever came of the incident.
In the jail back in two thousand and four, you know,
the sheriff's office contact of the FBI, and they said, Hey,
we've got these weird drawings. What do you guys think
(22:14):
about this. There's no indication that there was follow up
from there, but apparently they held on to them. Those
drawings remained in a filing cabinet somewhere in Ohio for
twenty years. It's kind of surprising that they still had
those drawings in twenty nineteen, but they are included in
the affidavit for the search warrant. So in the spring
(22:35):
of twenty eighteen, he seems pretty content with his hobbies.
He's making fake newspaper articles about his bomb going off
and showing them to a kid he volunteers with based
on his eBay review history. He's painting miniature models of
Godzilla and Frankenstein, both five stars from Gerald, and he's
getting into model rocketry. In March, he took a solo
(22:56):
vacation to Amsterdam. His trip Advisor count provides a pretty
robust log of his travels. He wasn't a big fan
of the Jewish History Museum, titling his review not really
for Gentiles, and writing that he felt shorted by the
lack of artifacts from the death camps at the Holocaust Museum.
He felt that it had been quote scrubbed of shock
(23:17):
due to the new PC way all museums are going.
He felt the same way about the Dutch Resistance Museum,
writing if you were looking for the story of the
full account of atrocities done on the citizens, well this
display doesn't have it. It Like many museums today have
had to lighten up on their truth so as not
to offend anyone. He did, however, really enjoy the Museum
(23:41):
of Prostitution and his visit to the Red Light District.
In a later post on a forum for sex doll owners,
he boasted that he is familiar with the female condoms
he uses to keep his dolls clean because he's used
them in European brothels. And for what it's worth, the
Anne frank House got his seal of approval as a
World War II history buff the Ripley's Believe It or
(24:01):
Not Museum, and he was deeply upset that his hostel
did not provide a traditional American breakfast with quote hot meats.
I don't know why you would expect a cheap hostel
in Amsterdam to have American breakfast, but he was not
satisfied and just as an aside about his trip Advisor reviews,
(24:21):
I think that was my favorite thing about researching this.
He loves to review the cell site location data in
one of the search warrant affidavits shows that he likely
dropped off that very first threat letter at a USPS
dropbox in a strip mall near the Dulles Airport just
before boarding an Air France flight from DC to Madrid
on September twenty first, twenty seventeen. So while his letter
(24:44):
threatening to throw piss and shit at Civil War reenactors
was making its way to Cedar Creek, he was on
his way to Spain. He hated the bullfighting, but he
raved about the burger king on Plaza de Castilla. Apparently
the burger king at home is always getting his order wrong.
He had to go all the way to Spain to
get his whopper with no onions and no pickles. The
(25:06):
burger king in his hometown only gets four stars from
gerald And Since visiting Italy in April twenty seventeen, he
rated four different Italian restaurants in Winchester, Virginia, based on
how the pizza measures up to the pizza in Rome
is given out two just like Romes, and two were
failures according to Gerald, So maybe he's done. Maybe it's
(25:29):
out of his system. Three threatening letters and one bomb
that didn't go off, and then he's back to his hobbies.
But on June nineteenth, twenty eighteen, his local newspaper ran
a story about the upcoming reenactment at Cedar Creek. The
event was just four months away and the board of
directors wanted everyone to know that the reenactment weekend would
have additional security after the incident the year before. Days
(25:51):
after the paper ran that story, a pair of identical
letters were mailed to the newspaper, the Winchester Star, and
the Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation. The first letters, the envelopes
had a symbol where the return address should be, but
for some reason, these letters had a version of the
anti fascist symbol with the red flag on top and
the black flag behind, which is reversed from the original letters.
(26:12):
I think he probably just downloaded a new image and
didn't notice that it was different. I don't think he
realized he was signaling a preference for anarchism over communism.
Or vice versa. You know, both versions of that symbol
exist and are perfectly real and valid and are used
by different people, but they are in fact different symbols
and do mean something slightly different. I don't think Gerald
(26:33):
knew that. And this time both letters were addressed to
Joe Derezo, the president of the foundation's board, and they
threatened to kill his mother with a car bomb if
he didn't call off the reenactment in October. Dereza later
told agents that he took the threat seriously enough that
he began checking underneath his mother's car for explosive devices.
But the language in the letters was odd and oddly specific.
(26:58):
Though the Winchester Star art didn't actually mention what those
increased security measures would be, the letter writer seemed to know.
One of the private discussions the board had was about
banning spectators from bringing bags of any kind to the event,
but they were worried that this would be an issue
for people like parents with diaper bags. The letter writer
(27:21):
said there were quote many ways for us to sneak
in a surprise, specifically mentioning putting a bomb inside of
a diaper bag, and the board had also quietly been
in contact with the local sheriff's office about providing metal detectors,
and the letter writer seemed to know this too, boasting
that he'd already outsmarted their security.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
We now have plastic bombs, so metal detectors are useless.
We have found a man that's going to pose as
an enactor to drive in some kind of fertilizer bomb.
We have coolers, thermoses, water bottles, all made into small IEDs.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
In the completely real and very serious way that real
Antifa terror cells sign off their terrorism threat letters, the
letter writer explained why the bomb didn't work in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 3 (28:12):
We are the ones that did it to you last year.
We used a bad bomb guy. His mercury switch and
rocket launch wire didn't work on the pipe bomb covered
in nuts. Just so you know we are real and returning. Yeah,
just so you know we're real. Okay, it's such a
weird mess, but silly or not, the letters recipient was
(28:33):
terrified they were threatening to blow up his mom, and
there really was a real bomb the year before, so
you know he's not bluffing. You already know he really
can build a bomb, so you can't laugh it off
while it's happening, but in hindsight, what a goofy hass
sign off. Just so you know, we had a bad
(28:53):
bomb guy last year, but we're very real and we
fixed that. Okay, We're real.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
A sixth letter, the third in this second batch, was
sent to John Bucheister, that vendor in Pennsylvania who had
spoken to the media about being there when the bomb
was discovered in twenty seventeen. He'd gotten a letter in
the first batch too, thanking him for spreading that rumor
that someone had been arrested for placing the bomb. Confusingly,
the letter he got in July twenty eighteen was addressed
(29:21):
to Joe, just like the letter sent to Joe Derezo
the same week, and it seemed to be speaking to
Joe Derezzo asking for him to call off the event,
which presumably Derezo could do as president of the board.
But John Buchheister is just a guy in Pennsylvania who
sells antiques and Civil War reproductions. This letter, like the others,
(29:43):
threatened to kill Derezo's mother.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
Since we can't seem to get you to stop this
celebration of a war to keep men in chains, maybe
if we go after your volunteers that help out. You
will stop this. I like the idea of burning your
mother alive in a car bomb.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
Days after these letters were received, the Foundation announced on
July third, twenty eighteen, they were calling off the reenactment
in October. You know, they got that letter in twenty
seventeen and they decided we're going to soldier On, We're
going to have the event, And then there was a
real bomb. People were really in danger. So when they
got this second set of letters in the middle of
(30:22):
twenty eighteen, they decided, we got to call it off.
It's not safe. What if the bomb goes off this year.
We know this guy's not bluffing, we know he got
a bomb in the tent last year. We can't risk it.
And on the Civil War Talk Forum, that online forum
where Gerald's been posting for years, reactions were mixed.
Speaker 3 (30:42):
A lot of.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
Users agreed that it was the right thing to do.
It's just not worth the risk people bring their children,
their families. Others didn't think it was right to let
the terrorists win, with one poster noting that he never
stopped going to NASCAR races after nine to eleven. I
don't know that NASCAR was like a big target for
al Qaida. But he's been carrying that weight for years,
(31:03):
I guess. But some posters were starting to ask questions
like why Cedar Creek and why only Cedar Creek. It's
not the largest or most high profile reenactment, even in
just the immediate area. I mean, I don't know if
you've ever spent time in Virginia, but most of that
part of Virginia just is a hippl war battlefield every
(31:25):
town has. When every town has a plaque and Cedar
Creek was a Union victory, wouldn't these people be happier
targeting or reenactment of a Confederate win. And then, after
pages and pages of going back and forth about this
decision on the forum, Gerald himself weighed in.
Speaker 3 (31:45):
I volunteer at Cedar Creek. From what we have been told,
and this is not for general release. The foundation has
received threats of bodily harm to the board members. They're
families and everyone that helps out. Then there is the
very high cost of security. It is It's sad that
we live in a world with such a hostile climate
to the Confederacy ANDPS has taken battle flags out of
all its stores and statues are being taken down. Here
(32:08):
in Virginia, schools, streets, parks, anything named about the Confederacy
is being changed. I do not know if they will
officially announce the reason or reasons for this decision. Last
year they refused to say much, and rumors were all
over the place. We all need to maybe send some
money to the foundation for expenses, as this was their
only way of raising funds. With the fall of so
(32:29):
many Confederate symbols and events going by the wayside, I
now can feel what my ancestors did when the actual
Confederacy fell.
Speaker 2 (32:39):
So he is victim and perpetrator here lingering in the
comment section, watching his fellow Civil War enthusiasts argue about
how the community should respond to what he has done.
It's like in every police procedural drama where the killer
returns to the scene of the crime just to take
in the aftermath, and again, just as sudden as the
(33:00):
letters began, they stopped again. He got what he wanted.
The event was canceled in October, just before the now
(33:22):
canceled event would have been approaching, Joe Derezo resigned as
head of the foundation's board. He didn't feel the board
was taking the threat seriously enough, although it's unclear what
discussions were taking place behind closed doors because there'd been
no threats in several months and the event was already canceled,
so I don't know what prompted him to resign just
then In October and the local paper, The Winchester Star,
(33:45):
ran an article about Derezo's resignation, and like clockwork, a
few days after the article ran, the letter started up again.
The foundation got a letter addressed to Derezzo, who again
had just resigned, saying we're sorry to see you go,
and moving on to threatening the foundation's new acting director,
Jeanette Schaefer. And I'm sorry it gets gross here. I mean,
(34:10):
none of this was good, but it gets gross again.
I'm always on the fence about repeating things like this, right,
Like is this just for shock value? Does this add
information to the story? Do you need to know exactly
what he said in order for the story to make sense?
But given his prior conviction for a crime of a
sexual nature involving a young girl, I think it does matter.
(34:33):
He wasn't just saying whatever he thought would be the
scariest and the nastiest like this kind of ties back
into his own past. The letter writer told Derezo that
his quote pretty mother and bald headed dad, we're safe
now that he'd resigned. But quote if Jeanette Schaeffer thinks
she is safe, well she is right, but her children
(34:56):
are not. If she puts together a reenactment to celebrate
being men in chains, we will come after her girls.
We have a convicted rapist that would love to introduce
them to his penis. There are letters that are a
lot more graphic than this when it comes to the
sexual threats to those girls. It's in the court record.
(35:20):
If you're interested in that, I don't see the value
in proceeding further. You get it at this point. But again,
even though these letters are obviously very frightening, there's something
off about them. The letter writer seems to know way
too much about the specific inner workings of the Cedar
(35:42):
Creek Battlefield Foundation. He knows a lot about the personal
lives of these individuals and the way that they interact
in this space, and the way they run this organization,
which again is not large. This is not a massive,
significant operation. This is a pretty small, regional annual event.
(36:03):
One of the letters in this patch threatened to shoot
a man named Pat as he opens up the visitor
center in the morning, and members of the board told
federal investigators that since those threats in June, the visitor
center was only open on a limited basis and not
many people knew about that. You'd have to be really
close to the operation to know that Pat, who's the
board's only full time employee, sometimes opened up the visitor
(36:27):
center in the morning alone. And the letter tried to
cast blame on a rat in the organization, claiming that
their inside knowledge came from a man named Sean Mowbray.
But Mowbray hadn't been a volunteer with the organization since
twenty fourteen. But in twenty fourteen, Mowbray was at the
center of that dispute that got Gerald kicked out of
(36:48):
his re enactment unit. And it's not just the letters
that seemed to be escalating in intensity the same way
he sent that letter threatening to rape those girls, Drake
posted on the subredit for his hometown of Winchester, Virginia,
asking for recommendations for a good lawyer. He owned a
lot of antique and reproduction firearms, and was an enthusiastic
(37:09):
hobbyist in black powder weapons. But he wanted a real gun,
a gun that shoots real bullets, and when he went
to buy one, the store refused to sell him anything
after pulling a background check. Now, his own account of
the situation is sort of murky and one sided, and
some of the details I've been able to verify indicate
(37:30):
that he's not telling the truth. But it appears that
despite having no felony record, that's true, his conviction for
child endangerment comes up on his record as a domestic
violence conviction, so they wouldn't sell him a gun because
of that. There's no information in any of the hundreds
of pages of court documents I read that gives me
(37:51):
any real insight into why he may have wanted to
buy a gun that week in particular. But if I
were one of the people who had gotten one of
those lefts, that timing would take my breath away. He
also traveled to Paris that October, somehow squeezing it into
his busy schedule of threatening letters. He loved the Louver
(38:13):
and Notre Dumb, noting in his review that the movie
The Hunchback of Notre Dame really doesn't do it justice,
and he visited several notable World War II historical sites.
He'd boasted on Reddit earlier that month that he was
thinking of getting into World War II re enacting because
the Civil War scene was dying out. McDonald's and Five
(38:33):
Guys in Paris both got four stars from Gerald, with
run review saying seeing McDonald's in Paris was like seeing
an old friend to me. Cheap and consistent food that
is the same flavor around the world. Fair enough, But
when he got home it was back to business, firing
off a letter to the mayor of Gettysburg on Halloween,
(38:54):
again threatening to bomb the annual parade. The letter demanded
that the mayor quote sold the flying of Confederate flags
and post it on Facebook, then we will leave you alone.
Don't and someone is going to die. The ninth and
final letter was sent to the Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation
after the embattled organization announced in December twenty eighteen that
(39:16):
they would be holding the reenactment in twenty nineteen. This
letter was addressed to Pat, the foundation's only full time employee,
that guy that opens the visitor center sometimes. The letter
asked him, would you like to bury, your sister, your brother.
We could also just kill you when you sit alone
in the visitor center. We have a guy that likes
(39:39):
to rape, we could send him to visit your sister.
What followed were some sexual threats against the director's daughter
that really aren't fit to repeat. I mean, they're gross.
It's definitely the most specific letter in terms of the
actions being threatened and the particular victims being threatened in
a way that feels specific enough to be alarming. What
(40:02):
makes a quote unquote true threat in the eyes of
the law is kind of a moving target. You never
really know where the line is where a federal prosecutor
is going to say, I'm taking that one to a
grand jury. But in my experience reading cases like this,
mailing someone a letter that tells them exactly when, where,
and how you plan to kill them, that's usually pretty serious.
(40:25):
The law does not like to see that. But by
this time, the Feds already know it's Gerald. By the
time Pat is reading this absolutely unhinged letter threatening to
rape and kill his sister, the FBI has already gotten
Gerald's phone records from Sprint. They've been conducting physical surveillance
with an FBI agent following him to his storage unit
(40:48):
and then returning later with a bomb dog to sniff
around the door, and again suddenly the letter stopped. But
this time there's no explanation. When the letters stopped before,
it was because he got something that he wanted, but
this time they just stop. In a letter to the
(41:08):
court before his sentencing, Gerald claims he came to his
senses sometime in December twenty eighteen and realized that what
he was doing was wrong. It seems a little bit
more likely to me that one of the FBI agents
following him around said something to him, and that's not uncommon.
I've read plenty of threatening communications cases where the agent
(41:30):
writing the affidavit describes his first conversation with a guy
about threatening to behead a senator or something. Sometimes they'll
come to a guy's door and say, hey, did you
post this? Because you can't do that, don't do it again.
And the only reason we're reading the affidavit is because
the guy didn't stop posting. So the next conversation had
(41:51):
a very different tone. And I don't know if that's
what happened here. It doesn't say. And for as insanely
detailed as the documents supporting these search warrants are There's
some really important details missing right here. If they were
following him around in November of twenty eighteen, while these
letters are still being sent, why wasn't he arrested until
(42:12):
twenty twenty two. It's clear they spent all of twenty
nineteen investigating the case. There are search weren't applications here
for his phone, his storage unit, his house, his Google account,
and warrant served on his cell phone provider for his
cell location data. The warrants were executed at various times
throughout twenty nineteen, with the physical search of his home
(42:32):
and his storage unit happening in October twenty nineteen, and
they have him dead to rights. The cell site location
data puts him at the mailboxes where the letters were
mailed on the days that they were mailed. For some
of the letters, he drove out of state to mail them,
far from his home. So we have the GPS coordinates
showing him leaving his home in Winchester, Virginia, driving to
(42:55):
a strip mall in Pennsylvania where there's a USPS drop box,
and then coming back home. And we know that on
the days that he did that, the letter was picked
up at that mailbox and processed at that sorting facility,
so it's there's not a lot of other explanations for
why he's driving to these mailboxes on these days. And
(43:15):
they found the image file for that Antifa logo that
was printed on the envelopes on a thumb drive in
his house. We have drone footage from the twenty seventeen
reenactment showing his car approaching the area where the bomb
was found shortly before it was placed there. But they
gathered all of this evidence, I mean more evidence than
I've ever seen laid out in documentation like this. I
(43:36):
mean pages and pages of maps showing his GPS coordinates
on the days the letters were mailed.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
And they gathered all.
Speaker 2 (43:44):
This evidence and they did nothing with it. The documents
associated with all of these search warrants were sealed. That's normal.
Usually you keep that sealed until the arrest is made.
So nobody knew that his house had been searched except Gerald.
Sue Gerald knew. I think he had to know. But
after six months, the ceiling order expired. That can happen.
(44:08):
I think in most cases they're sort of set to
auto expire after a certain amount of time. But you'll
see in cases where they haven't made a move yet,
the prosecutor will apply to continue ceiling. It's not uncommon.
I think in this case they must have forgotten to
file a motion to continue the ceiling. That's the only
explanation I can think of for why they would let
(44:30):
these warrants get unsealed when they weren't ready to charge him.
But the ceiling order expired and somebody noticed immediately, because
the very same day, Justin Rolick wrote an article for
Courts with the headline disgruntled Civil War reenactor allegedly framed
Antifa by fabricating threats against his unit. Journalists don't write
(44:54):
their own headlines, but somebody's got to do something about that.
That's a mouthful. Next, the Washington Post ran an article
with the headline, a Civil war reenactment group got threats
from Antifa. It was a disgruntled actor. FBI says again
the headlines, what are we doing, folks? But even after
these two articles ran in February of twenty twenty, the
(45:17):
case sat still. Well, because I can't say that because
there was no case. He hadn't been charged. He did
retain an attorney at this point, and she told The
Washington Post that he had no idea why he was
being investigated, which like comee yes, you doo, yeah you do.
And it wasn't until September of twenty twenty two, just
(45:41):
days before the five year statute of limitations would run
out for that first letter sent in September twenty seventeen,
that Gerald Drake was indicted by a federal grand jury.
The last bit of his Internet activity I can find
before his arrest on October six, twenty twenty two, is
a post he made the afternoon before He spent a
few hours lying to post on a forum for sext
(46:01):
all enthusiasts, with his final message being praised for a
customer service representative named Patrice at a Canadian company called
sex Doll Queen. Patrese always answers his emails and once
sent him a free sex doll head as compensation after
ups damaged the case his doll arrived in. There's no
(46:21):
explanation for the nearly three years between solving the case
and arresting the perpetrator. And maybe it's like those cases
I mentioned before where they give a guy a talking
to and they say, you know, if I have to
come back. It's game over. But you know, just knock
it off. But I've seen cases like that, and usually
(46:42):
it's mentioned there will be some sort of incident that
brings the agent back to his door. But there's no
indication here of any new conduct, certainly no charged conduct
in the years between the search warrant and the arrest warrant. Right,
So if they did all this work, they search his house,
you know, hypothetically they say to him, hey, Bud, knock
(47:04):
it off, or we have to charge you. If that
had happened, you would assume that there would be some
new incident, but there's not. Maybe it was a change
in office priorities, or somebody wanted this one close specifically,
And there was some turnover in the US Attorney's office
in Virginia's Western District during that time period, but nothing
(47:25):
that really coincides with this timeline. The assistant US attorney
whose name is on that warrant in twenty nineteen left
to become a judge. In March of twenty twenty one,
the US Attorney in the Western District left to become
a judge. In March twenty twenty, the current US attorney
was sworn in in October twenty twenty one, And that's
a lot of in and out, but none of that
(47:46):
does anything to explain how this case got lost. From
October twenty nineteen to September of twenty twenty two, I
spent way too much time, like browsing press releases and
looking at LinkedIn pages and trying to sort of track
the paw patterns in the federal indictments coming out of
this office to try to make these pieces fit together,
and they just don't. They don't. There's no obvious rationale
(48:09):
for this timeline, and I don't expect they're going to
tell us. Drake pled guilty in April twenty twenty three
in an agreement that dropped most of the charges. He
only had to plead guilty to one count of possessing
an unregistered explosive device and one count of stalking. The
stalking count was specifically regarding the letter sent to Joe Derezo.
(48:30):
Accounts related to the letters sent to everybody else were
dropped in exchange. And that's normal. This is really common.
Data published by the Pew Research Center last year shows
nearly ninety percent of people charged with the federal crime
just plead guilty, they take plea agreements. Eight percent of
(48:51):
cases end up dismissed, leaving only two point three percent
of people charged with the federal crime who actually take
their case to trial. The system desperately needs people to
plead guilty, which is a huge motivator for overcharging. Right
you say to a guy, hey, we got you on
twenty counts. You're going away for one hundred and ten years,
(49:14):
but hey, maybe we can make a deal for twenty years,
and then you've saved the United States government the cost
of a trial. It's not a great setup overall, right,
that our justice system requires that we not actually pursue justice,
because if everyone actually pursued justice in the form of
the jury trial you're entitled to, the system would collapse.
(49:35):
I mean it would fall apart instantly. Just something to
think about. So when you look at this and you
see that most of these charges got dropped, it's not
because they didn't think they could prove those charges at trial.
They just didn't want to pay for a trial. And
nine years in prison is enough. So yes, technically he
(49:56):
is only guilty legally of build the bomb and sending
the letters to Joe Derezo threatening to blow up his mom,
the letters threatening to rape Pat's sister and Jeanette's daughters
are among those dropped counts. So in the eyes of
the federal government, he is not guilty on those counts,
not because he was acquitted, he was not found not guilty,
(50:20):
but he is not guilty of them in the sense
that he was not prosecuted for those they were dropped.
Common sense and hundreds of pages of court documents lays
out a pretty convincing case that can lead you to
your own conclusion. But the law is what the law is.
He is not guilty of those things. He's currently serving
(50:41):
his nine year sentence at the Federal Correctional Institute in Myeland, Michigan.
He asked for a placement in Michigan to be closer
to his son. He'll be seventy two when he's released
in twenty thirty. The government has not yet responded to
his motion to seal certain case documents related to the
dropped counts. He wrote a letter from prison in December
twenty twenty three that certain information in his indictment has
(51:05):
caused problems for him when other inmates check his paperwork.
He doesn't get specific, but I assume the threats of
graphic sexual violence aren't exactly helping him win friends and
influence people, even if those counts were dropped in the
plea agreement. Again, he's not guilty of those things, but
it's in the indictment. So in the end, it turns
(51:29):
out Antifa never threatened to pour cups of piss on
Confederate War reenactors or drive a car through the Gettysburg Grade.
It's just Gerald, a weird little guy who's Maddie got
kicked out of his Civil War club.
Speaker 1 (51:45):
Weird little Guys the production of cool Zone Media. Or
more from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia dot com,
or check us out on the iHeartRadio app or wherever
you get your podcasts.
Host
Molly Conger
Popular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.