January 9, 2025 • 47 mins
In 1994, a former debutante named Carol Howe became an informant for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. For six months, she and Dennis Mahon made weekend trips to a white supremacist compound called Elohim City. Carol reported back to the government that Dennis Mahon was stockpiling weapons and talking about blowing up federal buildings. In April of 1995, someone did blow up a federal building. Had her handlers ignored credible information about the plot?
Sources:
Jones, Steven. Others Unknown: The Oklahoma City Case and Conspiracy. Public Affairs, 1998
Hammer, David Paul. Deadly Secrets: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing. Authorhouse, 2010.
Painting, Wendy. Aberration in the Heartland of the Real. Trine Day, 2012
Newton, Michael. White Robes and Burning Crosses: A History of the Ku Klux Klan from 1866. McFarland and Company, Inc, 2014.
Lee, Martin. The Beast Reawakens: Fascism's Resurgence from Hitler's Spymasters to Today's Neo-Nazi Groups and Right-Wing Extremists. Little, Brown and Company, 1997.
Ronson, Jon. “The Debutante.” Audible Originals, 2023
Gumbel, Andrew and Charles, Roger. Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed and Why it Still Matters. William Morrow, 2012
Flynn, Kevin, and Gary Gerhardt. The Silent Brotherhood: Inside America's Racist Underground Free Press ; Collier Macmillan, 1989.
https://politicalresearch.org/2006/08/01/white-power-cyberculture
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2004/racist-skinheads-klan-groups-2002
https://rogues.wiki/index.php/Wendy_Iwanow
https://www.villagevoice.com/beyond-mcveigh/
https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/barbecue-nations-6405901
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. On the morning of Saturday, February twenty first,
two thousand and four, Patricia Norfleet found a box. No
one can really say for certain how the box got there,
but there it was, sitting on a little wooden desk
in the library. As a part time library monitor at
(00:24):
the public Library in Scottsdale, Arizona's Civic Center, she was
making her regular rounds. It was her job to make
sure people weren't eating or talking on their phones, and
that's when she spot at the box. The librarian at
the circulation desk that morning recognized the name on the box.
It was addressed to a city employee, but he didn't
work in the library. Don Logan was the director of
(00:48):
the city's Office of Diversity and Dialogue. Librarians are busy people,
and they aren't responsible for your lost mail, so the
package was set aside. Maybe Don left it there and
he'd come back for it. The package sat behind the
circulation desk for a few days before another library employee
thought to pop it into the city's inner office mail system. Finally,
(01:11):
five days after the box appeared on a desk in
the library, it found its way into the hands of
the man whose name was on the box. Don Logan
had just returned from a quick lunch at his favorite
Mexican restaurant on February twenty six, two thousand and four.
A colleague told him he had a package in the
mail room. Someone joked that it was probably a bomb,
(01:31):
and everyone had a good laugh, but he gave it
a good shake anyway. It was oddly light for its size,
and it was sealed with more tape than really seemed necessary.
His administrative assistant, Ranita, was on the phone, but she
didn't miss a beat. She passed her boss a pair
of scissors without even looking up from her work. As
(01:52):
he ran the blade of the scissors down the seam
on one side of the box, he thought for a
second about the laugh he'd just shared with his colleagues.
But what a silly idea. Why are you being so paranoid?
He asked himself. Who would send you a bomb? And
then he heard a loud and the room went dark.
(02:17):
It didn't take long for investigators to zero in on
a suspect, but it would be eight years before an
ATF informant took the stand to tell a jury about
the years she'd spent getting close to that bomber. Dennis
Mahon built that bomb, But this chapter of our bomber
story starts with a bomb he probably didn't make. I'm
(02:40):
Molly Coner, and this is weird, little guys. At eight
(03:01):
fifty seven am on the morning of April nineteenth, nineteen
ninety five, a rented Yellow Rider truck parked outside the
Alpha Pi Mura Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. The
driver got out, locked the truck, and walked away. At
nine oh two, the bomb went off. The truck contained
(03:23):
nearly five thousand pounds of explosive material. Seismometers at a
nearby science museum registered what looked like an earthquake, measuring
three point zero on the Richter scale. In just seconds,
the northern portion of the building collapsed completely. One hundred
and sixty eight people were killed, nineteen of them were children.
(03:45):
One was just three months old. The building housed regional
offices for a number of federal government agencies, housing in
Urban Development, Veterans Affairs, Social Security Administration, the DEA at ATF,
and several military recruiting offices, but the truck had parked
directly under the building stake care center. The man responsible
(04:08):
was apprehended rather quickly and entirely by accident. Timothy McVeigh
was on his way out of town and a getaway
car he'd stashed nearby before the bombing when he was
pulled over by a state trooper. The car he was
driving didn't have a license plate. During the traffic stop,
the trooper noticed a bulge in his jacket concealing a
(04:28):
loaded firearm. He didn't have a valid permit. For the
rest of his story, you probably already know. He was
convicted and sentenced to death. He was executed by lethal
injection on June eleventh, two thousand and one. But this
isn't a story about Timothy McVeigh, not really, maybe another day.
(04:48):
This is still a story about Dennis Mayhon, and it's
a story that gets very murky for a year or
two in the mid nineties. When we last left Dennis Mayhon,
it was the summer of nineteen nine four. He had
just struck up a relationship with Carol Howe, a woman
twenty years his junior. She was the daughter of a
wealthy business man and had once been a debutante in Tulsa.
(05:10):
But now that she was sporting a giant swastika tattoo
on her arm. She was more at home on paramilitary
compounds than at ladies luncheons. In March of nineteen ninety four,
she and her husband were getting drunk in Tulsa's Chandler
Park when she broke bones in both of her feet
jumping off a piece of scenery set up for a
passion play that was put on every year by the
local Catholic church. For years, Carol would tell people she'd
(05:33):
been injured by a gang of black men. It was
a better origin story, and the crowd she was hoping
to impress was eager to believe a tale of a beautiful,
young white woman coming to harm at the hands of
vicious black men. And as she lay in bed convalescing,
she started calling in to the dial E racist hotline
run by Dennis Mayhon. Every day she listened to a
(05:55):
new recording of Dennis ranting and raving about whatever was
on his mind, scourge of immigration and Jewish influence on society,
violent crime committed by black people, and the need for
white men to stand up. Soon, she wasn't just listening
to Dennis's recordings. They met at a restaurant later that
spring and struck up a relationship. Everything that follows is
(06:19):
a riddle. I won't tell you what's true because I can't.
I can only tell you what was offered as truth
and by whom. Sometimes it's possible to speculate as to
why someone offered up a particular version of the truth.
Are they protecting themselves or someone else? Are they wielding
(06:41):
their words as a weapon hoping to incriminate an enemy?
Are they covering up another darker truth? Are they misremembering
or confused? Are they repeating a lie that they sincerely believe?
Or have they simply lost their minds? The two competing
truths I most often compare are those offered up in
(07:03):
a federal court record. There is a prosecutor's presentation of
evidence and a defense attorney's argument against it. In a
court of law, the judge and jury make their findings,
and at the end of a trial we have something
that is legally true, whether it's the whole truth or
even true at all in any other sense. We have
(07:25):
the judicial systems stamp of approval on one version of
the truth. And we kind of have that here because
I'll spoil the end now in the interests of full transparency,
as far as a court of law has weighed in
on the matter, Dennis Mayhon had nothing to do with
the Oklahoma City bombing. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols alone
(07:50):
were responsible. The Department of Justice wrote in a letter
to Timothy mcvay's defense attorney that Dennis Mayhon was never
a subject of their investigation into the bombing. When speaking
to the press, Dennis himself has always denied any involvement,
although when faced with a grand jury, he reportedly invoked
his Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination. As I research
(08:12):
my weird little guys, I often find myself navigating the
stories of unreliable narrators. I do my best to take
in every version of a story and do my own
primary source research on the surrounding facts, and offer you
these competing versions of the truth with some commentary. My
goal on this show is not to give you something
(08:34):
that I can guarantee to be an objective truth, to
the extent that such a thing exists, but rather to
present you a thoroughly researched synthesis of those mismatched truths
for you to consider. But I'm not sure we can
even get that far this time, too many researchers have
gone mad trying to sift for truths in the rubble
(08:57):
of the Alpha Pi Mura building. But with that said,
let's rejoin Carol and Dennis in nineteen ninety four. There
are some things every one can agree on. Carol and
Dennis spent a lot of time together that summer, and
by June of nineteen ninety four, she began accompanying him
on trips out to Ellaheim City, a Christian identity compound
(09:19):
in Oklahoma near the Arkansas border. The four hundred acre
community was led by a Christian identity minister named Robert Miller,
who settled there in nineteen seventy three. An article published
in The Oklahoma in nineteen ninety three puts the population
in Elleheim City around seventy five residents at the time.
(09:39):
The Peace quotes Miller extensively, and he paints the small
community as a quiet, peaceful group of religious separatists. He
downplays his connections to the Covenant, the Sword and the
Arm of the Lord, a Christian identity militia compound in
Missouri that was rated by federal authorities in nineteen eighty five.
Miller says there was quote not a long or profound
(10:00):
connection between the two groups. He fails to mention that
he had been CSA leader James Ellison's spiritual adviser, or
that when Ellison declared himself King James of the Ozarks
in nineteen eighty two, it had been Miller who anointed
Ellison's head with holy oils in a bizarre religious ceremony,
(10:21):
or that it was Miller who was called in to
negotiate Ellison's surrender and the ATF besieged his compound in
nineteen eighty five, or that Allison was one of several
residents of the CSA compound who would later settle in
Elaheim City, or that Ellison married Miller's granddaughter, or that
Miller had testified as a character witness for Richard Snell,
(10:42):
a CSA member sentenced to death for the murder of
a state trooper. So I'm not sure what he means
when he says he has no connection to the Covenant
the sword in the arm of the Lord, and I
think you need to take his description of a quiet
community of prayerful families with some skepticism. There were quite
a few residents of Eloaheim City in the nineteen eighties
(11:04):
and nineties whose stories would take us too far from
the one we're following today, So suffice it to say
for now that we'll be revisiting that place. But in
nineteen ninety four, Dennis Mayhon kept an old airstream trailer
on the property, and he would stay there from time
to time while maintaining his full time residence in Tulsa.
(11:26):
It wasn't long after Carol Howe got close to Dennis
Mayhon that their relationship soured. By most accounts, Dennis raped her.
She said that the experience left her terrified, and she
fled to her parents' house to lay low for a
few weeks, but Dennis wouldn't leave her alone. After repeated
threatening phone calls and more than one unwanted visit, she
(11:48):
realized he wasn't going to take no for an answer.
On August twenty third, she went to a courthouse in
Tulsa to get a restraining order against him. The petition
must have caught the eye of Angela Fine, an agent
with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, because by
the end of the week, Carol Howe was on the
ATF payroll as a federal informant. The hearing to determine
(12:11):
if Carol Howe's restraining order against Dennis Mahon would be granted,
was held on September sixth, nineteen ninety four, but Carol
wasn't there and the judge dismissed her petition. I can't
tell you exactly where Carol was instead of the courthouse
that day. It's possible that she was at Elheim City
that week. Where she was exactly on any given day
(12:36):
in particular wouldn't matter all too much if not for
the fact that these sources that place her there in
the first week of September put her on the compound's
gun range with Dennis and Timothy McVeigh, and that would
be an incredible revelation if we had a good source
for it. I don't want to harp on the problem
(12:58):
of the unreliable narrator, but I think this anecdote in
particular highlights the problem with this story. Because I read
an unhealthy number of books about the events leading up
to the Oklahoma City bombing. I read books written by professors, lawyers, criminals, journalists,
and conspiracy theorists. Some are well footnoted and others count
(13:22):
on you to just trust the author's account. A claim
that's repeated across multiple sources gives it the appearance of validity,
but sometimes, if you look closely at those footnotes, it
all leads back to the same bad source, and this
story is one of those. Criminology professor Mark Hamm credits
(13:43):
this anecdote to an unnamed source, and his claim is
repeated in a later book by prolific true crime author
Michael Newton, and the story also appears in a book
written by David Paul Hammer. Hammer is a convicted murderer
who befriended McVeigh when they were housed in neighboring cells
on death Row, and Hammer claims McVeigh told him this
(14:06):
story himself. The point I'm circling around here, I guess,
is that extensive research doesn't always mean you've found something valuable.
I found this claim in three separate books, and it's
a very intriguing anecdote, and it would be very satisfying
to believe, but I don't. Timothy McVay maintained until his
(14:30):
death that he'd never met Dennis Mahon. Dennis has told
a variety of stories, mostly he says they never met.
He told mcvay's defense attorney that they'd never met, and
court filings in mcvay's case show there was no evidence
that they had. He did tell journalist John Ronson that
(14:50):
they'd met once, a man he shared a cell with
in two thousand and nine claims Dennis told him that
he'd once sold Timothy mcveay some guns and a copy
of the Anarchist Cookbook. He told several grand juries nothing
at all. So I suppose we should stick with the
(15:21):
pieces of this timeline that I am more inclined to believe.
And from the end of August nineteen ninety four until
March of nineteen ninety five, Carol Howe met regularly with
her ATF handlers. She passed them information, they wrote reports,
and she spent most weekends at Elheim City with Dennis.
(15:42):
Something I think is important to remember here is that
the ATF hired Carol Howe as part of their investigation
into Dennis Mayhon and White Arian resistance. The copies of
Agent Finley's reports that I've been able to see for
myself show that quite clearly it's a standard piece of
government paperwork, and there's boxes to fill out at the top.
(16:05):
In the box labeled title of investigation. She's typed White
Aryan Resistance and under monitored investigation information she entered firearms violations.
So Agent Finley is looking into White Aryan Resistance and
the possibility that its members have illegal guns. This wasn't
(16:28):
an investigation into Elleheim City, and it wasn't an investigation
into Andrea Strasmeier, that mysterious German who is head of
security at the compound and sometimes stayed at Dennis's house.
The AHF agents who met with Carol Howe weren't investigating
Timothy McVeigh, and they certainly weren't investigating the Oklahoma City
bombing because that hadn't happened yet. But Dennis had been
(16:52):
bragging for years about making bombs. He claims to have
carried out a string of bombing in Florida, Michigan, and
Oklahoma during his underground years from nineteen eighty two to
nineteen eighty seven. He always stops short of specifics, but
he's told reporters and federal informants alike that he'd bombed
(17:13):
abortion clinics, Jewish community centers, and government office buildings during
those years. It's harder than you might think to find
historical record of an unsolved bombing in an unspecified place
at an unspecified time. But you know, I lost a
few days of my life trying to figure it out anyway.
(17:34):
Mainly I was looking for any evidence that a five
hundred pound ammonium nitrate bomb ever exploded under a truck
in Michigan, because that's something Carol Howe told her handlers
Dennis claimed to have done, and that's a big enough
bomb that it would have been in the news. I
(17:54):
tried pretty hard, and I couldn't find anything matching that description,
but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. There was what
seemed at first to be a pretty promising lead when
I found some news stories about a string of pipe
bombs left in public places throughout the Midwest in nineteen
eighty four, but the man responsible was caught when he
(18:15):
accidentally detonated one in his own car. His motivations were inscrutable,
and he was ultimately diagnosed with schizophrenia and confined to
a state mental hospital. So those bombs weren't Denisis. I
did find some stories from the mid eighties in Michigan
about a pipe bomb left at a Jewish community center
(18:36):
in West Bloomfield and a bomb in a Detroit abortion
clinic that didn't detonate, and both of those appear to
have gone unsolved, but who knows, we probably never will.
Andrew Gumbel and Roger C. Charles's twenty twelve book on
the Oklahoma City bombing is the only source I found
(18:58):
that highlights the fact that the the ATF had been
actively investigating Dennis Mayhon for a decade by the time
Carol Howe fell into their lap, and they must have
been keeping a pretty close eye on him, because within
a day of Carol Howe filing that petition for a
restraining order against him, there they were with an offer,
(19:19):
help us take him down. ATF Agent ANGELA. Finley's first
report summarizing information provided by Carol Howe is dated August thirtieth,
nineteen ninety four, just a few days after Carol signed
on as an informant. Finley wrote in that report, War
has approximately twenty to twenty five active, fifty non active,
(19:40):
and two hundred underground members. Locally, the primary training location
is called Eloheim City. Mayhan has made numerous statements regarding
the conversion of firearms into fully automatic weapons, the manufacturer
and use of silencers, and the manufacturer and use of
explosive devices. Mayhan and his organization are preparing for a
race war and war with the govern in the near future,
(20:01):
and it is believed that they are rapidly stockpiling weapons.
Over the next few months, Carol and Dennis spent more
and more time together at Eloheim City, with weekend trips
stretching into weeks long stays on the compound. They detonated
his home made grenades together in the woods, and she
pocketed the fragments, handing them over to the ATF as evidence.
(20:24):
In one report that fall, agent Finlay wrote that Carol
had reported Mayhan has talked with Carol about targeting federal
installations for destruction through bombings, such as the IRS Building,
the Tulsa Federal Building, and the Oklahoma City Federal Building.
Mayhan has also discussed a plan for destroying power lines
from Oklahoma City to Catoosa, Oklahoma, during the hottest time
of summer. Mayhon reasons this will create a panic and
(20:47):
without air conditioning, mass race riots would begin. I guess
accelerationist thinking really hasn't evolved much in thirty years, because
that's Dennis in nineteen ninety four thinking. He can start
the race war by turning out the lights, and today's
neo Nazis are still trying to do it. Carol also
(21:08):
told the agents that a man named Andy often spoke
with Dennis about the need for real violence. He was
talking about assassinations, mass shootings, and bombings. Carol said this
Andy guy was saying things like it's time to stop
talking and start blowing things up. When she met with
(21:29):
Agent Finley again in January of nineteen ninety five, after
spending most of December on the compound, Carol had more
information about Andy. He was Andrea Strossmeyer, Eloheim City's head
of security. Strassmeyer was a German national who was in
the United States illegally, which you might think would make
it difficult for him to purchase large quantities of firearms,
(21:52):
but he seemed to manage to find no one was
thinking anything at all about Timothy McVay in January of
nineteen ninety five, but Strasmeyer would later admit that he
had met McVeagh at a gun show in Tulsa in
nineteen ninety three. When Strasmeyer finally spoke to the FBI
in nineteen ninety six, he couldn't recall exactly what the
(22:12):
date had been, but he said it must have been
after February twenty eighth and before April nineteenth, because he
remembered that they'd discussed the ongoing siege at the Branch
Davidian Compound at Waco, Texas. It might refresh Strasmeyer's recollection
to know that the Wannamaker Gun and Knife show was
held on April third and fourth in nineteen ninety three,
(22:33):
which means McVeigh would have just come from Waco. He'd
been interviewed by a journalism student from Southern Methodist University
just outside a police checkpoint at the Branch Davidian Compound
on March thirtieth. And here again we have mismatched and
poorly remembered facts. Strasmeyer can't recall who he'd gone to
(22:54):
Tulsa with that weekend, and he told the FBI he
didn't remember giving McVay his busy card, But this is
one of those things I can tell you for sure
he did. Strasmeyer's Eloheim City business card was in mcvay's
possession when he was arrested. He'd called the number on
(23:15):
the card a few minutes before the bomb went off.
On the morning of April nineteenth at Elloheim City, a
woman answered the phone. She says the man was looking
for Andy, that he'd met him at a gun show
and wanted to come visit. The woman told him only
that Andy was out at the moment and he'd have
to call back. Whether Dennis Mayhun was present when Strasmeyer
(23:40):
met mcphay two years before the bombing is another one
of those things we'll never know. We do know that
Strasmeyer stayed at Dennis's house when he was in the
city buying guns, but there aren't any clear, credible claims
that Dennis was standing there with Strasmeyer when he handed
McVay that Eloheim City business card and told him he
could stop any time. It's very likely that Dennis was
(24:04):
somewhere at the gun show. We know he and his
brother were regulars at the Tulsa Gun Show as both
shoppers and vendors. But even in nineteen ninety three, the
Wannamaker Gun and Knife Show was billed as the world's
largest gun show right up in the Tulsa Sentinel that
year boasts over twenty seven hundred vendors spread out over
(24:25):
a seven acre show floor. David Paul Hammer, mcveig's friend
from death Row, claims in his book that McVeigh actually
went back to Dennis's house with Strasmeyer that night, and
that the three men talked about bombs, but that probably
didn't happen. But when Carol Howe was talking to Agent
Finley in January of nineteen ninety five, she didn't know
(24:48):
anything about Timothy mcveay or that he'd already met Andrea Strossmeyer.
They only knew that this heavily armed German was talking
about bombs. He was talking up blowing up federal buildings.
Carol also reported during that meeting that Robert Miller, the
leader at the compound, had been giving increasingly violent sermons,
(25:10):
urging his congregants to begin preparing for war against the government.
And I read that report, but I have not read
for myself the ATF report from the meeting. When Carol
Howe told her handlers that she had accompanied Mahon and
Strasmeier on one of their visits to Oklahoma City, she
(25:30):
believed they were scouting targets for the bombings they were
always talking about. Investigative journalist James Ridgway wrote in two
thousand and one that Carol Howe's own handwritten notes about
the information she collected for the ATF included what looks
to be an ominous misspelling. She had written down Morrow
building spelled Morrow. Perhaps she'd heard Murrah m u r
(25:57):
r ah and misunders stood. Stephen Jones, the attorney appointed
to represent McVeigh, wrote in his book that Agent Finley's
monthly report for December, which is when Carol reportedly told
Finley that Mayhon Strassmeyer had discussed the Murrah Building, was
missing from the ATF archives. I do want to take
(26:20):
a moment here to reorient us, to sort of ground
us a little bit, because it's easy to go off
the deep end and end up a raving conspiracy theorist.
There's so many versions of the truth that you can
find enough proof to convince yourself of anything you want,
and it's easy to see connections that aren't quite there.
(26:45):
Because it's worthwhile to note here that the Murror Building
had been a target before, it's not actually surprising that
it would have been a topic of idle chatter on
the compound a decade earlier. Members of the Covenant the
Sword of the Arm of the Lord had planned to
detonate a bomb at the Murrah Building, but the plan
fell apart before they could carry it out, and the
(27:07):
group itself fell apart not long after when the compound
was rated. But there were former members of the Covenant,
the Sword and the Arm of the Lord living in
Ellawhein City, and there's a lot of cross pollination of
ideas and relationships. So as tempting as it is to
see the possibility of that name being mentioned as some
(27:27):
kind of proof that How had reported specific prior knowledge
of what was to come, it may be more smoke
than substance. It sounds like a perfect one to one connection,
But in reality, a lot of people were talking about
blowing up a lot of things, and it's not that
surprising that more than one of them thought of that
(27:49):
building in particular. I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I'm not
making any claims here about alternative versions of the truth.
But we only have these competing truths. In March of
nineteen ninety five, just a month before the bombing, the
ATF deactivated Carol Howe as an informant. In later testimony,
(28:10):
Agent Finley would say that how had become mentally unstable
and had been associating with skinheads in her personal life
outside of her work for the government. Testimony from Finley supervisor, though,
indicates that how was seen as an effective, sincere, and
honest informant. A former ATF deputy director reviewed her file
in nineteen ninety seven and saw no evidence of deception, exaggeration,
(28:34):
or fabrication. Findley herself signed her name to a memo
in nineteen ninety six saying that she'd known how for
two years and never found her to be overly paranoid,
and they couldn't have been all that concerned that Carol
was unreliable in nineteen ninety five because when Carol Howe
called Agent Finley the day after the bombing, a month
(28:55):
after they'd cut her loose, they called her into the
office and reactivated her. They wanted her to get Dennis
on the phone in the presence of agents from the
FBI and the ATF. She tried to reach him, but
he didn't pick up. Years after the bombing, Bob Rix,
(29:30):
the agent in charge of the FBI's Oklahoma City Field office,
was asked why Dennis Mahon was never questioned about his
threats to blow up a federal building in Oklahoma City.
His answer was only I don't know. That question was
posed to him by Andrew Gumble, whose book Oklahoma City,
What the Investigation Missed and Why It Still Matters focuses
(29:53):
primarily on the failures of various government agencies in the
aftermath and investigation of the bombing, and the book explores
the idea that there was an interagency turf war when
it came to Elohim City. The ATF was still suffering
the damage to their reputation after the way things went
down at Ruby Ridge in nineteen ninety and Waco in
(30:15):
nineteen ninety three, and more than a few of the
FBI agents Gumbel spoke to believed that the ATF had
been holding back when it came to sharing information with them,
particularly about Elaheim City. But even if you take Oklahoma
City out of this, even if you eliminate all the
complication of these theories about a wider conspiracy leading up
(30:37):
to the bombing, even if imagine for a moment that
bombing had never happened at all, the ATF still had
credible information that a prominent militant white supremacist leader was
making and detonating explosive devices. They had physical evidence, They
(30:58):
had hours of tape from their informant about this man
illegally modifying guns and stockpiling weapons. They had reason to
believe he might be plotting a bombing of some kind,
and every reason to believe he knew how to do
it because they'd been investigating him for years, but they
never brought him in. Tommy Whitman, who is the Assistant
(31:21):
Special Agent in charge of the ATFS Dallas Field office
who oversaw this investigation, later told Gumbel quote, the thinking was,
we don't want to talk to Mahon because if we did,
he'd know we were super interested in him, and he
might change his activities. But of course he already knew
we were interested. The thinking was, also, we don't know
(31:43):
if the FBI or another agency may be looking at him,
so we won't If we make an inquiry, they'll want
to know what we know, and we don't want others
to know because they'll know we're interested and won't share
information with us. End quote. So in the end, the
explanation that fits the facts best, based on later revelations
(32:04):
from the FBI and ATF, is that the ATF was
just gun shy about another confrontation with armed separatists. They
didn't want another Waco, they didn't want another Ruby Ridge,
and they didn't want to move on Elaheim City. And
more than anything else, they didn't want to share what
they had with the FBI. The ATF was negligent. I'm
(32:28):
confident in that I can say that with unshakable certainty.
This was negligent. It was incompetent, It was irresponsible, it
was unforgivable. They had credible information that Dennis Mahon had
grenades and automatic weapons. They knew of absolute certainty that
Andrea Strossmeier was in the country illegally and was illegally
(32:51):
purchasing guns by the crate full. Both of those men
could have been and should have been arrested. Could that
have been accomplished without a Waco style siege at Eloheem City.
That's hard to say. I think so, but I guess
they didn't. But would that have prevented the Oklahoma City bombing?
(33:17):
That's the more important question, and I think the answer
is no. Because for as many unanswered questions as there
still are as many maddening possibilities, there are of these
connections that no one can quite prove. I don't think
it would have. The information Carol Howe provided to the
(33:37):
government can be divided into two categories, things she said
before April nineteen ninety five and things she said after
April nineteen ninety five. Because the majority of what she
said prior to the bombing is credible and consistent and
should have led to action being taken. Everything that comes
(33:59):
after that is a little squishier. One of those later
statements was her testimony at the trial of Terry Nichols
mcvay's accomplice in nineteen ninety seven. She said under oath
that in the fall of nineteen ninety four, she was
with Dennis when he took a phone call. She says
she heard Dennis say tim tuttle, tuttle, tuttle, tuttle and laugh. Now,
(34:25):
in fairness to Carol, she may not have reported that
conversation to the ATF at the time, because why would
she think it was significant. Tim Tuttle was an alias
used at that time by Timothy McVeigh. But in fairness
to those who think Carol would lie under oath, she
did also testify that day that she'd been injured in
(34:46):
nineteen ninety four by three young black men, not her
own drunken lack of judgment in a public park, So
hard to say. As for Tim Tuttle, if you remember
a few episodes ago, I said, the only issue that
I ever found of Dennis Mayhon's White Beret newsletter from
the nineties was one that his twin brother Daniel had
(35:09):
provided to a neo Nazi group who is trying to
archive right wing extremist history. So in twenty twenty two
he hands over a single issue of the White Beret
and this neo Nazi group posts it on their website.
And I don't know how to make a website, but
this is pretty common on a word Press type site.
(35:30):
The page indicates the site author who posted that particular
piece of content. It's not his real name, obviously, he's
a neo Nazi trying to memorialize the history of a terrorist.
But the name the author used was Tim Turtle, which
is perhaps a typo, but perhaps just a cheeky little
(35:54):
nod to McVeigh and his possible connections to Dennis. Many
little anecdotes, bits of testimony and one off claims, unsourced
allegations and mysteries. To go through them all, and a
lot of them don't warrant a second hearing anyway, But
one I can't let go of is a conversation Dennis
(36:15):
Mayhon had in January of nineteen ninety six with a
man named J. D. Cash. Now, if you're familiar with
this particular conspiracy landscape, you might already have an opinion
about JD. Cash. He was a reporter at the McCurtain
County Gazette, a tiny paper in a small town in
southeast Oklahoma, who devoted the last twelve years of his
(36:37):
life to the story of the Oklahoma City bombing. Saw
Mark quick to dismiss him outright as a conspiracy theorist,
And I'll tell you straight up, he did stray from
the straight and narrow path of facts and proof, There's
no doubt about that. But he also spent twelve years
investigating this story, and he was quite close to Mcbay'sttorneysan
(37:00):
Jones and the defense's private investigator, Richard Reyna. I wouldn't
take Cash's stories as a gospel truth necessarily, which is
why I wasn't so sure that this conversation ever happened
until I found a little external corroboration. Cash claims he
and Dennis spoke for five hours that day. Now, Cash
(37:22):
had a bit of an unconventional interviewing style, it seems,
because at some point during their conversation he offered up
his own opinion that Andrea Strasmeyer may have been working
for the German government. For what it's worth, I'm not
really even going to explore that. I'm not saying it
has any legs, but it's what JD. Cash said, and
(37:42):
Dennis's reaction to the idea was extreme. In a later deposition,
Cash said Denis became extremely agitated. He went pale and said,
sweet Jesus, I'm fucked. He got up and placed a
phone call to his friend Marked Thomas, an Area Nation's
member and clansman who spent a lot of time at
(38:03):
Ellaheim City. Dennis had just a few months earlier been
a speaker at a cross burning Thomas hosted on his
farm in Burke's County, Pennsylvania. Dennis was particularly eager to
reach Mark Thomas at that moment because he knew Michael
Brescia was staying with him. Russia had been Strasmeyer's roommate
at Allaheim City, and as Strasmeyer might be a snitch,
(38:24):
Russia needed to hear about it. The two men in
Pennsylvania were not thrilled to be put on the phone
with a reporter, and they refused to agree to allow
Cash to visit them on the farm. After he got
off the phone with Mark Thomas, Dennis made a second
phone call, this time to someone in Germany. Dennis doesn't
(38:44):
speak German, but his twin brother Daniel apparently does. He
passed the phone to his brother, who translated Dennis's instructions
for whoever was on the other end of the line
he wanted Strasmeyer found he wanted him interrogated, shoot him
in both knee caps if you have to, but get
him to confess, and then kill him. Just a few
(39:10):
weeks later, Dennis would deny that he ever said this.
For his part, Strasmeyer has laughed it off his fiction.
But Cash turned his notes over to mcvay's lawyers, and
those lawyers gave them to the FBI, and the FBI
notified the German federal authorities, who in turn briefed Strassmeyer
on this threat to his life in the presence of
his attorney. Whether it all went down the way J. D.
(39:33):
Cash described it or not, a lot of people took
it seriously, but again just to bring us back to
a space of reality, right, so we're not reaching escape
velocity on conspiracy theories, It's easy to see this as
evidence that Dennis Mahon, Mark Thomas, and Michael Brescia must
have known something about the Oklahoma City bombing? Right? Why
(39:55):
else would he panic at the news that there might
have been a snitch? But I would offer up this
alternative explanation for Dennis's reaction. He panicked because he knew
Mark Thomas and Michael Brescia had just robbed twenty two banks. J. D.
Cash didn't know it at the time, but Thomas and
(40:16):
Brescia were both members of the Aryan Republican Army, a
Nazi bank robbery gang responsible for twenty two bank robberies
over the prior two years. Richard Lee Guthrie had been
arrested just a few days before this conversation took place,
and Guthrie quickly gave up the group's ringleader, Donna Langon.
She wasn't known as Donna back then, though she wouldn't
(40:38):
transition until after her arrest. A story for another day.
My point is when Dennis called Mark Thomas and Michael
Brescia to ask them if they knew anything about Strasmeyer
being an informant. They didn't know yet. If Guthrie and
Langen had given up their names to the Feds, they
wouldn't be indicted until the following year. Dennis Mayhon was
(41:00):
called before multiple grand juries in nineteen ninety seven, in
nineteen ninety eight in ongoing proceedings related to the Oklahoma
City bombing, and every time he pled the Fifth invoking
his Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination. In nineteen ninety seven,
Denis Tolal reporter, it is my greatest desire to answer
(41:21):
all their questions, even if it takes days. But I
have to have immunity. I have to protect myself. In
nineteen ninety eight, he tried again for immunity ahead of
another trip to sit in front of another grand jury.
The judge denied his request, and when he was subpoena
to appear before that grand jury in March of nineteen
ninety eight, he told reporters it was pure harassment, whose
(41:44):
retaliation against him for his recent attempt to run for
mayor of Tulsa again. He'd lost in nineteen ninety two,
and he'd just lost again in February of nineteen ninety eight.
By nineteen ninety nine, though mcphay's appeal to the Supreme
Court was he was going to die. Terry Nichols had
been convicted in nineteen ninety seven. The investigation was more
(42:09):
or less over the official one. Anyway, Dennis was nearly
fifty and this one time rising star of right wing
extremism was fading from relevance. His brother got fired for
handing out white power pamphlets at work, a side story
we covered last week, and the brothers left Oklahoma in
two thousand and one. Dennis settled in Arizona, which is
(42:34):
where the next chapter of his life starts. On the
last weekend of January two thousand and four, two hundred
extremists from all over the country gathered in Phoenix, Arizona
for arian Fest, that white power woodstock that Tom Metzger
first held on a farm in Oklahoma in nineteen eighty eight.
Along with the musical performances from Nazi metal bands, there
(42:58):
were speeches from Metzger himself, Health Aran Nation's leader Richard Butler,
and a Nazi named Billy Roper. He is the subject
of several listener requests for his own episode, and I'm
getting there. The Phoenix New Times describes Billy Roper's failed
attempt to whip the crowd into a frenzy, noting rather
(43:18):
derisively that he looks more like a history teacher than
the skinheads in the audience, which is probably because he
had been a high school history teacher until his move
to full time white power activism a few years earlier.
Tom Metzger delivered his remarks while wearing a T shirt
that read some people are still alive simply because it
is illegal to kill them. But I don't think he
(43:41):
put it on with any sense of self awareness. He
warns the crowd that they shouldn't be stockpiling guns, and
he seems instead to be advising them to make bombs, saying, quote,
how many guns can you shoot at once? Guys? Besides,
I could brew up bigger way weapons then guns in
my kitchen. Arian Nation's leader Richard Butler, just a few
(44:06):
months before his death at age eighty six, arrived at
arion Fest without his Bucksom young traveling companion. They were
boarding a flight to Phoenix a few months earlier, when
his companion, Wyndy Ivanov, was arrested for check forgery. The
neo Nazi community was shocked to discover that Ivanov had
been living a double life as an adult film actress
(44:28):
called Bianca Trump. She'd starred in films like Barely Legal
Latinas and Big White Tits, Big Black Dicks. She'd bonded
out by the time the party started, but it seems
the revelations about her career had gotten her disinvited. Dennis
(44:48):
Mayhunt didn't give a speech at Arianfest two thousand and four,
but the Phoenix New Times Reporter noted that he was
quite the social butterfly all weekend, chatting up movement leaders
and young skinh heads alike. He was overheard bragging about
having known Timothy McVeigh, something he'd been denying for nine years, saying, quote,
(45:09):
I knew Timothy McVay quite well. In fact, I knew
him back when he was named Timothy Tuttle, and he
and I were involved in quite a few And then
he paused very dramatically and said, let's just say he
and I did some serious business together. And after Oklahoma City,
the Feds came after me big time boy, but they
(45:32):
never proved a thing, and that was probably a lie,
he said. It. I'm telling you what he said. He
said that he and McVeigh made moms together, but I
think he was lying. He was in his fifties by then,
his time had passed. I think he wanted to impress
(45:56):
these twenty something kids, or at least impress upon them
the value of terrorism, because that same weekend over beers,
he told some young Nazi skinheads terrorism works. We did
a lot of terrorism in Tulsa in the nineteen eighties.
We put heads in the road and people paid attention.
(46:19):
Two weeks later, Dennis Mahon wrote up his last will
and testament and sent it to his father by certified mail,
and then he got to work on the only bomb
the government ever proved. He built we Del guised as
(46:43):
a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. Its researched,
written and recorded by me Molly Conger. Our executive producers
are Sophie Lichttermant and Robert Evans. The show is edited
by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was
composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me at Weird
Little Podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it,
(47:03):
but I probably will not answer it. It's nothing personal.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other
listeners on the Weird Little Guys Subreddy, just don't post
anything that's going to make you one of my Weird
Little Guys.
Cool Zone Media. On the morning of Saturday, February twenty first,
two thousand and four, Patricia Norfleet found a box. No
one can really say for certain how the box got there,
but there it was, sitting on a little wooden desk
in the library. As a part time library monitor at
(00:24):
the public Library in Scottsdale, Arizona's Civic Center, she was
making her regular rounds. It was her job to make
sure people weren't eating or talking on their phones, and
that's when she spot at the box. The librarian at
the circulation desk that morning recognized the name on the box.
It was addressed to a city employee, but he didn't
work in the library. Don Logan was the director of
(00:48):
the city's Office of Diversity and Dialogue. Librarians are busy people,
and they aren't responsible for your lost mail, so the
package was set aside. Maybe Don left it there and
he'd come back for it. The package sat behind the
circulation desk for a few days before another library employee
thought to pop it into the city's inner office mail system. Finally,
(01:11):
five days after the box appeared on a desk in
the library, it found its way into the hands of
the man whose name was on the box. Don Logan
had just returned from a quick lunch at his favorite
Mexican restaurant on February twenty six, two thousand and four.
A colleague told him he had a package in the
mail room. Someone joked that it was probably a bomb,
(01:31):
and everyone had a good laugh, but he gave it
a good shake anyway. It was oddly light for its size,
and it was sealed with more tape than really seemed necessary.
His administrative assistant, Ranita, was on the phone, but she
didn't miss a beat. She passed her boss a pair
of scissors without even looking up from her work. As
(01:52):
he ran the blade of the scissors down the seam
on one side of the box, he thought for a
second about the laugh he'd just shared with his colleagues.
But what a silly idea. Why are you being so paranoid?
He asked himself. Who would send you a bomb? And
then he heard a loud and the room went dark.
(02:17):
It didn't take long for investigators to zero in on
a suspect, but it would be eight years before an
ATF informant took the stand to tell a jury about
the years she'd spent getting close to that bomber. Dennis
Mahon built that bomb, But this chapter of our bomber
story starts with a bomb he probably didn't make. I'm
(02:40):
Molly Coner, and this is weird, little guys. At eight
(03:01):
fifty seven am on the morning of April nineteenth, nineteen
ninety five, a rented Yellow Rider truck parked outside the
Alpha Pi Mura Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. The
driver got out, locked the truck, and walked away. At
nine oh two, the bomb went off. The truck contained
(03:23):
nearly five thousand pounds of explosive material. Seismometers at a
nearby science museum registered what looked like an earthquake, measuring
three point zero on the Richter scale. In just seconds,
the northern portion of the building collapsed completely. One hundred
and sixty eight people were killed, nineteen of them were children.
(03:45):
One was just three months old. The building housed regional
offices for a number of federal government agencies, housing in
Urban Development, Veterans Affairs, Social Security Administration, the DEA at ATF,
and several military recruiting offices, but the truck had parked
directly under the building stake care center. The man responsible
(04:08):
was apprehended rather quickly and entirely by accident. Timothy McVeigh
was on his way out of town and a getaway
car he'd stashed nearby before the bombing when he was
pulled over by a state trooper. The car he was
driving didn't have a license plate. During the traffic stop,
the trooper noticed a bulge in his jacket concealing a
(04:28):
loaded firearm. He didn't have a valid permit. For the
rest of his story, you probably already know. He was
convicted and sentenced to death. He was executed by lethal
injection on June eleventh, two thousand and one. But this
isn't a story about Timothy McVeigh, not really, maybe another day.
(04:48):
This is still a story about Dennis Mayhon, and it's
a story that gets very murky for a year or
two in the mid nineties. When we last left Dennis Mayhon,
it was the summer of nineteen nine four. He had
just struck up a relationship with Carol Howe, a woman
twenty years his junior. She was the daughter of a
wealthy business man and had once been a debutante in Tulsa.
(05:10):
But now that she was sporting a giant swastika tattoo
on her arm. She was more at home on paramilitary
compounds than at ladies luncheons. In March of nineteen ninety four,
she and her husband were getting drunk in Tulsa's Chandler
Park when she broke bones in both of her feet
jumping off a piece of scenery set up for a
passion play that was put on every year by the
local Catholic church. For years, Carol would tell people she'd
(05:33):
been injured by a gang of black men. It was
a better origin story, and the crowd she was hoping
to impress was eager to believe a tale of a beautiful,
young white woman coming to harm at the hands of
vicious black men. And as she lay in bed convalescing,
she started calling in to the dial E racist hotline
run by Dennis Mayhon. Every day she listened to a
(05:55):
new recording of Dennis ranting and raving about whatever was
on his mind, scourge of immigration and Jewish influence on society,
violent crime committed by black people, and the need for
white men to stand up. Soon, she wasn't just listening
to Dennis's recordings. They met at a restaurant later that
spring and struck up a relationship. Everything that follows is
(06:19):
a riddle. I won't tell you what's true because I can't.
I can only tell you what was offered as truth
and by whom. Sometimes it's possible to speculate as to
why someone offered up a particular version of the truth.
Are they protecting themselves or someone else? Are they wielding
(06:41):
their words as a weapon hoping to incriminate an enemy?
Are they covering up another darker truth? Are they misremembering
or confused? Are they repeating a lie that they sincerely believe?
Or have they simply lost their minds? The two competing
truths I most often compare are those offered up in
(07:03):
a federal court record. There is a prosecutor's presentation of
evidence and a defense attorney's argument against it. In a
court of law, the judge and jury make their findings,
and at the end of a trial we have something
that is legally true, whether it's the whole truth or
even true at all in any other sense. We have
(07:25):
the judicial systems stamp of approval on one version of
the truth. And we kind of have that here because
I'll spoil the end now in the interests of full transparency,
as far as a court of law has weighed in
on the matter, Dennis Mayhon had nothing to do with
the Oklahoma City bombing. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols alone
(07:50):
were responsible. The Department of Justice wrote in a letter
to Timothy mcvay's defense attorney that Dennis Mayhon was never
a subject of their investigation into the bombing. When speaking
to the press, Dennis himself has always denied any involvement,
although when faced with a grand jury, he reportedly invoked
his Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination. As I research
(08:12):
my weird little guys, I often find myself navigating the
stories of unreliable narrators. I do my best to take
in every version of a story and do my own
primary source research on the surrounding facts, and offer you
these competing versions of the truth with some commentary. My
goal on this show is not to give you something
(08:34):
that I can guarantee to be an objective truth, to
the extent that such a thing exists, but rather to
present you a thoroughly researched synthesis of those mismatched truths
for you to consider. But I'm not sure we can
even get that far this time, too many researchers have
gone mad trying to sift for truths in the rubble
(08:57):
of the Alpha Pi Mura building. But with that said,
let's rejoin Carol and Dennis in nineteen ninety four. There
are some things every one can agree on. Carol and
Dennis spent a lot of time together that summer, and
by June of nineteen ninety four, she began accompanying him
on trips out to Ellaheim City, a Christian identity compound
(09:19):
in Oklahoma near the Arkansas border. The four hundred acre
community was led by a Christian identity minister named Robert Miller,
who settled there in nineteen seventy three. An article published
in The Oklahoma in nineteen ninety three puts the population
in Elleheim City around seventy five residents at the time.
(09:39):
The Peace quotes Miller extensively, and he paints the small
community as a quiet, peaceful group of religious separatists. He
downplays his connections to the Covenant, the Sword and the
Arm of the Lord, a Christian identity militia compound in
Missouri that was rated by federal authorities in nineteen eighty five.
Miller says there was quote not a long or profound
(10:00):
connection between the two groups. He fails to mention that
he had been CSA leader James Ellison's spiritual adviser, or
that when Ellison declared himself King James of the Ozarks
in nineteen eighty two, it had been Miller who anointed
Ellison's head with holy oils in a bizarre religious ceremony,
(10:21):
or that it was Miller who was called in to
negotiate Ellison's surrender and the ATF besieged his compound in
nineteen eighty five, or that Allison was one of several
residents of the CSA compound who would later settle in
Elaheim City, or that Ellison married Miller's granddaughter, or that
Miller had testified as a character witness for Richard Snell,
(10:42):
a CSA member sentenced to death for the murder of
a state trooper. So I'm not sure what he means
when he says he has no connection to the Covenant
the sword in the arm of the Lord, and I
think you need to take his description of a quiet
community of prayerful families with some skepticism. There were quite
a few residents of Eloaheim City in the nineteen eighties
(11:04):
and nineties whose stories would take us too far from
the one we're following today, So suffice it to say
for now that we'll be revisiting that place. But in
nineteen ninety four, Dennis Mayhon kept an old airstream trailer
on the property, and he would stay there from time
to time while maintaining his full time residence in Tulsa.
(11:26):
It wasn't long after Carol Howe got close to Dennis
Mayhon that their relationship soured. By most accounts, Dennis raped her.
She said that the experience left her terrified, and she
fled to her parents' house to lay low for a
few weeks, but Dennis wouldn't leave her alone. After repeated
threatening phone calls and more than one unwanted visit, she
(11:48):
realized he wasn't going to take no for an answer.
On August twenty third, she went to a courthouse in
Tulsa to get a restraining order against him. The petition
must have caught the eye of Angela Fine, an agent
with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, because by
the end of the week, Carol Howe was on the
ATF payroll as a federal informant. The hearing to determine
(12:11):
if Carol Howe's restraining order against Dennis Mahon would be granted,
was held on September sixth, nineteen ninety four, but Carol
wasn't there and the judge dismissed her petition. I can't
tell you exactly where Carol was instead of the courthouse
that day. It's possible that she was at Elheim City
that week. Where she was exactly on any given day
(12:36):
in particular wouldn't matter all too much if not for
the fact that these sources that place her there in
the first week of September put her on the compound's
gun range with Dennis and Timothy McVeigh, and that would
be an incredible revelation if we had a good source
for it. I don't want to harp on the problem
(12:58):
of the unreliable narrator, but I think this anecdote in
particular highlights the problem with this story. Because I read
an unhealthy number of books about the events leading up
to the Oklahoma City bombing. I read books written by professors, lawyers, criminals, journalists,
and conspiracy theorists. Some are well footnoted and others count
(13:22):
on you to just trust the author's account. A claim
that's repeated across multiple sources gives it the appearance of validity,
but sometimes, if you look closely at those footnotes, it
all leads back to the same bad source, and this
story is one of those. Criminology professor Mark Hamm credits
(13:43):
this anecdote to an unnamed source, and his claim is
repeated in a later book by prolific true crime author
Michael Newton, and the story also appears in a book
written by David Paul Hammer. Hammer is a convicted murderer
who befriended McVeigh when they were housed in neighboring cells
on death Row, and Hammer claims McVeigh told him this
(14:06):
story himself. The point I'm circling around here, I guess,
is that extensive research doesn't always mean you've found something valuable.
I found this claim in three separate books, and it's
a very intriguing anecdote, and it would be very satisfying
to believe, but I don't. Timothy McVay maintained until his
(14:30):
death that he'd never met Dennis Mahon. Dennis has told
a variety of stories, mostly he says they never met.
He told mcvay's defense attorney that they'd never met, and
court filings in mcvay's case show there was no evidence
that they had. He did tell journalist John Ronson that
(14:50):
they'd met once, a man he shared a cell with
in two thousand and nine claims Dennis told him that
he'd once sold Timothy mcveay some guns and a copy
of the Anarchist Cookbook. He told several grand juries nothing
at all. So I suppose we should stick with the
(15:21):
pieces of this timeline that I am more inclined to believe.
And from the end of August nineteen ninety four until
March of nineteen ninety five, Carol Howe met regularly with
her ATF handlers. She passed them information, they wrote reports,
and she spent most weekends at Elheim City with Dennis.
(15:42):
Something I think is important to remember here is that
the ATF hired Carol Howe as part of their investigation
into Dennis Mayhon and White Arian resistance. The copies of
Agent Finley's reports that I've been able to see for
myself show that quite clearly it's a standard piece of
government paperwork, and there's boxes to fill out at the top.
(16:05):
In the box labeled title of investigation. She's typed White
Aryan Resistance and under monitored investigation information she entered firearms violations.
So Agent Finley is looking into White Aryan Resistance and
the possibility that its members have illegal guns. This wasn't
(16:28):
an investigation into Elleheim City, and it wasn't an investigation
into Andrea Strasmeier, that mysterious German who is head of
security at the compound and sometimes stayed at Dennis's house.
The AHF agents who met with Carol Howe weren't investigating
Timothy McVeigh, and they certainly weren't investigating the Oklahoma City
bombing because that hadn't happened yet. But Dennis had been
(16:52):
bragging for years about making bombs. He claims to have
carried out a string of bombing in Florida, Michigan, and
Oklahoma during his underground years from nineteen eighty two to
nineteen eighty seven. He always stops short of specifics, but
he's told reporters and federal informants alike that he'd bombed
(17:13):
abortion clinics, Jewish community centers, and government office buildings during
those years. It's harder than you might think to find
historical record of an unsolved bombing in an unspecified place
at an unspecified time. But you know, I lost a
few days of my life trying to figure it out anyway.
(17:34):
Mainly I was looking for any evidence that a five
hundred pound ammonium nitrate bomb ever exploded under a truck
in Michigan, because that's something Carol Howe told her handlers
Dennis claimed to have done, and that's a big enough
bomb that it would have been in the news. I
(17:54):
tried pretty hard, and I couldn't find anything matching that description,
but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. There was what
seemed at first to be a pretty promising lead when
I found some news stories about a string of pipe
bombs left in public places throughout the Midwest in nineteen
eighty four, but the man responsible was caught when he
(18:15):
accidentally detonated one in his own car. His motivations were inscrutable,
and he was ultimately diagnosed with schizophrenia and confined to
a state mental hospital. So those bombs weren't Denisis. I
did find some stories from the mid eighties in Michigan
about a pipe bomb left at a Jewish community center
(18:36):
in West Bloomfield and a bomb in a Detroit abortion
clinic that didn't detonate, and both of those appear to
have gone unsolved, but who knows, we probably never will.
Andrew Gumbel and Roger C. Charles's twenty twelve book on
the Oklahoma City bombing is the only source I found
(18:58):
that highlights the fact that the the ATF had been
actively investigating Dennis Mayhon for a decade by the time
Carol Howe fell into their lap, and they must have
been keeping a pretty close eye on him, because within
a day of Carol Howe filing that petition for a
restraining order against him, there they were with an offer,
(19:19):
help us take him down. ATF Agent ANGELA. Finley's first
report summarizing information provided by Carol Howe is dated August thirtieth,
nineteen ninety four, just a few days after Carol signed
on as an informant. Finley wrote in that report, War
has approximately twenty to twenty five active, fifty non active,
(19:40):
and two hundred underground members. Locally, the primary training location
is called Eloheim City. Mayhan has made numerous statements regarding
the conversion of firearms into fully automatic weapons, the manufacturer
and use of silencers, and the manufacturer and use of
explosive devices. Mayhan and his organization are preparing for a
race war and war with the govern in the near future,
(20:01):
and it is believed that they are rapidly stockpiling weapons.
Over the next few months, Carol and Dennis spent more
and more time together at Eloheim City, with weekend trips
stretching into weeks long stays on the compound. They detonated
his home made grenades together in the woods, and she
pocketed the fragments, handing them over to the ATF as evidence.
(20:24):
In one report that fall, agent Finlay wrote that Carol
had reported Mayhan has talked with Carol about targeting federal
installations for destruction through bombings, such as the IRS Building,
the Tulsa Federal Building, and the Oklahoma City Federal Building.
Mayhan has also discussed a plan for destroying power lines
from Oklahoma City to Catoosa, Oklahoma, during the hottest time
of summer. Mayhon reasons this will create a panic and
(20:47):
without air conditioning, mass race riots would begin. I guess
accelerationist thinking really hasn't evolved much in thirty years, because
that's Dennis in nineteen ninety four thinking. He can start
the race war by turning out the lights, and today's
neo Nazis are still trying to do it. Carol also
(21:08):
told the agents that a man named Andy often spoke
with Dennis about the need for real violence. He was
talking about assassinations, mass shootings, and bombings. Carol said this
Andy guy was saying things like it's time to stop
talking and start blowing things up. When she met with
(21:29):
Agent Finley again in January of nineteen ninety five, after
spending most of December on the compound, Carol had more
information about Andy. He was Andrea Strossmeyer, Eloheim City's head
of security. Strassmeyer was a German national who was in
the United States illegally, which you might think would make
it difficult for him to purchase large quantities of firearms,
(21:52):
but he seemed to manage to find no one was
thinking anything at all about Timothy McVay in January of
nineteen ninety five, but Strasmeyer would later admit that he
had met McVeagh at a gun show in Tulsa in
nineteen ninety three. When Strasmeyer finally spoke to the FBI
in nineteen ninety six, he couldn't recall exactly what the
(22:12):
date had been, but he said it must have been
after February twenty eighth and before April nineteenth, because he
remembered that they'd discussed the ongoing siege at the Branch
Davidian Compound at Waco, Texas. It might refresh Strasmeyer's recollection
to know that the Wannamaker Gun and Knife show was
held on April third and fourth in nineteen ninety three,
(22:33):
which means McVeigh would have just come from Waco. He'd
been interviewed by a journalism student from Southern Methodist University
just outside a police checkpoint at the Branch Davidian Compound
on March thirtieth. And here again we have mismatched and
poorly remembered facts. Strasmeyer can't recall who he'd gone to
(22:54):
Tulsa with that weekend, and he told the FBI he
didn't remember giving McVay his busy card, But this is
one of those things I can tell you for sure
he did. Strasmeyer's Eloheim City business card was in mcvay's
possession when he was arrested. He'd called the number on
(23:15):
the card a few minutes before the bomb went off.
On the morning of April nineteenth at Elloheim City, a
woman answered the phone. She says the man was looking
for Andy, that he'd met him at a gun show
and wanted to come visit. The woman told him only
that Andy was out at the moment and he'd have
to call back. Whether Dennis Mayhun was present when Strasmeyer
(23:40):
met mcphay two years before the bombing is another one
of those things we'll never know. We do know that
Strasmeyer stayed at Dennis's house when he was in the
city buying guns, but there aren't any clear, credible claims
that Dennis was standing there with Strasmeyer when he handed
McVay that Eloheim City business card and told him he
could stop any time. It's very likely that Dennis was
(24:04):
somewhere at the gun show. We know he and his
brother were regulars at the Tulsa Gun Show as both
shoppers and vendors. But even in nineteen ninety three, the
Wannamaker Gun and Knife Show was billed as the world's
largest gun show right up in the Tulsa Sentinel that
year boasts over twenty seven hundred vendors spread out over
(24:25):
a seven acre show floor. David Paul Hammer, mcveig's friend
from death Row, claims in his book that McVeigh actually
went back to Dennis's house with Strasmeyer that night, and
that the three men talked about bombs, but that probably
didn't happen. But when Carol Howe was talking to Agent
Finley in January of nineteen ninety five, she didn't know
(24:48):
anything about Timothy mcveay or that he'd already met Andrea Strossmeyer.
They only knew that this heavily armed German was talking
about bombs. He was talking up blowing up federal buildings.
Carol also reported during that meeting that Robert Miller, the
leader at the compound, had been giving increasingly violent sermons,
(25:10):
urging his congregants to begin preparing for war against the government.
And I read that report, but I have not read
for myself the ATF report from the meeting. When Carol
Howe told her handlers that she had accompanied Mahon and
Strasmeier on one of their visits to Oklahoma City, she
(25:30):
believed they were scouting targets for the bombings they were
always talking about. Investigative journalist James Ridgway wrote in two
thousand and one that Carol Howe's own handwritten notes about
the information she collected for the ATF included what looks
to be an ominous misspelling. She had written down Morrow
building spelled Morrow. Perhaps she'd heard Murrah m u r
(25:57):
r ah and misunders stood. Stephen Jones, the attorney appointed
to represent McVeigh, wrote in his book that Agent Finley's
monthly report for December, which is when Carol reportedly told
Finley that Mayhon Strassmeyer had discussed the Murrah Building, was
missing from the ATF archives. I do want to take
(26:20):
a moment here to reorient us, to sort of ground
us a little bit, because it's easy to go off
the deep end and end up a raving conspiracy theorist.
There's so many versions of the truth that you can
find enough proof to convince yourself of anything you want,
and it's easy to see connections that aren't quite there.
(26:45):
Because it's worthwhile to note here that the Murror Building
had been a target before, it's not actually surprising that
it would have been a topic of idle chatter on
the compound a decade earlier. Members of the Covenant the
Sword of the Arm of the Lord had planned to
detonate a bomb at the Murrah Building, but the plan
fell apart before they could carry it out, and the
(27:07):
group itself fell apart not long after when the compound
was rated. But there were former members of the Covenant,
the Sword and the Arm of the Lord living in
Ellawhein City, and there's a lot of cross pollination of
ideas and relationships. So as tempting as it is to
see the possibility of that name being mentioned as some
(27:27):
kind of proof that How had reported specific prior knowledge
of what was to come, it may be more smoke
than substance. It sounds like a perfect one to one connection,
But in reality, a lot of people were talking about
blowing up a lot of things, and it's not that
surprising that more than one of them thought of that
(27:49):
building in particular. I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I'm not
making any claims here about alternative versions of the truth.
But we only have these competing truths. In March of
nineteen ninety five, just a month before the bombing, the
ATF deactivated Carol Howe as an informant. In later testimony,
(28:10):
Agent Finley would say that how had become mentally unstable
and had been associating with skinheads in her personal life
outside of her work for the government. Testimony from Finley supervisor, though,
indicates that how was seen as an effective, sincere, and
honest informant. A former ATF deputy director reviewed her file
in nineteen ninety seven and saw no evidence of deception, exaggeration,
(28:34):
or fabrication. Findley herself signed her name to a memo
in nineteen ninety six saying that she'd known how for
two years and never found her to be overly paranoid,
and they couldn't have been all that concerned that Carol
was unreliable in nineteen ninety five because when Carol Howe
called Agent Finley the day after the bombing, a month
(28:55):
after they'd cut her loose, they called her into the
office and reactivated her. They wanted her to get Dennis
on the phone in the presence of agents from the
FBI and the ATF. She tried to reach him, but
he didn't pick up. Years after the bombing, Bob Rix,
(29:30):
the agent in charge of the FBI's Oklahoma City Field office,
was asked why Dennis Mahon was never questioned about his
threats to blow up a federal building in Oklahoma City.
His answer was only I don't know. That question was
posed to him by Andrew Gumble, whose book Oklahoma City,
What the Investigation Missed and Why It Still Matters focuses
(29:53):
primarily on the failures of various government agencies in the
aftermath and investigation of the bombing, and the book explores
the idea that there was an interagency turf war when
it came to Elohim City. The ATF was still suffering
the damage to their reputation after the way things went
down at Ruby Ridge in nineteen ninety and Waco in
(30:15):
nineteen ninety three, and more than a few of the
FBI agents Gumbel spoke to believed that the ATF had
been holding back when it came to sharing information with them,
particularly about Elaheim City. But even if you take Oklahoma
City out of this, even if you eliminate all the
complication of these theories about a wider conspiracy leading up
(30:37):
to the bombing, even if imagine for a moment that
bombing had never happened at all, the ATF still had
credible information that a prominent militant white supremacist leader was
making and detonating explosive devices. They had physical evidence, They
(30:58):
had hours of tape from their informant about this man
illegally modifying guns and stockpiling weapons. They had reason to
believe he might be plotting a bombing of some kind,
and every reason to believe he knew how to do
it because they'd been investigating him for years, but they
never brought him in. Tommy Whitman, who is the Assistant
(31:21):
Special Agent in charge of the ATFS Dallas Field office
who oversaw this investigation, later told Gumbel quote, the thinking was,
we don't want to talk to Mahon because if we did,
he'd know we were super interested in him, and he
might change his activities. But of course he already knew
we were interested. The thinking was, also, we don't know
(31:43):
if the FBI or another agency may be looking at him,
so we won't If we make an inquiry, they'll want
to know what we know, and we don't want others
to know because they'll know we're interested and won't share
information with us. End quote. So in the end, the
explanation that fits the facts best, based on later revelations
(32:04):
from the FBI and ATF, is that the ATF was
just gun shy about another confrontation with armed separatists. They
didn't want another Waco, they didn't want another Ruby Ridge,
and they didn't want to move on Elaheim City. And
more than anything else, they didn't want to share what
they had with the FBI. The ATF was negligent. I'm
(32:28):
confident in that I can say that with unshakable certainty.
This was negligent. It was incompetent, It was irresponsible, it
was unforgivable. They had credible information that Dennis Mahon had
grenades and automatic weapons. They knew of absolute certainty that
Andrea Strossmeier was in the country illegally and was illegally
(32:51):
purchasing guns by the crate full. Both of those men
could have been and should have been arrested. Could that
have been accomplished without a Waco style siege at Eloheem City.
That's hard to say. I think so, but I guess
they didn't. But would that have prevented the Oklahoma City bombing?
(33:17):
That's the more important question, and I think the answer
is no. Because for as many unanswered questions as there
still are as many maddening possibilities, there are of these
connections that no one can quite prove. I don't think
it would have. The information Carol Howe provided to the
(33:37):
government can be divided into two categories, things she said
before April nineteen ninety five and things she said after
April nineteen ninety five. Because the majority of what she
said prior to the bombing is credible and consistent and
should have led to action being taken. Everything that comes
(33:59):
after that is a little squishier. One of those later
statements was her testimony at the trial of Terry Nichols
mcvay's accomplice in nineteen ninety seven. She said under oath
that in the fall of nineteen ninety four, she was
with Dennis when he took a phone call. She says
she heard Dennis say tim tuttle, tuttle, tuttle, tuttle and laugh. Now,
(34:25):
in fairness to Carol, she may not have reported that
conversation to the ATF at the time, because why would
she think it was significant. Tim Tuttle was an alias
used at that time by Timothy McVeigh. But in fairness
to those who think Carol would lie under oath, she
did also testify that day that she'd been injured in
(34:46):
nineteen ninety four by three young black men, not her
own drunken lack of judgment in a public park, So
hard to say. As for Tim Tuttle, if you remember
a few episodes ago, I said, the only issue that
I ever found of Dennis Mayhon's White Beret newsletter from
the nineties was one that his twin brother Daniel had
(35:09):
provided to a neo Nazi group who is trying to
archive right wing extremist history. So in twenty twenty two
he hands over a single issue of the White Beret
and this neo Nazi group posts it on their website.
And I don't know how to make a website, but
this is pretty common on a word Press type site.
(35:30):
The page indicates the site author who posted that particular
piece of content. It's not his real name, obviously, he's
a neo Nazi trying to memorialize the history of a terrorist.
But the name the author used was Tim Turtle, which
is perhaps a typo, but perhaps just a cheeky little
(35:54):
nod to McVeigh and his possible connections to Dennis. Many
little anecdotes, bits of testimony and one off claims, unsourced
allegations and mysteries. To go through them all, and a
lot of them don't warrant a second hearing anyway, But
one I can't let go of is a conversation Dennis
(36:15):
Mayhon had in January of nineteen ninety six with a
man named J. D. Cash. Now, if you're familiar with
this particular conspiracy landscape, you might already have an opinion
about JD. Cash. He was a reporter at the McCurtain
County Gazette, a tiny paper in a small town in
southeast Oklahoma, who devoted the last twelve years of his
(36:37):
life to the story of the Oklahoma City bombing. Saw
Mark quick to dismiss him outright as a conspiracy theorist,
And I'll tell you straight up, he did stray from
the straight and narrow path of facts and proof, There's
no doubt about that. But he also spent twelve years
investigating this story, and he was quite close to Mcbay'sttorneysan
(37:00):
Jones and the defense's private investigator, Richard Reyna. I wouldn't
take Cash's stories as a gospel truth necessarily, which is
why I wasn't so sure that this conversation ever happened
until I found a little external corroboration. Cash claims he
and Dennis spoke for five hours that day. Now, Cash
(37:22):
had a bit of an unconventional interviewing style, it seems,
because at some point during their conversation he offered up
his own opinion that Andrea Strasmeyer may have been working
for the German government. For what it's worth, I'm not
really even going to explore that. I'm not saying it
has any legs, but it's what JD. Cash said, and
(37:42):
Dennis's reaction to the idea was extreme. In a later deposition,
Cash said Denis became extremely agitated. He went pale and said,
sweet Jesus, I'm fucked. He got up and placed a
phone call to his friend Marked Thomas, an Area Nation's
member and clansman who spent a lot of time at
(38:03):
Ellaheim City. Dennis had just a few months earlier been
a speaker at a cross burning Thomas hosted on his
farm in Burke's County, Pennsylvania. Dennis was particularly eager to
reach Mark Thomas at that moment because he knew Michael
Brescia was staying with him. Russia had been Strasmeyer's roommate
at Allaheim City, and as Strasmeyer might be a snitch,
(38:24):
Russia needed to hear about it. The two men in
Pennsylvania were not thrilled to be put on the phone
with a reporter, and they refused to agree to allow
Cash to visit them on the farm. After he got
off the phone with Mark Thomas, Dennis made a second
phone call, this time to someone in Germany. Dennis doesn't
(38:44):
speak German, but his twin brother Daniel apparently does. He
passed the phone to his brother, who translated Dennis's instructions
for whoever was on the other end of the line
he wanted Strasmeyer found he wanted him interrogated, shoot him
in both knee caps if you have to, but get
him to confess, and then kill him. Just a few
(39:10):
weeks later, Dennis would deny that he ever said this.
For his part, Strasmeyer has laughed it off his fiction.
But Cash turned his notes over to mcvay's lawyers, and
those lawyers gave them to the FBI, and the FBI
notified the German federal authorities, who in turn briefed Strassmeyer
on this threat to his life in the presence of
his attorney. Whether it all went down the way J. D.
(39:33):
Cash described it or not, a lot of people took
it seriously, but again just to bring us back to
a space of reality, right, so we're not reaching escape
velocity on conspiracy theories, It's easy to see this as
evidence that Dennis Mahon, Mark Thomas, and Michael Brescia must
have known something about the Oklahoma City bombing? Right? Why
(39:55):
else would he panic at the news that there might
have been a snitch? But I would offer up this
alternative explanation for Dennis's reaction. He panicked because he knew
Mark Thomas and Michael Brescia had just robbed twenty two banks. J. D.
Cash didn't know it at the time, but Thomas and
(40:16):
Brescia were both members of the Aryan Republican Army, a
Nazi bank robbery gang responsible for twenty two bank robberies
over the prior two years. Richard Lee Guthrie had been
arrested just a few days before this conversation took place,
and Guthrie quickly gave up the group's ringleader, Donna Langon.
She wasn't known as Donna back then, though she wouldn't
(40:38):
transition until after her arrest. A story for another day.
My point is when Dennis called Mark Thomas and Michael
Brescia to ask them if they knew anything about Strasmeyer
being an informant. They didn't know yet. If Guthrie and
Langen had given up their names to the Feds, they
wouldn't be indicted until the following year. Dennis Mayhon was
(41:00):
called before multiple grand juries in nineteen ninety seven, in
nineteen ninety eight in ongoing proceedings related to the Oklahoma
City bombing, and every time he pled the Fifth invoking
his Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination. In nineteen ninety seven,
Denis Tolal reporter, it is my greatest desire to answer
(41:21):
all their questions, even if it takes days. But I
have to have immunity. I have to protect myself. In
nineteen ninety eight, he tried again for immunity ahead of
another trip to sit in front of another grand jury.
The judge denied his request, and when he was subpoena
to appear before that grand jury in March of nineteen
ninety eight, he told reporters it was pure harassment, whose
(41:44):
retaliation against him for his recent attempt to run for
mayor of Tulsa again. He'd lost in nineteen ninety two,
and he'd just lost again in February of nineteen ninety eight.
By nineteen ninety nine, though mcphay's appeal to the Supreme
Court was he was going to die. Terry Nichols had
been convicted in nineteen ninety seven. The investigation was more
(42:09):
or less over the official one. Anyway, Dennis was nearly
fifty and this one time rising star of right wing
extremism was fading from relevance. His brother got fired for
handing out white power pamphlets at work, a side story
we covered last week, and the brothers left Oklahoma in
two thousand and one. Dennis settled in Arizona, which is
(42:34):
where the next chapter of his life starts. On the
last weekend of January two thousand and four, two hundred
extremists from all over the country gathered in Phoenix, Arizona
for arian Fest, that white power woodstock that Tom Metzger
first held on a farm in Oklahoma in nineteen eighty eight.
Along with the musical performances from Nazi metal bands, there
(42:58):
were speeches from Metzger himself, Health Aran Nation's leader Richard Butler,
and a Nazi named Billy Roper. He is the subject
of several listener requests for his own episode, and I'm
getting there. The Phoenix New Times describes Billy Roper's failed
attempt to whip the crowd into a frenzy, noting rather
(43:18):
derisively that he looks more like a history teacher than
the skinheads in the audience, which is probably because he
had been a high school history teacher until his move
to full time white power activism a few years earlier.
Tom Metzger delivered his remarks while wearing a T shirt
that read some people are still alive simply because it
is illegal to kill them. But I don't think he
(43:41):
put it on with any sense of self awareness. He
warns the crowd that they shouldn't be stockpiling guns, and
he seems instead to be advising them to make bombs, saying, quote,
how many guns can you shoot at once? Guys? Besides,
I could brew up bigger way weapons then guns in
my kitchen. Arian Nation's leader Richard Butler, just a few
(44:06):
months before his death at age eighty six, arrived at
arion Fest without his Bucksom young traveling companion. They were
boarding a flight to Phoenix a few months earlier, when
his companion, Wyndy Ivanov, was arrested for check forgery. The
neo Nazi community was shocked to discover that Ivanov had
been living a double life as an adult film actress
(44:28):
called Bianca Trump. She'd starred in films like Barely Legal
Latinas and Big White Tits, Big Black Dicks. She'd bonded
out by the time the party started, but it seems
the revelations about her career had gotten her disinvited. Dennis
(44:48):
Mayhunt didn't give a speech at Arianfest two thousand and four,
but the Phoenix New Times Reporter noted that he was
quite the social butterfly all weekend, chatting up movement leaders
and young skinh heads alike. He was overheard bragging about
having known Timothy McVeigh, something he'd been denying for nine years, saying, quote,
(45:09):
I knew Timothy McVay quite well. In fact, I knew
him back when he was named Timothy Tuttle, and he
and I were involved in quite a few And then
he paused very dramatically and said, let's just say he
and I did some serious business together. And after Oklahoma City,
the Feds came after me big time boy, but they
(45:32):
never proved a thing, and that was probably a lie,
he said. It. I'm telling you what he said. He
said that he and McVeigh made moms together, but I
think he was lying. He was in his fifties by then,
his time had passed. I think he wanted to impress
(45:56):
these twenty something kids, or at least impress upon them
the value of terrorism, because that same weekend over beers,
he told some young Nazi skinheads terrorism works. We did
a lot of terrorism in Tulsa in the nineteen eighties.
We put heads in the road and people paid attention.
(46:19):
Two weeks later, Dennis Mahon wrote up his last will
and testament and sent it to his father by certified mail,
and then he got to work on the only bomb
the government ever proved. He built we Del guised as
(46:43):
a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. Its researched,
written and recorded by me Molly Conger. Our executive producers
are Sophie Lichttermant and Robert Evans. The show is edited
by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was
composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me at Weird
Little Podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it,
(47:03):
but I probably will not answer it. It's nothing personal.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other
listeners on the Weird Little Guys Subreddy, just don't post
anything that's going to make you one of my Weird
Little Guys.
Host
Molly Conger
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