Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (42 page)

To the villagers of Bath, Kehoe seemed like an unusually smart, capable, and friendly fellow, always willing to lend a hand, particularly when it came to mechanical
matters. “Any favors we asked of him, he was perfectly willing to do,” one neighbor would later testify. “If anything was wrong, he’d come to our place and fix it.” When Monty Ellsworth, who operated a wholesale butcher business, needed a steam boiler installed in his slaughterhouse, he “asked Mr. Kehoe to come up and help me, which he did very readily. He ran the pipes to the scalding tanks and showed me all about the boiler. Being no mechanic, I had some trouble from time to time with the boiler and I would always call Kehoe and he would come right up and fix it and would never take any money for his work.”

To be sure, the man had his eccentricities. Unlike other farmers, who toiled in dirt-crusted coveralls and work boots, Kehoe kept himself as neatly groomed as a banker, riding his tractor in a business suit, vest, and polished shoes. He would hurry home to wash up if his hands got too greasy, and he was known to change his shirt in the middle of the day if he noticed a sweat stain or smudge of dirt. When finished with his tools, he made sure to put them back in perfect order. His barn, as Monty Ellsworth observed, was “cleaner than many houses.” His neighbors marveled at his meticulous ways. Nowadays, a psychologist would take a more pathological view of such compulsive behavior.

His insistence on perfection extended to other areas of his life. Though sociable enough to participate in weekly card games, he was bitterly intolerant of any perceived infractions, snapping at other players who didn’t stick strictly to the rules or who committed inadvertent errors. Though capable of generosity, he also displayed flashes of cruelty that bordered on outright sadism. On one occasion, he killed a neighbor’s dog whose incessant barking had gotten on his nerves. Another time, in a fit of frustration at a recalcitrant horse, he beat the overworked animal to death.

And then there was his obsession with taxes.

From the time of Bath’s founding in 1843, its children had attended one-room country schoolhouses where students of different ages shared the same teacher and their education ended with tenth grade. By the early 1920s, such an outmoded system no longer served the needs of the community. In the summer of 1921, the townspeople voted to build a modern new school with separate classes for every grade level from kindergarten through high school. To fund the project, household taxes were raised to $12.26 per $1,000 of property valuation. Construction began at once on a handsome two-story building and, in the fall of 1922, the Bath Consolidated School opened with 236 students bused in from throughout the township.

Though the majority of residents took enormous pride in the school—viewing it, in the words of one historian, as “a shining landmark overlooking the town, symbolically representing a higher ideal and bright future”—it was a source of resentment to others, who bridled at the increased tax burden, which grew heavier by the year. Andrew Kehoe, who had taken an increasingly active role in civic affairs, was from the first an outspoken critic of the school and the expense it imposed on the community, particularly on those, like himself, who were childless. In 1924, representing those disgruntled farmers who wanted tighter control exerted over educational expenditures, he got himself elected to the school board and was appointed treasurer.

Over the course of his three-year term, Kehoe found himself in constant conflict with other trustees and on the losing side of most battles. He clashed repeatedly with the school superintendent, Emory Huyck, a dedicated and much-admired administrator who seemed to inspire a peculiar loathing in Kehoe.

In 1926, following the sudden death of town clerk Maude Detluff, Kehoe was asked to fill the vacancy for the remainder of Detluff’s term. His confrontational style proved so alienating that—though he was eager to hold on to the post—his fellow party members refused to nominate him in the next general election. The following year, he made a final, futile bid for public office, running unsuccessfully for county justice of the peace. His defeat only added to his growing bitterness. By then—though he gave few outward signs of it—Andrew Kehoe was harboring a deep and growing hatred of his community, the world, and life itself.

T
HOUGH IT USED
to be a catchall phrase for any homicidal maniac who claimed multiple victims, the term “mass murderer” is now reserved for the type of profoundly embittered individual who—blaming the world for all that has gone wrong with his life—resolves to go out with a bang and take as many people with him as possible. In a single, sudden burst of apocalyptic violence, he explodes without warning, wiping out everyone within range and turning a safe, familiar environment into the site of a corpse-strewn massacre. Whereas the serial killer can be defined as a predator, a “hunter of humans” who slakes his bloodlust by stalking one victim at a time, the mass murderer is stereotypically described as a “human time bomb”—a metaphor that, in Andrew Kehoe’s case, would prove to be especially, horrendously apt.

By 1926, a toxic brew of emotions—resentment, humiliation, powerlessness,
paranoia—was simmering in Kehoe’s breast. His hopes for political office had been met by mortifying rejection. His wife had contracted tuberculosis and required constant and increasingly burdensome medical care. His personal finances were in such a shambles that he could no longer keep up his mortgage payments. In the fall of 1926, a deputy arrived at his farm to deliver a foreclosure notice.

“If it hadn’t been for that three hundred dollar school tax,” Kehoe remarked after examining the document, “I might have paid off the mortgage.” The comment was striking enough to stick in the deputy’s mind, though its full ominous import would only become clear later.

G
IVEN HIS AVERSION
to slovenliness and disorder—stemming from his obsessive need to exert absolute control over his environment—it was not surprising that Kehoe devoted much of his energy to making his property as tidy and well-tended as his tool shed. Among other things, this entailed clearing the land of tree stumps, boulders, and other such obstructions. To accomplish this goal, he relied on dynamite and pyrotol, an explosive made from surplus World War I gunpowder. Neighbors grew accustomed to the frequent detonations emanating from Kehoe’s farm. What none of them knew or suspected, however, was that in late 1925 Kehoe began accumulating and storing away large quantities of both explosives, for reasons that had nothing to do with farming.

B
ECAUSE OF HIS
electrical know-how, Kehoe was asked, while still serving on the school board, if he would perform some repairs on the school’s wiring system. When he agreed, he was given a key and free access to the building, day or night.

It was during some of those nights, beginning in late 1926, that he smuggled into the basement more than six hundred pounds of pyrotol in thirty-pound sacks, ten bushel baskets full of dynamite, a dozen blasting caps, and the simple components—wiring, battery, alarm clock—needed to fashion a crude homemade timer.

A
S APPALLING AS
the events of Wednesday, May 18, 1927, were, they might have been—and indeed were meant to be—much worse. With only one day to go before commencement, many seniors stayed home from school. Others weren’t scheduled to arrive until late in
the morning for a final exam. Even so, there were more than 250 children in the building when the bomb went off at eight forty-five, ten minutes after classes began.

The whole building rocked on its foundation, and the entire north wing, which housed grades three through six, was reduced to rubble. “Dynamite and pyrotol combined in a powerful ball of energy,” writes historian Arnie Bernstein, describing the detonation. “This forced the walls of the north wing upward about four feet. They fell back to earth, collapsing outward with a crash of wood, glass, plaster, and iron. The roof of the building slammed down onto the crumbling walls. A cloud of dust hovered above the ruins. For a moment there was silence. And then a cacophony of screams.”

The terrible blast “sounded throughout the farmlands of Bath Township, and continued to echo for miles beyond.” Such was the force of the explosion that windows of nearby houses were shattered, people were knocked to the floor, and “horses, terrified by the roar, broke loose from their plows and scattered.”

Within minutes, hundreds of people had arrived on the scene. While Emory Huyck supervised the rescue of the children still trapped inside the east wing, other villagers tore through the smoldering wreckage. As they brought out the small bodies—some terribly injured, others lifeless, a few miraculously unscathed—“the piercing lamentations of mothers” mingled with “the heartrending cries of the sufferers and the terror-stricken screams of children.” Altogether, two teachers and thirty-six children (some from the same family) died in the explosion.

But the horrors wrought by Andrew Kehoe—“the fiend in human form,” as one newspaper described him—were not yet at an end.

K
EHOE HAD BEEN
a busy man.

In the weeks before the disaster, a few visitors to his home noticed that he had been stringing copper wires between his farm buildings. Knowing that he was an inveterate tinkerer, they thought nothing of it. No one had the slightest inkling of the truth: that Kehoe, in his all-consuming rage, had resolved not just to wreak a terrible vengeance on his community but to obliterate his entire world.

Sometime between May 16, when he drove his wife home from a brief stay at the local hospital, and the morning of May 18, Kehoe murdered Nellie by crushing her skull with a blunt object. He then loaded her body onto a cart and wheeled her behind the chicken coop. Inside his barn, he hobbled his horses by wrapping wire around
Postcard showing “Small Portion of the Destruction Caused by the Crazed Maniac” at the Kehoe farm. their ankles. With a saw, he cut down the beautiful old shade trees surrounding his house and severed his grapevines.

Postcard showing “Small Portion of the Destruction Caused by the Crazed Maniac” at the Kehoe farm.

Finally, he packed the rear seat of his Ford pickup with old tools, nails, nuts, bolts, and assorted scraps of metal and placed a few sticks of dynamite atop the junk pile. With the vehicle thus converted into a massive shrapnel-filled bomb, Kehoe’s preparations for his personal Armageddon were complete.

At roughly the same moment that the explosives detonated in the basement of the Bath Consolidated School, Kehoe activated the ignition devices he had set up throughout his property, turning his house, barn, and assorted outbuildings into an inferno. He then jumped into his truck and headed for town.

K
EHOE’S NEMESIS
, S
UPERINTENDENT
Emory Huyck, was leading the rescue effort when the pickup pulled up in front of the demolished school. Stepping out of the vehicle, Kehoe called Huyck over. As Huyck approached, Kehoe grabbed either a pistol or a rifle from the cab of his truck (eyewitness accounts differed) and fired into the backseat.

The car bomb went off in a devastating blast that ripped apart the bodies of both men and sent hot metal fragments tearing through the flesh of a half dozen men, women, and children standing nearby. Seventy-five-year-old Nelson McFarren was killed outright. His son-in-law Glen Smith, the village postmaster, had one leg sheared off at the thigh and bled to death on the scene while reassuring the rescuers who were frantically trying to save him that they shouldn’t “feel bad if I go.” Another victim, eight-year-old Cleo Clayton, was struck in the stomach with a large bolt and died a few hours later.

A
S APPALLING AS
the bloodbath was, Kehoe’s plot, had it fully succeeded, would have wrought even greater destruction. Searching the basement of the ruined school, police found more than five hundred pounds of explosives that had failed to go off, owing to a faulty timer. Had the device worked as intended, the entire building would have blown up, killing or maiming everyone inside.

He had done a more complete job on his farm, where his house had been reduced
to cinders, his tractor and other equipment utterly destroyed, his horses incinerated, and his wife’s corpse charred to a blackened lump.