Deviant Criminology
Dr. Richard Weaver Jr., Heather Kenney, and Rachel Czar take listeners on a journey through the world of true crime. With their unique careers in the criminal justice and academic world; they work to provide an entertaining and educational experience for listeners. This podcast examines many areas of true crime including; the formation of laws, cases that defined caselaw, and crimes that impacted the world. Please join us on this journey as we transition from professionals in criminal justice and academia to budding podcasters.
Deviant Criminology
The Bath School Massacre: America's Forgotten Tragedy
The Bath School Massacre of 1927 stands as the deadliest school attack in US history, yet remains largely forgotten in American memory. Andrew Kehoe, fueled by financial troubles and anger over increased school taxes, meticulously planned and executed a devastating bombing that claimed 45 lives, including 38 children.
• Andrew Kehoe's troubled life included his mother's death, a severe head injury, and strained family relationships
• After suffering financial hardships and facing farm foreclosure, Kehoe blamed rising property taxes for his problems
• Despite serving on the school board, Kehoe harbored growing resentment toward the Bath community
• Over several months, Kehoe secretly planted explosives throughout the school building
• On May 18, 1927, Kehoe detonated explosives at his farm, killed his wife, then targeted the school
• A second cache of 500 pounds of explosives failed to detonate, potentially saving many lives
• Kehoe completed his attack with a suicide bombing that killed several rescuers
• The community demonstrated remarkable resilience, rebuilding the school within a year
• Despite being America's deadliest school massacre, the incident received limited historical recognition
• The attack shares disturbing parallels with modern mass violence events, highlighting our continued struggle to identify warning signs
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Welcome back to another episode of Deviant Criminology. I'm Richard.
Speaker 3:I'm.
Speaker 2:Heather, we'll just get the names out of the way. So today the case we're going to talk about is one that I have been heavily interested in and researched since about 20 years ago when I first started doing active shooter instructing and especially looking at things that had to do with school violence. So this episode we're talking about, a little known mass killing that occurred in 1927, so a little before the Great Depression. But this kind of leads into some of the issues that we saw in the Great Depression of overtaxation, farms not producing what they should have and, of course, the cost of medical care, especially at that time.
Speaker 2:So what we're talking about is the Bath School Massacre. It was one that is again just always kind of stuck in my head. It was such a horrific event and still is the most deadly school attack by an individual in United States history. It was all caused by a man who was angry over taxes and what he saw as government overreach. So this was all fueled by anger and hatred towards the community that he lived in, so he targeted the Bath community school. So this week we're talking about Andrew Cohey and the Bath school massacre.
Speaker 3:So, going back to Andrew Cohey, he was born on February 1st 1872 in Tux Tuxema, I think is how you say it Michigan and he's one of 13 children, which of course is a very large family, and his parents were Philip Cohey and Mary McGovern. 13 kids to me is just crazy. I can't imagine having 13 kids. No, 13 kids to me is just crazy.
Speaker 2:I can't imagine having 13 kids. No, and it's very interesting going back and looking at some of these, because even at this time, when we looked at the Lawson family massacre, that was seven children. So, like these big families nowadays, I have one Like I would never want more.
Speaker 3:It's crazy yeah, 13 is crazy. But Philip, his father. He was a successful farmer, which of course you'd have to be in order to support 13 children, and he had immigrated to the United States from Ireland at the age of eight. Philip initially married and had three daughters with his first wife, who passed away after a long illness. This, unfortunately, would be the first tragic death of spouses for Philip in a string to come, and you really have to feel sorry for this man after you hear everything that's happened to him. Philip is the tragedy, and then Andrew's reaction to those tragedies just further implicates and affects and impacts more and more people. But it makes me wonder, with some of these things that happened, if they hadn't happened in that sequence, if Andrew would have been on a different course.
Speaker 2:Yeah, especially the event in St Louis. I think that's one that really has in the death of his mother, which we're about to get to.
Speaker 3:Yes, so in 1866, philip married Mary McGovern, which is Andrew's mother, and they had nine more children, including Andrew, which made Andrew the favorite child because he was the oldest son that Philip had. And, of course, during those times, being a boy was much more important than it is now, because you carried on the family name and you were the one who took on all the responsibility for the family, whereas the girls kind of just got married off and left. The boys were the ones who actually were important.
Speaker 2:Yeah and so kind of, with the patriarchy of that time period. Mary managed the household and helped raise this large family, while Philip worked the farm and of course farming was a big part of the agricultural sector of Michigan at that time period. Their home life was typical of rural family America at the time. While all family members contributed to farm and household duties, of course the males, especially Andrew and Philip, would have carried a lot of the heavy burden. Andrew was reportedly favored as the firstborn son in his father's second marriage. However, his upbringing kind of became turbulent after his mother's death in 1890 when he was 18 years old.
Speaker 2:We were not able to really find specific causes of her death. We know his first wife died of illness and of course, being in this time period, it probably had something to do with an illness. So following her passing, philip remarried a lady by the name of Frances Wilder she was a much younger widow herself which brought the Cohey family to 13 total siblings after Francis had a child, a daughter, with Phillip. So again, this 13 children thing drives me to a place that I don't want to imagine. Raising one was hard enough. I couldn't imagine raising 13, especially in this time period. But again. You would need that for that big farm. It was not uncommon. So again I had two siblings. I couldn't imagine growing up with like 12 and sharing that space Like he's 18 and then has an infant sister.
Speaker 3:Just not just the space, but the attention too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like how much individual time did they get with their parents? So I don't know, just seems very insane to me to have that family.
Speaker 3:Right and unfortunately for Andrew, it seemed that Francis and Andrew did not get along. Their relationship was strained and this comes into play later in Andrew's life when he's trying to connect with his father and return to his father's home and again like that attention piece once his mom was gone. Then this other woman stepped in and he had this adverse relationship with her, so that impacted his relationship to his father.
Speaker 2:So it was almost like he lost both parents at least to some degree, at once when he was 18 too, at least to some degree at once, when he was 18 too, and going back to just Phillip losing two wives and then now he's got a third wife having to deal with the different children, and that makeup of a step-parent coming in so late in somebody's life and the respect that she would have expected but probably wasn't given, being that she was considerably younger.
Speaker 3:Exactly.
Speaker 2:But kind of going back to Andrew's early life, he'd attended to come see high school and, though not specific numbers, were not able to find about class sizes or anything it is notable that during this time the school he attended underwent major expansions because of the growth that that area was seeing. So again and this is kind of a growing, booming area Farms are successful. There's a need for a larger school, and that comes into play into this conversation. Once he graduates he goes on to study electrical engineering at Michigan State University, which is now well. At the time it was Michigan State College, now it's known as Michigan State University. Andrew had an interest in mechanical and electronic engineering. It is said that he did really well in physics and had a knack for machinery. So it was during this time period he met a young lady named Ellen, nellie Price, and Nellie would go on to become a major part of Andrew's development in life.
Speaker 3:After college, andrew moves to St Louis Missouri where he works as an electrician. During that time he suffers a severe head injury in 1911. And after that fall he's left in a coma for several weeks, and I think this would be a good time to talk about head injuries in general and also how they might have impacted Andrew. We discussed before Nanny Doss and she had some type of a head injury injury, or TBI, as a serious risk factor for aggressive and antisocial behavior, with studies highlighting its prevalence among violent offenders, including serial killers and mass murderers, and it's something too we talk about now with the NFL, and you can see in the NFL they have higher rates of domestic violence than in other professional sports.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and like with Nanny Doss, like she had that it was a young age where she hit her head off of the bar on the train and then with here we're seeing he's a little bit older, but this is such a severe head injury that he goes into a coma from it. A 2020 research study found that 77.5% of young violent offenders reported at least one TBI in their life, often linked to increased aggression behaviors and sometimes linked to substance use disorders. Meta-analysis has revealed incarcerated individuals have higher rates of TBIs compared to the general population, with head injuries often localized to brain regions involving decision-making impulse control, such as the orbital frontal cortex or the temporal lobes and the frontal lobes, especially where we know there's a lot of things dealing with social aspects, the ability to notice social cues from individuals and stuff. We see this in multiple, especially serial killers and violent offenders, namely Richard Ramirez. He was known for suffering several head traumas as a child.
Speaker 2:You brought up the NFL. Aaron Hernandez was known to have had a severe head injury from a hammer hit that he took to his head when he was a child, let alone all the concussions he had over his career. You had Robert Card, who was a mass shooter. That occurred in 2023, and a post-mortem analysis of him showed that he had suffered a significant TBI from blast exposure during military service. And then, finally, one known one, henry Lee Lucas. He sustained a head injury, also at a young age, at seven, from his mother, resulting in a coma that had damaged his prefrontal cortex.
Speaker 3:So of course, with that last one, him suffering that head injury from his mother, then it makes you wonder, like is it nurture nature If she has some predisposition to violence, does he? And again, like you said, how much did that injury contribute to where he ends up?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and Henry Lucas especially was one of those that had a lot of other stuff going on. Maybe we'll talk about him one day. There are some neurological issues Again. Damage to the orbital frontal cortex really has to do with decision-making area. You've got the temporal lobes, which are emotional regulation, and that's another common injury that you see with comas, with TBIs Wow English today and that will later be seen with Andrew, where you have this emotional regulation issue that he has and sometimes these angry outlashes.
Speaker 2:And then TBI survivors often exhibit these impulsivities, these mood disorders. The substance use disorder is a little bit less linked, but some people have seen that that could be a totally different thing about self-medicating. So contributing factors and limitations like to what we're talking about. Tbi's frequently interact with environmental risks as well, such as childhood abuse, family issues as well. So we can't just say the head injury, but there is a lot of research that substantiates that there is especially emotional regulation and mood disorders that come from severe head injuries Shows that a TBI is a modified risk factor for violent behavior, particularly when combined with psychosocial stressors which we are seeing develop in Andrew's life the divorce, the loss of his mother, the remarriage, a lot of children going off getting injured and then we'll have to see here in just a moment that he comes back and has to move back to his father's because the severity of his injuries.
Speaker 2:He comes back and has to move back to his father's because the severity of his injuries. So we can take away from this information about Andrew's incident that it was severe head trauma when taking into account that's put him into a coma for several weeks and negatively impacted his life and his job, causing him to leave his job and the city that he was living in at the time.
Speaker 3:And then, of course, that incident marks a significant period in his life. He eventually returns to Michigan to live with his father, but of course his mother had already died and his father had that new wife, frances Wilder, and she was a widow herself and significantly younger, and because of those various factors which we already talked about, andrew disliked his stepmother and they had a very strained relationship. And then there was another tragic incident that occurred in 1911 for poor Philip, when Andrew's stepmother, whom he really didn't like, died from burns that were caused by an oil stove explosion, died from burns that were caused by an oil stove explosion. On September 17th of 1911, frances suffered fatal injuries when the family's oil stove exploded while she was attempting to light it. The explosion caused the fuel to soak her body, which then caught fire. Andrew was present and he attempted to extinguish the flames by throwing water on her. However, because the fire was oil-based, the water exacerbated the flames instead of dousing them, and Frances succumbed to her injuries shortly thereafter.
Speaker 2:It kind of should be noted that some said Andrew may have caused this. I mean, he was good at mechanics, he was good with engineering and stuff. He didn't like his stepmother, but there's no proof of that. But related to this, though, is the water on oil. That wasn't really something that was common knowledge before this time period, but especially not until 1911, when the first fire extinguishers designed specifically for oil and liquid fires was patented, utilizing carbon tetrachloride. So it just happens to be, when I did the research this year, the year she died in those oil fires, the same year that they created these oil fighting fire extinguishers. So it may not have been common knowledge, even if he was good at physics and chemistry. There was just maybe a lapse in knowledge.
Speaker 3:Or sometimes you just react like you know there's a fire, there's an emergency. What do I do? You grab the water and you're not thinking about. Oh shit, this is the wrong thing to do.
Speaker 2:Well, my dad did that. So when he was much younger I'm pretty sure it was before I was born he was working at a coating plant and one of the pieces went to go into an acid bat and he just instinctively reached for it, grabbed it and his hand went into this acid bat and it burned his whole forearm and everything else to the point that he had to go to the hospital. I think it was every day for a little while to get it scrubbed out to try and limit scar tissue and infections and everything. But you know, very intelligent man, very knowledgeable, but just that instinct of oh crap, I've got to do something. And this very much may have been that situation where he just she's on fire, throw something on it, not realizing that it would exacerbate the situation.
Speaker 3:And then I can only imagine how much this furthers his own psychological problems, at least in my mind. I can't imagine being there, seeing somebody that anybody burned to death, let alone somebody that you know, somebody you know your father cares about and you know, maybe he tried to stop it. It's hard to say, but I can't imagine living through that experience and coming out the other side not scathed or scarred by it.
Speaker 2:And I can't again imagine Philip like this is his third wife now that has departed to from what looks to be illnesses, and then the third one in this tragic accident and he's just lost every time and from what I saw in the research like I couldn't find anything where he got remarried after this.
Speaker 3:So, despite his father's horrible luck with wives, the next year, in 1912, andrew marries Ellen Nellie Price, and she's the daughter of a wealthy Lansing family. Nellie, whose real name is Ellen Agnes Price, was born in 1875 to Patrick Price and Mary Wilson Price, a wealthy and prominent family, with her father, patrick, being an entrepreneur and philanthropist who amassed a considerable amount of wealth through his involvement in the automobile industry. He apparently is the co-founder of the REO Motor Car Company, which I'm not familiar with, and it was also alongside REO REOles after Olds sold his stock in the Oldsmobile Company, which, of course, I know that one Oldsmobile, but the other ones I'm not familiar with.
Speaker 2:There were so many small car companies in that time period after the model a came out, like the Ford company, there were a lot of little ones. My dad talks about this and we kind of saw that going back to um Dillinger there were a lot of cars and car companies that he liked that when I was doing the research I was like I've never heard of any of these whatsoever. But a lot of them got bought up and then kind of became Ford, oldsmobile, chevy and that. But yeah, back in the day there were like dozens of these little car companies in Michigan, Indiana, illinois.
Speaker 3:It makes a lot of sense because then, as they get their process more streamlined, it's more difficult to compete and more motivation to sell out, more motivation to sell out. So Patrick, which again is Nellie's father, also makes significant contributions to the community, including funding and construction of the Sparrow Hospital in Lansing, which ironically, later provides emergency care for the victims of the Bath School disaster. Nellie grew up in an affluent environment, benefiting from her family's financial success and social standings. The Price family's wealth was not only supporting her lifestyle but also allowed them to engage in philanthropic endeavors and of course that had massive impacts on Lansing's development.
Speaker 3:This was the background of the woman that Andrew married, the background of the woman that Andrew married, and you know, as we know, it doesn't sound like he was extremely well off as Nellie was. You know, 13 kids and living as a farmer. So it seems kind of odd that the two of them ended up together. And one other particular thing that stands out is that with their entire marriage of 15 years they never have any children. So I don't know if Andrew was like I'm sick of kids.
Speaker 2:That is something that I kind of took away from it, because they go to farming, he becomes a farmer, they have a farm, but no kids of their own, and there is part of me it's like no, I grew up with 12 siblings. I'm done. I don't want any kids. I didn't find a lot on her background of how many siblings she had or anything, and some of that goes into like. These stories are interesting when we look at these historic ones because they're ones people haven't heard about.
Speaker 2:But the flip side of that is a lot of information from the government side of statistics weren't there. There weren't a lot of vital statistics, but also information about certain people that didn't commit these like heinous crimes. There's not a lot of information about them. Last night, sidebar the last night, I was looking up more on the Lawson family and I was interested in how many families between 1929 and 1939 during the Great Depression, how many family massacres were there and annihilations, because we knew I just know anecdotally that there were quite a few, but just Google searching and everything, the Lawson family is the only one that kept coming up. It was like there were probably others, but this was the only one that we can definitely find anything about and I was like that's very interesting because we know there were more, because just the market's crashing and farms going under. So it's kind of this as well, where we weren't seeing a lot of information about individuals except Andrew. Because of what?
Speaker 3:And I think that goes back to the news coverage too Like other than this person was born and this person died and having the obituary, you didn't have a whole lot of other from them. If you have the right security type details in place, if somebody doesn't have their profile locked down, you can learn all kinds of things about them.
Speaker 2:And a lot of these smaller communities probably haven't digitized their old newspapers. I mean, this is 1911, 1912. There probably wasn't the 1929, 1930. In that time period the Great Depression there was just a lot of stuff that wasn't happening. Newspapers didn't have funding and stuff like that, but also dillinger, bonnie and clyde, organized crime, prohibition was kind of dominating these conversations. So even if you had an incident like this the next day, there would be some bank robbery that would take attention away from this, because this suspect affected a small community and wasn't glamorous like those big bank robberies were.
Speaker 3:So the couple purchases. Like you said, they went to farming. They get an 185-acre farm near Bath Township in 1919 for $12,000, which is the equivalent to about $390,000 in today's money. They paid half in cash and took out a mortgage for the remainder and despite their initial stability, the couple faced financial struggles. Over time Nellie developed chronic tuberculosis which required frequent hospitalizations and drained their funds. At that time there were no antibiotics or specific treatments for tuberculosis and most of the methods were experimental, including heliotherapy, which was basically sunbathing to try to address vitamin D deficiencies, or artificially collapsing a lung to allow it to rest, called an artificial pneumothorax. But sadly, most of the common treatments that came back to care in a sanatorium, not sanitarium, which of course those things were not cheap and they lasted months to years. So interestingly enough, we went to Mammoth Cave last summer and there was a section of Mammoth Cave that summer and there was a section of Mammoth Cave that they used for these purposes yeah, and tuberculosis, hey, I think people forget that it's still around, it's still a lot.
Speaker 2:one of the weirdest things when I was in EMT was going to like hospitals and I smoked at the time. You would go outside the smoking section and there were people out there with their oxygen machines smoking and had tuberculosis and you're just like. I don't think any of this is right, but at the time there were no treatments for it. So, like Doc Holliday went to Arizona and went into a sanitarium and they were supposed to, really it was like air, fresh air. Louisville had a massive sanitarium that's now like a haunted house or something. But there were a lot of these facilities that got built or were being utilized but they were expensive. And this comes into play with poor Andrew here. I don't really like saying poor Andrew, but at this time he hasn't done anything bad yet.
Speaker 3:Unless you count his stepmother.
Speaker 2:But we don't know that he did that. It's innocent until proven guilty. At this time period in history at least, yeah, by mid-1920s, andrew goey hay had stopped making mortgage payments, uh, and insurance payments on the farm. And again I kind of wonder you have this 185 acre farm, no kids but yourself, so how are you like? We know it took these big families and hired hands and stuff. So he blames a lot of stuff on these taxes that come in. But to me, being able to work a farm that massive with that few people himself and his very sick wife take care of her, I think there were other financial things that were going on and he was just looking for a target to blame. So again he stopped making payments. They start foreclosure proceedings which come from the lender. This specifically would be a major catalyst to his crime.
Speaker 2:There are a lot of variables about his personal life, his own personality, social life, his slight political life and family dynamics that we want to discuss before getting into the Bath school incident itself. So Andrew kind of gained this reputation amongst his neighbors as being very intelligent, and I mean he showed that his degrees, his barrier with engineering, and he was very quick to anger. He was meticulous about cleanliness and enjoyed tinkering with machinery more than actually doing the farming itself. So we're kind of starting to see little things of why he may have had financial problems, but also this kind of quick mention of he was known to have anger issues. So he was also known, besides having anger issues, to have this cruelty towards animals and erratic behavior. He was known to have beat a horse to death when it failed to meet his expectations.
Speaker 2:Working on the farm he also had killed a neighbor's dog. The neighbor recalled that her dog had wandered onto Coey's property and was annoying him by barking. And then later Andrew admitted to killing the dog without any hesitation and showed no empathy or disregard for the animal's lives or the feeling of the neighbors. Just like, hey, your dog came over, it bothered me, I killed it.
Speaker 3:Shit on the dog for you on the dog for you, and with the horse it sounded like the horse collapsed from exhaustion because it was working so hard without being given any time to rest and because of that that's when he beat it to death, which you know again. It's just crazy, extreme violent tendencies, with no compassion towards any of those animals.
Speaker 2:No, and he admits to his neighbor like oh yeah, it fell, I beat it to death. No regret, no remorse. So we're kind of starting to see going back again to what we saw with head traumas and stuff like this kind of impulsivity, this lack of emotional regulation, and in general neighbors frequently describe Cey as harsh and cruel in his treatment, not only of farm animals but abusive behavior towards other people. These incidents were seen as an extension of his broader personality traits of being impatient. Again his anger and then that lack of compassion, the abuse and animal killings as well. It's kind of like this marker we see a lot in mass murders and serial killers.
Speaker 2:Mass murders we don't talk about as much but the signs have been there in multiple that I've studied. But this act is a strong indicator of, again, the lack of empathy. The animal abuse always seems to kind of be a triggering start for that. Many times this all starts from power and control. He has power over the animal, he has control of it. When it doesn't do what he wants, he lashes out and reacts towards it. So this is just kind of again one aspect of his personality that's really important to remember when we get to the event itself.
Speaker 3:And of course those factors with animal abuse also relate to domestic violence and I kind of wondered on some to some extent, like what Nellie's life might have been like living with him, given all of these little things that we know about how he treated the farm animals and the neighbor's dog and the suspicions of what happened with his stepmother and the fact that she came from wealth. Part of me wondered if at any point she was like forget you, I'm going to go to mom's house, I'm done. But it seems like that never happened.
Speaker 2:And the other thing that kind of is again is some of this anger maybe coming from loving his wife and watching her suffer and everything, and he's just so. I mean there's so many things we don't know. We don't have any writings from him, we just have his actions and reports after the fact. But I mean he's got so many tragic things that are happening in his life and it sounds like he's lashing out at everybody around him and everything around him. So I don't know if he loved her or not or anything like that, but just looking at all the stuff he's been through, it doesn't justify anything he's about to do. But you can start to see where the paranoia, the anger and the rage develops from him on multiple fronts.
Speaker 3:So at this point he's financially strapped, he's embittered, because there's property taxes that are going up and those are mostly to try to fund a local Bath consolidated school. Because of these taxes, andrew becomes increasingly resentful of the community and because of these taxes, andrew becomes increasingly resentful of the community. Specifically, this consolidated school was established in 1922 after the voters approved a bond to create a modern school district and that decision doubled the property taxes in Bath Township in order to fund the construction and operation of the new school, of the new school. In 1922, the school tax was $12.26 per $1,000 of property valuation. So for Andrew, whose farm was valued at $10,000, this meant his annual tax bill of $198. So by that 1926 tax rate it rose $19.80 per thousand dollar evaluation. So this is, you know, today's money, his taxes in 20,. I'm sorry, his taxes would have been prior to the school, about $2,300. And then after the school in 1926, it would have gone up to $3,500. So it's about a third more and it's a significant amount of money.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and especially when he's already having problems Like he's already having financial problems before kind of this stuff starts going into effect. So this just exacerbates those problems. But now he has a target for that rage. It's not the farm failing, it's the taxes.
Speaker 3:Right the final straw.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and he believes these taxes were excessive and unjustified, particularly as he was facing on his own these mounting financial difficulties A due to the failing of the farm, b his wife's medical expenses and his inability to maintain mortgage payments. He frequently protested that he was paying far too much in taxes and even attempted to have his property valuation reduced to lower his tax liability, and his resentment just continued to grow as he blamed the school board and township officials for what he saw as kind of like this unnecessary financial burden.
Speaker 3:And he gets so angry over taxes and how they're compounding his financial struggles that in June 1926, when he's notified of the foreclosure proceedings on his farm that had begun because he stopped making his mortgage payments, he reportedly told the sheriff who was serving the foreclosure notice quote if it hadn't been for that $300 school tax I might have paid off this mortgage. And allegedly he told Mrs Price, who was the widow holding his mortgage quote if I can't live in that house, no one else will.
Speaker 2:He's going to live up to that. So Andrew's financial troubles coincided with his involvement in local politics. So he was elected treasurer of the Bass Consolidated School Board in 1924. But again his anger and temper. He clashes with other members over tax issues and accuses the superintendent specifically of mismanagement. The superintendent specifically of mismanagement.
Speaker 2:So as a member of the Bath Consolidated School Board from 1924 to 1926, serving as both first trustee and then treasurer, andrew Coey became known for his obstructionist behavior in opposition to nearly every expenditure they put across, which makes sense. He's angry about taxes. He thinks they're wasting money. It's costing him a lot of money. So of course he's going to put back on every dime that they're trying to spend to show that they didn't need to raise these taxes. He repeatedly clashes with Superintendent Emery Huckey, h-u-y-c-k for those accusing him of financial mismanagement without providing substantial evidence. So he's making all these claims but he's got no documentation to show that there's this waste, fraud and abuse. But he's just saying it. And if he says it then it's got to be true in his mind. So Andrew Coey often refuses to approve spending on essential items for the school and argues against what he considers unnecessary costs.
Speaker 3:Although I do have to recognize that he, at least on some level, went about this initial grievance process correctly. He ran for school board, he got elected, he went through the official channels. He said I'm challenging these expenses, I'm not going to approve them, as one of the people who is a fiduciary on this board. So at least on some level he tried to do the right thing in that 1924 to 1926 time frame in regards to the school district, even though he had no children.
Speaker 2:Yes, I mean, he's getting involved, he's advocating, he's getting into politics, he's going about what, from a social work perspective, we would say, hey, like this is how you properly do this. And he got elected. He also had this brief time where he served as the Bath Township clerk, but he lost re-election in 1926, which, like those dates are weird to me, like a one-year position, but I don't know, it's not my job to judge but this was a public defeat that reportedly deepened his grievances against the community. He blamed them for losing this election.
Speaker 3:So in 1927, Andrew has ceased working on his farm entirely and he begins to plan what ends up being this catastrophic attack that turns into the Bath School disaster. And his bitterness over his financial struggles, his personal losses, his perceived injustices fuel his actions leading up to the tragedy, and around the loss of the election, Andrew starts trying to come up with this plan as to how he's going to punish the community for all of these things happening.
Speaker 2:So Andrew begins purchasing explosives shortly after losing the Township Clerk election in April of 1926. And while he's facing foreclosure on his farm. So neighbors reported hearing explosions on his property. This is probably him testing different combinations of explosives, earning him the nickname the Dynamite Farmer of explosives earning him the nickname the Dynamite Farmer. So he had acquired pyrotol, which is a World War I era incendiary explosive. He was buying dynamite, and both commonly were used by farmers at the time to clear land, so this wouldn't have raised a lot of suspicions. So over time he amasses over a ton of explosive material, some of which were stolen from a nearby bridge construction site.
Speaker 3:Now Andrew's rage is focused on the community, but specifically it's on the Bath Consolidated School system for these increased taxes. As the treasurer of the Bath Consolidated School, andrew had unrestricted access to the buildings and during the summer vacation of 1926, he used his position to plant explosives in the school's basement and walls. He concealed dynamite in various items, including lengths of ease trough pipe, bamboo fishing rods and windmill rods embedded in the ceiling.
Speaker 2:So, leveraging his background in electronic engineering, andrew wired the school with a timed detonation system. So I mean he's doing this over a very long period of time, so there's no turning back Like. He was very determined to make this happen. So he installed an alarm clock in the basement of the North Wing, set to trigger the explosives. At 8.45 am on May 18th 1927. A secondary cache of 500 pounds of dynamite in the South Wing just happened to fail to explode during the attack due to a short circuit caused by the initial blast. So he'd set them for two different times the first blast goes off and cuts the second one from happening.
Speaker 3:Thank goodness.
Speaker 2:Yes. So Andrew also rigged his farm buildings with homemade pyrotol firebombs and wired them to explode simultaneously with the school blasts. He also converted his Ford truck into a mobile shrapnel bomb by loading it with metal debris such as nails and scrap metal. To maximize casualties, he installed new tires to ensure reliability during transport and concealed dynamite inside the vehicle.
Speaker 3:Which is, I mean, that's a ton of planning. He spent months on this.
Speaker 2:It's a lot of planning, but also, as we're getting into this, it's really important to remember this is 1927. This isn't modern times Like this is almost a hundred years ago that he's put this level of planning into this mass attack that he's about to carry out.
Speaker 3:So let's talk about our timeline for the school disaster. It happens on May 18th 1927. And at 8.45am Andrew detonates the explosives at his farm, destroying the buildings and killing his wife Nellie, whose body was later found charred in the ruins. Simultaneously, a timed alarm clock trigger the massive explosion in the north wing of bath consolidated school. That blast collapsed the structure, killing 38 children ages 7 to 12 and six adults which were teachers and staff. First grade teacher bernice sterling described the scene as resembling an earthquake, with children and debris hurtled into the air.
Speaker 2:So between 9 to 9.15 is when rescue efforts begin. So parents and volunteers rush to the school, trying to claw through rubble to search for survivors. Rescuers then discover the unexploded ordnance of 500 pounds of dynamite in the south wing, which had again failed to detonate due to this short circuit. Had it exploded, the entire school would have been destroyed.
Speaker 3:About 9.30, Andrew rolls up in his truck and he drives to the school in that Ford truck that's loaded with dynamite and shrapnel, including nails and scrap metal. He summons the superintendent over to his vehicle which, if you remember, that's the one that he's having all of the disagreements about spending Emery Huke.
Speaker 3:Huke yeah, how do we say it, superintendent Huke? And there's some type of a struggle and during that struggle, andrew fires a rifle into the truck's explosives. The resulting blast killing Andrew, superintendent Huke, a retired farmer, nelson McFarren, postmaster Glenn O Smith and eight-year-old Chloe Clayton, who had survived the initial explosion. This explosion injures dozens of bystanders and ignited cars nearby.
Speaker 2:The aftermath of this is you have 45 dead, which includes Andrew Coey, and 58 injured. Victims include 39 children in total, aged 4 to 14, and six adults in the school blast, plus the four killed in the truck explosion. There was a temporary morgue that was set up, with victims' bodies were laid in the schoolyard, while ambulances transported the survivors to the Lansing Hospital that we discussed earlier. So final death fourth grader Beatrice Gibbs died on August 22nd 1927 from complications of hip surgery, bringing the total fatalities for this horrific attack to 45.
Speaker 3:Which, when I read that one, that one, I mean they all got to me, but that one really got to me, because I can't imagine being her parents. You see all this death and destruction and your child lived and you're relieved, thank goodness, my child's okay. Only to what is that four months later, lose them? I can only imagine how crushed those parents would have been. I can only imagine how crushed those parents would have been.
Speaker 2:It's sad to me also, like when we think about this events. This was only four months, but I was recently reading about the last victim to die from Columbine, and they died in 2025. Right, columbine happened in 1999, but the last victim technically died in 2025 from injuries sustained during that attack. So it's just, you know, we always think of the initial events that happen and the things that we discuss, but sometimes, especially when we get into these type of mass events, we don't talk about the long-term effects that it has on people's health, their bodies and the injuries that they sustained during them. Long-term effects that it has on people's health, their bodies and the injuries that they sustained during them.
Speaker 2:The initial immediate response and relief efforts you had emergency aid. The American Red Cross established operation centers at what was the Crum Drugstore, coordinating medical care, burial costs and donations. They got over $5,284, which would have been almost $96,000 today which was raised, including $2,500 from the Clinton County Board of Supervisors and $2,000 from the Michigan legislature. And then it also garnered national attention. Hamburg's transatlantic flight elicited a global outpouring of sympathy, which included letters from Italian schoolchildren and financial support from across the US.
Speaker 3:And, of course, this had a massive impact on the community. There was local grief and solidarity because of this event, because residents held mass funerals for the victims, burying all of the deceased within days. The community prioritized rebuilding with repairing the school and opening it back in 1928. There were over 100,000 vehicles that descended on Bath in the days following the attack, which created mixed feelings in the community. Some people saw the visitors as intrusive, while others viewed them as a show of national support and solidarity. Because of these events, they did create a memorial statue called Girl with a Cat, which was donated in 1928 by Michigan Children. Currently, girl with Cat resides in the Bath School Museum, which is located in the auditorium lobby of Bath Middle School on Webster Road in Bath, michigan, just in case anybody wants to go check it out. The museum preserves artifacts and memorabilia related to the history of Bath schools, including items connected to the 1927 disaster. Visitors can view the statue, along with other exhibits that commemorate this tragedy and its impact on the community.
Speaker 2:So there's also the James Kozer Memorial Park that was built in 1975, and it features the original school, coppola and a bronze plaque listing all the victims' names. There's also some unmarked graves of victims like Emily Bromund and Robert Bromund, which received tombstones in 2008 through community-funded efforts. So again, almost 80 years later, and we're just recognizing victims and getting them headstones and stuff. So just the time and the impact that events like this have on a community can last 100 years or more. It's pretty tragic, but some policy and structural changes did come out of this. So again, the rebuilt Bath Consolidated School incorporated reinforced steel, concrete, fire alarms and emergency exits, which were innovations at that time. And then also Michigan Senator James Kozins funded reconstruction, emphasizing and wanted to emphasize resilience, which was the push to try and get it rebuilt in a year try and get it rebuilt in a year.
Speaker 3:And then, of course, just like we have now, every time something like this happens, there was a mental health and threat assessment awareness, because this tragedy highlighted the need for addressing mental health issues and financial stressors which impacted Andrew, and they wanted to make sure that there were formal policies that would be put in place, because they were lagging in addressing those types of issues, just like they do today. There were discussions about identifying at-risk individuals and trying to find ways to analyze situations to identify them, which even today we talk about, we still struggle with, because every time there's a school shooting, we say why didn't somebody see these signs? And in hindsight, people look for red flags. But it's well impossible, I would say, to predict when these things are going to happen.
Speaker 2:Well, I was just saying a lot because that is literally one of my areas of research as an academic is mass violence, mass murders, and specifically I started with schools. Columbine was kind of the thing that set me off on that path. But yeah, I mean, every time we're like why, you know, why didn't we see this coming, why didn't we know or see the warning signs? And we're like they were all there, like this wasn't hidden, like his acts, everything that he did. There were clear signs, you know.
Speaker 2:But even up until the Oklahoma City bombing, a lot of the same chemicals that Cohe used were used in Oklahoma City because they weren't regulated, because while farmers used them so amassing them wasn't seen as abnormal, and it wasn't until policy and regulations saw that. You know, we kind of have an issue when you can just get mass amounts of these explosives, set them aside, and then you know, here you have this massive event that kills 45 people. So it also did leave a long term legacy. So there are some historical recognitions. So a Michigan State historical marker again was installed in 1991 at that Memorial Park and again you have the Bath School Museum to preserve kind of the memory and keep people, I guess, remembering again, but keep it in people's minds that these events happen and we have to pay attention and we have to be aware and we can't forget about the victims, which is always kind of. You know, heather, and I's biggest focus on these is remembering the victims more than the people that commit the atrocities.
Speaker 3:There's also been cultural impacts, as there's been authors and scholars such as Arne Bernstein, who wrote the Bath Massacre, america's First School Bombing, which it frames the event as a precursor to modern domestic terrorism, which I think you can argue. It absolutely is, just like you mentioned Oklahoma City bombing. A lot of that you know similar ideas, similar chemicals, same type of methodology in order to reach the result that they got to. And then the disaster is cited in academic journals as the largest pediatric terror disaster in US history.
Speaker 2:And again this goes back to, like my research area and everything Like not only do you have the same like methodology of this massive bomb, but targeting a government facility, and a lot of the anger is aimed towards the government. It's the government's fault. His farm failed. It's the government's fault. His wife was sick and it was so expensive. It was the taxation that led to the foreclosures and everything else. Same thing we saw with Oklahoma City, ruby Ridge and everything else was this anti-government sentiment and it's the government's fault for my blight. So I'm going to make an example by attacking the government through bombs or some other means.
Speaker 2:And they do do an annual commemoration. The community holds ceremonies to honor the victims, including the 90th anniversary panel, which was done in 2017. So I would assume here in two years you'll see the 100-year anniversary, which I think will be important to bring attention to this in modern times that we're still dealing with these events. There were a couple books as well that were written. We're not going to get into all those. There was one documentary that I could find, called Forgotten, which is America's Deadliest School Massacre, and that's a three-part documentary. But again, you can find all those and we'll put them on the website as well.
Speaker 3:So I mean it's to me the most tragic part of this whole thing is the fact that a hundred years later, we still don't have these things figured out, and you would think, with all this experience and all of this time that we've had, we could figure some type of a system out to try to identify these people Because, just like you said, after the fact you look back you say, well, there's all these red flags, why didn't we figure this out? But it seems like we don't have a good screening process to try to list or score those red flags in advance to say these individuals are at risk and we need to try to help catch them before something like this happens.
Speaker 2:And I think even what makes it weirder is that we are in this digital technology age and so much of it, even since Columbine because Columbine there was online records and things that Eric and Dylan had put up about making explosives and videos of them shooting guns and everything that. Here we are, 27, 28 years, 26 years later from Columbine, almost 100 years from this event, and we still can't identify those trigger warnings. Or if we do, it's always too late and I think there's a lot that goes into that and we could do a whole episode on just the lack of education amongst law enforcement about the signs and signals against society, the parental blindness that well, that's not my child, my, you know, my child wouldn't do that, my father wouldn't do that. You know there was a book I read by BTK's daughter who talked about her normal life with her father who on the side, was a serial, torturous, sadistic serial killer, but she never saw any of that. So you know, looking back, there were signs, but it was just that blindness to well, this person's not going to do that. They're all talk, they're all hype.
Speaker 2:So I think in the aftermath of this horrific event still stands as the deadliest school massacre in US history, with 45 dead and 58 injured. I think the most horrific part of that is 38 of them being children aged 4 to 14. So the Bath School disaster catalyzed grassroots resilience. It memorialized and created incremental safety reforms that were still far from where I think we should be. And while direct policy changes were localized, its legacy persisted in discussions about school security, mental health and community solidarity. So this tragedy still kind of remains a somber lesson in addressing societal grievances before they escalate into violence.
Speaker 3:So hopefully you know again, we haven't figured out anything in the last hundred years. Maybe in the next hundred years we can figure out how to prevent some of these things.
Speaker 2:And I mean at the least keeping this alive, because I've talked to a lot of people in law enforcement and the study of these things that had never heard of this incident. And if we can not only keep the memory of the victims alive but what happened, combine that with the things we've learned in the hundred years since, and maybe it will inspire, as it did me as a researcher, to try and look into ways to at least minimize, or the overall God goal of hoping that we could one day stop, these type of events.
Speaker 3:We'll just have to wait and see what happens, I guess.
Speaker 2:I guess so, and hopefully, if you're listening, you enjoyed this episode and we look forward to next week. I want to thank you all so much for listening to our little podcast. This is created with love and passion for criminal justice and true crime. So if you're enjoying the podcast, please follow us, like or rate us on whatever system you're listening to us on, subscribe to our podcast and download episodes. Downloads are important for our growth, as is growing our listeners. So if you wouldn't mind, take the time to ask your friends, family, co-workers, tell them about us through word of mouth, social media I don't care if you even scream at strangers on the streets, to help us kind of get out there who we are.
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