By Melissa Ingells, WKAR News
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wkar/local-wkar-969706.mp3
EAST LANSING, MI – Eighty-four years ago this week, one of the worst acts of domestic terrorism ever on American soil took place. And it was right here in mid-Michigan, in the town of Bath, northeast of Lansing. Scores of people, mostly children, were killed or injured by a man who's since become known as the Bath Bomber. Our book reviewer Lev Raphael has been reading Bath Massacre: America's First School Bombing, by Arnie Bernstein, and spoke to WKAR's Melissa Ingells about it.
AUDIO:
LEV RAPHAEL: Most folks in Michigan don't know about it, and most Americans don't know about it, because 80 years ago, the worst school massacre in our country's history took place, and it took place right here in Michigan, in Bath. Forty-four killed, 58 wounded, and half a school building destroyed.
MELISSA INGELLS: Which is really just unthinkable numbers, especially, you know, for that year, you don't think of that kind of technology in the 1920s.
RAPHAEL: You wouldn't, except the farmer who blew up the school building, for reasons that are pretty mysterious, was an expert at dynamite. He used dynamite to blow up tree stumps on his 80 acre farm in Bath. And he knew how to use it, and he loved using dynamite instead of fireworks on Independence Day -- first clue that there was something a bit odd about this man.
INGELLS: So what exactly happened? The guy's name, Andrew Kehoe, what did he do?
RAPHAEL: Well, he rigged the Bath Consolidated School building completely with 600 pounds of explosives, and he knew the building really well because he had been asked to do wiring and plumbing there. And it's something right out of an episode of "24" or "NCIS." I mean, the guy was fiendishly clever, he took his time. And then he murdered his wife, set fire to and blew up his farm, blew up the school building, and, just like in any contemporary terrorist attack, he came to the site and then blew up his own truck which was filled with shrapnel and killed a few more people.
INGELLS: What was his motivation to blow up the children of a town, and the superintendent of schools? What was going on?
RAPHAEL: Nobody really knows. Arnie Bernstein tells the story in Bath Massacre: America's First School Bombing, and has to admit, we don't know a lot about the man's motivation. There is a possibility that he suffered pretty serious brain damage in an accident at one point in his life. He could have been a classic psychopath, because he did kill some animals and, of course, it's assumed he killed his wife. What you end up with is the classic American conundrum: "He didn't really seem like the kind of guy who would kill dozens of people by blowing up a school." You know, you hear this all the time. They interview the neighbors. "Well, he kept to himself, maybe, or he was a bit odd, or he was, you know, behind in his mortgage." But there really wasn't anything that gave you a clue that this man was deadly. And that's what makes the book so scary. Because this is a very sad American story.
INGELLS: I was reading the transcripts of the coroner's inquiry, actually, in getting ready for this interview, and exactly what you said, that people were like, "yeah, he was pretty neighborly, you know." Except there were a few things. He beat a horse to death once.
RAPHAEL: Shot a dog.
INGELLS: Shot a dog. And the neighbors said there was always some talk about, he was angry about his taxes being too high, and specifically the taxes being levied to build the nice new school in Bath. But one of the things in the coroner's inquest, somebody said, "Yeah, but we all complain about that."
RAPHAEL: Right. We all complain about taxes, even today. We don't go off and blow things up. The mystery of this massacre is one of the things that just keeps you reading the book, because you want to know why it happened, and yet you end up with the eternal question, why do some people commit evil acts? We don't know the answer and we're not going to know the answer. But everyone in Michigan should know that this massacre happened here in our state. It's a sad piece of our history, but we need to know it.