Bath Massacre: America's First School Bombing (30 page)

William Searl, prosecuting attorney for the county, initially planned the inquest for Thursday morning at nine o’clock, just twenty-four hours after the bombing. He quickly realized this would be a terrible mistake. The dead were not yet buried. Potential witnesses undoubtedly would be consumed with grief and suffering from physical exhaustion.
¹

Yet an informal hearing—what the
Lansing State Journal
referred to as “John Doe proceedings”—was held late Thursday afternoon.
²
Six men, chosen from the hasty pool Searl compiled on Wednesday, were sworn into service as jurors: Alton Church, Wilmer Coleman, Edward Drumheller, Ishmell Everett, Clarence Tolman and Burt Wilcox. They were selected in part for their highly respected status within the community. Additionally, each man had no children. While the men certainly mourned for their family and friends, none would be swept by the grief of losing a son or daughter. Theoretically the six would have open minds when sifting through the evidence presented to them.
³

Officially the jurors were responsible for a single task: learn all the details
leading up to the death of Superintendent Huyck. Everything up to and following Kehoe’s murder-suicide, including motivation, wiring the school, setting fire to his property, and killing Nellie, were part of the process. Deriving an account of what led to May 18 and how the day played out was an unspoken goal of the inquest.

As farmer-cum-coroner, C. E. Lamb was dependent on Searl to run the proceedings. County coroner was an elected position with duties that included death investigations caused by unusual circumstances. But Lamb was a farmer, not a legal scholar. With so many dead under such extraordinary conditions, he faced an inquest that was simply unprecedented. With Searl in command, Lamb surely felt considerable relief.

The proceedings were held in the ballroom of the Community Hall. Normally a gathering place for dances or amateur theatrics, the space was outfitted with two tables in front of the ballroom stage. One table was for jurors, the other for called witnesses. It was a stark setting, lit only by a few bare bulbs dangling off wires strung from the ceiling. Small windows on either side of the ballroom provided a little more illumination, but overall the setting reflected the sober nature of the gathering.
⁴

Relatively few witnesses appeared at the preliminary investigation. Janitor Frank Smith gave brief testimony. Six weeks previously he’d found the broken lock on the school door. Yes, he said, Kehoe had a key to the building for access anytime he needed it. And over the past week doors within the basement, normally shut, were found open.
⁵

Although the initial proceedings went unrecorded, Chief Charles Lane spoke with the press afterward, providing a hint of what was to come during the official hearing, now scheduled for Monday morning.

No evidence, he said, was presented suggesting that anyone but Kehoe was behind the bombing. The wiring, while not completely examined, conceivably could have been accomplished by one man. For now, people would have to wait for answers.
⁶

To some, the proceedings were senseless. Nothing could bring back the children; at best, the hearing might cauterize a psychic wound by explaining Kehoe’s actions. For many still deep in shock, such a prospect offered little—if any—comfort.

Fifty-five witnesses were called over two days, a cross section of students, school employees, board members, rescue workers, attorneys, and Kehoe’s neighbors (the term “Kehoe’s friends” didn’t seem apt). Glenn
Whitman, a talented court reporter, took down each word spoken by Searl and the witnesses. They told their stories in simple, unadorned English. There was no need for embellishment.

The tale unfolded in bits and pieces. Kehoe’s strange behavior on Wednesday morning. The first sounds of an explosion at the school. How the ground trembled. What people saw, what people did. Children’s low moans and high screams emerging from the rubble. A fledgling rescue effort. Huyck’s devotion to duty, seemingly everywhere in those early moments, running from the school to triage to deathbeds and back to the school.

The fire at Kehoe’s farm. Its rapid spread. Kehoe in his machine, emerging from the smoke, telling people to go to the school. (“I knew when he gave that warning possibly there might be something doing,” Sydney Howell testified.)
⁷

How Kehoe pulled up to the school. Calling Huyck to his truck. The second explosion. Terror. Panic.

Wiring, blasting caps, and dynamite winding with deadly precision throughout the labyrinthine underworld of the Bath Consolidated School. Dynamite in the Kehoe house, timers, and wiring leading to his farm buildings.

Horses hobbled by wire, roasted and burned alive. Searching for Nellie. Discovering her body and personal artifacts.

Background information. Kehoe’s antagonistic relationship with Huyck. His obstinate refusal to pay the mortgage. Nellie’s illnesses. Her last hours.

Kehoe’s talents. Mechanical. Electrical. Psychological. Unlimited access to the school. Time to develop a plan for destruction. Patience and diligence over the course of weeks or months, working in cramped, darkened spaces, gently pushing material into place, working through the night, bit by bit, piece by piece, until each element was in place.

The story unfolded over two days, a mosaic of memory and eyewitness accounts, physical evidence, and documentation. An undercurrent of extreme violence contrasted with unembellished heroism was laced together by the pastiche of stories.

And then it was over.

“Gentlemen,” said Searl, “we have no other witnesses here, and we expect to close the Inquest unless there is some other question you want answered, or unless you know of some other witnesses, or unless there
are some other witnesses in the room that know about this. I think that is all then, Gentlemen. I think you can go down in the basement to deliberate on this.”
⁸

The results didn’t take long. After a short deliberation, the six-man jury delivered its findings. Kehoe had acquired dynamite to carry out an elaborate plan. He had killed his wife, blown up the school and burned down his own farm with timers, driven to Bath, and blown up his truck to murder Huyck.

“We find that the said Andrew P. Kehoe was sane at all times, and so conducted himself and concealed his operations that there was no cause to suspicion any of the above acts,” read the concluding lines, “and we further find, that the School Board, and Frank Smith, Janitor of said school building, were not negligent in and about their duties, and were not guilty of any negligence in not discovering said plan.”
⁹

Lacing the school with explosives, murdering his wife, setting his farm ablaze, blowing himself up, killing forty-four all told (including Nellie and himself), these were unthinkable crimes that
could
be explained by “how.” The “why” remained elusive.

The general explanation, as retold in countless newspaper articles, in history books, and on Web pages, is that Kehoe was angry over property taxes and the possibility of losing his home. On the surface, that seems too simple, too pat an answer for the level of horror inflicted. Taxes are never a neutral issue; on any given day in any given place in any given period of history, people have complained and acted on government taxation. Like his father before him, Kehoe zealously spoke out against taxes, but they were hardly alone in this respect.

People upset over taxes do many things, but the systematic planning and realization of multiple, large-scale bombings by one person is on a psychological level far beyond anger.

The historical record shows that Kehoe was in no danger of being forced out of his home; the attorney Joseph Dunnebacke stated as much during the inquest, although this was a theory quickly postulated by newspapers in the wake of the bombing. “At no time did the executors of the Price Estate press Andrew Kehoe for his money,” Dunnebacke told the jurors. . . . “On the contrary, it was my idea, and I am sure Mr. Kehoe so understood it, that he would be given every opportunity to work out
his problem by making a sale of his farm and thereby saving his equity.”
¹⁰
It stood to reason that the Price sisters would not be so cruel and uncaring as to throw the Kehoes out of the house with Nellie so desperately ill.

Somewhere, somehow, some
thing
in Kehoe lost its way. No matter how much puzzling and questioning there is, the real answer—Kehoe’s personal “why”—burned to ash with his farm, exploded into senseless matter with his flesh, and was wiped from the earth at his own willing. The wooden suicide note found at the edge of his farm gives a clue. What happened in Bath, he seemed to be telling the world, was created by others. As the Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho would claim about himself years later, Kehoe believed he was not personally responsible for the mayhem. It was the fault of others who had pushed him to the edge, turning Kehoe into a man for whom epic death and destruction was his last means of personal expression.

Psychology, the plaything of the leisure class, was all the rage during the 1920s. In sophisticated New York City, Greenwich Village Bohemians held “Freuding” parties with guests telling about and analyzing one another’s dreams.
¹¹
Three years before the bombing, in Chicago defense attorney Clarence Darrow had turned a disturbing light on unsettled minds in his defense of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two brilliant University of Chicago students who brutally murdered fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks just for the thrill of it. The prosecution demanded the death penalty. Darrow delved into the psychology of his clients in a determined effort to save their lives. “How insane they are I care not, whether medically or legally,” he implored the judge. “They did not reason; they could not reason; they committed the most foolish, most unprovoked, most purposeless, most causeless act that any two boys ever committed. . . . They killed . . . because they were made that way. Because somewhere in the infinite processes that go to the making up of the boy or the man something slipped.”
¹²

During a staff dinner held at Owosso Memorial Hospital on May 21, three days after the bombing, a group of medical scientists gave their collective diagnosis of Kehoe’s psychology. He was manic depressive, they claimed, a man who created and executed his plan as an escape from his depressed state. Kehoe’s suicide, the doctors concluded, showed that he was not paranoid. A paranoid individual, convinced the world is out to get him, might kill others but certainly would not commit suicide.
¹³

Decades after the bombing, there is a better understanding of what forces operated inside Kehoe’s brain.
Psychopath
was a word tossed
around in 1927 as easily as terms such as
masochist
or
Oedipus complex.
As a mental illness and motivator, psychopathic behavior is now recognized and diagnosed with clarity. There are unique characteristics of the disorder, as identified by Dr. Robert Hare, a Canadian professor of psychology and leading expert in this dark underworld of human behavior.