Episode 2: The Family

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A note before we get started. This episode contains strong language.

It was a warm night, a nice summer night. About one in the morning, had the windows open, and I was sound asleep. One night, on a quiet slice of farmland, on the way out to the Oregon coast. Farmer Mike Seeley sat straight up in bed. And then all of a sudden you started hearing these loud booms. Very, very loud booms. They were incredible explosions. Down the road...

At a nearby tree farm, something had blown up. It sounded like a war was starting. Mike got up out of bed and rushed to the window. Outside... The sky was glowing red. 40 by 100 foot barn with trucks and tractors inside. They were on fire. Shop was on fire. Gas tanks, diesel tanks were all exploding. There was black smoke everywhere. And as it started to clear, an ominous message emerged from the gloom. There was a small building right beside it that they had painted health.

On the one side of an old white shed, someone had spray-painted the letters ELF. And on another wall, in the same black paint, there was a statement. A one-sentence manifesto. It said, you cannot control what is wild. I knew what ELF stood for. And there's no question about that. ELF. Those letters stood for Earth Liberation Front, a radical environmental group. Its members were known as the Elves. And one of those elves was Daniel McGowan. I was just sitting there.

Trying to get fresh air after breathing in a lot of gasoline fumes and just wondering, like, what's next? Trees might seem like an odd target. But the arsonists claim the hybrid variety farmed here were replacing native species. They described it as an ecological nightmare. The tree farm arson was just one of many lit across the western United States in the late 1990s and early 2000s. No one was killed or injured that night, or in any of the fires the ELF lit.

But soon the arsonists would be called eco-terrorists. And soon after that, this movement would be identified as the number one domestic terror threat in America.

When you're on that path, you're just like, well, I want this to stop. I want these things to stop. I want the forest to have a chance to recover. In this series, you're going to hear from people who 20 years ago sensed we were in a pot of water slowly reaching a boiling point and who took things further than anyone else had to try to draw attention to the threats to the environment.

I don't think you needed to be a psychic 25, 30 years ago to know that some of what we were doing was going to create a very bad situation. It's why I thought it was necessary. It was necessary to take such drastic action. And at the center of this are two fugitives who, for more than a decade, have sat on the FBI's most wanted domestic terror list.

The FBI is offering a reward of up to $50,000 for information leading to the arrest of each of these individuals. One who's still missing? Josephine Sunshine Overaker, who has been on the run since 2001. Second individual is Joseph McMood. And one now caught. I'm in Havana, Cuba. Sometime around midnight, I was driven to jail. It was brutally hot. No water.

About the third day, I was in pretty tough shape. I'd been going in and out of consciousness. Any way you look at it, these individuals are considered as terrorists. How many people who have been on the FBI's most wanted list have ever sat down for a podcast with the fucking BBC? Well, this one did. He wanted to know about arson and trying to... get me to say that this is me. And of course I'm not too eager to do that. This is Burn Wild. Episode 2. The Family.

I'm Leah Citilli. In my years of writing about extremism, I've tried to get to the root of why people radicalize. Because a lot of times, you can boil it down to a moment. or a couple of moments. And those moments can be key to understanding what pushes someone toward committing violence. I'm a visual person, and one of the best ways I've heard extremism described is like a funnel.

Someone becomes open to one idea at the wide end of the funnel, which leads them further down into it. The walls of the funnel get steeper, and they start sliding more and more quickly toward more and more extreme ideas. If they get all the way to the bottom of that funnel, then they might be open to breaking the law in the name of those ideas. Or worse. In most cases, my work on extremism has involved violent far-right ideologies.

But that's not what we're looking at here. We're trying to understand questions like how far is too far to go to stop the planet burning and how environmentalism becomes radical. And that's important to understand right now, in this moment. Because what can make a person feel more powerless than not being able to do anything about climate change?

Producer Georgia Cat and I started working on this project in January 2021. It turned out that would be a big week for discussions of what is and what isn't terrorism. Take that house! Take it now! On January 6th, a mob of far-right demonstrators stormed the United States Capitol in an attempt to overturn the presidential election in favor of former President Donald Trump.

And two days later, on January 8th, I was watching Joseph DeBay appear in court, shackled and masked. For three years, Joseph DeBay had been passed through various jails around Oregon. but still hadn't seen trial. And at this point in time, he'd contracted COVID. On this day, his attorney Matt Schindler was arguing that Joseph Debe should be released to home detention.

If you ask me, Matt, what are my chances of getting an international fugitive eco-terrorist released from jail? I would say not too strong. The FBI had been on the hunt for his client for more than a decade. In all that time, his mugshot stared out from the FBI's most wanted domestic terrorist list. But the following week...

It turned out his plan worked. The fact Joseph DeBay was sick with COVID, had had his jaw broken, and his father was dying, the government agreed to home detention. God, it couldn't have hurt to watch a bunch of... racist Nazi fucking hillbillies over on our Capitol two days ago to put this little chunk of eco-terrorism in perspective. For the first time in three years,

Joseph DeBay walked out of the jail in Portland. He wore a pair of cargo pants and a fleece jacket. He was released to home detention until his trial. And finally... We got to talk to him. Okay, so I should hold it. Setting this up hasn't been simple. For one, we're in the middle of a pandemic. And two, because house arrest comes with severe restrictions. You're not allowed to have a phone that has...

So my sister comes by and I actually don't touch the phone. She puts the phone down because I'm not allowed to touch. So Georgia mailed him a microphone. Technically, I'm maintaining the orders of the court. Other than the few words he said in his court hearing, this is the first time I've heard his voice. And it's the first time I've spoken to someone who's been on an FBI Most Wanted list.

Until this moment, I'd only seen Joseph DeBay in his mugshot on the FBI's website. A young hipster guy looking at the camera with a kind of bemusement, even arrogance, maybe. He tells us to call him Joe.

By the way, if you can't get that microphone working. Joe's attorney, Matt Schindler. Mr. Engineer, I'm going to be deeply disappointed. Too much technology. Before the federal government designated him a domestic terrorist, Joe was an engineer at Microsoft. He grew up in Seattle, the son of an esteemed university professor. As Georgia goes over the logistics of recording, I'm struck by the passage of time in his face.

He's not the hipster-looking guy in the mugshot anymore. He's in his 50s now. His beard is gray. His face looks a little more hollowed out by time and age. He looks tired. At first... I'm not really sure who I'm dealing with here. This guy has been talked about like a ghost and a terrorist. And it's hard to know what's real. So, uh, let's do it. I don't know what the date is, uh, because I haven't... It's 18th? March 19th. Oh, it's the 19th.

I'm still under house arrest and I was charged by the United States government with a slew of various crimes dating back from two decades ago. Leah, one thing that's important. Joe Debe's attorney, Matt Schindler. I wouldn't want people to think that Joe got out, you know, he went to the karaoke bar in the strip club. He's been to the...

the Bahamas. I mean, he's living under the strictest possible form of federal release. He's under house arrest, and that involves electronic monitoring, which is 24 hours a day, seven days a week. you know, while confronting being labeled a terrorist by the United States of America. So it's quite an adventure. Joe grew up near the Cascade Mountains in Washington state.

an area known for its beauty and thick forests. But it was also a place known for clear cuts, the removal of trees from an area. If you haven't seen a clear cut, it looks like a razor has gone through a strip of hair.

I want to start with kind of an odd opening question from a journalist probably, but when was the first time you can recall maybe falling in love with the earth in such a way that it was motivating for you? I think I came to it like sort of over time. When I was in high school, I was kind of a nerd, and I guess awkward is the word you'd probably use. There's this one meadow that I used to go to a lot. I discovered it sort of just by happenstance. I was plowing through this horrible clear cut.

There are a lot of clear cuts out there, and somehow they'd forgotten a little piece of it to cut. It had some second growth in it. It had some old growth in it. It had a little creek that ran through it. It was really beautiful. I went there. It was kind of like this little refuge. And because the area was destroyed around it, all the animals that would otherwise have been in that area gravitated toward that. And there was, if you walk quietly, like deer would jump out from behind the trees.

There was grouse in all the trees, and there was tons of rabbits and stuff. I kind of snuck up on the creek. There was all this trout in the creek because, you know, the water ran very clear there. It was the sort of refuge I went to. And so after a while, I think I was about 15. I got there, you know, I was looking forward to stomping around the meadow and and Somehow they remembered that they'd forgotten to cut it So I think that stirred me pretty deeply.

From there, you know, you're 15, still living at home. Obviously, where did you go next with it? Once I became 16, I got car keys. And I started mountaineering. It sort of became my life. And, you know, I climbed all these different mountains in the Cascades. And I got up to the top of all these mountains and I could look out. And I could look out all over the region.

And what I saw were clear cuts everywhere. And I thought back to the meadow that I'd enjoyed so much. And I realized it was like this really special place to me. I'd realized that they didn't just take my special place, that they'd taken everybody's special place. So it was really at that time that I... It kind of just gelled for me. It clicked for me. It's wrong. Somebody's got to do something about this. And if it's not me, then it's who. And if it's not now, then it's when.

In the years leading up to the Earth Liberation Front's formation in the Northwest, the loss of old-growth trees, like those Joe's talking about, had become a bitter issue for a lot of people. And the loss of forests wasn't restricted to the U.S. either. On Georgia's side of the Atlantic, there was anger brewing over road projects cutting through woodlands in the U.K. Hello? It seems to be working then.

This is Paul Rogers, an environmental activist now living in Scotland. Hi, Paul. Jolly good. Hello. Good morning. Paul holds provocative views, and he regularly found himself rubbing up against the law. a better word, what is the most extreme thing that you have done? I'm not going to tell you that. Needless to say, Paul's been arrested a lot. A range of criminal damage, essentially. So all things connected to... Oh yeah, they wrote, they wrote, let's go down.

For nearly 20 years until the early 2000s, Paul Rogers ran a magazine called Green Anarchist, which, as you probably guessed from the name, combined environmentalism with anarchism. At one stage we had two publications under the same name going out under different editors because that's what the anarchist movement is like, it's very anarchistic.

He and four others would be charged with conspiracy to incite criminal damage. Paul's case was dismissed, but three editors were in prison for three years before they were let out on appeal. And the magazine gave a sense of the kinds of actions taking place around the world in the 1990s. The listings tended to be like, you know, kind of people gluing locks, damage to...

construction equipment, that sort of thing, you know. But yeah, I mean, in the space of about two to three months between publications, we could fill pages of it. Maybe even give us a working definition of what you believe direct action to be. Direct action is imagine that there's a pipeline spilling polluted water or whatever into the local environment. Convention or orthodox practice would be to...

go through the appropriate channels, the agencies involved in regulating it, the legislators and so forth, asking them to stop doing this. A civil disobedience approach would be to do essentially the same thing, it's involved in other more.

dramatic ways of framing it. You know, they might go and occupy the roof of the polluter's house or something like that. But essentially they're still trying to persuade someone else to stop the pollution. What direct action would be if they go and block the pipe.

Think of the environmental movement in terms of different levels. The elves were part of the underground, secret, unaccountable. Then there's the one that's probably familiar to you, the above ground movement. People waving signs and writing letters to their representatives and members of parliament, working with the nonprofits, Greenpeace, Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, organizing direct actions in the open.

In the 1980s, a section of that movement came along that ratcheted up what above-ground direct action looked like. Their name was Earth First. Earth First's methods were very different from that of the Earth Liberation Front. Earth Firsters used their bodies as blockades and techniques they called monkey wrenching to sabotage machinery.

When it came to the forests, they took up residence in the trees slated to be cut down. During the anti-roads protests in the UK in the 1990s, they tunneled deep underground. It's been hailed the third battle of Newbury. Evicting people from the network of underground tunnels is proving the most difficult. These tunnelers got a name. Badgers. The anti-road protests of the 90s win.

Earth first really started rolling in the UK. There were skirmishes with the police. Protesters chained themselves to cranes and machines. ranged from people occupying the lands... ...to occupying sites... and moving on from there to actually destroying the plant used to construct the road. But of course there's a certain amount of, you know, clandestinity involved as well. really isn't very appropriate to discuss it. These tactics soon took off across the Atlantic.

They would influence the likes of Daniel McGowan, the elf you heard from at the beginning of this episode. I would say that this sort of UK environmental and animal rights movement was sort of like a... I don't know how to describe it, but it was definitely something I would say I looked up to. It was always like a, damn, the British really get down. Like, what?

But we would put them on pedestals and be like, oh man, these are the people that like, you know, stop this like highway. And there were campaigns in the United States that mirrored some of the anti-roads movement. But back in America in the 90s, one action was dominating the conversation. It was a massive year-long protest in the forests of Oregon. The year is 1995.

Deep in the Willamette National Forest, a thick mossy forest filled with waterfalls and old-growth trees, home to elk, cougar, and black bear. A huge timber sale was being proposed at a place called Warner Creek, critical habitat for the endangered spotted owl. It was nearly a year long of a blockade. Greg Harvey was a police detective in the close-by city of Eugene at the time. I forgot four or five feet of snow that they had to live in.

They blocked the road. They pulled up culverts. They had people buried in the culverts. At the site of the timber sale, Protesters put their bodies in the way of logging vehicles using techniques seen in earth-first blockades. They'd bury themselves on the only road up to the forests with their heads sticking out of the ground.

or they'd chain themselves together. Some protesters would sit at the top of these tall wooden tripods they'd set up, so if loggers tried to cut them down, they'd fall. Their message was clear. they were willing to be killed for that forest.

And in this story, Warner Creek would be a critical meeting place for a group who would take things further. A group that would become known as the family. Warner Creek was probably the actual ground zero. Police detective Greg Harvey. I know for a fact, I mean, I'm dedicated to a lot of stuff, but what they went through... It truly explains what they're willing to do. The group of environmentalists, the winter that they spent together, they were in a tight group.

And so if you're in a small, like a teepee type of a tent and pack snow all around it and you guys are just clinging together for warmth, for food. You're talking to each other. You're learning every deep, dark secret about each other. And you learn who you can trust, who you can't trust. Chelsea Gerlach.

who you heard in the last episode, starting the fire high on that snow-capped mountain, was there at Warner Creek. And so were the two fugitives. Josephine Overaker was there. I believe Joe Diaby was there. So I was an accomplished climber. I'd spent a lot of time climbing and I had a lot of climbing gear. You know, I had an engineering degree and I had a biology degree and I wanted to use them for something positive. Since witnessing the clear cut on that mountain.

Joe had become more and more involved with direct actions. And at Warner Creek, he used his mountaineering skills to help others scale the trees. But he was also an engineer. There were a bunch of technological...

sorts of gadgets that I've come up with, but I think that some of them are still in use and I don't really want to kind of sort of spill the beans on them. I see. Sure. Yeah. It was... there's some fear there's a lot of fear there because you know loggers would show up there with their chainsaws and they were pretty angry there was some hope

Warner Creek gave everybody a fair amount of hope that, you know, maybe something could change. Joe Debe, Chelsea Gerlach, Josephine Overacre, they were all there at Warner Creek. And their tactics worked. After a year-long blockade, the Warner Creek timber sale fell apart. Warner Creek had been where everything came together, where environmentalists put everything on the line and won.

But while the blockade was going on, another story was coming out of the area. A fire had been lit at a dairy in Eugene. Painted on the trucks were the words, dairy equals death. ALF. That stood for Animal Liberation Fund. And then, two months after the win at Warner Creek, two ranger stations run by the United States Forest Service

went up in flames. On the side of one of the buildings, the arsonists had spray-painted a message. Stop raping our forests. And they left a signature. Earth Liberation Front. The Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front are sprawling, leaderless movements that span far beyond Oregon and the Northwest. Joe tells us it's more like an ideology than a movement with members. People say that we were part of the Earth Liberation Front, but I don't really think so.

I don't think I was ever part of the Earth Liberation Front. You know, I was just... I was angry that the government, like, continually disrespected all the process that they created to keep us occupied. I was just... frustrated with that situation. But in the American Northwest in the 1990s, as the fires started, some would be claimed in the name of the Animal Liberation Front, or ALF.

and some in the name of the Earth Liberation Front, or ELF. And as the media and authorities tried to wrap their arms around who was behind these arsons and messages on the sides of scorched buildings, A name began to be used for this sub-cell of ELF and ALF, and it stuck. From 1996 to 2001, these individuals participated in a cell of approximately 20 individuals known as the family. The family.

The reason it was called the family, it was said that they would never betray each other. And I want to say that we know the family isn't a perfect term, but as shorthand, it works. And going forward, we'll use it. Because the fates of its members would become intertwined.

Joe DeBay is a guy who grew up in Seattle, with the mountains right nearby, and an early love for nature. Chelsea Gerlach was at environmental protests by the time she was a teenager. The forest was her backyard. But Daniel McGowan had a different kind of story. He was one of the members of the ELF that set the tree farm in Oregon on fire, the one you heard from at the beginning of this episode, coughing on gas fumes.

Daniel was born and raised in a sea of concrete, Queens, New York. People understand the need for fans and stuff, right? It is real life. It is. It's true. When we speak to him, he's in a hot apartment. And it could fit into your narrative, of course, right? Global warming. People are hot. Yeah, it's September in a closed bedroom in New York City. Daniel says in the 1990s, when he was in his early 20s, he was a recycler, a petition signer, highly concerned about the environment.

But to look at him, he was about as far from a hippie environmentalist as you can imagine, working a corporate job at a public relations firm. But then he heard about this bar that was a hotbed of political activity. A place for punk shows and zines and information on going vegan way before that was a mainstream thing. One day, he went by after work.

I walk in here and I'm wearing like, you know, work clothes, you know, essentially like, you know, khakis or something. I walk into this like hippie club and I just look like a complete square. And like people were like walking in with like these pro ALF t-shirts and I'm just like trying to keep up. Everything was self-referential. It's like trying to understand a foreign language. I mean... I just was totally perplexed by it, but it was intriguing at the same time.

I felt like a real hardcore, like, this dude's a cop vibe. Yeah, I was going to say, were they nervous about you? Yeah, yeah. And then when they get to know me and I'm kind of like, yeah, I work at this PR agency. So at what point did, I mean, was it like pretty immediate that you got involved that, you know, you like shed the khakis and...

and started in on the movement or was it? It was absolutely immediate. It was absolutely immediate. I was absolutely ready for it. And this organization, they had protests sometimes two to three days a week. I'd be at a protest. I'm like, people would do the wrong chant. So like somebody would start doing some kind of seal chant and you'd be like, dude, we're not here about that. And they'd be like, oh. Pretty quickly...

Daniel attended this big gathering that Earth First held each year to talk about their actions, set priorities and share tactics. And I was like camping and like hanging out in the woods and I ended up getting arrested standing outside like Exxon. uh mining headquarters and i spent like a week in jail which was like mind-blowing because i had never been arrested but uh it was it was super fast for me and i'm sure everyone in my life was like what the

Like what happened to this guy? Yeah. I would have been considered apolitical. Like I was not involved in anything, but I just had no idea how to be involved in anything. And was that it? I mean, was it was this sort of cannonballing into the deep end? What was it? Yeah, I don't I don't think I was missing anything. I mean, it was not some psychological like I was missing something. It was more like I had had these feelings for like most of my life.

that things that are going on in the world are really messed up. It just had no outlet for it. And once Daniel was in, he was all in. He started joining more actions and then started committing property damage. And he joined this group called... The Biotic Bacon Brigade. Right. And what they did? They pied people. Literally threw pies at people. One time...

Daniel threw a pie in the face of the president of the Sierra Club. At a shareholders meeting. Yeah, unbelievable. And I know this story might not seem like much, but this part is important. The Sierra Club is firmly a part of the above-ground environmental movement. You know, some might say, oh, you're eating your own, you're attacking the Sierra Club, but my politics were so beyond the Sierra Club at that point. It showed the tension within environmental circles.

Some people didn't think that what the Sierra Club was doing was enough.

By the mid-1990s, Daniel was taking part in anarchist actions on the West Coast. 40,000 people turned up to demonstrate against... Including the World Trade Organization Conference in Seattle. It was meant to be peaceful, turned into a riot. Images of black... clad protesters smashing up windows were broadcast all around the world. Daniel was one of those guys. Soon after, he would end up living near the site of the Warner Creek blockade.

In a city this story will come back to over and over again. Eugene, Oregon. Eugene was somewhere that environmentalists from all over the world would come to. Paul Rogers of Green Anarchist magazine in the UK would visit. I just went around and looked up old mates, essentially. There was a lot of militancy at this stage, close and trusting sort of community of activists. And Eugene is where Daniel would end up working as an editor at the Earth First Journal.

I would get stuck at the light in Eugene, Oregon, you know, by the train yard. And I would just watch, like, freshly cut trees. And sometimes you would just see, like, you know, a plywood train. It would be like 40 cars, 50 cars for plywood, you know, and it would just blow my mind and kind of kick me. It hit me really hard. I just was like, how do you deal with this? How do you deal with these massive environmental problems? The answer soon came to him. The same answer as had come to Chelsea.

Like, I don't know how I let these people know that I was down. I mean, obviously, you've just seen me in the street all day long breaking shit, so you've got to assume that I have no problem with that. you've heard me speak, and so you're like, okay, well, you're not an idiot. And so, like, I somehow, you know, I ended up crossing paths with people in the EOF case. It was a very, very intelligent group of people.

Greg Harvey, a police detective in Eugene, investigating who the family were. They didn't know each other's names. They knew as their nicknames. I mean, Joe Diaby was Seattle. When they would actually... do these arson they took an oath that they would never ever talk about it again they they would do the action and it was never to be brought up we've been told that the secrecy was so tight

They'd only know who was involved in their immediate actions. They were as in the dark as everyone else as to who was behind the rest. They didn't know how many people were involved. And they had a term for these precautions. It was called security culture. Chelsea Gerlach, who started that fire on the mountain in Vail, Colorado. Not calling each other on our actual phones, not visiting each other at our actual houses. We communicated through...

email Dropbox. We would only access that email from a public library. Sometimes we would use proxy servers, never use names. We would never discuss targets. What we would talk about in those emails would be, hey, let's meet. And we would have... established a meeting place probably beforehand. Would you call your relationships with the people that you perform these actions with, were they friendships? Yeah. So...

You know, I had been an above-ground activist in a lot of different areas, so I felt like I was known as an activist. And then when I made the decision to turn to more radical types of actions... I felt like I needed to separate myself from the above-ground movement, knowing that particularly the direct action, radical environmental movements like Earth First that were my friends,

Knowing that they were likely to be the first place that law enforcement started to investigate, I felt like I needed to distance myself from that community. And so I lost. I lost that community. I lost a lot of my friendships. And so the people that I was doing the actions with became really the only relationships that I had.

Really established new friendships because my whole life revolved around doing these actions and I couldn't talk to people about that. I distanced myself from my family as well. Yeah, the people I was doing actions with were my closest friends, but because of security culture, we couldn't really hang out. I couldn't call them and say, hey, let's go for a beer. Hey, I'm feeling down today. Let's hang out, you know.

So it was a very isolating existence. Interesting. Stressful? Very stressful. Yeah. Doing these actions were tough because it involved like lying to everyone. Daniel McGowan. Keeping it all to yourself, like I'm a chatty person. So, you know, then the very real fact that my family, my whole family is in New York and just feeling like, you know, very far away from them. Especially, you know, like you're in Eugene for the holidays and it's like.

54 degrees and rainy on Christmas and like that's just not a northeast Christmas I mean, it is now, but it used to be like a white Christmas, like total snowy and, you know, all that shit. And I'm a sucker for all that. I love that stuff. I love the like, you know, non-religious kind of cultural aspects of it. I mean, I'm drinking pumpkin coffee today.

Wow. I did not expect this. Yeah. No, I know. You really thought, you really thought you were going to talk to like, uh, you know, I'm as just as, I am as insane as you think I am in some ways, but I'm going to throw some curve balls.

In six years, there would be arson after arson. Millions in damages would be caused. Behind the fires, the so-called family. When all this was happening... While Chelsea and Daniel were in Eugene, Joe DeBay was living several hours north in Seattle. The government accused him of multiple charges. including three counts of conspiracy to commit arson, and say he participated in two arsons. And he's pleading not guilty to all of them. For almost all of them,

He says he was not involved in any way whatsoever. He tells us the name The Family is just a fantasy, enabling the United States government to charge people with crimes they hadn't committed. to imply they were in it together. We asked the FBI about this, and they told us in a statement that the name came from one of the members of the group saying they would never rat on each other. The press got a hold of it and ran with it.

And they told us, giving a name to a group does not gain anything for an investigation or prosecution. While Joe is pleading not guilty, for one of the actions the government accuses him, Well, he's not really denying he was there. The burning of a horse meat processing facility in Oregon. Georgia and I pulled up the charges. The horse slaughterhouse was called Cavill West. It was in Redmond, Oregon.

a rural city in the central part of the state. The communique bragged that the event would bring to a screeching halt what countless protests and letter-writing campaigns could never stop. Can we talk about Cavill West? Well, I mean, what I would tell you is that I think Joe can explain history. Joe, do you have an issue talking about that? I don't have an issue if you...

Yeah, no, I'm comfortable with that. And if something is uncomfortable, we'll all butt in. So it's my understanding, based on a number of articles that I read, that...

Cal West was taking horses off the public lands, and horses on public lands are protected under an act of Congress. The wild horse issue is unique to the American West. In some places, you might see herds of horses running all together, kicking up dust, manes in the wind. And a federal law protects them. But in the 1990s...

An article claimed that some people were adopting wild horses legally with the help of government agencies and then selling them off to slaughterhouses like Cavill West. They can't kill these horses. but they have a lot of political pressure to get rid of them in some way. So what they do is they go out there with helicopters and they round them up and then they set them up for adoption.

You know, these are wild animals. They don't want to be corralled. So they don't make very good house pets. Which is where Cavill West comes in. Joe had read it was a place that would buy these adopted wild horses. and kill them. He says that for years environmental and animal rights groups had been battling to get this practice stopped. But Cho says the process to protect these wild horses had failed.

that there appeared no legitimate or legal outlet for their grievance. We approached the Bureau of Land Management, the government agency responsible for these wild horses, with the claims made in this program. In a statement they told us, The BLM are committed to the health and safety of wild horses and burrows. Without management, wild horse herds grow 15-20% annually, overpopulating their habitat and degrading critical resources on which they and other wildlife rely.

The BLM works to sustainably manage these populations by gathering excess animals and offering them for adoption to qualified individuals or organisations. To adopt or purchase an animal, applicants must sign an affidavit under penalty of prosecution for making false statements to a federal agency that states they will provide humane care for the animal and not intentionally or knowingly send the animal to slaughter.

Adopted wild horses and burrows remain property of the US government for at least one year from adoption date, during which time the animal must be available for inspection and adopters are prohibited from reselling the animal for any purpose. Adopted animals must be inspected a final time before title of ownership is issued and the animal becomes private property. These safeguards disincentivise reselling horses for slaughter once they are titled.

According to the government, on the night of July 7th, 1997, Joe was down in Eugene, Oregon, and with several people made the two-hour drive over to Redmond. Under cover of night, they placed incendiary devices around Cavill West. They drilled holes through the walls and poured a flammable gel, something that's been called vegan jello, through those holes.

that ignited and burned the place to the ground. No people or animals were hurt, but the building was destroyed. Over a million dollars in damages was caused. The Animal Liberation Front claimed the arson. They said, quote, the action would bring to a screeching halt what countless protests and letter-writing campaigns could never stop.

The very last horse slaughterhouses in America shut down in 2007. They're all gone. It turned out people were enraged at the idea of horses being sold off for meat.

And it's hard not to see the Cavill West arson as a defining moment in that fight. If you say to any American, and I bet it would be the same way in the UK. Joe Debe's attorney, Matt Schindler. I represent a terrorist. who's accused of burning down a horse meat processing facility, people's reactions are horse meat? What? I frequently joke with a U.S. attorney.

then I'm going to defend the case on the basis that they fucking deserved it. We reached out to the former owner of Cavill West, who declined our interview request. We sent him the claims made in this program. But he didn't get back to us. For now, Joe's line is this. Until the government can prove I was there, I'm not guilty. He tells us he wants his case to go to trial so he can ask questions about the government's conduct.

He doesn't want to be forced into an agreement or a guilty plea on the other charges, things he says he had nothing to do with. In the story of the so-called family, it's hard on this first meeting to know what Joe's place in it is. Over the next two years we've spent recording with him, that will become clear.

But in January 2021, there was something more fundamental we're trying to understand. Producer Georgia and I hop on a call. So I'm not saying there's not a crime. I mean, of course there's harm in an arson. from what the government alleged he's done, he burnt down this slaughterhouse. I mean, we don't even know for sure that wild horses were being slaughtered there. You know, this is his, he read it in an article. At the same time, the terrorist thing, right?

Is his crime a big enough crime to be called terrorism, you know? And to be on the FBI's list of most wanted domestic terrorists. Yes, a domestic terrorist, when you say that term. You think of Oklahoma City, right? Like you think of this, you know, completely collapsed building and all these dead people, dead children. It's just... real hard for me to put that on the same kind of scale as a burning of a horse slaughterhouse with no one in it.

You know, if Joe was a terrorist, we wouldn't be here. Joe DeBay's attorney, Matt Schindler. You know, I'm not a moron. If I were defending a terrorist, you know. Here we are 15 years removed from this. This man is never engaged in a single other act of anything that you could remotely call violent. The folks that got involved in direct action stuff, it was never like the first thing they did. It's like, oh, yeah, let's go burn the place down. And so again, to compare an activity like that.

to somebody taking an occupied plane and rolling it into an office building. It's just outrageous.

Over the next 18 months, as Joe's case develops, George and I would talk to him a lot. I mean, from the moment they started, like, we're going to put you in prison for 35 years. Well, that was pretty serious, and it hasn't really relented any. His story and the story of the so-called family would change more than we could possibly have known on this first meeting. And as always with these stories, there are two sides. Do you think that the Earth Liberation Front were terrorists? Yeah, I do.

He punished this community. You know, so, I mean, I resent that. You know, I mean, I wouldn't have been able to raise my son. I wouldn't have been able to raise my daughter. You could have been blown apart, you know. I mean, for, you know, a piece of wood. That's next time. And we start to understand the role of something else, someone else, in this story too. I've been an agent for 21 years. 15 of those years I've been looking for overacre.

Someone side-by-side on the FBI's most wanted domestic terrorist page with Joe DeBay. Josephine Sunshine Overacre. Sunshine. I want to finish it. put the cap on the largest domestic terrorism overall case that we've had in the United States. This is the largest domestic terrorism case in the United States. The first fragments of a picture.

Pieces of a puzzle that would come together to reveal something massive. Seeing what has become of all of us and knowing the fate that would await, I'm not surprised that... She would decide wherever she is, whatever she's doing, to stay put there. Burn Wild is presented by me. Leah Satilli. It's co-written by producer Georgia Cat and me. Fact-checking by Rob Byrne. Music and sound design by Phil Channel. The theme is by Echo Collective.

Composed, performed, and produced by Neil Leiter and Margaret Hermont. And recorded, mixed, and produced by Fabian LeSueur. Podcast script recorded and engineered by Slater Swan. at Angina Recording Studio. Series Studio and Mixing by Sarah Hockley. The commissioning executive is Dylan Haskins. The editor is Philip Sellers. Burn Wild is a BBC Audio Documentaries production for BBC Radio 5 Live and BBC Sounds. Hi. I'm Dr. Julia Shaw. And I'm Sophie Hagen.

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