Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and it's just the three of us rampaging away in podcast land. That's stuff you should know.
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it's pretty great. And you can go to stuff youshould Know dot com and click on the tour page tour button, and you can also go to link tree, slash sysk Live, and both of those places will take you to sites where you can buy legitimate tickets to come see us.
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You guys, all right back to it?
Right?
Good one?
Oh you think so?
Yeah?
Okay, thanks.
I appreciate you letting us do this one first because, like I just announced to you, Yeah, I just watched the documentary on this topic, Tread Tread, directed by Paul Solette. Let's it's solet who knows we go with?
So?
Did you watch it?
Yes? I have, Actually I've seen it. I saw a few years back. I haven't seen I didn't watch it recently for this For.
Some reason, I think we covered this in like a video or something like how do I know about this?
It was pretty big news, and I mean it's become an Internet legend. Maybe we did do like an Internet round up on it or something like that on the tenth anniversary. Maybe I don't know.
Yeah, that feels about right, But I guess we should say what we're talking about.
Eh, sure, Oh, I'll do that then. Okay, So for those of you who don't know, we're talking about an event that took place in two thousand and four in a little town called Granby, Colorado, about fifty miles west of Denver, population two thousand ish. I think at the time it's a small town, yeah, but it wasn't, you know, an economically depressed town. It's like sixteen miles away from the entrance to Rocky Mounta National Park. They're skiing around there,
so there's tourists. There's also rural ranchers that come into shopping Granby. It's fine. It's just a cute, quinte small mountain town like South Park basically.
That's right. And it remained that way until June fourth, two thousand and four, when a lot of this town was destroyed by a man in a bulldozer that had ended up being dubbed later on as the kill Dozer. And we'll get to that later, right, But it was a muffler shop owner, a fifty two year old guy named Marvin he Meyer, Marv he Meyer, and he had beefs with the town. He had beefs with people in the town. We're going to go over all that stuff.
So he built or modified rather a gigantic bulldozer into basically a tank and destroyed the places of the people he had beefs with. More.
Yeah, I left all that out of my introduction, so I'm glad you filled it in. Yeah, you said it was like a tank essentially in some ways, as we'll see, it was actually superior to a tank. It was crazy what this guy built. And if you have the time and you're not driving right now, just go look up killdozer and get a load of this modified bulldozer that Marv he Meyer created. So, Chuck, I say, let's just dive in. That was a pretty good little setup. Let's
talk about Marv he Meyern who he was. He was known around town as Marv the muffler man, right.
That's right, because he owned a muffler shop. Previous to that, he was in the Air Force. Served in the Air Force, was stationed in Colorado at Lowry Air Force Base, liked Colorado, decided to literally set up shop there. And this is
in the early nineties. He moved to Grand Lake near Granby, and you know, pretty soon he got he started getting his feathers ruffled, ruffling feathers in the town kind of right away, it seems like, starting with having a beef against the local newspaper, the sky High News.
Yeah, so they introduced the concept of legalized gambling in Grand Lake, which is pretty near grand By, and the town was very evenly divided on it. The local newspaper, the sky High News or one of the local newspapers is another one in Grand Lake, came out very heavily against legalized gambling. Marv was very heavily in favor of gambling, so much so that he edited, i think two editions of a newspaper that was created just to tout the
benefits of legalized gambling. And so he lost. Like the I think they voted in the area, they voted four to one against legalizing gambling, and it was a bitter defeat. I think to Marv, he seemed like the kind of person who did not accept defeat very well and that it just trigged Stewing in him.
Yeah, that's fair to say, I think. And that was in nineteen ninety two. That same year is when he bought some property that would be sort of at the center of his next dispute. It was a couple of acres in western Granby. He bought it at public auction and foreclosure for a little more than forty grand, which turned out to be a great deal. The guy had a really good knack for finding good deals on stuff.
Yeah, what's funny that you remember the savings and loan scandal. Yeah, he actually bought it from the FDIC because it was a failed savings and loan bank in town.
Yeah, including that big bulldozer that he would end up getting a great deal on.
So that was a savings and loan bulldozer.
He had a nose for a deal. So he ended up setting up his Mountain View muffler shop. There was apparently a great welder stuff that he brought into the Air Force. It seems like was just really good on machines and motors and engines and welding, and worked for a uffler shop for many years and finally was like, I'm going to open up my own shop as this
is happening. There's another local family and this is one of the two two main families that he had beefs with, the dough Chef family, in particular the patriarch I guess of that family, Cody Dochef with his wife Susie and their son Joe, had a concrete factory and they were trying to expand this factory, so they bought up they
wanted this property that Marv had bought. They bought up a bunch of land around it still needed more space, and tried to buy Marv's parcel from him that he paid forty two thousand dollars for and initially they had an agreement for two hundred and fifty grand which would have been a really nice take on that land deal for Marv.
It would have for sure. And apparently the dough Chefs were at that auction that Marv bought it at and he outbid them, so yeah, they were very interested in this parcel of land. He agreed to that two hundred and fifty thousand dollars deal later on, I think that was eight years later, so that is a pretty significant increase in your investment. And then but he changed his mind, he decided that though land was worth more than two hundred and fifty grand, apparently kept getting appraisals on it.
So it's not like he was just saying, like, no, it's worth a billion dollars, right. He supposedly got appraisals and was like, this land is worth more than two hundred and fifty grand. Now, so he said, He said, he backed out of the deal. I don't know how much how far the deal had gotten, but he definitely backed out of an agreement to sell it for two hundred and fifty grand.
Yeah, he ended up asking four hundred. The dough chefs came up with three point fifty, and he said, now I want four to fifty again, he said, because of another reappraisal. I don't I'm not sure about all that stuff, Like, I mean, I'm just basing off kind of what I saw in the documentary and research. I hadn't seen the appraisals or anything, So I don't know if Marv was just like jacking this thing up or not. Who knows.
But while this is happening, at least, you know, one of the things we have left to kind of piece us all together is the series of audio tapes that he made on cassette that he mailed to his brother. So the documentary features a lot of those, you know, just firsthand accounts from Marv detailing what's going on. And one of the things he just he didn't like the
dough chefs. He said that Cody Docheff, and I guess this was after he had backed out of I'm not sure if it was after he backed out or not, but Cody Docheff at one point basically accosted him in a restaurant and that was one of their first exchanges about this. And Cody Docheff was known as a real hot head in town and Marv you should hear the words that he calls him on those audio tapes. He did not like this guy.
Right, that appraisal thing. That's a really good example of the squishiness I guess of this story. It's really difficult to pin down because, yeah, was he just jacking the price up because he didn't like the doe Cheffs. Did he really think that the land was worth that? Did he really get appraisals? You don't know, But that kind of thing completely changes the complexion of it. If he was getting appraisals and the doe Cheffs wouldn't pay the
appraised value. That's pretty reasonable. If he was lying about the appraisals and he was just jacking the price up on the doe Cheffs, that kind of makes him look like a jerk. And so that just something that small can make a story like this totally due a one point eighty. And this story is filled with those little kind of details that have either gotten overlooked at it or blown out in proportion.
Yeah. Absolutely, So they the dough Chefs end up buying some other land, a business park, and they said, hey, you give us the land where your muffler shop is, and we'll give you the prime lot that's right on the highway, this frontage land where muffler shop is going to do a lot better, get a lot more attention.
And he said, all right, I'll take that deal, but you've got to build this muffler shop for me, and that a really expensive one and really kind of highend muffler shop, I guess because that brought it up to about a million bucks. And they said, no, you know that muffler shop. Boy, how long were you waiting on that one?
Good thirty seconds.
Oh boy, I hope most people get that one. At least.
It doesn't matter as long as you've got it. Friend, Oh I got it.
So they said no deal, and he said, all right, then you basically started a war with me, and I'm gonna I'm going to do everything I can to fight the city to make sure that you're not able to open up that cement factory that you want to open up, and apparently got a lot of people on the side. There was a lot of opposition in the town that back to Marv against this expansion of the cement or concrete factory.
Yeah. So what I don't understand is was there opposition before Marv started this kind of grassroots campaign against it?
Yes?
Okay, Yeah, so he didn't just drum that up out of thin air, like not everybody was happy about a concrete batch creating plant like this is almost in downtown Gramby.
Yeah, there was opposition, but it seems like he really fueled the fire.
Okay, Yeah, so now you have war between essentially what amounts to two hotheads who are neighbors, and a concrete plant is not like a tidy, quiet neighbor to be next to, right, So I'm sure that every sound and every clank and every bit of like dust that blew his way just made him less and less happy. And
I guess I don't know. Also, if you said that they were buying up the land around him, so ultimately his muffler shop was the only little piece of parcel left and they were literally building a concrete plant owned his muffler shop. And one of the things if somebody tells you this, they don't know what they're talking about,
and stop listening to them about this. If they tell you that when the dough Chets bought the land up around him, that they cut off access from the road to Marv's muffler shop, basically created an island legally out of his muffler shop, that's wrong. That's not correct. He always had access and everyone always had access in and
out of his muffler shop. That's a really big point that a lot of people basically say, See, the guy had no choice, he couldn't he couldn't run a business like that, and that's just not true.
Yeah, that is not true, but that's something you see a lot online. So thanks for clearing that up.
Sure you got anything else, what else you want me, Clear.
Up, I got a pimple on my shoulder here, No take care of them.
Why did you say that?
Oh I don't. I don't get pimples. So Marv is he's got another problem that's also brewing. So you've got this problem with the dough chefs. Then you have the second issue with the sewer line. In order. His property wasn't hooked up to a sewer line. You've got to get hooked up to a sewer line if you're going to be in compliance. They kind of look the other way for many many years when he didn't because it was,
you know, small town western Colorado. It was sort of the wild West, and people would just sort of turn a blind eye if someone was making do on their own, which he was doing. But he also didn't have a septic tank, so he started dumping sewage into his concrete mixer, a concrete mixing tank, big violation. Then when that filled up, he started pumping it into the irrigation ditch on the property. All he had to do was pay a little bit of money at one point to hook up to some
neighboring sewer lines. But he basically thought that's over the town. Yeah, that's the town holding me over a barrel. You shouldn't have a resident or a business have to pay for their own sewer line, which is a public utility.
Okay, So I don't know, like the town overlooked this for a good decade, maybe twelve years something like that. That he was pooping and peeing I guess into a bucket or something and dumping it into a cement mixer, even if they had a line up to the cemt mixer. Yes,
that's a huge health code violation. Right. So when that concrete plant was built, they ran a sewer line to it, right, and that made it way easier and way less expensive for Marv Hemeyer to connect his muffler shop to that sewer line that's now being run from the road to this concrete plant next door. Then it would to have the city run it from the road to just his muffler shop. The problem was this is the Dochef's sewer line and it was on their land and for him
to tap into it, he needed to pay them. So they came back with an offer. They said, look, man, if you drop all these lawsuits and all this campaign against us, we will we will let you will give you an easement, a maintenance easement to connect to our sewer line from your muffler shop free of charge. That will be your little strip of land onto our land, connecting your muffler shop to the main line. You'll be in compliance, we won't have this lawsuit against us anymore,
and we'll just call it a day. And I don't believe Marv ever made good on that.
No, he didn't want to do it. He was done with him by that point, basically, so he was like, screw this. I'm not hooking up to your sewer line. I'm not paying the maybe as high as eighty grand to run the four hundred feet to the main sewer line. And so he wanted to sell the place. He's like, I'm getting out, I'm getting out of this muffler shop and I'm going to move. And the town then said, well, hey, now that we know about all this, you can't even
sell this thing without a sewer line. So, all of a sudden, he was caught between a rock and a hard place there with this sewer connection. He refuses to do it. He ends up being fined one hundred dollars a day because of this sewage issue and other violations. That were going on, like more than thirty three hundred bucks. When he wrote the check to the town, he put in the memo, it's for the Cowards and Liars Department. So this is kind of where things were. This guy
is fighting back against the town. He's fighting against these people. Whether or not you think it's fair that you have to pay for your own sewer line or not, it's the way it was. They weren't singling him out to try and screw him over anything. That was just how it works. I mean, I've had to replace sewer lines and it stinks. It's the worst thing to have to pay for.
It stinks literally and figuratively.
As a homeowner, it wrecks your yard or your property. It wrecks it's it's awful because it's not. It's just it's expensive. Have you ever had to do it? It just writing that check. I've had to do it a couple of times. It's awful. In the meantime, we need to introduce another family, because he ended up having two beefs with two prominent families, the do Chefs and then the Thompson family, who were had been there forever thereby owned tons and tons of the land in the town.
A guy named the elder Dick Thompson was on the county board and then became mayor for a while back when he was going through all this stuff in the nineties, and then he passed away, and he took up this beef with his two sons, basically saying like, you owe me money because of all this stuff that your dad and the town board made me go through.
One thing that I couldn't find, and it's one of those things that could change the complexion of the whole stories. At what point did the sewer thing that the city overlooked for a decade or so become a thing? You know? Was it connected to the concrete plant? I don't know. It's just just something that sticks out to me. Yeah, So I guess what he did ultimately was he shut down his muffler shop in two thousand and two and he held an auction. He auctioned off all of his equipment.
He sold his property to a local trash company for four hundred thousand, which I think what the highest he had asked the dough Chuffs for for it. But he said, I want to Lisa, this big old metal shed in the back. I got to keep a place to keep my bulldozer, because it's basically the only thing that no one bought in the auction of my stuff. So I'm just going to keep it back here and this will
be my little workshop. That's part of the deal. And they shook on it, and that's the setup starting around two thousand and two.
Yeah, And I'm also not sure how he was able to sell that stuff or sell it given that he didn't put in the sewer line, because in the documentary they said that the new owners this trash company, like within forty eight hours had the sewer line hooked up.
I mean, I think the city was like, whoever, like, this thing can't change hands without somebody agreeing that they're going to put maybe the one And that's what I think. You could probably work that into a legal document.
Probably. So should we take a break.
Yeah, we'll take a break and go find out.
All right. We'll be right back after this with more on the killdozer rampage.
All right. So remember Marvy Myer's gotten out of the muffler business, but he's known around town as an excellent welder, I mean, just a superior welder. And when he leased that little maintenance shed. We'll probably not mate little. But when he leased the big maintenance shed in the back of the property that he had sold to the trash company, he used it to modify the bulldozer that would later
become the killdozer. To start out with, it was a sixty ton Komatsu D three P fifty five a bulldozer, right, and I mean just as it came out of the package it was sixty tons. This guy added at least another twenty tons of reinforcement to it.
Yeah, it was. It's not like a little front loader that you know your landscape person has brought over if you've ever had your yard done or something dingo. This is this was a very, very very large bulldozer, which you can tell and when you see footage when there are other bulldozers trying to stop it, and this Kamatsu is is clearly clearly larger.
Right.
So he buys this thing at auction in California, has it shipped in July two thousand and two, and starting at the beginning of two thousand and three, And this is one of the craziest parts of this whole story to me, is that this wasn't a guy that got mad and like had a plan and it sort of fizzles out after a week or two when you're like, all right, well, you know, maybe I'll just watch the
Broncos game and let cooler heads prevail. Like he spent a year dedicated to this project with this idea, like planning this thing and equipping this thing. He set up a cot in a blanket and had a fridge. He was basically living in this shed basically full time, working on this thing at night so that people, you know, this company that bought it, this trash company, they're all around the place, right, Like an insurance adjuster came to inspect the shed because it was on the property of
the trash company. He had it behind a tarp and made up some story about how he was working on some equipment like air conditioning for some professor, and like no one ever looked behind it. It fit by an inch on either side. And he thought this was all God telling him all these little things that happened that where he didn't get caught beforehand. He thought was God saying, this is your mission.
Right, Marv he Meyer is a great example of why we need wives.
Right. Well, he had a girlfriend for a long time, and she was all over the documentary. It sounded like she was Australian or from New Zealand maybe, but Tricia McDonald. Yeah, that was kind of one of the sadder parts is that she seemed like she really liked him, and she was like, I kind of had no idea that he was that angry and it was going this far.
Yeah, if I remember correctly, she had a little bit of self blame maybe going on, or at least wondering how things could have turned out differently.
Well, I think their breakup beforehand might have been one of the last draws too, and so she may have felt bad about that.
Oh, that's another one too. So in addition to his muffler shop being completely cut off from access to the main road, he also caught his fiance in bed with another man. It's another dumb thing you'll find on the internet from people who don't know what they're talking about. Too. Oh, he chalked up to explaining him snapping.
Oh. One thing I did forget to mention is that four hundred grand het. He was I guess savvy enough to know that they could come after that money afterward, Yeah, to help give people. So he while his father was still alive. His dad died shortly before, which was another last straw apparently, but he had given the money to his father, who then gave the money to his sister and brother. So it was like two people removed and untouchable.
I guess, oh wow, yeah, that is pretty savvy.
Yeah.
So he's got this kill dozer that he's putting together. Let's talk a little bit about that. Like I said, it was a sixty ton bulldozer, just a big, big boy. But on top of that, he he took sheets of steel and separated them by about twelve inches and poured concrete in the in the space between the two. So he made twelve inch on either side twelve inches of
steel with concrete in the middle. Plates that he created, essentially a superstructure that he later before his rampage, right before his rampage lowered on top of the Komatsu itself.
Yeah, sealing him in there. He also had gun ports. He had a fifty cow rifle, which is if you just look up what a fifty caliber round looks like, it's very large and destructive, a three eight semi automatic, and then a twenty two long rifle. He also had a three point fifty seven revolver inside, and he had five video cameras mounted on the outside feeding three monitors on the inside, and these lenses were protected by three
inch lexand bulletproof plastic basically. So the small little tiny ports that were even on this thing were because they tried eventually shooting into these were only like two by three inches. So even these sharpshooters were having a hard time getting a bullet in there, and even if they did, it wasn't it was not effective anyway.
Yeah, there were so many layers of this plastic bulletproof like cladding. I guess that like, even if they broke some of the layers, there was still more layers to go through. It was nuts. But there's something I want everybody to make note of. He put in those three gun ports. Like you said, it's really important because one of the things that a lot of people use to defend Marv is that he was all he wanted was
property destruction. That's all he was intent on. And there's no way to explain away those three gun ports otherwise they don't jibe at that narrative at all. Certainly changes the complexion of things too.
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, as far as like folk hero who just wanted to direct the business who wrecked his Yeah, you don't go in there with a fifty.
Cal no, and I mean you can. He didn't even need to defend himself. They couldn't get through this the plating, the cladding, And even if he did need to defend himself, he certainly didn't need three guns. So there was basically no reason for those guns to be there aside from shooting people.
Yeah, absolutely they would later obviously, he, like I said, he mailed those tapes to his brother right before the attack. They ended up finding a list afterward with sort of like a hit list for the buildings he wanted to wreck. Obviously, the Doe Chefs and the Thompson's were on that list,
as was the church in town, the Catholic church. That is because on the tapes he was, or at least in this one part, he was very anti Catholic, called Catholic cowards, and the Thompsons were Catholic, and that was one of his big beats.
Gotcha. So again that Dozer Manifesto, they make an amazing use of his actual tapes to let him just kind of present himself and like you said that he apparently believed that God was at the very least looking the other way and kind of tacitly condoning this mission, if not, you know, blessing the mission by all those ways that you had said, like people overlooking the dozer, the fact that the dozer was the one thing that he wasn't
able to sell at auction. He even said that God told him to take take the winner off, put this whole thing off for a year, essentially, and he did. He also went on at length about the town that he was dealing with and gave his side of the story quite clearly, and he said that they use mafia type tactics against him. And there's this line from his tapes that this is like the people who consider him a folk hero point to it said, or he said, I was always willing to be reasonable until I had
to be unreasonable. Sometimes reasonable men must do unreasonable things. And it's a just a sweeping thing to say, because it completely explains away everything he does after that point, and it completely gives him an alibi up to that point. He's saying, I know what I'm doing, wrecking the town. That's an unreasonable thing, but I have every reason to do this. I have a very reasonable reason to do
this very unreasonable thing. It's really it's a very I don't know, it's just nuts how well it encapsulates everything. He just kind of lets him off the hook.
Yeah, totally. He had also been hassling the paper for not covering his story, like he was like, no one's even writing about my beaf with the sewer line and all this stuff. And so they ended up giving him a free ad. They were like, oh, jeez, this guy, how about we give you an ad. They came out and photographed him and gave him a you know, an ad for his muffler shop, which it turns out wasn't enough to appease him. As we'll see, the end of
his lease was coming up. He had gone through that breakup, his dad had just died, and so it was it was game time. Basically. On June fourth, two thousand and four, he uh, like we said, he sealed himself in that cockpit kind of like couldn't get out, basically, and to what looks like this a bulldozer meets ay the what were those crawlers called in Star Wars where the Jahwa's traded out of it kind of looked like that.
Yeah, I don't remember what they're called. I just remember built. It was based on a brutalist hotel in Morocco that George Lucas saw exactly. And you don't need to write in everybody, we can go look it up later.
Well, you know what it's called John at two pm and this was you know, when you see footage of this thing or watching the documentary, it's this thing goes four or five miles an hour, So it's a it's a different kind of rampage. It's a slow motion rampage going through town. But this thing was unstoppable, was the issue.
Yeah, that, I mean, that's a really great way to describe it. They, as we'll see, couldn't come up with anything to put an end to this. I say, before we really get underway with the rampage, we take our final break and come back and tell everybody just what happened. What do you think?
All right, let's do it. All right, So the rampage starts. Obviously, the first people he's going to go after are the dough chefs and that concrete plant. When he gets there, they quickly realize what's going on. Cody Dochef is like, that's Marv he Meyer in there, and cops are like, are you sure, how do you know? And he's like, trust me, it's Marv he Meyer. He tries to stop it. He tries shooting a revolver at this thing, which is just a joke. I guess that's just the first sort
of reaction is like shoot it. Yea in western Colorado at least, so hey, no shade there by the way, But he starts shooting at this thing. He's he's literally getting in his own This is Cody dochev getting in his own little front end loader and driving at it. He gets he rams aside of it, and he's trying to lift it up off of the ground because basically they're like, we can't. You know, they've tried shooting into it already. They know that's not going to work, so
they want to disable those treads. If you can disable a tank's treads, then you're in business. So they thought if they could lift it off the ground, that might work. They thought if they jammed this huge steel pole into the treads, that that might you know, get stuck or throw something out of whack. None of that works, and when Cody doe Chef rams this thing and tries to
pick it up, his wheels come off the ground. He hits the front windshield and gets knocked out cold and awakes to bullet fire coming his way.
Yeah. That was one thing that MARKI Meyer did was he took aim and shot at Cody Deutcheff's his front end loader, and there were bullet holes from the fifty caliber in the bucket of the front end loader. Astoundingly, he didn't hit Cody Dochef and he, I guess left the cement plan at this time and started moving toward
the town. And one of the ways that he got to the town was busting through a concrete road barrier, a pair of them that I believe some highway patrolmen were hiding behind, and they got out of the way just in time because that killed those who went right through those concrete barriers on its way to downtown Gramby.
Yeah, and he didn't have to go that way. So that was another instance where he he literally turned left and headed right toward those guys. And these are cops. They're bringing in forest service people, they're bringing in larger guns. They ended up firing about two hundred shots at this thing, but again they're just firing it at hard and steel and so nothing is doing any good. Cody Docheff also tried to climb up on top of it, but Marp and I shouldn't be laughing here, but this is the
one part I thought was kind of funny. Marp thought of that too, and he greased this thing up with like axle grease, and so Cody Docheff is slipping off of this thing. Eventually. There is a guy, a deputy named Glenn Trainor, who climbed up on top of the building and jumped right on top of the thing, and he rode this thing around town. There's footage of this guy riding this kill dozer around town trying to disable it from above.
Yeah, under Sheriff Glenn Trainer is typically referred to as one of the big heroes of the day just for trying. Nobody was successful, but a lot of people tried, and he definitely risked life and limb essentially to try to disable this thing. He found what he thought was a weak point into the engine and shot into it a bunch of times. Turns out it was a cover for the air conditioner that Marv had put onto the bulldozer. He also got a flashbran grenade, dropped it down the
exhaust pipe. It blew up. It did absolutely nothing, and despite yeah being greased, Glenn Trainor hung on until Marv he Meyer got the killdozer to the town hall building, and Glenn Trainor saw quite clearly he was going to be taken along with this thirteen foot tall, eighty ton bold Those are right into town hall and he would not fare very well in that circumstance. So he jumped off and rolled onto the grass from that thirteen foot height.
Yeah, so he's out of there safely. Like you said, he goes after the town hall. It has a local library in there where who knows whether he knows this or not, but there were a bunch of kids in there in a reading program, including the eleven year old daughter of the mayor at the time, so they're huddling
in the basement. The town has issued a reverse nine to one one call to basically where they call every single resident in town at once and say, you know, shelter in place, or in this case, calling the people at the library saying get out of there. He then turns on the bank the Liberty Bank branch, because obviously
he had problems with the banking system there. He then turns on the newspaper and the Patrick Brower, the editor the that he'd been you know, having his newspaper beef with, is running out the back door as he is collapsing this building. You know, he gets out in the nick of time as he's collapsing the building.
Yeah, and frequently in interviews, Patrick Brower points out that had he tripped and fall and he'd be dead, it was that close. Yeah, it does seem to have been that kind of experience for people on the ground during this rampage. Somebody would run in shouting like get out, get out, and probably didn't even have time to say what the heck was coming when the killdozer would come crashing through the front of the building, not the front door, not a side door. It would come right through the
front wall or the side wall. And one of the things that people pointed out who were there was that he would he would come crashing through the front wall and it would take out like, you know, the front wall, but the roof would still be thinking. So he back up and he'd go after a corner of the building, so like he was trying to demolish these buildings, he was making a pretty great attempt at it, and toward the end of the rampage he got pretty good at taking building out in a couple of swipes.
No, absolutely, So then you know this is a small town. When he makes a turn toward a thing, they kind of have a pretty good idea of where he's going because of the well known beef. So after he destroys the newspaper building, he makes a turn and everyone's like he's going after the Thompsons. He ends up Thelma Thompson, eighty two year old widow of former mayor Dick Thompson, was literally asleep taking a nap thirty minutes before her house is just gone because they get her out of there.
He completely destroys her house and then turns toward their business, which is the Thompson and Sons excavating business and services, and starts destroying those buildings.
Yeah, he cost them a good million and a half dollars I saw to rebuild again, despite the people he had the beef with not even being alive any longer. But it's how much he hated the Thompson family after that The next thing he did, this is a really really critical thing that he did that really kind of takes away a lot of sympathy I had for him.
He took out. He drove up to the propane company, a local propane company, and uses fifty caliber rifle to shoot at propane tanks for small ones, then big ones. He tried to shoot in an electrical transformer so that the sparks, ostensibly so the sparks would ignite the propane. When he shot a propane tank open and the whole thing would blow up. And that would have been significant. Had this propane company blown up. I saw an estimate that everyone within a half mile radius would have been
in danger. The blast would have been that big. Yeah, this is downtown. It was as densely packed as the town of Gramby could be, So half a mile radius is you know, that was a significant thing. And the reason why Patrick Brower points this out, and I tend to agree with him. He takes issue with people who are like these were all just warning shots. He just wanted to destroy property. He just wanted to blow up the propane company so that he could destroy more property.
He wasn't trying to kill anybody, And Patrick Brower was like, this is no, this is not true. The reason he didn't kill anybody was because the way that he had mounted the rifles was so kluegy that he had almost no chance whatsoever of shooting anybody. Those bulletproof class sights that you were talking about, like the two by three inch sights, or they weren't near the guns. The guns
weren't mounted right by them. The video cameras that he was using to kind of drive around with they weren't in line with the guns either, So when he was aiming the gun, he had to do some sort of weird mental topography to kind of figure out what he was looking at in relation to the gun and try to shoot that way. And Patrick Brower's point is that's
why no one was shot to death. That's why those propaane tanks didn't blow up, that's why the electrical transformer didn't blow up because he missed, not because he was just firing warning shots. Because he missed. And if those guns had been mounted more I guess efficiently, it could have been a totally different outcome from this whole event.
Yeah, for sure. He also, I mean, most of those bullets didn't even make it out of his own vehicle because the way he had the big fifty cow mounted, it ended up hitting his own armor. So you see like shooting toward this propane thing, and immediately these shots are just sort of exploding because I think they were some special kind of round or something, and they were sort of exploding at you know, into his own tank.
So yeah, and then who knows if he even knew what was going on, Like, no one knows what he could even see inside that thing. So the machines damaged. At this point, all the anti freeze has dumped out. There's white smoke just pouring from this thing. There's hydraulic fluid leaking all over the place, and it's pretty clear that like the last gasp is happening. So he heads
down to Gambles of Granby hardware store. There was a guy on the town board there related to the hardware store that approved the concrete plant, and so they were on the list. And you see this thing chugging along. It's on its last legs. Somehow remarkably had not failed up into that point. Yeah, Like I can't believe at some point it didn't. Those treads didn't. I guess that's why the bulldozer there there's you know, it's like a tank. It's it's supposed to do that, so it was doing
it well. But what he didn't know was that there was a basement in that hardware store, and eventually that right front tread slipped down just a couple of feet just enough into that basement to where the tread had nothing against it and it was just spinning. So it was finally stopped.
Yeah, people were walking alongside of this thing for a lot of the time, so there were people within earshot at this point, and there suddenly comes a muffled gunshot from inside the pull the kill dozer, and people were like, well, I'm pretty sure that if that's Marv he Meyer who's in there, he's no longer with us, and they were correct. They the next day they tried to blow a hole into the kill dozer, and do you remember at the outset, I said that it was probably superior to a tank.
The reason I said that is because the swat team who was creating this explosive charge to try to breach it, they consulted with some explosive experts who told them what charge to create to blow a hole in the side of a tank and it didn't work. Yeah, the explosive charge that could blow a hole in a tank did not blow a hole in the kill dozer. That's how thick and well welded this superstructure over the bulldozer was.
So nobody was killed or injured in this thing, which was remarkable considering what was happening. It was a little over two hours, up to seven million dollars in damage. I think eleven of the thirteen buildings were occupied at the time, and like you said, people were literally running out the back door for a lot of these and that was it. You know, the guy ends up, you know, they take this tank apart, and they didn't want any memory of it in town, so they take it apart,
get rid of the parts. I think one of them ended up staying with the Thompson family, like one small part, Yeah.
A trunion I think, something that connects the bucket to the rest of the dozer that had broken off when he came crashing through their house.
Yeah. But aside from that, people basically wanted to forget about it, and with the help of you know, insurance and everything, they ended up rebuilding everything. Not that it wasn't at great personal cost as well, of course, but Marv was gone and they were really eager to move on for the most part as it.
Yeah, Casey Farrell, who owned Gamble's hardware store, it took him seven years because his store was insured, but it wasn't insured for the kind of money it takes to rebuild after a dozer rampage. But I guess the Denver Post visited a year after on the anniversary of it to do a story, and they found that most of the buildings had either been rebuilt or were in the process of rebuilding. And I believe the mayor at the time this, I guess this would have been a year after.
A guy named Ted Wang. He said that the whole rampage had actually inspired the town to become tighter as a community, Like more people became involved in local politics, and the town just kind of like took pride in its own resurrection and rebuilding itself brick from brick, which is essentially I guess, the opposite of what Marvy Meyer would have wanted from his rampage.
Yeah, you know, probably, And you know the narrative that you hinted at early was still lives on for a lot of people. A lot of people think this guy's a folk hero, probably not surprisingly a lot of those people on the very far right of the political spectrum, and say, you know, this was a guy taking down, you know, his local government that was being he was a victim of his local government, and he was taking them out, you know, doing what we all want to
do on any given day. And people still celebrate June fourth is Killedozer Day in some of those circles.
Yeah, And so, you know, doing research on this, I just got less and less sympathetic with the guy and
really just came to dislike him. And then I came across that Dozer Manifesto webcomic by mister V and just reading some of it, I was like, well, I'm not exactly sure how I think about this whole thing, and I think I don't have enough information about what really went on in that town or didn't go on to decide one way or another, and get I don't think that matters, But I just thought it was interesting that I had an about face. I guess, yeah, I find it interesting when I think of my thoughts.
There was no one is quite sure who came up with the name kill Dozer in terms of this case, but there was obviously the band kill Dozer got to shout them out from Madison, Wisconsin, Okay, and they may have. I think they were the early eighties where they before or after the movie, because when they're a movie as well.
There was a movie called kill Dozer from nineteen seventy four. It was the ABC Suspense Saturday Suspense TV movie that was based on a nineteen forty four short story by fantasy writer Theodore Sturgeon.
Okay, so I bet kill Those are the band named themselves after. That would be mine, I would think.
But yeah, I don't understand why. It's like, well, where did the name come from? Like kill those? Like you would just look at that thing and be like, that's a kill dozer without ever hearing that word together. It's not like some great mystery like that's a kill dozer. That's just what you call that thing. Humans have some sort of innate genetic understanding of seeing that thing and knowing that it's a kill dozer without ever seeing that word before.
Yeah, though it didn't kill, No.
It didn't. That's a great point. So it's a I guess destroy dozer is a better one, yeah, or a bulldozer. Oh yeah. If you want to know more about kill Dozer, there's plenty of stuff to read and watch on the internet. Just be wary. Hopefully we've armed you with a little bit of info to measure against. And since I said that, it's time of course for a listener mail.
Yeah, and watch Tread You can rent it. I think it's free on two V and some other stuff.
But it is really well done. It's a great documentary.
Well, he does these recreations that I guess are CGI, but it looked to me like I was like, man, did they actually build another kill dozer replica to shoot the stuff?
Yeah? It was one of those few documentaries that had one hundred and fifty million dollar budget.
Not sure, but it looked good. And it's only like ninety eight minutes long or less than that eighty eight minutes ninety It's it's definitely worth seeing, all right, Listener Mail. Dangers of Whistling. Hey, guys, just finish that episode. And I thought you were going to mention the one thing about not whistling in a theater. Not one hundred percent sure of the veracity of the history of this, but
old theater. Legend has it that early stage hands were also sailors and or dock workers who communicated in whistles, and therefore, if you were a casual bystander whistling in a theater, you could actually cause an accident through miscommunication. As with some of other superstitions in the theater, this one is based more on safety than anything else, and I always find it fascinating. The concept of bad luck was apparently effective for early safety compliance. Thanks for keeping
me entertained on my long LA commutes. And that is from Claudia, who was a stage hand in Los Angeles.
Awesome. Thanks a lot, Claudia. I feel like we talked about that. It came across it in research or something like that. I don't know if it was related to whistling or what, but had to do with salty sea dogs moonlighting as stage hands for the theater.
Oh I remember that? Yeah?
All right, Well, thanks Claudia for getting in touch. And if you want to be like Claudia and share something awesome and interesting with us, we'd love that you can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it on its way to stuff. Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
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