Cool Zone Media. On the morning of Saturday, February twenty first, two thousand and four, Patricia Norfleet found a box. No one can really say for certain how the box got there, but there it was, sitting on a little wooden desk in the library. As a part time library monitor at the public Library in Scottsdale, Arizona's Civic Center, she was making her regular rounds. It was her job to make sure people weren't eating or talking on their phones, and
that's when she spot at the box. The librarian at the circulation desk that morning recognized the name on the box. It was addressed to a city employee, but he didn't work in the library. Don Logan was the director of the city's Office of Diversity and Dialogue. Librarians are busy people, and they aren't responsible for your lost mail, so the package was set aside. Maybe Don left it there and
he'd come back for it. The package sat behind the circulation desk for a few days before another library employee thought to pop it into the city's inner office mail system. Finally, five days after the box appeared on a desk in the library, it found its way into the hands of the man whose name was on the box. Don Logan had just returned from a quick lunch at his favorite Mexican restaurant on February twenty six, two thousand and four. A colleague told him he had a package in the
mail room. Someone joked that it was probably a bomb, and everyone had a good laugh, but he gave it a good shake anyway. It was oddly light for its size, and it was sealed with more tape than really seemed necessary. His administrative assistant, Ranita, was on the phone, but she didn't miss a beat. She passed her boss a pair
of scissors without even looking up from her work. As he ran the blade of the scissors down the seam on one side of the box, he thought for a second about the laugh he'd just shared with his colleagues. But what a silly idea. Why are you being so paranoid? He asked himself. Who would send you a bomb? And then he heard a loud and the room went dark.
It didn't take long for investigators to zero in on a suspect, but it would be eight years before an ATF informant took the stand to tell a jury about the years she'd spent getting close to that bomber. Dennis Mahon built that bomb, But this chapter of our bomber story starts with a bomb he probably didn't make. I'm Molly Coner, and this is weird, little guys. At eight fifty seven am on the morning of April nineteenth, nineteen ninety five, a rented Yellow Rider truck parked outside the
Alpha Pi Mura Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. The driver got out, locked the truck, and walked away. At nine oh two, the bomb went off. The truck contained nearly five thousand pounds of explosive material. Seismometers at a nearby science museum registered what looked like an earthquake, measuring three point zero on the Richter scale. In just seconds,
the northern portion of the building collapsed completely. One hundred and sixty eight people were killed, nineteen of them were children. One was just three months old. The building housed regional offices for a number of federal government agencies, housing in Urban Development, Veterans Affairs, Social Security Administration, the DEA at ATF, and several military recruiting offices, but the truck had parked directly under the building stake care center. The man responsible
was apprehended rather quickly and entirely by accident. Timothy McVeigh was on his way out of town and a getaway car he'd stashed nearby before the bombing when he was pulled over by a state trooper. The car he was driving didn't have a license plate. During the traffic stop, the trooper noticed a bulge in his jacket concealing a loaded firearm. He didn't have a valid permit. For the rest of his story, you probably already know. He was convicted and sentenced to death. He was executed by lethal
injection on June eleventh, two thousand and one. But this isn't a story about Timothy McVeigh, not really, maybe another day. This is still a story about Dennis Mayhon, and it's a story that gets very murky for a year or two in the mid nineties. When we last left Dennis Mayhon, it was the summer of nineteen nine four. He had just struck up a relationship with Carol Howe, a woman twenty years his junior. She was the daughter of a wealthy business man and had once been a debutante in Tulsa.
But now that she was sporting a giant swastika tattoo on her arm. She was more at home on paramilitary compounds than at ladies luncheons. In March of nineteen ninety four, she and her husband were getting drunk in Tulsa's Chandler Park when she broke bones in both of her feet jumping off a piece of scenery set up for a passion play that was put on every year by the local Catholic church. For years, Carol would tell people she'd
been injured by a gang of black men. It was a better origin story, and the crowd she was hoping to impress was eager to believe a tale of a beautiful, young white woman coming to harm at the hands of vicious black men. And as she lay in bed convalescing, she started calling in to the dial E racist hotline
run by Dennis Mayhon. Every day she listened to a new recording of Dennis ranting and raving about whatever was on his mind, scourge of immigration and Jewish influence on society, violent crime committed by black people, and the need for white men to stand up. Soon, she wasn't just listening to Dennis's recordings. They met at a restaurant later that spring and struck up a relationship. Everything that follows is a riddle. I won't tell you what's true because I can't.
I can only tell you what was offered as truth and by whom. Sometimes it's possible to speculate as to why someone offered up a particular version of the truth. Are they protecting themselves or someone else? Are they wielding their words as a weapon hoping to incriminate an enemy? Are they covering up another darker truth? Are they misremembering or confused? Are they repeating a lie that they sincerely believe?
Or have they simply lost their minds? The two competing truths I most often compare are those offered up in a federal court record. There is a prosecutor's presentation of evidence and a defense attorney's argument against it. In a court of law, the judge and jury make their findings, and at the end of a trial we have something that is legally true, whether it's the whole truth or even true at all in any other sense. We have the judicial systems stamp of approval on one version of
the truth. And we kind of have that here because I'll spoil the end now in the interests of full transparency, as far as a court of law has weighed in on the matter, Dennis Mayhon had nothing to do with the Oklahoma City bombing. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols alone were responsible. The Department of Justice wrote in a letter to Timothy mcvay's defense attorney that Dennis Mayhon was never
a subject of their investigation into the bombing. When speaking to the press, Dennis himself has always denied any involvement, although when faced with a grand jury, he reportedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination. As I research my weird little guys, I often find myself navigating the stories of unreliable narrators. I do my best to take in every version of a story and do my own primary source research on the surrounding facts, and offer you
these competing versions of the truth with some commentary. My goal on this show is not to give you something that I can guarantee to be an objective truth, to the extent that such a thing exists, but rather to present you a thoroughly researched synthesis of those mismatched truths for you to consider. But I'm not sure we can even get that far this time, too many researchers have gone mad trying to sift for truths in the rubble of the Alpha Pi Mura building. But with that said,
let's rejoin Carol and Dennis in nineteen ninety four. There are some things every one can agree on. Carol and Dennis spent a lot of time together that summer, and by June of nineteen ninety four, she began accompanying him on trips out to Ellaheim City, a Christian identity compound in Oklahoma near the Arkansas border. The four hundred acre community was led by a Christian identity minister named Robert Miller,
who settled there in nineteen seventy three. An article published in The Oklahoma in nineteen ninety three puts the population in Elleheim City around seventy five residents at the time. The Peace quotes Miller extensively, and he paints the small
community as a quiet, peaceful group of religious separatists. He downplays his connections to the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord, a Christian identity militia compound in Missouri that was rated by federal authorities in nineteen eighty five. Miller says there was quote not a long or profound
connection between the two groups. He fails to mention that he had been CSA leader James Ellison's spiritual adviser, or that when Ellison declared himself King James of the Ozarks in nineteen eighty two, it had been Miller who anointed Ellison's head with holy oils in a bizarre religious ceremony, or that it was Miller who was called in to negotiate Ellison's surrender and the ATF besieged his compound in nineteen eighty five, or that Allison was one of several
residents of the CSA compound who would later settle in Elaheim City, or that Ellison married Miller's granddaughter, or that Miller had testified as a character witness for Richard Snell, a CSA member sentenced to death for the murder of a state trooper. So I'm not sure what he means when he says he has no connection to the Covenant the sword in the arm of the Lord, and I think you need to take his description of a quiet
community of prayerful families with some skepticism. There were quite a few residents of Eloaheim City in the nineteen eighties and nineties whose stories would take us too far from the one we're following today, So suffice it to say for now that we'll be revisiting that place. But in nineteen ninety four, Dennis Mayhon kept an old airstream trailer on the property, and he would stay there from time to time while maintaining his full time residence in Tulsa.
It wasn't long after Carol Howe got close to Dennis Mayhon that their relationship soured. By most accounts, Dennis raped her. She said that the experience left her terrified, and she fled to her parents' house to lay low for a few weeks, but Dennis wouldn't leave her alone. After repeated threatening phone calls and more than one unwanted visit, she realized he wasn't going to take no for an answer. On August twenty third, she went to a courthouse in
Tulsa to get a restraining order against him. The petition must have caught the eye of Angela Fine, an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, because by the end of the week, Carol Howe was on the ATF payroll as a federal informant. The hearing to determine if Carol Howe's restraining order against Dennis Mahon would be granted, was held on September sixth, nineteen ninety four, but Carol
wasn't there and the judge dismissed her petition. I can't tell you exactly where Carol was instead of the courthouse that day. It's possible that she was at Elheim City that week. Where she was exactly on any given day in particular wouldn't matter all too much if not for the fact that these sources that place her there in the first week of September put her on the compound's gun range with Dennis and Timothy McVeigh, and that would be an incredible revelation if we had a good source
for it. I don't want to harp on the problem of the unreliable narrator, but I think this anecdote in particular highlights the problem with this story. Because I read an unhealthy number of books about the events leading up to the Oklahoma City bombing. I read books written by professors, lawyers, criminals, journalists, and conspiracy theorists. Some are well footnoted and others count
on you to just trust the author's account. A claim that's repeated across multiple sources gives it the appearance of validity, but sometimes, if you look closely at those footnotes, it all leads back to the same bad source, and this story is one of those. Criminology professor Mark Hamm credits this anecdote to an unnamed source, and his claim is repeated in a later book by prolific true crime author Michael Newton, and the story also appears in a book
written by David Paul Hammer. Hammer is a convicted murderer who befriended McVeigh when they were housed in neighboring cells on death Row, and Hammer claims McVeigh told him this story himself. The point I'm circling around here, I guess, is that extensive research doesn't always mean you've found something valuable. I found this claim in three separate books, and it's a very intriguing anecdote, and it would be very satisfying to believe, but I don't. Timothy McVay maintained until his
death that he'd never met Dennis Mahon. Dennis has told a variety of stories, mostly he says they never met. He told mcvay's defense attorney that they'd never met, and court filings in mcvay's case show there was no evidence that they had. He did tell journalist John Ronson that they'd met once, a man he shared a cell with in two thousand and nine claims Dennis told him that he'd once sold Timothy mcveay some guns and a copy of the Anarchist Cookbook. He told several grand juries nothing
at all. So I suppose we should stick with the pieces of this timeline that I am more inclined to believe. And from the end of August nineteen ninety four until March of nineteen ninety five, Carol Howe met regularly with her ATF handlers. She passed them information, they wrote reports, and she spent most weekends at Elheim City with Dennis. Something I think is important to remember here is that the ATF hired Carol Howe as part of their investigation
into Dennis Mayhon and White Arian resistance. The copies of Agent Finley's reports that I've been able to see for myself show that quite clearly it's a standard piece of government paperwork, and there's boxes to fill out at the top. In the box labeled title of investigation. She's typed White Aryan Resistance and under monitored investigation information she entered firearms violations. So Agent Finley is looking into White Aryan Resistance and
the possibility that its members have illegal guns. This wasn't an investigation into Elleheim City, and it wasn't an investigation into Andrea Strasmeier, that mysterious German who is head of security at the compound and sometimes stayed at Dennis's house. The AHF agents who met with Carol Howe weren't investigating Timothy McVeigh, and they certainly weren't investigating the Oklahoma City bombing because that hadn't happened yet. But Dennis had been
bragging for years about making bombs. He claims to have carried out a string of bombing in Florida, Michigan, and Oklahoma during his underground years from nineteen eighty two to nineteen eighty seven. He always stops short of specifics, but he's told reporters and federal informants alike that he'd bombed abortion clinics, Jewish community centers, and government office buildings during
those years. It's harder than you might think to find historical record of an unsolved bombing in an unspecified place at an unspecified time. But you know, I lost a few days of my life trying to figure it out anyway. Mainly I was looking for any evidence that a five hundred pound ammonium nitrate bomb ever exploded under a truck in Michigan, because that's something Carol Howe told her handlers Dennis claimed to have done, and that's a big enough
bomb that it would have been in the news. I tried pretty hard, and I couldn't find anything matching that description, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. There was what seemed at first to be a pretty promising lead when I found some news stories about a string of pipe bombs left in public places throughout the Midwest in nineteen eighty four, but the man responsible was caught when he
accidentally detonated one in his own car. His motivations were inscrutable, and he was ultimately diagnosed with schizophrenia and confined to a state mental hospital. So those bombs weren't Denisis. I did find some stories from the mid eighties in Michigan about a pipe bomb left at a Jewish community center in West Bloomfield and a bomb in a Detroit abortion clinic that didn't detonate, and both of those appear to have gone unsolved, but who knows, we probably never will.
Andrew Gumbel and Roger C. Charles's twenty twelve book on the Oklahoma City bombing is the only source I found that highlights the fact that the the ATF had been actively investigating Dennis Mayhon for a decade by the time Carol Howe fell into their lap, and they must have been keeping a pretty close eye on him, because within a day of Carol Howe filing that petition for a restraining order against him, there they were with an offer,
help us take him down. ATF Agent ANGELA. Finley's first report summarizing information provided by Carol Howe is dated August thirtieth, nineteen ninety four, just a few days after Carol signed on as an informant. Finley wrote in that report, War has approximately twenty to twenty five active, fifty non active, and two hundred underground members. Locally, the primary training location
is called Eloheim City. Mayhan has made numerous statements regarding the conversion of firearms into fully automatic weapons, the manufacturer and use of silencers, and the manufacturer and use of explosive devices. Mayhan and his organization are preparing for a race war and war with the govern in the near future, and it is believed that they are rapidly stockpiling weapons. Over the next few months, Carol and Dennis spent more and more time together at Eloheim City, with weekend trips
stretching into weeks long stays on the compound. They detonated his home made grenades together in the woods, and she pocketed the fragments, handing them over to the ATF as evidence. In one report that fall, agent Finlay wrote that Carol had reported Mayhan has talked with Carol about targeting federal installations for destruction through bombings, such as the IRS Building, the Tulsa Federal Building, and the Oklahoma City Federal Building.
Mayhan has also discussed a plan for destroying power lines from Oklahoma City to Catoosa, Oklahoma, during the hottest time of summer. Mayhon reasons this will create a panic and without air conditioning, mass race riots would begin. I guess accelerationist thinking really hasn't evolved much in thirty years, because that's Dennis in nineteen ninety four thinking. He can start the race war by turning out the lights, and today's
neo Nazis are still trying to do it. Carol also told the agents that a man named Andy often spoke with Dennis about the need for real violence. He was talking about assassinations, mass shootings, and bombings. Carol said this Andy guy was saying things like it's time to stop talking and start blowing things up. When she met with Agent Finley again in January of nineteen ninety five, after spending most of December on the compound, Carol had more
information about Andy. He was Andrea Strossmeyer, Eloheim City's head of security. Strassmeyer was a German national who was in the United States illegally, which you might think would make it difficult for him to purchase large quantities of firearms, but he seemed to manage to find no one was thinking anything at all about Timothy McVay in January of nineteen ninety five, but Strasmeyer would later admit that he had met McVeagh at a gun show in Tulsa in
nineteen ninety three. When Strasmeyer finally spoke to the FBI in nineteen ninety six, he couldn't recall exactly what the date had been, but he said it must have been after February twenty eighth and before April nineteenth, because he remembered that they'd discussed the ongoing siege at the Branch Davidian Compound at Waco, Texas. It might refresh Strasmeyer's recollection to know that the Wannamaker Gun and Knife show was held on April third and fourth in nineteen ninety three,
which means McVeigh would have just come from Waco. He'd been interviewed by a journalism student from Southern Methodist University just outside a police checkpoint at the Branch Davidian Compound on March thirtieth. And here again we have mismatched and poorly remembered facts. Strasmeyer can't recall who he'd gone to Tulsa with that weekend, and he told the FBI he didn't remember giving McVay his busy card, But this is one of those things I can tell you for sure
he did. Strasmeyer's Eloheim City business card was in mcvay's possession when he was arrested. He'd called the number on the card a few minutes before the bomb went off. On the morning of April nineteenth at Elloheim City, a woman answered the phone. She says the man was looking for Andy, that he'd met him at a gun show and wanted to come visit. The woman told him only that Andy was out at the moment and he'd have
to call back. Whether Dennis Mayhun was present when Strasmeyer met mcphay two years before the bombing is another one of those things we'll never know. We do know that Strasmeyer stayed at Dennis's house when he was in the city buying guns, but there aren't any clear, credible claims that Dennis was standing there with Strasmeyer when he handed McVay that Eloheim City business card and told him he could stop any time. It's very likely that Dennis was
somewhere at the gun show. We know he and his brother were regulars at the Tulsa Gun Show as both shoppers and vendors. But even in nineteen ninety three, the Wannamaker Gun and Knife Show was billed as the world's largest gun show right up in the Tulsa Sentinel that year boasts over twenty seven hundred vendors spread out over
a seven acre show floor. David Paul Hammer, mcveig's friend from death Row, claims in his book that McVeigh actually went back to Dennis's house with Strasmeyer that night, and that the three men talked about bombs, but that probably didn't happen. But when Carol Howe was talking to Agent Finley in January of nineteen ninety five, she didn't know anything about Timothy mcveay or that he'd already met Andrea Strossmeyer. They only knew that this heavily armed German was talking
about bombs. He was talking up blowing up federal buildings. Carol also reported during that meeting that Robert Miller, the leader at the compound, had been giving increasingly violent sermons, urging his congregants to begin preparing for war against the government. And I read that report, but I have not read
for myself the ATF report from the meeting. When Carol Howe told her handlers that she had accompanied Mahon and Strasmeier on one of their visits to Oklahoma City, she believed they were scouting targets for the bombings they were always talking about. Investigative journalist James Ridgway wrote in two thousand and one that Carol Howe's own handwritten notes about the information she collected for the ATF included what looks to be an ominous misspelling. She had written down Morrow
building spelled Morrow. Perhaps she'd heard Murrah m u r r ah and misunders stood. Stephen Jones, the attorney appointed to represent McVeigh, wrote in his book that Agent Finley's monthly report for December, which is when Carol reportedly told Finley that Mayhon Strassmeyer had discussed the Murrah Building, was
missing from the ATF archives. I do want to take a moment here to reorient us, to sort of ground us a little bit, because it's easy to go off the deep end and end up a raving conspiracy theorist. There's so many versions of the truth that you can find enough proof to convince yourself of anything you want, and it's easy to see connections that aren't quite there.
Because it's worthwhile to note here that the Murror Building had been a target before, it's not actually surprising that it would have been a topic of idle chatter on the compound a decade earlier. Members of the Covenant the Sword of the Arm of the Lord had planned to detonate a bomb at the Murrah Building, but the plan fell apart before they could carry it out, and the group itself fell apart not long after when the compound
was rated. But there were former members of the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord living in Ellawhein City, and there's a lot of cross pollination of ideas and relationships. So as tempting as it is to see the possibility of that name being mentioned as some kind of proof that How had reported specific prior knowledge of what was to come, it may be more smoke
than substance. It sounds like a perfect one to one connection, But in reality, a lot of people were talking about blowing up a lot of things, and it's not that surprising that more than one of them thought of that building in particular. I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I'm not making any claims here about alternative versions of the truth. But we only have these competing truths. In March of nineteen ninety five, just a month before the bombing, the
ATF deactivated Carol Howe as an informant. In later testimony, Agent Finley would say that how had become mentally unstable and had been associating with skinheads in her personal life outside of her work for the government. Testimony from Finley supervisor, though, indicates that how was seen as an effective, sincere, and honest informant. A former ATF deputy director reviewed her file in nineteen ninety seven and saw no evidence of deception, exaggeration,
or fabrication. Findley herself signed her name to a memo in nineteen ninety six saying that she'd known how for two years and never found her to be overly paranoid, and they couldn't have been all that concerned that Carol was unreliable in nineteen ninety five because when Carol Howe called Agent Finley the day after the bombing, a month after they'd cut her loose, they called her into the office and reactivated her. They wanted her to get Dennis on the phone in the presence of agents from the
FBI and the ATF. She tried to reach him, but he didn't pick up. Years after the bombing, Bob Rix, the agent in charge of the FBI's Oklahoma City Field office, was asked why Dennis Mahon was never questioned about his threats to blow up a federal building in Oklahoma City.
His answer was only I don't know. That question was posed to him by Andrew Gumble, whose book Oklahoma City, What the Investigation Missed and Why It Still Matters focuses primarily on the failures of various government agencies in the aftermath and investigation of the bombing, and the book explores the idea that there was an interagency turf war when
it came to Elohim City. The ATF was still suffering the damage to their reputation after the way things went down at Ruby Ridge in nineteen ninety and Waco in nineteen ninety three, and more than a few of the FBI agents Gumbel spoke to believed that the ATF had been holding back when it came to sharing information with them,
particularly about Elaheim City. But even if you take Oklahoma City out of this, even if you eliminate all the complication of these theories about a wider conspiracy leading up to the bombing, even if imagine for a moment that bombing had never happened at all, the ATF still had credible information that a prominent militant white supremacist leader was making and detonating explosive devices. They had physical evidence, They had hours of tape from their informant about this man
illegally modifying guns and stockpiling weapons. They had reason to believe he might be plotting a bombing of some kind, and every reason to believe he knew how to do it because they'd been investigating him for years, but they
never brought him in. Tommy Whitman, who is the Assistant Special Agent in charge of the ATFS Dallas Field office who oversaw this investigation, later told Gumbel quote, the thinking was, we don't want to talk to Mahon because if we did, he'd know we were super interested in him, and he might change his activities. But of course he already knew
we were interested. The thinking was, also, we don't know if the FBI or another agency may be looking at him, so we won't If we make an inquiry, they'll want to know what we know, and we don't want others to know because they'll know we're interested and won't share information with us. End quote. So in the end, the explanation that fits the facts best, based on later revelations from the FBI and ATF, is that the ATF was
just gun shy about another confrontation with armed separatists. They didn't want another Waco, they didn't want another Ruby Ridge, and they didn't want to move on Elaheim City. And more than anything else, they didn't want to share what they had with the FBI. The ATF was negligent. I'm confident in that I can say that with unshakable certainty. This was negligent. It was incompetent, It was irresponsible, it was unforgivable. They had credible information that Dennis Mahon had
grenades and automatic weapons. They knew of absolute certainty that Andrea Strossmeier was in the country illegally and was illegally purchasing guns by the crate full. Both of those men could have been and should have been arrested. Could that have been accomplished without a Waco style siege at Eloheem City. That's hard to say. I think so, but I guess they didn't. But would that have prevented the Oklahoma City bombing?
That's the more important question, and I think the answer is no. Because for as many unanswered questions as there still are as many maddening possibilities, there are of these connections that no one can quite prove. I don't think it would have. The information Carol Howe provided to the government can be divided into two categories, things she said before April nineteen ninety five and things she said after
April nineteen ninety five. Because the majority of what she said prior to the bombing is credible and consistent and should have led to action being taken. Everything that comes after that is a little squishier. One of those later statements was her testimony at the trial of Terry Nichols mcvay's accomplice in nineteen ninety seven. She said under oath that in the fall of nineteen ninety four, she was with Dennis when he took a phone call. She says
she heard Dennis say tim tuttle, tuttle, tuttle, tuttle and laugh. Now, in fairness to Carol, she may not have reported that conversation to the ATF at the time, because why would she think it was significant. Tim Tuttle was an alias used at that time by Timothy McVeigh. But in fairness to those who think Carol would lie under oath, she did also testify that day that she'd been injured in nineteen ninety four by three young black men, not her own drunken lack of judgment in a public park, So
hard to say. As for Tim Tuttle, if you remember a few episodes ago, I said, the only issue that I ever found of Dennis Mayhon's White Beret newsletter from the nineties was one that his twin brother Daniel had provided to a neo Nazi group who is trying to archive right wing extremist history. So in twenty twenty two he hands over a single issue of the White Beret and this neo Nazi group posts it on their website.
And I don't know how to make a website, but this is pretty common on a word Press type site. The page indicates the site author who posted that particular piece of content. It's not his real name, obviously, he's a neo Nazi trying to memorialize the history of a terrorist. But the name the author used was Tim Turtle, which is perhaps a typo, but perhaps just a cheeky little
nod to McVeigh and his possible connections to Dennis. Many little anecdotes, bits of testimony and one off claims, unsourced allegations and mysteries. To go through them all, and a lot of them don't warrant a second hearing anyway, But one I can't let go of is a conversation Dennis Mayhon had in January of nineteen ninety six with a man named J. D. Cash. Now, if you're familiar with this particular conspiracy landscape, you might already have an opinion
about JD. Cash. He was a reporter at the McCurtain County Gazette, a tiny paper in a small town in southeast Oklahoma, who devoted the last twelve years of his life to the story of the Oklahoma City bombing. Saw Mark quick to dismiss him outright as a conspiracy theorist, And I'll tell you straight up, he did stray from the straight and narrow path of facts and proof, There's no doubt about that. But he also spent twelve years investigating this story, and he was quite close to Mcbay'sttorneysan
Jones and the defense's private investigator, Richard Reyna. I wouldn't take Cash's stories as a gospel truth necessarily, which is why I wasn't so sure that this conversation ever happened until I found a little external corroboration. Cash claims he and Dennis spoke for five hours that day. Now, Cash had a bit of an unconventional interviewing style, it seems, because at some point during their conversation he offered up his own opinion that Andrea Strasmeyer may have been working
for the German government. For what it's worth, I'm not really even going to explore that. I'm not saying it has any legs, but it's what JD. Cash said, and Dennis's reaction to the idea was extreme. In a later deposition, Cash said Denis became extremely agitated. He went pale and said, sweet Jesus, I'm fucked. He got up and placed a phone call to his friend Marked Thomas, an Area Nation's member and clansman who spent a lot of time at
Ellaheim City. Dennis had just a few months earlier been a speaker at a cross burning Thomas hosted on his farm in Burke's County, Pennsylvania. Dennis was particularly eager to reach Mark Thomas at that moment because he knew Michael Brescia was staying with him. Russia had been Strasmeyer's roommate at Allaheim City, and as Strasmeyer might be a snitch,
Russia needed to hear about it. The two men in Pennsylvania were not thrilled to be put on the phone with a reporter, and they refused to agree to allow Cash to visit them on the farm. After he got off the phone with Mark Thomas, Dennis made a second phone call, this time to someone in Germany. Dennis doesn't
speak German, but his twin brother Daniel apparently does. He passed the phone to his brother, who translated Dennis's instructions for whoever was on the other end of the line he wanted Strasmeyer found he wanted him interrogated, shoot him in both knee caps if you have to, but get him to confess, and then kill him. Just a few weeks later, Dennis would deny that he ever said this. For his part, Strasmeyer has laughed it off his fiction.
But Cash turned his notes over to mcvay's lawyers, and those lawyers gave them to the FBI, and the FBI notified the German federal authorities, who in turn briefed Strassmeyer on this threat to his life in the presence of
his attorney. Whether it all went down the way J. D. Cash described it or not, a lot of people took it seriously, but again just to bring us back to a space of reality, right, so we're not reaching escape velocity on conspiracy theories, It's easy to see this as evidence that Dennis Mahon, Mark Thomas, and Michael Brescia must have known something about the Oklahoma City bombing? Right? Why else would he panic at the news that there might have been a snitch? But I would offer up this
alternative explanation for Dennis's reaction. He panicked because he knew Mark Thomas and Michael Brescia had just robbed twenty two banks. J. D. Cash didn't know it at the time, but Thomas and Brescia were both members of the Aryan Republican Army, a Nazi bank robbery gang responsible for twenty two bank robberies over the prior two years. Richard Lee Guthrie had been arrested just a few days before this conversation took place, and Guthrie quickly gave up the group's ringleader, Donna Langon.
She wasn't known as Donna back then, though she wouldn't transition until after her arrest. A story for another day. My point is when Dennis called Mark Thomas and Michael Brescia to ask them if they knew anything about Strasmeyer being an informant. They didn't know yet. If Guthrie and Langen had given up their names to the Feds, they
wouldn't be indicted until the following year. Dennis Mayhon was called before multiple grand juries in nineteen ninety seven, in nineteen ninety eight in ongoing proceedings related to the Oklahoma City bombing, and every time he pled the Fifth invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination. In nineteen ninety seven, Denis Tolal reporter, it is my greatest desire to answer all their questions, even if it takes days. But I
have to have immunity. I have to protect myself. In nineteen ninety eight, he tried again for immunity ahead of another trip to sit in front of another grand jury. The judge denied his request, and when he was subpoena to appear before that grand jury in March of nineteen ninety eight, he told reporters it was pure harassment, whose retaliation against him for his recent attempt to run for
mayor of Tulsa again. He'd lost in nineteen ninety two, and he'd just lost again in February of nineteen ninety eight. By nineteen ninety nine, though mcphay's appeal to the Supreme Court was he was going to die. Terry Nichols had been convicted in nineteen ninety seven. The investigation was more or less over the official one. Anyway, Dennis was nearly fifty and this one time rising star of right wing
extremism was fading from relevance. His brother got fired for handing out white power pamphlets at work, a side story we covered last week, and the brothers left Oklahoma in two thousand and one. Dennis settled in Arizona, which is
where the next chapter of his life starts. On the last weekend of January two thousand and four, two hundred extremists from all over the country gathered in Phoenix, Arizona for arian Fest, that white power woodstock that Tom Metzger first held on a farm in Oklahoma in nineteen eighty eight. Along with the musical performances from Nazi metal bands, there were speeches from Metzger himself, Health Aran Nation's leader Richard Butler,
and a Nazi named Billy Roper. He is the subject of several listener requests for his own episode, and I'm getting there. The Phoenix New Times describes Billy Roper's failed attempt to whip the crowd into a frenzy, noting rather derisively that he looks more like a history teacher than the skinheads in the audience, which is probably because he had been a high school history teacher until his move to full time white power activism a few years earlier.
Tom Metzger delivered his remarks while wearing a T shirt that read some people are still alive simply because it is illegal to kill them. But I don't think he put it on with any sense of self awareness. He warns the crowd that they shouldn't be stockpiling guns, and he seems instead to be advising them to make bombs, saying, quote, how many guns can you shoot at once? Guys? Besides, I could brew up bigger way weapons then guns in
my kitchen. Arian Nation's leader Richard Butler, just a few months before his death at age eighty six, arrived at arion Fest without his Bucksom young traveling companion. They were boarding a flight to Phoenix a few months earlier, when his companion, Wyndy Ivanov, was arrested for check forgery. The neo Nazi community was shocked to discover that Ivanov had been living a double life as an adult film actress called Bianca Trump. She'd starred in films like Barely Legal
Latinas and Big White Tits, Big Black Dicks. She'd bonded out by the time the party started, but it seems the revelations about her career had gotten her disinvited. Dennis Mayhunt didn't give a speech at Arianfest two thousand and four, but the Phoenix New Times Reporter noted that he was quite the social butterfly all weekend, chatting up movement leaders
and young skinh heads alike. He was overheard bragging about having known Timothy McVeigh, something he'd been denying for nine years, saying, quote, I knew Timothy McVay quite well. In fact, I knew him back when he was named Timothy Tuttle, and he and I were involved in quite a few And then he paused very dramatically and said, let's just say he
and I did some serious business together. And after Oklahoma City, the Feds came after me big time boy, but they never proved a thing, and that was probably a lie, he said. It. I'm telling you what he said. He said that he and McVeigh made moms together, but I think he was lying. He was in his fifties by then, his time had passed. I think he wanted to impress these twenty something kids, or at least impress upon them the value of terrorism, because that same weekend over beers,
he told some young Nazi skinheads terrorism works. We did a lot of terrorism in Tulsa in the nineteen eighties. We put heads in the road and people paid attention. Two weeks later, Dennis Mahon wrote up his last will and testament and sent it to his father by certified mail, and then he got to work on the only bomb the government ever proved. He built we Del guised as a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. Its researched, written and recorded by me Molly Conger. Our executive producers
are Sophie Lichttermant and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me at Weird Little Podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I probably will not answer it. It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys Subreddy, just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys.