In 1994, a former debutante named Carol Howe became an informant for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. For six months, she and Dennis Mahon made weekend trips to a white supremacist compound called Elohim City. Carol reported back to the government that Dennis Mahon was stockpiling weapons and talking about blowing up federal buildings. In April of 1995, someone did blow up a federal building. Had her handlers ignored credible information about the plot? Sources: Jones, Steven. Others Unknown: The Oklahoma City Case and Conspiracy. Public Affairs, 1998 Hammer, David Paul. Deadly Secrets: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing. Authorhouse, 2010. Painting, Wendy. Aberration in the Heartland of the Real. Trine Day, 2012 Newton, Michael. White Robes and Burning Crosses: A History of the Ku Klux Klan from 1866. McFarland and Company, Inc, 2014. Lee, Martin. The Beast Reawakens: Fascism's Resurgence from Hitler's Spymasters to Today's Neo-Nazi Groups and Right-Wing Extremists. Little, Brown and Company, 1997. Ronson, Jon. “The Debutante.” Audible Originals, 2023 Gumbel, Andrew and Charles, Roger. Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed and Why it Still Matters. William Morrow, 2012 Flynn, Kevin, and Gary Gerhardt. The Silent Brotherhood: Inside America's Racist Underground Free Press ; Collier Macmillan, 1989. https://politicalresearch.org/2006/08/01/white-power-cyberculture https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2004/racist-skinheads-klan-groups-2002 https://rogues.wiki/index.php/Wendy_Iwanow https://www.villagevoice.com/beyond-mcveigh/ https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/barbecue-nations-6405901 https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/1997/07/15/sighting-accounts-differ-grand-jury-witnesses-put-bomber-in-2-places/62308562007/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220211005304/https://www.oklahoman.com/article/2451569/elohim-city-residents-enjoy-separate-lifestyle-religion https://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/20/us/oklahoma-city-building-was-target-of-plot-as-early-as-83-official-says.html?pagewanted=all&src=pmSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
To have a murder as gruesome as Jade Beasley's doesn't happen very often down here.
In Marion, Illinois, an 11-year-old girl brutally stabbed to death.
Her father's longtime live-in girlfriend maintaining innocence, but charged with her murder.
I am confident that Julie Bethley is guilty.
They've never found a weapon.
Never made sense.
Still doesn't make sense.
She found out she was pregnant in jail.
The person who did it is still out there.
Listen to Murder on Songbird Road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Jason Alexander.
And I'm Peter Tilden.
And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you?
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On the morning of Saturday, February 21st, 2004, Patricia Norfleet found a box.
Music 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 spotted 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 26, 2004. A colleague told him he had a package in the mailroom.
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, Renita, 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 pop!
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 Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
At 8.57 a.m., on the morning of April 19, 1995, a rented yellow rider truck parked outside the Alpha P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City.
The driver got out, locked the truck, and walked away.
At 9.02, the bomb went off.
The truck contained nearly 5,000 pounds of explosive material.
Seismometers at a nearby science museum registered what looked like an earthquake.
Measuring 3.0 on the Richter scale.
In just seconds, the northern portion of the building collapsed completely.
168 people were killed.
19 of them were children.
One was just three months old.
The building housed regional offices for a number of federal government agencies.
Housing and Urban Development, Veterans Affairs, Social Security Administration.
The DEA and ATF and several military recruiting offices.
But the truck had parked directly under the building's daycare center.
The man responsible was apprehended rather quickly and entirely by accident.
Timothy McVeigh was on his way out of town in 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 11, 2001. But this isn't a story about Timothy McVeigh.
Not really.
Maybe another day.
This is still a story about Dennis Mahon.
And it's a story that gets very murky for a year or two in the mid-90s.
When we last left Dennis Mahon, it was the summer of 1994. He had just struck up a relationship with Carol Howe, a woman 20 years his junior.
She was the daughter of a wealthy businessman 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 1994, 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 a Racist hotline run by Dennis Mahon.
Every day, she listened to a new recording of Dennis ranting and raving about whatever was on his mind.
The scourge of immigration, 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' 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 system's 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 interest of full transparency, as far as a court of law has weighed in on the matter, Dennis Mahon 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 McVeigh's defense attorney that Dennis Mahon 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 guise, 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 Alfred P. Murrah Building.
But with that said, let's rejoin Carol and Dennis in 1994. There are some things everyone can agree on.
Carol and Dennis spent a lot of time together that summer.
And by June of 1994, she began accompanying him on trips out to Elohim City, a Christian identity compound in Oklahoma, near the Arkansas border.
The 400-acre community was led by a Christian identity minister named Robert Miller, who settled there in 1973. An article published in The Oklahoman in 1993 puts the population of Elohim City around 75 residents at the time.
The piece 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 raided by federal authorities in 1985. 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 advisor, or that when Ellison declared himself King James of the Ozarks in 1982, 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 when the ATF besieged his compound in 1985. Or that Ellison was one of several residents of the CSA compound who would later settle in Elohim 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, and 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 Elohim City in the 1980s and 90s 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 1994, Dennis Mahon 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 Mahon 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 23rd, she went to a courthouse in Tulsa to get a restraining order against him.
The petition must have caught the eye of Angela Finley, 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 6th, 1994. 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 Elohim 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 the 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 McVeigh 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 McVeigh's defense attorney that they'd never met, and court filings in McVeigh'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 2009 claims Dennis told him that he'd once sold Timothy McVeigh some guns and a copy of the anarchist cookbook.
He told several grand juries nothing at all. - To have a murderer as gruesome as Jade Beasley's doesn't happen very often down here.
In Marion, Illinois, an 11-year-old girl brutally stabbed to death, her father's longtime live-in girlfriend maintaining innocence, but charged with her murder.
I am confident that Julie Bethley is guilty.
This case, the more I learned about it, the more I'm scratching my head.
Something's not right.
I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco.
Murder on Songbird Road dives into the conviction of a mother of four who remains behind bars and the investigation that put her there.
I have not seen this level of corruption anywhere.
It's sickening.
If you stab somebody that many times, you have blood splatter.
Where's the change in clothes?
She found out she was pregnant in jail.
She wasn't treated like she was an innocent human being at all.
Which is just horrific.
Nobody has gotten justice yet.
And that's what I wish people would understand.
Listen to Murder on Songbird Road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Jason Alexander.
And I'm Peter Tilden.
And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse.
To make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor?
We got the answer.
Will space junk block your cell signal?
The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.
We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth.
Plus...
Does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts?
his stuntman reveals the answer.
And you never know who's going to drop by.
Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today.
How are you, too?
Hello, my friend.
Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park.
Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir.
God bless you all.
Hello, Newman.
And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging.
Really?
That's the opening?
Really No Really.
Oh, yeah, really.
No Really.
Go to ReallyNoReally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead.
It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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 1994 until March of 1995, Carol Howe met regularly with her ATF handlers.
She passed them information, they wrote reports, and she spent most weekends at Elohim 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 Mahon.
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 Monitor 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 Elohim City.
And it wasn't an investigation into Andreas Strasmeier, that mysterious German who was head of security at the compound and sometimes stayed at Dennis' house.
The ATF 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 bombings in Florida, Michigan, and Oklahoma during his underground years from 1982 to 1987. 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 500-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 1984. 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 Dennis's.
I did find some stories from the mid-80s in Michigan about a pipe bomb left at a Jewish community center in West Bloomfield and a bomb at 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' 2012 book on the Oklahoma City bombing is the only source I've found that highlights the fact that the ATF had been actively investigating Dennis Mahon 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 30, 1994, just a few days after Carol signed on as an informant.
Finley wrote in that report, War has approximately 20 to 25 active, 50 non-active, and 200 underground members locally.
The primary training location is called Elohim City.
Mahan has made numerous statements regarding the conversion of firearms into fully automatic weapons, the manufacture and use of silencers, and the manufacture and use of explosive devices.
Mahan and his organization are preparing for a race war and war with the government 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 Elohim City, with weekend trips stretching into weeks-long stays on the compound.
They detonated his homemade grenades together in the woods, and she pocketed the fragments, handing them over to the ATF as evidence.
In one report that fall, Agent Finley wrote that Carroll had reported, Mahon has talked with Carroll about targeting federal installations for destruction through bombings, such as the IRS building, the Tulsa Federal Building, and the Oklahoma City Federal Building.
I guess accelerationist thinking really hasn't evolved much in 30 years.
Because that's Dennis in 1994, thinking he can start the race war by turning out the lights.
And today's neo-Nazis are still trying to do it.
Carroll also told the agents that a man named Andy...
Carol said this Andy guy was saying things like, When she met with Agent Finley again in January of 1995, after spending most of December on the compound, Carol had more information about Andy.
He was Andreas Strasmeier.
Strasmeyer 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 just fine.
No one was thinking anything at all about Timothy McVeigh in January of 1995, but Strasmeyer would later admit that he had met McVeigh at a gun show in Tulsa in 1993. When Strassmeyer finally spoke to the FBI in 1996, he couldn't recall exactly what the date had been.
But he said it must have been after February 28th and before April 19th, because he remembered that they'd discussed the ongoing siege at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.
It might refresh Strassmeyer's recollection to know that the Wanamaker Gun and Knife Show was held on April 3rd and 4th in 1993, 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 30th.
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 McVeigh his business card.
But this is one of those things I can tell you for sure.
He did.
Strasmeyer's Elohim City business card was in McVeigh'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 19th, at Elohim 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 Mahon was present when Strasmeyer met McVeigh two years before the bombing is another one of those things we'll never know.
We do know that Strasmeyer stayed at Dennis' 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 McVeigh that Elohim City business card and told him he could stop by 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 1993, the Wanamaker Gun and Knife Show was billed as the world's largest gun show.
A write-up in the Tulsa Sentinel that year boasts over 2,700 vendors, spread out over a seven-acre show floor.
David Paul Hammer, McVeigh's friend from Death Row, Claims in his book that McVeigh actually went back to Dennis' 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 1995, she didn't know anything about Timothy McVeigh, or that he'd already met Andreas Strasmeyer.
They only knew that this heavily armed German was talking about bombs.
He was talking about 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 Strassmeyer on one of their visits to Oklahoma City.
She believed they were scouting targets.
Or the bombings they were always talking about.
Investigative journalist James Ridgway wrote in 2001 that Carol Howe's own handwritten notes about the information she collected for the ATF included what looks to be an ominous misspelling.
She'd written down Morrow Building, spelled M-O-R-R-O-W. Perhaps she'd heard Murrah, M-U-R-R-A-H, and misunderstood.
Stephen Jones, the attorney appointed to represent McVeigh, wrote in his book that Agent Finley's monthly report for December, which is when Carroll reportedly told Finley that Mahon and Strasmeyer 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 are 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 Murrah 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, and 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 raided.
But there were former members of the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord living in Elohim City.
There was 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 Howe 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 1995, just a month before the bombing, the ATF deactivated Carol Howe as an informant.
In later testimony, Agent Finley would say that Howe had become mentally unstable and had been associating with skinheads in her personal life outside of her work for the government.
Testimony from Finley's supervisor, though, indicates that Howe was seen as an effective, sincere, and honest informant.
A former ATF deputy director reviewed her file in 1997 and saw no evidence of deception, exaggeration, or fabrication.
Finley herself signed her name to a memo in 1996, saying that she'd known Howe 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 1995, 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.
To have a murder as gruesome as Jake Beasley's doesn't happen very often down here.
In Marion, Illinois, an 11-year-old girl brutally stabbed to death.
Her father's longtime live-in girlfriend maintaining innocence, but charged with her murder.
I am confident that Julie Bethle is guilty.
This case, the more I learned about it, the more I'm scratching my head.
Something's not right.
I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco.
Murder on Songbird Road dives into the conviction of a mother of four who remains behind bars and the investigation that put her there.
I have not seen this level of corruption anywhere.
It's sickening.
A few steps.
How many times you have blood splatter?
Where's the changed clothes?
She found out she was pregnant in jail.
She wasn't treated like she was an innocent human being at all.
Which is just horrific.
Nobody has gotten justice yet.
And that's what I wish people would understand.
Listen to Murder on Songbird Road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Jason Alexander.
And I'm Peter Tilden.
And together...
On the Really No Really podcast...
Our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions, like...
Why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor.
We got the answer.
Will space junk block your cell signal?
The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.
We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you, and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth.
Plus...
Does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts?
his stuntman reveals the answer.
And you never know who's going to drop by.
Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today.
How are you, too?
Hello, my friend.
Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park.
Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir.
God bless you all.
Hello, Newman.
And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging.
Really?
That's the opening?
Really No Really.
Oh, yeah, really.
No Really.
Go to ReallyNoReally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead.
It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Years after the bombing.
Bob Ricks, 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 Gumbel, 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 1990, in Waco in 1993.
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 Elohim 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 ATF's 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.
And 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 Elohim City.
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 with absolute certainty.
That Andrea Strassmeyer was in the country illegally and was illegally purchasing guns by the crateful.
Both of those men could have been and should have been arrested.
Could that have been accomplished without a Waco-style siege at Elohim 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 1995.
And things she said after April 1995.
Because the majority of what she said prior to the bombing is credible and consistent and should have led to action being taken.
Music Everything that comes after that is a little squishier.
One of those later statements was her testimony at the trial of Terry Nichols, McVeigh's accomplice.
In 1997, she said under oath that in the fall of 1994, she was with Dennis when he took a phone call.
She says she heard Dennis say, 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 1994 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 Mahon's White Beret newsletter from the 90s 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 2022, 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 WordPress-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.
There are too 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 Mahon had in January of 1996 with a man named J.D. Cash.
Now, if you're familiar with this particular conspiracy landscape, you might already have an opinion about J.D. Cash.
He was a reporter at the McCurtain County Gazette, a tiny paper in a small town in southeast Oklahoma.
We devoted the last 12 years of his life to the story of the Oklahoma City bombing.
Some are 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 12 years investigating this story.
And he was quite close to McVeigh's attorney, Stephen Jones, and the defense's private investigator, Richard Rayna.
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 Andreas Strasmeier 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 J.D. Cash said.
And Dennis' reaction to the idea was extreme.
In a later deposition, Cash said Dennis became extremely agitated.
He went pale and said, Sweet Jesus, I'm fucked.
He got up and placed a phone call to his friend Mark Thomas, an Arya Nations member and Klansman who spent a lot of time at Elohim City.
Dennis had just a few months earlier been a speaker at a cross-burning Thomas hosted on his farm in Berks County, Pennsylvania.
Dennis was particularly eager to reach Mark Thomas at that moment because he knew Michael Brescia was staying with him.
Brescia had been Strasmeyer's roommate at Elohim City, and if Strasmeyer might be a snitch, Brescia 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 caught 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' instructions for whoever was on the other end of the line.
He wanted Strasmeyer found.
He wanted him interrogated.
Shoot him in both kneecaps 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 as fiction.
But Cash turned his notes over to McVeigh's lawyers, and those lawyers gave them to the FBI. And the FBI notified the German federal authorities, who in turn briefed Strasmeyer 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' reaction.
He panicked because he knew Mark Thomas and Michael Brescia had just robbed 22 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 22 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 Langen.
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 Langan had given up their names to the feds.
They wouldn't be indicted until the following year.
Dennis Mahon was called before multiple grand juries in 1997 and 1998 in ongoing proceedings related to the Oklahoma City bombing.
And every time, he pled the fifth.
In 1997, Dennis told a reporter, In 1998, 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 subpoenaed to appear before that grand jury in March of 1998, He told reporters it was pure harassment.
It was retaliation against him for his recent attempt to run for mayor of Tulsa.
Again.
He'd lost in 1992, and he'd just lost again in February of 1998. By 1999, though, McVeigh's appeal to the Supreme Court was denied.
He was going to die.
Terry Nichols had been convicted in 1997. The investigation was more or less over.
The official one, anyway.
Dennis was nearly 50, 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 2001. Dennis settled in Arizona, which is where the next chapter of his life starts.
On the last weekend of January 2004, 200 extremists from all over the country gathered in Phoenix, Arizona for Aryan Fest, that white power woodstock that Tom Metzger first held on a farm in Oklahoma in 1988. Along with the musical performances from Nazi metal bands, there were speeches from Metzger himself, Aryan Nations 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 warned 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 weapons than guns.
In my kitchen.
Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler, just a few months before his death at age 86, arrived at Aryan Fest without his buxom young traveling companion.
They were boarding a flight to Phoenix a few months earlier when his companion, Wendy Ivanov, was arrested for Czech 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 Mahon didn't give a speech at Arianfest 2004, but the Phoenix New Times reporter noted that he was quite the social butterfly all weekend.
Chatting up movement leaders and young skinheads alike.
He was overheard bragging about having known Timothy McVeigh, something he'd been denying for nine years, saying, quote, I knew Timothy McVeigh quite well.
In fact, I knew him back when he was named Timothy Tuttle, and he and I were involved in quite a few bu- 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 bombs together.
But I think he was lying.
He was in his 50s by then.
His time had passed.
I think he wanted to impress these 20-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 1980s.
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.
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman 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 weirdlittleguyspodcast at gmail.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 subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.
To have a murder as gruesome as Jade Beasley's doesn't happen very often down here.
In Marion, Illinois, an 11-year-old girl brutally stabbed to death.
Her father's longtime live-in girlfriend maintaining innocence, but charged with her murder.
I am confident that Julie Bethley is guilty.
They've never found a weapon.
Never made sense.
Still doesn't make sense.
She found out she was pregnant in jail.
The person who did it is still out there.
Listen to Murder on Songbird Road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Jason Alexander.
And I'm Peter Tilden.
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