This is the end of Dennis Mahon's story. In 2012, he was convicted for building the bomb that went off in the hands of Scottsdale, Arizona's director of Diversity & Dialogue in 2004. In the eyes of the law, Dennis and Dennis alone is guilty in that case... but the investigation leaves a lot of unanswered questions about his co-conspirators. Sources: https://jeffmaysh.substack.com/p/how-an-undercover-exotic-dancer-captured https://www.upi.com/Archives/1992/08/31/Charges-against-Geraldo-Rivera-dropped/1010715233600/ https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2015/05/20/chaos-compound https://journaltimes.com/news/national/police-chief-blames-rivera-for-fracas/article_8fadd613-527c-5c88-aa56-d4098045a0bd.html https://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/mow/news2010/joos.conv.htm https://www.aol.com/suspect-still-wanted-30-years-090827741.html https://web.archive.org/web/20130323064622/http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20090626/LOCAL/306269980/1002/LOCAL https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/30527442/united-states-v-joos/ https://www.upi.com/Archives/1987/10/01/Coeur-dAlene-bombing-suspects-arraigned/1813560059200 https://buffalonews.com/article_168a62c8-b04b-580e-b169-48333e56a23b.html https://www.nytimes.com/1979/10/11/archives/2-in-nationalist-party-seized-in-plot-to-bomb-an-elementary-school.html https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/13838089/gerhardt-v-lazaroff/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4871827/united-states-v-mahon/ Gumbel, Andrew and Charles, Roger. Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed and Why it Still Matters. William Morrow, 2012 Ronson, Jon. “The Debutante.” Audible Originals, 2023See 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.
He was a Boy Scout leader, a husband, a father.
But he was leading a double life.
He was a monster, hiding in plain sight.
Journey inside the mind of one of history's most notorious killers, BTK. Through the voices of the people who know him best.
Listen to Monster BTK on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline Podcast.
And this January, we're going to go on the road to beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada to cover the Consumer Electronics Show, Tech's Biggest Conference.
Better Offline's CES coverage won't be the usual rundown of the hottest gadgets or biggest trends, but an unvarnished look at what the tech industry plans to sell or do to you in 2025. I'll be joined by David Roth of Defecta and the writer Edward Ongueso Jr., with guest appearances from Behind the Bastards' Robert Evans, It Could Happen Here's Gare Davis, and a few surprise guests throughout the show.
Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts from.
Catch Jon Stewart back in action on The Daily Show and in your ears with The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast.
From his hilarious satirical takes on today's politics and entertainment to the unique voices of correspondents and contributors, it's your perfect companion to stay on top of what's happening now.
Plus, you'll get special content just for podcast listeners, like in-depth interviews and a roundup of the week's top headlines.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Call Zone Media Call Zone Media A little after 6 a.m.
on June 25, 2009, there was a knock at the door.
Dennis Mahon looked outside and saw deputies from the Ogle County Sheriff's Office standing on the stoop of his parents' farmhouse.
But he said he wasn't coming out unless they had a warrant.
A deputy held up the paperwork, copies of arrest warrants and search warrants for the property.
But Dennis still wouldn't open the door.
Dennis Mahon and his twin brother Daniel were nearly 60 years old, and neither man had a criminal record until that day.
Their elderly parents were asleep in their beds upstairs.
But agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms had briefed the deputies that morning before they all set out for the Mahon farm.
Dennis had once told their confidential informant, quote, I'm going to be dying with a gun in my hands.
He was cordial enough at the door, but as the sound of his footsteps receded, the officers saw the blinds go up in an upstairs window.
The officers scattered, fearing the brothers had chosen to open fire instead of opening the door.
But nothing happened.
For half an hour, they tried making contact with the brothers.
But Dennis and Daniel didn't answer the phone.
They were busy making phone calls of their own.
Most of their friends failed to answer the phone so early in the morning.
But Dennis left a voicemail for Becca Stevens.
Or, at least the woman he thought was Becca Stevens.
He would soon find out that his friend Becca was an ATF informant whose real name was Rebecca Williams.
And he would later claim that he'd long suspected that she wasn't who she said she was.
But at dawn on the day of his arrest, he called a woman he'd been in love with for years and told her he was considering going down shooting.
But he didn't.
At 6.45 a.m., a deputy tried Dennis' cell phone again, this time from a number he wouldn't recognize.
He picked up and agreed to surrender.
Officers entered the house and arrested both brothers.
They were just sitting, calmly.
Feet away from a loaded AK-47 lying on the table.
For the next two hours, the brothers sat in a van in their parents' front yard as ATF agents searched the house.
They didn't know it yet, but ATF agents were searching the homes of their longtime friends Tom Metzger in Indiana and Robert Joes in Missouri.
Sitting side by side, hands cuffed in their laps in a minivan, the twins discussed their situation.
Dennis seemed to regret his choice.
Saying they should have had a shootout.
Daniel seemed less ready to die, asking his brother what good it would have done to take out those agents.
They were offered snacks and drinks, and the air conditioning was on.
They took a few bathroom breaks, but mostly they sat and talked to each other as the agents searched the house.
They speculated about what the agents might find in there.
Illegal armor-piercing rounds, pornography.
White supremacist literature, guns, and bomb-making supplies.
They worried about their mother, over whom they'd recently been appointed legal guardians due to her advancing Alzheimer's disease.
And they agreed that they'd stay silent.
When Dennis climbed out of the van to stretch his legs around 9.30, there was a man in a suit standing in his parents' front yard.
He looked the man up and down and said, You know, I think I've seen you before.
And ATF agent Tristan Moreland, the man Dennis had known up until that moment as a neo-Nazi named Jimmy the Wolf, answered, Yes, you have.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
This is the last chapter of Dennis Mahon's life.
It has to be.
It ends with a 74-year-old man who isn't scheduled to get out of federal prison until he's 93. He will almost certainly die there.
And I really didn't intend for this to become a five-part series.
That's too many parts.
Even with the cuts and compromises I've made, there's still so much left to say about the life this man led.
But we can't let this become The Dennis Mahon Show.
There are too many weird little guys whose stories I've promised to tell you for us to spend any more weeks on Dennis.
But one thing we keep discovering together on this show is that no weird little guy is an island.
Their lives intersect and intertwine and overlap.
They share hate group affiliations, they date the same women, they're suspects in the same crimes, they attend the same cross-burnings, and subscribe to each other's racist newsletters.
I found a photo this week of Dennis Mahon's White Berets at a Klan rally in Tennessee in 1993, where the headline speaker was past Weird Little Guy subject, Barry Black.
The influence their hate and violence has on the world...
Can be devastating.
But their worlds are actually pretty small.
And through the lens of Dennis' life, we've traveled through several decades of hate, meeting side characters like the Tulsa Midtown Boot Boys, a neo-Nazi skinhead band in Oklahoma that was linked to years of racist violence.
We followed Dennis to Germany, where he stoked the flames of anti-immigrant violence amidst a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.
We met Carol Howe, the first ATF informant that Dennis fell in love with.
And we followed Carol and Dennis to Elohim City, a white separatist compound with blurry connections to bombings and bank robberies.
A lot of the bit players in Dennis' story will be back, because they have whole stories of their own, too.
Like Daniel Roosh, the bassist for the Midtown Boot Boys.
A few years after we left him in the early 90s, after his stint in prison for racially motivated violence, he illustrated a Nazi comic book that William Luther Pierce wrote for children.
Or Wolfgang Droge, the German-born neo-Nazi Dennis was trying to visit in Canada when he got deported in 1993. A few years before he invited Dennis to Toronto, he was a key player in a harebrained scheme to overthrow the government of Dominica.
That plan failed.
But in a roundabout way, it's why the Nazi message board Stormfront exists.
The website's founder, Don Black, learned how to use a computer during his prison sentence for attempting to coup the government of a Caribbean nation.
So I think maybe you can understand why I've had so much trouble getting myself out of this rabbit hole.
Admittedly, I often find that I am Completely at the mercy of my curiosity.
I have a list of episode topics ten pages long and Dennis wasn't even on it.
Back in November, I was reading a book written by Kelvin Pierce, the son of National Alliance founder William Luther Pierce.
I was just trying to squeeze in a little research where I could for whenever the day comes that I try to tackle that story.
And I got fixated on the question of money.
If you can even remember back nearly two months ago now, this all started with a question of money.
William Luther Pierce almost certainly paid for his West Virginia compound with stolen cash given to him in 1984 by Robert Matthews.
But then I wanted to know, what happened to the other $4 million those Nazis stole out of the back of a Brinks truck?
From there, we got to the $300,000 that ended up in the hands of Tom Metzger, the founder of White Aryan Resistance.
Have you ever read the children's book, If You Give a Moose a Muffin?
I think there's one about a mouse and a cookie, too, but when I was a kid, I was a moose and muffin girl.
Basically, the moose asks for a muffin.
But once he gets the muffin, he realizes he needs jam to go with it, and it's so delicious that when he's done, he wants to go to the store to get more muffin ingredients.
But it's cold outside, so he needs to put on a sweater to go to the store, but when he puts on the sweater, he loses the button and he wants to mend it.
And before you know it, that one little muffin has turned into an afternoon-long ordeal that has nothing at all to do with muffins.
And that's kind of where I am right now.
Except there's no Blackberry jam and there's a lot more hate crimes.
Because while I was digging around into what Tom Metzger's immediate next move was after getting that mountain of cash, it was his 1980s public access TV show.
And that's where I first found Dennis.
When we first encountered him, he was a side character in someone else's story.
He was just one of many men around the country who were trying to air copies of Tom Metzger's show on their own local TV channels.
I made a passing reference to his story ending with a bomb and a prison sentence, but I didn't realize I'd find all of this in between.
I figured it would be a quick one-and-done follow-up on the story of that bomb.
It was a pretty well-publicized case and...
Maybe I wouldn't even have to read any books or spend a lot of money on court documents to get a good story out of it.
I have never been more wrong in my life.
So after nearly two months on this story, let's finally get to the only bomb anybody ever proved Dennis Mahon made.
In 2004, a package bomb exploded in the hands of Don Logan, the director of Scottsdale, Arizona's Office of Diversity and Dialogue.
He and two other city employees were injured.
The Mahon brothers were arrested in 2009 and went to trial in 2012.
The jury found Dennis guilty, but acquitted his twin brother, Daniel.
I'm telling you the ending here at the beginning, because this isn't an episode of Law & Order.
As easy as it would be, To tell you a straightforward story of a trial, which is what I set out to do two months ago, I drove myself to the brink of madness instead.
Because those facts alone, that timeline, raises a really big question.
What took so long?
You might think the answer is, well, investigations take time.
Maybe they didn't know it was him.
But they did.
Almost immediately.
A few months before the bombing, Dennis Mahon was unhappy to see that the city of Scottsdale was celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month.
So he called the Office of Diversity and Dialogue to share his feelings with them.
He called from his own phone, and he introduced himself as Dennis Mahon of the White Aryan Resistance of Arizona.
He left a...
Rambling, racial slur-laden voicemail that ended kind of ominously.
Quote, Anyway, we've got lots of support.
The white Aryan resistance is growing in Scottsdale.
There are a few white people who are standing up.
So Dennis Mahon was on investigators' radar pretty quickly.
And his name was already very familiar to agents from the ATF. They'd had their eye on Dennis for nearly 20 years.
But it still took another year before they began their undercover investigation into the Mahon brothers.
So at this point you might be thinking, okay, they've got their suspect.
They've got an undercover operation.
But they're going to want to get him dead to rights.
And maybe it took a long time for the informant to get him to confess on tape.
Another reasonable assumption.
But you'd be wrong again.
In January of 2005, nearly a year after the bombing, the Mahon brothers were living in a trailer park in Catoosa, Oklahoma.
The ATF arranged for their informant, Rebecca Williams, to move in a few trailers down and try to befriend them.
Within hours of this beautiful blonde new neighbor's arrival on a Wednesday afternoon, the brothers were drinking in her trailer, with ATF agents listening in.
In their very first meeting, Dennis boasted about his long history of bombings.
Mid-drinks, he ran back to his own trailer to get his photo album, because he was eager to show his new friend Rebecca pictures of him in his clan robes.
By the time the weekend rolled around, they were all drunk on Everclear, and the brothers were regaling her with stories of bombings and drive-by shootings.
Daniel, the quieter brother, Explained that when he blew up people's cars, it wasn't out of anger.
It was a sense of duty.
Barely a week into their budding friendship, Rebecca told Dennis a made-up story about a child molester.
She said there was a man she knew who was molesting a young relative of hers, and she wanted to hurt him.
She was thinking of using a mail bomb.
Dennis responded by describing what kind of bomb a person might make in such a scenario.
And the bomb he described was identical to the one that had blown up in Scottsdale.
In a conversation that took place inside her trailer, captured on audio and video recording, live-streamed to agents from the ATF, he said that he had successfully made such a bomb.
And that it blew the fingers off the diversity officer in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Now, he's probably drunk.
He usually is.
And he says things he shouldn't say when he's drunk.
And he backtracks pretty quickly, saying, actually, he didn't build that bomb.
It was the Scottsdale Police Department who did that.
But he'd taught them how to do it.
He would maintain for years that it was, in fact, disgruntled white police officers in Scottsdale who built the bomb.
The ATF did investigate those leads.
Several employees of the Scottsdale Police Department were polygraphed, their phones were tapped, they were investigated and cleared.
But that was the story Dennis stuck with for a long time.
But still, here he is on tape.
Just days into this undercover operation, linking himself to that bomb.
Within weeks, Dennis was taking Rebecca to the gun show to buy the parts he'd need to teach her how to build a bomb.
Over and over and over again, for years, Dennis Mahon makes incriminating statements on tape to a federal informant.
He admits to having machine guns and illegal silencers.
He teaches her how to make a letter bomb that will only injure and not kill its recipient.
They discuss the Scottsdale bomb often.
After she moves to Arizona, he asks her to mail him news clippings about the ongoing investigation.
A year into their friendship, she sent him a news story where Don Logan, the victim of that bombing, was interviewed.
Afterwards, he called her to talk about it, and he's clearly in a rage to see that his victim is still carrying on the work of the diversity office.
He called Logan a, quote, very arrogant bastard who just might get what's coming to him again.
And he said, quote, I just wanted to teach the motherfucker a lesson the first time, and there will be no lesson to learn a second time.
And it was still another three years after that phone call, before cops showed up on his front porch.
What could they possibly have been waiting for?
They had enough evidence to arrest him on a wide variety of federal charges, and they clearly planned to, because they kept pouring resources into the investigation.
But they waited four years.
The answer, though, is pretty simple.
They had enough evidence to arrest Dennis.
But they didn't just want Dennis.
In last week's story, we flirted a little bit with conspiracy theory.
Terrell Howe provided information to the ATF in 1994 that Dennis Mahon was talking about blowing up a federal building.
A few months later, someone else actually did blow up that federal building.
But there was never anything substantial that actually connected Dennis to the Oklahoma City bombing.
There are a lot of unanswered questions, some of which are aggravated by Dennis' own habit of getting drunk and bragging about having been involved.
But as far as the official record goes, The only connection between Dennis Mahon and Timothy McVeigh is that they possibly once met at a gun show.
This week, though, we aren't talking about a conspiracy theory.
We're talking about conspiracy in the legal sense.
In 2012, a federal jury found Dennis Mahon guilty of three things.
Distribution of information about explosives.
malicious damage of a building by means of explosives, and conspiracy to damage buildings and property by means of explosives.
That's a lot of words to say he talked about making a bomb, planned to build a bomb, and set off a bomb.
But the conspiracy charge is what I want to talk about.
A criminal conspiracy is just an agreement between two or more people to do something illegal.
The conspirators discuss an illegal act.
They intend to commit this illegal act, and at least one of them takes some kind of step to carry the plan out.
It's a little bit more complicated than that, but this isn't a criminal law class, so let's not get bogged down.
The thing to understand here is that a conspiracy requires more than one person.
In this case, the government did indict Dennis' twin brother, Daniel, on a single count of conspiracy.
But the jury found him not guilty.
Two people is enough for a conspiracy.
And these were the only two people who got charged in this one.
But the ATF's theory of the case involved a much wider cast of characters.
People all over the country.
Halfway through this investigation, Agent Moreland filed an application for a wiretap.
In it, he reveals who he thinks might be involved.
An heir to a banking fortune who is locked in a legal battle over his family's charitable foundation.
A pair of Nazi brothers who did time in the 80s for a foiled plot to blow up an elementary school in Ohio.
A Christian identity preacher hiding machine guns and precious metals in caves on his compound in the Ozarks.
An infamous white nationalist leader.
And a wealthy farmer from Illinois.
who once got his teeth knocked out by Geraldo Rivera at a Klan rally.
To have a murderer 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 would 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.
He was a Boy Scout leader, a church deacon, a husband, a father.
He went to a local church.
He was going to the grocery store with us.
He was the guy next door.
But he was leading a double life.
He was certainly a peeping Tom, looking through the windows, looking at people, fantasizing about what he could do.
He then began entering the houses.
He could get into their home, take something, and get out and not be caught.
He felt very powerful.
He was a monster, hiding in plain sight.
Someone killed four members of a family.
It just didn't happen here.
Journey inside the mind of one of history's most notorious killers, BTK, through the voices of the people who know him best.
Listen to Monster BTK on the iHeartRadio app.
Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast.
And this January, we're going on the road to beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada to cover the Consumer Electronics Show, Tech's biggest conference.
Better Offline CES coverage won't be the usual rundown of the hottest gadgets or the biggest trends.
But an unvarnished look at what the tech industry plans to sell or do to you in 2025, interrogating their narratives alongside a remarkable cast of industry talent and award-winning journalists.
We'll have daily episodes, on-the-ground interviews, and special panels covering everything from the BS of AI to the ways in which race and gender play into how people are treated in the tech industry and at these conferences.
I'll be joined by David Roth of Defecta and the writer Edward Ongueso Jr., with appearances from Behind the Bastards' Robert Evans, It Could Happen Here's Gare Davis, and a few surprise guests throughout the show.
Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts from.
And check out betteroffline.com.
Jon Stewart is back at The Daily Show, and he's bringing his signature wit and insight straight to your ears with The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast.
Dive into Jon's unique take on the biggest topics in politics, entertainment, sports, and more.
Joined by the sharp voices of the show's correspondents and contributors.
And with extended interviews and exclusive weekly headline roundups, this podcast gives you content you won't find anywhere else.
Ready to laugh and stay informed?
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We should start with the bomb.
We should start with the bomb.
At the end of last week's episode, Dennis was at Arian Fest in Phoenix, Arizona.
It was the end of January 2004. Dennis was 53 years old and claimed to be retired from the movement.
He spent the weekend listening to white power bands and speeches from movement leaders like his friend Tom Metzger, Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler, and Billy Roper.
And he got really, really drunk.
A reporter from the Phoenix New Times Overheard him bragging to some young neo-Nazis about having been involved with Timothy McVeigh.
When the article came out a few weeks later, Dennis left the reporter several very drunk voicemails, trying to explain to her that he had actually been cleared in the investigation into the Oklahoma City bombing, and he wanted her make that clear in the article.
Tom Metzger, whose speech at Arian Fest included what you...
Might interpret as incitement to carry out bombings, also responded to the article, emailing the reporter, quote, Amusing article.
If only you knew.
But you will.
Years later, a man named Alan was arrested for defrauding buyers on eBay.
Alan wasn't at Aryan Fest.
He's not involved in any of this.
I think he's just a normal guy who did a pretty staggering amount of wire fraud.
But in 2009, he was being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago.
Dennis Mahon was there, too.
He'd just been arrested, and he was awaiting extradition to Arizona to be tried for the bombing.
And for a week in July 2009, Dennis and Alan shared a cell.
During their time together, Alan asked Dennis what he was in for, and Dennis refused to say.
This prompted Alan to speculate that if he won't say, it must be pedophilia.
And that apparently made Dennis angry enough to tell the truth.
He said he was in for making bombs.
Specifically, that he was the Scottsdale bomber.
I think it's fair to say that you always have to take the story of a jailhouse informant With a grain of salt.
Allen was definitely hoping to exchange this information for some consideration in his own case, and ultimately he did.
But from the time he claims he had these conversations with Dennis, until he was interviewed by federal agents about it, he was in seg.
He wasn't involved in the movement.
He had no connection to Scottsdale, Arizona.
I can't promise you that everything he said is true.
But I do think it's very safe to say that everything he told those agents really was something Dennis told him.
Because there's just no other way he could have produced any of these details.
Some of the things Dennis told Alan are not true.
But they are consistent with the kinds of lies Dennis is known to tell.
He boasted about his friendship with Timothy McVeigh and even hinted that he had been one of the John Does that witnesses saw with McVeigh on the morning of the bombing.
He claimed to have opened fire on civilians during the Miami riots in 1980. And we've talked about both of those claims in previous episodes.
These are lies that have come up before, and I don't think either of those things are true.
But they are things that Dennis sometimes wants you to think are true.
He also told Alan that he'd been on the phone with Tom Metzger on the morning he was arrested, and that it had been Tom Metzger who convinced him to surrender, telling him he didn't need to go down shooting, that he'd get him out of this.
And that may be true.
Metzger certainly would not have wanted to end up charged in connection with the deaths of a bunch of federal agents.
The other revelations from Alan are...
intriguing.
By his account, Dennis decided to build that bomb in February of 2004 because he'd recently met a man that he wanted to impress.
Alan couldn't remember anyone's names, but he says shortly before the bombing, Dennis met a man from Europe who had recently been released from a prison in the UK for blowing up a building.
It struck me as completely extraneous at first, but this next detail is the most important one.
He mentions that the man was Protestant.
This is all very vague.
This sounds like it could be nothing.
But hear me out, because I'm going to do a little wild speculation based in half a day of wasted research.
Let's go back to Arianfest 2004 for a second.
It takes a lot of work to pull off a Nazi picnic, so there were several groups involved in planning the event.
It was organized mainly by a group called Volksfront, but that's not important right now.
A lot of the on-the-ground logistics, camping, food, communication, were handled by women.
Obviously.
Specifically, it was a group called Women for Aryan Unity.
The group's newsletter indicates that they had active chapters in several U.S. cities and in Dublin.
But I didn't need their newsletter to tell me that the Women for Aryan Unity probably know some Ulster loyalists.
Victoria Cahill was living in Colorado by the time she was responsible for the Women for Aryan Unity's newsletter.
But she is from Dublin.
She's also the niece of an infamous Irish crime boss named Martin Cahill.
When Martin Cahill was murdered in 1994, The IRA issued a press release claiming responsibility.
It was believed that Cahill's criminal organization had been trafficking guns for the Ulster Volunteer Force, specifically for the unit that had recently murdered an IRA member who prevented a Loyalist bombing attack at a Dublin pub.
So, no, it's not hard to believe someone at Aryan Fest would invite an Ulsterman to the party.
In the few digital scraps remaining of the...
Defunct online message boards set up for Arian Fest 2004 attendees, several organizers from Women for Arian Unity make reference to their Irish guests.
But I haven't been able to put any names to it.
There are, honestly, quite a few possibilities here.
Because after the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998, over 400 prisoners from both sides of the Troubles were released early from prison.
And the last batch of those releases took place in 2000. And Alan told the agents from the ATF that Dennis built that bomb because he wanted to impress a Protestant from the UK who went to prison for blowing up a building.
And that would be a very strange thing for a man who didn't know any of that to pull out of thin air.
He also claimed Dennis told him after the bombing...
Tom Metzger had arranged for the brothers to stay with a man named Harrington in Tulsa.
This one took me a minute to sort out, because the ATF report spells Harrington with an A, not an E. But I believe this has to be Clifford Harrington, the founder and former chairman of the National Socialist Movement.
He had stepped down as chairman a few years earlier and was living in Tulsa at the time.
Alan's memory is fuzzy here.
But he said something about how maybe this Harrington fellow also needed Dennis' help because of his own trouble with the law.
And that doesn't make much sense.
How can two men hide each other from the law?
But I think I can explain this.
I think Alan is blending together two different, similar stories.
Because there are rumors in the weirder corners of the white nationalist world that Cliff Harrington crashed at Dennis' house for a while in the mid-90s after he got caught with an underage girl in Minnesota.
So maybe Harrington was just repaying the favor 10 years later by letting Dennis stay at his house after the bombing.
Harrington's wife, Andrea, has denied any of this ever happened, but...
She was also a priestess with the Nazi cult Joy of Satan Ministries, and she spent many years denying a lot of allegations after it came out that the Nazi's wife was running a satanic cult out of the same P.O. box he used for national socialist movement business.
She died in 2020 after falling and hitting her head, so we can't ask her about any of that.
During that week in 2009 that Dennis and Alan shared a cell, Dennis talked a lot.
He talked a lot about a lot of people he knew and a lot of things that he'd done.
He talked about his friend Steve Waddell, a man who'd lived down the street from the Mahon brothers in Tulsa in the 90s.
And he told Alan that he was worried his friend John McLaughlin might be a federal informant.
He talked a lot about Tom Metzger.
He was so sure.
That Metzger was already hard at work organizing a big, expensive legal defense team for him.
After all, he'd promised on the morning of the arrest, we'll get you out of this.
But that never happened.
Like I said, maybe nothing Dennis told Allen in that jail cell in Chicago five years after the bombing means anything at all.
But whether he felt moved to impress an aging monarchist from Ireland or not, It was just two weeks after Arian Fest 2004 that he really recommitted himself to violence.
On February 13, 2004, Dennis Mahon wrote out his last will and testament.
He planned to leave $5,000 to Tom Metzger, and everything else would go to his twin brother Daniel.
The document was signed by Daniel as his witness, and it reads in part, I request to be buried next to Robert J. Matthews' ashes on his widow Matthews' property in Medline Falls, Washington.
I have fought the evil, greedy, race-and-culture-destroying politicians, the corporate leaders, the bankers, and the powerful Jews since I was 28 years old after studying the real history of our race.
At the bottom, he signs off by writing, quote, in memory of Robert Matthews and Tim McVeigh, just above his own signature.
He sent the document to his father in Illinois by certified mail.
Postal service records indicate he mailed it on February 21st, the same day the bomb was discovered.
Now, I've never built a bomb.
Obviously.
I don't even know how to change a car battery.
I certainly wouldn't trust myself with a soldering iron and black powder.
But I've read enough about bombers to know that it's not uncommon for a bomber to blow himself up by accident.
So, maybe if I were tinkering with a bomb, I would get my will sorted out beforehand, just in case.
But that's not actually the timeline we have here.
He wasn't concerned he would die trying to make the bomb.
He assumed the cops would link him to the bomb immediately after the explosion.
And he was getting his affairs in order because he planned to die in a shootout with the ATF in the very near future.
He even asked to be laid to rest alongside Robert Matthews, the Nazi who died in a shootout with the FBI in 1984. On February 21st, he mails his will.
And he made a lot of phone calls.
No one can say for certain exactly how the bomb ended up in the Scottsdale Public Library.
But the most logical answer is that Dennis put it there himself.
He'd said several times over the years to both informants and reporters that it was his practice to hand-deliver his package bombs in disguise.
The package was located at about 10.30 a.m.
And Dennis' phone records show that he was on the phone most of that day, starting at 6 a.m.
But he didn't make any calls between 9.30 a.m.
and 11.30 a.m.
Which is the perfect window of time for him to make the 30-minute round-trip drive to Scottsdale Civic Center and leave the package on the desk in the library where it was found.
And who did Dennis Mahon call on the morning he planted that bomb?
Quite a few people, as it turns out.
To have a murderer 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 would 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 iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
He was a Boy Scout leader, a church deacon, a husband, a father.
He went to a local church.
He was going to the grocery store with us.
He was the guy next door.
But he was leading a double life.
He was certainly a peeping Tom.
Looking through the windows, looking at people, fantasizing about what he could do.
He then began entering the houses.
He could get into their home, take something, and get out and not be caught.
He felt very powerful.
He was a monster, hiding in plain sight.
Someone killed four members of a family.
It just didn't happen here.
Journey inside the mind of one of history's most notorious killers.
B-T-K. Through the voices of the people who know him best.
Listen to Monster B-T-K on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and this January, we're going on the road to beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada, to cover the Consumer Electronics Show, Tech's biggest conference.
Better Offline's CES coverage won't be the usual rundown of the hottest gadgets or the biggest trends, but an unvarnished look at what the tech industry plans to sell or do to you in 2025, interrogating their narratives alongside a remarkable cast of industry talent and award-winning journalists.
We'll have daily episodes, on-the-ground interviews, and special panels covering everything from the BS of AI to the ways in which race and gender play into how people are treated in the tech industry and at these conferences.
I'll be joined by David Roth of Defecta and the writer Edward Ongueso Jr., with appearances from Behind the Bastards' Robert Evans, It Could Happen Here's Gare Davis, and a few surprise guests throughout the show.
Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts from.
And check out betteroffline.com.
Jon Stewart is back at The Daily Show, and he's bringing his signature wit and insight straight to your ears with The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast.
Dive into Jon's unique take on the biggest topics in politics, entertainment, sports, and more.
Joined by the sharp voices of the show's correspondents and contributors.
And with extended interviews and exclusive weekly headline roundups, this podcast gives you content you won't find anywhere else.
Ready to laugh and stay informed?
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The day the bomb was planted, Dennis Mahon got up early.
He placed his first call of the day at 6 a.m. to Robert Joes.
Joes is a curious character, and we may have to revisit him.
He still lives on his 300-acre compound in Missouri.
Over the course of the investigation into the bombing, Dennis told the ATF informant, Rebecca, a lot about his friend Robert Joes.
They'd known each other for quite a long time.
When Joes went to prison in the mid-90s, the Mahon brothers maintained his property for him.
He's a bit of a sovereign citizen type.
In the late 80s, he was charged with interfering with the courts because he wouldn't stop filing nonsense motions in cases he wasn't involved in.
But the cops couldn't manage to get their hands on him.
In 1994, he was finally detained by a state trooper during a traffic stop and held on that old warrant.
Shortly after his arrest, a man who'd been living on Joseph's compound took revenge on that trooper, shooting him in the chest while he was sitting at his own kitchen table.
The trooper survived, but the shooter, a man named Timothy Coombs, remains on Missouri's most wanted list to this day.
As a convicted felon, Robert Joes is not supposed to have any guns at all.
But according to Dennis, the caves that dot the landscape of his compound are full of stockpiled weapons.
Those caves, he told Rebecca, were where he and his brother would go if they really started to feel any heat from the feds.
During the investigation into the Scottsdale bombing, the informant visited Joes on his Missouri compound three times, twice in the company of an undercover agent.
With the Mahon brothers vouching for Rebecca and Rebecca vouching for her friend, Jimmy the Wolf, Joes welcomed the informant and the agent onto his property.
They discussed bomb-making and purchasing illegal weapons.
Over the course of those three visits, Joe's got very comfortable discussing bomb-making and illegal guns with his new friends.
Agent Moreland, posing as Jimmy the Wolf, had a fairly explicit conversation with Joe's about the fact that he understood that he was not legally allowed to own any guns and that he did, in fact, own guns.
Guns that were in the room with them as they had this conversation.
And while the ATF was never able to scrape together enough proof to charge Joe's as a co-conspirator in the bombing, he was arrested the same day as the Mahon twins and charged with being a felon in possession of guns and explosives, both of which were found in abundance on his property.
In his own criminal case, he tried to downplay his connection to the Mahons, claiming that he had no real knowledge at all of what the brothers were into.
Admitted into evidence in his case, though, was a videotape the ATF found at Tom Metzger's house.
In 1993, Dennis Mahon conducted paramilitary training drills for members of White Aryan Resistance on Jose's property.
By the time the twins went to trial in 2012, Jose was already two years into his seven-year sentence.
I'm not sure what I thought I would learn by paying $30 to read the transcripts from his trial.
I didn't get much of substance out of it.
But I couldn't live with myself if I didn't tell you that he tried to attend his own trial in his underwear.
He claimed that his religious beliefs require him to wear clothing that complies only with God's law, which means that he can only wear clothing that has fringe down the sides and a violet ribbon around the border.
Now, me personally?
I'd rather show up in court in my underwear than unpack the strange appropriation of misinterpreted Jewish law by the world's weirdest anti-Semites.
In the end, the jail wouldn't let him go to court in his underpants, so he showed up to the first day of his trial in his jail uniform.
Apparently by the second day, someone had provided him with satisfactorily fringed garments, but there aren't any pictures.
He was released from prison in 2015 and seems to have stayed out of any criminal trouble since then.
But it looks like he's being sued by his 94-year-old mother over the title to that land.
Robert Joes wasn't called to testify in the Mahons trial, and I don't know if he's had a chance to read any of those documents since he got out of prison in 2015. He may have no idea that before his arrest in 2009, Dennis had started to talk pretty seriously about putting a bullet in Robert Joes and taking the $30,000 worth of silver he believed was hidden in the caves.
Back to the morning the bomb was planted in 2004, after he got off the phone with Joes, Dennis spoke briefly with his brother, who was finishing an overnight shift at the Phoenix airport.
And then he made his second phone call of the morning, and he called Charles Kuntz.
Koontz is an interesting element in this story because outside of this relationship, I can't find anything that connects him to the white power movement.
No arrests, no group affiliations, no racist letters to the editor of his local paper.
Aside from the filings in this case, the only other place his name really exists...
is in the extensive litigation regarding his seat on the board of the Gilbert and Martha Hitchcock Foundation, a charitable foundation in Nebraska that was run for decades by his father, Denman Kuntz Jr., the great-grandson of the founder of the First National Bank of Omaha.
But it seems Charles Kuntz had been a quiet but enthusiastic supporter of white supremacist terror for many years.
He sent the Mahon brothers money, he visited them occasionally, he called often, and he once gave them a car.
By the time Dennis' conversations were being recorded by a federal informant, though, the money they'd been enjoying for years seemed to be drying up a little.
After his father's death in 2005, Kuntz lost his seat on the board of the Hitchcock Foundation.
Factions formed within the family, and they all spent years suing each other, which probably took up a lot of his time and money.
Over the years, between 2005 and 2009, Dennis would often tell Rebecca that he was concerned Kuntz may be an informant, which is a little funny because we only know he said that because he was sharing those fears with the actual informant.
After Koontz visited Dennis one day in 2005, he called Rebecca to complain that Koontz wouldn't stop asking if they could shoot some of Dennis' guns together.
And it was very suspicious how insistent he was that he wanted to try shooting with a silencer, something that would be a federal crime for Dennis to own.
Later that year, he told Rebecca that Koontz had been asking him a lot of questions.
About various bombings he'd carried out in the past.
He was trying to get specific details about which abortion clinic it was that he bombed in the 80s.
And he really wanted to talk about Scottsdale.
And honestly?
That sounds like snitch behavior.
That's exactly the kind of conversation an informant might try to have with you.
But the ATF put his name in their wiretap affidavit as a suspect, so...
I don't think he was their informant.
I guess we have to leave open the possibility that he was informing for another agency?
Or maybe he was just planning to do some freelance snitching down the line?
More likely, though, I think he just liked living vicariously through the domestic terrorists he'd been funding for years.
He sent them money, and in return, he got to feel like he was part of something exciting.
By 2007, he was only sending the brothers a few hundred dollars every couple of months.
Around the same time that he started talking about killing Robert Joes and stealing his guns in silver, Dennis was complaining to Rebecca that Koontz had millions in the bank, and he was holding out on him.
He said he was thinking about asking Koontz for $100,000 so he could do something big.
And if Koontz refused...
Maybe he'd take him out to Joseph's compound and, quote, cut his balls off with a dull knife.
Koontz was never called to testify in the trial, and as far as I can tell, he's never spoken publicly about any of this.
I couldn't even find in the documentation for the case any transcripts of intercepted calls between Dennis and Koontz.
They may be there, there are thousands of documents, but I didn't see them.
So most of what I know about their relationship comes from transcripts of calls where Dennis gets off the phone with Kuntz and then calls Rebecca and describes it to her.
But based on the information I do have, it seems like in the months before Dennis was finally arrested, his longtime benefactor really did have his best interests at heart.
He was incredibly suspicious of Rebecca.
For the most part, Dennis believed Rebecca when she said she'd moved out to Arizona and gotten involved in border militia-type activity.
The ATF staged a whole photo shoot out in the deserts, with agents dressed up as right-wing extremists posing with guns and Nazi flags.
She mailed Dennis a photo from that outing.
She's sort of leaning up against a blue pickup truck, and the edge of a Nazi flag is visible behind her.
She's wearing a camo-print bucket hat and a white bikini top.
And then there, nestled between her breasts, there's a hand grenade.
And Dennis apparently really, really enjoyed these pictures, and that may be why he chose to believe her.
But Koontz just wasn't buying it.
Just two months before the ATF showed up to arrest Dennis, Koontz called him to say that he'd been searching for any news stories in Arizona.
About the kinds of things Rebecca claimed she'd been doing for the movement.
Right?
She'd been telling Dennis about various actions she and her cell were carrying out.
And Koons was looking to see if there was any news about any of this.
And he couldn't find anything.
And Dennis was irate at this implication.
He told Koons that Rebecca had done more for the movement than Koons ever had.
And then he reminded Kunz that Dennis was someone who knew what he was talking about, shouting, you don't know how many pipe bombs I lit off.
You don't know how many transformers I've destroyed and put people out of power in the early 80s, from 82 to 87, before I got outed.
And again, here's Dennis making some oddly specific claims about things he'd done in the past.
Last week, I tried and failed to find any news stories about a 500-pound ammonium nitrate bomb blowing up a truck in Michigan in the 80s.
Which is a very specific claim that he made to Carol Howe.
And here he is now, talking about carrying out a grid attack in the 80s.
I wish he'd be a little more specific about what region and maybe exactly which year, because I feel like I could solve this if he just gave me a few more clues.
One possibility...
Is, in 1981, three power substations in Martin and St. Lucie counties were attacked in the same night, using a combination of rifle fire and explosives.
The method that Dennis would later drunkenly describe to Rebecca.
The attacks caused about a million dollars worth of damage, but the lights actually only went out for about an hour.
I couldn't find any follow-up stories about the incident.
Being solved, and Dennis did live in South Florida at the time, so I don't know.
In another conversation with Rebecca, he's starting to get very paranoid that his past might catch up with him, and he's sure that the feds are closing in.
Quote, For something that happened in 1986. 1985. Quite a few things happened in those two years around the country.
A lot of bombs went off.
End quote.
Yeah, I don't know about that one.
I mean, some bombs definitely did go off in 85 and 86. In 1986, there was a series of bombings in Idaho carried out by members of the Aryan Nations, but there were arrests made in those cases.
1986 is also the year I found for an unsolved pipe bomb at a Jewish community center in West Bloomfield, Michigan.
A bomb at a Detroit abortion clinic and an arson at a Planned Parenthood in Kalamazoo.
I don't think any of those were ever solved, but again, it's hard to say.
So if you know a retired ATF agent with loose lips, for the love of God, ask them to just give me a hint.
Just give me a hint.
Because I lost days.
Trying to figure out every unsolved bombing in the span of 15 years.
And I just can't figure out which bombs Dennis is trying to take credit for in that angry phone call with his secret benefactor.
But, back to Dennis' phone calls on the morning he planted this bomb.
So far, he's called Robert Joes, his brother, and Charles Kuntz.
He talks to his brother again briefly.
And then he received a call from someone using a calling card with an Atlanta area code.
The call lasted less than a minute.
He may not have even picked up.
But the same number called again two more times, five days later, just a few hours after the bomb actually went off.
And both of those calls also lasted just a few seconds.
I can't explain that, and there's nothing offered in the record.
He missed two more calls from his brother while he was on the phone for his longest call that morning.
He spent half an hour on the phone with Edward Gerhardt.
And this was another surprise.
I didn't expect to see them here.
Edward and his brother John started a short-lived Nazi group called the American White Nationalist Party in 1972. In 1974, they were sentenced to a short stay at the state reformatory for shooting out the windows of a state education official and then calling to let him know that it had only been a warning from the Klan.
A 1976 issue of the Ohio National Socialist includes a brief mention that Ohio leaders of the National Socialist Movement had met with Ed and John Gerhardt of the American White Nationalist Party to discuss how their Nazi groups might present a unified front against forced busing in Columbus.
One of the representatives at that meeting was a young James Mason, just a few years before he would start writing the essays that would eventually become Siege, every Nazi terrorist's favorite book.
And as for that united front against desegregation in Ohio, the Gerhardt brothers would spend a few years in federal prison.
After they were arrested in 1979 for plotting to blow up Old Orchard Elementary School in Columbus.
The 11-year-old daughter of the federal judge who'd ordered Columbus schools to begin busing was a student there.
John Gerhart would go on to get arrested again in 1992 for abduction.
During the decade he spent in an Ohio prison, he sued the state prison system for infringing on his free exercise of religion.
The religion in question was the Church of Jesus Christ Christian, which sounds like it might be normal Christianity, but it's not.
It is the particular flavor of Christian identity that was popularized by Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler.
I can't find much about what Edward Gerhardt got up to after he got out of prison in 1983. He doesn't seem to exist anywhere that I could find.
Although, admittedly, I ran out of time to look.
But based on my cursory search, if I didn't know that he'd been on the phone with a bomber on the morning of a bombing in 2004, I might have assumed that he just didn't think about bombs at all anymore.
But given that I do know that he was on the phone with Dennis the morning of the bombing, I gotta say I don't think they were talking about the weather.
And just before Dennis Mahon's phone goes quiet for that two-hour window, which is probably when he dropped off the bomb, he made one last phone call.
He called Tom Metzger, and they spoke for seven minutes.
Dennis must have been very confused later that day.
He didn't see anything in the news about a bomb.
He planted that bomb.
On February 21st.
Then he went home, and he waited.
What he didn't know is that he'd delivered it to the wrong address.
It's not entirely clear how this mistake happened, but he wrote down on the box the address of the library, not the address of the diversity office.
And so when the time came to deliver it, he took the box to the address.
Written on the box.
It took another five days before that package found its way into Don Logan's hands, detonating around 1pm on February 26th.
And when the explosion finally hit the national news that evening, Charles Kuntz started blowing up Dennis' phone.
He called him several times that evening, right around the time it would have hit the 5 o'clock news.
But it doesn't look like Dennis ever picked up.
He was too busy calling Tom Metzger repeatedly and having his calls ignored.
A lot of the documents related to this wiretap are kind of a riddle to me.
They raise a lot more questions than they answer.
When Agent Moreland applied for those wiretaps, he was exploring a theory of this case that included this large cast of co-conspirators.
But by the time the case got to trial, That wasn't the theory anymore.
That wasn't what was pursued by the prosecutor.
And so almost none of those names ever come up in any other documents related to the case.
And no evidence was presented at trial to explain these flurries of telephone activity on dates that were significant in the bombing case.
The day the bomb was planted.
The day the bomb went off.
The day the sheriff showed up with a warrant for his DNA. DNA ended up being useless in this case.
Dennis was careful.
He always wore gloves, and he taught Rebecca not to lick stamps.
But a year before the arrests, a warrant was served to swab both brothers for DNA samples.
And after that sample was taken, Dennis called Tom Metzger.
And on a line he surely did not know was tapped, he said over and over again, I'll never betray you, Tom.
I'll never betray you.
I'll never implicate you.
And he doesn't say, for what?
And Tom Metzger doesn't ask.
He doesn't ask Dennis what he means.
He doesn't say, implicate me in what?
He responds, I know you won't.
Some of the calls to Joes and Metzger were allowed into evidence at trial.
But Charles Kunz and Edward Gerhardt, We're nowhere to be found.
The wiretap documentation lists even more names we never really see again.
Dennis received several calls the week of the bombing from Tina Higgins, the founder of a hate group called Central New York White Pride.
Agent Moreland lists the brother's old neighbor, Steve Waddell, as a target of the investigation, along with another name I can't quite place, Stephen Sawyer.
When Agent Moreland spoke to Daniel Mahon on the morning of the arrest, he told him that agents were at Tom Metzger's house at that very moment, and he warned Daniel that even more of his friends would be getting the same treatment in the near future.
A transcription of his body camera during this encounter shows Moreland telling Daniel that he's just trying to be straight with him, telling him, Mr. Kuntz, the Gerhart brothers, Tina Higgins, all of them, all this stuff's going on all over the country right now.
McLaughlin down in Springfield?
Sawyer?
Waddell?
It goes on and on.
Daniel laughs and says they'll have to get Sawyer to sober up if they want to get anything out of him.
As far as I can tell, none of those other people got raided that day.
If they did, they never said anything.
John McLaughlin.
A man who was exchanging calls with Dennis on a weekly basis for years during the course of this investigation was never mentioned in connection with the case outside of these wiretap documents.
Maybe Dennis was on to something when he told his cellmate that McLaughlin may have been an informant.
He died in 2017, so we can't ask him if there's a better explanation for this.
But in 1995, the ATF recovered...
A cache of illegal weapons that he'd been stockpiling for the race war.
But he wasn't charged federally.
The ATF let the state of Illinois handle the case, and a county judge gave him community service.
Maybe there's an explanation, but I don't have it.
In 1992, McLaughlin and Geraldo Rivera were both arrested after they got into a fistfight at a Klan rally in Janesville, Wisconsin.
Rivera says the man got on his face and called him a racial slur.
The charges against Rivera were eventually dropped.
Witnesses say the bloody teeth left on the pavement after three cops pulled the reporter off the Klansman belonged to McLaughlin.
A local TV news reporter interviewed a bystander for his perspective on the brawl.
He doesn't give his name, but he's wearing a bright yellow ball cap with a white Aryan resistance logo on it.
And at this point, I'd know that voice anywhere.
It's Dennis.
The most maddening detail in the application for the wiretap is a...
Passing mentioned that this isn't the first time the ATF has wiretapped Dennis Mahon.
They'd done it once before, back in 1990. He'd been suspected of involvement in a series of mail bombs in 1989. One of those bombs killed federal judge Robert Vance in Alabama.
Another killed Robert Robinson, a black civil rights attorney in Georgia.
Bombs mailed to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta and the NAACP office in Jacksonville did not go off.
And early in that investigation, a wiretap recorded Dennis boasting about having made package bombs.
And he describes with great pride the care he took in disguising them well and using inconspicuous mailing labels to avoid suspicion.
But he never said anything specific enough.
About the targets.
And he wasn't charged.
A man named Walter Moody was eventually convicted of those bombings.
Moody had been to prison once before for making a package bomb.
In 1972, he constructed a pipe bomb that he planned to mail to the car dealership that had repossessed his car.
But before he could get it into the mail, his wife saw a box on the kitchen counter and opened it.
She was badly injured, and he was sentenced to five years.
And so, it looks like the theory of these later bombings, the one that killed the federal judge, was that Moody wanted revenge on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals because they'd refused to reverse his conviction in that 1972 bombing.
The idea is that he actually only wanted to kill Judge Vance, and the other three bombings were an elaborate ruse to make the bombing look racially motivated.
It sounds a little far-fetched, but stranger things have happened, and bombers aren't always the most rational kinds of guys.
It borders on beyond belief that Dennis Mahon had no criminal record.
Until he was arrested in 2009. He'd been investigated in connection with the assassination of a federal judge and the deadliest act of domestic terror in American history.
He was cleared in both investigations, but how many times can you be a suspect in something so serious if there's nothing going on there?
He was banned from Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany.
He was designated as a terrorist by Interpol.
He boasted to reporters about being a serial bomber.
And for decades, he published his Nazi propaganda and drank himself to sleep.
In the end, I think the ATF wanted Tom Metzger.
They kept tabs on Dennis for years in the hopes that they'd turn up something concrete that would lead them to Metzger.
But they never did.
It's impossible to know why they finally made the arrest when they did.
Most federal crimes have a statute of limitations of five years.
But these explosive-related offenses he was charged with are actually an exception to that, so they still had more than four years left on a ten-year clock.
And it couldn't have been because they'd given up on getting Metzger, because they did try.
His house was raided too, but they failed to get enough evidence to charge him.
I think it's because Dennis' mom was dying.
That sounds terrible, but I don't mean they were trying to exploit his grief or something like that.
Because just a few months before his arrest, Dennis was very drunk, as he often was.
He and his brother had just been to court to get legal guardianship over their mother.
She was dying, and caring for a loved one dying of Alzheimer's disease is a terrible thing to bear.
And so he's very drunk, and he calls Rebecca, and he leaves her a voicemail.
It's a rambling, slurred several minutes.
But he explains that he's busy taking care of his mother right now.
And it won't be long.
He fully expects that she'll pass pretty soon.
And he says when she's gone, quote, I'll go back to my radical, bomb-throwing, sniper-shooting realm.
But until Mom passes away, I really can't do much.
But when she does, look out, Zob.
Look out.
Because I've got nothing to lose, motherfuckers.
I will shut the country down on electrical power.
Yeah, I know how to do it.
I got the weaponry.
I got the high-powered rifles to shoot down the high-tower power accelerators.
And he continues from there, and the middle portion is largely unintelligible.
There are portions of the transcript that are just marked unintelligible.
But he picks back up by saying, Take care.
Remember.
Learn.
Learn.
Get high-power weaponry to take out the high-power towers.
Take out electrical power.
Understand that.
There's explosives.
High-powered rifles.
Shoot the insulators.
We need to do this.
When the time comes, the time is coming this way close.
Take care, darling.
Remember, the electrical power grid is the Achilles' heel of America.
Dennis' mother would end up hanging on for another three years, passing away just a few weeks after Dennis was sentenced in 2012. But in March of 2009, it looked like she was on her way out.
And Dennis was getting ready for the race war.
And maybe, just maybe, this time, when an ATF informant brought them credible information that Dennis Mahon was talking about blowing something up, they acted on it.
Dennis Mahon is serving a 40-year sentence at Terre Haute.
He occasionally writes in letters to the editor at the Barnes Review.
A quarterly Holocaust denial magazine founded by Willis Cardo.
It seems fitting that his story ends in the back pages of the Barnes Review.
One of the earliest mentions I ever found of Dennis in white supremacist movement literature was in a 1981 issue of another of Cardo's publications, a newspaper called The Spotlight.
Dennis and Daniel Mahon were featured in an article for their heroic efforts distributing copies of the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory newspaper in Florida.
From prison, he sometimes writes in to boast about all the famous Nazis he once knew.
He wrote in to tell his fellow readers that he used to know Art Jones.
He knew Robert Miles.
He knew Richard Butler.
He once claimed that he'd met American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell, but I don't think that's true.
He was only 17 when Rockwell was shot by one of his own followers.
As far as the official record is concerned, Dennis Mahon alone was responsible for the package bomb that exploded in the Scottsdale Office of Diversity and Dialogue on February 26, 2004. His brother was acquitted.
No one else was ever charged in connection with the plot.
Dennis and Dennis alone is guilty of that bombing.
But there are no lone wolves.
Not really.
Not really.
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.
Don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.
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.
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.
He was a Boy Scout leader, a husband, a father.
But he was leading a double life.
He was a monster, hiding in plain sight.
Journey inside the mind of one of history's most notorious killers, BTK, through the voices of the people who know him best.
Listen to Monster BTK on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast.
And this January, we're going to go on the road to beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada, to cover the Consumer Electronics Show, Tech's Biggest Conference.
Better Offline's CES coverage won't be the usual rundown of the hottest gadgets or biggest trends, but an unvarnished look at what the tech industry plans to sell or do to you in 2025. I'll be joined by David Roth of Defecta and the writer Edward Ongueso Jr., with guest appearances from Behind the Bastards' Robert Evans, It Could Happen Here's Gare Davis, and a few surprise guests throughout the show.
Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts from.
Jon Stewart is back at The Daily Show, and he's bringing his signature wit and insight straight to your ears with The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast.
Dive into Jon's unique take on the biggest topics in politics, entertainment, sports, and more.
Joined by the sharp voices of the show's correspondents and contributors.
And with extended interviews and exclusive weekly headline roundups, this podcast gives you content you won't find anywhere else.
