In 2017, police investigating a double homicide found more than just bodies in a Tampa condo. The founder of a neonazi group was making bombs in the garage. Sources: https://ctc.westpoint.edu/the-threat-is-the-network-the-multi-node-structure-of-neo-fascist-accelerationism/ https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/visions-chaos-weighing-violent-legacy-iron-march/ https://ironmarch.noblogs.org/post/2019/11/15/meet-lauren-paul-mit-alumni-and-neo-nazi-atomwaffen-division-propagandist/ https://www.bu.edu/articles/2016/police-release-video-of-suspect-in-hate-poster-distribution/ https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2019/12/19/transnational-white-terror-exposing-atomwaffen-and-the-iron-march-networks/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/all-american-nazis-628023/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime.
On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell and the DNA holds the truth.
He never thought he was going to get caught and I just looked at my computer screen and was just like, ah, gotcha.
This technology's already solving so many cases.
Listen to America's Crime Lab on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The Girlfriends is back with a new season and this time I'm telling you the story of Kelly Harnett.
Kelly spent over a decade in prison for a murder she says she didn't commit.
As she fought for her freedom, she taught herself the law.
She goes, Oh God, Harnett, Jailhouse Lawyer.
and became a beacon of hope for the women locked up alongside her.
You're supposed to have your faith in God, but I had nothing but faith in her.
I think I was put here to save souls by getting people out of prison.
The Girlfriends, Jailhouse Lawyer.
Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Liz went from being interested in true crime to living in true crime.
My husband said, your dad's been killed.
This is Hands Tied, a true crime podcast exploring the murder of Jim Melgar.
I was just completely in shock.
Liz's father murdered, and her mother found locked in a closet, her hands and feet bound.
It didn't feel real at all.
More than a decade on, she's still searching for answers.
We're still fighting.
Listen to Hands Tied on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's stuff they don't want you to know.
Every Monday we break down the news, make connections, and reveal the stuff they don't want you to know.
A secret deal between members of Mexican cartels and the United States government.
Residents are reporting sightings of exploding birds.
Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows.
wall zone media It was a little after 5.30 p.m. on a Friday evening when the first 911 call came in.
The property manager at a gated condo complex in Tampa sounded almost like she was asking a question when she told the operator that a man had walked into the leasing office and announced that he'd just killed two people.
What a strange thing to say to a lobby full of maintenance technicians and a woman who was just trying to check her mail.
Maybe it didn't quite sink in right away.
that he meant it.
He left the office and started walking.
As she dialed 911, she followed him, telling the operator that he kept grabbing the back of his pants as he walked, as if there was something heavy tucked into his waistband.
The police were already in route when the second call came.
The woman on the other end of the line this time was calling from a smoke shop in a strip mall across from the apartment complex.
She was crying hysterically, barely able to get the words out.
There was a man in the store pointing a gun at her.
When the police arrived, Devon Arthurs was holding a handgun in one hand and a bottle of Coca-Cola in the other.
He was ready to surrender, but he wanted to finish his soda first.
Once he was in handcuffs, an officer asked him if anyone was hurt.
He responded cryptically, saying that there were people he'd hurt out back.
In the confusion, his hostages had seized the opportunity to run out the back door, away from this volatile situation.
So the officer assumed that he meant one of those people had been injured.
But they were all unharmed.
The officer again asked him, who is hurt?
He replied calmly, Oh.
Oh, the people in the apartment.
But they aren't hurt.
They're dead.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
Weird Little Guys few times before.
It's always just a quick aside, a sort of hand-waving acknowledgement of that time two members of Atomwaffen were murdered by their roommate.
It was a pivotal moment in the history of that now defunct neo-Nazi terrorist organization, so it comes up in just about any story involving any member of Atomwaffen.
But I've never really bothered to explain it.
I'm usually busy trying to get somewhere else.
I was thinking about it again this week because I was thinking about Brandon Russell, the founder of Atomwaffen.
These murders usually come up when I mention Brandon Russell because they're kind of what put him in federal prison the first time.
Not because he committed them.
He wasn't even home when it happened.
But it was his name on the lease at the condo.
And it was his name written in Sharpie on the cooler full of explosives police found in the garage.
Brandon Russell did his time for having that little bomb workshop, and he's since been convicted again, this time for conspiring to blow up the power grid in Baltimore.
If you're listening to this episode the day it came out, he might be sitting in front of a federal judge right now, receiving his sentence.
I'm not psychic, so I couldn't tell you how long he's going away for this time around.
But that upcoming sentencing got me thinking about how we ended up there.
And that story starts with these murders.
I hadn't intended to focus so much on the murders themselves.
I didn't think there was really all that much meat to the story.
Most of the news articles I've read in the past kind of say the same thing, just those broad strokes I was already familiar with.
Devon Arthurs shot and killed Andrew Onischuk and Jeremy Himmelman in the apartment they shared with Brandon Russell.
All four men were members of Adam Hoffman, and the investigation into the murders led to the discovery of the explosives in the garage.
The explosives belonged to Brandon Russell, and he was federally charged for possessing them.
His federal case doesn't have a lot of detail to it because he pled guilty pretty quickly, and Devin Arthur's criminal case wasn't federal.
But then I remembered, this happened in Florida.
People love to make jokes about the Florida man.
The idea that people in Florida are uniquely predisposed to committing bizarre crimes.
Florida man throws live gator at fast food cashier.
Florida man leads cops on high-speed horse chase.
Florida man robs convenience st store dressed as Spider-Man.
All real headlines.
But people in Florida aren't actually more likely than people from anywhere else to crash a car into a grocery store while high on meth or whatever else this mythical Florida man is getting up to.
Florida just happens to have some of the broadest public records laws in the country.
making it incredibly easy for journalists to quickly gain access to police reports and court records.
I wish every weird little guy would do his weird little crimes in the state of Florida because it makes my job so much easier.
In this case, it means I was able to read hundreds of pages of police reports, watch police interrogation videos, and view court records not just for this murder case, but filings from the murderer's parents' divorce.
And it painted a slightly different picture from the one I had in my head.
But as always, let's start before the beginning.
Atomwaffen was an international network of neo-Nazis.
It was one of several organizations that formed out of relationships that started on an online forum called Iron March.
Iron March first appeared online in 2011, launched by a Russian nationalist named Alisher Mukitnidov.
In its six years online, it was an incubator for neo-Nazi ideology around the world.
Fascist organizations like National Action in the United Kingdom, Atomwaffen in the United States, Skidis in Lithuania, and Antipodian Resistance in Australia were all born on this forum.
Existing organizations grew and networked, and they recruited online posters into real-life terror cells.
The site disappeared without explanation one day in November of 2017.
There was plenty of speculation about why the site went dark, but Mukitnidov declined to answer any questions about it when he hung up on a reporter from the BBC in 2020.
One theory popular among American neo-Nazis is that there was international governmental pressure to shut the site down because of these murders.
The birth date of Adam Waffen is typically offered as October 12, 2015.
That's the day Brandon Russell posted a thread on the forum formally announcing the group's existence.
There were a handful of posts that refer to the group by name that predate that announcement thread, and there are photographs of Russell holding an Adamovin flag that were taken in the late spring and summer of 2015.
So it did exist prior to October, but his claim in that post that the group had existed for three years already is unlikely.
especially considering that he hadn't founded the group alone.
His co-founder was a teenage boy named Devin Arthurs was young.
He was born in 1999.
His parents separated when he was five, but didn't actually file for divorce until 2010.
The divorce was contentious, and it dragged on for years.
The court appointed a Guardian Ad Lightum, an attorney whose role is to advocate for the best interest of the child.
In one letter to the court in 2011, the Guardian Ad Lightum noted that Devin was taking the divorce much harder than most children in his position, and he was having behavioral problems.
In 2012, his parents agreed in mediation that Devin should be evaluated by a child behavioral specialist, which his mother claimed in subsequent filings never happened.
In the fall of 2014, when he was still living primarily with his father, he ordered a copy of Mein Kampf off of Amazon.
When the package arrived in the mail, his father opened it, saw what was inside, and refused to let his son have the book.
After Devin physically confronted his father over the text, his dad kicked him out.
According to his mother's filings in the divorce case, his father abandoned him at her house.
The estranged couple lived in different counties, so the sudden move meant that he had to change schools mid-year.
He only ended up attending his new school for a few months.
He dropped out of school later that year before finishing the 10th grade.
Devin Arthurs joined the Iron March Forum in March of 2015, just a few days before his 16th birthday and the same month he dropped out of high school.
By April of 2015, Arthurs and Russell were hanging out in person after realizing they both lived in the Orlando area.
In the fall of 2015, when Russell announced that Adam Waffen was open for new members, he claimed the group already had chapters in Chicago, Texas, Boston, New York, Kentucky, Alabama, Ohio, Missouri, Oregon, and Virginia, with more than 40 members nationwide.
A private message that Arthur sent another user around that same time, though, puts that number closer to 15, mainly in Central Florida, though there was a small cell of just three guys in the Chicago area.
When Brandon Russell bragged in November that the group had met up to do, quote, a lot of activism, what he actually meant was that he and Devin had gone to the University of Central Florida to hang up racist flyers.
It was a group of two.
But the pair were close.
In separate police interrogations on the night of the murder, both Brandon Russell and Devin Arthurs told police that they were the best of friends, and they had been for years.
When Russell joined the National Guard in 2016, he left Arthurs in charge of Adam Hoffman.
At first, things seemed to be going really well for Arthurs as the group's interim leader.
He was recruiting and vetting new members, and he was even trying to get some new chapters off the ground.
In April, he exchanged messages with a prospective new member in the Boston area, one of the men he would murder a year later.
In May of 2016, he organized a flyering campaign in Boston.
There were only two Adam Waffen members in the Boston area at the time, a woman who posted under the username Rexha, and the young man Arthurs had just approved for membership, Andrew Onishuk.
A few weeks later, Rexha got a direct message from Slavros.
the site's moderator who is widely believed to be the site's founder Alexander Mukitnidov.
He sent her a link to a now-deleted post on Twitter showing that someone had made the connection between the flyers and the Iron March users who'd put them up.
The post claims that there were two known Atomwaffen members in the Boston area and that one of them was a student at MIT.
The post didn't actually reveal her name, but she was panicking.
How could they know any of that?
What else did they know?
She begged Slavros to wipe out her account history, writing, can you delete my account here?
Please?
Or delete all my posts?
Please.
I go to university.
I cannot be involved with this.
If they find me, my entire life is ruined.
But he refused, saying that it would only make her look even more guilty if the posts were deleted now, and she had nothing to worry about anyway.
He assured her that there was simply no way for anyone to access her IP address.
They didn't know it at the time.
But an anti-fascist researcher had made an account on Iron March and tricked several users into clicking a link that recorded their IP addresses.
She clicked it from a school computer, revealing her to be a student at MIT.
Without knowing how this person knew exactly where she was, they had to consider the possibility that someone had sold her out.
She insisted in her messages with Slavros that despite Devin Arthur's recent conversion to Islam, they were still on good terms and he assured her that he hadn't said anything to anyone.
The forum was buzzing that week.
The interim leader of Atomwaffen had announced his conversion to Islam.
Sometime in May of 2016, Devin Arthur's updated his Iron March profile.
Older archived versions of his his user profile show that he listed his location as, quote, Dixieland and his ideology as Confederate National Socialism.
With this new update, he now lived in the land of non-believers and he identified as a Salafist National Socialist.
There was apparently a bit of a blow-up over this conversion.
In the massive data dump of leaked posts from Iron March, this thread isn't there.
It was deleted by the moderators pretty quickly, so it wasn't there to scrape when researchers pulled everything off the site later.
But the moderators didn't delete people's direct messages about the thread, and those private conversations are in the data.
Despite what Devin Arthurs would later claim, his conversion to Islam wasn't a renunciation of his prior beliefs.
It was a twisted evolution of them.
In one direct message, a user who saw the thread before it was deleted said that Arthurs planned to convert other Atomwaffen members to Islam.
He failed to convince the forum that his newfound commitment to jihad was the right direction for American neo-Nazis and he was banned from the website.
Slavros threatened to cut ties with Adam Waffen entirely but several members of the group said they'd convinced Arthurs to step down as interim leader.
Until Brandon Russell returned from army training, two other members would step up to run the group.
Ironically, one of those new interim leaders was also a Muslim convert.
David Cole Tarkington had converted to Islam more than two years before Devin Arthurs did, and it doesn't appear to have been a secret.
Tarkington was a major recruiter for Adam Waffen.
often, bringing in at least 11 new members to the group in 2016, including John Cameron Denton, the man who would go on to lead the group after Russell went to prison.
But when Arthurs was being interviewed by that homicide detective, he said that after he converted, he realized his prior beliefs had been wrong, that the hate left his heart, and guided by the Quran, he came to understand that there was no point in wanting to kill people of other races.
A lot of the news coverage takes his statements at face value.
He killed his roommates because they were Nazis, and since his conversion, he wasn't any anymore.
But I have a really hard time believing that.
We talked a little bit about the idea of this strange melding of neo-Nazism and interest in Islamic extremism a few weeks ago in the episode about Nicholas Young, the DC Metro transit cop with the Nazi tattoos who went to prison for trying to send gift cards to ISIS.
And it seems like an obvious contradiction.
How can a neo-Nazi be a Muslim?
Don't white supremacists hate Muslims?
They do, of course.
But it's more complicated than that.
It's a contradiction, sure, but plenty of people live in contradiction.
And there's a lot of overlap, too.
Even neo-Nazis who would never entertain the idea of a conversion are willing to talk about the possibility of finding common cause with people they see as allies in anti-Semitism, people whose commitment to armed extremism is appealing to them.
And all of the finer points of syncretic fascism aside, Devin Arthurs didn't know what he believed.
His conversion happened in a Minecraft chat.
Several friends he met through the online game converted around the same time, and it seems like for some of them it was a bit.
One of those friends later told Rolling Stone that Devin's version of Islam was weird.
Quote, it wasn't true Islam.
It was more about idealizing the Prophet Muhammad as a white Aryan.
You know, Muhammad as an ideal male form.
I don't know.
He says, you know, but I don't know what he's talking about.
And it is unkind., I think, to cast out on the sincerity of someone's religious conversion.
But I'm going to.
He was extremely online.
His exposure to Islam was through memes and jokes in a chat room populated by teenage gamers who met on 4chan.
He was a high school dropout with absent parents.
He was struggling with mental illness.
He never spoke to an imam about his religious path.
When it came to reading the Quran, he was entirely self-taught, and it sounds like he didn't get it.
But, taken at face value, Devon Arthur was Muslim in his own way.
The other neo-Nazis didn't like it, and he was kicked off the Iron Marsh Forum.
He was forced to step down as interim leader of Atomwaffen, but he wasn't kicked out of Atomwaffen.
And he didn't even stay off of Iron Marsh.
He still logged in to use the site under Brandon Russell's account.
And he stayed best friends with Brandon Russell.
In October of 2016, months after this blow-up, he and Brandon traveled to Massachusetts together to visit Adam Waffen's Boston cell, which at the time consisted of just two members, Andrew Onishuk and Jeremy Himmelman.
They'd both joined the group that year and quickly became very close friends.
Several of Jeremy's friends in Boston met Devin Arthurs and Brandon Russell during that trip.
And they all said the same thing.
These guys are fucking weird.
They cannot behave in a normal fashion.
Jeremy Himmelman's sister begged him to get these people out of the apartment that the siblings shared.
They wouldn't stop drawing swastikas on things and making Holocaust jokes.
Devon kept calling her a dumpster slut.
Another friend of Jeremy said, quote, it was very obvious that they were mentally unstable people.
A few months later, in January of 2017, Jeremy Himmelman flew down to Florida to visit Brandon after he faked a suicide attempt as a joke.
It was a cruel joke.
I mean, it would be cruel in any context.
But Brandon almost certainly knew that Jeremy had tried several times in the last few years to end his own life.
So of course he dropped everything to be there when he believed Brandon had nearly died.
Two months later, in March of 2017, back home in Massachusetts, Jeremy Himmelman attempted suicide for a fourth time after an argument with his roommates.
He survived.
His girlfriend and his parents say that it was a wake-up call for him.
He was ready to leave Adam Waffen behind.
It wasn't good for him.
These weren't his friends.
This wasn't a path forward.
But he didn't have any other path forward either.
And he was having trouble cutting ties.
He didn't leave the chats.
He was still best friends with Andrew Onishuk.
And he didn't have much else to do.
So when Brandon Russell invited them both back to Florida, they went.
Florida State University A foot washed up, a shoe with some bones in it.
They had no idea who it was.
Most of everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable.
These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change.
Every case that is a cold case that has DNA, right?
Right now in a backlog, we'll be identified in our lifetime.
A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA.
Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues and evidence so tiny you might just miss it.
He never thought he was going to get caught.
And I just looked at my computer screen.
I was just like, ah, got you.
On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors.
And you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othram, the Houston lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolvable.
Listen to America's Crime Lab on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Kelly Harnett spent over a decade in prison for a murder she says she didn't commit.
I'm 100% innocent.
While behind bars, she learned the law from scratch.
She goes, Oh, God, Harnett, jailhouse lawyer.
And as she fought for herself, she also became a lifeline for the women locked up alongside her.
You're supposed to have faith in God, but I had nothing but faith in her.
So many of these women had lived the same stories.
I said, Were you a victim of domestic violence?
And she was like, Yeah.
But maybe Kelly could change the ending.
I said, how many people have gotten other incarcerated individuals out of here?
I'm going to be the first one to do that.
This is the story of Kelly Harnett, a woman who spent 12 years fighting not just for her own freedom, but her girlfriends too.
I think I have a mission from God to save souls by getting people out of prison.
The Girlfriends, Jailhouse Lawyer.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Music playing.
Liz went from being interested in true crimeime to living true crime.
My husband comes back outside and he's he's shaking and he just looks like he's seen a ghost and he's just in shock.
And he said, Your dad's been killed.
This is Hands Tied, a true crime podcast exploring the murder of Jim Melgar.
Liz's mom had just been found shut in a closet, her hands and feet tied up, shouting for help.
I was just completely in shock.
Her dad had been stabbed to death.
It didn't feel real at all.
For more than a decade, Liz has been trying to figure out what happened.
There's a lot of guilt, I think.
pushing me and I just I want answers listen to hands tied on the iHeart radio app app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts in 2020 a group of young women in a tidy suburb of New York City found themselves in an AI fueled nightmare someone was posting photos It was just me naked.
Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts that looked exactly like my own.
I wanted to throw up.
I wanted to scream.
It happened in Levittown, New York.
But reporting the series took us through the darkest corners of the internet and to the front lines of a global battle against deep fake pornography.
This should be illegal, but what is this?
This is a story about a technology that's moving faster than the law and about vigilantes trying to stem the tide.
I'm Margie Murphy.
And I'm Olivia Carvell.
This is Levittown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope.
Listen to Levittown on Bloomberg's Big Take Podcast.
Find it on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Music That same month in March of 2017, Brandon Russell's grandmother co-signed a lease for him.
It was a nice little condo in a gated community in Tampa.
Sometime in early April, he and Devin moved in.
And that's when he started begging Andrew Onishuk and Jeremy Himmelman to come down and visit.
Come down and spend the summer with us.
He promised them a rent-free summer in Florida.
They could go fishing.
There was a pool.
It would be fun.
Andrew and Jeremy regretted it almost immediately.
Barely a week into their stay, they were already talking about going home early.
This two-bedroom condo wasn't big enough for four men.
Andrew and Jeremy shared the smaller bedroom.
Devin slept in the living room, and Brandon kept the larger bedroom for himself.
Brandon was gone a lot.
On top of being in the National Guard, he had a job at a shooting range.
Andrew and Jeremy got temporary jobs at a recycling plant, but Devin just sat in the living room all day on the computer.
The place was messy.
No one did dishes.
I was going to say I assumed they didn't even own a vacuum cleaner, but I did see one in the crime scene photographs.
It was pushed up against the wall in the living room underneath the North Korean flag.
They barely even had any furniture.
The room that Andrew and Jeremy shared didn't have a bed.
It was just a futon and a mattress on the floor.
This wasn't the fun Florida summer they'd imagined.
Devin was weird and annoying.
And things were tense.
They wanted to go home.
On May 17th, Andrew Anishuk told his parents that he was going to come home early.
He told his mom that he planned to stay another week just to finish out his temp job.
He didn't feel right walking away from it.
Just two days later, though, on Friday, May 19th, he'd changed his mind.
He had to go, and he was going to leave on Monday.
Jeremy Himmelman called his girlfriend that day to lament Andrew's decision.
He was going to miss Andrew, but things had gotten too uncomfortable in the apartment.
That same day, May 19, Brendan Russell left the condo early in the morning.
He had National Guard drill that weekend and had to report in that day.
Devin was, as always, at home on the computer all day.
Around 5 p.m., Jeremy was texting with his girlfriend back home in Massachusetts.
At 5.04 p.m., she asked him if they could FaceTime.
I'm hanging out with Devin and Andrew right now.
Maybe later.
he replied with a heart emoji she said she might take a nap and he joked that she was probably going to fall asleep for seven hours again like she had last time His phone was still resting on his stomach under his right arm when crime scene techs photographed his body a few hours later.
I can't tell you exactly what happened in the 15 minutes between 5.05 p.m. and 5.20 p.m.
When Jeremy sent his last text to his girlfriend at 5.05 p.m., nothing was wrong.
He seemed relaxed.
He said that he was hanging out with his roommates and he gave no indication that anything was amiss.
She knew all about the ongoing tension in the apartment.
He would have mentioned it if anything out of the ordinary was happening.
But at 520, Devin Arthurs called his father and told him that he'd just killed two people.
There's no dispute about the basic facts.
Devin Arthurs shot Andrew Onischuk and Jeremy Himmelman with a Wasser-10.
That's a Romanian version of an AK-47.
Based on the medical examiner's report, Both men would have died instantly from multiple shots to the head and torso fired from the rifle at close range.
They were both in the bedroom they shared.
Jeremy was lying on the futon, and Andrew's body was on the floor near the bathroom door.
Devin left the rifle on the couch in the living room, picked up a Glock 17, and walked out of the apartment.
He walked over to the leasing office where he announced what he'd done to two maintenance techs, the property manager and a resident, and then he walked across the street into the strip mall and entered the smokeshop where he held the store clerk and two customers hostage at gunpoint until the police arrived.
He's never denied what he did.
Quite the opposite.
All he wanted to do was tell people.
He called his dad.
He called his mom.
He told the people in the leasing office.
He told the people in the smoke shop.
He told every officer he encountered after his arrest.
But as he continued to tell and retell this story, it changed a little.
In a report written by the officer who transported him to the police station that night, it's noted that Arthurs was talking almost constantly.
offering up spontaneous statements even though no one was asking him questions.
The officer wrote, Arthurs continued to repeat his story and would add more details each time.
Devin's account of the actual physical sequence of events remains pretty consistent, and it mostly matches up with the physical evidence.
It's his recollection of his internal monologue and his motivations that changed throughout the evening.
It was a little after 1 in the morning, nearly eight hours after the murder.
by the time a Tampa homicide detective turned on the camera to record a formal interview with Devin Arthurs.
And by that time, he'd had plenty of time alone to think.
And over the course of this two hour interrogation, you can hear him convincing himself of the story that he's come up with.
I hear Jeremy, he grabs my Guran off the thing and he says, You have your book of fairy tales here.
And that set me over the limit.
And I remember in a blur, I shot them both.
And I didn't, I wasn't thinking clearly.
This part is probably pretty close to the truth.
It's the same thing he said in the back of the patrol car right after he was arrested.
He killed them because they made fun of him, because they mocked his religion, because they disrespected his faith, because they were bullying him pretty relentlessly, and he'd had enough.
And there is plenty of proof that that had been going on, so it's no surprise that it would have happened again that evening.
I think this first story is the truth.
He was sitting in the living room cleaning the rifle.
when Jeremy and Andrew started teasing him again.
He'd spent the entire day on the computer in an encrypted group chat full of other members of Atomwaffen.
And on that particular day, the chat was making fun of him.
Again, he was reaching a boiling point.
And he snapped.
And, unfortunately, in the moment that he snapped, he happened to already have a rifle in his hands.
And in that split second where he made the decision to pull the trigger, that's what he was thinking about.
He shot them because they made fun of him.
But as the reality of this situation settled in, that didn't really feel like a good enough explanation.
It may not have even been a conscious choice.
He may have eventually convinced himself that this is true.
But within an hour, he's adding details to the narrative.
And the more time he has to think about it, the clearer his new story becomes.
I remember what, Cowboy, I was sitting in that cube or whatever, and he was pacing back and forth.
And I'm like, and I'm like, thinking to myself, which cube?
In the holding cell?
A holding cell?
Oh, you just wrote a letter.
Yeah, yeah.
And I remember like, I was thinking, like, you know, how could I have done this and stuff like that?
And the only things that I could rationalize was like, you know, if I hadn't done that, if I hadn't.
shut this organization down by doing this, there'd be a lot more people dead than just two people from that organization.
I was really struck by this language.
It's a little too on the nose that he keeps literally using the word rationalize as he's describing his thought process to the officer.
I think he's still processing what he's done.
I guess witnessing a murder is very traumatic, even if you're the one who did it.
He's still processing that experience.
He's still processing seeing his friends' dead bodies and he's coming to terms with it.
He's trying to understand his own actions and figure out how he's supposed to live with them.
And he's externalizing that entire thought process in a recorded interview with a homicide detective.
And the thing that keeps me rational about this is that like, I feel what I've done is horrible in the sense that if a human life has been lost and I feel sad.
I feel like an animal and I feel like I should be in a hospital somewhere just, you know, begin medicine or something like that to help me.
And I want you to know that I realize the full extent of, you know, their families are going to feel very bad about this, their loved ones, and I feel the most bad about that.
But I also realize that these people of what they were planning with the explosives that were down, downstairs.
Yeah, well, tell me about that.
What's that all about?
Adam Pfauffin's Division is a terrorist organization.
It's a neo Nazi organization that I was a part of before I converted.
By the time he's sitting in that interrogation room at one in the morning, he's the hero of the story.
He understands that it was a great tragedy.edy to have had to take those lives, but if you really think about it, didn't he save countless lives by doing it?
I think it's the only way he can cope.
He told one of the officers on the scene shortly after his arrest that he couldn't get the image of his friends' dead bodies out of his mind.
He said he had no idea how much blood can come out of a human body.
He has to find a way to convince himself that there was a good reason for it.
He feels like a monster, so he's trying to find a way to be a hero.
But he's lying.
An organization that he was part of before his conversion?
He had converted a year ago and he still lived with the group's leader.
He still participated in the group's private chats.
He was still privy to the group's secret internal operations.
He went on group outings and road trips.
When Adam Waffen went camping, Devin was there.
When Adam Waffen did training drills in the woods, Devin was there.
Just a month before the murders, he accompanied Brandon Russell on a trip to Detroit, Chicago, and Boston for the purpose of buying and selling guns.
Remember, they live in Florida.
It's pretty easy to buy a gun in Florida.
So I don't think they were buying guns in places like Chicago or Boston, so you'll have to use your imagination to fill in the gaps here.
Maybe they were selling guns purchased in Florida to members of the group operating in areas where it was harder to buy them.
If Devin Arthurs had abandoned his prior beliefs, if he was so disgusted with neo-Nazism, why was he participating in this.
He could have moved back in with either one of his parents.
He could have called the FBI.
He could have just stayed home when the neo-Nazi terrorist group went out into the woods to practice shooting drills for the race war.
But he didn't do any of that.
He's telling this officer now, in May of 2017, that he was no longer a member of Atomwaffen and hadn't been since his conversion a year earlier and I just don't think that's true.
I think he's lying.
Maybe even to himself.
He sounds, for the most part, fairly lucid in this interview.
But half a dozen psychiatrists and forensic psychologists would eventually agree that he was profoundly mentally ill.
So a lot of this is maybe just trying to cope with his own actions.
But I don't think it's just coping.
I think he realizes he has a bargaining chip here.
Because throughout the interview, he keeps asking to speak with the FBI, and he says he has important information that they'll want to hear.
If I could get like a meeting with an FBI agent or something like that, I could shut down like not just Adam Faufen but several other organizations like we could probably facilitate that.
I would very much like to do that.
He's pretty relaxed through most of the interview, but several times he asks if what he's saying in the interview is confidential.
And when he's talking about that, he gets very anxious.
And the officer tells him that police reports do eventually become public record, but he assures him that sensitive information, like the things he's talking about, can be held back from public view and he tells him that what you say to me here just for the investigation nobody's gonna see this video now remember cops can lie to you cops can always lie to you it's always okay for
them to lie because I watched the video of this officer telling Devin Arthurs that no one would ever watch the video He wants to tell the FBI everything he knows about Atomwaffen, but he's very worried that people will know he talked.
He's worried that members of the group will target him if they find out.
And then on the other hand, if I somehow get some kind of plea bargain from this and then I get released, I might get killed by someone else.
If that gets released, especially since they know that I unless, unless, whatever information you can provide shuts down this group entirely and these guys are just out of commission.
Well, that's the main thing.
That's why I'm mainly helping you all.
Again, he's being very explicit here.
You know, when he's rationalizing his actions, he says out loud, I'm rationalizing my actions.
And now that he realizes he might have information to trade for favorable treatment.
He says, hey, maybe I'll get a plea bargain out of this, he's saying the quiet part very loud.
And what he's saying is that he wants to talk to the FBI about the bombs.
I imagine a cop usually takes you pretty seriously if you start talking about bombs.
Just in case.
Even if you are spinning a pretty fanciful sounding tale.
And in this case, even though what he's saying does sound a little far-fetched, they're listening carefully.
because they know there's some truth to it because they've already seen the explosives.
Before Devin Arthur's ever mentioned the presence of explosive material inside the condo, the officers who arrived first on the scene saw enough to make them cautious.
The first officer to enter the apartment wrote in his report that on his initial walkthrough of the scene, he opened the closet in the other bedroom, the one that belonged to Brandon Russell.
And on a shelf in the closet where you would normally keep sweaters or something, there were several Geiger counters, a significant number of batteries, and a lot of matches.
Another officer found a backpack near the front door that contained electric matches and some kind of device that looked like it might be an IED.
They weren't entirely sure what they were looking at, but they knew enough to know that somebody else needed to be the one looking at it.
So they confirmed that the two victims were deceased and not in need of any medical help and that the apartment was otherwise empty and then they evacuated the neighboring apartments while they waited for the bomb squad.
And so backing up to this point in our timeline, When Devin Arthurs was arrested at the smoke shop, he was put into a police car.
And he told the officers that his two roommates were dead inside their home, which was in the complex across the street.
But he couldn't remember the unit number.
They'd only just moved in a month before, but he offered to show them which one it was if they would drive him there.
And so as the police car is pulling up outside the condo, they can hear someone screaming inside.
And as the officers are approaching the residence, a man dressed in military fatigues came out the front door.
He is hysterical, unable to respond to their questions, collapses onto the ground, sobbing, crying, and he's screaming, Jeremy is dead.
That was Brandon Russell.
He'd arrived home sometime in that very small window of time after the murders, but before the police arrived.
He wasn't there when it happened, but by the time the police get there, he is.
The property manager said that she saw him driving erratically through the parking lot when she was standing outside after dialing 911.
So he had to have gotten home after 5.30.
but before 5.45.
He was detained by the officers on the scene for obvious reasons.
They just watched him walk out of an apartment with two dead bodies inside.
They don't know what they're dealing with.
So around 6 p.m., those officers who first entered the apartment saw some things they thought they needed a bomb squad for.
Brandon Russell and Devin Arthurs are both handcuffed and sitting in separate police cars right outside.
And both men, separately, and for their own reasons, voluntarily disclosed to the police that there are explosives inside the house.
Devin is starting to realize that he wants the police to know that the people he killed were very bad men and that maybe they were going to use those bombs to hurt innocent people.
And at this point, he adds that I wouldn't kill innocent people.
I had plenty of opportunities tonight to kill innocent people, even those responding officers, and I didn't do it.
For Brandon, he's just trying to get out ahead of the problem he knows is coming.
The cops already saw some suspicious material inside the condo, but they hadn't looked in the garage yet.
So he told a detective that they would find some things in there that they should know about.
He said that in the garage, there's potassium chlorate, thorium, which is a radioactive material, rocket propellant, and a compound called HMDT.
Hexamethylene triperoxide diamine is a highly volatile explosive compound.
It is dangerous to handle.
It is dangerous to store.
It is insane to keep it in your garage when your garage is directly underneath your living room.
He did fail to mention to the officer that there was also some ammonium nitrate in there, but the bomb squad found it anyway.
Russell told the officer on scene that they are going to find that stuff in the garage, but he wants them to know that it's only there for fueling model rockets.
But as he's sitting there in handcuffs, trying to convince the officer that those explosives in the garage are just for his hobby, he asks if he's ever going to see his family again.
Because he knows what this looks like, and it looks bad.
He stuck to the lie though.
He's just a model rocket enthusiast having a very traumatic day.
A foot washed up, a shoe with some bones in it.
They had no idea who it was.
Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable.
These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change.
Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime.
A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA.
Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues and evidence so tiny you might just miss it.
He never thought he was going to get caught.
And I just looked at my computer screen.
I was just like, ah, gotcha.
On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors.
And you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othram, the Houston Lab lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolvable.
Listen to America's Crime Lab on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Kelly Hornet spent over a decade in prison for a murder she says she didn't commit.
I'm 100% innocent.
While behind bars, she learned the law from scratch.
She goes, oh God, Hornet, jailhouse lawyer.
And as she fought for herself, she also became a lifeline for the women locked up alongside her.
You're supposed to have your faith in God, but I had nothing but faith in her.
So many of these women had lived the same stories.
I said, Were you a victim of domestic violence?
And she was like, Yeah.
But maybe Kelly could change the ending.
I said, How many people have gotten other incarcerated individuals out of here?
I'm going to be the first one to do that.
This is the story of Kelly Harnett, a woman who spent twelve years fighting not just for her own freedom, but her girlfriends too.
I think I have a mission from God to save souls by getting people out of prison.
The Girlfriends, Jailhouse Lawyer.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Liz went from being interested in true crime to living true crime.
My husband comes back outside and he's he's shaking and he just looks like he's seen a ghost and he's just in shock.
And he said, your dad's been killed.
This is Hands Tied, a true crime podcast exploring the murder of Jim Melgarth.
Liz's mom had just been found shut in a closet.
her hands and feet tied up, shouting for help.
I was just completely in shock.
Her dad had been stabbed to death.
It didn't feel real at all.
For more than a decade, Liz has been trying to figure out what happened.
There's a lot of guilt, I think, pushing me, and I just, I want answers.
Listen to Hands Tied on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2020, a group of young women in a tidy suburb of New York City found themselves in an AI-fueled nightmare.
Someone was posting photos.
It was just me naked.
Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts that looked exactly like mine own.
I wanted to throw up.
I wanted to scream.
It happened in Livettown, New York.
But reporting the series took us through the darkest corners of the internet and to the front lines of a global battle against deep fake pornography.
This should be illegal, but what is this?
This is a story about a technology that's moving faster than the law and about vigilantes trying to stem the tide.
I'm Margie Murphy.
And I'm Olivia Carvell.
This is Levittown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope.
Listen to Livetown on Bloomberg's Big Take Podcast.
Find it on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Music by Ben Thede At some point, both men were separately transported to the police station to await their interrogations.
And during Devin's interrogation, he has a very clear idea of exactly what the bomb squad is going to find in the house.
He knew what was in the house, where it was, and where it was and how it got there.
Yes, there is nuclear materials in that in that garage.
There is some nuclear material.
Okay, what's in that garage that's in that garage?
HMTD, yeah, those explosives, yeah, some some ammonium nitrate, I believe, and I know that there's some radiated materials that he was able to bring in through the Bahamas.
And because he's a Bahamian citizen, he was able to bring it, bring it in.
And more than that, he was willing to tell anyone who would listen what the group planned to do with those materials.
But the things that they were planning were horrible.
They're planning bombings and stuff like that on countless people.
They're planning to kill civilian life.
What did they, were they specific in their plans?
Power lines, nuclear reactors, synagogues, things like that.
He knew all the details of the group's plans.
He knew what Atomwaffen was going to do because he was a member of Atomwaffen.
He's in the chats where these things are being discussed.
He's in the living room where these things are being discussed.
And by the time he's in that interrogation room.
room, he's convinced himself that that's why he murdered his roommates.
It wasn't some petty personal dispute.
It wasn't because they were bullying him.
It was because he had to do it.
He had to stop them before they could hurt innocent people.
And of course, the detective did specifically ask about the model rockets.
You guys don't build model rockets and go out in the back and shoot them off at the, you know, or fireworks for the 4th of July killing.
Nothing of that.
None of that.
It's all literally there specifically to kill people.
Is this probably the truth?
I think so.
To some degree, yeah.
Not to spoil the ending, but Brandon Russell was convicted earlier this year for a separate plot to destroy electrical infrastructure.
He's also alleged to have co-authored some of the Terogram Collective manuals that advise other neo-Nazis on how to go about carrying out their own attacks.
It's not at all hard to believe that he was thinking about and talking about these things.
as he's building bombs in his garage in 2017.
And he wasn't a model rocket enthusiast.
He did work on a project involving a model rocket as a member of the Engineering Club at the University of South Florida, but that was in 2013.
And he had since dropped out because he couldn't pass calculus.
There were no model rockets in the condo.
An explosives expert wrote in a report that no one would use HMTD to power a model rocket.
It's too volatile.
It's too volatile for pretty much everything.
The military doesn't use it.
It fell out of favor in mining decades ago.
But it is possible to make it home if you're not afraid of accidentally blowing your fingers off if the workshop gets too warm.
So it's still popular among terrorists.
At the end of his interview, Arthur says again quite plainly, if I hadn't done this, there would have been attacks.
He's sure of it now, that's why he did it.
He's sure at this point that he'd actually always thought that, and that was what he was thinking before it happened.
Throughout his interview, Arthur's is asking to speak to the FBI.
He's insisting that they need to hear what he has to say.
And they keep sort of pushing him off, saying, yeah, we can think about that.
You know, we'll get to that.
That's later.
he doesn't know that an FBI agent is watching a video feed from the next room.
And he's right.
The FBI was very interested in what he had to say.
Because shortly after that interview wrapped up, the same detective sat down with Brandon Russell.
And this time, that FBI agent is in the room.
They talked to Brandon for a little over an hour.
The detective had him sign a form confirming that he'd been informed of his Miranda rights, but he was also told that he wasn't in custody.
He wasn't being detained.
He's not under arrest.
And he's free to leave at any time.
He signed the form and he agreed to talk without a lawyer, which I'm fine with him doing, but you, listener, never talk to the police without a lawyer.
They talked a lot about the murders.
Obviously, he's talking to a homicide detective in a homicide investigation.
They talked about Devin and Andrew and Jeremy, how they'd all come to be friends, how they met online and then in person.
how that friendship had fallen apart over Devin's conversion to Islam.
Brandon says Devin's conversion was never an issue for him.
And I think that's true.
He insisted that what was going on in the house was all just banter, just regular ball busting teasing between friends.
After the detective rephrases the question half a dozen times, he reluctantly agrees that, yeah, Jeremy and Andrew crossed the line sometimes.
Maybe they were bullying him, and Devin was having a hard time with it.
But he said it had never gotten physical.
and he never thought anyone would get hurt.
He also said Adam Offen was just a club for people with shared political interests, and they liked to do outdoor activities together.
He did agree that those shared beliefs were national socialism, and he got a little animated when he started complaining that schools only teach lies about Hitler.
For the most part, though, he was mumbling.
His body language is guarded and anxious.
He's sitting sort of folded in on himself, slouching down with his legs crossed and his arms folded tightly across his chest.
He's tired.
He's traumatized.
But he's scared.
And he insists throughout this conversation that everything they found was legal.
It was legally obtained, he wasn't planning to do anything nefarious with it, and it was all related to his hobby of building model rockets.
After about an hour of this, the detective's tone changes.
He's been sort of yes-anding him, just letting him talk, getting him to open up, talking about his hobbies, not passing any kind of judgment, and Brandon Russell has been portraying himself and his organization as what the detective calls, you know, knuckleheads, horsing around, you know, just kids, having fun.
But if we look on your computer, what are we going to find?
Is it just jokes and camping trips?
Or are we going to find that you've made explicit threats?
Are you saying things like, kill all Jews, right?
What are you saying?
Are you making the kind of threats that could lead to federal charges?
And at first, Brandon tries to answer the question.
He says, you know, only ever as a joke.
I've never said that non-satirically.
And they press him a little harder.
What kinds of things are you saying?
And then he just mumbles that maybe he needs a lawyer.
So the questions stop there.
He's not under arrest.
He can leave at any time.
And if he wants a lawyer, they're not going to ask him any more questions.
He can go.
But he can't go home, though.
The ATF has only just arrived, and they still haven't finished clearing the house of explosive material.
And until the ATF clears the scene, the medical examiner can't take the bodies away.
So he's not going to be able to get into that condo anytime soon.
So Russell asks the detective to call his dad.
He doesn't ask if he can use the phone to call his dad.
He, a 22-year-old member of the military, is asking this other adult man, will you call my dad?
He doesn't actually know his dad's phone number and his cell phone is still inside the condo, but he says, you know, you can just call the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office and ask for him by name.
He's a deputy there.
Or maybe it's West Palm Beach.
He can't actually remember.
He and his dad aren't close.
He wasn't around when Brandon was a kid and they don't really get along now.
But he tells the FBI that he's going to drive to Palm Beach and stay with his dad.
His mom still lives in the Bahamas, so he doesn't really have anywhere else nearby he can go.
So a little after 6 a.m. on Saturday morning, a Tampa police officer dropped Russell off outside the condo.
The explosive ordnance disposal team had finished with the scene, so detectives were just now arriving to conduct their search.
One of those detectives went inside and got his keys for him.
In her report, she notes that when she entered his bedroom to look for his keys, she saw a large framed photograph of Timothy McVeigh on his dresser.
An explosives enforcement agent from the ATF confirmed to the FBI sometime early Saturday morning that the materials they found did meet the legal definition of a destructive device.
What they found in that garage was enough to bring federal charges.
But by the time the ATF agents were done examining the scene and writing up their findings, the FBI had already let him go.
He was gone.
He said he was going to his dad's house in West Palm Beach, but he didn't.
When FBI agents contacted his family, they said they hadn't heard from him.
Instead of going to his dad's house to get some rest, he'd driven straight to the home of another Atomwaffen member.
He told him about the murders, and he said he needed to get away for a while to clear his head.
But his friend didn't just toss a few t-shirts and a toothbrush into a backpack like you might expect someone to do for a spur of the moment weekend away.
Instead, he withdrew all of the money from his bank account, quit his job, and got into Russell's car heading south.
When deputies apprehended Russell in the Florida Keys a day later, the rifles they'd bought at a sporting goods store were still in their manufacturer's packaging.
We'll pick back up next week with the years-long ordeal in court of resolving Devon Arthur's mental competency and Brandon Russell's first trip to federal prison.
Hopefully by then, we'll know how his story ends.
He is scheduled to be sentenced for his second foiled plot on August 7.
Until then, I don't know.
Make sure your teenage son isn't accidentally converting to a memified version of Islam in a neo-Nazi Minecraft chat.
And don't store volatile explosives in a cooler in your garage.
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and I Heart Radio.
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 Dickard.
You can email me at Weird Little Guys Podcast at gmail.com.
I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing personal.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys Saturday.
We're little guys separate.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.
Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime.
On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell and the DNA holds the truth.
He never thought he was going to get caught and I just looked at my computer screen.
I was just like, ah, got you.
This technology's already solving so many cases.
Listen to America's Crime Lab on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
The Girlfriends is back with a new season and this time I'm telling you the story of Kelly Harnett.
Kelly spent over a decade in prison for a murder she says she didn't commit.
As she fought for her freedom, she taught herself the law.
She goes, oh God, Harnett, jailhouse lawyer.
and became a beacon of hope for the women locked up alongside her.
You're supposed to have faith in God, but I had nothing but faith in her.
I think I was put here to save souls by getting people out of prison.
The Girlfriends, jailhouse lawyer.
Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Liz went from being interested in true crime to living true crime.
My husband said, your dad's been killed.
This is Hands Tied, a true crime podcast exploring the murder of Jim Melgar.
I was just completely in shock.
Liz's father murdered, and her mother found locked in a closet, her hands and feet bound.
It didn't feel real at all.
More than a decade on, she's still searching for answers.
We're still fighting.
Listen to Hands Tied on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's stuff they don't want you to know.
Every Monday we break down the news, make connections, and reveal the stuff they don't want you to know.
A secret deal between members of Mexican cartels and the United States government.
Residents are reporting sightings of exploding birds.
Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows.
