After Devon Arthurs murdered his roommates, he claimed he'd only done it to prevent the loss of innocent lives. The man he said was planning a terrorist attack was arrested with a car full of guns, but not charged with any of the things Arthurs claimed their nazi terror cell had been working on.Sources:https://www.propublica.org/article/an-atomwaffen-member-sketched-a-map-to-take-the-neo-nazis-down-what-path-officials-took-is-a-mysteryhttps://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/three-murder-suspects-linked-to-atomwaffen-where-their-cases-stand/https://www.bradenton.com/news/local/crime/article156282099.htmlhttps://www.huffpost.com/entry/nicholas-giampa-neo-nazi-teenager-murder-girlfriends-parents-virginia_n_5a4d0797e4b0b0e5a7aa4780https://www.middlebury.edu/institute/academics/centers-initiatives/ctec/ctec-publications/dangerous-organizations-and-bad-actors-4https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/documenting-hate-new-american-nazis/transcript/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjEBXDfuBDE&ab_channel=COURTTVSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Summer's here, and with the kids home and off to camp, it's easy for moms to get lost in the shuffle.
On Good Mom's Bad Choices, we're making space to center ourselves with joy, rest, and pleasure.
Take the kids to camp.
You know what?
It was expensive, but I was also thinking, if you have my kid, this is kind of priceless.
Take her, feed her, make core memories.
I don't have to do anything.
Main thing, I don't have to do anything.
To hear this and more, listen to Good Mom's Bad Choices from Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
It's Black Business Month, and Black Tech Green Money is tapping in.
I'm Will Lucas spotlighting Black founders, investors, and innovators building the future one idea at a time.
Let's talk legacy, tech, and generational wealth.
I had the skill and I had the talent.
I didn't have the opportunity.
Yeah.
We all know, right?
Genius is evenly distributed.
Opportunity is not.
To hear this and more on the power of black innovation and ownership, listen to Black Tech Green Money from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2020, a group of young women 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 part.
This is Levitt Town, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg, and Kaleidoscope about the rise of deep fake pornography and the battle to stop it.
Listen to Levitown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast.
Find it on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Maybe you've heard that Stonewall was a riot where queer people fought back against police, or that it's the reason Pride is celebrated this time of year.
It was one of the most liberating things that I have ever done.
Legend says Marsha P. Johnson threw the very first brick.
Start banging on the door of the stonewall like one, boom.
This week on Afterlives, we'll separate the truth from the myth in the life of Marsha P. Johnson.
Listen to Afterlives on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Call Zone Media Call Zone Media On Sunday, May 21st, 2017, Monroe County Sheriff's Deputy Deanna Torres pulled into the parking lot outside of a Burger King on Route 1.
There were plenty of empty parking spots, but she wasn't there for lunch.
She positioned her patrol car directly behind a blue SUV, blocking it in, and got out of her car.
As she approached the restaurant, the door opened and a man walked out.
Before he had a chance to react, she grabbed him by the wrist and started handcuffing him.
For all his tough talk online, Brandon Russell went quietly.
He would later say that he just needed to get out of town to clear his head after what he'd experienced on Friday night.
He'd come home from work to find two of his roommates dead in their bedroom, murdered by a young man he'd considered his best friend.
But when officers searched the car, they didn't find the kind of luggage you'd expect someone to have for a weekend trip to the Florida Keys.
There wasn't so much as a toothbrush in the vehicle.
Instead of t-shirts and swim trunks, they found rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, some of it already loaded into four high-capacity magazines.
300 miles away, in a jail cell in Tampa, a murderer was begging for a meeting with the FBI.
He claimed he knew exactly why his roommate was driving around South Florida with a car full of guns.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weirdly Guys.
When we left off last week, two men were in custody and two men were dead.
The actual facts of the story are fairly straightforward and it would make for a pretty short episode.
Devin Arthurs eventually pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder for the murders of Andrew Onishuk and Jeremy Himmelman, as well as three counts of kidnapping for the three people he held at gunpoint at the strip mall.
Brandon Russell pleaded guilty to federal charges of possessing an unregistered destructive device and improper storage of explosive materials.
Devin was sentenced to 45 years in a Florida State prison and Brandon was released in 2021 after serving most of a five-year sentence.
The narrative tension in this story is not in what happened, but why and what it might mean.
Hundreds of pages of police reports, years of filings in their respective criminal cases, scores of news reports, a documentary, TV interviews.
There's no shortage of material laying out the facts.
But it all leaves me with more questions than answers.
I've spent some time on the show ruminating on one of these big questions before.
It's one probably better left to a philosopher than a podcaster, but it's about the nature of truth.
What does it even mean to say that something is true?
In this story, we have a set of truths.
Sure.
We know that these men are guilty of the crimes they committed.
We know it because a court said so.
Devin killed two people.
Brandon had a garage full of explosive materials.
That's true.
But because neither of them took their case to trial, that's all we can really, legally speaking, say we know for certain.
Maybe at trial, there would have been a more aggressive exploration of Devin's claims that he'd killed his roommates to prevent the terrorist attack they were planning.
Maybe if Brandon had gone to trial, the government would have had to prove to a jury what he was going to do with those explosives.
But they didn't.
So we don't know.
And we're left trying to construct our own version of what might be true.
Aside from the concrete facts, the physical evidence, the bullet casings, the autopsy reports, the crime scene photographs, the rest of the pieces that we have in this quest to assemble some version of the truth are probably lies.
So let's go back to where we were last week, May 19th, 2017.
The murders happened on a Friday evening.
Tampa police, responding to 911 calls about an armed man at a strip mall, found 18-year-old Devin Arthurs holding three people hostage at a smokeshop.
As he was being handcuffed, he told the officers that his roommates were dead in his apartment across the street, and he'd be happy to show them which unit it was if they would drive him there.
As the police pulled up out front, another man walked out the front door of the apartment and collapsed on the ground in front of them, sobbing hysterically.
Brandon Russell had arrived home from work minutes after the murders and discovered the dead bodies of Andrew Anishuk and Jeremy Himmelman.
Inside, officers found not just the bodies of Devin's murder victims, but Brandon's bomb-making workshop.
The crime scene was a complicated one.
When officers first arrived on scene Friday evening, they saw the bodies.
Of course, you couldn't miss them.
But they immediately noticed some other very concerning things lying around the apartment.
Geiger counters, an unusually large number of batteries, electric matches, piles of military gear, gas masks, bookshelves full of white supremacist literature, a Nazi flag tacked to the wall, a framed photograph of Timothy McVeigh.
A backpack in the living room with some kind of device inside that looked like a bomb.
Those first responding officers saw all of this and they got out of there in a hurry.
There was nothing they could do for the two men lying dead in the bedroom.
That much was very obvious based on the state of the bodies.
So they secured the perimeter, evacuated the neighboring apartments, and waited for the experts to arrive.
All night, as Brandon and Devin sat waiting at the police station, officers worked on the crime scene.
Members of the Tampa Police Department's explosive ordnance disposal team entered first to try to figure out how volatile the situation was.
The only reports I have access to were written by Tampa police officers, so I can only see what they said about their interactions with agents from the FBI and ATF.
But based on the crime scene logs, bomb technicians from the FBI arrived a few hours later, and agents from the ATF arrived after midnight.
It was the middle of the night by the time Devin and Brandon were interviewed by a homicide detective.
In the early morning hours of May 20th, Brandon Russell asked for a lawyer.
He'd been talking for over an hour already.
But when the FBI agent in the room pressed him a little too hard about what they might find if they searched his computer, he didn't want to talk anymore.
He wasn't under arrest.
He was there voluntarily.
He wasn't being detained.
They weren't technically investigating him at all.
He had just happened to come home from work and stumble into a crime scene.
So if he didn't want to talk anymore, he was free to go.
Around 6 a.m., a Tampa police officer drove him home.
The explosives experts had finished their sweep of the residence and signed off on it being safe to enter.
So detectives were starting to arrive to execute search warrants.
Brandon waited outside in the parking lot while a detective entered the condo to find his car keys.
And then he was on his way.
His apartment was a crime scene, and his mother lived in the Bahamas.
So he planned to drive to Palm Beach to stay with his dad.
Or at least that's what he told the FBI.
There's a lot of uninteresting details here about the memorandum of understanding between the FBI and the ATF, but they share primary jurisdiction when investigating possible federal crimes involving explosives, and both agencies have explosives experts.
But ultimately, the decision as to whether the materials found in the garage constituted a violation of federal law was up to the ATF.
And by the time the ATF briefed the FBI on what they found, Brandon Russell was gone.
The federal criminal complaint was signed by a judge by midday on Saturday, just a few hours after Brandon Russell drove off.
No problem, though, right?
He told them where he was going, and if he drove straight there, he should have already arrived at his dad's house in Palm Beach.
FBI agents called Brandon's dad, a Palm Beach County Sheriff's Deputy.
But not only was Brandon not there, his dad hadn't even heard from him and had no idea where he might be.
So how did they find him?
He could have gone anywhere.
I couldn't find anything in the court filings that indicated that they had tried to ping his phone or that they got a warrant for his banking information.
They don't seem to have tracked him down using his digital footprint.
But they found him pretty damn quick, and he was arrested the very next day.
Here's where we wade into versions of the truth told by liars, where we start guessing about what these breadcrumbs might mean.
Last week, I played some clips for you of the police interrogation video recorded on the night of the murders.
And in that interview, Devin Arthur's very quickly settled into a story that positioned him as some kind of hero.
He knew it was wrong to kill, but he had to do it.
It was the only way to save thousands of innocent lives.
And I told you that I think he was lying.
But it's a lie built around the truth.
Devin shot his friends because they made fun of him.
He'd converted to Islam a year earlier, and the neo-Nazi community did not take it well.
He was pushed out of leadership in Adam Waffen, a group he'd helped found.
He was banned from Iron March, the online Nazi message board where he'd found friendship and a sense of belonging.
But he stayed involved with Adam Woffen, and he stayed best friends with Brandon Russell, the group's leader.
He lived with Brandon.
He traveled with Brandon when he drove cross-country to visit Adam Woffen's cells or to buy and sell weapons for use by the group.
And on the day of the murders, he was chatting online all day with other members of Adam Woffen.
He was very much still involved, despite his claims after the fact.
But as he's sitting there in this interrogation room, I think a few things are happening.
Psychologically, he's trying to find a way to rationalize his actions.
He needs to find a way to justify what he's done.
And he also realizes that he's made himself a very nasty enemy.
Killing two members of the Nazi terror cell makes him a target of the Nazi terror cell.
It makes his family a potential target.
And he knows what kind of people he's just crossed.
And he doesn't want to go to jail.
So he lands on a story that potentially solves all three problems.
If he tells the cops everything, they'll take down Adam Waffen.
Then he's safe from retribution.
And he's a hero.
He can convince himself that he isn't a monster who shot his friends in the head over a disagreement.
And maybe he'll even get a good deal in exchange for all this information and won't have to go to prison.
So I do think he's lying about this being his actual motivation for the murders.
He wasn't trying to stop a terrorist attack.
But the lie came so easily because regardless of his intentions when he pulled that trigger, he may have actually ended up stopping a terrorist attack.
The things he told that detective weren't made up.
As he's sitting in that room, rattling off a list of explosive materials that he knows Brandon kept in the apartment, the bomb squad is at the crime scene and they're inventorying those exact items.
And if that part was true, maybe other parts of his story were too.
When I first saw where Brandon Russell was arrested, I wasn't sure what to make of it.
He's from the Bahamas, so maybe he was going home?
He has Bahamian citizenship.
Most of his family lives there.
Maybe that's where he was going and he just wanted to avoid the airport.
Admittedly, geography is not my strong suit.
So I thought it might make sense that you would take a boat from the keys to the Bahamas.
And you can, sure.
But it looks like typically you take a ferry from Fort Lauderdale, not the Florida Keys.
And then you have to ask yourself, if he was there because he was trying to get home to the Bahamas, why had he picked up a friend first?
Why had they paid cash for two new rifles?
And why hadn't he contacted anyone to let them know where he was going?
He wasn't going home.
And the cops found him as quickly as they did because they knew exactly where to look for him.
Because Devin told them.
He was planning on building a mortar and firing it into a, there was a nuclear plant off the coast of Florida and it's off the coast of Miami and it's used to power that entire city in Fort Lauderdale and that kind of thing.
And they're planning on firing a mortar with nuclear materials in it at that plant into the cooling, things that are in the water.
The FBI alerted authorities in Monroe County, Florida to be on the lookout for Brandon Russell's vehicle.
Deputy Torres didn't find him in that Burger King parking lot by accident.
She was out looking for him.
We had his picture.
We were told that he could possibly be going up near Turkey Point for some type of terrorist act.
That's all we knew.
Turkey Point is the name of a nuclear power plant.
When Brendan Russell was handcuffed outside that Burger King in Key Largo, he wasn't alone.
Documents filed in federal court don't name his friend, but police reports from this initial encounter do.
He was traveling with another Adam Waffen member named William Chantra.
When Brandon left Tampa on Saturday morning, he didn't drive to his dad's house in Palm Beach.
Instead, he drove 45 minutes south to Bradenton, Florida, and he knocked on his friend's front door.
He'd been up all night.
He's still wearing his military uniform.
Remember, he discovered the bodies in his apartment when he got home from work on Friday evening, and work in this case was National Guard drill.
He hasn't slept at all.
He doesn't even have a cell phone.
But he drives to Bradenton and he gets William Chantra out of bed and he tells him what happened.
You can't ever really say what you would do in someone else's shoes in a situation you've never found yourself in.
But I can use my imagination.
And I think I would probably be pretty overwhelmed at first if I'm William Chantra.
You know, your friend is standing there on your front porch, exhausted and traumatized, and he's telling you that these other two guys, both friends of yours, are dead.
And he can't go home because their dead bodies are in his apartment.
I think my next move would probably be to say, I don't know, you know, hey, man, come inside.
Let me get you some clean clothes, something to eat, maybe some tea, you know, probably offer to let him stay on the couch for a few days until he can figure something out.
Something like that.
Something that involved everyone going inside and sitting on the couch.
Like I said, that's not a situation I've ever been in, so I don't know exactly what I would do.
But I can tell you with 100% ironclad certainty what I would not do.
And that's quit my job, withdraw the entire balance of my savings account, and get into that man's car heading out of town.
That just doesn't make any sense at all to me.
But that's exactly what William Chantra did.
He had $3,000 in cash, and on their way out of town, they stopped at the Chick-fil-A where he worked to let them know he wouldn't be back.
And then they hit the road.
There's not a lot of specificity in the timeline, so I don't know what route they took.
But later that day, they stopped at a Bass Pro shop near Fort Lauderdale, and they spent most of Chantra's cash on guns and ammunition.
After a night in a hotel, they headed south again toward the Florida Keys.
After his arrest, Brandon wasn't in the mood to talk anymore.
He admitted that there were guns and ammunition in the car, but when he was asked about Adam Woffen, he stopped talking.
Chantra, on the other hand, he was happy to chat.
He wasn't under arrest, and as far as I can tell, he's never been charged with anything.
And he had no problem telling the officers about Adam Woffen.
He was a member, of course.
And he'd met Brandon on Iron March, that neo-Nazi online forum.
In this conversation with FBI agents, he describes himself as a fascist, a National Socialist, and a neo-Nazi.
Beliefs he shares with his best friend, Brandon Russell.
Sometimes they would go shooting together.
And they'd recently been discussing the possibility of him moving to Tampa into the condo with Brandon, Jeremy, Andrew, and Devin.
They were all friends.
And they were all members of Adam Woffen.
He helpfully explained that, sure, most members of Adam Waffen use Iron March.
But Adam Woffen is actually much more exclusive than that.
Not anybody can just join.
In fact, Brandon screens potential members to ensure that they share the group's ideology and aren't, quote, complete idiots.
Which is an incredible statement, really, considering this is behavior that you might expect from a complete idiot.
That thing I said a minute ago about how he quit his job because he didn't know if he was ever coming home again?
We only know he felt that way because he said it to an FBI agent.
And for the second time that weekend, the FBI was sitting across the table from Brandon Russell.
This time though, he was in custody.
For my heart podcasts and Rococo Punch, this is the turning River Road.
I knew I wanted to obey and submit, but I didn't fully grasp for the rest of my life what that meant.
In the woods of Minnesota, a cult leader married himself to 10 girls and forced them into a secret life of abuse.
Why did I think that way?
Why did I allow myself to get so sucked in by this man and thinking to the point that if I died for him, that would be the greatest honor?
But in 2014, the youngest of the girls escaped and sparked an international manhunt.
For all those years, you know, he was the predator and I was the prey.
And then he became the prey.
Listen to the turning River Road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We all know, right?
Genius is evenly distributed.
Opportunity is not.
It's Black Business Month and Black Tech Green Money is tapping in.
I'm Will Lucas spotlighting Black founders, investors, and innovators building the future one idea at a time.
Let's talk legacy, tech, and generational wealth.
I don't think any person of any gender, race, ethnicity should alter who they are, especially on an intellectual level or a talent level, to make someone else feel comfortable just because they are the majority in this situation and they need employment.
So for me, I'm always going to be honest in saying that we need to be unapologetically ourselves.
If that makes me a vocal CEO and people consider that rocking the boat, so be it.
To hear this and more on the power of black innovation and ownership, listen to Black Tech Green Money from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio 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 Leavett Town, New York.
But reporting this 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 a legal book.
What is this?
This is a story about technology that's moving faster than the law and about vigilantes trying to stem the tide.
I'm Margie Murphy and I'm Olivia Carville.
This is Levittown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope.
Listen to Levitt Town on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast.
Find it on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Maybe you've heard that Stonewall was a riot where queer people fought back against police, or that it's the reason Pride is celebrated this time of year it was one of the most liberating things that i have ever done but did you know that before it went down in history the stonewall was a queer hangout run by the mafia the voguing at stonewall was unbelievable in the summer of 1969 it became the site that set off the modern movement for
lgbtq plus rights started banging on the door of the stonewall like one boom boom boom legend says marsha p johnson a mother in the fight for trans rights threw the very first brick she was really like scrubbed out of that history this week on afterlives will separate the truth from the myth in the life of marsha p johnson listen to afterlives on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Music It took a little bit of time to get through the process of transferring him from one district to another.
He was arrested in South Florida, but his case was in a court further north, back home in Tampa, in the Middle District of Florida.
It was June 8th by the time the U.S. Marshals transported him from Miami to Tampa to have his first real hearing.
He'd been in custody for more than two weeks already, and his attorney asked that he be released on bond.
His grandmother owned a home in Orlando that she was willing to offer as collateral, and both his mother and grandmother said they'd watch over him to ensure he complied with any release conditions.
He had no criminal history.
He was a member of the National Guard.
His father is a police officer.
And his attorney said there's just no evidence that he's a flight risk or a danger to the community.
And the judge agreed.
The judge agreed that there was nothing going on here that convinced him that this defendant should be held in detention.
And he granted the motion for bond.
But before he could sign the final order releasing Russell, the government filed an urgent motion for a stay.
They said, look, just give us 72 hours to write a more detailed explanation.
Let's brief this thing a little more thoroughly before we do anything rash.
Because this case never went to trial, this frantic back and forth about whether or not he would be released on bond is actually the most detailed set of documents in the entire case.
It sounds like the government was maybe phoning it in at that first detention hearing.
They sketched out the details, but they didn't offer a lot of evidence to demonstrate what they were talking about.
So when the judge initially granted that motion for bond, he's saying things like, oh, the government believes that the defendant is a purported leader of a neo-Nazi group.
The government asserts that the materials could be used to make a bomb.
The government suggests that the defendant is active on social media sites, but doesn't proffer any particulars.
It doesn't sound like they did a great job presenting any evidence at all here.
It sounds like they figured the judge would hear the key words Nazi and bomb and not need to hear much more than that.
The judge granted them that three-day pause on the release order, and they returned to court later that week for another hearing on the issue of bond.
And this time, the prosecution brought the evidence the court needed to see.
Those materials found in the garage weren't just some odds and ends that could be reasonably explained away as model rocket supplies.
There was a cooler full of homemade hexamethylene triperoxide diamine, a highly volatile explosive compound with no safe or practical use.
There were jars of nitromethane and potassium chlorate.
A coffee grinder full of some unknown white powder.
There were bags of potassium chloride, potassium nitrate, iron oxide, and hexamine.
He had several pounds of ammonium nitrate, much of which was in bags still inside a box addressed to him by name.
And there, littered amongst these bomb-making materials, There were shell casings that he'd fitted with fuses, a homemade setup that can be used to detonate a bomb.
In his bedroom, he had flyers for his neo-Nazi group.
On his dresser, there was a framed photograph of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVay.
In his closet, there were piles of military gear and cases of ammunition.
In the bedroom where his roommates were found dead, there was a duffel bag full of homemade fuses and handwritten instructions for making a bomb.
The prosecution also produced pages of screenshots of posts that Brandon Russell had made on Iron March, showing that he was actively recruiting for a group that, in his own words, he calls fanatical and militant.
And this motion to revoke Bond is the document where we find that anecdote about his friend telling the FBI agent that when he left home with Brandon, he didn't know if he would ever be back.
After reviewing this evidence, the judge changed his mind.
He wrote, Upon further consideration, I am obliged to conclude that defendants' actions in response to the discovery of the explosive materials and ongoing investigation cast doubts on suggestions of defendants' innocent intentions.
In his order revoking Russell's bond, the judge gives voice to the problem I was talking about at the top of the episode.
It's hard to know what's true.
A lot of the connective tissue here is based on claims made by Devin Arthur's immediately after he was arrested for murder.
The judge watched the same video I did, and he came to some of the same conclusions.
A lot of what Devin was saying looks like, quote, attempts by Mr. Arthur's to rationalize or justify his unconscionable killing of two people.
But the judge also said there's no denying that some of what Devin said is definitely true.
Writing, quote, Arthur's statements of potential harm appear consistent with what has been revealed so far about the defendant and the lifestyle he engaged in.
Consistent with other circumstances, defendant is placed at the head of a small neo-Nazi group with a militant bent, armed for violent confrontation and capable of executing on plans to harm others or destroy property.
The judge was a little concerned that the government had yet to produce any proof corroborating Devin's claims that there were internal Adam Woffen chats containing explicit discussion of some kind of plot.
But he was satisfied at least that Brandon Russell should remain in custody for the time being.
And that was it.
Two months later, Brandon Russell changed his plea to guilty just days before he was scheduled to go to trial.
The government never produced any additional evidence because they didn't have to.
They never had to convince a jury that Brandon Russell was going to do anything in particular with those explosives.
They never had to explain how they knew they'd find him near that nuclear power plant or why he had a car full of guns and ammunition when they found him.
A court never settled the question of whether or not Devin Arthurs was telling the truth about Brandon Russell's intentions.
Brandon Russell pleaded guilty on the explosives charges in September of 2017.
A few months later, in December, a 17-year-old Adam Woffin member in Virginia shot and killed his ex-girlfriend's parents.
On January 9th, 2018, Brandon Russell was sentenced to five years in prison.
One day later, on January 10th, police in California found the body of Blaise Bernstein in a shallow grave.
He'd been murdered a week earlier by a member of Adam Woffen.
In a matter of months, three young men connected to the group had killed.
And one of those killers is in jail insisting the group was planning terrorist attacks.
But the man he said was behind these plots was only charged with possessing And improperly storing explosive materials.
Brendan Russell's criminal case was resolved in a matter of months, and he was already serving his sentence before there was much movement in the case against Devon Arthurs.
That case dragged on for years.
The plea agreement was finally filed just days before the sixth anniversary of the murders.
Throughout this process, though, Devin Arthurs never denied committing the murders.
But there was a problem.
He'd always been a bit of an odd kid.
When he was in middle school, his parents agreed in mediation during their divorce that he should be evaluated by a specialist.
But it doesn't look like either of his parents ever followed through on that.
On the night of the murders, he told the detective that he thought he probably needed to go to a hospital to get some kind of treatment, and he wished he'd listened sooner when people told him he needed help.
He was diagnosed with ADHD as a child, but there were no other mental health diagnoses on his record prior to the murders.
Based on reports written by the doctors who evaluated him in jail, he rapidly deteriorated after his arrest.
But there does appear to have been some pre-existing mental illness going on.
In the interrogation video, he's a little disjointed.
His speech is a little pressured, but he's lucid for the most part, and his body language is pretty relaxed.
A doctor who evaluated him in 2020 wrote that Devin had developed a habit of pressing his fists into his neck when he felt anxious.
He would apply pressure to his throat until he felt dizzy, sometimes even losing consciousness.
A TV news camera in the courtroom recorded him doing it during at least one hearing, and the doctor said the behavior was compulsive.
He couldn't stop doing it even when asked by the doctor to try.
He also claimed to be experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations and said that he would lie awake at night and communicate with the dead.
Even on heavy doses of antipsychotics and sedatives, he exhibited the rapid tangential speech of someone who's experiencing mania.
For the first few years after his arrest, most of the doctors who met with him agreed he was experiencing severe mental illness.
And for several years, the only movement on his case was related to these competency evaluations.
He was moved back and forth between jail and a state mental hospital a few times.
And doctor after doctor met with him and reported back to the court that he wasn't competent to stand trial.
Now, there's a difference here between incompetent to stand trial and insane.
Insane is not a nice word, but it is a word with a particular meaning in a courtroom.
You're not going to go to a doctor and get diagnosed insane.
That's not really something we say anymore.
But in a courtroom, someone who is insane is not legally responsible for their actions.
That's something that you can argue at trial.
Being legally insane is not the same thing as being mentally ill.
You can be profoundly mentally ill and still legally responsible for a crime.
Someone who successfully presents an insanity defense has to prove that at the time of the offense, they lacked the ability to understand that what they were doing was wrong.
They couldn't form criminal intent because they just were not in the same reality as the rest of us.
And so at this stage of the case, before it goes to trial, we're not talking about insanity.
Insanity is a trial issue.
But before there can be a trial, he has to have the mental capacity to understand a trial.
So they have to get him back to competency.
These doctors aren't making any kind of finding about whether or not he was insane at the time of the murders.
They're just saying that right now, today, he lacks the ability to communicate effectively with his lawyer to participate in his own defense.
He doesn't know what's going on in the courtroom right now.
But after a few years of treatment, the doctors finally agree that he's competent to proceed, and they set the case for trial in May of 2023.
The morning the trial was supposed to begin, he signed a plea agreement.
The state agreed to drop the murder charges down from first degree to second degree murder, and he agreed to plead guilty to all the charges.
Earlier this year, a reporter from Court TV interviewed Devin in prison.
And in this interview, in 2025, his story isn't any clearer than it was on the night of the murders.
He's stable now.
He says he doesn't have hallucinations anymore and he has his anger under control and he sees a psychiatrist in prison once a month.
And he still believes that he did what he had to do.
The reporter plays a clip for him of his own statements the night of the murder, the part where he says he did it to prevent the deaths of even more people.
And he asks him, do you still stand by that claim?
And Devin says that he does.
And he gets visibly angry with the reporter when he's pressed on the issue of the way he's justifying these murders.
The way you describe it, you're basically turning a brutal murder into an act of heroism by saying that you were acting to save civilian lives from future terrorist attacks.
Well, I certainly was.
That's a way of aggrandizing yourself.
David, I can see where that comes from in that context.
But the thing is, I don't have any intent to really hurt innocent people.
He goes as far as to say that he has sacrificed 45 years of his own life to stop Adam Waffen.
I won't rehash the thoughts I had about those claims in the last episode.
I don't believe him.
I said that.
But I spent most of this week thinking about it, turning it over in my head and reading and rereading the documents that I have.
And I found two strange statements buried in the police reports from that night.
The officer who drove him from the strip mall to the apartment complex so he could show her where the bodies were wrote that during that very brief trip, I mean, it's right across the street, he asks her if the media would want to interview him.
And as they're pulling into the parking lot in front of the condo, he said, quote, it's just a shame I didn't get to write my manifesto before this.
Another report written by a different officer who later drove Devin from the crime scene to the police station says that Devin was talking pretty much nonstop.
From the portion of the report detailing Devin's statements immediately after being placed in a holding cell, the officer wrote, quote, Arthur's expressed how relieved he felt because he fulfilled his mission and he can now have peace.
Arthur's made several statements throughout that he was planning to do something in the next week or so anyway, and he was trying to pick a target.
So which is it?
Which is it?
Was he insane?
Did he snap because he was being bullied?
Was he heroically preventing a terrorist attack?
Was this a premeditated ideological act?
And for what ideology exactly?
The only person who really knows is Devin.
And he's still telling a version of this story that doesn't add up.
After last week's episode, I saw a listener comment online that they'd encountered Devin Arthur's many years ago while playing Minecraft.
Remember, Devin converted to Islam in 2016 when several members of his Minecraft server took a joke a little too far and ended up meming themselves into a bastardized version of Islam.
I'm not a gamer.
I don't know anything about Minecraft.
So I just took this as written and didn't try to look for more information about that.
That's just a culture I don't understand.
But this listener's message got me thinking.
A lot of people Devin was gaming with back then remember him.
This listener was not the only person to have ever posted online that they knew Devin from Minecraft.
There are posts where people are processing their shock that someone they'd known from an online game turned out to be a murderer.
So I started looking for posts made in the immediate aftermath.
I found some.
For My Heart Podcasts and Rococo Punch, this is the turning River Road.
I knew I wanted to obey and submit, but I didn't fully grasp for the rest of my life what that meant.
In the woods of Minnesota, a cult leader married himself to 10 girls and forced them into a secret life of abuse.
Why did I think that way?
Why did I allow myself to get so sucked in by this man and thinking to the point that if I died for him, that would be the greatest honor?
But in 2014, the youngest of the girls escaped and sparked an international manhunt.
For all those years, you know, he was the predator and I was the prey.
And then he became the prey.
Listen to the turning River Road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We all know, right?
Genius is evenly distributed.
Opportunity is not.
It's Black Business Month and Black Tech Green Money is tapping in.
I'm Will Lucas spotlighting Black founders, investors, and innovators building the future one idea at a time.
Let's talk legacy, tech, and generational wealth.
I don't think any person of any gender, race, ethnicity should alter who they are, especially on an intellectual level or a talent level, to make someone else feel comfortable just because they are the majority in the situation and they need employment.
So for me, I'm always going to be honest in saying that we need to be unapologetically ourselves.
If that makes me a vocal CEO and people consider that rocking the boat, so be it.
To hear this and more on the power of black innovation and ownership, listen to Black Tech Green Money from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio 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 Leavett Town, New York.
But reporting this 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 a legal book.
What is this?
This is a story about technology that's moving faster than the law and about vigilantes trying to stem the tide.
I'm Margie Murphy and I'm Olivia Carville.
This is Levitown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope.
Listen to Levitown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast.
Find it on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Maybe you've heard that Stonewall was a riot where queer people fought back against police, or that it's the reason Pride is celebrated this time of year.
It was one of the most liberating things that I have ever done.
But did you know that before it went down in history, the Stonewall was a queer hangout run by the mafia?
The voguing at Stonewall was unbelievable.
In the summer of 1969, it became the site that set off the modern movement for LGBTQ plus rights.
Started banging on the door of the stonewall like one.
Boom, boom, boom.
Legend says Marsha P. Johnson, a mother in the fight for trans rights, threw the very first brick.
She was really like scrubbed out of that history.
This week on Afterlives, we'll separate the truth from the myth in the life of Marsha P. Johnson.
Listen to Afterlives on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
���� First of all, it turns out Minecraft is a lot more complicated than I thought.
Don't laugh at me.
I don't play games.
But I thought it was just literally like Legos on the computer.
I thought it was computer Legos.
I don't know.
I didn't know there was a whole culture with this encyclopedia's worth of lore.
Devin was active on a Minecraft server called Civcraft, where users play a modified version of the game that includes elements of the game's civilization.
So in Civcraft, users band together as nations and they do diplomacy, they go to war against other nations in the game.
I don't know.
Don't email me about Minecraft.
I'm doing my best.
I read a lot of stuff about games that I didn't understand.
He eventually joined a server called Intcraft, which has similar gameplay dynamics to Civcraft, but it was started by people who met on 4chan.
And it turns out, Devin used the same username for years.
And his behavior was weird enough that a lot of people who played Civcraft remember him.
I found 4chan posts going as far back as 2013 that appeared to be Devin talking about Minecraft.
By October of 2014, the same month his dad kicked him out of the house for ordering a copy of Mein Kampf off Amazon, he's posting on 4chan trying to recruit more users to his Minecraft server, where he's playing as a Nazi.
He posted an image containing a swastika and what appears to be a historical photograph of a mass grave over which he's written an anti-Semitic slogan.
Now, again, I'm showing my ignorance of Minecraft culture, I guess, but both Int Craft and Civcraft have kept extensive histories of their games.
There are blogs and wikis and subreddits.
And as I was reading through one of the Intcraft wikis, because there is more than one, I kept seeing the name of a particular user.
Devin was second in command of a group of players that called themselves Striker Gang, named after their leader, a man playing under the username Striker123ABC.
Interesting, maybe, but not relevant.
I'm sure Devin played with a lot of people online.
But just days after the murders, someone posted a link to a news story about Devin on a subreddit for a particular Minecraft server.
Several Reddit users replied, recalling strange run-ins they'd had with him in the game.
He'd been pretty well known for a couple of years already for being a Nazi.
People posted things like, I remember him being a little shit in Civ, but I didn't realize he'd do anything IRL.
And I assumed those short political rants were to come off as edgy.
Guess I couldn't believe someone could unironically be like that.
But one user posted something very odd.
The account's been deleted, but the posts remain.
He killed two of my friends, and he planned on killing me.
This is a very surreal experience.
In a follow-up post, the same deleted account confirms that he was friends with the victims.
In real life, not on Minecraft.
Offline.
Another user replying to that post wrote, hope you're doing all right despite all this, Stryker.
Stryker.
Stryker from Minecraft was an Adam Waffen too?
So I looked for Stryker in the Iron March leagues.
And wouldn't you know it?
He's there too.
In 2016, Stryker posted on Iron March that he was one of three Adam Waffen members in South Florida.
He signed up with his real email address from a computer with an IP address in South Florida.
Now I have to hand it to him, this man has done an incredible job wiping himself off the face of the internet.
But he did leave just enough breadcrumbs that appeared to connect that Minecraft user to the Iron March poster to a 37-year-old middle school teacher in South Florida.
That would have made him 28 back in 2016, which is actually quite old for an Adam Waffen member.
Members tended to be in their teens or early 20s.
Maybe because that's the demographic that was most online in the dark corners where the group recruited, right?
They're more impressionable, less likely to make good decisions, less likely to have their lives figured out.
All that's true.
But it was also very intentional.
Brandon Russell was explicit about this.
He preferred to recruit very young members, literal children, because a child can't be an FBI agent.
If you only recruit teenagers, you don't have to worry that any of them are an undercover cop.
But maybe Stryker made the cut because there was just no way an undercover cop could spend that much time pretending to lead ISIS on Minecraft.
But back to that Reddit post.
Why did Stryker think Devin planned to kill him too?
Another mysterious Reddit post from a deleted account claims that the leader of the group talked to some people who knew Devin on Minecraft, and they allegedly told him that the murders were premeditated.
The account is deleted and the post is not very clear where this information came from, but someone is claiming that Devin had been talking online about a plan to kill not only Andrew and Jeremy, but several other members of the group too.
I guess we'll never really know.
As far as the hard facts go, Devin pleaded guilty to murder.
His story still shifts with every retelling.
He shot them because he was mentally ill.
He shot them because they were bullies.
He shot them because he had to prevent a terrorist attack.
But in one tiny moment, before those bodies were even cold, he told a police officer that he'd been planning to carry out an attack that week.
And he told another officer that he wished he'd found time to write his manifesto first.
Maybe there is no truth here.
There is no actual version of the truth because what happened isn't something that can be made sense of.
His story changes because even he doesn't know why he did what he did.
In Minecraft, he role-played.
Sometimes as ISIS, sometimes as a national socialist on a mission to kill communists, sometimes he was a pony from the My Little Pony animated series.
His online fantasy bled into real life.
It wasn't enough to pretend to be an ISIS or pretend to be a Nazi in Minecraft.
He founded a real-life Nazi group, and then he got pushed out of leadership of his Nazi group for swearing allegiance to ISIS.
When it came to his real-world ideology, he believed all sorts of contradictory things.
Maybe he really does believe entirely contradictory versions of his own reality too.
In the moment that he became a murderer, maybe he believed all of it or none of it.
But he'd been thoroughly steeped in the violent rhetoric of the Nazi group he helped create.
Even if he does believe that he was only trying to stop the group's violence, that culture of violence is the reason that gun was in his hands in the first place.
In the end, though, I guess he did kind of prevent something.
Brandon Russell's bomb-making workshop was discovered.
He was arrested before he got a chance to do whatever he may or may not have been planning to do in South Florida at that nuclear power plant.
But Brandon Russell's commitment to kicking off the race war only intensified during his years in prison.
And within months of his release, he was back online, chatting with impressionable young people about how to blow up electrical transformers.
Brendan Russell was recently sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Devin Arthur's is serving his 45-year sentence in Florida.
He spends a lot of his time these days in the prison law library.
As recently as last month, he was filing handwritten motions for post-conviction relief, claiming his attorneys failed him by not presenting more mitigating evidence at sentencing.
For what it's worth, I don't think any version of the truth would have helped him there.
Florida law didn't really give the judge any discretion to have handed down a lighter sentence, even if mitigation evidence had been presented.
But I'll keep an eye on the docket just to see if he gets that evidentiary hearing he's been asking for.
Maybe this time, he'll have a new version of the truth.
So Weirdly Guys is a production of Cool Snow Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Ray Gagan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickard.
You can email me at RidleyGuysPodcast 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 Riddle the Guys subreddit.
Just please don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.
Thank you.
Summer's here, and with the kids home and off to camp, it's easy for moms to get lost in the shuffle.
On Good Mom's Bad Choices, we're making space to center ourselves with joy, rest, and pleasure.
Take the kids to camp.
You know what?
It was expensive.
But I was also thinking, if you have my kid, this was kind of priceless.
Take her, feed her, make core memories.
I don't have to do anything.
Main thing, I don't have to do anything.
To hear this and more, listen to Good Mom's Bad Choices from Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
It's Black Business Month and Black Tech Green Money is tapping in.
I'm Will Lucas spotlighting Black founders, investors, and innovators building the future one idea at a time.
Let's talk legacy, tech, and generational wealth.
I had the skill and I had the talent.
I didn't have the opportunity.
Yeah.
We all know, right?
Genius is evenly distributed.
Opportunity is not.
To hear this and more on the power of black innovation and ownership, listen to Black Tech Green Money from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2020, a group of young women 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 part.
This is Levitt Town, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg, and Kaleidoscope about the rise of deep fake pornography and the battle to stop it.
Listen to Levitown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast.
Find it on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Maybe you've heard that Stonewall was a riot where queer people fought back against police, or that it's the reason Pride is celebrated this time of year.
It was one of the most liberating things that I have ever done.
Legend says Marsha P. Johnson threw the very first brick.
Start banging on the door of the stonewall like one.
Boom.
This week on Afterlives, we'll separate the truth from the myth in the life of Marsha P. Johnson.
Listen to Afterlives on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
