Maniac: The Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Mass Killer
By Harold Schechter

The crime:

In 1927 Andrew P. Kehoe blew up a primary school in Bath, Michigan. He also blew up his house and burned his wife’s body in ritualistic fashion after killing her with a blow to the head. Later, while rescuers were working at the school to try to find any survivors, he arrived at the scene and blew himself up in his truck, killing several more people. In total 45 people died, including 38 children.

The book:

A first-rate account of one of the less well-known atrocities in the annals of true crime. Indeed, the fact that it is so little known today is a point that Harold Schechter (a fellow I once referred to as “the dean of American true crime writing”) spends some time unpacking in his Introduction.

Why is it that some crimes grab and maintain a fierce hold on the public imagination when others, equally bloody or sensational, are almost immediately forgotten? “Horrific violence,” even approaching “the sublime of horror,” “isn’t enough to ensure that a crime will become an ongoing media sensation, let alone a permanent part of our cultural mythology.” There has to be more. It seems that “for a murder to really take hold of the communal imagination and exercise an enduring grip, something else is necessary.” But what?

It’s a point Schechter returns to at the end of the book when considering why the Bath bombing was only a “seven-day horror” pushed off the front page by Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight and then “relegated to obscurity,” Shechter puts forward an intriguing thesis. In order to become a cultural touchstone a crime has to resonate with contemporary public fears. It has to be “a story with a particular meaning, speaking to an issue that was a source of growing social concern at the time.” So around the turn of the twentieth century poisoners were big news because in

a pre-FDA age, when people could never be certain of what they were putting into their mouths – when medicines were made of strychnine and arsenic, bakers preserved their dough with sulfur of copper, babies consumed “swill milk” from cows fed on distiller waste, and soldiers received rations of “embalmed beef” – the poisoner was the nightmarish symbol, the personified projection, of a pervasive cultural anxiety.

Just so, Leopold and Loeb became embodiments of a fear of immoral youth (and affluent decadence) in the 1920s, while the “family” of Charles Manson “became the living realization of Middle America’s worst nightmares about sex-and-drug-crazed hippies” in the 1960s. If anyone remembers the Snyder-Gray case today it’s probably for the famous shot of Ruth Snyder being electrocuted in 1928, but at the time it was big news for other reasons.

In an era of radical social change, [feminist scholars] argue, when young women were kicking over the traces of Victorian morality and breaking free of their traditional domestic roles, Ruth came to embody everything that a sizable portion of the population most hated and feared: the sexually emancipated, self-indulgent flapper, symbol of a modern society run amok. In short, for Jazz Age America, the Snyder-Gray case resonated with powerful social and psychological meanings, becoming, in the words of culture critic Ann Jones, the decade’s “most important morality play.”

Schechter doesn’t bring the point up here, but the same has been argued about horror films. In the 1950s we got giant ants, spiders, and people mutated by nuclear explosions. Post-Watergate we got conspiracy thrillers. In the 1980s during the AIDS crisis we got “venereal horror” and slasher films where promiscuous teenagers were slaughtered. Each generation summons its own demons.

Interest in the Bath school bombing tracks this same movement. Following the long ascendancy of serial killers as the kings of true crime, we’ve gradually lost interest in them. As Shechter points out, the revelation in 2018 of the crimes of Samuel Little, who may have killed more than 90 people over five decades, “barely made a dent in public awareness.” The era we’ve entered into, however, has brought the Bath bomber back into the collective consciousness. Andrew Kehoe was a mass (not serial) murderer, a suicide bomber, an anti-government terrorist, a school killer. References to the Bath school bombing would increasingly appear in the media, “cited as a grim harbinger of the wholesale slaughters besetting the nation” in the twenty-first century.

And Kehoe wanted to kill a lot more. Over 500 sticks of dynamite and pyrotol that he had planted remained unexploded, enough to destroy the entire school and everyone in it. Which leads me to a quick digression. We’re lucky that making bombs isn’t easy. It’s not widely known, but Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold made a pair of propane bombs that they stuck in duffel bags and set to go off in the Columbine cafeteria on the day they went on their shooting rampage. Their attack was planned primarily as a school bombing, after which they would shoot any survivors. But the bombs failed to detonate. That’s not too surprising, as they were both 17 years old with no experience in such matters, but even a skilled handyman like Bill Rothstein’s elaborate (probably too elaborate) collar bomb only detonated one of the two pipe bombs it contained. Kehoe was known as a highly skilled mechanic and trained electrician, but most of the explosives he’d planted in the Bath Consolidated school building failed to go off.

Overall then I’d rate this as not just a great read – punchy and lean, with little of the novelistic or autobiographical flourishes that have become so prevalent in the genre – but a book that has something important to say about our two-way relation to true crime reporting. Another reminder that when we look into the abyss, the abyss is looking back at us.

Noted in passing:

Kehoe married into an established and prosperous family that he soon found himself in conflict with. Just for starters, they held the mortgage on the farm where he lived. For me this recalled All That is Wicked by Kate Winkler Dawson and what happened when Edward Rulloff married into the Schutt family, a blessed event that led to disastrous results. Considering the matter a little more, I also thought of Blood & Ink and Edward Hall marrying an heiress.

There is a lesson here that fits with some of what I’ve observed over the course of my own life. “Hypergamy” is a word that gets tossed around a lot these days when discussing female relationship choices. Basically it just means mating up, and among some online communities it’s considered to be an iron law, driven by evolutionary psychology (women seeking a mate with resources adequate to provide for them and their children). While some may call it gold-digging, casting it in these terms just makes it seem natural. And in the real world you don’t see women being criticized for it except in the most egregious situations.

Male hypergamy, however, is traditionally seen as quite unnatural, and men who marry for money are almost always looked upon with distaste if not outright disgust. I think of the killer Chigurh’s startled reaction to the Texaco gas station owner telling him that the station and the home out back is his “wife’s father’s place” in the coin-toss scene from the movie No Country for Old Men. “You married into it?” Chigurh chokes in disbelief. The owner’s immediate loss of status is palpable, and his attempt to save face doesn’t fly with Chigurh for a second (“I don’t have a way to put it. That’s the way it is.”).

The fact that this is how society looks upon men who marry up no doubt gives a turn of the screw to the domestic situation here and in the other cases I mentioned. And I imagine this was especially so in the 1920s. I don’t think the fact that all these men had wives with money from “good” families drove them to murder, but at the same time it probably didn’t help them stay on an even keel.

Another connection to the Hall-Mills murder case that struck me was the public fetishizing of souvenirs. In that earlier case the poor crab apple tree the bodies had been discovered under was stripped bare by trophy hunters. In this case a local reporter complained of how disaster tourists came to the ruins of the schoolhouse and “whittled it away and carried away bricks until there’s nothing left to tear down.” But even more remarkable was “one particularly ghoulish sightseer” who, in the immediate aftermath of Kehoe blowing himself up in his car, “deftly snipped a section of intestine from the steering column, placing it carefully in a jar of apparent alcohol.”

Why? The existence of “murderabilia” has always mystified me. What do people even do with these trophies? Put them on display in their homes? I guess it’s just a fact that collectors will collect anything, and celebrity/fame/notoriety has the effect of touching any part of our mundane, material reality with some aura of arcane value. Even so, you’d think people would have some sense of shame.

Takeaways:

Kehoe left a “note” (a sign wired to a gate at his farm) saying “CRIMINALS ARE MADE, NOT BORN.” He apparently targeted the school because he didn’t like being taxed to support it. Americans really do hate anything to do with taxes. Always have, and probably always will.

True Crime Files