The KILLDOZER Rampage

2024/7/25

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Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And it's just the three of us rampaging away in podcast land. And that's stuff you should know in case you didn't know.

Well, before we get started, I think we should mention that there are still tickets available for our shows coming up very soon in Chicago on August 7th and Minneapolis on August 8th. Yeah, it's going to be pretty great. We're going to be at the auditorium in Chicago, and we're going to be at the State Theater in Minneapolis. And there are tickets left, and you can come see us. It's a great show. We've gotten great feedback so far. Only like two people have been like, that sucked. Everybody else is like, that was pretty great.

And you can go to stuffyoushouldknow.com and click on the tour page, tour button. And you can also go to linktree.com slash SYSK live. And both of those places will take you to sites where you can buy legitimate tickets to come see us. Yeah. And those are both great cities for us. We love going to Chicago and Minneapolis. I know it's been a little while for Minneapolis, but we've always had great shows there. Yeah. And we're not promoting Indianapolis because Indianapolis sold out. So we'll see them as well.

But you can't come in if you haven't already bought your tickets. I'm sorry. Yeah, well, you know, it's a Midwestern-themed show, so sort of Chicago-adjacent, really Indianapolis-adjacent. So they got on it. They want to hear about their people. That's right. So, yeah, come see us at the beginning of August, you guys. All right. Back to it. Right. Good one. Oh, you think so? Yeah. Okay. Thanks.

I appreciate you letting us do this one first because like I just announced to you. Yeah. I just watched the documentary on this topic. Tread. Tread directed by Paul Solet. Let's it's Soleil. Who knows? I'm going with Soleil. Did you watch it? Yes, I have actually. I've seen it. I saw a few years back. I haven't seen, I didn't watch it recently for this. For some reason, I think we covered this in like a video or something. Like, how do I know about this?

It was pretty big news, and I mean, it's become an internet legend. Maybe we did do like an internet roundup on it or something like that on the 10th anniversary, maybe. I don't know. Yeah, that feels about right. But I guess we should say what we're talking about, eh? Sure.

Oh, I'll do that then. Okay. So for those of you who don't know, we're talking about an event that took place in 2004 in a little town called Granby, Colorado, about 50 miles west of Denver. Population 2000-ish, I think at the time. It's a small town. Yeah. But it wasn't, you know, an economically depressed town. It's like...

16 miles away from the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park. There's skiing around there, so there's tourists. There's also rural ranchers that come in to shop in Granby. It's fine. It's just a cute, quaint, small mountain town. Like South Park, basically. Yeah.

That's right. And it remained that way until June 4th, 2004, when a lot of this town was destroyed by a man in a bulldozer that had ended up being dubbed later on as the Killdozer. We'll get to that later. Right. But it was a muffler shop owner, a 52-year-old guy named Marvin Heemeyer, Marv Heemeyer. Mm-hmm.

And he had beefs with the town. He had beefs with people in the town. We're going to go over all that stuff. So he built or modified rather a gigantic bulldozer into basically a tank and destroyed the places of the people he had beefs with and more.

Yeah, I left all that out of my introduction, so I'm glad you filled it in. Yeah, you said it was like a tank, essentially. In some ways, as we'll see, it was actually superior to a tank. It was crazy what this guy built. And if you have the time and you're not driving right now, just go look up Killdozer and get a load of this modified bulldozer that Marv Hemeier created.

So, Chuck, I say let's just dive in. That was a pretty good little setup. Let's talk about Marv Hemeyer and who he was. He was known around town as Marv the Muffler Man, right? That's right, because he owned a muffler shop. Previous to that, he was in the Air Force, served in the Air Force, was stationed in Colorado at Lowry Air Force Base. Liked Colorado, decided to literally set up shop there. And this is in the early 90s. He moved to Grand Lake near Granby and...

You know, pretty soon he got he started getting his feathers ruffled and ruffling feathers in the town.

Kind of right away, it seems like, starting with having a beef against the local newspaper, the Sky High News. Yeah, so they introduced the concept of legalized gambling in Grand Lake, which is pretty near Granby. And the town was very evenly divided on it. The local newspaper, the Sky High News, or one of the local newspapers, another one in Grand Lake, came out very heavily against this.

legalized gambling. Marv was very heavily in favor of gambling, so much so that he edited, I think, two editions of a newspaper that was created just to tout the benefits of legalized gambling. And so he lost. I think they voted in the area, they voted four to one against legalizing gambling. And it was a bitter defeat, I think, to Marv.

He seemed like the kind of person who did not accept defeat very well and that it just triggered stewing in him. Yeah, that's fair to say, I think. And that was in 1992. That same year is when he bought some property that would be sort of at the center of his next dispute. It was a couple of acres.

In Western Granby, he bought it at public auction and foreclosure for a little more than $40,000, which turned out to be a great deal. The guy had a really good knack for finding good deals on stuff. Yeah. What's funny, you remember the savings and loan scandal? Yeah. He actually bought it from the FDIC because it was a failed savings and loan bank in town.

Yeah, including that big bulldozer that he would end up getting a great deal on. That was a savings and loan bulldozer. He had a nose for a deal. So he ended up setting up his Mountain View muffler shop there, was apparently a great welder. Stuff that he brought into the Air Force, it seems like, was just really good on machines and motors and engines and welding. And worked for a muffler shop for many years and finally was like, I'm going to open up my own shop.

So as this is happening, there's another local family, and this is one of the two main families that he had beefs with, the Docheff family. In particular, the patriarch, I guess, of that family, Cody Docheff, with his wife Susie and their son Joe, had a concrete factory built.

And they were trying to expand this factory, so they wanted this property that Marv had bought. They bought up a bunch of land around it, still needed more space, and tried to buy Marv's parcel from him that he paid $42,000 for. Mm-hmm.

And initially they had an agreement for 250 grand, which would have been a really nice take on that land deal for Marv. It would have, for sure. And apparently the Docheffs were at that auction that Marv bought it at and he outbid them. So, yeah, they were very interested in this parcel of land. He agreed to that $250,000 deal later on. I think that was eight years later. So that is a pretty significant increase in your investment there.

But he changed his mind. He decided that the land was worth more than $250,000. Apparently, he kept getting appraisals on it. So it's not like he was just saying, like, no, it's worth a billion dollars. He supposedly got appraisals and was like, this land is worth more than $250,000 now. So he said he backed out of the deal. I don't know how far the deal had gotten, but he definitely backed out of an agreement to sell it for $250,000.

Yeah, he ended up asking 400. The Docheffs came up with 350. And he said, now I want 450. Again, he said, because of another reappraisal, I'm not sure about all that stuff. Like, I mean, I'm just basing off kind of what I saw in the documentary and research. I didn't see any appraisals or anything. So I don't know if Marv was just like jacking this thing up or not. Who knows? Yeah.

But while this is happening, at least, you know, one of the things we have left to kind of piece this all together is the series of audio tapes that he made on cassette that he mailed to his brother. So the documentary features a lot of those, you know, just firsthand accounts from Marv detailing what's going on. And one of the things he just he didn't like the Docheffs. He said that Cody Docheff, and I guess this was after he had backed out of

I'm not sure if it was after he backed out or not, but Cody Docheff at one point basically accosted him in a restaurant. And that was one of their first exchanges about this. And Cody Docheff was known as a real hothead in town. And Marv, you should hear the words that he calls him on those audio tapes. He did not like this guy. That appraisal thing, that's a really good example of the –

squishiness, I guess, of this story, it's really difficult to pin down because, yeah, was he just jacking the price up because he didn't like the dough chefs? Did he really think that the land was worth that? Did he really get appraisals? You don't know. But that kind of thing completely changes the complexion of it. If he was getting appraisals and the dough chefs wouldn't pay the appraised value,

That's pretty reasonable. If he was lying about the appraisals and he was just jacking the price up on the dough chefs, that kind of makes him look like a jerk. And so just something that small can make a story like this totally do a 180. And this story is filled with those little kind of details that have either gotten overlooked, added, or blown out of proportion. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. So they the dough chefs end up buying some other land, a business park. And they said, hey, you give us your the land where your muffler shop is and we'll give you the prime lot that's right on the highway. This frontage land where your muffler shop is going to do a lot better, get a lot more attention. And he said, all right, I'll take that deal. But you got to build this muffler shop for me.

And that really expensive one and really kind of high end muffler shop, I guess. Right. Because that brought it up to about a million bucks. And they said, no, you know, you've gone too far. We're not going to pay a lot for that muffler shop. Boy, how long were you waiting on that? A good 30 seconds.

Oh, boy. I hope that most people get that one at least. It doesn't matter. As long as you got it, friend. Oh, I got it. So they said, no deal. And he said, all right, then you basically start a war with me and I'm going to

I'm going to do everything I can to fight the city to make sure that you're not able to open up that cement factory that you want to open up. And apparently got a lot of people on the side. There was a lot of opposition in the town that backed Marv against this expansion of the cement or concrete factory. Yeah. So what I don't understand is, was there opposition before Marv started this kind of grassroots campaign against it?

Yes. Okay. Yeah. So he didn't just drum that up out of thin air. Like not everybody was happy about a concrete batch creating plant. Like this is almost in downtown Granby.

Yeah, there was opposition, but it seems like he really fueled the fire against it. Okay, yeah. So now you have war between essentially what amounts to two hotheads who are neighbors. And a concrete plan is not like a tidy, quiet neighbor to be next to, right? So I'm sure that every sound and every clank and every bit of like dust that blew his way just made him less and less happy.

Um, and I guess, I don't know also if you said that they were buying up the land around him. So ultimately his muffler shop was the only little piece of parcel left and they were literally building a concrete plant around his muffler shop. And one of the things, if you, if somebody tells you this, they don't know what they're talking about and stop listening to them about this.

If they tell you that when the Docheffs bought the land up around him, that they cut off access from the road to Marv's muffler shop, basically created an island legally out of his muffler shop, that's wrong. That's not correct. He always had access and everyone always had access in and out of his muffler shop. That's a really big point that a lot of people basically say, see, the guy had no choice. He couldn't run a business like that. And that's just not true. Yeah, that is not true. But that's something you see a lot online. Yeah.

Thanks for clearing that up. You got anything else? What else do you want me to clear up? I got a pimple on my shoulder here. Take care of that. Why did you say that? Oh, I don't. I don't get pimples. So Marv is he's got another problem that's also brewing. So you've got this this problem with the dough chefs.

Then you have the second issue with the sewer line. His property wasn't hooked up to a sewer line. You've got to get hooked up to a sewer line if you're going to be in compliance. They kind of looked the other way for many, many years when he didn't because it was a small town, western Colorado. It was sort of the Wild West, and people would just sort of turn a blind eye if someone was making do on their own, which he was doing. Right.

Um, but he also didn't have a septic tank. Uh, so he started dumping sewage into his, uh, concrete mixer or concrete mixing tank. Um, big violation. Uh, then when that filled up, he started pumping it into the irrigation ditch on the property. Uh, all he had to do was pay a little bit of money at one point to hook up to some neighboring sewer lines. But he basically thought that's, uh,

Yeah, that's the town holding me over a barrel. You shouldn't have a resident or a business have to pay for their own sewer line, which is a public utility. Okay. So I don't know, like the town overlooked this for a good decade, maybe 12 years, something like that, that he was pooping and peeing, I guess, into a bucket or something and dumping it into a cement mixer. Even if they had a line up to the cement mixer. Yes. That's a huge health code violation, right? Yeah.

So when that concrete plant was built, they ran a sewer line to it, right? And that made it way easier and way less expensive for Marv Hemeyer to connect his muffler shop to that sewer line that's now being run from the road to this concrete plant next door than it would to have the city run it from the road to just his muffler shop.

The problem was this was the Docheff's sewer line, and it was on their land. And for him to tap into it, he needed to pay them. So they came back with an offer. They said, look, man, if you drop all these lawsuits and all this campaign against us, we will—

We will let you, we'll give you an easement, a maintenance easement to connect to our sewer line from your muffler shop free of charge. That will be your little strip of land onto our land, connecting your muffler shop to the main line. You'll be in compliance. We won't have this lawsuit against us anymore, and we'll just call it a day. And I don't believe Marv ever made good on that.

No, he didn't want to do it. He was done with them by that point, basically. So he was like, screw this. I'm not hooking up to your sewer line. I'm not paying the maybe as high as 80 grand to run the 400 feet to the main sewer line.

And so he wanted to sell the place. He was like, I'm getting out of this muffler shop and I'm going to move. And the town then said, well, hey, now that we know about all this, you can't even sell this thing without a sewer line.

So all of a sudden he was caught between a rock and a hard place there with this sewer connection. He refuses to do it. He ends up being fined $100 a day because of the sewage issue and other violations that were going on, like more than $3,300. When he wrote the check to the town, he put in the memo, it's for the Cowards and Liars Department.

So this is kind of where things were. This guy is fighting back against the town. He's fighting against these people. Whether or not you think it's fair that you have to pay for your own sewer line or not, it's the way it was. They weren't singling him out.

to try and like screw him over or anything. That was just how it works. I mean, I've had to replace sewer lines and it stinks. It's the worst thing to have to pay for. It stinks literally and figuratively. As a homeowner, it wrecks your yard or your property. It wrecks, it just, it's awful because it's not, it's just, it's expensive. Have you ever had to do it? It just, you hate writing that check. Let me knock on wood here.

I've had to do it a couple of times. It's awful. In the meantime, we need to introduce another family because he ended up having two beefs with two prominent families, the Docheffs and then the Thompson family, who were...

Had been there forever, thereby owned tons and tons of the land in the town. A guy named the elder, Dick Thompson, was on the county board and then became mayor for a while back when he was going through all this stuff in the 90s. And then he passed away and he took up this beef with his two sons, basically saying like, you owe me money because of all this stuff that your dad and the town board made me go through. Right.

One thing that I couldn't find, and it's one of those things that could change the complexion of the whole story, is at what point did the sewer thing that the city overlooked for a decade or so become a thing? You know, was it connected to the concrete plant? I don't know. It's just something that sticks out to me.

Yeah. So I guess what he did ultimately was he shut down his muffler shop in 2002 and he held an auction. He auctioned off all of his equipment. He sold his property to a local trash company for $400,000, which is, I think, the highest he had asked the Docheffs for it. But he said, I want to lease this big old metal shed in the back.

I got to keep a place to keep my bulldozer because it's basically the only thing that no one bought in the auction of my stuff. So I'm just going to keep it back here and this will be my little workshop. That's part of the deal. And they shook on it. And that's the setup starting around 2002. Yeah. And I'm also not sure how he was able to sell that stuff or sell it, given that he didn't put it in the sewer line, because in the documentary, they said the

the new owners, this trash company, like within 48 hours had the sewer line hooked up. I mean, I think the city was like, whoever, like this thing can't change hands without somebody agreeing that they're going to put a sewer line in. That's what I think. You could probably work that into a legal document. Probably so. Should we take a break? Yeah, we'll take a break and go find out. All right. We'll be right back after this with more on the Killdozer Rampage.

Sheesh.

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All right. So remember, Marv Hemeyer has gotten out of the muffler business, but he's known around town as an excellent welder. I mean, just a superior welder. And when he leased that little maintenance shed, well, probably not little, but when he leased the big maintenance shed in the back of the property that he had sold to the trash company, he was able to get a lot of money out of it.

He used it to modify the bulldozer that would later become the killdozer. To start out with, it was a 60-ton Komatsu D355A bulldozer, right? And, I mean, just as it came out of the package, it was 60 tons. This guy added at least another 20 tons of reinforcement to it. Yeah, it was – it's not like a –

a little front loader that, you know, your landscape person has brought over. If you've ever had your yard done or something, this is, this was a very, very, very large bulldozer, uh, which you can tell. And when you see footage, when there are other bulldozers trying to stop it, and this Komatsu is, is clearly, clearly larger, right? So he buys this thing at auction in California, has it shipped in July, 2002 and starting at the beginning of 2003, uh,

He and this is one of the craziest parts of this whole story to me is that this wasn't a guy that got mad and like had a plan. And it sort of fizzles out after a week or two when you're like, all right, well, you know, maybe I'll just watch the Broncos game and let cooler heads prevail. Right. Like he spent a year trying.

dedicated to this project with this idea, like planning this thing and equipping this thing. He set up a cot and a blanket and had a fridge. He was basically living in this, um,

basically full time working on this thing at night. So the people, you know, this company that bought it, this trash company, they're all around the place. Like an insurance adjuster came to inspect the shed because it was on the property of the trash company. He had it behind a tarp and made up some story about how he was working on some equipment for like...

air conditioning for some professor and like no one ever looked behind it. It fit by an inch on either side. And he thought this was all God telling him all these little things that happened that where he didn't get caught beforehand, he thought was God saying, this is your mission. Right. Marv Heidmeier is a great example of why we need wives.

Well, he had a girlfriend for a long time and she was all over the documentary. It sounded like she was Australian or from New Zealand maybe. Trisha McDonald. Yeah, that was kind of one of the sadder parts is that she seemed like she really liked him and she was like, I kind of had no idea that he was that angry and it was going this far. Yeah, if I remember correctly, she had a little bit of self-blame maybe going on or at least wondering how things could have turned out differently. Yeah.

Well, I think their breakup beforehand might have been one of the last draws, too. And so she may have felt bad about that. Oh, that's another one, too. So in addition to his muffler shot being completely cut off from access to the main road, he also caught his fiancee in bed with another man. It's another dumb thing you'll find on the Internet from people who don't know what they're talking about, too. Oh, is that a thing? It's usually chalked up to explaining him snapping.

Oh, um, one thing I did forget to mention is that 400 grand he got, he was, I guess, savvy enough to know that they could come after that money afterward to help give people. So he, uh, while his father was still alive, his dad died shortly before, which was another last straw apparently, but he had given the money to his father who then gave the money to his sister and brother. So it was like two people removed and untouchable, I guess. Oh, wow. Yeah. That is pretty savvy. Yeah.

Yeah. So he's got this killdozer that he's putting together. Let's talk a little bit about that. Like I said, it was a 60-ton bulldozer, just a big, big boy. But on top of that, he took sheets of steel and separated them by about 12 inches and poured concrete in the space between the two. So he made 12-inch on either side.

12 inches of steel with concrete in the middle, plates that he created essentially a superstructure that he later, before his rampage, right before his rampage, lowered on top of the Komatsu itself. Yeah, sealing him in there. He also had gun ports. He had a .50 cal rifle, which is

If you just look up what a .50 caliber round looks like, it's very large and destructive. A .308 semi-automatic and then a .22 long rifle. He also had a .357 revolver inside. And he had five video cameras mounted on the outside feeding three monitors on the inside. And these camera lenses were protected by 3-inch Lexan, bulletproof plastic, basically. Mm-hmm.

So the small little tiny ports that were even on this thing were, because they tried eventually shooting into these, were only like

Two by three inches. So even these sharpshooters were having a hard time getting a bullet in there. And even if they did, it wasn't it was not effective anyway. Yeah, there were so many layers of this plastic bulletproof like cladding, I guess, that like even if they broke some of the layers, there was still more layers to go through. It was nuts. But there's something I want everybody to make note of. He put in those three gun ports, like you said, it's really important.

Because one of the things that a lot of people use to defend Marv is that all he wanted was property destruction. That's all he was intent on. And there's no way to explain away those three gun ports otherwise. They don't jibe with that narrative at all. And that certainly changes the complexion of things too. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. As far as like folk hero who just wanted to wreck the business who wrecked his business.

Uh, yeah, you don't go in there with a 50 cal. No. And I mean, you can, he didn't even need to defend himself. They couldn't get through this, this, the, the plating, the cladding. And even if he did need to defend himself, he certainly didn't need three guns. So there was basically no reason for those guns to be there aside from shooting people. Yeah, absolutely. Um, they would later, uh, obviously he, um, like I said, he mailed those tapes to his brother, uh, right before the attack.

Um, they've ended up finding a list afterward with, uh, sort of like a hit list for the buildings he wanted to wreck, uh,

Obviously, the Docheffs and the Thompsons were on that list, as was the church in town, the Catholic church, that is, because on the tapes he was, or at least in this one part, he was very anti-Catholic, called Catholics cowards, and the Thompsons were Catholic, and that was one of his big beefs. So, again, that Dozer manifesto, they make amazing use of his actual tapes to let him just kind of present himself. Yeah.

And like you said, that he apparently believed that God was at the very least looking the other way and kind of tacitly condoning this mission, if not, you know, blessing the mission by all those ways that you had said, like people overlooking the dozer, the fact that the dozer was the one thing that he wasn't able to sell at auction. He even said that God told him to take the winner off.

put this whole thing off for a year essentially. And, uh, he did. He also went on at length about the, um, the town that he was dealing with and gave his side of the story quite clearly. And he said that they use mafia type tactics, tactics against him. And there's this line from his, um, tapes that this is like the people who consider him a folk hero point to it said, or he said, um,

I was always willing to be reasonable until I had to be unreasonable. Sometimes reasonable men must do unreasonable things. And it's just a sweeping...

Thing to say, because it completely explains away everything he does after that point. And it completely gives him an alibi up to that point. He's saying, I know what I'm doing, wrecking the town. That's an unreasonable thing. But I have every reason to do this. I have a very reasonable reason to do this very unreasonable thing. It's really, it's a, it's a very, I don't know. It's just nuts how well it encapsulates everything. It just kind of lets them off the hook.

Yeah, totally. He had also been hassling the paper for not covering his story. Like he was like, no one's even writing about my beef with the sewer line and all this stuff. And so they ended up giving him a free ad. They were like, oh, geez, this guy. How about we give you an ad? They came out and photographed him and gave him an ad for his muffler shop, which it turns out wasn't enough to appease him, as we'll see. The end of his lease was coming up.

He had gone through that breakup. His dad had just died. And so it was game time, basically. On June 4th, 2004, like we said, he sealed himself in that cockpit. Kind of like couldn't get out, basically. Right. Into what looks like this. A bulldozer meets a, what were those crawlers called in Star Wars where the Jawas?

traded out of. It kind of looked like that. Yeah. I don't remember what they're called. I just remember it was built, it was based on a brutalist hotel in Morocco that George Lucas saw. Exactly. And you don't need to write in everybody. We can go look it up later. Well, you know what it's called, John. Uh,

At 2 p.m., and this was, you know, when you see footage of this thing or watch the documentary, this thing goes four or five miles an hour. So it's a different kind of rampage. It's a slow motion rampage going through town. But this thing was unstoppable, was the issue.

Yeah, I mean, that's a really great way to describe it. They, as we'll see, couldn't come up with anything to put an end to this. I say before we really get underway with the rampage, we take our final break and come back and tell everybody just what happened. What do you think? All right, let's do it.

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All right, so the rampage starts. Obviously, the first people he's going to go after are the Docheffs and that concrete plant. When he gets there, they quickly realize what's going on. Cody Docheff is like, that's Marv Hemeyer in there. And cops are like, are you sure? How do you know? And he's like, trust me, it's Marv Hemeyer. He tries to stop it. He tries shooting a gun.

at this thing, which is just a joke. I guess that's just the first sort of reaction is like, shoot it. In Western Colorado, at least. So, hey, no shade there, by the way. But he starts shooting at this thing. He's literally getting in his own, this is Cody Docha, getting in his own little front end loader and driving at it. He gets, he rams aside of it and he's trying to lift it up off of the ground because he's

Basically, they're like, we can't, you know, they've tried shooting into it already. They know that's not going to work. So they want to disable those treads. If you can disable a tank's treads, then you're in business. So they thought if they could lift it off the ground, that might work. They thought if they jam this huge steel pole into the treads that that might, you know, get stuck or throw something out of whack. None of that works. And when Cody Docheff rams this thing and tries to pick it up,

His wheels come off the ground. He hits the front windshield and gets knocked out cold and awakes to bullet fire coming his way. Yeah, that was one thing that Marv Heemeyer did was he took aim and shot at Cody Duchef's, his front end loader. And there were bullet holes from the .50 caliber in the bucket of the front end loader. Astoundingly, he didn't hit Cody Duchef and he...

I guess, left the cement plant at this time and started moving toward the town. And one of the ways that he got to the town was busting through a concrete road barrier, a pair of them that I believe some highway patrolmen were hiding behind. And they got out of the way just in time because that killdozer went right through those concrete barriers on its way to downtown Granby. Yeah. And he didn't even have to go that way. So that was another instance where he literally turned left and headed right toward those guys. Mm-hmm.

And these are cops. They're bringing in Forest Service people. They're bringing in larger guns. They've ended up firing about 200 shots at this thing. But again, they're just firing it at hardened steel. And so nothing is doing any good. Cody Docheff also tried to climb up on top of it. But Marv and I shouldn't be laughing here, but this is the one part I thought was kind of funny.

Marv thought of that too. And he greased this thing up with like axle grease. And so Cody Jochef is slipping off of this thing. Eventually there is a guy, a deputy named Glenn trainer who climbed up on top of the building and jumped right on top of the thing. And he rode this thing around town. There's footage of this guy riding this thing.

killdozer around town trying to disable it from above. Yeah, Undersheriff Glenn Trainor is typically referred to as one of the big heroes of the day just for trying. Nobody was successful, but a lot of people tried and he definitely risked

Life and limb, essentially, to try to disable this thing. He found what he thought was a weak point into the engine and shot into it a bunch of times. Turns out it was the cover for the air conditioner that Marv had put onto the bulldozer.

He also got a flashbang grenade, dropped it down the exhaust pipe. It blew up. It did absolutely nothing. And despite, yeah, it being greased, Glenn Traynor hung on until Marv Hemeyer got the killdozer to the town hall building.

And Glenn Traynor saw quite clearly he was going to be taken along with this 13-foot-tall, 80-ton bulldozer right into town hall, and he would not fare very well in that circumstance. So he jumped off and rolled onto the grass from that 13-foot height.

Yeah. So he's out of there safely. Like you said, it goes after the town hall. It has a local library in there where who knows whether he knows this or not, but there were a bunch of kids in there in a reading program, including the 11 year old daughter of the mayor at the time. So they're huddling in the basement. The town has issued a reverse 911 call to basically where they call every single resident in town at once.

And say, you know, shelter in place or in this case, calling the people at the library saying get out of there. He then turns on the the bank, the Liberty Bank branch, because obviously he had problems with the banking system there.

He then turns on the newspaper and Patrick Brouwer, the editor, the guy that he'd been having his newspaper beef with, is running out the back door as he is collapsing this building. He gets out in the nick of time as he's collapsing the building. Yeah, and frequently in interviews, Patrick Brouwer points out that had he tripped and fallen, he'd be dead. It was that close. Yeah, for sure. It does seem to have been that kind of experience for people on the ground during this rampage.

Somebody would run in shouting like, get out, get out, and probably didn't even have time to say what the heck was coming when the killdozer would come crashing through the front of the building. Not the front door, not a side door. It would come right through the front wall or the side wall. And one of the things that people pointed out who were there was that he would—

He would come crashing through the front wall and it would take out like, you know, the front wall, but the roof would still be staying. So he'd back up and he'd go after a corner of the building. So like he was trying to demolish these buildings. He was making a pretty great attempt at it. And toward the end of the rampage, he got pretty good at taking a building out in a couple of swipes. No, absolutely. So then, you know, this is a small town when he makes a turn.

toward a thing, they kind of have a pretty good idea of where he's going because of the well-known beef. So after he destroys the newspaper building, he makes a turn and everyone's like, he's going after the Thompson's.

He ends up Thelma Thompson, 82 year old widow of former mayor Dick Thompson, was literally asleep taking a nap 30 minutes before her house is just gone because they get her out of there. He completely destroys her house and then turns toward their business, which is the Thompson and Sons excavating business and services and starts destroying those buildings. Yeah.

He cost them a good million and a half dollars, I saw, to rebuild. Again, despite the people he had the beef with not even being alive any longer. That's how much he hated the Thompson family.

Um, after that, the next thing he did, this is a really, really critical thing that he did that really kind of takes away a lot of sympathy I had for him. He took out, uh, he, he drove up to the propane company, a local propane company and uses 50 caliber rifle to shoot at propane tanks for small ones, then big ones.

He tried to shoot in an electrical transformer so that the sparks, ostensibly so the sparks would ignite the propane when he shot a propane tank open and the whole thing would blow up. And that would have been significant had this propane, um, company blown up. I saw an estimate that, uh,

Everyone within a half mile radius would have been in danger. The blast would have been that big. Yeah. This is downtown. It was as densely packed as the town of Granby could be. So a half a mile radius is, you know, that was a significant thing.

And the reason why, and Patrick Brower points this out, and I tend to agree with him, he takes issue with people who are like, these were all just warning shots. He just wanted to destroy property. He just wanted to blow up the propane company so that he could destroy more property. He wasn't trying to kill anybody. And Patrick Brower is like, no, this is not true. The reason he didn't kill anybody was because the way that he had mounted the rifles was so kludgy that he had almost no chance whatsoever of shooting anybody. Right.

those bulletproof glass sights that you were talking about, like the two by three inch sights, they weren't near the guns. The guns weren't mounted right by them. The video cameras that he was using to kind of drive around with, they weren't in line with the guns either. So when he was aiming the gun, he had to do some sort of weird mental topography to kind of figure out what he was looking at in relation to the gun and try to shoot that way. And Patrick Brower's point is,

That's why no one was shot to death. That's why those propane tanks didn't blow up. That's why the electrical transformer didn't blow up because he missed, not because he was just firing warning shots because he missed. And if those guns had been mounted more, I guess, efficiently, it could have been a totally different outcome from this whole event.

Yeah, for sure. He also, I mean, most of those bullets didn't even make it out of his own vehicle because the way he had the big 50 cal mounted, it ended up hitting his own armor. So you see like shooting toward this propane thing and immediately these shots are just sort of exploding because I think they were some special kind of round or something. And they were sort of exploding at, you know,

into his own tank. I'll bet that was frustrating. Yeah, and who knows if he even knew what was going on. Like, no one knows what he could even see inside that thing. Oh, yeah, good point.

So the machine's damaged at this point. All the antifreeze has dumped out. There's white smoke just pouring from this thing. There's hydraulic fluid leaking all over the place. And it's pretty clear that like the last gasp is happening. So he heads down to Gambles of Granby hardware store. There was a guy on the town board there related to the hardware store that approved the concrete plant. And so they were on the list.

And you see this thing chugging along. It's on its last legs. Somehow, remarkably, had not failed up into that point. Like, I can't believe at some point it didn't. Those treads didn't. I guess that's why it's a bulldozer there. You know, it's like a tank. It's supposed to do that.

So it was doing it well. But what he didn't know was that there was a basement in that hardware store. And eventually that right front tread slipped down just a couple of feet, just enough into that basement to where the tread had nothing against it. And it was just spinning. So it was finally stopped. Yeah.

People were walking alongside of this thing for a lot of the time. So there were people within earshot at this point. And there suddenly comes a muffled gunshot from inside the killdozer. And people were like, well, I'm pretty sure that if that's Marv Hemeyer who's in there, he's no longer with us. And they were correct. The next day,

They tried to blow a hole into the killdozer. And do you remember at the outset I said that it was probably superior to a tank? The reason I said that is because the SWAT team who was creating this explosive charge to try to breach it, they consulted with some explosive experts who told them what charge to create to blow a hole in the side of a tank, and it didn't work.

The explosive charge that could blow a hole in a tank did not blow a hole in the killdozer. That's how thick and well-welded the superstructure over the bulldozer was. So nobody was killed or injured in this thing, which was remarkable considering what was happening. It was a little over two hours, up to $7 million in damage. I think 11 of the 13 buildings destroyed.

were occupied at the time. And like you said, people were literally running out the back door for a lot of these. And that was it. You know, the guy ends up

You know, they take this tank apart and they didn't want any memory of it in town. So they take it apart, get rid of the parts. I think one of them ended up staying with the Thompson family, like one small part. Yeah. A trunnion, I think, something that connects the bucket to the rest of the dozer that had broken off when he came crashing through their house.

Yeah, but aside from that, people basically wanted to forget about it. And with the help of, you know, insurance and everything, they ended up rebuilding everything. Not that it wasn't at great personal cost as well, of course, but...

And Marv was gone, and they were really eager to move on for the most part as a town. Yeah, Casey Farrell, who owned Gamble's hardware store, it took him seven years because his store was insured, but it wasn't insured for the kind of money it takes to rebuild after a dozer rampage.

Yeah. But I guess the Denver Post visited a year after on the anniversary of it to do a story, and they found that most of the buildings had either been rebuilt or were in the process of rebuilding. And I believe the mayor at the time – I guess this would have been a year after – a guy named Ted Wang, he said that the whole rampage had actually –

inspired the town to become tighter as a community. Like more people became involved in local politics and the town just kind of like took pride in its own resurrection and rebuilding itself brick from brick. Which is essentially, I guess, the opposite of what Marv Heemeyer would have wanted from his rampage. Yeah. You know? Probably. And, you know, the narrative that you hinted at early was

Still lives on for a lot of people. A lot of people think this guy's a folk hero. Probably not surprisingly, a lot of those people live on the very far right of the political spectrum and say, you know, this was a guy taking down, you know, his local government that was being and he was a victim of his local government.

And he was taking them out, you know, doing what we all want to do on any given day. And people still celebrate June 4th as Killdozer Day in some of those circles. Yeah. And so, you know, doing research on this, I just got less and less sympathetic with the guy and really just came to dislike him. And then I came across that Dozer Manifesto webcomic by Mr. Vee.

And just reading some of it, I was like, well, I'm not exactly sure how I think about this whole thing. And I think I don't have enough information about what really went on in that town or didn't go on to decide one way or another. And I don't think that matters. But I just thought it was interesting that I had an about face, I guess. I find it interesting when I think of my thoughts. Yeah.

There was – no one is quite sure who came up with the name Killdozer in terms of this case, but there was obviously the band Killdozer. Got to shout them out from Madison, Wisconsin. Okay. And they may have – I think they were the early 80s. Were they –

Before or after the movie? Because wasn't there a movie as well? There was a movie called Killdozer from 1974. It was an ABC Saturday suspense TV movie that was based on a 1944 short story by fantasy writer Theodore Sturgeon.

Okay, so I bet Killdozer the band named themselves after that would be my guess. I would think, but yeah, I don't understand why it's like, well, where did the name come from? Like, you would just look at that thing and be like, that's a Killdozer without ever hearing that word together. It's not like some great mystery. Like, that's a Killdozer. That's just what you call that thing. Humans have some sort of innate genetic understanding of

Of seeing that thing and knowing that it's a killdozer without ever seeing that word before. Yeah. Though it didn't kill.

No, it didn't. That's a great point. So I guess Destroy Dozer is a better one. Or Bulldozer. Oh, yeah. If you want to know more about Killdozer, there's plenty of stuff to read and watch on the Internet. Just be wary. Hopefully we've armed you with a little bit of info to measure against. And since I said that, it's time, of course, for Listener Mail.

Yeah, and watch Tread. You can rent it. I think it's free on Tubi and some other stuff. It is really well done. It's a great documentary. Well, he does these recreations that I guess are CGI, but it looked to me like I was like, man, did they actually build another Killdozer replica to shoot this stuff? Yeah, it was one of those few documentaries that had a $150 million budget.

I'm not sure, but it looked pretty good. And it's only like 98 minutes long or less than that. 88 minutes, 90 minutes. It's a good one. It's definitely worth seeing.

All right. Listener mail. Dangers of whistling. Hey, guys, just finished that episode. And I thought you were going to mention the one thing about not whistling in a theater. Not 100% sure of the veracity of the history of this, but old theater legend has it that early stagehands were also sailors and or dock workers who communicated in whistles. And therefore, if you were a casual bystander whistling in a theater, you could actually cause an accident through miscommunication.

as with some of other superstitions in the theater. This one is based more on safety than anything else, and I always find it fascinating. The concept of bad luck was apparently effective for early safety compliance. Thanks for keeping me entertained on my long L.A. commutes. And that is from Claudia, who is a stagehand in Los Angeles. Awesome. Thanks a lot, Claudia. I feel like we talked about that or came across it in research or something like that. I don't know if it was related to whistling or what, but it had to do with...

Salty Sea Dogs, Moonlighting as Stagehands for the theater. Oh, I remember that. Very good. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks, Claudia, for getting in touch. And if you want to be like Claudia and share something awesome and interesting with us, we'd love that. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it on its way to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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The KILLDOZER Rampage

Stuff You Should Know

Chapters

Who Was Marv Heemeyer and What Triggered His Rampage?

The Build-Up to the Killdozer Rampage: Marv's Beefs and Preparations