The forgotten story of America's deadliest school massacre
In 1927 on this date a very angry and evil madman dynamited his local elementary school and killed 38 children
This Sunday column for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review was written in 2007.
MANIAC BLOWS UP SCHOOL,
KILLS 42, MOSTLY CHILDREN;
HAD PROTESTED HIGH TAXES
The "Bath School Disaster," described above in the dry but still shocking front-page headlines of The New York Times, remains the deadliest mass murder ever committed at a U.S. school.
Like the coldblooded murder of 20 six- and seven-year-olds at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, what happened in central Michigan on May 18, 1927, seems too horrible and too impossibly evil to be true.
Planned and carried out by school board member Andrew Kehoe, the massacre's final death toll was 45. That figure, which Kehoe hoped would be much higher, included 38 grade-school children, Kehoe and his wife. Another 56 were injured.
As is made clear by a quick Google search for "Bath School Disaster," Kehoe, 55, was one troubled, morally challenged Middle American.
Wife sick with TB, farm being foreclosed on, he was mired in serious financial problems -- part of which he blamed on high property taxes for construction of the Bath Consolidated School he never wanted.
Though generally considered a local weirdo, Kehoe was an intelligent college grad known for his thriftiness and poor farming abilities. Unfortunately, he also was very handy with both electricity and explosives.
Sometime after the school board appointed him to do maintenance at Bath School, Kehoe began accumulating dynamite and an incendiary explosive called pyrotol. He attracted no attention as he slowly stashed 1,000 pounds of explosives under the building's floors and wired them together.
By May 18 Kehoe had wired his farmhouse and buildings with home-made firebombs. He also had put explosives in the back seat of his pickup truck and covered it with tools and other shrapnel-producing metal objects. He also had bludgeoned his wife to death.
That morning he tied his horses and other animals in the barn and set all his buildings on fire. Almost simultaneously, the north wing of Bath School exploded. The time bomb under the south wing never detonated.
Kehoe wasn't done killing. He drove his pickup-bomb to the collapsed school, parked near some rescuers and used a shotgun to set off the explosives in his back seat. He and four others died instantly.
A three-day coroner's inquest made the highly dubious determination that Kehoe -- whose final message was a carefully carved sign posted at his farm that said "Criminals are made, not born" -- was not legally insane.
So why did Kehoe do it, asked the media of the day? Was it his financial woes? His hatred of property taxes? His evil step-mother? That nasty blow to his head he suffered as a younger man? Who could ever know?
The nuts running the local KKK blamed Kehoe's Roman Catholicism and hatred of Protestants and public schools.
But there's no report that religious scolds tried to pin it on jazz or radio, the violent video games of the day.
Or that New York Times editorialists blamed it on the easy availability of Kehoe's weapon of choice -- high explosives -- and demanded tougher dynamite-control laws.
Apparently, most folks back then pegged Kehoe for what he obviously was -- one of those rare, very disturbed, very dangerous, very evil madmen who will find a weapon to hurt us with no matter what we do or how many laws we pass.