Bulldozer

I'm Ina Garten, and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. We talk all about attending a fashion show in Paris together, throwing dinner parties, and making her Broadway debut in other desert cities. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers! Support for Criminal comes from FAIR. If you run your own shop, whether it's an online shop or brick-and-mortar, you want your products to be unique. With FAIR, it's easy for independent retailers to stock products from over 100,000 brands worldwide. Perfect for planning e-commerce and online shopping. inventory for the holiday season. Sign up today and get 50% off your first wholesale order, up to $100, at faire.com slash criminal. That's faire.com slash criminal. Terms may apply. Hi, it's Phoebe. In just a few weeks, I'm going to be heading back out on the road with a brand new live show. But this tour is very different from the ones we've done before. Because this time, I'm telling a story I've never told before. My own. You'll get to hear about my wild family and the secrets I kept for them. It's a show about not giving up on people. Get your tickets now at thisiscriminal.com slash live. I hope to see you. This episode contains language that may not be suitable for everyone. Please use discretion. On June 4th, 2004, Patrick Brower got a call at the newspaper offices where he worked in Granby, Colorado. Did you know there's something going on down in western Granby? There's guns going off and somebody's going crazy. It was just a quick phone call, and when I heard that, I thought, wow, that sounds interesting. Granby is a small town in the Colorado Rockies. Shortly after that first call, another call came in. This one was from the sheriff's department telling us to evacuate and leave the building and go east because there was something dangerous going on and they wanted to get everybody out of town. At the time, Patrick Brower was the editor of the Sky High News, located in a building on the main road that runs through Granby. Mostly everyone decided to leave the office, but Patrick and another editor stayed. Suddenly there were a lot of police cars on Main Street. Some of them were coming into our office, wanting to use the phone. They couldn't really tell us much other than there's something going on in eastern Granby. A guy's tearing down buildings. You guys maybe should get out of here, but we decided to stay put because we wanted to cover whatever was happening. Patrick grabbed a digital camera and went outside. He started heading west, down the town's Main Street, Highway 40. And I could see coming toward us this I didn't really, you could say it was a bulldozer, but I thought it was like sort of a weird bulldozer tank. Kind of looked like a 1960s version of a spaceship on treads. I frequently think of it as Darth Vader's helmet on a bulldozer. And at that time he was flanked by police officers. On both sides and in the rear. Could you see inside of it? Could you see who was driving it? No, no. It was completely enshrouded in steel. So you couldn't see in any way. There were no windows or. There were a few things that looked like openings, but they weren't large at all. Patrick watched as the bulldozer slowly drove down Main Street, toward where he was standing. He went back inside the newspaper building. We could feel the rumble. We could actually feel the ground shaking. And we started to be able to hear the creaking and the clanking of the treads. And we were in the office looking out the window and suddenly it took a sharp right turn toward our office. The bulldozer first slammed into an aspen tree in front of the newspaper offices. And then it kept going right into the building. The wall just collapsed like a sheet of glass. And then you could really hear the dozer, the diesel engine screaming and the treads creaking and the ground shaking. Patrick says he was about 20 feet away from where the bulldozer had taken down the wall. He and the other editor turned and ran toward the back of the building. As we turned and ran out of the building toward the back to exit the building, I thought to myself, man, we've really upset somebody in our coverage or what we've written in the paper. Could it be somebody we put in there for a DUI or somebody who assaulted his wife? And then it all kind of dawned on me, yeah, this could probably be Marv. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Marvin Heemeyer was a 52-year-old mechanic and welder. He was originally from South Dakota and had served a short stint in the Air Force. He moved to Grand Lake, the next town over from Granby, in 1991. He liked the area because of the snowmobiling. That was his main goal in being in the area was to snowmobile. And Marv being mechanically inclined would modify snowmobiles, make them faster, make them louder. He would extend certain kind of bumpers on the snowmobiles. So they could go through rough terrain. And he developed a circle of friends around snowmobiling. And it was through that circle of friends that he then decided, well, he would try to help one of his friends out by buying him a property where that guy could put his auto repair shop. Soon after he moved to the area, Marv Heemeyer went to an auction. He hoped to get a good deal on two acres of land in Granby. He planned to rent it out to his friend. He started by bidding $20,000 for it. But someone kept bidding against him. His name was Cody Docheff. Cody Docheff was the patriarch of the Docheff clan who had a concrete business in Granby. And Cody was a colorful character. He's kind of short, very outspoken. You know, he would dress in Western attire. He was kind of a no-nonsense guy. Marv Heemeyer eventually outbid him and bought the land for $42,000. But he later said he went up to Cody Docheff after the auction and said he was willing to sell it to him. For $20,000 more than he had just paid, they said that was too much. And that was going to mark a continuing trend whereby Marv would offer to sell that parcel to the Docheffs. They would make an offer and he would say that sounds good. And then a week later, he would come back and say, I want another $100,000 or whatever. And I think there were three offers made, all of which ended up failing because Marv upped the price so high that they just couldn't afford it and they wouldn't accept it. Marv Heemeyer wasn't happy about this. He eventually opened a muffler shop on the property after his friend decided he didn't want to sell it. He didn't want to rent it after all. And then, a few years later, Marv found out that Cody Docheff, along with his wife and son Joe, had bought land next door. They were planning to build a concrete plant on it. Their plan would require a zoning change. There would be a public hearing process. Prior to the first hearing on that, Marv went up to Joe and said, if you don't give me the money I want for this thing, I'm going to fight you the whole way. And that's just what he did. They didn't give him the money and he fought him the whole way. Marv tries to get everyone around in the area to rally against this concrete plant. What were his reasons? How did he try to convince others that this was a bad idea? Well, he basically said it was going to be a nuisance and it would cause noise, dust, and a lot of other things. traffic problems, etc. for the nearby neighborhood. There was a nearby residential neighborhood. But he got all those people to sign petitions against the concrete plant. He basically came up with a laundry list of grievances about what he thought the concrete plant would do to the area. Patrick Brower covered many of the hearings about this for the Sky High News. At one point, Marv Hemeier wanted to publish a letter to the editor in the newspaper about the concrete plant. He said, Patrick Brower says Marv's original ending to the letter read, Don't let the lying good old boys and backstabbers dump this on the community of Granby and Grand County. Patrick made some edits. And other people began to figure out that Marv was also using this just as leverage to get back at the Docheffs for those personal reasons. Initially, he had a lot of support from the neighborhood. But as it became clear what was really going on, a lot of the support he had dwindled to the point where nobody even showed up at the final meetings about the approval process to back Marv and his opposition. This was also after Marv had filed a lawsuit against the town and the Docheffs, claiming that they had, you know, illegally done certain things. In the process of trying to get the plant approved. And it was eventually approved. Oh, yeah, it was. Marv Heemeyer's lawsuit was thrown out, too. It just festered on him, I think. And he just became obsessed with what he saw as a great big public humiliation of having lost his fight. And he was just going to get back at anybody and anyone who he thought had aided and abetted the effort to get the concrete plant. Approved. In 2002, after a decade in business, Marv Heemeyer closed down his muffler shop in Granby. He told people that he was going to sell his property and leave town. Around the same time, he drove out to an equipment auction in California and bought a 45-ton Komatsu bulldozer. He had it shipped out to Granby and parked it on his property. His former girlfriend, Trish, one day dropped by the then-closed muffler shop and saw the bulldozer just sitting there on the lot. And she said, Marv, what are you going to do with that thing? And he says, well, I think I'm just going to bulldoze the town. And Trish says, she told him, Marv, you need to just get out of here and give up on this fight. That's not going to accomplish anything. You just need to get moving. You just need to get moving on and get out of here and stop worrying about this thing. He also had told his attorney, and he actually had told friends of his, that he was going to bulldoze the town. And I just think people didn't take him seriously, to tell you the truth. It just seemed like such a far-fetched, grandiose thing to do that, spectacular, in fact. But he wanted to make a mark, and he wanted to show Granby, that they had sinned, that they had somehow violated the rules of good interaction with people in society. And he was going to show them. And that's how he was going to do it. We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R dot com. Every style, every home. Support for Criminal comes from Quince. Quince makes elevated, everyday essentials using premium materials like Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, and premium stretch denim. The designs are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. Think about the first shirt or pair of pants you reach for after laundry day. That's the kind of pieces Quince makes. And it's not just a pair. Quince also makes bedding, kitchen essentials, and thoughtfully designed furniture. I have a lot of pieces from Quince. And the one item I find myself wearing more than I expected is her organic cotton t-shirt. It's comfortable and easy to wear. Find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you're going, or if you heard about them, let them know it was criminal. It's the best way to support the show. Hello. My name is Marvin Heemeyer. In April of 2004, Marvin Heemeyer sat down in front of a cassette player and started recording. I'm living in Grand Lake, Colorado. And this tape is about my life since I came up here to Grand Lake, Colorado. I came up here to Grand Lake in 1991. At first, he talked about what brought him to Grand Lake. But then, he began talking about the problems he had had in the community, all the way back to his bidding war against Cody Docheff at the auction. Cody Docheff, he came back there and introduced himself to me about the rudest, most arrogant person. I mean, this guy's just a fucking asshole. Marv recorded himself for hours, over a series of days. He basically vents his grievances, states his point of view. They only respect what they want. And if they're in that power circle, that's the way it's going to be. They believe. And you're not going to get in if you've done anything to offend them in any way. Well, I guess that's their right in America. But I've got my rights, too. He goes down the list of people he didn't like. I'm on that list. And he goes down the list of people he didn't like. He accused me of being a pot-smoking army brat. Patrick Brower. I mean, he's a pothead. Of course, you can't tell anybody that. You know, a big liberal army brat has had everything in his life given to him. You know, but he knows how to abuse the power of the pit. And that's a big thing up here, is abuse of power. By the time that Marv Heemeyer recorded these cassette tapes, he'd spent months holed up on the property. where he'd formerly run his muffler shop. He had moved his bulldozer inside a large steel shed and had been secretly working on modifying it. He had a corner sort of cell set up where he had a cot. He had buckets of water. He had a TV. He had videos that he could watch on the TV. He had some food in there, a small little refrigerator. He could stay in there and work on the dozer day, and night without going home. What did he do to this bulldozer? It's just fascinating, really. He took three-eighths or half-inch sheets of steel and welded them onto the exterior of the cab of the bulldozer, put a shelf beneath that, and then put another layer of steel so that there was a cavity in between the two layers of steel all around the entire dozer. And then he poured concrete into that cavity, about four to five inches wide, around the entire cab of the bulldozer. Marv had also made portholes for the barrels of several rifles and small bulletproof windows to look out of above them. And he also had mounted five cameras on the outside of the tank, kind of concealing, sealed either in the actual armor or underneath points in the armor. And he rigged those up to two monitors he had inside the tank so that he could see what was going on outside without having to open any portholes or expose himself to any fire. So he had given a lot of thought to how he was going to see what he was doing in the tank. By April 2004, Marv Heemeyer had sold his property, and he was renting the shed space back from the new owners. He did almost get caught. The new owners of the property had to do an insurance inspection, and they walked in there, and there was Marv working on the bulldozer, but it wasn't obviously a tank yet. And they said, what are you doing, Marv? And Marv was all proud of himself for coming up with a story where he had been hired to come up with modifications on bulldozers so they could operate in extremely cold conditions. And he was doing work on the bulldozer to modify it to meet that requirement. On the tapes, Marv Heemeyer refers to it as Marv's Komatsu tank, MK tank for short. But I didn't get the old MK tank done last fall is amazing because it should have happened. But, you know, God has his timing, his plans made out, and they're there to be. He definitely had this sort of religious fervor about him, about getting back at the wrongs that had been done to him. They're going to have to deal with it. I guarantee you I am going to make them deal with it. It is my duty. God has asked me to do this. I couldn't live with myself the rest of my life if I didn't have a plan to make this right. On June 4th, 2001. In 2004, around 2.30 in the afternoon, Marv Heemeyer climbed up a ladder on the outside of his bulldozer and got inside. He designed the top hatch so it was almost seamless. There was no way to open it from the outside. Inside his shed, he left behind a for sale by owner sign covered in his writing. He wrote things like, Had Cody paid me $66,000 on the day of the auction, I would not have to be so unreasonable. If you had worked with me any time from 1992 to 2002, I would not have to be so unreasonable. And if we all don't win, we all lose. He wrote, You, Gramby, have got to learn to listen. Can you hear me now? Then, he started up the bulldozer. And he just literally drove right out of the front of the building. Not through a door, just right out through the wall. In the building. And drove out into the world. We'll be right back. Support for Criminal comes from Mint Mobile. Some things appear too good to be true. But a $15 monthly phone plan isn't one of them. Mint Mobile has affordable, premium wireless plans. And they include high-speed data and unlimited talk and text. And they make signing up easy. You can do it all online. We have a friend who switched to Mint Mobile. He said that it's a great deal. And he liked that he didn't necessarily need to get a new phone or phone number when he switched. To get your new wireless plan for just $15 a month, go to mintmobile.com slash phoebe. 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They provide comprehensive advice on how to treat and treat people with ADHD. By now, Kody Docheff had heard that his property was under attack. He first tried to shoot at the bulldozer, which didn't do anything. Then he drove up in a front-end loader and started trying to push the bulldozer away. But that angered Marv enough to where he fired, we know, nine rounds at the front-end loader because there were nine holes in the bucket. Of the loader that you could stick your finger through when the whole thing was done. It's a miracle that Kody didn't get hit by those rounds that were fired at the front-end loader. Workers at the concrete plant were trying to stop the bulldozer by sticking bars into the bulldozer's treads. But it just broke the wood and the steel and nobody could stop it. The police arrived. Marv Hemeyer began shooting. But at the time, police didn't know if anyone was even inside of the bulldozer. They couldn't see anything and wondered if it was being remotely operated. And they would shoot at the dozer, but it didn't do any good. It was completely armored. No bullets could penetrate it. Police started looking for other ways to get in. The sides of the bulldozer had been creased. But one officer managed to climb on top of it and was riding on the top. As it kept moving down the road. He even had a deputy come along and toss him a flashbang grenade. They tossed that down the exhaust, but it popped out from the exhaust. And he was unable to stop it. The bulldozer's next stop was a business called Mountain Parks Electric. Two of its employees were former town board members. Marv drove the bulldozer into the front of the building. And then he drove to a company called. Maple Street Builders. The owner had declined to sign a second petition against the concrete plant after signing a first one. Pushed a pickup truck right into the side of the building and destroyed the building. And then he proceeded to go back on Highway 40. And all this is being done at a relatively slow speed. The dozer's only going maybe three to four miles per hour. So it's kind of a slow motion catastrophe taking place before your eyes. Police shooting at the cameras that they'd finally seen on the side of the dozer. Randomly shooting at it, trying to figure out a way to stop it. Then the bulldozer drove to Town Hall. By this point, a reverse 911 call had gone out to everyone in Granby, telling them to leave town. Only five minutes before he got to the Town Hall, a children's reading group had been downstairs in the Town Hall, which was then the library. And they had been hasty. They had been hastily evacuated. Literally, probably five to four minutes before the dozer slammed into the building. Town Hall was destroyed. Then Marv Hemeyer drove the bulldozer to the newspaper offices, where Patrick Brower was inside. I went out the back door and then ran up the side, took a few photos of the bulldozer as it was destroying our building, but got really scared when I started to hear bullets whizzing over my head because the bulldozer was destroying our building. The police were shooting at it pretty frequently when it was by our building. So I got scared and ran to the south, down an embankment behind our building to the railroad tracks. And it was down there on the other side of the tracks that I overheard people talking, listening to a radio broadcast where they were saying it was Marv Hemeyer. And then I ran home to get my wife, who was pregnant at the time, out of the building. So I ran to the house and flee because we had been told that my name was on a list he had put together twice. So they figured he may be heading toward our house. Police had gone inside Marv Hemeyer's shed and his house and had found two lists. One with local names on it and one that appeared to be potential bulldozer targets. Patrick Brower's name was on both. It had been an hour and a half since the bulldozer hit the building. It had been an hour and a half since Marv Hemeyer started bulldozing the town. The bulldozer moved on from the newspaper office to the business and home of the widow of Gramby's former mayor, destroying both. A county employee tried to block the tank with a huge earth quake. mover. But the bulldozer hit it, bursting one of its tires. The bulldozer drove on to a propane gas storage yard. Marv Hemeyer started shooting at some of the gas tanks. I think his goal was to shoot holes in the tanks, then shoot the transformer so it will spark, and then the sparks would ignite the escaping gas and cause a huge explosion. But luckily, he didn't hit any of the tanks. And then Marv Hemeyer drove to a store called Gamble's. Sort of like a hardware store that was owned and operated by Casey and Rhonda Farrell. Casey had been on the town board at the time of the hearings. As he drove toward the store, white smoke started pouring out of the bulldozer. Marv kept going, taking down an entire length of wall, the building collapsing with it. And about a third, two-thirds of the way back through the store, as he's going down one wall, he stops. Looks like he tries to turn the machine back and forth, but doesn't go anywhere. And then he turns the machine off. Or what probably really happened is it just stopped because it was overheating. The bulldozer stayed still. And then, a few minutes later, there was a noise heard from inside. It sounded like a gun. I mean, at this point, what were police. Did they have a plan? It had stopped. But what was the plan? So, once the dozer had stopped, they had already talked to a SWAT team in Larimer County about bringing up a small howitzer mounted on a trailer to come up and shoot at the dozer. There was worry about other explosions that might occur in case he had bombs mounted on the dozer. If they did that sort of a thing. But they finally did get into the dozer through a hole that they had cut in the top. And there they saw Marv sitting dead in the seat of the dozer with an obvious bullet wound. He shot himself. In the evening, the governor of Colorado flew in on a helicopter. He promised to help Granby rebuild. In the more than two hours that Marv Heemeyer had been driving his bulldozer, he had hit 13 different buildings in Granby, destroying some completely. There was debris and junk and trash and concrete laying in Main Street, laying all around the buildings that had been hit. The town was an absolute mess. Several cars were damaged in the midst of the rampage. And ironically, you know, he still had other targets on his list that he didn't get to. It's shocking that no one was killed. It's an absolute miracle. If I had tripped when he hit our building, he would have killed me. Luckily, I didn't trip. But the building fell, was literally was falling down around me as I was running out of there. This was the case in all the other buildings. As the destruction was taking place that day, a news helicopter from Denver flew overhead, broadcasting live footage of the bulldozer taking down buildings. Many of the stores, the buildings, the offices that we have seen him take out apparently seemed to have some rhyme or reason to him, some kind of history, some kind of ongoing gripe that were part of his problem. The story made national headlines. It even got a nickname. People started calling it "The Killdozer." People heard about it and just thought it was crazy. And it just took off online. Marv then quickly sort of gained this sort of hero, cult hero status. Why do you think so many people were quick to come to Marv's defense? Well, first of all, it's just appealing to anybody with the slightest grievance against anybody in power or government to love the idea that someone built a tank out of a bulldozer and attacked government and the town, just to show him that he had been wronged and to get back from the evil government. I think just that in and of itself appeals to the imagination of a lot of people. But, secondly, there was stuff circulated very quickly. This is before social media. This is 2004. But a guy had posted a, I think he called it "No BS News" website. You can listen to "Criminal" at This is Love, and Phoebe Reads a Mystery, without any ads. Plus, you'll get bonus episodes. These are special episodes with me and Criminal co-creator Lauren Spohr, talking about everything from how we make our episodes, to the crime stories that caught our attention that week, to things we've been enjoying lately. To learn more, go to patreon.com slash criminal. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com slash criminal podcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.