Four Dead in Ohio: The Kent State Shootings Investigation
10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories
Joe
4.9 • 638 Ratings
🗓️ 10 February 2026
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In May 1970, National Guardsmen fired 67 rounds in thirteen seconds at Kent State University students protesting the Vietnam War's expansion into Cambodia, killing Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Schroeder, and wounding nine others. The FBI investigation, civil trials, and forensic analysis of audio evidence would span decades, with questions about whether guardsmen received an order to fire remaining central to the case.
Four days. That's all it took for a college campus in Ohio to go from burying a copy of the Constitution as a symbolic protest to actual students bleeding out on the grass. And here's what makes this case so disturbing: for forty years, everyone involved said no order was given to shoot. Then in 2010, a forensic audio expert cleaned up a forgotten tape recording and found something that changed everything about what we thought we knew.
#KentState #TrueCrime #KentStateMassacre #May4th1970 #VietnamWarProtest #NationalGuard #ColdCase
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | May 4th, 1970, 77 National Guardsmen marched on to the Kent State University campus to break up a protest. |
| 0:12.0 | 13 seconds later, four students were dead and nine were wounded. For 40 years, the official story was that no one ordered them to fire. |
| 0:25.8 | Then, a forensic audio expert got his hands on a tape recording made by a student who'd left his microphone running in a dorm window. |
| 0:29.1 | What he found would challenge everything the government had been saying since 1970. |
| 0:37.2 | The So I want to do. So I want to talk about Kent State, and I know you've heard this one before. |
| 1:02.2 | Four dead in Ohio, the famous photo of the girl screaming over Jeffrey Miller's body. |
| 1:08.1 | Even the song, Mike Crosby stills, Stills Nation Young called Ohio. But there's this |
| 1:13.4 | whole other layer to the story that most people don't know about, and it involves a piece of |
| 1:18.3 | audio evidence that sat in someone's closet for 40 years. On April 30, 1970, President Richard Nixon |
| 1:25.9 | announces on national television that the United States is expanding |
| 1:29.9 | the Vietnam War into Cambodia. For everyone who thought the war was winding down, this felt |
| 1:35.8 | like complete betrayal to those people. The next day, Nixon visits the Pentagon and calls the |
| 1:41.0 | college students protesting the decision bums compared to brave soldiers |
| 1:45.6 | overseas. The president is telling the nation that student protesters are enemies. Sounds kind of |
| 1:52.1 | familiar. At Kent State University in Ohio, about 500 students gather on the Commons on May 1st. |
| 1:59.4 | History students bury a copy of the Constitution in the |
| 2:02.3 | grass because there's been no congressional declaration of war. It's symbolic, peaceful, |
| 2:09.0 | and they plan another rally for Monday. That Friday night, though, everything shifts. Students are |
| 2:15.3 | downtown drinking, and what starts as a typical bar fight becomes chaos with people smashing windows. |
| 2:22.5 | Someone breaks a bank window, and the mayor becomes convinced there's a radical plot to burn down the city. |
| 2:28.5 | He declares a state of emergency and calls the governor. |
| 2:31.9 | Saturday night, over a thousand people surround the ROTC building, |
... |
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