The Demented Dynamiter Of Bath
True Crime Historian
Richard O Jones
4.4 • 729 Ratings
🗓️ 22 December 2023
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Episode 48 looks at the most tragic school massacre in American history, this one perpetrated by the school district’s treasurer, upset over a recent rise in his property taxes to build a new school. So he decides to blow up his own house and take the school down, too, claiming 45 lives, including his own. If not for a faulty wiring plan, it could have been worse. Much worse.Music by Chuck Wiggins
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Popular.com |
| 0:03.5 | Bath, Michigan, May 21st, 1927. |
| 0:13.0 | Not in the lifetime of the present generation in this community |
| 0:16.5 | will the consolidated school disaster and the dynamiting maniac responsible for it cease to be a topic of conversation and a poignant memory? |
| 0:26.6 | Physically maimed and mentally stunned now by the extent and horror of the tragedy, |
| 0:32.6 | the community will continue for years to witness the daily pilgrimage to the school of children with broken, twisted, and scarred bodies. |
| 0:41.3 | Some will come on crutches, others in wheelchairs, and still others will be missing arms. |
| 0:48.3 | There will be a few who will grope through endless dark, others who will live in a world eternally stilled. |
| 0:57.1 | Plastic surgery, which has rebuilt many of the bodies maimed in the World War, will |
| 1:02.0 | be summoned to the aid of the tiny bits of humanity that lie tonight on the Lansing |
| 1:07.0 | hospital beds. |
| 1:09.2 | It will work wonders, but only miracles could repair some of the human |
| 1:13.0 | wreckage that came alive out of the dynamited school. Bath is an unincorporated village with a |
| 1:20.0 | population of about 250. It is situated nine miles northwest of Lansing and is inhabited mainly by |
| 1:27.3 | retired farmers. There are a few grocery |
| 1:30.1 | stores, a pool room, a blacksmith shop, a post office, and a railroad station. It was over-emergency |
| 1:38.0 | telegraphed apparatus installed in the railroad station that the first complete accounts of the |
| 1:43.2 | story were sent out. |
| 1:45.3 | When two telegraph operators from Lansing reached the depot, it was deserted. |
| 1:50.3 | There were no typewriters, and the first copy was turned out in longhand. |
| 1:55.7 | Reporters sat on boxes and crates writing. Finally, a search of the village was made and an antique typewriter was found. |
| 2:04.0 | For hours, the decrepit keys of this machine rattled out the tumult and tragedy of the disaster. |
... |
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