Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Season Six: Holiday Episode Nine (2025)
4 Plays4 minutes ago
This podcast was made possible by www.labrottiecreations.com Check out their merchandise and specifically their fun pop pet art custom pieces made from photos of your very own pets. Use the promo code CRIMEXS for 20% off a fun, brightly colored, happy piece of art of your own pet at their site.
Music in this episode was licensed for True Crime XS. Our theme song is No Scars from slip.fm
You can reach us at our website truecrimexs.com and you can leave us a voice message at 252-365-5593. Find us most anywhere with @truecrimexs
Thanks for listening. Please like and subscribe if you want to hear more and you can come over to patreon.com/truecrimexs and check out what we’ve got going on there if you’d like to donate to fund future True Crime XS road trip investigations and FOIA requests. We also have some merchandise up at Teepublic http://tee.pub/lic/mZUXW1MOYxM
Sources:
Various News Sources Mentioned by Name
Ad Information:
New Era Caps: https://zen.ai/dWeCYLHxxANOaZ6NcKocEw
Liquid IV: Link: https://zen.ai/45lYmDnWl1Z3cR66LBX5mA
Zencastr: Link: https://zen.ai/SFkD99OGWGNz_plc2c_Yaw
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Content Warning
00:00:00
Speaker
The content you're about to hear may be graphic in nature. Listener discretion is advised.
Podcast Theme and Approach
00:00:50
Speaker
This is True Crime XS.
00:01:00
Speaker
It's interesting. visit all these different time periods, like when we're doing holiday episodes. I remember a time when I used to i just going to focus on things that happened around the holidays, but that is such a confusing way to do things. So we developed these themes, and one of those themes that we ended up developing was was sort of home for the holidays. And this year, I still think with the hostage-taking episodes, there's kind of a home for the holidays, like, underlying, you know.
00:01:33
Speaker
I can agree with that.
The 1980s Crime Story in Wyoming
00:01:35
Speaker
This one, and we're we're going to the 1980s, but we're also going to Wyoming, which is so interesting to me. And before I, like, looked at all of this, I was very confused because...
00:01:50
Speaker
I had to like walk myself through the concept of a husband and wife team. And that doesn't happen a lot in crime.
00:02:02
Speaker
I mean, we have like the Bonnie and Clyde image. that like it's ah It's almost like an original meme. That's how we know who Bonnie and Clyde are. But that type of relationship is very rare.
00:02:17
Speaker
And also, we don't know the entire dynamic. No, we don't. And that's one of the things about this one that I say it's interesting. It's largely interesting, i guess, because of the outcome.
00:02:31
Speaker
We don't know what's happening. Right.
Cokeville Elementary School Hostage Crisis
00:02:34
Speaker
You're right. But this takes place in May of 1986. And I think the way it's talked about on the internet, it's called the Cokeville, like C-O-K-E-V-I-L-E,
00:02:50
Speaker
V-I-L-L-E, elementary school hostage crisis. So I had to kind of go hunting to learn a little bit about Wyoming for this.
00:03:02
Speaker
Cokeville is this little, very small town in a county called Lincoln County. that has, if I'm reading everything correctly, a population of 20,000. It has a population of 20,000. That's the entire county.
00:03:19
Speaker
According to what I read, the town itself in modern times, there are 622 residents as of 2024 in Cokeville, Wyoming. I don't know how accurate that is, but um it is fascinating.
00:03:33
Speaker
This town is ultimately ah settled in about 1869,
00:03:39
Speaker
The railroad comes through in 1882 and the town grows and it's incorporated as a town 1910. And how many people did you say there were? 622 people as of 2024. So a very small town.
00:03:51
Speaker
This area was ah largely occupied by Shoshone Indians when the first guy, this guy named Tilford Kutch, arrives in 1869. He opens a little trading post and he runs a ferry here.
00:04:07
Speaker
The town is known for coal found in the area. Once the railroad got here, the big popular thing locally is sheep ranching.
00:04:18
Speaker
So in 1918, Cokeville was informally called the sheep capital of the world. um it It's always interesting to me that like like places like this exist and they're so small and I wonder like you know how do you fund things in a town this size.
David Young's Extremist Affiliations
00:04:35
Speaker
But where we're headed today is to Cokeville. Now, Cokeville in 1979 has one police officer, and that guy is a guy named David Young. He is fired as the only Cokeville police officer by what I assume is the town council or town manager for misconduct.
00:05:00
Speaker
And he moves away. He moves to Tucson, Arizona. And he gets married to a woman named Doris Young. So David and ah Doris Young. They have ties to several groups according to the internet. These groups appear to be white supremacist groups. And the first one is the Aryan Nations.
00:05:20
Speaker
The Aryan Nations is this hate group that originally was based in the middle of nowhere Idaho. It was founded back in the 1970s by a guy named Richard Butler.
00:05:32
Speaker
i I know a little bit about them. They're not that interesting to me. This other one is interesting to me. And it's called Posse Comitatus. So that's always interesting because they're using Latin and they're using something that is specifically not allowed in in in the U.S. But force of the country is posse comitatus.
00:06:00
Speaker
That act within the U.S. s government is designed to say when and when not to use the military. um But this is a very, it's it's I'm not entirely sure this thing exists, but for the sake of the story, we're going to say that it exists because these two people, David and um his wife, Doris, D-O-R-I-S, are linked to it.
00:06:26
Speaker
It sounds a little bit to me like the Dixie Mafia. Like it's a couple of small groups that are like have been said to be together, but maybe not so much. Right. And some of the, at least the way they get lumped together, it's white supremacists, right? Yeah. yeah's there They're far-right extremist movement that seem to be linked to other white supremacist groups. They're not specifically white supremacists themselves. They just have links to it.
00:06:50
Speaker
It's said, and I'm saying this because like this is mythology. It's said that they are a far-right extremist social movement. started in the late 1960s as a response to counterculture. And but the idea is that they spread...
00:07:06
Speaker
conspiracy-minded, anti-government, anti-Semitic messages that are ultimately similar to like actual white supremacy groups that are known, like the Aryan Nation. They believe that they have been put here to counter an attack on the social and political rights of white Christians.
00:07:24
Speaker
So there is an element of this that's like a white supremacist, nationalist, Christian identity movement element. Many of these people in posse comitatas are said to be preppers and survivalists.
00:07:39
Speaker
from what I can tell, there are actual militias that start forming in the 1990s that are linked to posse comitatas.
Ideologies and Beliefs of the Youngs
00:07:50
Speaker
And they sort of become paper terrorists. So are you familiar with the concept of being paper terrorists? Are you right about it? It's the use of bogus letters of credit and false liens and frivolous lawsuits and other bizarre...
00:08:09
Speaker
legal and pseudo legal theories and actions as a method of harassment it's it's supposed to be like an alternative to armed terrorism or combat terrorism it is paper terrorism well yeah that's sort of what i meant i mean you write about it like it's a sovereign citizen situation right kind of yeah yeah i that type of thing Yeah, I had read up on this whole false liens thing. and I'm not going to spend all day on it, but this is fascinating to me.
00:08:38
Speaker
But a false lien is when you file a document with no legal basis based on either false, fictitious, or fraudulent statements or representations within statements. essentially against the target, alleging that this target, whoever it is, owes the person who's filing some sum of sum of money for services or goods that are probably not been delivered. So it's a really easy thing to do in terms of cost and effort.
00:09:08
Speaker
But for the person who's the focus of it or or the literal target of it, it requires significant time and lawyer's fees for a court to undo it. One of the examples I found on the Internet was 1992.
00:09:23
Speaker
A resident of Seattle filed a false lien of about $63,000 against General Electric for unpaid wages, claiming that GE i'd owed him for work that he had performed ah but had, quote, given away to the Internal Revenue Service without his permission.
00:09:44
Speaker
So his wages had been garnished due to outstanding income taxes, which he had refused to pay. ah it They don't name him in a lot of the places. I've seen the names now. I'm not going to name him here because he drags his wife into this and they file false liens against President Bush.
00:10:04
Speaker
ah That would have been... George H.W. Bush, so Bush won, U.S. Senator Slade Gordon, Jack Walts Jr., the CEO of GE, four IRS agents and their spouses, and various other public officials and judges, including the Attorney General of Washington State.
00:10:24
Speaker
They claimed the false liens against the public officials and IRS employees were justified because the latter had failed to help the plaintiffs and were not fulfilling their, quote, oaths of office.
00:10:35
Speaker
So the false liens were only dissolved after many years of legal battles, which eventually resulted in an order barring the couple from filing any further non-consensual lien or encumbrance against any federal employee.
00:10:54
Speaker
It is now federally criminal or criminalized to file false liens, but it was not for a very long time. Well, the reason that it wasn't is because, duh yeah like don't file false liens. And it really takes somebody cooking something up to think of that, right? Yeah. Because, come on. And to me, that type of nuisance is, it's very annoying, right? It's like a fly that won't go away. Because it's sort of like, it it and it's so hypocritical, because they're like...
00:11:29
Speaker
Well, I'm using the government even though don't want to pay my taxes, right? Right. Because to file something, you're using what has been set up as the government system, right? Yeah. And I find it really interesting. Most of the time,
00:11:47
Speaker
i can just sort of vaguely empathize with the initial principle of what might have led somebody to the point they're at. But it's one of those things where you're like, well, you need to suck it up, right? Right. ah Because all of us have, you know, all of us are ticked that we have to pay taxes and that, you know, politicians aren't always doing the the right, the thing we think it would be right. We suck it up because we live here in this country. But I find those positions...
00:12:20
Speaker
kind of sad, right? Because I realized at some point they were disillusioned and that's what's led them here, but it's kind of pointless. It is. And like, so I have to like look at it from the perspective of like the priority here seems to have been the Christian identity stuff, meaning they were embracing various antisemitic and white supremacist conspiracies. One of those conspiracies they embrace was that the U S federal government is completely illegitimate And that we were all in the hands of a Zionist occupation government.
00:12:53
Speaker
This is like kind of documented in their newsletter and how they like have interacted in communications that we're able to see where they're like spreading this quote, international Jewish conspiracy right there. They lose me.
00:13:07
Speaker
Well, right. Because I'm going, yeah, so life is hard, but you don't have to make it harder. Yeah, if you take that element out of it, all they really are, i think you said the word sovereign citizen, which they're in that realm.
00:13:21
Speaker
What they really are at their base, peeling it all away and just kind of looking at it, is something that this country is kind of based on, and that is they are tax protesters. Right, right. Ultimately, members of this alleged group, posse comitatus, they are refusing to pay their taxes. They don't want to obtain driver's license.
00:13:43
Speaker
They don't ah comply with regulatory authorities. i I do want to point out, you said that it's what our country is based on. Not this, just like the protestation.
00:13:54
Speaker
Well, yeah, I got it. But also, i realize that there's a a larger discussion here. But basically, you know initially our country was founded, they didn't want to pay taxes when they weren't being represented, right? Right. And so in theory, i say that loosely, right? based on some of the budget information available, we are paying for our existence here, so it does represent us, right?
00:14:19
Speaker
Correct. Okay.
The Hostage Plan and Execution
00:14:21
Speaker
Yeah, so they deny the validity of like fiat money, and that is because of like the lack of being backed by gold, which in the posse comitatus handbook or whatever they have, they claim that the U.S. Constitution requires to be backed by gold,
00:14:41
Speaker
And again, you know, they they do all these weird common law liens. They are involved in various types of what I would characterize tax protab.
00:14:52
Speaker
Wait, and maybe it's just me, but do you see the irony in protesting the fiat money concept, but also filing liens? Right. Yes, I do. Just making sure. Yeah. the It's interesting. What I read in like kind of briefly looking at this to see how it might have affected...
00:15:13
Speaker
our story today, was that they they do a lot of that. And this is the origin story of a lot of what we know as sovereign citizen and sovereign citizen extremists.
00:15:26
Speaker
One of the weird things that they did, in spite of everything I just said, in the late 1970s, they attempted to take over Alpine County, California. So they settled there.
00:15:38
Speaker
It's a small populate population area. I think it's the least populous county in California. they settle here. It's in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
00:15:49
Speaker
It would be east of Stockton, California. i think it would be basically off of State Highway 4. I'd have to look at it. But the Posse Comitatus people, they thought that if they won all the elections in Alpine County, they would be able to take control of a single county.
00:16:07
Speaker
So they fielded the candidate for sheriff, and the first mistake that they made was they registered a bunch of fictitious voters using post office boxes and vacant lots in a county of 1,200 people. They had 3,000 votes that year.
00:16:24
Speaker
um Six people were prosecuted for voter fraud. ah The false registrations for voting were thrown out, and the incumbent sheriff was reelected.
00:16:35
Speaker
So there's that. There were some interesting things that happened to them in the early eighty s in an area of Wisconsin known as Tigerton, which had a ah population of 752 people today.
00:16:48
Speaker
Prosecutors with the U.S. Department of Justice, for some reason, cracked down on them and put a bunch of the posse comitatus leaders into prison. And then there are a couple of instances that i think maybe are leading to our story today.
00:17:05
Speaker
There was one that takes place once later, and it's an interesting story. i think I'm going to reserve for another day. But they arrest a group of posse comitatus actors for what appears to be an assassination.
00:17:18
Speaker
And that's interesting. It happens much later than our story. But in 1975, a guy named Francis Earl Gillings, who was founder of one of the California posse groups,
00:17:29
Speaker
He led a group of armed posse comitatus members to prevent United Farm Workers Union organizers from attempting to organize non-union tomato pickers. So they get into it with Francis Earl Gillings.
00:17:45
Speaker
He has an outstanding traffic warrant. The sheriff's deputies arrive. They get into a scuffle, and there's a shot fired. This is like the earliest thing I've found where it's kind of like, all right, maybe these guys were just rabble-rousers.
00:17:59
Speaker
In 1983, they do make the national news. Because on February 13th, a posse commentatus member named Gordon Call, he kills two U.S. Marshals.
00:18:13
Speaker
They had come to arrest him in North Dakota. And he goes on the run. So that's February 13th of 1983. By June take them into custody. there's another like attempt to take them into custody And at that point in time, Gordon Call and the sheriff of Lawrence County, Arkansas, who the sheriff at the time was Gene Matthews, they both killed.
00:18:40
Speaker
Other members of the same group had been convicted of different crimes, including tax evasion and counterfeiting. They had also been convicted of threatening the lives of IRS agents and judges.
00:18:52
Speaker
And on October 23rd of 1984, one of members, Arthur Ruff, one of the members arthur Kirk, who was a 49-year-old man at the time, he is killed when a raid on his home is going down.
00:19:06
Speaker
And from what I've read about it, it appears he pulled the gun and started shouting some of his more interesting things here. That could be BS from the officers at the scene.
00:19:17
Speaker
But the bottom line is, this is the group that David and Doris Young are tied to.
00:19:26
Speaker
So... May 16th, 1986, in spite of the fact that David Young had been fired as the only police officer in Cokeville in 1979, they returned to Cokeville, Wyoming.
00:19:39
Speaker
At one o'clock p.m., David and Doris, they pull up to the Cokeville Elementary School. They unload a large stash of guns, including five rifles and five handguns.
00:19:56
Speaker
And for some strange reason, they wheel out a gasoline. It doesn't appear that this is like some kind of revenge for having been fired, but we do have a weird philosophy slash manifesto that David has brought with him.
00:20:17
Speaker
And it seems that he believes, after having read Brave New World that he has been given the privilege of being one of the few people on earth who can reign over the intelligent children.
00:20:40
Speaker
He has documented what he says are above average achievement scores in the local Cokeville education system. And he saw an opportunity in this little town where he believed he could create essentially a cult.
00:20:58
Speaker
So he starts at the school office handing out a manifesto titled Zero Equals Infinity. And as he walks around handing out this manifesto to the children and their teachers, he's shouting, this is a revolution.
00:21:14
Speaker
And the teachers responded exactly how you expect teachers to respond in 1986 to the former town marshal walking through your school with guns, shouting, this is a revolution, and handing out a manifesto titled, zero equals infinity.
00:21:33
Speaker
They try to read it. And they have no idea what David Young is talking about. Doris has started going classroom to classroom, and she has lured 136 children six faculty and support staff, nine teachers, and three random adults, ah one of whom is a job applicant, the other of whom is a UPS driver, all into a single first grade classroom.
00:22:10
Speaker
So she has literally put 154 people into a standard size first grade classroom.
00:22:19
Speaker
She has lured them there using various ruses, telling them there's an emergency for some, a surprise for others. There's an assembly, a special assembly is taking place.
00:22:33
Speaker
And i do not know how you fit 154 people into a first grade classroom. Or why that didn't alarm anybody.
00:22:43
Speaker
I do not know why this is happening or how this is happening, but it sort of fits with the insanity that is the rest of this story. Right. And just to um back up for a second, the manifesto, there was, I don't know if it was in there or if it was separate, but it was documented in I guess, his journal that He was coming from a position of, ah you know, he wanted to reign over intelligent children. He wanted power and control. But he saw an opportunity in the close-knit community where he had been the the only ah police officer.
00:23:22
Speaker
And ah he had the theme, Threaten One and All Are at Your Mercy. Right. And that had had to do directly with ah having a close-knit community because without it, that doesn't work. But I wondered if maybe because he had lived there and been the police officer, maybe that was the best place he could think of to ah to act out his delusion.
00:23:50
Speaker
i would probably go that, yeah. So it's just David and Doris doing this. But originally they had some friends they were bringing along And those friends are Gerald Deppie and Doyle Mendenhall. They have apparently been friends with David Young for a very long time.
00:24:10
Speaker
And they have invested money with him in a get-rich-quick scheme that he had called, quote, the biggie, which I can only imagine was not nearly as big as David thought it was, because none of this seems to make any sense.
00:24:28
Speaker
So, Little background, there's only 500 people living in Cokeville at this time. 154 of them are all in one first grade classroom.
00:24:41
Speaker
We get a little information about what life was like for them later on. Now, from what I can tell, David did go to college. He went to Chagrin State College in Nebraska. He had earned a degree in criminal justice.
00:24:56
Speaker
He was literally a police officer in this town, but he was also considered the town marshal. He doesn't even make it out of his six-month probationary period in 1979 when he does that.
00:25:08
Speaker
But when he meets Doris Waters, who will become Doris Young, she's a divorcee working as a waitress and a singer in a bar. during the The two of them are from Cokeville, by the way.
00:25:24
Speaker
They go to Tucson because David's lost his job. During their time in Tucson, our insight comes from Bernie Peterson. Bernie Peterson is Doris Young's daughter.
00:25:39
Speaker
She says that during that time of writing the manifesto, David became increasingly ah hermit-like and reclusive. He focused on these bizarre philosophical readings and
Bomb Explosion and Immediate Aftermath
00:25:50
Speaker
rantings.
00:25:50
Speaker
And to be quite honest, it sounds like he is going deep into some level of schizophrenia, some kind of psychotic. So Doris is taking part-time jobs. She's housekeeping. She's waitressing. She's supporting their lifestyle. They are living in a mobile home.
00:26:06
Speaker
with David's youngest daughter from his first marriage, who was named Princess. And Bernie is the one giving us the story. That's Doris' daughter.
00:26:17
Speaker
David is the father of two at this time, but his oldest daughter did not want to talk to him. They're estranged. She is not in his life.
00:26:29
Speaker
So the biggie plan that David's friends had invested in Is this moment where we're going to be at this school?
00:26:42
Speaker
He apparently had recently read Brave New World. Have you ever read Brave New World? No. Aldous Huxley. it's um I believe it's written early 30s. I think it's published in 32 33. And it's a dystopian novel. It's sort of the inverse of 1984, which was published much later.
00:27:00
Speaker
It's an interesting read. It is bleak, to say the the least. But having read it, has influenced what he is doing here. Right. And he has he actually has Gerald Devin Doyle Mendenhall handcuffed in that his van outside of the school because they refused to participate. He does because he refused to reveal his plans until moments of before it unfolded. He had been pitching them that he was going to be creating this community.
00:27:28
Speaker
Right. And Princess also, um she was with them when they went into the... Now, I don't know how old she was, but Princess entered the elementary school with David and Doris, but she was like, I'm not doing this. And she left and reported the incident.
00:27:44
Speaker
Yep. She goes to the town hall and she reports what's happening. So what David reveals to Gerald and Doyle is that They're going to take these children hostage and they are going to request $2 million dollars in ransom for each child.
00:28:08
Speaker
Afterwards, they're going to detonate this bomb, but take the money and the children to this new place they're going to build with the money where he is going to be, quote, God.
00:28:24
Speaker
Now, at this time, everything I found indicates that David and Doris Young are not really like religious. They are not going to a church. They are not involved in a specific cult. They are part of the other organizations I mentioned, and they're said to be spiritual.
00:28:42
Speaker
According to some of the writings, David appears to believe in reincarnation. And i think the idea was... They were going to all die except take the money and the children with them.
00:29:00
Speaker
And when they came back, they would have the money and the children, which is why I say I think there was some kind of psychotic or schizo-effective something happening here.
00:29:10
Speaker
So he can't let his two friends go, Gerald and Doyle, because they will definitely tell that he's about to do this. He has them handcuffed inside of the van.
00:29:22
Speaker
He takes the daughter in, as you mentioned. He's got all these guns. Princess fleeing literally takes the van and drives away. Now, they're never charged. That's Princess.
00:29:35
Speaker
That's Gerald and Doyle. None of them are charged. But we're still back to having to deal with the fact that we have 154 people. in a 30 capacity student first grade classroom.
00:29:53
Speaker
And the first thing that all these 150 people are seeing when they come into this room is all the guns spread out on the teacher's desk. And I have to describe the bomb for you.
00:30:05
Speaker
This bomb is a large improvised explosive device. It has been constructed from a small two-wheeled shopping cart that has two baskets.
00:30:16
Speaker
One is on top of the other. The top basket contains a gallon milk jug of gasoline that has been wired with a blasting cap.
00:30:28
Speaker
Below that jug, in the other basket, are two tuna fish cans. So like, you know chicken of the sea cans. feel They're filled with a mixture of aluminum powder and flour.
00:30:43
Speaker
They are meant to aerosolize and deflagrate or combust subsonically following the detonation.
00:30:54
Speaker
A poof. each Right. Each of these has their own blasting cap. They are linked together. And then throughout the baskets, there's chain links, like you would find from like a chain, gunpowder, and boxes of ammunition that will act as continuing shrapnel.
00:31:15
Speaker
The mechanism is wired to a dead man's switch. So a dead man's switch, I'm sure people have heard that term before, It is a switch that is designed to be activated or deactivated if the person holding the switch becomes incapacitated in whatever way.
00:31:35
Speaker
It's a terrible way to switch up an explosive, but that's what he's done here. That dead man switch is a wooden piece separating two metal connectors with the jaws of a clothespin.
00:31:47
Speaker
So what is happening is it leaves the circuit incomplete. And that circuit is going to be powered powered by a little 9-volt battery. So once the wooden piece is removed, the two metal connectors will complete the circuit, and the bomb will blow up.
00:32:05
Speaker
And for some reason, the wooden piece that has to be removed is tied to a string, and that string is tied to Doris' wrist. That doesn't sound like an... It sounds like there may be a little bit more involved than a Deadman switch, but okay. yeah I get the idea. like it sounds like she's got to pull it out, right? She's got to do some stuff there, in my opinion. but i think That was the idea. like that yeah It's
Crisis Resolution and Community Response
00:32:31
Speaker
insurance, right? it is point of a dead man switch is to say, I've got a bomb, and if you kill me, it's going to blow up anyway. right no Yeah, so the jug of gasoline that's set up in here, it has a little leak in the bottom of it.
00:32:46
Speaker
So while they're moving into the school and gathering all the people, the gasoline is slowly dripping into the tuna fish cans. So the aluminum flour mixture that has been created to aerosolize and deflagrate is going to be unable to aerosolize.
00:33:04
Speaker
Just throwing that out there. Because it's wet. Yep. The leaking gasoline has a terrible smell. And teachers start to open the classroom windows.
00:33:16
Speaker
And this is going to create vents. Just really quick, Dave and Doris are both from Cokeville. So does everybody know them? do you have any idea? ye Oh, they do know them. yeahp Everybody will know who they are.
00:33:30
Speaker
Not in a good way. No, but i mean like now. like Yes. Are they going with because they know? Okay. Okay. That's what I was wondering. Yep. Because instead of opening the windows to create vents for the impending bomb explosion, right, ah I just was curious why they didn't, like, I don't know, leave? um Yeah, that's a really good question. let's Let's kind of describe what happens here. So we've got all these people in the classroom.
00:33:57
Speaker
According to, you know, the stories after the fact, he has demanded a ransom $308 million, dollars which and I guess today's money, that's like asking for a billion dollars, basically.
00:34:09
Speaker
He wanted an audience with then-president Ronald Reagan, and according to David and what survivors tell us, and his insane journal, he had sent a copy of this manifesto that he had written to Ronald Reagan.
00:34:24
Speaker
Don't know what the goal was there. But with permission, the teachers brought in books, art supplies, and a television. They were focused on keeping the children occupied, which all of this is so weird to me because I distinctly remember a couple of things from 1986. I don't know if you do, but January 28th, 1986, we were kept occupied by television to see the Challenger launch and explode.
00:34:52
Speaker
So that's going to be four months before this. Man, that's one of my worst memories. Yeah, it's one of mine too. So because Princess has gone to town hall, police are aware, and apparently they have a police force at this point or someone they can call.
00:35:11
Speaker
And police and parents are gathering at the school. The thing is, everybody's in this one room. And Doris Young, for her part, tries to calm these children who like or obviously in a stressful situation.
00:35:26
Speaker
And as this goes on, it's not going to be clear immediately that they're hostages until suddenly they realize that they are indeed hostages. That's what I was wondering. like Yeah, like they don't know at first like what's happening until it's probably an hour into this when they're like, if something's wrong.
00:35:45
Speaker
Right, which is something I feel like, i don't know I don't know exactly the dynamics of everything, but I guess maybe they could have come up with the three different stories for the three different types of people they would have to convince. But to me, I'd be like, yeah, we're getting out of here.
00:36:01
Speaker
Well, so she's literally telling the children to think of this as an adventure movie, and they're going to have this great story to tell their grandchildren one day. i think she's just as out of it as David is. I don't know if this is like drug use or what.
00:36:15
Speaker
but The children are obviously in distress. They're crying. They're complaining of headaches because the smell of the gasoline is terrible. um there's Someone had a birthday, so songs are sung to the birthday person. All the children simply want to go home.
00:36:31
Speaker
And it's reported that when they were singing songs, including the birthday song for whoever had a birthday that day, that David and Doris were singing along. So the songs did not fix the mood.
00:36:45
Speaker
And that's when more items are brought in to try and help these kids get their minds off what's actually happening. Because the the adults know. They see the guns. They know what's happening.
00:36:56
Speaker
Throughout this standoff, David's psychosis is starting to show. He's growing increasingly agitated and irritable. Probably because no one is responding to his demands. Because I'm not actually sure how he communicated these demands. To the air? Right, right. He's sort of walking around yelling bankruptcy. Yeah.
00:37:15
Speaker
We have an account from a woman named Carol Peterson, who was a second grade teacher the Copeville Elementary School. And that comes from yohistory.org. She says, we could tell that he was becoming very nervous. As I sat there and watched them, I could feel he was becoming agitated.
00:37:30
Speaker
He just had these big rings of perspiration. i was frightened and I felt that we needed to do something to try and calm him down to be careful. So we decided to take some masking tape. And we taped what I think it was an eight foot square in the middle of the room.
00:37:45
Speaker
And he pushed the cart, this homemade bomb, into it. And we told the children this was the magic square. Don't go past the square. So the children just sat like right all around him watching him.
00:37:57
Speaker
And I'm sure that that was making him very nervous. Or the fact that like he has no idea what he's doing. That could also be what's happening here. About two and a half hours into all of this...
00:38:12
Speaker
ah is when they have transferred back and forth. And I don't know the order, but at one point David has the dead man switch string and then Doris has it, David has it.
00:38:22
Speaker
About two and a half hours in, it ends up on Doris's wrist and David goes into a bathroom that is ah connecting this first grade classroom to a second grade classroom.
00:38:37
Speaker
And during this time, Doris had developed a headache from the fumes in the room.
00:38:45
Speaker
She has this string around her wrist and she raises her wrist to her head. And when she does that, she unintentionally activates the triggering mechanism.
00:39:01
Speaker
And this bizarre bomb explodes. And it severely injures Doris. And it fills the room with black smoke and pockets of fire. I don't know if you've ever seen what happens when gasoline suddenly catches fire and goes everywhere. It sort of sits on top of whatever it's on and burns. Sometimes it catches, sometimes it doesn't what's underneath it.
00:39:24
Speaker
But immediately following this happening, the the teachers react very quickly. They push these kids away, out the windows, into the hallway. And it causes chaos because these parents, who police have kind of barricaded away from the building at this point,
00:39:40
Speaker
They're rushing forward. The police are trying to assist. And David opens the door from the connecting bathroom and all hell has broken loose.
00:39:52
Speaker
There's black smoke everywhere. Everything's on fire. Everyone is screaming and everyone is rushing around. So he sees Doris and how severely injured she is.
00:40:05
Speaker
And he shoots her in the head and kills her. He then shoots and wounds a man named John Miller, who was a music teacher who had been trapped in this room with them. He's trying to flee.
00:40:17
Speaker
And then David slams the bathroom door shut. He steps back with one of the pistols and he fires a single shot to his head and kills himself. During all of this chaos, Doris's burning body was expelled through a window.
Analyzing Motivations and Mental States
00:40:32
Speaker
When the bomb had detonated, it had blown loose ceiling tiles up and the open windows had acted as vents. So what this did is it like dispersed the concussion, like the explosive power of the bomb.
00:40:49
Speaker
And according to a bomb technician who's commenting on whyohistory.org, he says you could see that like the roof tiles in there had been lifted up and out of their brackets.
00:40:59
Speaker
He said that he didn't think that they were planning on this particular room or how it was working. he thought that they were planning on getting everyone onto a school bus and aborted it because they weren't able to convince everyone to go outside.
00:41:14
Speaker
no Right, and part of that was predicated on the fact that, i don't I guess it came out later, that in Arizona when he lived there, he had built another IED, I guess similar to the one that he had there, and he had exploded a sealed bus. Yes.
00:41:30
Speaker
I am trying to keep a straight face with all this because people are injured. So 79 children are taken different hospitals. So there's 154 people in this room. 79 of these 154 people are treated mostly for second-degree burns and smoke inhalation.
00:41:49
Speaker
They're taken around the area ah in Wyoming to different hospitals and into Idaho and Utah because this area in Wyoming did not have the capacity to treat 79 people at one time. And survivors start telling these stories pretty much immediately.
00:42:04
Speaker
And investigators, family members, hospital personnel, in the days and weeks right after this event, they come forward and may tell like a lot of stories about that day. But one of the things that emerges is that this is a Mormon community that really came together in sort of the face of this tragedy.
00:42:20
Speaker
um Regardless of what you think of different religions or whatever, the community part is the the important part here. I think there's a book out called Witness to Miracles, and there was another one something about angels, um and it ends up being a CBS made-for-TV movie ah called To Save the Children. I think the other book was maybe The Cokeville Miracle, and it was written by Hart Wixom, I think. he He writes a lot about Latter-day Saints stuff.
00:42:50
Speaker
I read this story and I realized that we were doing hostage taking stuff. And I just had to talk to you about this because even though it's like, it it all kind of takes place in under three hours.
00:43:03
Speaker
It is one of the weirdest situations I have ever heard of. It is really weird. I think ah part of the issue, especially reading it now, I think part of the issue was It's so weird and unbelievable. like they didn't They couldn't even put together what was happening. Yeah, I think that's ultimately what... like You were asking, how did all these people get involved?
00:43:29
Speaker
I think in 1986, Cokeville, Wyoming, the last thing you're thinking is that these two crazy people are going to blow up the school. Exactly, and... I feel like if they, because it is such a small community, if they knew them, they would be more likely to like take their word for like why they need to all gather together.
00:43:48
Speaker
But it's, it just seems like a really strange ah situation. I saw where, i can't remember if you went over this or not, but ah they discovered that two of the three blasting caps failed to detonate. Oh, I don't know if I mentioned that. um The wires were also cut on the tuna can, and I wondered if Princess did that. Yeah, I'm not sure. Somebody did, right? At some point, they ah somebody had the, I don't know, wherewithal? or I'm not really sure what's going on there. he So he knew the device at least...
00:44:23
Speaker
Its predecessor had been successful, right? Right. Because he had blown up a school bus. And you said that he killed his wife to put her out of her misery, essentially. yeah I was wondering if he didn't kill his wife because she blew the bomb up.
00:44:39
Speaker
ah Possibly. You know, on WyoHistory, going to say this kind of to you and also so if people want to go look at this. WyoHistory has this really cool thing under the category oral histories where they talk to a lot of these survivors, including like the people involved in investigating the aftermath.
00:44:57
Speaker
And That's an interesting question that you bring up. Like, she kind of failed the mission. I was wondering ah a little bit differently, like, did he want to make sure that they were reincarnated together? We have no idea. i think that that, I assume the fact that she had a headache and she put her hand up to her head and caused the dead man switch to activate and blow up. I assume that's somebody recounting it, right? Yeah. I would, you know, I i take whatever they say for what it is. But it's interesting because, you know, it is possible she did it on purpose. It's also possible that he ah realized how wounded she was Put out of misery. Wanted... Yeah, put her out of the misery. I just don't know. And I also don't entirely understand the prerogative here.
00:45:44
Speaker
i wasn't sure if the plan was actually to kill everybody. yeah it was very confusing because it seems kind of pointless to like demand almost a billion dollars and then blow everything up. Yeah. You know, I looked at this and I read through the interviews and stuff and it is an absolutely fascinating story. But the conclusion that I kind of came to, that's why I mentioned all of what I mentioned at the beginning, these people were like,
00:46:18
Speaker
cult members without a cult who thought like and he was trying to start a cult it seems like like he was trying to have like an indentured servant of intelligent people which weird that sounds like i don't know about you if i were starting my cult right now i definitely am not going to go to a local elementary school and be like send me all the smart ones Well, right. And obviously, I mean, how was he going to lead a bunch of smart people? Right. And like, I couldn't, I never, in in all the reading I've done on this, I've never been able to figure out, because I don't think anyone really knows.
00:46:54
Speaker
um I've never been able to figure out, like, was this just insanity? Because I see clear signs of like, some kind of mental disorder having happened. But it also seems to be affecting Doris, and I can't tell like if she's just a follower of him going along with it. or she's also had like So could it have been something environmental that they ran into? um But whatever's happening here,
00:47:17
Speaker
light you know sometimes insanity almost looks like genius.
Understanding the Crisis' Complexities
00:47:22
Speaker
Parts of this do, but none of it makes any sense. It is possible that...
00:47:28
Speaker
Well, you know, in retrospect, we see how insane it is. She might have actually like believed in it and went along with him because she really did have faith in what he was saying.
00:47:39
Speaker
it It's always really hard to tell, especially from like but when you're part of inner circle, right? Like, cause all the teachers from the outside looking in, they were like, something and wrong. They're like putting tape around the bomb. So it doesn't, nobody jostles it or whatever.
00:47:59
Speaker
And, you know, people are seeing, like, this is crazy. But at the same time, the... It's not really... so the police never show up that we see, right, and in the narrative of the story.
00:48:14
Speaker
no they're there, but they're, like, outside. They don't come in. Like, it it what the... In signing event for the end of this is when she triggers the explosion, and and and then that chaos is kind of covered for...
00:48:29
Speaker
Like, it's no longer a controllable situation for them, for Doris and Dan. Right, and so either he was mad at her for blowing it up, or he gave up, right? One way or the other, but he ends up killing himself, and, like, literally nothing happened. Like, nothing was accomplished. Yeah, and that's one of those things, like, so I think...
00:48:50
Speaker
Like, the most rational thing he did that day was to shoot her and then kill himself. i yeah Well, I would say that, yeah, i I would say... I'm glad that nobody else... they There were some injuries, but I don't think there were any other fatalities, right? It was just the two perpetrators. It just the perpetrators. There's 78 burns and smoke inhalation injuries, and then one bullet wound in John Miller, the music teacher, who was like trying to get away that.
00:49:14
Speaker
Right, but he survived there. This is a... It's a weird situation. I do think that he just had lost his mind for whatever reason. It is possible it was environmental. um did Do we know how old he was? um David Young.
00:49:29
Speaker
He was 39 years old. Oh, wait. No, that's not right. I'm sorry. It was 39 years ago. hold on. 18, 22, 23. He in
00:49:44
Speaker
He's 30. I think he's 30 years old. Maybe drugs then. Yeah. i you know I went on and read how it affected the community, and I wanted to mention this one interesting thing.
00:49:59
Speaker
The lead investigator for this case is a guy named Ron Hartley. He had four kids in the room that day. That's how small a place this is. Oh, yeah. No question. I mean, he the underlying, like, thinking the underlying part of that out, it seems like it would be some sort of crafty thinking, right?
00:50:20
Speaker
But, like, all the other different kind of stupid stuff, it doesn't seem like he was thinking very clearly, like, I have no idea who he demanded the money from. Yeah.
00:50:32
Speaker
And the other thing I read is he had like the boxes of his journals. I think there were 50 total documents with him.
00:50:43
Speaker
So like where did he send them to? ah Exactly. Like, who was who was going to do this? And I guess he thought it was going to catch the right person's attention. i don't really know. But we've kind of got a split thing going here because he did say, like, he was going to be the leader of all the intelligent children or whatever, Right. Which is, right I don't know, weird. But then also he makes, like, ransom demands, right? Yeah.
00:51:10
Speaker
or hostage, nie whatever whatever they're called, right? Because he's saying, I need $2 million per kid. it It was nearly a billion dollars in what the value would be today. right And so you kind of got two different things happening, and don't know, I think he just lost his mind. Yeah, I don't think we pulled all the threads on this, if people want to read about it. There was allegedly a third person that was with ah the two guys in the van, but he...
00:51:39
Speaker
got out before he knew anything about it. I think his name was Harrison. He comes up in some of the interviews. um There's a lot of fascinating perspectives from the parents and the survivors. And it is just the strangest thing to me that like we end up with like this guy, this very strange former town police officer, ah like essentially blowing himself up.
00:52:08
Speaker
And like all of these kids survive. That doesn't happen in all of the cases that we cover where, except for the perpetrators, no one really dies.
00:52:20
Speaker
um Particularly when there's 154 hostages. I'm going to reiterate this one more time, and I swear I won't say it again in this episode because they're almost done. They're in a first grade classroom.
00:52:35
Speaker
What the world? It's unimaginable. like I can't even picture that in my head. I literally cannot picture how you put 154 people into this room.
00:52:48
Speaker
I don't know. it's the And then when she was saying that they put like an eight foot square, i was like, how is there eight foot available? It's probably around the teacher's desk in the front of the room. guess so. I bet you everybody's like, you know, in movie classrooms, you have the front row of desks.
00:53:05
Speaker
I'm picturing all 154 people are behind the front row of desks to the wall. Yeah, I guess so, because that's exactly what I was thinking. i was like, how could there possibly be room for that? but yeah, probably.
00:53:17
Speaker
This is terrible to say, but I feel like it's an appropriate way to close this episode.
Reflections and Conclusion
00:53:21
Speaker
I do not think i will ever get the visual image of Doris Young burning body, being passed out the building and left on the lawn out of my head.
00:53:33
Speaker
Anytime I think of this case, that will be the thing I see forever. Yeah, I mean, kind of. These teachers opening up those windows saved everybody.
00:53:45
Speaker
They did. I think the explosion would have been much bigger if the gasoline fumes, because that's the thing that fuels gasoline anyways. If the fumes had been allowed to like concentrate in that space, I think it would have damaged, i think it would hurt more people. Well, from what I heard, for one thing, the wires were cut on two of parts of the bomb, right? So it was only a partial explosion. And then it the force behind it was dissipated further than I guess they intended for it to be. Yeah.
00:54:15
Speaker
yeah But it is an interesting concept that was for absolutely nothing. So to me, it's like 154 people you know now will have PTSD for the rest of their lives because of this lunatic, basically.
00:54:32
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, i don't I don't have anything else on this one. The way that it shows up in like a lot of popular media is with like this religious undertone. And I just wanted to tell it, without that, from the perspective of what if this is just like some weirdos And they have these ideologies that don't make a lot of sense.
00:54:52
Speaker
And that's how we end up here with this whole concept of we need $2 million dollars per child.
00:54:59
Speaker
They should have asked for like a billion dollars per child because like they literally weren't getting anything. They could have asked for anything that they wouldn't get. um yeah there's tons of articles about this out there. I'm sure there's some summaries on the internet.
00:55:13
Speaker
um I've heard that ah zero equals infinity is somewhere i found it oh did you find it yep um it did it did not uh it's not something that i researched for this because i figured it would be yeah not all that brilliant it doesn't make a whole lot of sense it it didn't help me understand and anything any better it's weird um Well, that's all I got on this one. We still have we have a lot more hostage-shaking episodes. I will say that this one is one of the most unique like weapons with this whole bomb that's like not working at all. It is really interesting. I would like to i wonder if anybody's ever said, I cut the wires or whatever, because if not, that's almost like divine intervention, right? Yeah, I couldn't find it, but I did find where the investigators stood around one day, and like they... um
00:56:07
Speaker
They talked to each other and they were like, we have no idea how that happened. We don't think the kids did it. It had to have been a pair of wire cutters. And we just couldn't figure out like who had done it and they sort of um they leave it at that. But I i look at it and I'm like, I wonder if it's the kid or the wife.
00:56:25
Speaker
um I don't think it's going to be David unless like, well, unless this was all just like a, ah he decided for infamy and decided to go out with a bang, right?
00:56:36
Speaker
He was going to commit suicide the whole time. And I don't know. I always wonder if sometimes, especially really inexplicable situations like this one, I wonder if like, oh, they're just committing suicide the really long way.
00:56:51
Speaker
like That's kind of how this feels. Yeah. Because they want, obviously we're talking about it now. Right. And it's a bizarre situation, but in some ways it's like guaranteeing their legacy. It's like sacrificing the, any sort of good thing about them. Right.
00:57:07
Speaker
For, yeah for infamy, but to be remembered. Oh yeah. And it's definitely the opposite of the holiday spirit. oh You definitely went out with the bank.
00:57:25
Speaker
Special consideration was given to True Crime XS by LabrattiCreations.com. If you have a moment in your favorite app, please go on and give us a review or five-star rating.
00:57:36
Speaker
It helps us get noticed in the crowd. This is True Crime XS.
00:59:40
Speaker
True Crime Access is brought to you by John and Meg. It's written, produced, edited, and posted by John and Meg. You can always support True Crime Access through Patreon.com, or if you have a story you'd like them to cover, you can reach them at TrueCrimeAccess.com.
00:59:59
Speaker
Thank you for joining us.