Bulldozer

Muffler shop owner Marvin Heemeyer bought a 45-ton Komatsu bulldozer and parked it on his lot in Granby, Colorado. When someone asked him what he was planning to do with it, he said, “I think I'm going to bulldoze the town." Patrick Brower's book is Killdozer: The True Story of the Colorado Bulldozer Rampage. Tickets for our brand new live show, Don't Worry with Phoebe Judge, are on sale now! Learn more and see all of our tour dates at ⁠⁠⁠⁠thisiscriminal.com/live⁠⁠⁠⁠. Say hello on ⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠. Sign up for our ⁠⁠occasional newsletter⁠⁠. Follow the show and review us on ⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠. ⁠⁠Sign up for Criminal Plus⁠⁠ to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, invitations to virtual events, special merch deals, and more. We also make ⁠⁠This is Love⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠Phoebe Reads a Mystery⁠⁠. Artwork by ⁠⁠Julienne Alexander⁠⁠. Check out ⁠⁠our online shop⁠⁠. Episode transcripts are posted on ⁠⁠our website⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  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.

• 0:38Phoebe Judge?

  Support for Criminal comes from FAIRE. If you run your own shop, whether it's an online shop or a brick-and-mortar, you want your products to be unique. With FAIRE, it's easy for independent retailers to stock products from over 100,000 brands worldwide. Perfect for planning inventory for the holiday season. Sign up today and get 50% off your first wholesale order, up to $100, at FAIRE.com/criminal. That's FAIRE.com/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.

• 1:23Phoebe Judge?

  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/live. I hope to see you.

• 1:45Phoebe Judge?

  This episode contains language that may not be suitable for everyone. Please use discretion.

• 1:54Phoebe Judge?

  On June 4, 2004, Patrick Brower got a call at the newspaper offices where he worked, in Granby, Colorado.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:16Phoebe Judge?

  Granby is a small town in the Colorado Rockies. Shortly after that first call, another call came in.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:40Phoebe Judge?

  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.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:18Phoebe Judge?

  Patrick grabbed a digital camera and went outside. He started heading west, down the town's main street, Highway 40.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:57Phoebe Judge?

  Could you see inside of it? Could you see who was driving it?

• 4:01Speaker 02

  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.

• 4:16Phoebe Judge?

  Patrick watched as the bulldozer slowly drove down Main Street, toward where he was standing. He went back inside the newspaper building.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  We could feel the rumble. We could actually feel the ground shaking. And we started to be able to hear the creaking and the clunking of the treads. And we were in the office, looking out the window, and suddenly, it took a sharp right turn toward our office.

• 4:43Phoebe Judge?

  The bulldozer first slammed into an aspen tree in front of the newspaper offices. And then, it kept going, right into the building.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  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.

• 5:04Phoebe Judge?

  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.

• 5:14Speaker 02

  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.

• 5:39Phoebe Judge?

  I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

• 5:50Phoebe Judge?

  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.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  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.

• 6:45Phoebe Judge?

  Soon after he moved to the area, Marv Heemeyer went to an auction. He helped 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 Dochev.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  Cody Dochev was the patriarch of the Dochev 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.

• 7:28Phoebe Judge?

  Marv Heemeyer eventually outbid him and bought the land for $42,000. But he later said he went up to Cody Dochev after the auction and said he was willing to sell it to him.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  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 Dochevs. 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.

• 8:15Phoebe Judge?

  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 rent it after all. And then, a few years later, Marv found out that Cody Dochev, 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.

• 8:45Speaker 02

  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 them the whole way.

• 9:01Phoebe Judge?

  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?

• 9:15Speaker 02

  Well, he basically said it was going to be a nuisance, and it would cause noise, dust, traffic problems, et cetera. 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.

• 9:47Phoebe Judge?

  Patrick Brower covered many of the hearings about this for the Sky High News. At one point, Marv Heemeyer wanted to publish a letter to the editor in the newspaper about the concrete plant.

• 10:01Phoebe Judge?

  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.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  And other people began to figure out that Marv was also using this just as leverage to get back at the Dochefs 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 in his opposition. This was also after Marv had filed a lawsuit against the town and the Dochefs claiming that they had illegally done certain things in the process of trying to get the plant approved.

• 10:57Phoebe Judge?

  And it was eventually approved.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, it was.

• 11:01Phoebe Judge?

  Marv Heemeyer's lawsuit was thrown out, too.

• 11:04Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:24Phoebe Judge?

  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.

• 11:50Speaker 02

  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 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

• 12:35Speaker 02

  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 and society. And he was going to show them, and that's how he was going to do it.

• 13:07Phoebe Judge?

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• 13:51Phoebe Judge?

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• 14:22Speaker 03

  Wayfair, every style, every home.

• 14:29Phoebe Judge?

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• 15:27Speaker 04

  Hello. My name is Marvin Heemeyer.

• 15:36Phoebe Judge?

  In April of 2004, Marvin Heemeyer sat down in front of a cassette player and started recording.

• 15:43Speaker 04

  I'm living in Grand Lake, Colorado, and this tape is about my life since I came up here to Grand Lake in 1991.

• 15:56Phoebe Judge?

  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 Dochef at the auction.

• 16:08Speaker 04

  Cody Dochef, he came back there and introduced himself to me about the rudest, most arrogant person. I mean, this guy's just a fucking asshole.

• 16:21Phoebe Judge?

  Marv recorded himself for hours over a series of days.

• 16:25Speaker 02

  He basically vents his grievances, states his point of view.

• 16:29Speaker 04

  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.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  He goes down the list of people he didn't like. I'm on that list, and he accused me of being a pot-smoking army brat.

• 16:56Speaker 04

  Patrick Brower. I mean, he's a pothead. Of course, you can't tell anybody that. You know, big liberal, army brat, has had everything in his life given to him. But he knows how to abuse the power of the pen. And that's a big thing up here, is abuse of power.

• 17:18Phoebe Judge?

  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.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  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.

• 17:56Phoebe Judge?

  What did he do to this bulldozer?

• 18:00Speaker 02

  It's just fascinating, really. He took 3/8 or 1/2-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 4 to 5 inches wide, around the entire cab of the bulldozer.

• 18:37Phoebe Judge?

  Marv had also made portholes for the barrels of several rifles and small bulletproof windows to look out of above them.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  And he also had mounted five cameras on the outside of the tank, kind of concealed 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.

• 19:19Phoebe Judge?

  By April 2004, Marv Heemeyer had sold his property, and he was renting the shed space back from the new owners.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  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 temperatures. And he was doing work on the bulldozer to modify it to meet that requirement.

• 20:03Phoebe Judge?

  On the tapes, Marv Heemeyer refers to it as Marv's Komatsu Tank, MK Tank for short.

• 20:11Speaker 04

  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 to be.

• 20:25Speaker 02

  He definitely had this sort of religious fervor about him, about getting back at the wrongs that had been done to him.

• 20:33Speaker 04

  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 myself the rest of my life if I didn't have a plan to make this right.

• 20:53Phoebe Judge?

  On June 4th, 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.

• 21:34Phoebe Judge?

  And if we all don't win, we all lose." He wrote, "You, Granby, have got to learn to listen. Can you hear me now?" Then, he started up the bulldozer.

• 21:49Speaker 02

  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.

• 22:04Phoebe Judge?

  We'll be right back.

• 22:17Phoebe Judge?

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• 23:02Phoebe Judge?

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• 23:18Phoebe Judge?

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• 24:23Phoebe Judge?

  After driving through the walls of the shed, Marvin Heimeyer first drove his bulldozer in the direction of the Dochev's concrete business next door.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  Directly toward a large, concrete fabrication building that was on the Dochev batch plant property. And he just started driving into it. He would drive in about four or five feet, then back out, in and out, in and out, until the building just collapsed. Guys had been working in there shortly before he went in there, but they ran away when they saw what was happening. And then his next target was the concrete batch plant itself, which was just next door. And he just started smashing into the side of the building, going in a few feet, backing out, going in a few feet, backing out.

• 25:13Phoebe Judge?

  By now, Cody Dochev 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.

• 25:28Speaker 02

  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 Cody didn't get hit by those rounds that were fired at the front-end loader.

• 25:54Phoebe Judge?

  Workers at the concrete plant were trying to stop the bulldozer by sticking bars into the bulldozer's treads.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  But it just broke the wood and the steel, and nobody could stop it.

• 26:08Phoebe Judge?

  The police arrived. Marv Heemeyer began shooting at them. 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.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  And they would shoot at the dozer, but it didn't do any good. It was completely armored. No bullets could penetrate it.

• 26:30Phoebe Judge?

  Police started looking for other ways to get in. The sides of the bulldozer had been greased, but one officer managed to climb on top of it and was riding on the top as it kept moving down the road.

• 26:44Speaker 02

  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.

• 26:55Phoebe Judge?

  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.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  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 3 to 4 miles per hour. So it's kind of a slow-motion catastrophe taking place before your eyes, with police shooting at the cameras that they finally seen on the side of the dozer, randomly shooting at it, trying to figure out a way to stop it.

• 27:50Phoebe Judge?

  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.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  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 hastily evacuated, literally, probably, five to four minutes before the dozer slammed into the building.

• 28:19Phoebe Judge?

  Town Hall was destroyed. Then Marv Heemeyer drove the bulldozer to the newspaper offices, where Patrick Brower was inside.

• 28:29Speaker 02

  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 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 Heemeyer. And then I ran home to get my wife, who was pregnant at the time, out of the house and flee,

• 29:13Speaker 02

  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.

• 29:23Phoebe Judge?

  Police had gone inside Marv Heemeyer'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 Marv Heemeyer started bulldozing the town.

• 29:47Phoebe Judge?

  The bulldozer moved on from the newspaper office to the business and home of the widow of Granby’s former mayor, destroying both. A county employee tried to block the tank with a huge earth mover, but the bulldozer hit it, bursting one of its tires. The bulldozer drove on to a propane gas storage yard. Marv Heemeyer started shooting at some of the gas tanks.

• 30:14Speaker 02

  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.

• 30:31Phoebe Judge?

  And then, Marv Heemeyer drove to a store called Gambles.

• 30:35Speaker 02

  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.

• 30:47Phoebe Judge?

  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.

• 30:59Speaker 02

  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.

• 31:18Phoebe Judge?

  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?

• 31:40Speaker 02

  So, once the dozer had stopped, they had already talked to a SWAT team in Laramie 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.

• 32:22Phoebe Judge?

  That 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.

• 32:46Speaker 02

  There was debris, and junk, and trash, and concrete laying in Main Street, laying all around the buildings that had been hit. 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.

• 33:04Phoebe Judge?

  It’s shocking that no one was killed.

• 33:06Speaker 02

  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.

• 33:23Phoebe Judge?

  As the destruction was taking place that day, a news helicopter from Denver flew overhead, broadcasting live footage of the bulldozer taking down buildings.

• 33:35Speaker 05

  Many of the stores, the buildings, the offices that we had 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.

• 33:47Phoebe Judge?

  The story made national headlines. It even got a nickname. People started calling it “The Kill Dozer.”

• 33:54Speaker 02

  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.

• 34:05Phoebe Judge?

  Why do you think so many people, you know, were quick to come to Marv’s defense?

• 34:11Speaker 02

  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 in a town just to show them 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, and

• 34:56Speaker 02

  he immediately started posting a bunch of lies about the rampage the day after it had happened. The first one that he started spouting was that the police had actually killed Heemeyer, and that they were trying to cover it up. The second one was that there were no guns in the bulldozer, that the police had planted them. Third, he claimed that Marv went to extreme effort not to hurt people. He just went on with this whole thing where Marv was a victim, and people just latched on to it, and it went crazy.

• 35:31Phoebe Judge?

  A week after the attack, Patrick Brower’s newspaper, The Sky High News, received a letter to the editor from a woman in California. She said she’d read about what had happened online, and wrote, “You drove that poor, lonely 52-year-old man to despair and ultimately death. Shame on you, Granby City.” In an article about the story a month later, The Los Angeles Times quoted one web commenter saying, “When a man has had it up to here with all the bull that the corrupt officials dish out, he can do things others may find unreasonable yet are totally justifiable.

• 36:13Phoebe Judge?

  This man will go down as a folk hero.” A high school student made a website, KillDozer.us. It called Marv Heemeyer “an almighty legend” and sold merchandise. It also had a poll, asking what people thought should be done with the bulldozer.

• 36:33Speaker 02

  People wanted to save the bulldozer and put it on a stand in the park and immortalize it. People wanted to, thought Granby should have a Granby Bulldozer Days to commemorate the event and have bulldozer races and all kinds of things like that. Even the local historical association wanted the county to save the bulldozer and let them have it for display. But there was this big contingent of people in the town of Granby and other victims who thought that would be glorifying, you know, violence, and we eventually talked the town into, the county really, into paying to have it completely pieced out and dismantled and

• 37:18Speaker 02

  basically recycled.

• 37:19Phoebe Judge?

  Initial estimates were that Marv Heemeyer caused $5 million in damage in Granby. Patrick Brower estimates that it was more like $10 million. Some of the buildings were rebuilt quickly, like the town hall and the newspaper office. Others, like the hardware store that Marv Heemeyer attacked last, took almost a decade to reopen. Do people still talk about that day there?

• 37:49Speaker 02

  Yes, it comes up all the time. Initially, people were kind of closed-mouthed about it because, imagine, with all these people out there thinking the town had wronged Marv, and that Marv was this righteous, great American anti-hero, you’d think, well, these people are probably siding against the town, think we’re a bunch of jerks. So people were kind of quiet and subdued about it, but on the other hand, they tried to say that, you know, really, we didn’t do Marv any wrong, Marv just kind of went off the deep end and just tried to carry out this act of extraordinary violence. Really, he was just upset that he didn’t get his way. Look what he did.

• 38:32Phoebe Judge?

  Patrick Brower’s book is called Kill Dozer: The True Story of the Colorado Bulldozer Rampage. You can find a link in our show notes. And you can find some really wild pictures and videos from the story on our Instagram at @criminal_podcast, and on Facebook at ThisIsCriminal. Next month, I’m heading out on the road with a brand-new live show. It’s called Don’t Worry.

• 39:12Phoebe Judge?

  You can find out where I’m headed and get your tickets at thisiscriminal.com/live. I hope to see you. Criminal is created by Lauren Spoor and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susannah Roberson, Jackie Sajikko, Lilly Clark, and Lena Silison. This episode was fact-checked by Katie Sederborg. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. Special thanks to Brian McPherson.

• 39:53Phoebe Judge?

  We hope you’ll consider supporting our work by joining our membership program, Criminal Plus. You can listen to Criminal, 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 Spoor, 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/criminal. We’re also on YouTube at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I’m Phoebe Judge, this is Criminal.