About a month ago I picked up the book "Bath Massacre".
I had known about the horrible event for a long-time now, but outside of the what I read on the Internet, never read a book on the topic.
And then the mass shooting at the school in Texas occurred and it I wanted to get the book read...
I thought if nothing else perhaps it would give me more insight into what drove a Michigan farmer to blow up a school in Bath, Michigan on May 18th, 1927 killing 45 (including his wife and himself).
In a lot of ways Andrew Kehoe seems to share traits with many school shooters...
However Andrew did not use a gun. He used dynamite.
You see Andrew Kehoe, who was in his early 50's at the time, was not your typical farmer.
He graduated from college and was always considered "well dressed" even when doing farm work. The image in my mind of him out in his fields behind a team of horses strikes me like the Eddy Albert image in the opening song on the TV show "Green Acres" where Albert is all dressed up and riding a tractor.
In a lot of ways Andrew Kehoe was like the Eddy Albert character– Smart with high regard for themselves and not very good at farming.
I won't go into Kehoe's family background– The book does a splendid job of that.
But there were threads of his personality that seemed problematic even when he was young.
Kehoe ended up on the school board for the Bath School District– Due to his very much "penny-pinching" ways and his hatred of having to pay anything that was considered a "tax".
He figured that by being the treasurer on the School Board he could help control the amount of school tax he was going to have to pay.
This put him at odds with the superintendent of the district. Their relationship was acidic at best.
Kehoe's personality would not allow him to take sleights and forget about them.
Not Andrew Kehoe.
Over time the sleights would layer one on top of another. He was known to "go off" once in a while beating one of his horses to death and purposely shooting a neighbor's dog.
At the same time we did get a long with a few folks and generally speaking did not seem to have a dislike of children.
On May 18th, 1927 that all came to an end.
On that day Kehoe blew-up a section of the Bath School.
Oh and he also blew-up his home, barn and other outbuildings.
In addition he killed his wife.
After the explosion at the school he drove to the site where bystanders were already trying to free the injured and recover the dead.
We do not know if the district superintendent either saw Kehoe pull up or that Kehoe called him over to his Ford pickup.
What we do know is that Kehoe's truck was also loaded with explosives, pulled out a gun, shot the explosives and the truck with Kehoe and the superintendent were blown to smithereens. In addition several other adults were killed by the truck explosion. Also killed was a 2nd grader, who had not long before escapes from the collapsed school relatively unharmed.
Kehoe was fingered as the responsible party almost from the get-go. The debate on his innocence or guilt ended when authorities visited the still smoldering Kehoe farm and found a new sign near the driveway to the home– the sign read "Criminals are made and not born".
I won't get into too much how he orchestrated all this, but in the final analysis only about 100 pounds of explosives did go off that day under the school. However police and other inspectors found over 500 pounds of additional explosives that did not (for one reason or another) go off.
The Bath School would typically have about 250 children plus faculty and support staff. So the carnage could have been far worse.
Anyway that's a synopsis of the worst school massacre in US history.
If anyone is interested in the book, just drop me a PM and I'll send it to you.
