Speaker 1: Col Zone Media.
Speaker 2: On Sunday, May twenty first, twenty seventeen, Monroe County Sheriff's
Speaker 2: Deputy Diana Torres pulled into the parking lot outside of
Speaker 2: a Burger King on Route One. There were plenty of
Speaker 2: empty parking spots, but she wasn't there for lunch. She
Speaker 2: positioned her patrol car directly behind a blue suv, blocking
Speaker 2: it in, and got out of her car. As she
Speaker 2: approached the restaurant, the door opened and a man walked out.
Speaker 2: Before he had a chance to react, she grabbed him
Speaker 2: by the wrist and started handcuffing him. For all his
Speaker 2: tough talk online, Brandon Russell went quietly. He would later
Speaker 2: say that he just needed to get out of town
Speaker 2: to clear his head after what he'd experienced on Friday night.
Speaker 2: He'd come home from work to find two of his
Speaker 2: roommates dead in their bedroom, murdered by a young man
Speaker 2: he'd considered his best friend. But when officers searched the car,
Speaker 2: they didn't find the kind of luggage you'd expect someone
Speaker 2: to have for a weekend trip to the Florida Keys.
Speaker 2: There wasn't so much as a toothbrush in the vehicle.
Speaker 2: Instead of t shirts and swim trunks. They found rifles
Speaker 2: and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, some of it already
Speaker 2: loaded into four high capacity magazines. Three hundred miles away
Speaker 2: in a jail cell in Tampa, a murderer was begging
Speaker 2: for a meeting with the FBI. He claimed he knew
Speaker 2: exactly why his roommate was driving around South Florida with
Speaker 2: a car full of guns. I'm Molly Conger in this.
Speaker 1: It's weird. The guys.
Speaker 2: When we left off last week, two men were in
Speaker 2: custody and two men were dead. The actual facts of
Speaker 2: the story are fairly straightforward, and it would make for
Speaker 2: a pretty short episode. Devon Arthur's eventually pleaded guilty to
Speaker 2: two counts of second degree murder for the murderers of
Speaker 2: Andrew Anoschach and Jeremy Hemmelman, as well as three counts
Speaker 2: of kidnapping for the three people he held at gunpoint
Speaker 2: at the Strip Mall. Brand and Russell pleaded guilty to
Speaker 2: federal charges of possessing an unregistered destructive device and improper
Speaker 2: storage of explosive materials. Devon was sentenced to forty five
Speaker 2: years in a Florida state prison, and Brandon was released
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty one, after serving most of a five
Speaker 2: year sentence. The narrative tension in this story. It's not
Speaker 2: in what happened, but why and what it might mean.
Speaker 2: Hundreds of pages of police reports, years of filings in
Speaker 2: their respective criminal cases, scores of news reports, at documentary
Speaker 2: TV interviews, There's no shortage of material laying out the facts.
Speaker 2: But it all leaves me with more questions than answers.
Speaker 2: I've spent some time on the show ruminating on one
Speaker 2: of these big questions before. It's one probably better left
Speaker 2: to a philosopher than a podcaster. But it's about the
Speaker 2: nature of truth. What does it even mean to say
Speaker 2: that something is true? In this story? We have a
Speaker 2: set of truths. Sure, we know that these men are
Speaker 2: guilty of the crimes they committed. We know it because
Speaker 2: a court said, so, Devin killed two people, Brandon had
Speaker 2: a garage full of explosive materials.
Speaker 1: That's true.
Speaker 2: But because neither of them took their case to trial,
Speaker 2: that's all we can really legally speaking say we know
Speaker 2: for certain. Maybe at trial there would have been a
Speaker 2: more aggressive exploration of Devon's claims that he'd killed his
Speaker 2: roommates to prevent the terrorist attack they were planning. Maybe
Speaker 2: if Brandon had gone to trial, the government would have
Speaker 2: had to prove to a jury what he was going
Speaker 2: to do with those explosives, but they didn't, so we
Speaker 2: don't know, and we're left trying to construct our own
Speaker 2: version of what might be true. Aside from the concrete facts,
Speaker 2: the physical evidence, the bullet casings, the autopsy reports, the
Speaker 2: crime scene photographs, the rest of the pieces that we
Speaker 2: have in this quest to assemble some version of the
Speaker 2: truth are probably lies. So let's go back to where
Speaker 2: we were last week, May nineteenth, twenty seventeen. The murders
Speaker 2: happened on a Friday evening. Tampa police responding to nine
Speaker 2: one one calls about an armed man at a strip
Speaker 2: mall found eighteen year old Devon Arthur's holding three people
Speaker 2: hostage a smoke shop. As he was being handcuffed, he
Speaker 2: told the officers that his roommates were dead in his
Speaker 2: apartment across the street and he'd be happy to show
Speaker 2: them which unit it was if they would.
Speaker 1: Drive him there.
Speaker 2: As the police pulled up out front, another man walked
Speaker 2: out the front door of the apartment and collapsed on
Speaker 2: the ground in front of them sobbing hysterically. Brandon Russell
Speaker 2: had arrived home from work minutes after the murders and
Speaker 2: discovered the dead bodies of Andrew Anoshack and Jeremy Himmelman. Inside,
Speaker 2: officers found not just the bodies of Devon's murder victims,
Speaker 2: but Brandon's bomb making workshop. The crime scene was a
Speaker 2: complicated one. When officers first arrived on the scene Friday evening,
Speaker 2: they saw the bodies, of course, you couldn't miss them,
Speaker 2: but they immediately noticed some other very concerning things lying
Speaker 2: around the apartment. Geiger counters an unusually large number of batteries,
Speaker 2: electric matches, piles of military gear, gas masks, bookshelves full
Speaker 2: of white supremacist literature, a Nazi flag tacked to the wall,
Speaker 2: a framed photograph of Timothy McVeigh, a backpack in the
Speaker 2: living room with some kind of device inside that looked
Speaker 2: like a bomb. Those first responding officers saw all of this,
Speaker 2: and they got out of there in a hurry. There
Speaker 2: was nothing they could do for the two men lying
Speaker 2: dead in the bedroom. That much was very obvious, based
Speaker 2: on the state of the bodies, so they secured the perimeter,
Speaker 2: evacuated the neighboring apartments and waited for the experts to arrive.
Speaker 2: All night. As Brandon and Devon sat waiting at the
Speaker 2: police station, officers worked on the crime scene. Members of
Speaker 2: the Tampa Police Department's Explosive Ordnance Disposal Team entered first
Speaker 2: to try to figure out how volatile the situation was.
Speaker 2: The only reports I have access to were written by
Speaker 2: Tampa police officers, so I can only see what they
Speaker 2: said about their interactions with agents from the FBI and ATF,
Speaker 2: but based on the crime scene logs. Bomb technicians from
Speaker 2: the FBI arrived a few hours later, and agents from
Speaker 2: the ATF arrived after midnight. It was the middle of
Speaker 2: the night by the time Devon and Brandon were interviewed
Speaker 2: by a homicide detective in the early morning hours of
Speaker 2: May twentieth. Brandon Russell asked for a lawyer. He'd been
Speaker 2: talking for over an hour already, but when the FBI
Speaker 2: agent in the room pressed him a little too hard
Speaker 2: about what they might find if they searched his computer,
Speaker 2: he didn't want to talk anymore. He wasn't under arrest,
Speaker 2: He was there voluntarily. He wasn't being detained. They weren't
Speaker 2: technically investigating him at all. He had just happened to
Speaker 2: come home from work and stumble into a crime scene,
Speaker 2: so if he didn't want to talk anymore, he was
Speaker 2: free to go. Around six am, a Tampa police officer
Speaker 2: drove him home. The explosives experts had finished their sweep
Speaker 2: of the residents and signed off on it being safe
Speaker 2: to enter, so detectives were starting to arrive to execute
Speaker 2: search warrants. Brandon waited outside in the parking lot while
Speaker 2: a detective entered the condo to find his car keys,
Speaker 2: and then he was on his way. His apartment was
Speaker 2: a crime scene and his mother lived in the Bahamas,
Speaker 2: so he planned to drive to Palm Beach to stay
Speaker 2: with his dad, or at least that's what he told
Speaker 2: the FBI. There's a lot of uninteresting details here about
Speaker 2: the memorandum of understanding between the FBI and the ATF,
Speaker 2: but they share primary jurisdiction when investigating possible federal crimes
Speaker 2: involving explosives, and both agencies have explosives experts. But ultimately,
Speaker 2: the decision as to whether the materials found in the
Speaker 2: garage constituted a violation of federal law was up to
Speaker 2: the ATF. And by the time the ATF briefed the
Speaker 2: FBI on what they found, Brandon Russell was gone. The
Speaker 2: federal criminal complaint was signed by a judge by midday
Speaker 2: on Saturday, just a few hours after Brandon Russell drove off.
Speaker 2: No problem though, right he told them where he was going,
Speaker 2: and if he drove straight there, he should have already
Speaker 2: arrived at his dad's house in Palm Beach. FBI agents
Speaker 2: called Brandon's dad, a Palm Beach County Sheriff's deputy. But
Speaker 2: not only was Brandon not there, his dad hadn't even
Speaker 2: heard from him and had no idea where he might be.
Speaker 1: So how did.
Speaker 2: They find him? He could have gone anywhere. I couldn't
Speaker 2: find anything in the court filings that indicated that they
Speaker 2: had tried to ping his phone or that they got
Speaker 2: a warrant for his banking information. They don't seem to
Speaker 2: have tracked him down using his digital footprint. But they
Speaker 2: found him pretty damn quick, and he was arrested the
Speaker 2: very next day. Here's where we waded into versions of
Speaker 2: the truth told by liars, where we start guessing about
Speaker 2: what these breadcrumbs might mean. Last week I played some
Speaker 2: clips for you of the police interrogation video recorded on
Speaker 2: the night of the murders, and in that interview, Devon
Speaker 2: Arthur's very quickly settled into a story that positioned him
Speaker 2: as some kind of hero. He knew it was wrong
Speaker 2: to kill, but he had to do it. It was the
Speaker 2: only way to save thousands of innocent lives. And I
Speaker 2: told you that. I think he was lying, but it's
Speaker 2: a lie built around the truth. Devon shot his friends
Speaker 2: because they made fun of him. He'd converted to Islam
Speaker 2: a year earlier, and the neo Nazi community did not
Speaker 2: take it well. He was pushed out of leadership in
Speaker 2: Adam Woffin, a group he'd helped found. He was banned
Speaker 2: from Iron March, the online Nazi message board where he'd
Speaker 2: found friendship and a sense of belonging, but he stayed
Speaker 2: involved with Adam Woffin, and he's stayed best friends with
Speaker 2: Brandon Russell, the group's leader. He lived with Brandon. He
Speaker 2: traveled with Brandon when he drove cross country to visit
Speaker 2: Adam Woffin cells or to buy and sell weapons for
Speaker 2: use by the group, And on the day of the murders,
Speaker 2: he was chatting online all day with other members of
Speaker 2: Adam Woffin. He was very much still involved, despite his
Speaker 2: claims after the fact. But as he's sitting there in
Speaker 2: this interrogation room, I think a few things are happening. Psychologically,
Speaker 2: he's trying to find a way to rationalize his actions.
Speaker 2: He needs to find a way to justify what he's done,
Speaker 2: and he also realizes that he's made himself a very
Speaker 2: nasty enemy. Killing two members of the Nazi terror cell
Speaker 2: makes him a target of the Nazi terror cell. It
Speaker 2: makes his family a potential target, and he knows what
Speaker 2: kind of people he's just crossed, and he doesn't want
Speaker 2: to go to jail, so he lands on a story
Speaker 2: that potentially solves all three problems. If he tells the
Speaker 2: cops everything, they'll take down Adam Woffen. Then he's safe
Speaker 2: from retribution and he's a hero. He can convince himself
Speaker 2: that he isn't a monster who shot his friends in
Speaker 2: the head over a disagreement, and maybe he'll even get
Speaker 2: a good deal in exchange for all this information and
Speaker 2: won't have to go to prison. So I do think
Speaker 2: he's lying about this being his actual motivation for the murders.
Speaker 2: He wasn't trying to stop a terrorist attack. But the
Speaker 2: lie came so easily because regardless of his intentions, when
Speaker 2: he pulled that trigger, he may have actually ended up
Speaker 2: stopping a terrorist attack. The things he told that detective
Speaker 2: weren't made up. As he's sitting in that room rattling
Speaker 2: off a list of explosive materials that he knows Brandon
Speaker 2: kept in the apartment, the bomb squad is at the
Speaker 2: crime scene and they're inventorying those exact items. And if
Speaker 2: that part was true, maybe other parts of his story
Speaker 2: were too. When I first saw where Brandon Russell was arrested,
Speaker 2: I wasn't sure what to make of it. He's from
Speaker 2: the Bahamas, so maybe he was going home. He has
Speaker 2: Behamian citizenship, most of his family lives there. Maybe that's
Speaker 2: where he was going and he just wanted to avoid
Speaker 2: the airport. Admittedly, geography is not my strong suit, so
Speaker 2: I thought it might make sense that you would take
Speaker 2: a boat from the Keys to the Bahamas. And you
Speaker 2: can sure, but it looks like typically you take a
Speaker 2: ferry from Fort Lauderdale, not the Florida Keys. And then
Speaker 2: you have to ask yourself if he was there because
Speaker 2: he was trying to get home to the Bahamas. Why
Speaker 2: had he picked up a friend first, Why had they
Speaker 2: paid cash for two new rifles, and why hadn't he
Speaker 2: contacted anyone to let them know where he was going.
Speaker 2: He wasn't going home, And the cops found him as
Speaker 2: quickly as they did because they knew exactly where to
Speaker 2: look for him, because Devin told them.
Speaker 3: He's planning on building mortar and firing it into a
Speaker 3: There was a nuclear plant off the Cosa of Florida,
Speaker 3: and it's off the COASA Miami and it's used to
Speaker 3: power that entire city in Fort Lauderdale and that kind
Speaker 3: of thing, and they're planning on firing that mortar of
Speaker 3: nuclear materials in it at that plant into the coolank
Speaker 3: things that are in the water.
Speaker 2: The FBI alerted authorities in Monroe County, Florida, to be
Speaker 2: on the lookout for Brandon Russell's vehicle. Deputy Torres didn't
Speaker 2: find him in that Burger King parking lot by accident.
Speaker 2: She was out looking for him. We had his picture.
Speaker 2: We were told that he could possibly be.
Speaker 1: Going up near Turkey Point for some type of terrorist act.
Speaker 1: That's all we knew.
Speaker 2: Turkey Point is the name of a nuclear power plant
Speaker 2: when Brendan Russell was handcuffed outside that Burger King in
Speaker 2: Key Largo. He wasn't alone. Documents filed in federal court
Speaker 2: don't name his friend, but police reports from this initial
Speaker 2: encounter do. He was traveling with another Adam Waffin member
Speaker 2: named William Chantra. When Brendon left Tampa on Saturday morning,
Speaker 2: he didn't drive to his dad's house in Palm b Instead,
Speaker 2: he drove forty five minutes south to Bradenton, Florida, and
Speaker 2: he knocked on his friend's front door. He'd been up
Speaker 2: all night. He's still wearing his military uniform. Remember, he
Speaker 2: discovered the bodies in his apartment when he got home
Speaker 2: from work on Friday evening, and work in this case
Speaker 2: was National Guard drill. He hasn't slept at all. He
Speaker 2: doesn't even have his cell phone. But he drives to
Speaker 2: Bradenton and he gets William Chantra out of bed and
Speaker 2: he tells him what happened. You can't ever really say
Speaker 2: what you would do in someone else's shoes in a
Speaker 2: situation you've never found yourself in. But I can use
Speaker 2: my imagination, and I think I would probably be pretty
Speaker 2: overwhelmed at first. If I'm William Chantra. You know, your
Speaker 2: friend is standing there on your front porch, exhausted and traumatized,
Speaker 2: and he's telling you that these other two guys, both
Speaker 2: friends of yours, are dead and he can't go home
Speaker 2: because their dead bodies are in his apartment. I think
Speaker 2: my next move would probably be to say, I don't know,
Speaker 2: you know, hey, man, come inside, let me get you
Speaker 2: some clean clothes, something to eat, maybe some tea. You know,
Speaker 2: probably offer to let him stay on the couch for
Speaker 2: a few days until he can figure something out. Something
Speaker 2: like that, something that involved everyone going inside and sitting
Speaker 2: on the couch. Like I said, that's not a situation
Speaker 2: I've ever been in, So I don't know exactly what
Speaker 2: I would do, but I can tell you with one
Speaker 2: hundred percent, ironclad certainty what I would not do, and
Speaker 2: that's quit my job, withdraw the entire balance of my
Speaker 2: savings account, and get into that man's car heading out
Speaker 2: of town. That just doesn't make any sense at all
Speaker 2: to me, but that's exactly what William Chantra did.
Speaker 1: He had three.
Speaker 2: Thousand dollars in cash, and on their way out of town,
Speaker 2: they stopped at the Chick fil A where he worked
Speaker 2: to let them know he wouldn't be back, and then
Speaker 2: they hit the road. There's not a lot of specificity
Speaker 2: in the timeline, so I don't know what route they took.
Speaker 2: But later that day they stopped at a bass pro
Speaker 2: shop near Fort Lauderdale, and they spent most of Chantra's
Speaker 2: cash on guns and ammunition. After a night in a hotel,
Speaker 2: they headed south again toward the Florida Keys. After his arrest,
Speaker 2: Brandon wasn't in the mood to talk anymore. He admitted
Speaker 2: that there were guns and ammunition in the car, but
Speaker 2: when he was asked about Adam Woffin, he stopped talking. Chantra,
Speaker 2: on the other hand, he was happy to chat. He
Speaker 2: wasn't under arrest, and as far as I can tell,
Speaker 2: he's never been charged with anything, and he had no
Speaker 2: problem telling the officers about Adam Woffin. He was a member,
Speaker 2: of course, and he'd met Brandon on Iron March, that
Speaker 2: neo Nazi online forum. In this conversation with FBI agents,
Speaker 2: he describes himself as a fascist, a national socialist, and
Speaker 2: a neo Nazi. Believes he shares with his best friend
Speaker 2: Brandon Russell. Sometimes they would go shooting together and they'd
Speaker 2: recently been discussing the possibility of him moving to Tampa
Speaker 2: into the condo with Brandon, Jeremy, Andrew, and Devin. They
Speaker 2: were all friends and they were all members of Adam Woffin.
Speaker 2: He helpfully explained that sure, most members of Adam Woffin
Speaker 2: use iron March, but Adam Woffin is actually much more
Speaker 2: exclusive than that. Not anybody can just join. In fact,
Speaker 2: Brandon screen's potential members to ensure that they share the
Speaker 2: group's ideology and aren't quote complete idiots, which is an
Speaker 2: incredible statement, really, considering this is behavior that you might
Speaker 2: expect from me, a complete idiot. That thing I said
Speaker 2: a minute ago about how he quit his job because
Speaker 2: he didn't know if he was ever coming home again.
Speaker 2: We only know he felt that way because he said
Speaker 2: it to an FBI agent. And for the second time
Speaker 2: that weekend, the FBI was sitting across the table from
Speaker 2: Brandon Russell. This time, though he was in custody, it
Speaker 2: took a little bit of time to get through the
Speaker 2: process of transferring him from one district to another. He
Speaker 2: was arrested in South Florida, but his case was in
Speaker 2: a court further north. Back home in Tampa, in the
Speaker 2: Middle District of Florida. It was June eighth. By the
Speaker 2: time the U. S. Marshals transported him from Miami to
Speaker 2: Tampa to have his first real hearing. He'd been in
Speaker 2: custody for more than two weeks already, and his attorney
Speaker 2: asked that he'd be released on bond. His grandmother owned
Speaker 2: a home in Orlando that she was willing to offer
Speaker 2: us collateral, and both his mother and grandmother said they'd
Speaker 2: watch over him to ensure he complied with any release conditions.
Speaker 2: He had no criminal history, he was a member of
Speaker 2: the National Guard, his father is a police officer, and
Speaker 2: his attorney said, there's just no evidence that he's a
Speaker 2: flight risk or a danger to the community, and the
Speaker 2: judge agreed. The judge agreed that there was nothing going
Speaker 2: on here that convinced him that this defendant should be
Speaker 2: held in detention, and he granted the motion for bond.
Speaker 2: But before he could sign the final order releasing Russell,
Speaker 2: the government filed an urgent motion for a stay. They said, look,
Speaker 2: just give us seventy two hours to write a more
Speaker 2: detailed explanation. Let's brief this thing a little more thoroughly
Speaker 2: before we do anything rash because this case never went
Speaker 2: to trial. This frantic back and forth about whether or
Speaker 2: not he would be released on bond is actually the
Speaker 2: most detailed set of documents in the entire case. It
Speaker 2: sounds like the government was maybe phoning it in at
Speaker 2: that first attention hearing. They sketched out the details, but
Speaker 2: they didn't offer a lot of evidence to demonstrate what
Speaker 2: they were talking about. So when the judge initially granted
Speaker 2: that motion for bond, he's saying things like, oh, the
Speaker 2: government believes that the defendant is a purported leader of
Speaker 2: a neo Nazi group. The government asserts that the materials
Speaker 2: could be used to make a bomb. The government suggests
Speaker 2: that the defendant is active on social media sites, but
Speaker 2: doesn't proffer any particulars. It doesn't sound like they did
Speaker 2: a great job presenting any evidence at all here. It
Speaker 2: sounds like they figured the judge would hear the keywords
Speaker 2: Nazi and bomb and not need to hear much more
Speaker 2: than that. The judge granted them that three day pause
Speaker 2: on the release order, and they returned to court later
Speaker 2: that week for another hearing on the issue of bond,
Speaker 2: and this time the prosecution brought the evidence The court
Speaker 2: needed to see those materials found in the garage weren't
Speaker 2: just some odds and ends that could be reasonably explained
Speaker 2: away as model rocket supplies. There was a cooler full
Speaker 2: of homemade hexamethylene, triperoxide diamine, a highly volatile explosive compound
Speaker 2: with no safe or practical use. There were jars of
Speaker 2: nitromethane and potassium chlorate, a coffee grinder full of some
Speaker 2: unknown white powder. There were bags of potassium chloride, potassium nitrate,
Speaker 2: iron oxide, and hexamine. He had several pounds of ammonium nitrate,
Speaker 2: much of which was in bags still inside a box
Speaker 2: addressed to him by name, and there littered amongst these
Speaker 2: bomb making materials there were shell casings that he'd fitted
Speaker 2: with fuses, a homemade setup that can be used to
Speaker 2: detonate a bomb. In his bedroom, he had flyers for
Speaker 2: his neo Nazi group on his dresser. There was a
Speaker 2: framed photograph of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy mcveay. In his closet,
Speaker 2: there were piles of military gear and cases of ammunition.
Speaker 2: In the bedroom where his roommates were found dead, there
Speaker 2: was a duffel bag full of homemade fuses. And handwritten
Speaker 2: instructions for making a bomb. The prosecution also produced pages
Speaker 2: of screenshots of posts that Brandon Russell had made on
Speaker 2: Iron March, showing that he was actively recruiting for a
Speaker 2: group that, in his own words, he calls fanatical and militant.
Speaker 2: And this motion to revoke bond is the document where
Speaker 2: we find that anecdote about his friend telling the FBI
Speaker 2: agent that when he left home with Brandon he didn't
Speaker 2: know if he would ever be back. After reviewing this evidence,
Speaker 2: the judge changed its mind. He wrote, upon further consideration,
Speaker 2: I am obliged to conclude that defendant's actions in response
Speaker 2: to the discovery of the explosive materials and ongoing investigation,
Speaker 2: past doubts on suggestions of defendant's innocent intentions. In his
Speaker 2: order revoking Russell's bond, the judge gives voice to the
Speaker 2: problem I was talking about at the top of the episode.
Speaker 2: It's hard to know what's true. A lot of the
Speaker 2: connective tissue here is based on claims made by Devon
Speaker 2: Arthur's immediately after he was arrested for murder. The judge
Speaker 2: watched the same video I did, and he came to
Speaker 2: some of the same conclusions. A lot of what Devon
Speaker 2: was saying looks like quote attempts by mister Arthur's to
Speaker 2: rationalize or justify his unconscionable killing of two people. But
Speaker 2: the judge also said there's no denying that some of
Speaker 2: what Devon said is definitely true, writing quote Arthur's statements
Speaker 2: of potential harm appear consistent with what has been revealed
Speaker 2: so far about the defendant and the lifestyle he engaged.
Speaker 2: In consistent with other circumstances, defendant is placed at the
Speaker 2: head of a small neo Nazi group with a militant bent,
Speaker 2: armed for violent confrontation and capable of executing on plans
Speaker 2: to harm others or destroy property.
Speaker 1: The judge was.
Speaker 2: A little concerned that the government had yet to preduce
Speaker 2: use any proof corroborating Devon's claims that there were internal
Speaker 2: Adam Woffin chats containing explicit discussion of some kind of plot,
Speaker 2: but he was satisfied at least that Brandon Russell should
Speaker 2: remain in custody for the time being, and that was it.
Speaker 2: Two months later, Brandon Russell changed his plea to guilty,
Speaker 2: just days before he was scheduled to go to trial.
Speaker 2: The government never produced any additional evidence because they didn't
Speaker 2: have to. They never had to convince a jury that
Speaker 2: Brandon Russell was going to do anything in particular with
Speaker 2: those explosives. They never had to explain how they knew
Speaker 2: they'd find him near that nuclear power plant, or why
Speaker 2: he had a car full of guns and ammunition when
Speaker 2: they found him. A court never settled the question of
Speaker 2: whether or not Devon Arthur's was telling the truth about
Speaker 2: Brandon Russell's intentions. Brandon Russell pleaded guilty on the explosive
Speaker 2: charges in September of twenty seventeen. A few months later,
Speaker 2: in December, a seventeen year old Adam Woffin member in
Speaker 2: Virginia shot and killed his ex girlfriend's parents. On January ninth,
Speaker 2: twenty eighteen, Brandon Russell was sentenced to five years in prison.
Speaker 2: One day later, on January tenth, police in California found
Speaker 2: the body of Blaize Bernstein in a shallow grave. He'd
Speaker 2: been murdered a week earlier by a member of Adam Woffin.
Speaker 2: In a matter of months, three young men connected to
Speaker 2: the group had killed and one of those killers is
Speaker 2: in jail, insisting the group was planning terrorist attacks, but
Speaker 2: the man he said was behind these plots was only
Speaker 2: charged with possessing and improperly storing explosive materials. Brendon Russell's
Speaker 2: criminal case was resolved in a matter of months, and
Speaker 2: he was already serving his sentence before there was much
Speaker 2: movement in the case against Devon Arthur's. That case dragged
Speaker 2: on for years. The plea agreement was finally filed just
Speaker 2: days before the sixth anniversary of the murders. Throughout this process,
Speaker 2: though Devon Arthur's never denied committing the murders, but there
Speaker 2: was a problem. He'd always been a bit of an
Speaker 2: odd kid when he was in middle school. His parents
Speaker 2: agreed in mediation during their divorce that he should be
Speaker 2: evaluated by a specialist, but it doesn't look like either
Speaker 2: of his parents ever followed through on that. On the
Speaker 2: night of the murders, he told the detective that he
Speaker 2: thought he probably needed to go to a hospital to
Speaker 2: get some kind of treatment, and he wished he'd listen
Speaker 2: sooner when people told him he needed help. He was
Speaker 2: diagnosed with ADHD as a child, but there were no
Speaker 2: other mental health diagnoses on his record prior to the murders.
Speaker 2: Based on reports written by the doctors who evaluated him
Speaker 2: in jail. He rapidly deteriorated after his arrest, but there
Speaker 2: does appear to have been some pre existing mental illness
Speaker 2: going on. In the interrogation video, he's a little disjointed,
Speaker 2: his speech is a little pressured, but he's lucid for
Speaker 2: the most part, and his body language is pretty relaxed.
Speaker 2: A doctor who evaluated him in twenty twenty wrote that
Speaker 2: Devon had developed a habit of pressing his fists into
Speaker 2: his neck when he felt anxious. He would apply pressure
Speaker 2: to his throat until he felt dizzy, sometimes even losing consciousness.
Speaker 2: A TV news camera in the courtroom recorded him doing
Speaker 2: it during at least one hearing, and the doctor said
Speaker 2: the behavior was compulsive. He couldn't stop doing it, even
Speaker 2: when asked by the doctor to try. He also claimed
Speaker 2: to be experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations, and said that
Speaker 2: he would lie awake at night and communicate with the dead,
Speaker 2: even on heavy doses of antipsychotics and sedatives. He exhibited
Speaker 2: the rapid, tangential speech of someone who's experiencing mania for
Speaker 2: the first few years after his arrest. Most of the
Speaker 2: doctors who met with him, agreed he was experiencing severe
Speaker 2: mental illness, and for several years the only movement on
Speaker 2: his case was related to these competency evaluations. He was
Speaker 2: moved back and forth between jail and a state mental
Speaker 2: hospital a few times, and doctor after doctor met with
Speaker 2: him and reported back to the court that he wasn't
Speaker 2: competent to stand trial. Now, there's a difference here between
Speaker 2: incompetent to stand trial and insane. Insane is not a
Speaker 2: nice word, but it is a word with a particular meaning.
Speaker 1: In a courtroom.
Speaker 2: You're not going to go to a doctor and get
Speaker 2: diagnosed insane. That's not really something we say anymore. But
Speaker 2: in a courtroom, someone who is insane is not legally
Speaker 2: responsible for their actions. That's something that you can argue
Speaker 2: at trial. Being legally insane is not the same thing
Speaker 2: as being mentally ill. You can be profoundly mentally ill
Speaker 2: and still legally responsible for a crime. Someone who successfully
Speaker 2: presents an insanity defense has to prove that at the
Speaker 2: time of the offense they lacked the ability to understand
Speaker 2: that what they were doing was wrong. They couldn't form
Speaker 2: criminal intent because they just were not in the same
Speaker 2: reality as the.
Speaker 1: Rest of us.
Speaker 2: And so at this stage of the case, before it
Speaker 2: goes to trial, we're not talking about insanity. Insanity is
Speaker 2: a trial issue, but before there can be a trial,
Speaker 2: he has to have the mental capacity to understand a trial,
Speaker 2: so they have to get him back to competycy. These
Speaker 2: doctors aren't making any kind of finding about whether or
Speaker 2: not he was insane at the time of the murders.
Speaker 2: They're just saying that right now today he lacks the
Speaker 2: ability to communicate effectively with his lawyer, to participate in
Speaker 2: his own defense. He doesn't know what's going on in
Speaker 2: the courtroom right now. But after a few years of treatment,
Speaker 2: the doctors finally agree that he's competent to proceed and
Speaker 2: they set the case for trial. In May of twenty
Speaker 2: twenty three, the morning the trial was supposed to begin,
Speaker 2: he signed a plea agreement. The state agreed to drop
Speaker 2: the murder charges down from first degree to second degree murder,
Speaker 2: and he agreed to plead guilty to all the charges.
Speaker 2: Earlier this year, a reporter from Court TV interviewed Devon
Speaker 2: in prison, and in this interview in twenty twenty five,
Speaker 2: his story isn't any clearer than it was on the
Speaker 2: night of the murders. He's stable now, he says, he
Speaker 2: doesn't have hallucinations anymore, and he has his anger under control,
Speaker 2: and he sees a psychiatrist in prison once a month,
Speaker 2: and he still believes that he did what he had
Speaker 2: to do. The reporter plays a clip for him of
Speaker 2: his own statements the night of the murder, the part
Speaker 2: where he says he did it to prevent the deaths
Speaker 2: of even more people, and he asks him, do you
Speaker 2: still stand by that claim, and Devin says that he does,
Speaker 2: and he gets visibly angry with the reporter when he's
Speaker 2: pressed on the issue of the way he's justifying these murders.
Speaker 1: The way you describe it, you're basically turning a brutal
Speaker 1: murder into an act of heroism by saying that, by
Speaker 1: saying that you were acting to save civilian lives from
Speaker 1: future terrorist attacks. Well, I certainly was.
Speaker 2: That's a way of adizing yourself, David.
Speaker 1: I can see where that come from in that context.
Speaker 3: And the thing is, I don't have any intent to
Speaker 3: really hurt innocent people.
Speaker 2: He goes as far as to say that he has
Speaker 2: sacrificed forty five years of his own life to stop
Speaker 2: Adam Woffin. I won't rehash the thoughts I had about
Speaker 2: those claims in the last episode. I don't believe him,
Speaker 2: I said that, but I spent most of this week
Speaker 2: thinking about it, turning it over in my head, and
Speaker 2: reading and rereading the documents that I have, And I
Speaker 2: found two strange statements buried in the police reports from
Speaker 2: that night. The officer who drove him from the Strip
Speaker 2: Mall to the apartment complex so he could show her
Speaker 2: where the bodies were wrote that during that very brief trip,
Speaker 2: I mean it's right across the street, He asks her
Speaker 2: if the media would want to interview him, and as
Speaker 2: their pull into the parking lot in front of the condo,
Speaker 2: he said, quote, it's just a shame I didn't get
Speaker 2: to write my manifesto before this. Another report, written by
Speaker 2: a different officer who later drove Devon from the crime
Speaker 2: scene to the police station, says that Devon was talking
Speaker 2: pretty much NonStop. From the portion of the report detailing
Speaker 2: Devon's statements immediately after being placed in a holding cell,
Speaker 2: the officer wrote, quote, Arthur's expressed how relieved he felt
Speaker 2: because he fulfilled his mission and he can now have
Speaker 2: peace Arthur's made several statements throughout that he was planning
Speaker 2: to do something in the next week or so anyway,
Speaker 2: and he was trying to pick a target. So which
Speaker 2: is it? Which is it? Was he insane? Did he
Speaker 2: snap because he was being bullied? Was he heroically preventing
Speaker 2: a terrorist attack? Was this a premeditated ideological act for
Speaker 2: what ideology exactly? The only person who really knows is Devin,
Speaker 2: and he's still telling a version of this story that
Speaker 2: doesn't add up. After last week's episode, I saw a
Speaker 2: listener comment online that they'd encountered Devin Arthur's many years
Speaker 2: ago while playing Minecraft. Remember Devin converted to Islam in
Speaker 2: twenty sixteen when several members of his Minecraft server took
Speaker 2: a joke a little too far and ended up meming
Speaker 2: themselves into a bastardized version of Islam. I'm not a gamer.
Speaker 2: I don't know anything about Minecraft, so I just took
Speaker 2: this as written and didn't try to look for more
Speaker 2: information about that. That's just a culture I don't understand.
Speaker 2: But this listener's message got me thinking. A lot of
Speaker 2: people Devin was gaming with back then remember him. This
Speaker 2: listener was not the only person to have ever posted
Speaker 2: online that they knew Devin from Minecraft. There are posts
Speaker 2: where people are processing their shock that someone they'd known
Speaker 2: from an online game turned out to be a murderer.
Speaker 2: So I started looking for posts made in the immediate aftermath,
Speaker 2: and I found some. First of all, it turns out
Speaker 2: Minecraft is a lot more complicated than I thought. Don't
Speaker 2: laugh at me. I don't play games, but I thought
Speaker 2: it was just literally like Legos on the computer. I
Speaker 2: thought it was computer legos. I don't know. I didn't
Speaker 2: know there was a whole culture with this encyclopedias where
Speaker 2: of lore. Devin was active on a Minecraft server called Sivcraft,
Speaker 2: where users play a modified version of the game that
Speaker 2: includes elements of the game civilization. So in Sivcraft, users
Speaker 2: banded together as nations and they do diplomacy. They go
Speaker 2: to war against other nations in the game. I don't know.
Speaker 2: Don't email me about Minecraft. I'm doing my best. I
Speaker 2: read a lot of stuff about games that I didn't understand.
Speaker 2: He eventually joined a server called Intcraft, which has similar
Speaker 2: gameplay dynamics to Sivcraft, but it was started by people
Speaker 2: who met on four Chan, and it turns out Devin
Speaker 2: used the same username for years, and his behavior was
Speaker 2: weird enough that a lot of people who played sivcraft
Speaker 2: remember him. I found four Chan posts going as far
Speaker 2: back as twenty thirteen that appeared to be Devin talking
Speaker 2: about Minecraft. By October of twenty fourteen, the same month
Speaker 2: his dad kicked him out of the house for ordering
Speaker 2: a copy of minecomf off Amazon, he's posting on four
Speaker 2: Chan trying to recruit more users to his Minecraft server,
Speaker 2: where he's playing as a Nazi. He posted an image
Speaker 2: containing a swastika in what appears to be a historical
Speaker 2: photograph of a mass grave, over which he's written an
Speaker 2: antisemitic slogan. Now again, I'm showing my ignorance of Minecraft culture,
Speaker 2: I guess. But both int and Sivcraft have kept extensive
Speaker 2: histories of their games. There are blogs and wikis and subreddits.
Speaker 2: And as I was reading through one of the Intcraft wikis,
Speaker 2: because there is more than one, I kept seeing the
Speaker 2: name of a particular user. Devin was second in command
Speaker 2: of a group of players that call themselves Striker Gang,
Speaker 2: named after their leader, a man playing under the username
Speaker 2: Striker one two three abc. Interesting maybe, but not relevant.
Speaker 2: I'm sure Devin played with a lot of people online,
Speaker 2: but just days after the murders, someone posted a link
Speaker 2: to a news story about Devin on a subreddit for
Speaker 2: a particular Minecraft server. Several reddit users replied, recalling strange
Speaker 2: run ins they'd had with him in the game. He'd
Speaker 2: been pretty well known for a couple of years already
Speaker 2: for being a Nazi. People posted things like I remember
Speaker 2: him being a little shit and sieve, but I didn't
Speaker 2: realize he'd do anything irl, and I assumed those short
Speaker 2: political rants were to come off as edgy. Yes, I
Speaker 2: couldn't believe someone could on ironically be like that. But
Speaker 2: one user posted something very odd. The account's been deleted,
Speaker 2: but the posts remain. He killed two of my friends
Speaker 2: and he planned on killing me. This is a very
Speaker 2: surreal experience. In a follow up post, the same deleted
Speaker 2: account confirms that he was friends with the victims in
Speaker 2: real life, not on Minecraft off line. Another user replying
Speaker 2: to that post wrote, hope you're doing all right despite
Speaker 2: all this. Striker Striker Striker from Minecraft was in Adam
Speaker 2: Woffen two. So I looked for Striker in the Iron
Speaker 2: March leagues and wouldn't you know it, he's there too.
Speaker 2: In twenty sixteen, Striker posted on Iron March that he
Speaker 2: was one of three Adam Woffen members in South Florida.
Speaker 2: He signed up with his real email address from a
Speaker 2: computer with an IP address in South Florida. Now I
Speaker 2: have to hand it to him, this man has done
Speaker 2: an incredible job wiping himself off the face of the Internet.
Speaker 2: But he did leave just enough bread crumbs that appeared
Speaker 2: to connect that Minecraft user to the Iron March poster
Speaker 2: to a thirty seven year old middle school teacher in
Speaker 2: South Florida. That would have made him twenty eight back
Speaker 2: in twenty sixteen, which is actually quite old for an
Speaker 2: Adam Waffen member. Members tended to be in their teens
Speaker 2: or early twenties, maybe because that's the demographic that was
Speaker 2: most online in the dark corners where the group recruited, right,
Speaker 2: they're more impressionable, less likely to make good decisions, less
Speaker 2: likely to have their lives figured out. All that's true,
Speaker 2: but it was also very intentional. Brandon Russell was explicit
Speaker 2: about this. He preferred to recruit very young members, literal children,
Speaker 2: because a child can't be an FBI agent. If you
Speaker 2: only recruit teenagers, you don't have to worry that any
Speaker 2: of them are an undercover cop. But maybe Striker made
Speaker 2: the cut because there was just no way an undercover
Speaker 2: cop could spend that much time pretending to lead isis
Speaker 2: on Minecraft. But back to that Reddit post, why did
Speaker 2: Striker think Devvin planned to kill him too? Another mysterious
Speaker 2: Reddit post from a deleted account claims that the leader
Speaker 2: of the group talked to some people who knew Devon
Speaker 2: on Minecraft and they allegedly told him that the murders
Speaker 2: were premeditated. The account is deleted and the post is
Speaker 2: not very clear where this information came from, but someone
Speaker 2: is claiming that Devin had been talking online about a
Speaker 2: plan to kill not only Andrew Jeremy, but several other
Speaker 2: members of the group too. I guess we'll never really know.
Speaker 2: As far as the hard facts go. Devin pleaded guilty
Speaker 2: to murder. His story still shifts with every retelling. He
Speaker 2: shot them because he was mentally ill, he shot them
Speaker 2: because they were bullies, he shot them because he had
Speaker 2: to prevent a terrorist attack. But in one tiny moment,
Speaker 2: before those bodies were even cold, he told a police
Speaker 2: officer that he'd been planning to carry out an attack
Speaker 2: that week, and he told another officer that he wished
Speaker 2: he'd found time to write his manifesto first. Maybe there
Speaker 2: is no truth here. There is no actual version of
Speaker 2: the truth, because what happened isn't something that can be
Speaker 2: made sense of. His story changes because even he doesn't
Speaker 2: know why he did what he did. In Minecraft, he
Speaker 2: role played sometimes as Isis, sometimes as a national socialist
Speaker 2: on a mission to kill communists. Sometimes he was a
Speaker 2: pony from the My Little Pony animated series. His online
Speaker 2: fantasy bled into real life. It wasn't enough to pretend
Speaker 2: to be an Isis or pretend to be a Nazi
Speaker 2: in Minecraft. He founded a real life Nazi group, and
Speaker 2: then he got pushed out of leadership of his Nazi
Speaker 2: group for swearing allegiance to Isis. When it came to
Speaker 2: his real world ideology, he believed all sorts of contradictory things.
Speaker 2: Maybe he really does believe entirely contradictory versions of his
Speaker 2: own reality too. In the moment that he became a murderer,
Speaker 2: maybe he believed all of it or none of it,
Speaker 2: but he'd been thoroughly steeped in the violent rhetoric of
Speaker 2: the Nazi group he helped create. Even if he does
Speaker 2: believe that he was only trying to stop the group's violence.
Speaker 2: That culture of violence is the reason that gun was
Speaker 2: in his hands in the first place. In the end, though,
Speaker 2: I guess he did kind of prevent something. Brandon Russell's
Speaker 2: bomb making workshop was discovered. He was arrested before he
Speaker 2: got a chance to do whatever he may or may
Speaker 2: not have been planning to do in South Florida at
Speaker 2: that nuclear power plant. But Brandon Russell's commitment to kicking
Speaker 2: off the race war only intensified during his years in prison,
Speaker 2: and within months of his release, he was back online
Speaker 2: chatting with impressionable young people about how to blow up
Speaker 2: electrical transformers. Brandon Russell was recently sentenced to twenty years
Speaker 2: in prison. Devon Arthur's is serving his forty five year
Speaker 2: sentence in Florida. He spends a lot of his time
Speaker 2: these days in the prison law library. As recently as
Speaker 2: last month, he was filing handwritten motions for post conviction relief,
Speaker 2: claiming his attorneys failed him by not presenting more mitigating
Speaker 2: evidence at sentencing. For what it's worth, I don't think
Speaker 2: any version of the truth would have helped him there.
Speaker 2: Florida law didn't really give the judge any discretion to
Speaker 2: have handed down a lighter sentence even if mitigation evidence
Speaker 2: had been presented. But I'll keep an eye on the
Speaker 2: docket just to see if he gets that evidentiary hearing
Speaker 2: he's been asking for. Maybe this time he'll have a
Speaker 2: new version of the truth. Weirdling the Guys see production
Speaker 2: of Coolsnow Media and iHeartRadio has researched, written, recorded by
Speaker 2: me Molly Coner. Our executive producers are Sophie Lecturement Van
Speaker 2: Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented
Speaker 2: Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickard.
Speaker 2: You can email me at Riddleyguys Podcast at gmail dot com.
Speaker 2: I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
Speaker 2: It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the
Speaker 2: show with other listeners on the Riddle the Guys subreddit.
Speaker 2: Just please don't post anything that's going to make you
Speaker 2: one of my weird little guys.