WEBVTT - CZM Rewind: Revisionist History Riverboat Cruise: Curtis Maynard, Pt. 1 0:00:01.680 --> 0:00:13.080 Wol Zone Media. In March of twenty twenty five, an 0:00:13.119 --> 0:00:18.880 episode of this show disappeared. It only existed at all 0:00:19.160 --> 0:00:23.240 for a few weeks, and its absence was obvious because 0:00:23.280 --> 0:00:25.479 it was the second half of a story whose beginning 0:00:26.079 --> 0:00:30.520 is still there. A lot of you have asked what 0:00:30.720 --> 0:00:36.440 happened to that episode, and I can't exactly tell you that, 0:00:37.320 --> 0:00:41.560 not in any kind of satisfying detail, but I have 0:00:41.760 --> 0:00:48.600 finally rewritten and re recorded it. When an episode of 0:00:48.600 --> 0:00:52.720 a podcast disappears, with that explanation, it's only natural to 0:00:52.760 --> 0:00:56.760 speculate about what happened behind the scenes. Maybe there was 0:00:56.800 --> 0:01:03.400 some sort of scandal, plagiarism, information, sloppy research, factual errors, 0:01:04.000 --> 0:01:08.240 maybe some kind of offensive slip of the tongue. It's 0:01:08.280 --> 0:01:13.120 happened to other shows. Sometimes it gets addressed, and sometimes 0:01:13.120 --> 0:01:17.399 it doesn't. Sometimes it's not really something that can be 0:01:17.480 --> 0:01:21.600 aired out. If there's litigation of some kind, it's best 0:01:21.600 --> 0:01:26.240 to say nothing at all. None of those things happened here. 0:01:27.080 --> 0:01:30.840 That much I can promise you. I stand behind my 0:01:30.920 --> 0:01:35.240 research one hundred and ten percent. I have sources for 0:01:35.319 --> 0:01:38.720 my facts, and I try to be clear when I'm 0:01:38.760 --> 0:01:43.479 only offering up conjecture based on those facts. I try 0:01:43.480 --> 0:01:48.240 to be even clearer when I'm just bitballing. There was 0:01:48.320 --> 0:01:55.320 no inaccuracy. That sounds cocky, but it's true. I've been 0:01:55.360 --> 0:01:59.360 writing unflattering things about dangerous men for a long time now. 0:02:00.480 --> 0:02:05.040 I'm thorough and I'm careful, and one of the lessons 0:02:05.080 --> 0:02:07.800 I've learned over the years is that a lot of 0:02:07.840 --> 0:02:12.080 people don't really like it when you write honestly about 0:02:12.080 --> 0:02:16.880 the ugly things they've been doing and saying I'm used 0:02:16.919 --> 0:02:19.840 to that. So when a man with a history of 0:02:19.880 --> 0:02:23.520 violence and a long track record of vexatious litigation sent 0:02:23.639 --> 0:02:29.160 a vague but threatening sounding email about the episode, I 0:02:29.280 --> 0:02:35.000 wasn't surprised. I'm not going to name this man, and 0:02:35.040 --> 0:02:37.720 I would prefer that you not either, for reasons that 0:02:37.800 --> 0:02:43.560 I think will become obvious. He's never actually succeeded it 0:02:43.760 --> 0:02:47.800 seriously harming anyone as far as I can tell, and 0:02:47.880 --> 0:02:50.160 he's never made it very far in any of his 0:02:50.320 --> 0:02:55.359 many lawsuits. But he has been to jail, and he's 0:02:55.400 --> 0:02:58.919 had court ordered psychiatric treatment for this kind of behavior. 0:03:02.680 --> 0:03:06.160 Corporations tend to be pretty risk averse, and their lawyers 0:03:06.240 --> 0:03:12.360 even more so. The message was brief, but alarming, and 0:03:12.400 --> 0:03:14.480 the guys in the suits just didn't want to have 0:03:14.520 --> 0:03:18.000 anything to do with someone who, based on his history 0:03:18.080 --> 0:03:21.440 and this current behavior, seems like he might be in 0:03:21.480 --> 0:03:25.200 the middle of a serious mental health crisis. So the 0:03:25.240 --> 0:03:30.240 decision was made to take the episode down. I wasn't 0:03:30.240 --> 0:03:34.079 happy about it, but I get it. I'm a team 0:03:34.120 --> 0:03:38.320 player now, and that means that I understand these days. 0:03:39.040 --> 0:03:42.360 I'm not just gambling with my own wellbeing when I 0:03:42.440 --> 0:03:47.360 decide to play chicken with a conspiracy theorist. So for 0:03:47.400 --> 0:03:50.120 the last eight months or so, there's been an episode 0:03:50.160 --> 0:03:55.520 on the show's feed called Curtis Maynard Part One, but 0:03:55.600 --> 0:04:01.120 there is no episode called Curtis Maynard Part two. As 0:04:01.160 --> 0:04:03.600 twenty twenty five is coming to a close and I've 0:04:03.600 --> 0:04:07.360 been reflecting on the year past, I decided to fix that, 0:04:08.760 --> 0:04:12.520 which meant excising any mention of that man, who was 0:04:12.600 --> 0:04:17.280 really only ever a tangent in the story. Anyway, you 0:04:17.360 --> 0:04:19.400 might have assumed that the man who was upset about 0:04:19.440 --> 0:04:24.799 the episode was the subject of the episode. It wasn't. 0:04:25.760 --> 0:04:29.359 Curtis Maynard had no complaints about the episode, not that 0:04:29.400 --> 0:04:34.159 he shared with me. Anyway, he probably wouldn't have liked it, 0:04:34.360 --> 0:04:37.839 if he heard it, to be honest, but he didn't 0:04:38.600 --> 0:04:42.800 because he's dead. No, the man that I had to 0:04:42.839 --> 0:04:45.960 go back and cut out of this story was an 0:04:46.000 --> 0:04:51.320 interesting digression at best. He wasn't directly involved with the 0:04:51.320 --> 0:04:55.440 core storyline. He never even interacted directly with the weird 0:04:55.480 --> 0:04:59.520 little guy at the center of it. This man wouldn't 0:04:59.560 --> 0:05:02.040 warrant talking about it all if it weren't for his 0:05:02.040 --> 0:05:06.000 connection to a secondary character and a story about someone else. 0:05:08.120 --> 0:05:13.680 He is, luckily for us, not someone who matters at all. 0:05:16.320 --> 0:05:19.359 So now that I've hopefully dispelled the rumor that the 0:05:19.440 --> 0:05:23.480 episode was taken down because it contained factual statements about 0:05:23.560 --> 0:05:27.920 Ron Paul's connection to Neo Nazis and white supremacists, here 0:05:28.000 --> 0:05:31.080 is the original first half of that story to refresh 0:05:31.080 --> 0:05:37.200 your memory. The rewritten, re recorded lost episode will be 0:05:37.279 --> 0:05:39.760 right behind this one in the show's feed on your 0:05:39.800 --> 0:05:44.240 podcast app of choice. My editor Rory and I will 0:05:44.279 --> 0:05:47.240 be off next week for Thanksgiving, but I'll be back 0:05:47.279 --> 0:05:58.880 with new We're Little Guys in December. On the Saturday 0:05:58.960 --> 0:06:03.000 night before Labor Day two thousand three, Charter buses pulled 0:06:03.000 --> 0:06:07.920 into the lot at Cincinnati's Public Landing. Passengers streamed out 0:06:07.960 --> 0:06:11.520 of the buses one hundred and fifty or so, mostly 0:06:11.560 --> 0:06:15.039 older white men in suits, and they boarded the Delta Queen. 0:06:16.600 --> 0:06:18.640 It was a beautiful late summer evening for a dinner 0:06:18.680 --> 0:06:21.600 cruise down the Ohio River, and they'd spent all day 0:06:21.640 --> 0:06:24.320 cooped up inside in a rented ballroom at the Marriotte 0:06:24.320 --> 0:06:27.960 near the airport. They'd paid three hundred and seventy five 0:06:28.000 --> 0:06:31.760 dollars apiece to attend a weekend long conference called Real 0:06:31.920 --> 0:06:37.039 History USA, but the history they were interested in wasn't 0:06:37.040 --> 0:06:40.360 what any real historian would call real history at all. 0:06:42.320 --> 0:06:44.479 This was the fifth year in a row that disgraced 0:06:44.560 --> 0:06:48.760 historian and infamous Holocaust denier David Irving had brought anti 0:06:48.760 --> 0:06:53.560 Semites from around the world to Cincinnati. Over the years, 0:06:53.640 --> 0:06:58.640 He's been banned from entering Canada, Germany, Austria, Australia, New Zealand, 0:06:58.680 --> 0:07:02.560 and Lithuania, but he seemed to enjoy the Ohio River, 0:07:03.240 --> 0:07:08.040 and he came back to Cincinnati year after year. That weekend. 0:07:08.120 --> 0:07:13.040 Speakers ranged from notorious to obscure, but they all shared 0:07:13.040 --> 0:07:18.400 a passion for Nazi Germany. Brigham Young University professor Tom 0:07:18.480 --> 0:07:21.640 Catherall had to cancel at the last minute due to 0:07:21.680 --> 0:07:25.080 a health concern, and I'm sure the attendees were devastated 0:07:25.160 --> 0:07:28.640 to miss his presentation on Hermann Goering's love of model Trains. 0:07:30.000 --> 0:07:32.760 Over lunch at the Marriotte on Saturday, they watched Lenny 0:07:32.800 --> 0:07:37.000 Riefenstahl's Victory of the Faith, the less famous predecessor to 0:07:37.040 --> 0:07:41.320 her infamous Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. The 0:07:41.360 --> 0:07:45.920 conference program notes that Reefenstahl is quote still going strong 0:07:46.000 --> 0:07:50.160 at over one hundred and Irving said that Riefenstah sends 0:07:50.160 --> 0:07:54.800 her greetings to the conference's attendees. David Irving couldn't have 0:07:54.840 --> 0:07:57.679 known then that his friend would actually die later that week. 0:07:59.520 --> 0:08:03.320 On Sunday morning, the conference resumed with presentations from Donald Bustian, 0:08:03.640 --> 0:08:07.920 an adjunct professor at Southern Arkansas University and founding member 0:08:07.960 --> 0:08:10.640 of a group called Scholars for Nine to eleven Truth. 0:08:12.280 --> 0:08:16.520 Before lunch, Charles Pravaan, a theologian whose anti contraception writing 0:08:16.600 --> 0:08:20.760 is highly regarded by adherents of the Quiverful movement, opined 0:08:20.800 --> 0:08:23.480 on the possibility that a self published book by an 0:08:23.480 --> 0:08:27.720 American Jew was actually to blame for Hitler's policies in Germany, 0:08:29.080 --> 0:08:32.360 and that afternoon, David Irving gave the stage to a 0:08:32.360 --> 0:08:36.400 young protege, an up and coming white nationalist blogger who'd 0:08:36.440 --> 0:08:39.640 recently finished his master's degree at Texas A and M University. 0:08:41.000 --> 0:08:44.400 Curtis Maynard presented his master's thesis on a lesser known 0:08:44.400 --> 0:08:47.800 incident from World War II. The one hundred and four 0:08:47.800 --> 0:08:51.720 page thesis doesn't actually mention the Holocaust a single time. 0:08:52.160 --> 0:08:56.120 It's not about that. It's about a nineteen forty three 0:08:56.320 --> 0:08:59.680 German air raid on US naval vessels docked at Bari, Italy. 0:09:01.080 --> 0:09:03.600 But the old man in the Marriott conference room probably 0:09:03.600 --> 0:09:06.560 spent most of their Sunday afternoons watching the History Channel, 0:09:06.679 --> 0:09:09.960 so I'm sure they enjoyed hearing a dry resitation of 0:09:10.000 --> 0:09:15.319 facts about planes and ships. Either way. In two thousand 0:09:15.360 --> 0:09:18.720 and three, Curtis Maynard was a rising star in the 0:09:18.800 --> 0:09:22.920 revisionist history community. Sharing the stage with David Irving was 0:09:22.960 --> 0:09:27.079 a great honor for an aspiring white supremacist writer, and 0:09:27.240 --> 0:09:31.240 in certain circles his writing was well regarded and is 0:09:31.320 --> 0:09:37.400 sometimes still remembered. But Curtis Maynard is best remembered for 0:09:37.480 --> 0:09:40.839 how his story ends At the wheel of a nineteen 0:09:40.920 --> 0:09:45.520 ninety four Lincoln Sedan crashing a ditch with a bullet 0:09:45.520 --> 0:09:52.520 hole in his head. I'm Molly Conger, and this is weird, 0:09:52.520 --> 0:10:12.680 little guys. When I started writing this episode, I thought 0:10:12.720 --> 0:10:15.920 the story of Curtis Maynard would revolve around the revisionist 0:10:15.960 --> 0:10:21.880 historians and pseudo intellectuals he admired. But instead I spent 0:10:21.960 --> 0:10:26.120 most of this week reconstructing one man's disastrous downward spiral 0:10:26.160 --> 0:10:28.600 after getting into a flame war on a form thread 0:10:28.640 --> 0:10:33.360 about Ron Paul. I think, at its core, this is 0:10:33.400 --> 0:10:38.479 a story about lies, not just the lies of dishonest scholarship. 0:10:39.360 --> 0:10:41.600 No listener to this show needs to be told this, 0:10:41.800 --> 0:10:48.640 But the Holocaust did happen. Millions of Jews, roma queer people, communists, 0:10:48.720 --> 0:10:52.200 and political dissidents were shot, gassed, and starved to death 0:10:52.240 --> 0:10:56.240 by Nazi Germany. I have no interest at all in 0:10:56.320 --> 0:10:59.240 engaging with the revisionist history of David Irving and his ilk. 0:11:00.240 --> 0:11:03.520 There's no debate to be had there, although we will 0:11:03.760 --> 0:11:07.920 wade through a bit of the swamp they inhabit. No, 0:11:08.520 --> 0:11:13.079 this is a story about smaller lies, about the gossip 0:11:13.160 --> 0:11:15.480 and rumors that live in the comments on twenty year 0:11:15.520 --> 0:11:20.280 old blog posts and ancient threads on hateful online forums 0:11:20.320 --> 0:11:23.920 about internes, scene squabbles for clout on Nazi message boards, 0:11:23.960 --> 0:11:26.480 and debate within the white power movement about what kind 0:11:26.520 --> 0:11:30.600 of messaging will actually advance their cause. And it's a 0:11:30.640 --> 0:11:35.200 story that ends in a despicable, tragic act of domestic violence. 0:11:37.200 --> 0:11:42.400 A woman was murdered, a child was shot, and children 0:11:42.440 --> 0:11:47.520 lost their parents. It's a story about the violent speech 0:11:47.760 --> 0:11:52.439 of violent men, men who talk about mass murder and genocide, 0:11:53.280 --> 0:11:56.880 and how sometimes those men cross the threshold into real 0:11:56.920 --> 0:12:00.920 world violence. This is some I spend a lot of 0:12:00.920 --> 0:12:06.080 time thinking about. It's unavoidable. Really, I spend a lot 0:12:06.080 --> 0:12:09.840 of time studying the digital debris left behind after the fact, 0:12:10.920 --> 0:12:14.400 after a man like this stops posting and starts loading 0:12:14.400 --> 0:12:18.840 his gun. But that's almost always where I start reading. 0:12:20.320 --> 0:12:24.760 I'm looking back in time. I already know what he did. 0:12:26.320 --> 0:12:29.200 A few months ago, I started researching for an episode 0:12:29.200 --> 0:12:34.319 about a different man, a different murderer. I realized something 0:12:34.360 --> 0:12:37.720 that seems obvious now, I just never really thought about 0:12:37.720 --> 0:12:42.559 it this way before. When I study the internet footprint 0:12:42.800 --> 0:12:46.560 of a killer, I'm looking at a fossil of sorts, 0:12:47.480 --> 0:12:51.880 these posts preserved in stone, evidence of where he once was, 0:12:53.600 --> 0:12:59.240 But those online ecosystems are thriving, busy places full of 0:12:59.240 --> 0:13:03.760 people who read those posts the day they were made, 0:13:03.920 --> 0:13:08.560 people who responded to them. So what is for me 0:13:08.880 --> 0:13:14.679 some kind of artifact? Was once an actual conversation between 0:13:14.679 --> 0:13:19.040 real people who really knew each other, And when one 0:13:19.040 --> 0:13:22.480 of them logs off for the last time, the ones 0:13:22.559 --> 0:13:27.400 left behind processed that violence right there in the same 0:13:27.480 --> 0:13:33.600 digital forum they'd spent years chatting. The story they got 0:13:33.600 --> 0:13:38.080 me thinking about this particular genre of online conversation is 0:13:38.080 --> 0:13:42.320 when I haven't finished. Fraser Glenn Miller murdered three people 0:13:42.360 --> 0:13:47.280 in Kansas in twenty fourteen. He died in prison convicted 0:13:47.320 --> 0:13:50.920 of those murders, but he was also a suspect in 0:13:51.120 --> 0:13:53.720 three other murders in nineteen eighty seven, and was a 0:13:53.760 --> 0:13:57.640 central figure in the Greensboro massacre, where Nazis and klansmen 0:13:57.720 --> 0:14:02.360 murdered five communist organizers in nineteen seven nine. He didn't 0:14:02.400 --> 0:14:05.200 pull the trigger in nineteen seventy nine, and nobody ever 0:14:05.240 --> 0:14:08.120 approved he did in eighty seven, but he played a 0:14:08.160 --> 0:14:12.360 part in those deaths. His hands were unclean long before 0:14:12.360 --> 0:14:16.480 he opened fire in Overland Park. It's a long and 0:14:16.640 --> 0:14:20.600 complicated story with mountains of archival material left to consume 0:14:20.680 --> 0:14:23.640 before I'm ready to write it. But on the day 0:14:23.720 --> 0:14:26.960 Miller started shooting outside a Jewish community center in Kansas, 0:14:28.120 --> 0:14:32.640 his peers saw the news. Within an hour of the shooting. 0:14:32.680 --> 0:14:36.360 There were threads on Stormfront and Vanguard News, the two 0:14:36.440 --> 0:14:40.640 most popular Nazi message boards of the day, and in 0:14:40.680 --> 0:14:44.440 the immediate aftermath, a lot of the posters were celebrating 0:14:45.400 --> 0:14:48.640 they thought there were some dead Jews, in their words, 0:14:50.360 --> 0:14:53.320 but others were skeptical about initial reports that the shooter 0:14:53.400 --> 0:14:58.200 had yelled Hyle Hitler as officers handcuffed him, and then 0:14:58.280 --> 0:15:02.080 someone posted the news footage of that moment of the 0:15:02.120 --> 0:15:08.440 shooter yelling Kyle Hitler, and the shooter's face isn't terribly clear, 0:15:08.760 --> 0:15:11.560 as he's being shoved into the back of a police car. 0:15:12.040 --> 0:15:15.320 If you didn't know him, that blurry, poorly lit image 0:15:15.360 --> 0:15:19.560 wouldn't really look like anything at all. But they did 0:15:19.640 --> 0:15:24.080 know him. It was Brad Griffin, a prominent member of 0:15:24.120 --> 0:15:26.560 the secessionist group the League of the South, and a 0:15:26.600 --> 0:15:31.200 man I have my own history with who recognized Miller first. 0:15:31.840 --> 0:15:34.400 The shooter wasn't just one of their own, He was 0:15:34.440 --> 0:15:38.520 a prolific poster in their online community. He was someone 0:15:38.520 --> 0:15:42.040 they talked to every day, someone who'd been a significant 0:15:42.040 --> 0:15:46.640 figure in their movement for decades. And on both sites, 0:15:47.440 --> 0:15:52.000 users were searching for meaning, and some said they always 0:15:52.080 --> 0:15:54.360 knew this would happen, that he was going to crack 0:15:54.440 --> 0:15:58.640 one of these days and do something like this. Others 0:15:58.680 --> 0:16:02.160 insisted that the they knew would never do this and 0:16:02.360 --> 0:16:07.960 he must have been set up. Some celebrated, some were disappointed, 0:16:09.360 --> 0:16:14.320 but no one grieved for his victims. And those conversations 0:16:14.360 --> 0:16:19.600 seemed so unique to me, What a strange window into 0:16:19.640 --> 0:16:25.000 this terrible world. They're deeply troubling, of course, but surely 0:16:25.040 --> 0:16:30.200 those were an anomaly, I thought. But while I was 0:16:30.280 --> 0:16:34.160 researching for this episode, the story I'm circling around getting 0:16:34.240 --> 0:16:39.240 to this week, I saw it again because four years 0:16:39.280 --> 0:16:43.120 before Fraser Glenn Miller made his last post, that same 0:16:43.160 --> 0:16:46.800 online community reacted to the news that Curtis Maynard had 0:16:46.880 --> 0:16:52.560 murdered his ex wife and then taken his own life. 0:16:52.680 --> 0:16:57.480 But I suppose we should start at the end. On 0:16:57.600 --> 0:17:03.120 April twenty first, twenty ten, Curtis Boon Maynard was harassing 0:17:03.120 --> 0:17:08.399 his ex wife. It wasn't the first time they'd been 0:17:08.400 --> 0:17:11.080 divorced for a little over a year, and he hadn't 0:17:11.119 --> 0:17:15.560 reacted well to losing custody of their two daughters. I 0:17:15.560 --> 0:17:18.679 couldn't find any coverage that included the contents of any 0:17:18.760 --> 0:17:22.040 of those texts he sent Melissa Masa that day, but 0:17:22.119 --> 0:17:25.280 whatever it was, she was upset enough about the texts 0:17:25.520 --> 0:17:29.840 that she'd discussed them with a friend. That afternoon, at 0:17:29.880 --> 0:17:36.040 eight twenty pm, Melissa's neighbors heard gunshots. Her middle daughter, 0:17:36.280 --> 0:17:38.560 just twelve years old, ran to a neighbor's house with 0:17:38.560 --> 0:17:42.399 her two year old sister in her arms. A neighbor 0:17:42.440 --> 0:17:45.879 heard the commotion and came outside and saw Melissa, a 0:17:45.960 --> 0:17:48.719 thirty four year old mother of three, dead in her 0:17:48.720 --> 0:17:52.520 front yard. He was still taking in the sight of 0:17:52.520 --> 0:17:55.320 his neighbour's body there on the lawn when he noticed 0:17:55.320 --> 0:17:58.080 her ex husband, Curtis Maynard, pulling out of the driveway. 0:18:00.000 --> 0:18:01.879 We were dialed nine one one as he started his 0:18:01.920 --> 0:18:05.639 own car, following Maynard and providing his location to the dispatcher. 0:18:07.560 --> 0:18:10.720 Officers who arrived at the house found Melissa's oldest child, 0:18:10.760 --> 0:18:13.480 a sixteen year old daughter from a prior marriage inside. 0:18:15.000 --> 0:18:17.800 She survived, but she had been shot in the face 0:18:17.920 --> 0:18:20.040 by the man who had been her stepfather since she 0:18:20.119 --> 0:18:25.000 was a toddler. Curtis Maynard was driving seventy miles an 0:18:25.040 --> 0:18:27.800 hour down the highway when police caught up to him. 0:18:28.840 --> 0:18:31.800 He ended the chase without ever even stepping on the brakes. 0:18:33.280 --> 0:18:34.960 He shot himself in the head while he was still 0:18:35.000 --> 0:18:38.520 speeding down the dark road. With the driver dead at 0:18:38.560 --> 0:18:41.000 the wheel, his car slammed into an SUV that had 0:18:41.040 --> 0:18:42.840 pulled over onto the shoulder to get out of the 0:18:42.880 --> 0:18:46.320 way of the high speed chase. The mother and her 0:18:46.320 --> 0:18:54.159 two children inside were thankfully uninjured. The irresistible and unanswerable 0:18:54.240 --> 0:18:56.800 question in the aftermath of a tragedy like this is 0:18:56.840 --> 0:19:02.040 always why. Why did he murder his ex wife? Why 0:19:02.040 --> 0:19:04.440 did he shoot his stepdaughter in the face? Why did 0:19:04.440 --> 0:19:08.320 he take his own life? Why? Today? Why? Like this? 0:19:10.080 --> 0:19:14.040 And there are no answers. Nothing I can tell you 0:19:14.119 --> 0:19:19.239 will explain this, not for lack of trying, but I 0:19:19.320 --> 0:19:22.680 can try to understand who he was before the last 0:19:22.720 --> 0:19:25.720 day of his life. And pieced together the fragments of 0:19:25.760 --> 0:19:28.080 an online argument that seems to have been the beginning 0:19:28.119 --> 0:19:31.119 of the end of Curtis Maynard's dream of making a 0:19:31.160 --> 0:19:36.720 career out of being a racist blogger. I don't know 0:19:36.800 --> 0:19:39.840 exactly when Curtis Maynard decided he wanted to be a writer. 0:19:41.840 --> 0:19:44.240 He served briefly in the US Army after high school. 0:19:45.240 --> 0:19:47.280 In nineteen ninety two, at the age of twenty five, 0:19:47.920 --> 0:19:50.440 he got his associate's degree in nursing and began working 0:19:50.480 --> 0:19:54.679 as a registered nurse. In nineteen ninety six, while he 0:19:54.720 --> 0:19:57.720 was still married to his first wife, he started seeing 0:19:57.720 --> 0:20:00.560 the woman who had become his second wife and only 0:20:00.640 --> 0:20:06.000 murder victim. Melissa Mesa was actually still married to her 0:20:06.119 --> 0:20:09.160 first husband at the time, but they were separated, and 0:20:09.200 --> 0:20:11.879 Maynard would later say he'd believed she was already divorced. 0:20:13.600 --> 0:20:16.080 It's hard to piece together the particulars of a man's 0:20:16.080 --> 0:20:20.199 personal life so many years before he got online, but 0:20:20.320 --> 0:20:25.480 things were not going well. In nineteen ninety seven, just 0:20:25.560 --> 0:20:28.720 as his divorce from his first wife was finalized, a 0:20:28.800 --> 0:20:32.160 judge in Texas issued a bench warn't for him. He'd 0:20:32.200 --> 0:20:35.240 pled guilty to a dui in nineteen ninety four, and 0:20:35.320 --> 0:20:38.280 he got off easy. He didn't have to go to jail. 0:20:38.320 --> 0:20:42.000 All he had to do was complete the dui education program, 0:20:42.520 --> 0:20:46.600 but he never did it, so maybe he skipped town 0:20:46.840 --> 0:20:49.879 to avoid the benchwarn't. Maybe he was just looking for 0:20:49.960 --> 0:20:53.960 a fresh start after his divorce. But just as he 0:20:54.040 --> 0:20:57.720 was doing court in Corpus Christi, Texas, he got a 0:20:57.800 --> 0:21:02.160 job at a hospital in Idaho in June of nineteen 0:21:02.240 --> 0:21:05.560 ninety seven, right around the time Melissa probably would have 0:21:05.560 --> 0:21:09.600 been realizing she was pregnant with Maynard's daughter. He did 0:21:09.640 --> 0:21:13.280 something he should not have done. And I don't mean 0:21:13.440 --> 0:21:15.840 impregnating a woman who was still married to another man. 0:21:15.880 --> 0:21:19.520 I don't care about that. But according to a decision 0:21:19.520 --> 0:21:23.080 from the Idaho Board of Nursing, one vial of demarole 0:21:23.600 --> 0:21:27.200 and one vial of morphine went missing from the locked 0:21:27.280 --> 0:21:31.720 narcotics cabinet at Boundary County Community Hospital on June twenty eighth, 0:21:31.840 --> 0:21:37.840 nineteen ninety seven. Missing opiates are a big deal in 0:21:37.880 --> 0:21:41.720 a hospital. They're not something that just gets misplaced and 0:21:41.880 --> 0:21:45.720 shrugged off. It's not a lost pen. These things are 0:21:45.760 --> 0:21:51.600 carefully accounted for these days. Everything's tracked in a computer system. 0:21:52.280 --> 0:21:54.920 But even in the dark ages of the nineteen nineties, 0:21:55.520 --> 0:21:57.800 every dose of an opiate had to be signed for. 0:21:58.520 --> 0:22:02.680 There was a record where every drop of this was 0:22:02.720 --> 0:22:07.440 supposed to be. If those vials were missing, someone had 0:22:07.440 --> 0:22:11.960 to have taken them. An inventory was done to determine 0:22:11.960 --> 0:22:15.120 if anything else was missing, and a few days later 0:22:15.160 --> 0:22:18.719 it was discovered that two boxes, each containing ten vials 0:22:18.720 --> 0:22:23.320 of morphine, had been tampered with. The evidence was turned 0:22:23.320 --> 0:22:26.399 over to the Bonners Ferry Police department. The hospital had 0:22:26.440 --> 0:22:30.840 their own investigation to conduct. They drug tested every hospital 0:22:30.840 --> 0:22:35.919 employee who had access to that cabinet. Sure, it's possible 0:22:36.080 --> 0:22:39.640 that a nurse who steals pain medication is just selling it, 0:22:40.800 --> 0:22:43.280 but there's a really good chance that whoever took that 0:22:43.400 --> 0:22:49.120 morphine was going to test positive for it. Everyone tested negative, 0:22:50.320 --> 0:22:54.560 well everyone except for Curtis Maynard, who didn't show up 0:22:54.560 --> 0:22:56.320 for his shift on the day of the drug test. 0:22:57.680 --> 0:23:00.560 In fact, he never came back to work at all. 0:23:15.400 --> 0:23:19.400 The police investigation would eventually determine that Maynard's fingerprints were 0:23:19.440 --> 0:23:23.000 on the boxes that had been tampered with. The morphine 0:23:23.000 --> 0:23:25.360 that should have been in those vials in that box 0:23:26.280 --> 0:23:28.320 had all been replaced with what the Board of Nursing 0:23:28.359 --> 0:23:33.719 decision only calls quote a benign substance, which I assume 0:23:33.840 --> 0:23:38.439 is a saline solution or something like that. So the 0:23:38.520 --> 0:23:42.879 investigation was kicked off because two vials were physically missing 0:23:42.920 --> 0:23:46.040 from the cabinet, but in the end it looks like 0:23:46.119 --> 0:23:50.639 a significant amount of morphine was actually missing, having been 0:23:50.680 --> 0:23:56.280 taken from the vials and replaced with something else, And 0:23:56.359 --> 0:23:59.920 so if he hadn't slipped up and stolen the vial 0:24:00.160 --> 0:24:04.000 of demarole, they might never have noticed that he'd been 0:24:04.040 --> 0:24:09.280 replacing morphine with saltwater, and hospital patients may have been 0:24:09.320 --> 0:24:15.520 administered an unknown substance instead of their pain medication. By 0:24:15.520 --> 0:24:18.439 the time those lab results came back, though Maynard had 0:24:18.480 --> 0:24:22.840 already moved back to Texas, he was technically still a 0:24:22.880 --> 0:24:27.159 registered nurse with a valid license in Texas. When his 0:24:27.200 --> 0:24:29.600 oldest daughter was born in March of nineteen ninety eight, 0:24:29.920 --> 0:24:31.679 he was working as a nurse at a hospital in 0:24:31.720 --> 0:24:35.600 Corpus Christi. The Idaho Board of Nursing filed their formal 0:24:35.640 --> 0:24:39.040 complaint against him that summer, a year after the morphine 0:24:39.040 --> 0:24:45.080 first went missing. Maynard never responded. After months of getting 0:24:45.119 --> 0:24:47.760 no response from Maynard, the Idaho Board of Nursing got 0:24:47.760 --> 0:24:52.320 a default order against him, suspending his nursing license, and 0:24:52.440 --> 0:24:54.679 before the Texas Board of Nursing had a chance to 0:24:54.680 --> 0:24:58.199 suspend him. A standard practice in most professions, where if 0:24:58.200 --> 0:25:01.480 you're disciplined by a board in one state, there is 0:25:01.520 --> 0:25:05.840 what's called reciprocal discipline in most other states. But before 0:25:05.880 --> 0:25:09.359 Texas could do anything like that, he mailed them a 0:25:09.440 --> 0:25:13.080 letter saying I no longer desire to be licensed as 0:25:13.080 --> 0:25:17.480 a professional nurse, and he voluntarily relinquished his nursing license 0:25:17.520 --> 0:25:22.199 before it could be taken. The Bonners Ferry Herald, a 0:25:22.280 --> 0:25:26.679 newspaper in Bonner's Ferry, Idaho, ran several announcements in the 0:25:26.680 --> 0:25:30.480 summer of two thousand that Curtis Maynard was wanted on 0:25:30.480 --> 0:25:33.880 a felony warrant for possession of controlled substance and theft, 0:25:34.080 --> 0:25:37.680 but Idaho court records don't show that any criminal case 0:25:37.720 --> 0:25:41.280 was ever filed. I have to assume that's in relation 0:25:41.400 --> 0:25:43.679 to the theft of the morphine three years earlier, but 0:25:44.520 --> 0:25:48.520 I don't know how those pieces fit together. He did 0:25:48.600 --> 0:25:51.399 move back to Idaho years later, but the five year 0:25:51.480 --> 0:25:54.840 statute of limitations had already passed, so he was never 0:25:54.880 --> 0:25:59.199 actually criminally charged in connection with the missing morphine. But 0:25:59.240 --> 0:26:02.520 in nineteen ninety ane nine, Curtis Maynard had lost his 0:26:02.640 --> 0:26:06.679 nursing license in Idaho and given it up in Texas. 0:26:07.119 --> 0:26:09.399 He was unable to work in the only field he 0:26:09.480 --> 0:26:12.600 had any real experience in. He had a baby and 0:26:12.640 --> 0:26:15.600 a common law wife to support, and he had a 0:26:15.640 --> 0:26:20.640 pretty serious addiction to alcohol and opiates. After twenty eight 0:26:20.680 --> 0:26:24.479 days of residential treatment for substance abuse, he did what 0:26:24.520 --> 0:26:26.200 a lot of people do when they have no idea 0:26:26.240 --> 0:26:29.600 what to do with their lives. He went to graduate school, 0:26:30.400 --> 0:26:32.920 enrolling in a master's program in history at Texas A 0:26:33.000 --> 0:26:38.160 and M University. I wish I could tell you which 0:26:38.200 --> 0:26:42.320 came first. Did Curtis Maynard set out to write his 0:26:42.359 --> 0:26:45.280 master's thesis about a German air raid on US naval 0:26:45.359 --> 0:26:48.840 vessels in Italy because he had a genuine interest in 0:26:48.880 --> 0:26:52.760 this lesser known chapter of World War II history, and 0:26:52.840 --> 0:26:57.080 he accidentally stumbled upon David Irving's work while he was researching. 0:26:58.119 --> 0:27:01.199 Or was he already familiar with the work of revisionist 0:27:01.280 --> 0:27:04.399 historians and hoping to add his voice to the choir. 0:27:05.880 --> 0:27:09.640 I'm not sure there's anyone left to ask, but whichever 0:27:09.680 --> 0:27:12.600 it was. By the time Maynard finished his thesis in 0:27:12.600 --> 0:27:15.480 the spring of two thousand and three, he wasn't just 0:27:15.840 --> 0:27:22.320 reading David Irvings's Holocaust denial works. They were corresponding. The 0:27:22.320 --> 0:27:25.560 thesis not only lists three of Irving's books in its bibliography, 0:27:26.359 --> 0:27:29.600 there are several footnotes indicating the source for a particular 0:27:29.680 --> 0:27:34.879 claim is an email exchange between Curtis Maynard and David Irving. 0:27:36.680 --> 0:27:41.280 Maynard's thesis isn't about the Holocaust. The word doesn't even 0:27:41.280 --> 0:27:44.960 appear in the paper. There's no mention of Jews, camps, 0:27:45.040 --> 0:27:50.919 gas chambers, nothing like that. The writing isn't great in 0:27:50.960 --> 0:27:53.919 my opinion, but I think he could have produced a 0:27:54.760 --> 0:28:00.960 serviceable paper about a real historical event out of college. 0:28:01.040 --> 0:28:03.360 So to be honest, I have no idea how the 0:28:03.359 --> 0:28:07.600 thesis writing process works. Maybe there was no point at 0:28:07.640 --> 0:28:11.439 which someone read any of this in draft form and 0:28:11.520 --> 0:28:16.960 asked him, hey, why did you write quote? Without the 0:28:17.000 --> 0:28:20.440 works of historians like Elkafrolic and David Irving, who conducted 0:28:20.480 --> 0:28:23.320 research in the former Soviet archives in Moscow, there was 0:28:23.359 --> 0:28:25.760 a distinct possibility that we would not be privy to 0:28:25.800 --> 0:28:30.200 the uncensored and unedited thoughts, ideas and words of doctor 0:28:30.320 --> 0:28:36.080