Just Another Summer Day: The Bath School Disaster

While Charles Lindbergh was making aviation history with his flight to Paris, the families of Bath, Michigan were burying their dead. The small and unassuming rural village lies peacefully just outside of Lansing—Michigan's state capitol. It's a tranquil sort of town where lingering spring days beckon the coming of summer. Not so the spring of 1927 when daydreams turned to nightmares as the residents of Bath came face to face with death and madness.

That was the year when the quiet community found themselves unwillingly thrust into the national spotlight—their innocence lost. It was the year when one of their own dynamited the newly built school killing thirty-eight of their children.

Born in 1872 in Tecumseh, Michigan, Andrew Kehoe was one of thirteen children. He graduated from Tecumseh High School and went on to attend East Lansing's Michigan State College (now Michigan State University). While there, he met Nellie Price and eventually married her.

For a while, the couple lived out west, where an accident left Kehoe with a serious head injury. After drifting in and out of a coma for days, he eventually recovered. Whether the head injury had anything to do with his subsequent actions, we'll never know, but such injuries have been shown to sometimes alter the personalities of victims. (Significantly, head injuries are one of the few common denominators among serial killers.)

After his recovery, the Kehoes settled in Bath where they bought a farm from Nellie's uncle. Then their financial troubles started. Kehoe lived in dire fear of losing the farm. He blamed his money woes on the high taxes he thought he paid and so began his vehement campaign to lower them.

Elected to the Bath school board as Treasurer, Kehoe fought hard against the building of a new school. Not only did he feel it was unnecessary, but, to him, a new school meant more taxes. Despite his heated arguments against it, the district built the Bath Consolidated School leaving Kehoe embittered. He blamed the board and, in particular, its president, Emory E. Huyck, for his poor financial circumstances. Finally, when the mortgage on his farm was foreclosed, Kehoe grew even angrier. The way he saw it, the school, and the higher taxes it caused, ruined his life. Andrew Kehoe wanted to get even.

In the winter of 1926, the board appointed Kehoe, a handyman, to do maintenance work inside the new school. But Kehoe wasn't interested in upkeep. He used his new position to get revenge. For months, he traveled from store to store, in and around Lansing, purchasing small amounts of explosives, which he took to the school. There, he developed an intricate wiring system connecting the carefully laid dynamite beneath the floor and in the walls and rafters of the Bath Consolidated School. By May of the following year, he had laid thousands of feet of wire linking over one thousand pounds of dynamite, which he planned to detonate with a clock. Not a man to leave loose ends, Kehoe also rigged the buildings on his farm.

On May 17, 1927, Kehoe put his painstaking plan into action. First, he filled the back seat of his pickup truck with old tools, nails, shovels and any other metal materials he could find. On top of the junk, he placed a package of dynamite. Next, he laid a loaded rifle on the front seat. Then, he murdered his wife.

The next morning brought with it a beautiful spring day. Beneath the deceiving warmth of the sun, hard working farmers went into their fields and unsuspecting mothers saw their children off to school—some for the last time-while Andrew Kehoe went about his ominous work. Around 8:45 a.m., the nightmare started as the first deadly explosions came directly from Kehoe's farm. In the midst of their early routines, concerned neighbors rushed to offer help, but in minutes the entire farm went up in flames.

Shortly after, a second explosion, even louder than the first, blasted through the air causing the earth to shake. The school! The townsfolk panicked as they rushed to the scene unable to comprehend the horror that greeted them. Half the building was gone. Trapped underneath the fallen roof and collapsed walls were the children-some eerily silent, some hysterically screaming. With windows shattered in nearby homes, cars on fire and trees aflame, more explosions could be heard coming from the Kehoe farm. The people of Bath thought that they were under siege.

An elderly neighbor who witnessed the school explosion described the scene: "The whole walls caved outward, the roof toppled into the interior and a heavy cloud of smoke spread out in all directions. Then we heard the screams of the children…For a few minutes we could not understand what had happened."

Robert Gates was one of the first men to reach the school. He remembered: "Mother after mother came running into the school yard, and demanded information about her child and, on seeing the lifeless form lying on the lawn, broke into sobs…In no time more than 100 men were at work tearing away the debris of the school, and nearly as many women were frantically pawing over the timber and broken bricks for traces of their children."

Amidst the chaos, Andrew Kehoe pulled up in his truck. He surveyed the carnage until he spotted Superintendent Huyck, digging in the rubble along with the others. Huyck had been giving a test to some pupils just as the explosion struck. After leading his students to safety, he returned to the school to assist with the rescue effort when Kehoe called to him. As Huyck approached the truck, Kehoe turned, picked up his rifle and fired a shot point blank into the dynamite behind him. As the vehicle exploded, the metal debris in the backseat turned into deadly shrapnel killing not only Kehoe, but Huyck, Postmaster Glen Smith, resident Nelson McFarren and eight-year old Cleo Clayton who had just survived the school explosion and happened to be walking by.

The Michigan State Police, as well as other local police and fire departments, arrived at the deadly scene to find parents frantically digging for their children. As they joined in the rescue effort, the officers were shocked to find more dynamite in the basement. There was no choice, but to temporarily stop the search and clear the area until all of the explosives were found and dismantled. Over 500 pounds of undetonated dynamite were removed from what remained of the school. It seems the first explosion caused something to go wrong with Kehoe's wiring and, thankfully, only half of the dynamite had gone off.

The bodies of the children were taken to City Hall where a temporary morgue was set up. Horrified parents were brought in to identify their sons and daughters. In the end, thirty-eight children and seven adults were killed with dozens more injured. Every single home in the community suffered from a fatality or injury-some losing more than one child. The next day as families mourned, Nellie Kehoe's body was found on what was left of the farm. The buildings were leveled and the farm animals had perished. As officials searched the property, they found a hand made sign wired to a fence-a final message from a misguided man who had taken revenge. It read: "CRIMINALS ARE MADE, NOT BORN."

Today a small park stands on the spot where the school once was. The names of the children that died there are engraved on a bronze plaque-Bath's way of ensuring that neither they, nor their story, will be forgotten. Just this past May, the people of Bath remembered. Over 200 residents and some survivors attended a memorial service to honor those that died so violently. Seventy-five years later, their anguish is still visible-their memories still vivid. What happened in Bath was, and still is, the worst incident of school violence in American history and, until 1995's bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building, it stood alone as the single worst act of domestic terrorism—a term unheard of back in 1927. Still a small town, but no longer innocent, these men and women know only too well the haunting record they hold.