Bath Massacre: America's First School Bombing (22 page)

He handed Lane four loose sticks of dynamite. No blasting caps were attached. The chief recognized this explosive as Hercules 40 percent, a common form of dynamite used in road construction or by farmers in removing old tree stumps.

High-test gasoline as a possible cause of the school explosion was no longer under consideration.
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Gertie Burnett felt the bricks pressing down on her body. From below, she could feel someone thumping her back, over and over, maybe using trapped legs to kick out of the rubble. It was too much for one child to handle.

Stop kicking, she implored the person beneath her.

Eventually the thumping stopped.

Gertie never knew who was beneath her. When the kicking ended, she thought, that person is dead.
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Desperate mothers combed the killing zone, pulling at the rubble, tugging heavy wooden beams, trying to lift chunks of concrete and plaster, frantically searching for their children.
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In the midst of the chaos, one man snuck through the crowd to the smoking remains of Kehoe’s truck. He reached into the ruined cab, clipped himself a piece of intestine dripping off the steering column, and put his precious souvenir in a jar. The unknown ghoul disappeared as quickly as he arrived, artifact in hand.
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Albert Detluff stood over a bloody mass, a terrible hunk of blood and bone and hair bearing some likeness to a human body.

The remains wore a shredded but still recognizable checkered coat. Detluff knew at once he’d found what was left of Superintendent Emory E. Huyck’s body.
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Within an opening in the rubble, some fourteen feet below, was an opening that resembled the mouth of a cave. Within it were children, trapped and unable to climb out.

Mr. Fiora, one of the schoolteachers, didn’t hesitate. He jumped into the cave, dug his way through, soothed the crying children as he freed them, and handed them up to the outstretched arms of rescuers just within reach.

Fiora’s search went deeper into the cave.
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Assistant Chief Lieutenant Lyle W. Morse, one of the top men in Michigan’s Secret Service Division, arrived with his assistant, Detective William Watkins, at 10:20 a.m. (Despite the same name, this Secret Service was not affiliated with the federal agency; rather, it was a bureau within Michigan’s Department of Public Safety.) Like many others, Morse’s original hunch after receiving word of the disaster was that the cause of the catastrophe was an exploded boiler. When he and Watkins got to the scene word was rife: Kehoe had blown himself up. Morse quickly realized that this was no mechanical accident. He went looking for the school janitor. When Morse got to Frank Smith’s house, Leone Smith told him about Kehoe’s remains, bankbook, and driver’s license. The documents, she said, were now safe with Sheriff Fox.

D. B. Huffman approached Morse and identified himself as the express agent who had taken care of Kehoe’s package earlier that morning. He asked Morse if he had any idea as to who had dynamited Bath Consolidated.

Although nothing was official (“At that time we didn’t know dynamite was used,” he later told the inquest),
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Morse said that Andrew Kehoe evidently was behind the explosion. Huffman detailed his encounter with Kehoe and the box sent to Clyde Smith, the school’s insurance man. Lane, who also was at the Smith home, said he’d get in touch with the intended recipient of Kehoe’s package.
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From the grassy knoll where dead children still lay in cold repose, the temporary morgue grew larger. Sheets covered the dust-and-blood-encrusted bodies silently across the grass. From beneath the shrouds, feet
poked here and there. All that could be seen were the soles of shoes, some worn paper thin. Other shoes sagged, too big for the feet they covered. It was clear that some of the children went to school in hand-me-down footwear.
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Nellie Cushman, desperate to find Ralph, peered under the sheets. Body after body. Her boy was not there.
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Other parents nervously peeked beneath the bloodied sheets of the temporary morgue, looking through the corpses, praying they would not find what they were looking for. One father, weary from rescue work, looked over the rows of lifeless bodies and saw his son. “Well,” he said, “there’s Billy.”

There was nothing he could do for Billy now. With resignation, the man returned to the killing field, hoping to find someone else’s child alive.
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A mother searching for her son lifted a sheet. It was not a boy but a girl covered by the shroud. Sunshine, breaking through the dust in the air, spread across the child’s face. Her eyes fluttered against the light.

Josephine England was badly injured but not dead.
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Another voice rang out, loud and clear.

“Dean’s not dead! He’s alive!”

It was true. A neighbor, looking sorrowfully at the body of Dean Sweet, suddenly realized that the boy was wiggling his toes.

No ambulances were available to transport Dean to Lansing. He was taken to the hospital in the only machine around: a hearse.
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Loose debris tumbled down from the ceiling in the school basement. It caught the attention of Captain John O’Brien, a Lansing police officer, and William Klock, a sheriff’s deputy from nearby Ingham County. The two men cautiously approached the coal room, where they could see part of the ceiling now fallen and scattered on the floor.

There was something on the floor hidden under plaster; this was the chunk of debris Chief Lane had stepped over just minutes before.

The plaster was removed, revealing dynamite connected to some kind of wire. O’Brien and Klock didn’t need to search any farther. They hightailed it out of the school.
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At 10:45 a painful but levelheaded decision came down: stop all rescue
efforts. Dynamite was beneath the school, still wired and to God knows what. Perhaps a timing device was ticking away, ready to go off at any moment. The risk was simply too great to chance more death.

Morse, Lefke, state troopers Ernest “Buck” Haldeman and Donald McNaughton, and F. I. Phippeny, a Michigan State College engineer, carefully reentered the basement, now a hot zone where anything could happen.
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The wire was traced to a tin pipe. The pipe, connected by small bolts, ran a considerable length through the ceiling into other rooms within the basement. The team could see that this conduit was packed solid with dynamite.

More dynamite was planted in the ceiling, hidden by wire mesh covered with plaster. Wire connected the explosive caches to a blasting cap. The men followed the trail as it led them from the collapsed north wing south toward the rest of the school basement beneath the main building. More wires were found, firmly stapled to wooden beams. The staples were a bit rusty, indicating that they had been in place for some time. These wires led to more blasting caps attached to more explosives, some dynamite, other heavy sacks filled with army surplus pyrotol.

The wire trail led to a hotshot battery connected to a clock. A similar device was discovered elsewhere in the catacombs. Whoever planted these explosives clearly knew how to do it right. Had the other timers gone off and electric currents run as intended, all of Bath Consolidated School would now be rubble with every student conceivably dead or severely injured.
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