Bath Massacre: America's First School Bombing

by Arnie Bernstein

Overview

"With the meticulous attention to detail of a historian and a storyteller's eye for human drama, Bernstein shines a beam of truth on a forgotten American tragedy. Heartbreaking and riveting."
—-Gregg Olsen, New York Times best-selling author of Starvation Heights
 
"A chilling and historic character study of the unfathomable suffering that desperation and fury, once unleashed inside a twisted mind, can wreak on a small town. Contemporary mass murderers Timothy McVeigh, Columbine's Dylan Klebold, and Virginia Tech's Seung-Hui Cho can each trace their horrific genealogy of terror to one man: Bath school bomber Andrew Kehoe."
—-Mardi Link, author of When Evil Came to Good Hart
 
On May 18, 1927, the small town of Bath, Michigan, was forever changed when Andrew Kehoe set off a cache of explosives concealed in the basement of the local school. Thirty-eight children and six adults were dead, among them Kehoe, who had literally blown himself to bits by setting off a dynamite charge in his car. The next day, on Kehoe's farm, what was left of his wife—-burned beyond recognition after Kehoe set his property and buildings ablaze—-was found tied to a handcart, her skull crushed. With seemingly endless stories of school violence and suicide bombers filling today's headlines, Bath Massacre serves as a reminder that terrorism and large-scale murder are nothing new.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780472033461
Publisher:	University of Michigan Press
Publication date:	03/16/2009
Pages:	216
Sales rank:	1,132,799
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

A native of Chicago, Arnie Bernstein is the author of The Hoofs and Guns of the Storm: Chicago's Civil War Connections and Hollywood on Lake Michigan: 100 Years of Chicago and the Movies. He is the winner of a Puffin Foundation Grant and Midwest Regional History Publishing honors.
 
Visit his Web site at www.arniebernstein.com.

Table of Contents

Prologue: April 16, 2007 xi

One A Community in Michigan 1

Two Andrew P. Kehoe 6

Three Dawn of a Decade 16

Four New Man in Town 20

Five The Bath Consolidated School 25

Six A Growing Storm 39

Seven Electricity 55

Eight A School, a Farm 88

Nine The Valley of the Shadow of Death 115

Ten Requiems 127

Eleven In the Matter of the Inquest as to the Cause of Death of Emery E. Huyck, Deceased 138

Twelve Summer 144

Thirteen Tulips 157

Victims' Names 177

Acknowledgments 181

Notes 185

Selective Bibliography 199