July 10, 2025 • 53 mins
When someone left a bomb at a Civil War reenactment event in 2017, it looked like antifascist activists were out for revenge after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. A mysterious letter writer claiming to be an antifascist collective took credit for the bomb and threatened even more violence to come if Civil War reenactments weren't called off. But the bomber wasn't antifa - it was a spurned Confederate re-enactor.
Orignal Air Date: 8.15.24
Sources:
https://qz.com/1800988/antifa-falsely-accused-of-threatening-civil-war-group https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2020/02/12/civil-war-reenactor-antifa-threats/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/civil-war-reenactment-in-virginia-canceled-amid-worries-over-violence/2017/08/18/633b71d8-844a-11e7-b359-15a3617c767b_story.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/we-wanted-to-send-a-message-reenactors-stage-civil-war-battle-despite-threat/2017/10/15/77dd0348-b1c4-11e7-a908-a3470754bbb9_story.html https://www.winchesterstar.com/news/frederick_county/increased-security-planned-for-battle-of-cedar-creek-event/article_aec48f2e-c708-5b7d-8679-1ca677e96f3d.html https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/65406287/united-states-v-drake/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. Hey everybody, Molly here, I don't have
a new episode for you this week. I'm sorry about that.
I promise I'll be back next week with a new
Weird Little Guy for you. This rerun is almost a
(00:23):
year old. The show is almost a year old. This
was the second ever episode of Weird Little Guys, So
if you haven't been a listener from the beginning, it
might not be a rerun for you. Like I said,
I promise I'll have something new for you next week.
But for now, I hope you'll enjoy the story of Gerald,
(00:45):
a man who loved historical reenactment, sex dolls, and writing
online reviews of fast food restaurants. On October fourteenth to
twenty seventeen, the Battle of Cedar Creek was happening all
over again. Originally fought on October nineteenth, eighteen sixty four,
(01:09):
the crushing defeat meant Confederate troops could no longer maneuver
through the Shenandoah Valley to march on Washington, and the
Union victory was the last minute boost for Lincoln's reelection campaign.
One hundred and fifty three years later, as re enactors
in Middletown Virginia, milled around in their historically accurate wool
uniforms and replica weaponry, waiting for the battle to begin.
One of them found an alarming anachronism in the Sutler's tent,
(01:33):
a pipe bomb. I'm Molly Conger, and this is weird,
little guys. The Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation has held their
(02:00):
annual re enactment of the battle since nineteen ninety, but
twenty seventeen was a politically fraught time in America. On
August twelfth, twenty seventeen, the Unite the Right rally in Charlesville,
Virginia ended when a young rally attendee who kept a
framed picture of Adolph Hitler on his nightstand, ran his
car through a crowd of peaceful protesters marching on a
closed street. He injured dozens and killed Heather Hire. Images
(02:25):
of the crowd that day, with rally attendees carrying Confederate
flags and swastikas side by side, flooded the national consciousness.
Most Americans heard the word antifa for the first time
that week. The national conversation about Confederate monuments, which had
been simmering all year, boiled over the city council in Baltimore, Maryland,
(02:47):
voted to remove their Confederate statues. Just two days later.
The same week, the mayor of Lexington, Kentucky, asked his
city council to approve the removal of the statues at
their courthouse. A Confederate monument in Hollywood Forever Cemetery in
LA was removed overnight. From Florida to California, Confederate monuments
were removed, toppled, and vandalized. No one wanted to be
(03:08):
the next Charlottesville. Six days after the rally, officials in Manassas,
a small city outside of d C about two hours
north of Charlottesville, announced they were calling off the annual
Civil War Reenactment weekend scheduled for the end of August.
The Washington Posts reported that the reenactors themselves were worried
the quote racially charged atmosphere around the country over whether
(03:30):
to remove Civil War monuments would lead to violence. So
the concern was not whether it was appropriate to continue
celebrating the Confederacy in the wake of the deadly rally,
but rather anxiety about the possibility that Antifa America's new
black clad boogeyman would target these events and these growing
(03:51):
fears of persecution from the radical left were confirmed on
September twenty third, when the Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation received
an ominous letter in the mail. Instead of a return haddress,
the envelope bore a symbol that was fresh in their minds,
a black circle containing a black flag overlaying a red flag.
(04:11):
It was from Antifa. The letter inside read, you need.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
To cancel your coming up celebration of the Civil War
on October thirteen, fourteen fifteen, twenty seventeen. If you choose
to continue with this farce of history that clearly celebrates
the war to keep African Americans in chains, then we
have no choice but to come in protest. We will
come and disrupt and cause problems for all those who
attend the atrocity of history. Several hundred of our supporters
(04:40):
will attend and slash tires, block traffic, harass patrons and reenactors.
We will make Charlottesville look like a Sunday picnic. Many
of us have dogs, so we'll bring dog feces to
throw on people. We will also throw cups of human urine.
We might resort to actually firing guns into the camps
and at the reenactors will put poison in the water.
(05:01):
You would use noise to disrupt the battles in sleep.
These events must stop. Our local organizer tells us he
is ready to go. You have been warned now. If
it is not.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Called off, we will destroy you.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
You have less than one month to issue a cancelation
notice to it asap.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Days before the event in October, the Cedar Creek Battlefield
Foundation did announce publicly that they had received a threatening letter,
but that the event would go on with increased security,
and the details of the threat were not released, but
speculation immediately turned to the Culture War, and after the
bomb was discovered, the National Review wrote, the simplest and
most logical explanation is that this is a new, violent
(05:44):
extension of the effort to remove Confederate statues. The Federalists
lamented that history itself was becoming another casualty in the
culture War. The threatening letters continued for over a year,
becoming increasingly gruesome and terrifyingly specific, targeting members of the
board at Cedar Creek and their family members. Cedar Creek
(06:05):
had to cancel the reenactment in twenty eighteen after one
director of the Foundation resigned in fear for his family
safety when the letter writer threatened to put a bomb
under his mother's car. The new director started getting threats
of sexual violence against her young daughters. The mayor of
Gettysburg received a letter threatening to bomb the annual Gettysburg
Remembrance Day parade. Would Antifa stop at nothing to destroy history?
(06:30):
But it was at Antifa. It wasn't Antifa at all.
It was Gerald. Gerald Leonard Drake born in nineteen fifty
eight in Michigan, loves the Civil War. In nineteen ninety six,
his hometown paper, The port Here in Thymes, Harold wrote
an article about his dedication to reenactment. He'd gotten a
(06:51):
second job to save up the ten thousand dollars it
would cost him to transport Judith, his five hundred and
twenty five pound replica Civil War canon, from Mission Wigan
to Columbus, Georgia for the Chattahoochee Heritage Festival. Judith the
Canon was named after his wife, Judy, who would file
for divorce the following year. When he married his third wife,
(07:13):
Donna in twenty ten, they took wedding photos in Civil
War era address at the Historic Adams County courthouse in Gettysburg.
They got two cats and named them Shiloh and Musket.
But the world was changing. The world of eighteen sixty
falls further away every day, no matter how historically accurate
(07:33):
the brass buttons on your coat are. In twenty eleven,
he posted a thread on a Civil War reenactment forum
about a living history event he'd recently participated in a
tour group. Was appalled that the re enactors, role playing
as soldiers reading aloud letters from home, read a letter
describing the brutal whipping of an enslaved person that was
riddled with racial slurs. Though he felt that the event
(07:56):
itself went well, he wrote that shit hit the fan
afterwards and the liberals in the group had a bitch
session about appropriate language.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
I guess what I'm asking here is, as living historians
and reenactors, aren't we supposed to do as good of
a job and impression of our ancestors as we possibly can.
We used to get praise and accolades for doing a
great first person impression. Let me know if anyone else
is having this kind of trouble for being the best
you can be.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
Surprisingly, even in twenty eleven, fellow users on the Civil
War message board disagreed with Gerald. Their reenactment groups is
committed as they were to historical accuracy, did not use
the N word. One user, whose profile bears the badge
for Member of the Year wrote that he is quote
careful to avoid certain language in terms, always realizing that
(08:50):
my performance is in the present century. To modern day
folks who live in the present, it would not understand
the customs, practices, and language of the nineteenth century with
any real clarity. Another user, a former moderator of the forum,
replied to a comment from Drake that he was looking
for a less PC group, wrote that he can't imagine
there is any group out there that would condone that
(09:11):
kind of language, and all this achieves his bad publicity
for reenactors, adding that those tourists surely all went home
that day and told their friends about the racists they
saw at the event. A year later, Drake posted again
in the same Civil War forum, complaining that people are
getting too hung up on safety, writing remember when reenacting
(09:31):
used to be fun and mourning the old days when
battle reenactments were more like real battle. Again. Fellow reenactors
pushed back with one veteran reenactor, writing that he did
indeed remember those days. He'd once had a costume ruined
and gotten pretty serious burns when another reenactor shot him
with a replica shotgun. Even in his chosen community of
(09:53):
Civil War reenactors, Gerald was living in a version of
the past that was becoming increasingly lonely. In October of
twenty fourteen, things really started to fall apart. His third
marriage was on the rocks, and after what sounds like
a pretty petty dispute, Gerald was kicked out of his
Civil War reenactment unit as a volunteer at the Cedar
(10:15):
Creek Battlefield. He'd heard a rumor that someone was planning
to sneak into the reenactment without paying the registration fee.
Gerald and his friend and fellow reenactor Daryl found this
to be an outrageous offense and decided to print up
flyers letting everyone know that Duffy Miller wasn't going to
pay his entry fee and anyone who sees him should
(10:36):
stop him. Duffy Miller, as it turns out, was their
unit commander, and he was not pleased to see the posters.
He kicks Gerald and Daryl out of the unit. Jerald
continued volunteering at Cedar Creek, but it seems this incident
was the end of his love for reenacting. Now. I
can't find exactly how much it cost to register for
(10:58):
the event in twenty fourteen, but the twenty twenty four
registration fee is thirty five dollars, and I know from
the forum post that's actually been increased in the last
couple of years to cover the new security measures that
they have to have, So you have to assume it
was much less ten years ago. So the inciting incident
for this entire debacle was a couple of old guys
(11:20):
fighting about twenty bucks and the sanctity of Confederate reenactment.
I guess, so what's a guy to do now, First
they stop letting him say the N word, You're not
even allowed to shoot each other anymore, and now he's
kicked out of his unit entirely, a hobby he'd loved
since the early nineties was being ruined. They weren't saying
(11:41):
like wokeness back then, but I think if this happened today,
Gerald would say that it was being ruined by woke
He'd been left by three wives and now his own
civil war unit didn't want him around, but he continued
volunteering at Cedar Creek. He retired, He built and little models,
(12:01):
He got into model rockets. He traveled the world, and
he posted a lot, and apparently he held on to
his anger about that incident at the twenty fourteen Cedar
Creek Reenactment. I spent a lot of time combing through
hundreds of pages of court documents, years and years of
his posts on forums, but I can't quite sort out
(12:23):
what the catalyst was in twenty seventeen. Why did he
wait three years to put that bomb at Cedar Creek.
Maybe he saw the news about the Manassas Reenactment getting
canceled out of fear of political violence at the wake
up Unite the Right and just got an idea, because
within weeks of that news story, Gerald started writing letters.
(12:47):
After his first letter to the Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation
in September, he followed up by placing an actual bomb
at the event in October. The reenactment community is pretty
small and the bomb was big news, but a rumor
was going around on Facebook that a teenager had been
arrested for the original letter, and then that was sort
(13:09):
of conflated. As you know, people are posting and reposting
and talking about the post that they saw. It was
conflated to the idea that someone had been arrested for
the bomb, and the rumor was very quickly disproven. No
one was arrested, replacing the bomb in the vendor's tent,
But the letter writer was frustrated. If they thought the
culprit had been apprehended, they wouldn't be afraid anymore. John Buchheister,
(13:34):
a vendor at the event who told a reporter that
he was present when the bomb was found, was one
of the posters in that Facebook rumor mill And there's
nothing malicious here. He just reposted something that someone else
had said that the would be bomber had been apprehended.
I think there was a lot of relief in believing that,
so a lot of people were posting it. But I
guess our letter writer saw John Buchheister's post because on
(13:57):
November thirteenth, twenty seventeen, he opened a letter addressed to
his home in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Like the first letter, the
envelope was printed with the ANTIFA symbol in place of
a return address, inside a typed letter read.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Thank you so much for putting on Facebook that a
teenager was arrested for the threat to Cedar Creek. It
was so much easier to bring in a bomb do
something like this again for us. We are coming to
Gettysburg parade and speech. Thank you again for all your
help in the last terror event.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
That same week, a local newspaper in Gettysburg received a
letter threatening the upcoming Gettysburg Remembrance Day parade. The letter
threatened to drive trucks through the crowd at the parade,
a troubling callback to the still recent vehicular murderer Unite
the Right, and threatened to put sharpshooters in windows and
on rooftops. The letter writer ended the note by giving
(14:55):
a detailed description of the bomb at Cedar Creek quote
for proof that we did the sea terror attack. But
just as Cedar Creek had not canceled when they were threatened,
the Gettysburg Rememberance Day parade was not canceled that year,
but the route was significantly shortened to allow for a
heavy police presence. S Chris Anders, a Republican political activist,
(15:17):
wrote on Facebook, apparently Antifa and other hate groups are
headed to try and cause problems this Saturday at the
annual Remembrance Day parade, but he wrote that he would
be marching with his brothers in gray rather than giving
in to terrorists. There are nearly one hundred comments on
this Facebook post, mostly agreeing that Dantifa must be stopped
or offering questionable safety tips, like advising that you should
(15:40):
use a wool scarf to protect yourself from tear gas.
I have to assume that would only make things worse.
I feel like wool is very absorbent. But one loan commenter,
a reenactor from New England who rides with the First
Main Cavalry, had a different theory. He wrote, I bet
you five dollars that the perpetrator is a reenactor or
(16:03):
former reenactor. No offense to anyone, but no one knows
about rem Day beyond reenactors and locals. For it to
be a target, someone would have to be aware of it,
and there are plenty of other high profile, low security
events with bigger crowd numbers to choose. From his comment,
drew ire from the victimized Confederates, obsessed with the idea
(16:24):
of a massive conspiracy from the radical left. He was,
of course correct and now here's where things start to
(16:45):
get really weird. Just some truly inexplicable behavior with deep
weird roots. I mean, I guess that's the show, right,
This guy's weird. But here's where it takes its super
weird turn. Gerald is retired at this point, and when
he's not traveling, he's volunteering. He's still volunteering at Cedar
Creek even though he doesn't reenact anymore. But he's also
(17:07):
volunteering at sky Meadows State Park. It's not entirely clear
why a registered sex offender was allowed to volunteer at
the state park alongside a high school student, but that's
what it says in the affidavit. So I guess that
one fell through the cracks at sky Meadows because while
he did successfully petition to get himself removed from the
sex offender registry in twenty twenty one, in twenty eighteen,
(17:29):
the background check required for volunteers at state parks would
have shown that he was a registered sex offender for
a two thousand and four conviction in Ohio for sexual
imposition and child endangerment. And again, I'll be so clear
with you right up front, there's no allegation that Drake
was involved in any inappropriate sexual conduct as a volunteer anywhere,
(17:52):
not at the state park, not anywhere. So in the
time period of these events, there's no allegation that he's
touching any children or engaging in any inappropriate sexual conduct.
But I'm not just telling you he's a registered sex
offender to sort of point and laugh at that. As
a circumstance, these things intersect. So in twenty eighteen, he's
(18:15):
volunteering at the park with this teenage boy, and one
afternoon in February, they're volunteering together. They're shooting the shit
fill in the time, and Gerald, who is sixty at
this point, is telling this teenage boy about his hobby
of Civil War reenactment, which is very tragically in decline.
The topic of the twenty seventeen reenactment at Cedar Creek
comes up. I have to assume Gerald brought it up,
(18:38):
because why would the seventeen year old boy have brought
that up. But Gerald is telling the kid about some
funny articles about that twenty seventeen event. He later emailed
the teenager what appeared to be photographs of newspaper clippings
about the bombing. But in these articles the bomb went off.
(18:58):
The articles he emails this tea nag contained details of
the bomb actually killing people, with more deaths caused by
subsequent sniper fire. But we know the bomb didn't really
go off. No one got shot, no one got hurt,
nothing really happened. The articles he showed his young friend
(19:19):
were completely fake. The federal agents investigating the case wrote
that attempts to locate sources for these fake newspaper clippings
turned up nothing. I mean, not even anything online showing
these fake articles. Nothing, there's nothing. He must have made
them himself, and that's where his sex offender status ties
back in. In two thousand and three, he was indicted
(19:42):
in Auglaize County, Ohio for gross sexual imposition, and shortly
after he's indicted, someone start sending weird letters to the
Auglais County prosecutor. The letters were made to appear as
though they were sent by a member of the police
department in Drake's hometown of Port Huron, Michigan, and they
appeared to prove that Drake's second wife was a child abuser.
(20:06):
The letter writer sent a forged polygraph report on Michigan
State Police letterhead and a forged notarized statement from Drake's
estranged wife, and when his home was eventually searched, police
found a doctored page from the local newspaper. He had
taken an actual newspaper and manually altered it with a
false news story about his estranged second wife, Susan, pleading
(20:29):
guilty to child abuse and endangerment. No such news story
ever existed, and I can find no evidence that Susan
was ever charged with such a crime. Maybe a more
thorough journalist would have pushed harder for the details here,
but court cases involving sexual abuse of a minor tend
to be completely closed. Those documents are sealed unless someone
(20:50):
was sitting in those hearings, and there's local news reports
about the testimony. You're just you're not going to find it,
and short of reaching out to the parties involved, there's
no way from me to know exactly what led to
Gerald Drake being convicted of sexual imposition and child endangerment
or why he tried to frame his strange wife for it.
But I can tell you that after his conviction, there's
(21:12):
a note on the docket that the judge prohibited Drake
from contacting his second ex wife and her minor daughter
from a prior marriage. So I think we can get
the gist of the situation without me asking a young
woman why her stepdad, a man now in prison for
making a bomb, was court ordered to stay away from
her when she was ten. Take from that what you will.
(21:34):
The relevant kernel of that story, though, is those fake
newspaper articles. In two thousand and three, he's manually cutting
and pasting by hand and xeroxing his creations to disguise
the alterations. He's arts and craftsing his way into an
alternate reality where his ex wife is the one in
dangering children, not him. And in twenty eighteen, he's doing
(21:56):
it again. He's making fake newspaper clippings about what he
wished were real. He's showing this teenage boy a reality
where the bomb did go off and the people who
snubbed him died. And while he was in jail for
that sex offense a short eight months in an Ohio
County jail, he made another art project of sorts. In
(22:18):
September two thousand and four, the Auglais County Sheriff's office
reached out to the FBI Field office in Cleveland. Gerald
had been trying to make friends in jail by showing
off his knowledge of explosives. He produced eight pages of
hand drawn diagrams and instructions for creating a pipe bomb,
a CO two cartridge bomb, a Coleman fuel bomb, a
propane tank bomb, and diagrams about how to modify the
(22:41):
kind of inert grenades you can buy as antiques or
at the Army surplus store, and how to turn them
back into live grenades. And the diagram of the pipe
bomb he drew in jail in two thousand and four
is remarkably similar to the device he made in twenty seventeen.
It doesn't appear that anything ever came of the incident
(23:03):
in the jail back in two thousand and four. You know,
the Sheriff's office contact of the FBI, and they said, hey,
we've got these weird drawings. What do you guys think
about this. There's no indication that there was follow up
from there, but apparently they held on to them. Those
drawings remained in a filing cabinet somewhere in Ohio for
twenty years. It's kind of surprising that they still had
(23:23):
those drawings in twenty nineteen, but they are included in
the affidavit for the search warrant, so in the spring
of twenty eighteen, he seems pretty content with his hobbies.
He's making fake newspaper articles about his bomb going off
and showing them to a kid he volunteers with based
on his eBay review history. He's painting miniature models of
Godzilla and Frankenstein, both five stars from Gerald, and he's
(23:47):
getting into model rocketry. In March, he took a solo
vacation to Amsterdam. His trip Advisor account provides a pretty
robust log of his travels. He wasn't a big fan
of the Jewish History Museum, titling his review not really
for Gentiles and writing that he felt shorted by the
lack of artifacts from the death camps at the Holocaust Museum.
(24:09):
He felt that it had been quote scrubbed of shock
due to the new PC way all museums are going.
He felt the same way about the Dutch Resistance Museum,
writing if you were looking for the story of the
full account of atrocities done on the citizens, well this
display doesn't have it it. Like many museums today have
had to lighten up on their truth so as not
(24:30):
to offend anyone. He did, however, really enjoy the Museum
of Prostitution and his visit to the Red Light District.
In a later post on a forum for sex doll owners,
he boasted that he is familiar with the female condoms
he uses to keep his dolls clean because he's used
them in European brothels. And for what it's worth, the
Anne frank House got his seal of approval as a
(24:52):
World War II history buff. He loved the Ripley's Believe
It or Not Museum, and he was deeply upset that
his hostel did not provide a t additional American breakfast
with quote hot meats. I don't know why you would
expect a cheap hostel in Amsterdam to have American breakfast,
but he was not satisfied, and just as an aside
(25:14):
about his trip Advisor reviews, I think that was my
favorite thing about researching this. He loves to review the
cell site location data in one of the search warrant
affidavits shows that he likely dropped off that very first
threat letter at a USPS drop box in a strip
mall near the Dulles Airport just before boarding an Air
France flight from DC to Madrid on September twenty first,
(25:36):
twenty seventeen. So while his letter threatening to throw piss
and shit at Civil War reenactors was making its way
to Cedar Creek, he was on his way to Spain.
He hated the bullfighting, but he raved about the burger
king on Plaza de Castilla. Apparently the burger king at
home is always getting his order wrong. He had to
go all the way to Spain to get his whopper
(25:57):
with no onions and no pickle. The burger king in
his hometown only gets four stars from Gerald. And since
visiting Italy in April twenty seventeen, he rated four different
Italian restaurants in Winchester, Virginia, based on how the pizza
measures up to the pizza in Rome is given out
two just like Rome's, and two were failures according to Gerald.
(26:22):
So maybe he's done. Maybe it's out of his system.
Three threatening letters and one bomb that didn't go off,
and then he's back to his hobbies. But on June nineteenth,
twenty eighteen, his local newspaper ran a story about the
upcoming reenactment at Cedar Creek. The event was just four
months away and the board of directors wanted everyone to
know that the reenactment weekend would have additional security after
(26:43):
the incident the year before. Days after the paper ran
that story, a pair of identical letters were mailed to
the newspaper, the Winchester Star and the Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation.
Like the first letters, the envelopes had a symbol where
the return address should be, But for some reason, these
letters a version of the anti fascist symbol with the
red flag on top and the black flag behind, which
(27:04):
is reversed from the original letters. I think he probably
just downloaded a new image and didn't notice that it
was different. I don't think he realized he was signaling
a preference for anarchism over communism, or vice versa. You know,
both versions of that symbol exist and are perfectly real
and valid and are used by different people, but they
are in fact different symbols and do mean something slightly different.
(27:27):
I don't think Gerald knew that. And this time both
letters were addressed to Joe Derezzo, the president of the
foundation's board, and they threatened to kill his mother with
a car bomb if he didn't call off the reenactment
in October. Dereza later told agents that he took the
threat seriously enough that he began checking underneath his mother's
car for explosive devices. But the language in the letters
(27:49):
was odd and oddly specific. Though the Winchester Star article
didn't actually mention what those increased security measures would be,
the letter writers seemed to know. One of the private
discussions the board had was about banning spectators from bringing
bags of any kind to the event, but they were
(28:10):
worried that this would be an issue for people like
parents with diaper bags. The letter writer said there were
quote many ways for us to sneak in a surprise,
specifically mentioning putting a bomb inside of a diaper bag.
And the board had also quietly been in contact with
the local sheriff's office about providing metal detectors, and the
(28:30):
letter writer seemed to know this too, boasting that he'd
already outsmarted their security.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
We now have plastic bombs, so metal detectors are useless.
We have found a man that's going to pose as
an enactor to drive in some kind of fertilizer bomb.
We have coolers, thermoses, water bottles, all made into small IEDs.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
And in the completely real and very serious way that
real Antifa terror cells sign off their terror some threat letters.
The letter writer explained why the bomb didn't work in
twenty seventeen.
Speaker 2 (29:06):
We are the ones that did it to you last year.
We used a bad bomb guy. His mercury switch and
rocket launch wire didn't work on the pipe bomb covered
in nuts. Just so you know we are real and returning.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
Yeah, just so you know we're real. Okay, it's such
a weird mess, but silly or not. The letters recipient
was terrified they were threatening to blow up his mom,
and there really was a real bomb the year before,
so you know he's not bluffing. You already know he
really can build a bomb. So you can't laugh it
(29:40):
off while it's happening. But in hindsight, what a goofy
ass sign off? Just so you know, we had a
bad bomb guy last year, but we're very real and
we fixed that. Okay, we're real. A sixth letter, the
third in this second batch, was sent to John Buchheister,
that vendor in Pennsylvania who had spoken to the media
(30:03):
about being there when the bomb was discovered in twenty seventeen.
He'd gotten a letter in the first batch too, thanking
him for spreading that rumor that someone had been arrested
for placing the bomb. Confusingly, the letter he got in
July twenty eighteen was addressed to Joe, just like the
letter sent to Joe Derezo the same week, and it
seemed to be speaking to Joe Derezzo asking for him
(30:24):
to call off the event, which presumably Durezzo could do
as president of the board. But John Buchheister is just
a guy in Pennsylvania who sells antiques and Civil War reproductions.
This letter, like the others, threatened to kill Derezo's mother.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
Since we can't seem to get to to stop this
celebration of a war to keep men in chains, maybe
if we go after your volunteers that help out, you
will stop this. I like the idea of burning your
mother alive in a car bomb.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
Days after these letters were received, the Foundation announced on
July third, twenty eighteen, they were calling off the reenactment
in October. You know, they got that letter in twenty
seventeen and they decided we're going to soldier On, We're
going to have the event, and then there was a
real bomb. People were really in danger. So when they
got this second set of letters. In the middle of
(31:17):
twenty eighteen, they decided, we got to call it off.
It's not safe. What if the bomb goes off this year.
We know this guy's not bluffing, we know he got
a bomb in the tent last year. We can't risk it.
And on the Civil War Talk Forum, that online forum
where Gerald's been posting for years, reactions were mixed. A
lot of users agreed that it was the right thing
(31:39):
to do. It's just not worth the risk people bring
their children, their families. Others didn't think it was right
to let the terrorists win, with one poster noting that
he never stopped going to NASCAR races after nine to eleven.
I don't know that NASCAR was like a big target
for al Qaida, but he's been carrying that weight for years,
I guess. But some posters were starting to ask questions
(32:02):
like why Cedar Creek and why only Cedar Creek. It's
not the largest or most high profile reenactment, even in
just the immediate area. I mean, I don't know if
you've ever spent time in Virginia, but most of that
part of Virginia just is as hip will wear a
battlefield every town has When every town has a plaque
(32:22):
and Cedar Creek was a Union victory, wouldn't these people
be happier targeting a reenactment of a Confederate win. And then,
after pages and pages of going back and forth about
this decision on the forum, Gerald himself weighed in.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
I volunteer at Cedar Creek from what we have been told,
and this is not for general release. The foundation has
received threats of bodily harm to the board members. They're
families and everyone that helps out. Then there is the
very high cost of security. It is sad that we
live in a world with such a hostile climate to
the Confederacy, and PS has taken battle flags out of
all its stores, and statues are being taken down here
(33:03):
in Virginia, schools, streets, parks, anything named about the Confederacy
is being changed. I do not know if they will
officially announce the reason or reasons for this decision. Last
year they refused to say much, and rumors were all
over the place. We all need to maybe send some
money to the foundation for expenses, as this was their
only way of raising funds. With the fall of so
(33:24):
many Confederate symbols and events going by the wayside, I
now can feel what my ancestors did when the actual
Confederacy fell.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
So he is victim and perpetrator here lingering in the
comment section, watching his fellow Civil War enthusiasts argue about
how the community should respond to what he has done.
It's like in every police procedural drama where the killer
returns to the scene of the crime just to take
in the aftermath and again, just as suddenly as the
(33:55):
letters began, they stopped again. He got what he wanted.
The event was canceled in October, just before the now
(34:17):
canceled event would have been approaching, Joe Derezo resigned as
head of the foundation's board. He didn't feel the board
was taking the threat seriously enough, although it's unclear what
discussions were taking place behind closed doors because there'd been
no threats in several months and the event was already canceled,
so I don't know what prompted him to resign just then.
In October and the local paper, The Winchester Star, ran
(34:40):
an article about Derezo's resignation, and like clockwork, a few
days after the article ran, the letter started up again.
The foundation got a letter addressed to Deurezzo, who again
had just resigned, saying we're sorry to see you go,
and moving on to threatening the foundation's new acting director,
Jeanette Schaeffer, and I'm sorry it gets gross here. I mean,
(35:04):
none of this was good, but it gets gross again.
I'm always on the fence about repeating things like this, right,
Like is this just for shock value? Does this add
information to the story? Do you need to know exactly
what he said in order for the story to make sense?
But given his prior conviction for a crime of a
sexual nature involving a young girl, I think it does matter.
(35:27):
He wasn't just saying whatever he thought would be the
scariest and the nastiest, Like this kind of ties back
into his own past. The letter writer told Derezo that
his quote pretty mother and bald headed dad were safe
now that he'd resigned, But quote, if Jeanette Schaeffer thinks
she is safe, well she is right, but her children
(35:51):
are not. If she puts together a reenactment to celebrate
keeping men in chains, we will come after her girls.
We have a convicted rapist that was love to introduce
them to his penis. There are letters that are a
lot more graphic than this. When it comes to the
sexual threats to those girls, it's in the court record.
(36:14):
If you're interested in that, I don't see the value
in proceeding further. You get it at this point. But again,
even though these letters are obviously very frightening, there's something
off about them. The letter writer seems to know way
too much about the specific inner workings of the Cedar
(36:37):
Creek Battlefield Foundation. He knows a lot about the personal
lives of these individuals and the way that they interact
in this space, and the way they run this organization,
which again is not large. This is not a massive,
significant operation. This is a pretty small, regional, annual event.
(36:58):
One of the letters in this batch threatened to shoot
a man named Pat as he opens up the visitor
center in the morning, and members of the board told
federal investigators that since those threats in June, the visitor
center was only open on a limited basis, and not
many people knew about that. You'd have to be really
close to the operation to know that Pat, who is
the board's only full time employee, sometimes opened up the
(37:21):
visitor center in the morning alone. And the letter tried
to cast blame on a ract in the organization, claiming
that their inside knowledge came from a man named Sean Mowbray.
But Mowbray hadn't been a volunteer with the organization since
twenty fourteen. But in twenty fourteen, Mowbray was at the
center of that dispute that got Gerald kicked out of
(37:43):
his re enactment unit. And it's not just the letters
that seemed to be escalating in intensity. The same way
he sent that letter threatening to rape those girls, Drake
posted on the subredit for his hometown of Winchester, Virginia,
asking for recommendations for a good lawyer. He owned a
lot of antique and reproduction firearms and was an enthusiastic
(38:04):
hobbyist in black powder weapons, but he wanted a real gun,
a gun that shoots real bullets, and when he went
to buy one, the store refused to sell him anything
after pulling a background check. Now, his own account of
the situation is sort of murky and one sided, and
some of the details I've been able to verify indicate
(38:25):
that he's not telling the truth. But it appears that
despite having no felony record, that's true his conviction for
child endangerment comes up on his record as a domestic
violence conviction, so they wouldn't sell him a gun because
of that. There's no information in any of the hundreds
of pages of court documents I read that gives me
(38:46):
any real insight into why he may have wanted to
buy a gun that week in particular. But if I
were one of the people who had gotten one of
those letters, that timing would take my breath away. He
also traveled to Paris thought October, somehow squeezing it into
his busy schedule of threatening letters. He loved the Louver
(39:07):
and Notre Dame, noting in his review that the movie
The Hunchback of Notre Dame really doesn't do it justice,
and he visited several notable World War two historical sites.
He'd posted on Readit earlier that month that he was
thinking of getting into World War II re enacting because
the Civil War scene was dying out. McDonald's and Five
Guys in Paris both got four stars from Gerald, with
(39:31):
run review saying seeing McDonald's in Paris was like seeing
an old friend to me. Cheap and consistent food that
is the same flavor around the world, fair enough, But
when he got home, it was back to business, firing
off a letter to the mayor of Gettysburg on Halloween,
again threatening to bomb the annual parade. The letter demanded
(39:53):
that the mayor quote canceled the flying of Confederate flags
and posted on Facebook, then we will leave you alone.
Don't and someone is going to die. The ninth and
final letter was sent to the Cedar Greek Battlefield Foundation
after the embattled organization announced in December twenty eighteen that
they would be holding the reenactment in twenty nineteen. This
(40:16):
letter was addressed to Pat, the foundation's only full time employee,
that guy that opens the visitor center sometimes. The letter
asked him, would you like to bury your sister? Your brother?
We could also just kill you when you sit alone
in the visitor center. We have a guy that likes
to rape. We could send him to visit your sister.
(40:37):
What followed were some sexual threats against the director's daughter
that really aren't fit to repeat the I mean, they're gross.
It's definitely the most specific letter in terms of the
actions being threatened and the particular victims being threatened in
a way that feels specific enough to be alarming. What
makes a quote unquote true threat. In the eyes of
(41:00):
the law is kind of a moving target. You never
really know where the line is where a federal prosecutor
is going to say, I'm taking that one to a
grand jury. But in my experience reading cases like this,
mailing someone a letter that tells them exactly, when, where,
and how you plan to kill them, that's usually pretty serious.
The law does not like to see that. But by
(41:23):
this time, the defense already know it's Gerald. By the
time Pat is reading this absolutely unhinged letter threatening to
rape and kill his sister, the FBI has already gotten
Gerald's phone records from Sprint. They've been conducting physical surveillance,
with an FBI agent following him to his storage unit
and then returning later with a bomb dog to sniff
(41:45):
around the door. And again suddenly the letter stopped. But
this time there's no explanation. When the letter stopped before
it was because he got something that he wanted, but
this time they just stop. In a letter to the
court before his sentencing, Gerald claims he came to his
(42:07):
senses sometime in December twenty eighteen and realized that what
he was doing was wrong. It seems a little bit
more likely to me that one of the FBI agents
following him around said something to him. And that's not uncommon.
I've read plenty of threatening communications cases where the agent
writing the affidavit describes his first conversation with a guy
(42:28):
about threatening to behead a senator or something. Sometimes they'll
come to a guy's door and say, hey, did you
post this? Because you can't do that, don't do it again.
And the only reason we're reading the affidavit is because
the guy didn't stop posting. So the next conversation had
a very different tone. And I don't know if that's
(42:48):
what happened here. It doesn't say. And for as insanely
detailed as the documents supporting these search warrants are, there's
some really important details missing right here. If they were
following him around in November of twenty eighteen, while these
letters are still being sent, why wasn't he arrested until
twenty twenty two. It's clear they spent all of twenty
(43:10):
nineteen investigating the case. There are search warn't applications here
for his phone, his storage unit, his house, his Google account,
and warrant served on his cell phone provider for his
cell location data. The warrants were executed at various times
throughout twenty nineteen, with the physical search of his home
and his storage unit happening in October twenty nineteen, and
(43:31):
they have him dead to rights. The cell site location
data puts him at the mailboxes where the letters were
mailed on the days that they were mailed. For some
of the letters, he drove out of state to mail
them far from his home, So we have the GPS
coordinates showing him leaving his home in Winchester, Virginia, driving
to a strip mall in Pennsylvania where there's a USPS
(43:52):
drop box, and then coming back home. And we know
that on the days that he did that, the letter
was picked up that mailbox and processed at that sorting facility,
so it's there's not a lot of other explanations for
why he's driving to these mailboxes on these days. And
they found the image file for that Antifa logo that
(44:12):
was printed on the envelopes on a thumb drive in
his house. We have drone footage from the twenty seventeen
re enactment showing his car approaching the area where the
bomb was found shortly before it was placed there. But
they gathered all of this evidence. I mean more evidence
than I've ever seen laid out in documentation like this.
I mean pages and pages of maps showing his GPS
(44:35):
coordinates on the days the letters were mailed. They gathered
all this evidence, and they did nothing with it. The
documents associated with all of these search warrants were sealed.
That's normal. Usually you keep that sealed until the arrest
is made, so nobody knew that his house had been
searched except Gerald. I assume Gerald knew. I think he
(44:56):
had to know. But after six months, the ceiling order expired.
That can happen. I think in most cases they're sort
of set to auto expire after a certain amount of time.
But you'll see in cases where they haven't made a
move yet, the prosecutor will apply to continue ceiling. It's
not uncommon. I think in this case, they must have
(45:18):
forgotten to file a motion to continue the ceiling. That's
the only explanation I can think of for why they
would let these warrants get unsealed when they weren't ready
to charge him. But the ceiling order expired and somebody
noticed immediately, because the very same day, Justin Rolick wrote
an article for Courts with the headline disgruntled Civil War
(45:42):
reenactor allegedly framed Antifa by fabricating threats against his unit.
Journalists don'trite their own headlines, but somebody's got to do
something about that. That's a mouthful. And the next day
the Washington Post ran an article with the headline, a
Civil war reenactment group got threats from Antique. It was
a disgruntled actor. FBI says again the headlines, what are
(46:04):
we doing, folks. But even after these two articles ran
in February of twenty twenty, the case sat still. Well,
because I can't say that because there was no case.
He hadn't been charged. He did retain an attorney at
this point, and she told the Washington Post that he
had no idea why he was being investigated, which, like comene, yes,
(46:27):
you do, you do. And it wasn't until September of
twenty twenty two, just days before the five year statute
of limitations would run out for that first letter sent
in September twenty seventeen, that Gerald Drake was indicted by
a federal grand jury. The last bit of his Internet
activity I can find before his arrest on October six,
(46:49):
twenty twenty two is a post he made the afternoon
before he spent a few hours replying to posts on
a forum for sextal enthusiasts, with his final message being
praised for a customer service representative named Patrice at a
Canadian company called Sex Doll Queen. Patrese always answers his
emails and once sent him a free sex doll head
(47:10):
as compensation after ups damaged the case his doll arrived in.
There's no explanation for the nearly three years between solving
the case and arresting the perpetrator. And maybe it's like
those cases I mentioned before where they give a guy
a talking to and they say, you know, if I
have to come back, it's game over, but you know,
(47:32):
just knock it off. But I've seen cases like that,
and usually it's mentioned there will be some sort of
incident that brings the agent back to his door. But
there's no indication here of any new conduct, certainly no
charged conduct in the years between the search warrant and
the arrest warrant. Right, So if they did all this work,
(47:53):
they search his house, you know, hypothetically they say to him, hey, Bud,
knock it off, or we have to charge you. If
that had happened, you would assume that there would be
some new incident, but there's not. Maybe it was a
change in office priorities, or somebody wanted this one close specifically,
(48:14):
And there was some turnover in the US Attorney's office
in Virginia's Western District during that time period, but nothing
that really coincides with this timeline. The assistant US attorney
whose name is on that warrant in twenty nineteen left
to become a judge in March of twenty twenty one.
The US Attorney in the Western District left to become
a judge in March twenty twenty. The current US attorney
(48:35):
was sworn in in October twenty twenty one. And that's
a lot of in and out, but none of that
does anything to explain how this case got lost. From
October twenty nineteen to September of twenty twenty two, I
spent way too much time, like browsing press releases and
looking at LinkedIn pages and trying to sort of track
the patterns in the federal indictments coming out of this
(48:57):
office to try to make these pieces fit together, and
they just don't. They don't. There's no obvious rationale for
this timeline, and I don't expect they're going to tell us.
Drake pled guilty in April twenty twenty three in an
agreement that dropped most of the charges. He only had
to plead guilty to one count of possessing an unregistered
(49:17):
explosive device and one count of stalking. The stalking count
was specifically regarding the letter sent to Joe Derezo. Accounts
related to the letters sent to everybody else were dropped
in exchange. And that's normal. This is really common. Data
published by the Pew Research Center last year shows nearly
(49:38):
ninety percent of people charged for the federal crime just
plead guilty. They take plea agreements. Eight percent of cases
end up dismissed, leaving only two point three percent of
people charged with the federal crime who actually take their
case to trial. The system desperately needs people to plead guilt,
(50:00):
which is a huge motivator for overcharging. Right, you say
to a guy, hey, we got you on twenty counts.
You're going away for one hundred and ten years, but hey,
maybe we can make a deal for twenty years, and
then you've saved the United States government, the cost of
a trial. It's not a great setup overall, right, that
our justice system requires that we not actually pursue justice,
(50:23):
because if everyone actually pursued justice in the form of
the jury trial you're entitled to, the system would collapse.
I mean, it would fall apart instantly. Just something to
think about. So when you look at this and you
see that most of these charges got dropped, it's not
because they didn't think they could prove those charges at trial.
They just didn't want to pay for a trial, and
(50:46):
nine years in prison is enough. So yes, technically he
is only guilty legally of building the bomb and sending
the letters to Joe Derezo threatening to blow up his mom.
The letters threatened to rate Pat's sister and Jeanette's daughters
are among those dropped counts. So in the eyes of
the federal government, he is not guilty on those counts,
(51:10):
not because he was acquitted. He was not found not guilty,
but he is not guilty of them in the sense
that he was not prosecuted for those they were dropped.
Common sense and hundreds of pages of court documents lays
out a pretty convincing case that can lead you to
your own conclusion, but the law is what the law is.
(51:31):
He is not guilty of those things. He's currently serving
his nine year sentence at the Federal Correctional Institute in Myeland, Michigan.
He asked for a placement in Michigan to be closer
to his son. He'll be seventy two when he's released
in twenty thirty. The government has not yet responded to
his motion to seal certain case documents related to the
(51:51):
dropped counts. He wrote a letter from prison in December
twenty twenty three that certain information in his indictment has
caused problems for him when other inmates check his paperwork.
He doesn't get specific, but I assume the threats of
graphic sexual violence aren't exactly helping him win friends and
(52:12):
influence people, even if those counts were dropped in the
plea agreement. Again, he's not guilty of those things, but
it's in the indictment. So in the end, it turns
out Antifa never threatened to pour cups of piss on
Confederate War reenactors or drive a car through the Gettysburg parade.
Who's just Gerald, a weird little guy, who's Maddie got
(52:35):
kicked out of his Civil War club. Weird Little Guys
as a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched,
written and recorded by me, WHILEI kunger. Our executive producers
are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The show is edited
(52:56):
by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme news was
composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me at Weird
Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely
read it, but I almost certainly will not answer it.
It's nothing personal. I don't answer any of my emails.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other
listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post
(53:19):
anything that's going to make you one of my Weird
Little Guys
Cool Zone Media. Hey everybody, Molly here, I don't have
a new episode for you this week. I'm sorry about that.
I promise I'll be back next week with a new
Weird Little Guy for you. This rerun is almost a
(00:23):
year old. The show is almost a year old. This
was the second ever episode of Weird Little Guys, So
if you haven't been a listener from the beginning, it
might not be a rerun for you. Like I said,
I promise I'll have something new for you next week.
But for now, I hope you'll enjoy the story of Gerald,
(00:45):
a man who loved historical reenactment, sex dolls, and writing
online reviews of fast food restaurants. On October fourteenth to
twenty seventeen, the Battle of Cedar Creek was happening all
over again. Originally fought on October nineteenth, eighteen sixty four,
(01:09):
the crushing defeat meant Confederate troops could no longer maneuver
through the Shenandoah Valley to march on Washington, and the
Union victory was the last minute boost for Lincoln's reelection campaign.
One hundred and fifty three years later, as re enactors
in Middletown Virginia, milled around in their historically accurate wool
uniforms and replica weaponry, waiting for the battle to begin.
One of them found an alarming anachronism in the Sutler's tent,
(01:33):
a pipe bomb. I'm Molly Conger, and this is weird,
little guys. The Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation has held their
(02:00):
annual re enactment of the battle since nineteen ninety, but
twenty seventeen was a politically fraught time in America. On
August twelfth, twenty seventeen, the Unite the Right rally in Charlesville,
Virginia ended when a young rally attendee who kept a
framed picture of Adolph Hitler on his nightstand, ran his
car through a crowd of peaceful protesters marching on a
closed street. He injured dozens and killed Heather Hire. Images
(02:25):
of the crowd that day, with rally attendees carrying Confederate
flags and swastikas side by side, flooded the national consciousness.
Most Americans heard the word antifa for the first time
that week. The national conversation about Confederate monuments, which had
been simmering all year, boiled over the city council in Baltimore, Maryland,
(02:47):
voted to remove their Confederate statues. Just two days later.
The same week, the mayor of Lexington, Kentucky, asked his
city council to approve the removal of the statues at
their courthouse. A Confederate monument in Hollywood Forever Cemetery in
LA was removed overnight. From Florida to California, Confederate monuments
were removed, toppled, and vandalized. No one wanted to be
(03:08):
the next Charlottesville. Six days after the rally, officials in Manassas,
a small city outside of d C about two hours
north of Charlottesville, announced they were calling off the annual
Civil War Reenactment weekend scheduled for the end of August.
The Washington Posts reported that the reenactors themselves were worried
the quote racially charged atmosphere around the country over whether
(03:30):
to remove Civil War monuments would lead to violence. So
the concern was not whether it was appropriate to continue
celebrating the Confederacy in the wake of the deadly rally,
but rather anxiety about the possibility that Antifa America's new
black clad boogeyman would target these events and these growing
(03:51):
fears of persecution from the radical left were confirmed on
September twenty third, when the Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation received
an ominous letter in the mail. Instead of a return haddress,
the envelope bore a symbol that was fresh in their minds,
a black circle containing a black flag overlaying a red flag.
(04:11):
It was from Antifa. The letter inside read, you need.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
To cancel your coming up celebration of the Civil War
on October thirteen, fourteen fifteen, twenty seventeen. If you choose
to continue with this farce of history that clearly celebrates
the war to keep African Americans in chains, then we
have no choice but to come in protest. We will
come and disrupt and cause problems for all those who
attend the atrocity of history. Several hundred of our supporters
(04:40):
will attend and slash tires, block traffic, harass patrons and reenactors.
We will make Charlottesville look like a Sunday picnic. Many
of us have dogs, so we'll bring dog feces to
throw on people. We will also throw cups of human urine.
We might resort to actually firing guns into the camps
and at the reenactors will put poison in the water.
(05:01):
You would use noise to disrupt the battles in sleep.
These events must stop. Our local organizer tells us he
is ready to go. You have been warned now. If
it is not.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Called off, we will destroy you.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
You have less than one month to issue a cancelation
notice to it asap.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Days before the event in October, the Cedar Creek Battlefield
Foundation did announce publicly that they had received a threatening letter,
but that the event would go on with increased security,
and the details of the threat were not released, but
speculation immediately turned to the Culture War, and after the
bomb was discovered, the National Review wrote, the simplest and
most logical explanation is that this is a new, violent
(05:44):
extension of the effort to remove Confederate statues. The Federalists
lamented that history itself was becoming another casualty in the
culture War. The threatening letters continued for over a year,
becoming increasingly gruesome and terrifyingly specific, targeting members of the
board at Cedar Creek and their family members. Cedar Creek
(06:05):
had to cancel the reenactment in twenty eighteen after one
director of the Foundation resigned in fear for his family
safety when the letter writer threatened to put a bomb
under his mother's car. The new director started getting threats
of sexual violence against her young daughters. The mayor of
Gettysburg received a letter threatening to bomb the annual Gettysburg
Remembrance Day parade. Would Antifa stop at nothing to destroy history?
(06:30):
But it was at Antifa. It wasn't Antifa at all.
It was Gerald. Gerald Leonard Drake born in nineteen fifty
eight in Michigan, loves the Civil War. In nineteen ninety six,
his hometown paper, The port Here in Thymes, Harold wrote
an article about his dedication to reenactment. He'd gotten a
(06:51):
second job to save up the ten thousand dollars it
would cost him to transport Judith, his five hundred and
twenty five pound replica Civil War canon, from Mission Wigan
to Columbus, Georgia for the Chattahoochee Heritage Festival. Judith the
Canon was named after his wife, Judy, who would file
for divorce the following year. When he married his third wife,
(07:13):
Donna in twenty ten, they took wedding photos in Civil
War era address at the Historic Adams County courthouse in Gettysburg.
They got two cats and named them Shiloh and Musket.
But the world was changing. The world of eighteen sixty
falls further away every day, no matter how historically accurate
(07:33):
the brass buttons on your coat are. In twenty eleven,
he posted a thread on a Civil War reenactment forum
about a living history event he'd recently participated in a
tour group. Was appalled that the re enactors, role playing
as soldiers reading aloud letters from home, read a letter
describing the brutal whipping of an enslaved person that was
riddled with racial slurs. Though he felt that the event
(07:56):
itself went well, he wrote that shit hit the fan
afterwards and the liberals in the group had a bitch
session about appropriate language.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
I guess what I'm asking here is, as living historians
and reenactors, aren't we supposed to do as good of
a job and impression of our ancestors as we possibly can.
We used to get praise and accolades for doing a
great first person impression. Let me know if anyone else
is having this kind of trouble for being the best
you can be.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
Surprisingly, even in twenty eleven, fellow users on the Civil
War message board disagreed with Gerald. Their reenactment groups is
committed as they were to historical accuracy, did not use
the N word. One user, whose profile bears the badge
for Member of the Year wrote that he is quote
careful to avoid certain language in terms, always realizing that
(08:50):
my performance is in the present century. To modern day
folks who live in the present, it would not understand
the customs, practices, and language of the nineteenth century with
any real clarity. Another user, a former moderator of the forum,
replied to a comment from Drake that he was looking
for a less PC group, wrote that he can't imagine
there is any group out there that would condone that
(09:11):
kind of language, and all this achieves his bad publicity
for reenactors, adding that those tourists surely all went home
that day and told their friends about the racists they
saw at the event. A year later, Drake posted again
in the same Civil War forum, complaining that people are
getting too hung up on safety, writing remember when reenacting
(09:31):
used to be fun and mourning the old days when
battle reenactments were more like real battle. Again. Fellow reenactors
pushed back with one veteran reenactor, writing that he did
indeed remember those days. He'd once had a costume ruined
and gotten pretty serious burns when another reenactor shot him
with a replica shotgun. Even in his chosen community of
(09:53):
Civil War reenactors, Gerald was living in a version of
the past that was becoming increasingly lonely. In October of
twenty fourteen, things really started to fall apart. His third
marriage was on the rocks, and after what sounds like
a pretty petty dispute, Gerald was kicked out of his
Civil War reenactment unit as a volunteer at the Cedar
(10:15):
Creek Battlefield. He'd heard a rumor that someone was planning
to sneak into the reenactment without paying the registration fee.
Gerald and his friend and fellow reenactor Daryl found this
to be an outrageous offense and decided to print up
flyers letting everyone know that Duffy Miller wasn't going to
pay his entry fee and anyone who sees him should
(10:36):
stop him. Duffy Miller, as it turns out, was their
unit commander, and he was not pleased to see the posters.
He kicks Gerald and Daryl out of the unit. Jerald
continued volunteering at Cedar Creek, but it seems this incident
was the end of his love for reenacting. Now. I
can't find exactly how much it cost to register for
(10:58):
the event in twenty fourteen, but the twenty twenty four
registration fee is thirty five dollars, and I know from
the forum post that's actually been increased in the last
couple of years to cover the new security measures that
they have to have, So you have to assume it
was much less ten years ago. So the inciting incident
for this entire debacle was a couple of old guys
(11:20):
fighting about twenty bucks and the sanctity of Confederate reenactment.
I guess, so what's a guy to do now, First
they stop letting him say the N word, You're not
even allowed to shoot each other anymore, and now he's
kicked out of his unit entirely, a hobby he'd loved
since the early nineties was being ruined. They weren't saying
(11:41):
like wokeness back then, but I think if this happened today,
Gerald would say that it was being ruined by woke
He'd been left by three wives and now his own
civil war unit didn't want him around, but he continued
volunteering at Cedar Creek. He retired, He built and little models,
(12:01):
He got into model rockets. He traveled the world, and
he posted a lot, and apparently he held on to
his anger about that incident at the twenty fourteen Cedar
Creek Reenactment. I spent a lot of time combing through
hundreds of pages of court documents, years and years of
his posts on forums, but I can't quite sort out
(12:23):
what the catalyst was in twenty seventeen. Why did he
wait three years to put that bomb at Cedar Creek.
Maybe he saw the news about the Manassas Reenactment getting
canceled out of fear of political violence at the wake
up Unite the Right and just got an idea, because
within weeks of that news story, Gerald started writing letters.
(12:47):
After his first letter to the Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation
in September, he followed up by placing an actual bomb
at the event in October. The reenactment community is pretty
small and the bomb was big news, but a rumor
was going around on Facebook that a teenager had been
arrested for the original letter, and then that was sort
(13:09):
of conflated. As you know, people are posting and reposting
and talking about the post that they saw. It was
conflated to the idea that someone had been arrested for
the bomb, and the rumor was very quickly disproven. No
one was arrested, replacing the bomb in the vendor's tent,
But the letter writer was frustrated. If they thought the
culprit had been apprehended, they wouldn't be afraid anymore. John Buchheister,
(13:34):
a vendor at the event who told a reporter that
he was present when the bomb was found, was one
of the posters in that Facebook rumor mill And there's
nothing malicious here. He just reposted something that someone else
had said that the would be bomber had been apprehended.
I think there was a lot of relief in believing that,
so a lot of people were posting it. But I
guess our letter writer saw John Buchheister's post because on
(13:57):
November thirteenth, twenty seventeen, he opened a letter addressed to
his home in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Like the first letter, the
envelope was printed with the ANTIFA symbol in place of
a return address, inside a typed letter read.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Thank you so much for putting on Facebook that a
teenager was arrested for the threat to Cedar Creek. It
was so much easier to bring in a bomb do
something like this again for us. We are coming to
Gettysburg parade and speech. Thank you again for all your
help in the last terror event.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
That same week, a local newspaper in Gettysburg received a
letter threatening the upcoming Gettysburg Remembrance Day parade. The letter
threatened to drive trucks through the crowd at the parade,
a troubling callback to the still recent vehicular murderer Unite
the Right, and threatened to put sharpshooters in windows and
on rooftops. The letter writer ended the note by giving
(14:55):
a detailed description of the bomb at Cedar Creek quote
for proof that we did the sea terror attack. But
just as Cedar Creek had not canceled when they were threatened,
the Gettysburg Rememberance Day parade was not canceled that year,
but the route was significantly shortened to allow for a
heavy police presence. S Chris Anders, a Republican political activist,
(15:17):
wrote on Facebook, apparently Antifa and other hate groups are
headed to try and cause problems this Saturday at the
annual Remembrance Day parade, but he wrote that he would
be marching with his brothers in gray rather than giving
in to terrorists. There are nearly one hundred comments on
this Facebook post, mostly agreeing that Dantifa must be stopped
or offering questionable safety tips, like advising that you should
(15:40):
use a wool scarf to protect yourself from tear gas.
I have to assume that would only make things worse.
I feel like wool is very absorbent. But one loan commenter,
a reenactor from New England who rides with the First
Main Cavalry, had a different theory. He wrote, I bet
you five dollars that the perpetrator is a reenactor or
(16:03):
former reenactor. No offense to anyone, but no one knows
about rem Day beyond reenactors and locals. For it to
be a target, someone would have to be aware of it,
and there are plenty of other high profile, low security
events with bigger crowd numbers to choose. From his comment,
drew ire from the victimized Confederates, obsessed with the idea
(16:24):
of a massive conspiracy from the radical left. He was,
of course correct and now here's where things start to
(16:45):
get really weird. Just some truly inexplicable behavior with deep
weird roots. I mean, I guess that's the show, right,
This guy's weird. But here's where it takes its super
weird turn. Gerald is retired at this point, and when
he's not traveling, he's volunteering. He's still volunteering at Cedar
Creek even though he doesn't reenact anymore. But he's also
(17:07):
volunteering at sky Meadows State Park. It's not entirely clear
why a registered sex offender was allowed to volunteer at
the state park alongside a high school student, but that's
what it says in the affidavit. So I guess that
one fell through the cracks at sky Meadows because while
he did successfully petition to get himself removed from the
sex offender registry in twenty twenty one, in twenty eighteen,
(17:29):
the background check required for volunteers at state parks would
have shown that he was a registered sex offender for
a two thousand and four conviction in Ohio for sexual
imposition and child endangerment. And again, I'll be so clear
with you right up front, there's no allegation that Drake
was involved in any inappropriate sexual conduct as a volunteer anywhere,
(17:52):
not at the state park, not anywhere. So in the
time period of these events, there's no allegation that he's
touching any children or engaging in any inappropriate sexual conduct.
But I'm not just telling you he's a registered sex
offender to sort of point and laugh at that. As
a circumstance, these things intersect. So in twenty eighteen, he's
(18:15):
volunteering at the park with this teenage boy, and one
afternoon in February, they're volunteering together. They're shooting the shit
fill in the time, and Gerald, who is sixty at
this point, is telling this teenage boy about his hobby
of Civil War reenactment, which is very tragically in decline.
The topic of the twenty seventeen reenactment at Cedar Creek
comes up. I have to assume Gerald brought it up,
(18:38):
because why would the seventeen year old boy have brought
that up. But Gerald is telling the kid about some
funny articles about that twenty seventeen event. He later emailed
the teenager what appeared to be photographs of newspaper clippings
about the bombing. But in these articles the bomb went off.
(18:58):
The articles he emails this tea nag contained details of
the bomb actually killing people, with more deaths caused by
subsequent sniper fire. But we know the bomb didn't really
go off. No one got shot, no one got hurt,
nothing really happened. The articles he showed his young friend
(19:19):
were completely fake. The federal agents investigating the case wrote
that attempts to locate sources for these fake newspaper clippings
turned up nothing. I mean, not even anything online showing
these fake articles. Nothing, there's nothing. He must have made
them himself, and that's where his sex offender status ties
back in. In two thousand and three, he was indicted
(19:42):
in Auglaize County, Ohio for gross sexual imposition, and shortly
after he's indicted, someone start sending weird letters to the
Auglais County prosecutor. The letters were made to appear as
though they were sent by a member of the police
department in Drake's hometown of Port Huron, Michigan, and they
appeared to prove that Drake's second wife was a child abuser.
(20:06):
The letter writer sent a forged polygraph report on Michigan
State Police letterhead and a forged notarized statement from Drake's
estranged wife, and when his home was eventually searched, police
found a doctored page from the local newspaper. He had
taken an actual newspaper and manually altered it with a
false news story about his estranged second wife, Susan, pleading
(20:29):
guilty to child abuse and endangerment. No such news story
ever existed, and I can find no evidence that Susan
was ever charged with such a crime. Maybe a more
thorough journalist would have pushed harder for the details here,
but court cases involving sexual abuse of a minor tend
to be completely closed. Those documents are sealed unless someone
(20:50):
was sitting in those hearings, and there's local news reports
about the testimony. You're just you're not going to find it,
and short of reaching out to the parties involved, there's
no way from me to know exactly what led to
Gerald Drake being convicted of sexual imposition and child endangerment
or why he tried to frame his strange wife for it.
But I can tell you that after his conviction, there's
(21:12):
a note on the docket that the judge prohibited Drake
from contacting his second ex wife and her minor daughter
from a prior marriage. So I think we can get
the gist of the situation without me asking a young
woman why her stepdad, a man now in prison for
making a bomb, was court ordered to stay away from
her when she was ten. Take from that what you will.
(21:34):
The relevant kernel of that story, though, is those fake
newspaper articles. In two thousand and three, he's manually cutting
and pasting by hand and xeroxing his creations to disguise
the alterations. He's arts and craftsing his way into an
alternate reality where his ex wife is the one in
dangering children, not him. And in twenty eighteen, he's doing
(21:56):
it again. He's making fake newspaper clippings about what he
wished were real. He's showing this teenage boy a reality
where the bomb did go off and the people who
snubbed him died. And while he was in jail for
that sex offense a short eight months in an Ohio
County jail, he made another art project of sorts. In
(22:18):
September two thousand and four, the Auglais County Sheriff's office
reached out to the FBI Field office in Cleveland. Gerald
had been trying to make friends in jail by showing
off his knowledge of explosives. He produced eight pages of
hand drawn diagrams and instructions for creating a pipe bomb,
a CO two cartridge bomb, a Coleman fuel bomb, a
propane tank bomb, and diagrams about how to modify the
(22:41):
kind of inert grenades you can buy as antiques or
at the Army surplus store, and how to turn them
back into live grenades. And the diagram of the pipe
bomb he drew in jail in two thousand and four
is remarkably similar to the device he made in twenty seventeen.
It doesn't appear that anything ever came of the incident
(23:03):
in the jail back in two thousand and four. You know,
the Sheriff's office contact of the FBI, and they said, hey,
we've got these weird drawings. What do you guys think
about this. There's no indication that there was follow up
from there, but apparently they held on to them. Those
drawings remained in a filing cabinet somewhere in Ohio for
twenty years. It's kind of surprising that they still had
(23:23):
those drawings in twenty nineteen, but they are included in
the affidavit for the search warrant, so in the spring
of twenty eighteen, he seems pretty content with his hobbies.
He's making fake newspaper articles about his bomb going off
and showing them to a kid he volunteers with based
on his eBay review history. He's painting miniature models of
Godzilla and Frankenstein, both five stars from Gerald, and he's
(23:47):
getting into model rocketry. In March, he took a solo
vacation to Amsterdam. His trip Advisor account provides a pretty
robust log of his travels. He wasn't a big fan
of the Jewish History Museum, titling his review not really
for Gentiles and writing that he felt shorted by the
lack of artifacts from the death camps at the Holocaust Museum.
(24:09):
He felt that it had been quote scrubbed of shock
due to the new PC way all museums are going.
He felt the same way about the Dutch Resistance Museum,
writing if you were looking for the story of the
full account of atrocities done on the citizens, well this
display doesn't have it it. Like many museums today have
had to lighten up on their truth so as not
(24:30):
to offend anyone. He did, however, really enjoy the Museum
of Prostitution and his visit to the Red Light District.
In a later post on a forum for sex doll owners,
he boasted that he is familiar with the female condoms
he uses to keep his dolls clean because he's used
them in European brothels. And for what it's worth, the
Anne frank House got his seal of approval as a
(24:52):
World War II history buff. He loved the Ripley's Believe
It or Not Museum, and he was deeply upset that
his hostel did not provide a t additional American breakfast
with quote hot meats. I don't know why you would
expect a cheap hostel in Amsterdam to have American breakfast,
but he was not satisfied, and just as an aside
(25:14):
about his trip Advisor reviews, I think that was my
favorite thing about researching this. He loves to review the
cell site location data in one of the search warrant
affidavits shows that he likely dropped off that very first
threat letter at a USPS drop box in a strip
mall near the Dulles Airport just before boarding an Air
France flight from DC to Madrid on September twenty first,
(25:36):
twenty seventeen. So while his letter threatening to throw piss
and shit at Civil War reenactors was making its way
to Cedar Creek, he was on his way to Spain.
He hated the bullfighting, but he raved about the burger
king on Plaza de Castilla. Apparently the burger king at
home is always getting his order wrong. He had to
go all the way to Spain to get his whopper
(25:57):
with no onions and no pickle. The burger king in
his hometown only gets four stars from Gerald. And since
visiting Italy in April twenty seventeen, he rated four different
Italian restaurants in Winchester, Virginia, based on how the pizza
measures up to the pizza in Rome is given out
two just like Rome's, and two were failures according to Gerald.
(26:22):
So maybe he's done. Maybe it's out of his system.
Three threatening letters and one bomb that didn't go off,
and then he's back to his hobbies. But on June nineteenth,
twenty eighteen, his local newspaper ran a story about the
upcoming reenactment at Cedar Creek. The event was just four
months away and the board of directors wanted everyone to
know that the reenactment weekend would have additional security after
(26:43):
the incident the year before. Days after the paper ran
that story, a pair of identical letters were mailed to
the newspaper, the Winchester Star and the Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation.
Like the first letters, the envelopes had a symbol where
the return address should be, But for some reason, these
letters a version of the anti fascist symbol with the
red flag on top and the black flag behind, which
(27:04):
is reversed from the original letters. I think he probably
just downloaded a new image and didn't notice that it
was different. I don't think he realized he was signaling
a preference for anarchism over communism, or vice versa. You know,
both versions of that symbol exist and are perfectly real
and valid and are used by different people, but they
are in fact different symbols and do mean something slightly different.
(27:27):
I don't think Gerald knew that. And this time both
letters were addressed to Joe Derezzo, the president of the
foundation's board, and they threatened to kill his mother with
a car bomb if he didn't call off the reenactment
in October. Dereza later told agents that he took the
threat seriously enough that he began checking underneath his mother's
car for explosive devices. But the language in the letters
(27:49):
was odd and oddly specific. Though the Winchester Star article
didn't actually mention what those increased security measures would be,
the letter writers seemed to know. One of the private
discussions the board had was about banning spectators from bringing
bags of any kind to the event, but they were
(28:10):
worried that this would be an issue for people like
parents with diaper bags. The letter writer said there were
quote many ways for us to sneak in a surprise,
specifically mentioning putting a bomb inside of a diaper bag.
And the board had also quietly been in contact with
the local sheriff's office about providing metal detectors, and the
(28:30):
letter writer seemed to know this too, boasting that he'd
already outsmarted their security.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
We now have plastic bombs, so metal detectors are useless.
We have found a man that's going to pose as
an enactor to drive in some kind of fertilizer bomb.
We have coolers, thermoses, water bottles, all made into small IEDs.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
And in the completely real and very serious way that
real Antifa terror cells sign off their terror some threat letters.
The letter writer explained why the bomb didn't work in
twenty seventeen.
Speaker 2 (29:06):
We are the ones that did it to you last year.
We used a bad bomb guy. His mercury switch and
rocket launch wire didn't work on the pipe bomb covered
in nuts. Just so you know we are real and returning.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
Yeah, just so you know we're real. Okay, it's such
a weird mess, but silly or not. The letters recipient
was terrified they were threatening to blow up his mom,
and there really was a real bomb the year before,
so you know he's not bluffing. You already know he
really can build a bomb. So you can't laugh it
(29:40):
off while it's happening. But in hindsight, what a goofy
ass sign off? Just so you know, we had a
bad bomb guy last year, but we're very real and
we fixed that. Okay, we're real. A sixth letter, the
third in this second batch, was sent to John Buchheister,
that vendor in Pennsylvania who had spoken to the media
(30:03):
about being there when the bomb was discovered in twenty seventeen.
He'd gotten a letter in the first batch too, thanking
him for spreading that rumor that someone had been arrested
for placing the bomb. Confusingly, the letter he got in
July twenty eighteen was addressed to Joe, just like the
letter sent to Joe Derezo the same week, and it
seemed to be speaking to Joe Derezzo asking for him
(30:24):
to call off the event, which presumably Durezzo could do
as president of the board. But John Buchheister is just
a guy in Pennsylvania who sells antiques and Civil War reproductions.
This letter, like the others, threatened to kill Derezo's mother.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
Since we can't seem to get to to stop this
celebration of a war to keep men in chains, maybe
if we go after your volunteers that help out, you
will stop this. I like the idea of burning your
mother alive in a car bomb.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
Days after these letters were received, the Foundation announced on
July third, twenty eighteen, they were calling off the reenactment
in October. You know, they got that letter in twenty
seventeen and they decided we're going to soldier On, We're
going to have the event, and then there was a
real bomb. People were really in danger. So when they
got this second set of letters. In the middle of
(31:17):
twenty eighteen, they decided, we got to call it off.
It's not safe. What if the bomb goes off this year.
We know this guy's not bluffing, we know he got
a bomb in the tent last year. We can't risk it.
And on the Civil War Talk Forum, that online forum
where Gerald's been posting for years, reactions were mixed. A
lot of users agreed that it was the right thing
(31:39):
to do. It's just not worth the risk people bring
their children, their families. Others didn't think it was right
to let the terrorists win, with one poster noting that
he never stopped going to NASCAR races after nine to eleven.
I don't know that NASCAR was like a big target
for al Qaida, but he's been carrying that weight for years,
I guess. But some posters were starting to ask questions
(32:02):
like why Cedar Creek and why only Cedar Creek. It's
not the largest or most high profile reenactment, even in
just the immediate area. I mean, I don't know if
you've ever spent time in Virginia, but most of that
part of Virginia just is as hip will wear a
battlefield every town has When every town has a plaque
(32:22):
and Cedar Creek was a Union victory, wouldn't these people
be happier targeting a reenactment of a Confederate win. And then,
after pages and pages of going back and forth about
this decision on the forum, Gerald himself weighed in.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
I volunteer at Cedar Creek from what we have been told,
and this is not for general release. The foundation has
received threats of bodily harm to the board members. They're
families and everyone that helps out. Then there is the
very high cost of security. It is sad that we
live in a world with such a hostile climate to
the Confederacy, and PS has taken battle flags out of
all its stores, and statues are being taken down here
(33:03):
in Virginia, schools, streets, parks, anything named about the Confederacy
is being changed. I do not know if they will
officially announce the reason or reasons for this decision. Last
year they refused to say much, and rumors were all
over the place. We all need to maybe send some
money to the foundation for expenses, as this was their
only way of raising funds. With the fall of so
(33:24):
many Confederate symbols and events going by the wayside, I
now can feel what my ancestors did when the actual
Confederacy fell.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
So he is victim and perpetrator here lingering in the
comment section, watching his fellow Civil War enthusiasts argue about
how the community should respond to what he has done.
It's like in every police procedural drama where the killer
returns to the scene of the crime just to take
in the aftermath and again, just as suddenly as the
(33:55):
letters began, they stopped again. He got what he wanted.
The event was canceled in October, just before the now
(34:17):
canceled event would have been approaching, Joe Derezo resigned as
head of the foundation's board. He didn't feel the board
was taking the threat seriously enough, although it's unclear what
discussions were taking place behind closed doors because there'd been
no threats in several months and the event was already canceled,
so I don't know what prompted him to resign just then.
In October and the local paper, The Winchester Star, ran
(34:40):
an article about Derezo's resignation, and like clockwork, a few
days after the article ran, the letter started up again.
The foundation got a letter addressed to Deurezzo, who again
had just resigned, saying we're sorry to see you go,
and moving on to threatening the foundation's new acting director,
Jeanette Schaeffer, and I'm sorry it gets gross here. I mean,
(35:04):
none of this was good, but it gets gross again.
I'm always on the fence about repeating things like this, right,
Like is this just for shock value? Does this add
information to the story? Do you need to know exactly
what he said in order for the story to make sense?
But given his prior conviction for a crime of a
sexual nature involving a young girl, I think it does matter.
(35:27):
He wasn't just saying whatever he thought would be the
scariest and the nastiest, Like this kind of ties back
into his own past. The letter writer told Derezo that
his quote pretty mother and bald headed dad were safe
now that he'd resigned, But quote, if Jeanette Schaeffer thinks
she is safe, well she is right, but her children
(35:51):
are not. If she puts together a reenactment to celebrate
keeping men in chains, we will come after her girls.
We have a convicted rapist that was love to introduce
them to his penis. There are letters that are a
lot more graphic than this. When it comes to the
sexual threats to those girls, it's in the court record.
(36:14):
If you're interested in that, I don't see the value
in proceeding further. You get it at this point. But again,
even though these letters are obviously very frightening, there's something
off about them. The letter writer seems to know way
too much about the specific inner workings of the Cedar
(36:37):
Creek Battlefield Foundation. He knows a lot about the personal
lives of these individuals and the way that they interact
in this space, and the way they run this organization,
which again is not large. This is not a massive,
significant operation. This is a pretty small, regional, annual event.
(36:58):
One of the letters in this batch threatened to shoot
a man named Pat as he opens up the visitor
center in the morning, and members of the board told
federal investigators that since those threats in June, the visitor
center was only open on a limited basis, and not
many people knew about that. You'd have to be really
close to the operation to know that Pat, who is
the board's only full time employee, sometimes opened up the
(37:21):
visitor center in the morning alone. And the letter tried
to cast blame on a ract in the organization, claiming
that their inside knowledge came from a man named Sean Mowbray.
But Mowbray hadn't been a volunteer with the organization since
twenty fourteen. But in twenty fourteen, Mowbray was at the
center of that dispute that got Gerald kicked out of
(37:43):
his re enactment unit. And it's not just the letters
that seemed to be escalating in intensity. The same way
he sent that letter threatening to rape those girls, Drake
posted on the subredit for his hometown of Winchester, Virginia,
asking for recommendations for a good lawyer. He owned a
lot of antique and reproduction firearms and was an enthusiastic
(38:04):
hobbyist in black powder weapons, but he wanted a real gun,
a gun that shoots real bullets, and when he went
to buy one, the store refused to sell him anything
after pulling a background check. Now, his own account of
the situation is sort of murky and one sided, and
some of the details I've been able to verify indicate
(38:25):
that he's not telling the truth. But it appears that
despite having no felony record, that's true his conviction for
child endangerment comes up on his record as a domestic
violence conviction, so they wouldn't sell him a gun because
of that. There's no information in any of the hundreds
of pages of court documents I read that gives me
(38:46):
any real insight into why he may have wanted to
buy a gun that week in particular. But if I
were one of the people who had gotten one of
those letters, that timing would take my breath away. He
also traveled to Paris thought October, somehow squeezing it into
his busy schedule of threatening letters. He loved the Louver
(39:07):
and Notre Dame, noting in his review that the movie
The Hunchback of Notre Dame really doesn't do it justice,
and he visited several notable World War two historical sites.
He'd posted on Readit earlier that month that he was
thinking of getting into World War II re enacting because
the Civil War scene was dying out. McDonald's and Five
Guys in Paris both got four stars from Gerald, with
(39:31):
run review saying seeing McDonald's in Paris was like seeing
an old friend to me. Cheap and consistent food that
is the same flavor around the world, fair enough, But
when he got home, it was back to business, firing
off a letter to the mayor of Gettysburg on Halloween,
again threatening to bomb the annual parade. The letter demanded
(39:53):
that the mayor quote canceled the flying of Confederate flags
and posted on Facebook, then we will leave you alone.
Don't and someone is going to die. The ninth and
final letter was sent to the Cedar Greek Battlefield Foundation
after the embattled organization announced in December twenty eighteen that
they would be holding the reenactment in twenty nineteen. This
(40:16):
letter was addressed to Pat, the foundation's only full time employee,
that guy that opens the visitor center sometimes. The letter
asked him, would you like to bury your sister? Your brother?
We could also just kill you when you sit alone
in the visitor center. We have a guy that likes
to rape. We could send him to visit your sister.
(40:37):
What followed were some sexual threats against the director's daughter
that really aren't fit to repeat the I mean, they're gross.
It's definitely the most specific letter in terms of the
actions being threatened and the particular victims being threatened in
a way that feels specific enough to be alarming. What
makes a quote unquote true threat. In the eyes of
(41:00):
the law is kind of a moving target. You never
really know where the line is where a federal prosecutor
is going to say, I'm taking that one to a
grand jury. But in my experience reading cases like this,
mailing someone a letter that tells them exactly, when, where,
and how you plan to kill them, that's usually pretty serious.
The law does not like to see that. But by
(41:23):
this time, the defense already know it's Gerald. By the
time Pat is reading this absolutely unhinged letter threatening to
rape and kill his sister, the FBI has already gotten
Gerald's phone records from Sprint. They've been conducting physical surveillance,
with an FBI agent following him to his storage unit
and then returning later with a bomb dog to sniff
(41:45):
around the door. And again suddenly the letter stopped. But
this time there's no explanation. When the letter stopped before
it was because he got something that he wanted, but
this time they just stop. In a letter to the
court before his sentencing, Gerald claims he came to his
(42:07):
senses sometime in December twenty eighteen and realized that what
he was doing was wrong. It seems a little bit
more likely to me that one of the FBI agents
following him around said something to him. And that's not uncommon.
I've read plenty of threatening communications cases where the agent
writing the affidavit describes his first conversation with a guy
(42:28):
about threatening to behead a senator or something. Sometimes they'll
come to a guy's door and say, hey, did you
post this? Because you can't do that, don't do it again.
And the only reason we're reading the affidavit is because
the guy didn't stop posting. So the next conversation had
a very different tone. And I don't know if that's
(42:48):
what happened here. It doesn't say. And for as insanely
detailed as the documents supporting these search warrants are, there's
some really important details missing right here. If they were
following him around in November of twenty eighteen, while these
letters are still being sent, why wasn't he arrested until
twenty twenty two. It's clear they spent all of twenty
(43:10):
nineteen investigating the case. There are search warn't applications here
for his phone, his storage unit, his house, his Google account,
and warrant served on his cell phone provider for his
cell location data. The warrants were executed at various times
throughout twenty nineteen, with the physical search of his home
and his storage unit happening in October twenty nineteen, and
(43:31):
they have him dead to rights. The cell site location
data puts him at the mailboxes where the letters were
mailed on the days that they were mailed. For some
of the letters, he drove out of state to mail
them far from his home, So we have the GPS
coordinates showing him leaving his home in Winchester, Virginia, driving
to a strip mall in Pennsylvania where there's a USPS
(43:52):
drop box, and then coming back home. And we know
that on the days that he did that, the letter
was picked up that mailbox and processed at that sorting facility,
so it's there's not a lot of other explanations for
why he's driving to these mailboxes on these days. And
they found the image file for that Antifa logo that
(44:12):
was printed on the envelopes on a thumb drive in
his house. We have drone footage from the twenty seventeen
re enactment showing his car approaching the area where the
bomb was found shortly before it was placed there. But
they gathered all of this evidence. I mean more evidence
than I've ever seen laid out in documentation like this.
I mean pages and pages of maps showing his GPS
(44:35):
coordinates on the days the letters were mailed. They gathered
all this evidence, and they did nothing with it. The
documents associated with all of these search warrants were sealed.
That's normal. Usually you keep that sealed until the arrest
is made, so nobody knew that his house had been
searched except Gerald. I assume Gerald knew. I think he
(44:56):
had to know. But after six months, the ceiling order expired.
That can happen. I think in most cases they're sort
of set to auto expire after a certain amount of time.
But you'll see in cases where they haven't made a
move yet, the prosecutor will apply to continue ceiling. It's
not uncommon. I think in this case, they must have
(45:18):
forgotten to file a motion to continue the ceiling. That's
the only explanation I can think of for why they
would let these warrants get unsealed when they weren't ready
to charge him. But the ceiling order expired and somebody
noticed immediately, because the very same day, Justin Rolick wrote
an article for Courts with the headline disgruntled Civil War
(45:42):
reenactor allegedly framed Antifa by fabricating threats against his unit.
Journalists don'trite their own headlines, but somebody's got to do
something about that. That's a mouthful. And the next day
the Washington Post ran an article with the headline, a
Civil war reenactment group got threats from Antique. It was
a disgruntled actor. FBI says again the headlines, what are
(46:04):
we doing, folks. But even after these two articles ran
in February of twenty twenty, the case sat still. Well,
because I can't say that because there was no case.
He hadn't been charged. He did retain an attorney at
this point, and she told the Washington Post that he
had no idea why he was being investigated, which, like comene, yes,
(46:27):
you do, you do. And it wasn't until September of
twenty twenty two, just days before the five year statute
of limitations would run out for that first letter sent
in September twenty seventeen, that Gerald Drake was indicted by
a federal grand jury. The last bit of his Internet
activity I can find before his arrest on October six,
(46:49):
twenty twenty two is a post he made the afternoon
before he spent a few hours replying to posts on
a forum for sextal enthusiasts, with his final message being
praised for a customer service representative named Patrice at a
Canadian company called Sex Doll Queen. Patrese always answers his
emails and once sent him a free sex doll head
(47:10):
as compensation after ups damaged the case his doll arrived in.
There's no explanation for the nearly three years between solving
the case and arresting the perpetrator. And maybe it's like
those cases I mentioned before where they give a guy
a talking to and they say, you know, if I
have to come back, it's game over, but you know,
(47:32):
just knock it off. But I've seen cases like that,
and usually it's mentioned there will be some sort of
incident that brings the agent back to his door. But
there's no indication here of any new conduct, certainly no
charged conduct in the years between the search warrant and
the arrest warrant. Right, So if they did all this work,
(47:53):
they search his house, you know, hypothetically they say to him, hey, Bud,
knock it off, or we have to charge you. If
that had happened, you would assume that there would be
some new incident, but there's not. Maybe it was a
change in office priorities, or somebody wanted this one close specifically,
(48:14):
And there was some turnover in the US Attorney's office
in Virginia's Western District during that time period, but nothing
that really coincides with this timeline. The assistant US attorney
whose name is on that warrant in twenty nineteen left
to become a judge in March of twenty twenty one.
The US Attorney in the Western District left to become
a judge in March twenty twenty. The current US attorney
(48:35):
was sworn in in October twenty twenty one. And that's
a lot of in and out, but none of that
does anything to explain how this case got lost. From
October twenty nineteen to September of twenty twenty two, I
spent way too much time, like browsing press releases and
looking at LinkedIn pages and trying to sort of track
the patterns in the federal indictments coming out of this
(48:57):
office to try to make these pieces fit together, and
they just don't. They don't. There's no obvious rationale for
this timeline, and I don't expect they're going to tell us.
Drake pled guilty in April twenty twenty three in an
agreement that dropped most of the charges. He only had
to plead guilty to one count of possessing an unregistered
(49:17):
explosive device and one count of stalking. The stalking count
was specifically regarding the letter sent to Joe Derezo. Accounts
related to the letters sent to everybody else were dropped
in exchange. And that's normal. This is really common. Data
published by the Pew Research Center last year shows nearly
(49:38):
ninety percent of people charged for the federal crime just
plead guilty. They take plea agreements. Eight percent of cases
end up dismissed, leaving only two point three percent of
people charged with the federal crime who actually take their
case to trial. The system desperately needs people to plead guilt,
(50:00):
which is a huge motivator for overcharging. Right, you say
to a guy, hey, we got you on twenty counts.
You're going away for one hundred and ten years, but hey,
maybe we can make a deal for twenty years, and
then you've saved the United States government, the cost of
a trial. It's not a great setup overall, right, that
our justice system requires that we not actually pursue justice,
(50:23):
because if everyone actually pursued justice in the form of
the jury trial you're entitled to, the system would collapse.
I mean, it would fall apart instantly. Just something to
think about. So when you look at this and you
see that most of these charges got dropped, it's not
because they didn't think they could prove those charges at trial.
They just didn't want to pay for a trial, and
(50:46):
nine years in prison is enough. So yes, technically he
is only guilty legally of building the bomb and sending
the letters to Joe Derezo threatening to blow up his mom.
The letters threatened to rate Pat's sister and Jeanette's daughters
are among those dropped counts. So in the eyes of
the federal government, he is not guilty on those counts,
(51:10):
not because he was acquitted. He was not found not guilty,
but he is not guilty of them in the sense
that he was not prosecuted for those they were dropped.
Common sense and hundreds of pages of court documents lays
out a pretty convincing case that can lead you to
your own conclusion, but the law is what the law is.
(51:31):
He is not guilty of those things. He's currently serving
his nine year sentence at the Federal Correctional Institute in Myeland, Michigan.
He asked for a placement in Michigan to be closer
to his son. He'll be seventy two when he's released
in twenty thirty. The government has not yet responded to
his motion to seal certain case documents related to the
(51:51):
dropped counts. He wrote a letter from prison in December
twenty twenty three that certain information in his indictment has
caused problems for him when other inmates check his paperwork.
He doesn't get specific, but I assume the threats of
graphic sexual violence aren't exactly helping him win friends and
(52:12):
influence people, even if those counts were dropped in the
plea agreement. Again, he's not guilty of those things, but
it's in the indictment. So in the end, it turns
out Antifa never threatened to pour cups of piss on
Confederate War reenactors or drive a car through the Gettysburg parade.
Who's just Gerald, a weird little guy, who's Maddie got
(52:35):
kicked out of his Civil War club. Weird Little Guys
as a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched,
written and recorded by me, WHILEI kunger. Our executive producers
are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The show is edited
(52:56):
by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme news was
composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me at Weird
Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely
read it, but I almost certainly will not answer it.
It's nothing personal. I don't answer any of my emails.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other
listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post
(53:19):
anything that's going to make you one of my Weird
Little Guys
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Molly Conger
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