August 14, 2025 • 50 mins
After Devon Arthurs murdered his roommates, he claimed he'd only done it to prevent the loss of innocent lives. The man he said was planning a terrorist attack was arrested with a car full of guns, but not charged with any of the things Arthurs claimed their nazi terror cell had been working on.
Sources:
https://www.propublica.org/article/an-atomwaffen-member-sketched-a-map-to-take-the-neo-nazis-down-what-path-officials-took-is-a-mystery
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/three-murder-suspects-linked-to-atomwaffen-where-their-cases-stand/
https://www.bradenton.com/news/local/crime/article156282099.html
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nicholas-giampa-neo-nazi-teenager-murder-girlfriends-parents-virginia_n_5a4d0797e4b0b0e5a7aa4780
https://www.middlebury.edu/institute/academics/centers-initiatives/ctec/ctec-publications/dangerous-organizations-and-bad-actors-4
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/documenting-hate-new-american-nazis/transcript/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjEBXDfuBDE&ab_channel=COURTTV
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Col Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
On Sunday, May twenty first, twenty seventeen, Monroe County Sheriff's
Deputy Diana Torres pulled into the parking lot outside of
a Burger King on Route One. There were plenty of
empty parking spots, but she wasn't there for lunch. She
positioned her patrol car directly behind a blue suv, blocking
(00:29):
it in, and got out of her car. As she
approached the restaurant, the door opened and a man walked out.
Before he had a chance to react, she grabbed him
by the wrist and started handcuffing him. For all his
tough talk online, Brandon Russell went quietly. He would later
(00:53):
say that he just needed to get out of town
to clear his head after what he'd experienced on Friday night.
He'd come home from work to find two of his
roommates dead in their bedroom, murdered by a young man
he'd considered his best friend. But when officers searched the car,
they didn't find the kind of luggage you'd expect someone
to have for a weekend trip to the Florida Keys.
(01:16):
There wasn't so much as a toothbrush in the vehicle.
Instead of t shirts and swim trunks. They found rifles
and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, some of it already
loaded into four high capacity magazines. Three hundred miles away
in a jail cell in Tampa, a murderer was begging
(01:38):
for a meeting with the FBI. He claimed he knew
exactly why his roommate was driving around South Florida with
a car full of guns. I'm Molly Conger in this.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
It's weird. The guys.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
When we left off last week, two men were in
custody and two men were dead. The actual facts of
the story are fairly straightforward, and it would make for
a pretty short episode. Devon Arthur's eventually pleaded guilty to
two counts of second degree murder for the murderers of
Andrew Anoschach and Jeremy Hemmelman, as well as three counts
(02:32):
of kidnapping for the three people he held at gunpoint
at the Strip Mall. Brand and Russell pleaded guilty to
federal charges of possessing an unregistered destructive device and improper
storage of explosive materials. Devon was sentenced to forty five
years in a Florida state prison, and Brandon was released
in twenty twenty one, after serving most of a five
(02:55):
year sentence. The narrative tension in this story. It's not
in what happened, but why and what it might mean.
Hundreds of pages of police reports, years of filings in
their respective criminal cases, scores of news reports, at documentary
(03:16):
TV interviews, There's no shortage of material laying out the facts.
But it all leaves me with more questions than answers.
I've spent some time on the show ruminating on one
of these big questions before. It's one probably better left
to a philosopher than a podcaster. But it's about the
(03:38):
nature of truth. What does it even mean to say
that something is true? In this story? We have a
set of truths. Sure, we know that these men are
guilty of the crimes they committed. We know it because
a court said, so, Devin killed two people, Brandon had
(04:00):
a garage full of explosive materials.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
That's true.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
But because neither of them took their case to trial,
that's all we can really legally speaking say we know
for certain. Maybe at trial there would have been a
more aggressive exploration of Devon's claims that he'd killed his
roommates to prevent the terrorist attack they were planning. Maybe
if Brandon had gone to trial, the government would have
(04:28):
had to prove to a jury what he was going
to do with those explosives, but they didn't, so we
don't know, and we're left trying to construct our own
version of what might be true. Aside from the concrete facts,
(04:50):
the physical evidence, the bullet casings, the autopsy reports, the
crime scene photographs, the rest of the pieces that we
have in this quest to assemble some version of the
truth are probably lies. So let's go back to where
we were last week, May nineteenth, twenty seventeen. The murders
(05:11):
happened on a Friday evening. Tampa police responding to nine
one one calls about an armed man at a strip
mall found eighteen year old Devon Arthur's holding three people
hostage a smoke shop. As he was being handcuffed, he
told the officers that his roommates were dead in his
apartment across the street and he'd be happy to show
(05:32):
them which unit it was if they would.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
Drive him there.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
As the police pulled up out front, another man walked
out the front door of the apartment and collapsed on
the ground in front of them sobbing hysterically. Brandon Russell
had arrived home from work minutes after the murders and
discovered the dead bodies of Andrew Anoshack and Jeremy Himmelman. Inside,
officers found not just the bodies of Devon's murder victims,
(05:59):
but Brandon's bomb making workshop. The crime scene was a
complicated one. When officers first arrived on the scene Friday evening,
they saw the bodies, of course, you couldn't miss them,
but they immediately noticed some other very concerning things lying
(06:21):
around the apartment. Geiger counters an unusually large number of batteries,
electric matches, piles of military gear, gas masks, bookshelves full
of white supremacist literature, a Nazi flag tacked to the wall,
(06:43):
a framed photograph of Timothy McVeigh, a backpack in the
living room with some kind of device inside that looked
like a bomb. Those first responding officers saw all of this,
and they got out of there in a hurry. There
was nothing they could do for the two men lying
dead in the bedroom. That much was very obvious, based
(07:04):
on the state of the bodies, so they secured the perimeter,
evacuated the neighboring apartments and waited for the experts to arrive.
All night. As Brandon and Devon sat waiting at the
police station, officers worked on the crime scene. Members of
the Tampa Police Department's Explosive Ordnance Disposal Team entered first
(07:29):
to try to figure out how volatile the situation was.
The only reports I have access to were written by
Tampa police officers, so I can only see what they
said about their interactions with agents from the FBI and ATF,
but based on the crime scene logs. Bomb technicians from
the FBI arrived a few hours later, and agents from
(07:49):
the ATF arrived after midnight. It was the middle of
the night by the time Devon and Brandon were interviewed
by a homicide detective in the early morning hours of
May twentieth. Brandon Russell asked for a lawyer. He'd been
talking for over an hour already, but when the FBI
(08:10):
agent in the room pressed him a little too hard
about what they might find if they searched his computer,
he didn't want to talk anymore. He wasn't under arrest,
He was there voluntarily. He wasn't being detained. They weren't
technically investigating him at all. He had just happened to
(08:30):
come home from work and stumble into a crime scene,
so if he didn't want to talk anymore, he was
free to go. Around six am, a Tampa police officer
drove him home. The explosives experts had finished their sweep
of the residents and signed off on it being safe
to enter, so detectives were starting to arrive to execute
(08:52):
search warrants. Brandon waited outside in the parking lot while
a detective entered the condo to find his car keys,
and then he was on his way. His apartment was
a crime scene and his mother lived in the Bahamas,
so he planned to drive to Palm Beach to stay
with his dad, or at least that's what he told
(09:14):
the FBI. There's a lot of uninteresting details here about
the memorandum of understanding between the FBI and the ATF,
but they share primary jurisdiction when investigating possible federal crimes
involving explosives, and both agencies have explosives experts. But ultimately,
the decision as to whether the materials found in the
(09:35):
garage constituted a violation of federal law was up to
the ATF. And by the time the ATF briefed the
FBI on what they found, Brandon Russell was gone. The
federal criminal complaint was signed by a judge by midday
on Saturday, just a few hours after Brandon Russell drove off.
(10:00):
No problem though, right he told them where he was going,
and if he drove straight there, he should have already
arrived at his dad's house in Palm Beach. FBI agents
called Brandon's dad, a Palm Beach County Sheriff's deputy. But
not only was Brandon not there, his dad hadn't even
(10:20):
heard from him and had no idea where he might be.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
So how did.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
They find him? He could have gone anywhere. I couldn't
find anything in the court filings that indicated that they
had tried to ping his phone or that they got
a warrant for his banking information. They don't seem to
have tracked him down using his digital footprint. But they
found him pretty damn quick, and he was arrested the
(10:48):
very next day. Here's where we waded into versions of
the truth told by liars, where we start guessing about
what these breadcrumbs might mean. Last week I played some
clips for you of the police interrogation video recorded on
the night of the murders, and in that interview, Devon
(11:09):
Arthur's very quickly settled into a story that positioned him
as some kind of hero. He knew it was wrong
to kill, but he had to do it. It was the
only way to save thousands of innocent lives. And I
told you that. I think he was lying, but it's
a lie built around the truth. Devon shot his friends
(11:35):
because they made fun of him. He'd converted to Islam
a year earlier, and the neo Nazi community did not
take it well. He was pushed out of leadership in
Adam Woffin, a group he'd helped found. He was banned
from Iron March, the online Nazi message board where he'd
found friendship and a sense of belonging, but he stayed
(11:58):
involved with Adam Woffin, and he's stayed best friends with
Brandon Russell, the group's leader. He lived with Brandon. He
traveled with Brandon when he drove cross country to visit
Adam Woffin cells or to buy and sell weapons for
use by the group, And on the day of the murders,
(12:18):
he was chatting online all day with other members of
Adam Woffin. He was very much still involved, despite his
claims after the fact. But as he's sitting there in
this interrogation room, I think a few things are happening. Psychologically,
he's trying to find a way to rationalize his actions.
(12:41):
He needs to find a way to justify what he's done,
and he also realizes that he's made himself a very
nasty enemy. Killing two members of the Nazi terror cell
makes him a target of the Nazi terror cell. It
makes his family a potential target, and he knows what
(13:03):
kind of people he's just crossed, and he doesn't want
to go to jail, so he lands on a story
that potentially solves all three problems. If he tells the
cops everything, they'll take down Adam Woffen. Then he's safe
from retribution and he's a hero. He can convince himself
(13:28):
that he isn't a monster who shot his friends in
the head over a disagreement, and maybe he'll even get
a good deal in exchange for all this information and
won't have to go to prison. So I do think
he's lying about this being his actual motivation for the murders.
He wasn't trying to stop a terrorist attack. But the
(13:49):
lie came so easily because regardless of his intentions, when
he pulled that trigger, he may have actually ended up
stopping a terrorist attack. The things he told that detective
weren't made up. As he's sitting in that room rattling
off a list of explosive materials that he knows Brandon
(14:11):
kept in the apartment, the bomb squad is at the
crime scene and they're inventorying those exact items. And if
that part was true, maybe other parts of his story
were too. When I first saw where Brandon Russell was arrested,
(14:31):
I wasn't sure what to make of it. He's from
the Bahamas, so maybe he was going home. He has
Behamian citizenship, most of his family lives there. Maybe that's
where he was going and he just wanted to avoid
the airport. Admittedly, geography is not my strong suit, so
I thought it might make sense that you would take
(14:53):
a boat from the Keys to the Bahamas. And you
can sure, but it looks like typically you take a
ferry from Fort Lauderdale, not the Florida Keys. And then
you have to ask yourself if he was there because
he was trying to get home to the Bahamas. Why
(15:14):
had he picked up a friend first, Why had they
paid cash for two new rifles, and why hadn't he
contacted anyone to let them know where he was going.
He wasn't going home, And the cops found him as
quickly as they did because they knew exactly where to
look for him, because Devin told them.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
He's planning on building mortar and firing it into a
There was a nuclear plant off the Cosa of Florida,
and it's off the COASA Miami and it's used to
power that entire city in Fort Lauderdale and that kind
of thing, and they're planning on firing that mortar of
nuclear materials in it at that plant into the coolank
things that are in the water.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
The FBI alerted authorities in Monroe County, Florida, to be
on the lookout for Brandon Russell's vehicle. Deputy Torres didn't
find him in that Burger King parking lot by accident.
She was out looking for him. We had his picture.
We were told that he could possibly be.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
Going up near Turkey Point for some type of terrorist act.
That's all we knew.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
Turkey Point is the name of a nuclear power plant
when Brendan Russell was handcuffed outside that Burger King in
Key Largo. He wasn't alone. Documents filed in federal court
don't name his friend, but police reports from this initial
encounter do. He was traveling with another Adam Waffin member
(16:51):
named William Chantra. When Brendon left Tampa on Saturday morning,
he didn't drive to his dad's house in Palm b Instead,
he drove forty five minutes south to Bradenton, Florida, and
he knocked on his friend's front door. He'd been up
all night. He's still wearing his military uniform. Remember, he
(17:15):
discovered the bodies in his apartment when he got home
from work on Friday evening, and work in this case
was National Guard drill. He hasn't slept at all. He
doesn't even have his cell phone. But he drives to
Bradenton and he gets William Chantra out of bed and
he tells him what happened. You can't ever really say
(17:38):
what you would do in someone else's shoes in a
situation you've never found yourself in. But I can use
my imagination, and I think I would probably be pretty
overwhelmed at first. If I'm William Chantra. You know, your
friend is standing there on your front porch, exhausted and traumatized,
and he's telling you that these other two guys, both
(18:00):
friends of yours, are dead and he can't go home
because their dead bodies are in his apartment. I think
my next move would probably be to say, I don't know,
you know, hey, man, come inside, let me get you
some clean clothes, something to eat, maybe some tea. You know,
probably offer to let him stay on the couch for
(18:22):
a few days until he can figure something out. Something
like that, something that involved everyone going inside and sitting
on the couch. Like I said, that's not a situation
I've ever been in, So I don't know exactly what
I would do, but I can tell you with one
hundred percent, ironclad certainty what I would not do, and
(18:46):
that's quit my job, withdraw the entire balance of my
savings account, and get into that man's car heading out
of town. That just doesn't make any sense at all
to me, but that's exactly what William Chantra did.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
He had three.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
Thousand dollars in cash, and on their way out of town,
they stopped at the Chick fil A where he worked
to let them know he wouldn't be back, and then
they hit the road. There's not a lot of specificity
in the timeline, so I don't know what route they took.
But later that day they stopped at a bass pro
shop near Fort Lauderdale, and they spent most of Chantra's
(19:24):
cash on guns and ammunition. After a night in a hotel,
they headed south again toward the Florida Keys. After his arrest,
Brandon wasn't in the mood to talk anymore. He admitted
that there were guns and ammunition in the car, but
when he was asked about Adam Woffin, he stopped talking. Chantra,
(19:48):
on the other hand, he was happy to chat. He
wasn't under arrest, and as far as I can tell,
he's never been charged with anything, and he had no
problem telling the officers about Adam Woffin. He was a member,
of course, and he'd met Brandon on Iron March, that
neo Nazi online forum. In this conversation with FBI agents,
(20:11):
he describes himself as a fascist, a national socialist, and
a neo Nazi. Believes he shares with his best friend
Brandon Russell. Sometimes they would go shooting together and they'd
recently been discussing the possibility of him moving to Tampa
into the condo with Brandon, Jeremy, Andrew, and Devin. They
(20:34):
were all friends and they were all members of Adam Woffin.
He helpfully explained that sure, most members of Adam Woffin
use iron March, but Adam Woffin is actually much more
exclusive than that. Not anybody can just join. In fact,
Brandon screen's potential members to ensure that they share the
(20:54):
group's ideology and aren't quote complete idiots, which is an
incredible statement, really, considering this is behavior that you might
expect from me, a complete idiot. That thing I said
a minute ago about how he quit his job because
he didn't know if he was ever coming home again.
(21:17):
We only know he felt that way because he said
it to an FBI agent. And for the second time
that weekend, the FBI was sitting across the table from
Brandon Russell. This time, though he was in custody, it
(21:49):
took a little bit of time to get through the
process of transferring him from one district to another. He
was arrested in South Florida, but his case was in
a court further north. Back home in Tampa, in the
Middle District of Florida. It was June eighth. By the
time the U. S. Marshals transported him from Miami to
Tampa to have his first real hearing. He'd been in
(22:11):
custody for more than two weeks already, and his attorney
asked that he'd be released on bond. His grandmother owned
a home in Orlando that she was willing to offer
us collateral, and both his mother and grandmother said they'd
watch over him to ensure he complied with any release conditions.
He had no criminal history, he was a member of
the National Guard, his father is a police officer, and
(22:35):
his attorney said, there's just no evidence that he's a
flight risk or a danger to the community, and the
judge agreed. The judge agreed that there was nothing going
on here that convinced him that this defendant should be
held in detention, and he granted the motion for bond.
(22:56):
But before he could sign the final order releasing Russell,
the government filed an urgent motion for a stay. They said, look,
just give us seventy two hours to write a more
detailed explanation. Let's brief this thing a little more thoroughly
before we do anything rash because this case never went
to trial. This frantic back and forth about whether or
(23:19):
not he would be released on bond is actually the
most detailed set of documents in the entire case. It
sounds like the government was maybe phoning it in at
that first attention hearing. They sketched out the details, but
they didn't offer a lot of evidence to demonstrate what
they were talking about. So when the judge initially granted
(23:43):
that motion for bond, he's saying things like, oh, the
government believes that the defendant is a purported leader of
a neo Nazi group. The government asserts that the materials
could be used to make a bomb. The government suggests
that the defendant is active on social media sites, but
doesn't proffer any particulars. It doesn't sound like they did
(24:05):
a great job presenting any evidence at all here. It
sounds like they figured the judge would hear the keywords
Nazi and bomb and not need to hear much more
than that. The judge granted them that three day pause
on the release order, and they returned to court later
(24:25):
that week for another hearing on the issue of bond,
and this time the prosecution brought the evidence The court
needed to see those materials found in the garage weren't
just some odds and ends that could be reasonably explained
away as model rocket supplies. There was a cooler full
of homemade hexamethylene, triperoxide diamine, a highly volatile explosive compound
(24:50):
with no safe or practical use. There were jars of
nitromethane and potassium chlorate, a coffee grinder full of some
unknown white powder. There were bags of potassium chloride, potassium nitrate,
iron oxide, and hexamine. He had several pounds of ammonium nitrate,
(25:11):
much of which was in bags still inside a box
addressed to him by name, and there littered amongst these
bomb making materials there were shell casings that he'd fitted
with fuses, a homemade setup that can be used to
detonate a bomb. In his bedroom, he had flyers for
his neo Nazi group on his dresser. There was a
(25:34):
framed photograph of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy mcveay. In his closet,
there were piles of military gear and cases of ammunition.
In the bedroom where his roommates were found dead, there
was a duffel bag full of homemade fuses. And handwritten
instructions for making a bomb. The prosecution also produced pages
(25:58):
of screenshots of posts that Brandon Russell had made on
Iron March, showing that he was actively recruiting for a
group that, in his own words, he calls fanatical and militant.
And this motion to revoke bond is the document where
we find that anecdote about his friend telling the FBI
agent that when he left home with Brandon he didn't
(26:21):
know if he would ever be back. After reviewing this evidence,
the judge changed its mind. He wrote, upon further consideration,
I am obliged to conclude that defendant's actions in response
to the discovery of the explosive materials and ongoing investigation,
(26:42):
past doubts on suggestions of defendant's innocent intentions. In his
order revoking Russell's bond, the judge gives voice to the
problem I was talking about at the top of the episode.
It's hard to know what's true. A lot of the
connective tissue here is based on claims made by Devon
(27:02):
Arthur's immediately after he was arrested for murder. The judge
watched the same video I did, and he came to
some of the same conclusions. A lot of what Devon
was saying looks like quote attempts by mister Arthur's to
rationalize or justify his unconscionable killing of two people. But
(27:25):
the judge also said there's no denying that some of
what Devon said is definitely true, writing quote Arthur's statements
of potential harm appear consistent with what has been revealed
so far about the defendant and the lifestyle he engaged.
In consistent with other circumstances, defendant is placed at the
head of a small neo Nazi group with a militant bent,
(27:48):
armed for violent confrontation and capable of executing on plans
to harm others or destroy property.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
The judge was.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
A little concerned that the government had yet to preduce
use any proof corroborating Devon's claims that there were internal
Adam Woffin chats containing explicit discussion of some kind of plot,
but he was satisfied at least that Brandon Russell should
remain in custody for the time being, and that was it.
Two months later, Brandon Russell changed his plea to guilty,
(28:20):
just days before he was scheduled to go to trial.
The government never produced any additional evidence because they didn't
have to. They never had to convince a jury that
Brandon Russell was going to do anything in particular with
those explosives. They never had to explain how they knew
they'd find him near that nuclear power plant, or why
(28:41):
he had a car full of guns and ammunition when
they found him. A court never settled the question of
whether or not Devon Arthur's was telling the truth about
Brandon Russell's intentions. Brandon Russell pleaded guilty on the explosive
charges in September of twenty seventeen. A few months later,
(29:02):
in December, a seventeen year old Adam Woffin member in
Virginia shot and killed his ex girlfriend's parents. On January ninth,
twenty eighteen, Brandon Russell was sentenced to five years in prison.
One day later, on January tenth, police in California found
(29:22):
the body of Blaize Bernstein in a shallow grave. He'd
been murdered a week earlier by a member of Adam Woffin.
In a matter of months, three young men connected to
the group had killed and one of those killers is
in jail, insisting the group was planning terrorist attacks, but
(29:45):
the man he said was behind these plots was only
charged with possessing and improperly storing explosive materials. Brendon Russell's
criminal case was resolved in a matter of months, and
he was already serving his sentence before there was much
movement in the case against Devon Arthur's. That case dragged
(30:07):
on for years. The plea agreement was finally filed just
days before the sixth anniversary of the murders. Throughout this process,
though Devon Arthur's never denied committing the murders, but there
was a problem. He'd always been a bit of an
(30:29):
odd kid when he was in middle school. His parents
agreed in mediation during their divorce that he should be
evaluated by a specialist, but it doesn't look like either
of his parents ever followed through on that. On the
night of the murders, he told the detective that he
thought he probably needed to go to a hospital to
get some kind of treatment, and he wished he'd listen
(30:50):
sooner when people told him he needed help. He was
diagnosed with ADHD as a child, but there were no
other mental health diagnoses on his record prior to the murders.
Based on reports written by the doctors who evaluated him
in jail. He rapidly deteriorated after his arrest, but there
does appear to have been some pre existing mental illness
(31:13):
going on. In the interrogation video, he's a little disjointed,
his speech is a little pressured, but he's lucid for
the most part, and his body language is pretty relaxed.
A doctor who evaluated him in twenty twenty wrote that
Devon had developed a habit of pressing his fists into
(31:34):
his neck when he felt anxious. He would apply pressure
to his throat until he felt dizzy, sometimes even losing consciousness.
A TV news camera in the courtroom recorded him doing
it during at least one hearing, and the doctor said
the behavior was compulsive. He couldn't stop doing it, even
when asked by the doctor to try. He also claimed
(31:54):
to be experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations, and said that
he would lie awake at night and communicate with the dead,
even on heavy doses of antipsychotics and sedatives. He exhibited
the rapid, tangential speech of someone who's experiencing mania for
the first few years after his arrest. Most of the
(32:16):
doctors who met with him, agreed he was experiencing severe
mental illness, and for several years the only movement on
his case was related to these competency evaluations. He was
moved back and forth between jail and a state mental
hospital a few times, and doctor after doctor met with
him and reported back to the court that he wasn't
(32:38):
competent to stand trial. Now, there's a difference here between
incompetent to stand trial and insane. Insane is not a
nice word, but it is a word with a particular meaning.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
In a courtroom.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
You're not going to go to a doctor and get
diagnosed insane. That's not really something we say anymore. But
in a courtroom, someone who is insane is not legally
responsible for their actions. That's something that you can argue
at trial. Being legally insane is not the same thing
as being mentally ill. You can be profoundly mentally ill
(33:18):
and still legally responsible for a crime. Someone who successfully
presents an insanity defense has to prove that at the
time of the offense they lacked the ability to understand
that what they were doing was wrong. They couldn't form
criminal intent because they just were not in the same
reality as the.
Speaker 1 (33:39):
Rest of us.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
And so at this stage of the case, before it
goes to trial, we're not talking about insanity. Insanity is
a trial issue, but before there can be a trial,
he has to have the mental capacity to understand a trial,
so they have to get him back to competycy. These
doctors aren't making any kind of finding about whether or
(34:04):
not he was insane at the time of the murders.
They're just saying that right now today he lacks the
ability to communicate effectively with his lawyer, to participate in
his own defense. He doesn't know what's going on in
the courtroom right now. But after a few years of treatment,
the doctors finally agree that he's competent to proceed and
(34:27):
they set the case for trial. In May of twenty
twenty three, the morning the trial was supposed to begin,
he signed a plea agreement. The state agreed to drop
the murder charges down from first degree to second degree murder,
and he agreed to plead guilty to all the charges.
(34:48):
Earlier this year, a reporter from Court TV interviewed Devon
in prison, and in this interview in twenty twenty five,
his story isn't any clearer than it was on the
night of the murders. He's stable now, he says, he
doesn't have hallucinations anymore, and he has his anger under control,
(35:09):
and he sees a psychiatrist in prison once a month,
and he still believes that he did what he had
to do. The reporter plays a clip for him of
his own statements the night of the murder, the part
where he says he did it to prevent the deaths
of even more people, and he asks him, do you
still stand by that claim, and Devin says that he does,
(35:33):
and he gets visibly angry with the reporter when he's
pressed on the issue of the way he's justifying these murders.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
The way you describe it, you're basically turning a brutal
murder into an act of heroism by saying that, by
saying that you were acting to save civilian lives from
future terrorist attacks. Well, I certainly was.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
That's a way of adizing yourself, David.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
I can see where that come from in that context.
Speaker 3 (36:01):
And the thing is, I don't have any intent to
really hurt innocent people.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
He goes as far as to say that he has
sacrificed forty five years of his own life to stop
Adam Woffin. I won't rehash the thoughts I had about
those claims in the last episode. I don't believe him,
I said that, but I spent most of this week
thinking about it, turning it over in my head, and
(36:33):
reading and rereading the documents that I have, And I
found two strange statements buried in the police reports from
that night. The officer who drove him from the Strip
Mall to the apartment complex so he could show her
where the bodies were wrote that during that very brief trip,
I mean it's right across the street, He asks her
(36:55):
if the media would want to interview him, and as
their pull into the parking lot in front of the condo,
he said, quote, it's just a shame I didn't get
to write my manifesto before this. Another report, written by
a different officer who later drove Devon from the crime
scene to the police station, says that Devon was talking
(37:18):
pretty much NonStop. From the portion of the report detailing
Devon's statements immediately after being placed in a holding cell,
the officer wrote, quote, Arthur's expressed how relieved he felt
because he fulfilled his mission and he can now have
peace Arthur's made several statements throughout that he was planning
to do something in the next week or so anyway,
(37:41):
and he was trying to pick a target. So which
is it? Which is it? Was he insane? Did he
snap because he was being bullied? Was he heroically preventing
a terrorist attack? Was this a premeditated ideological act for
what ideology exactly? The only person who really knows is Devin,
(38:08):
and he's still telling a version of this story that
doesn't add up. After last week's episode, I saw a
listener comment online that they'd encountered Devin Arthur's many years
ago while playing Minecraft. Remember Devin converted to Islam in
twenty sixteen when several members of his Minecraft server took
(38:31):
a joke a little too far and ended up meming
themselves into a bastardized version of Islam. I'm not a gamer.
I don't know anything about Minecraft, so I just took
this as written and didn't try to look for more
information about that. That's just a culture I don't understand.
(38:53):
But this listener's message got me thinking. A lot of
people Devin was gaming with back then remember him. This
listener was not the only person to have ever posted
online that they knew Devin from Minecraft. There are posts
where people are processing their shock that someone they'd known
(39:13):
from an online game turned out to be a murderer.
So I started looking for posts made in the immediate aftermath,
and I found some. First of all, it turns out
(39:41):
Minecraft is a lot more complicated than I thought. Don't
laugh at me. I don't play games, but I thought
it was just literally like Legos on the computer. I
thought it was computer legos. I don't know. I didn't
know there was a whole culture with this encyclopedias where
of lore. Devin was active on a Minecraft server called Sivcraft,
(40:05):
where users play a modified version of the game that
includes elements of the game civilization. So in Sivcraft, users
banded together as nations and they do diplomacy. They go
to war against other nations in the game. I don't know.
Don't email me about Minecraft. I'm doing my best. I
read a lot of stuff about games that I didn't understand.
(40:28):
He eventually joined a server called Intcraft, which has similar
gameplay dynamics to Sivcraft, but it was started by people
who met on four Chan, and it turns out Devin
used the same username for years, and his behavior was
weird enough that a lot of people who played sivcraft
(40:50):
remember him. I found four Chan posts going as far
back as twenty thirteen that appeared to be Devin talking
about Minecraft. By October of twenty fourteen, the same month
his dad kicked him out of the house for ordering
a copy of minecomf off Amazon, he's posting on four
Chan trying to recruit more users to his Minecraft server,
(41:13):
where he's playing as a Nazi. He posted an image
containing a swastika in what appears to be a historical
photograph of a mass grave, over which he's written an
antisemitic slogan. Now again, I'm showing my ignorance of Minecraft culture,
I guess. But both int and Sivcraft have kept extensive
(41:38):
histories of their games. There are blogs and wikis and subreddits.
And as I was reading through one of the Intcraft wikis,
because there is more than one, I kept seeing the
name of a particular user. Devin was second in command
(41:58):
of a group of players that call themselves Striker Gang,
named after their leader, a man playing under the username
Striker one two three abc. Interesting maybe, but not relevant.
I'm sure Devin played with a lot of people online,
but just days after the murders, someone posted a link
(42:19):
to a news story about Devin on a subreddit for
a particular Minecraft server. Several reddit users replied, recalling strange
run ins they'd had with him in the game. He'd
been pretty well known for a couple of years already
for being a Nazi. People posted things like I remember
him being a little shit and sieve, but I didn't
(42:41):
realize he'd do anything irl, and I assumed those short
political rants were to come off as edgy. Yes, I
couldn't believe someone could on ironically be like that. But
one user posted something very odd. The account's been deleted,
(43:02):
but the posts remain. He killed two of my friends
and he planned on killing me. This is a very
surreal experience. In a follow up post, the same deleted
account confirms that he was friends with the victims in
real life, not on Minecraft off line. Another user replying
(43:30):
to that post wrote, hope you're doing all right despite
all this. Striker Striker Striker from Minecraft was in Adam
Woffen two. So I looked for Striker in the Iron
March leagues and wouldn't you know it, he's there too.
(43:52):
In twenty sixteen, Striker posted on Iron March that he
was one of three Adam Woffen members in South Florida.
He signed up with his real email address from a
computer with an IP address in South Florida. Now I
have to hand it to him, this man has done
an incredible job wiping himself off the face of the Internet.
(44:17):
But he did leave just enough bread crumbs that appeared
to connect that Minecraft user to the Iron March poster
to a thirty seven year old middle school teacher in
South Florida. That would have made him twenty eight back
in twenty sixteen, which is actually quite old for an
(44:37):
Adam Waffen member. Members tended to be in their teens
or early twenties, maybe because that's the demographic that was
most online in the dark corners where the group recruited, right,
they're more impressionable, less likely to make good decisions, less
likely to have their lives figured out. All that's true,
(44:58):
but it was also very intentional. Brandon Russell was explicit
about this. He preferred to recruit very young members, literal children,
because a child can't be an FBI agent. If you
only recruit teenagers, you don't have to worry that any
of them are an undercover cop. But maybe Striker made
(45:22):
the cut because there was just no way an undercover
cop could spend that much time pretending to lead isis
on Minecraft. But back to that Reddit post, why did
Striker think Devvin planned to kill him too? Another mysterious
Reddit post from a deleted account claims that the leader
(45:45):
of the group talked to some people who knew Devon
on Minecraft and they allegedly told him that the murders
were premeditated. The account is deleted and the post is
not very clear where this information came from, but someone
is claiming that Devin had been talking online about a
plan to kill not only Andrew Jeremy, but several other
(46:09):
members of the group too. I guess we'll never really know.
As far as the hard facts go. Devin pleaded guilty
to murder. His story still shifts with every retelling. He
shot them because he was mentally ill, he shot them
because they were bullies, he shot them because he had
to prevent a terrorist attack. But in one tiny moment,
(46:34):
before those bodies were even cold, he told a police
officer that he'd been planning to carry out an attack
that week, and he told another officer that he wished
he'd found time to write his manifesto first. Maybe there
is no truth here. There is no actual version of
the truth, because what happened isn't something that can be
(46:55):
made sense of. His story changes because even he doesn't
know why he did what he did. In Minecraft, he
role played sometimes as Isis, sometimes as a national socialist
on a mission to kill communists. Sometimes he was a
pony from the My Little Pony animated series. His online
(47:18):
fantasy bled into real life. It wasn't enough to pretend
to be an Isis or pretend to be a Nazi
in Minecraft. He founded a real life Nazi group, and
then he got pushed out of leadership of his Nazi
group for swearing allegiance to Isis. When it came to
his real world ideology, he believed all sorts of contradictory things.
(47:42):
Maybe he really does believe entirely contradictory versions of his
own reality too. In the moment that he became a murderer,
maybe he believed all of it or none of it,
but he'd been thoroughly steeped in the violent rhetoric of
the Nazi group he helped create. Even if he does
(48:04):
believe that he was only trying to stop the group's violence.
That culture of violence is the reason that gun was
in his hands in the first place. In the end, though,
I guess he did kind of prevent something. Brandon Russell's
bomb making workshop was discovered. He was arrested before he
(48:28):
got a chance to do whatever he may or may
not have been planning to do in South Florida at
that nuclear power plant. But Brandon Russell's commitment to kicking
off the race war only intensified during his years in prison,
and within months of his release, he was back online
chatting with impressionable young people about how to blow up
(48:50):
electrical transformers. Brandon Russell was recently sentenced to twenty years
in prison. Devon Arthur's is serving his forty five year
sentence in Florida. He spends a lot of his time
these days in the prison law library. As recently as
last month, he was filing handwritten motions for post conviction relief,
(49:11):
claiming his attorneys failed him by not presenting more mitigating
evidence at sentencing. For what it's worth, I don't think
any version of the truth would have helped him there.
Florida law didn't really give the judge any discretion to
have handed down a lighter sentence even if mitigation evidence
had been presented. But I'll keep an eye on the
(49:31):
docket just to see if he gets that evidentiary hearing
he's been asking for. Maybe this time he'll have a
new version of the truth. Weirdling the Guys see production
(49:56):
of Coolsnow Media and iHeartRadio has researched, written, recorded by
me Molly Coner. Our executive producers are Sophie Lecturement Van
Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented
Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickard.
You can email me at Riddleyguys Podcast at gmail dot com.
I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the
(50:19):
show with other listeners on the Riddle the Guys subreddit.
Just please don't post anything that's going to make you
one of my weird little guys.
Col Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
On Sunday, May twenty first, twenty seventeen, Monroe County Sheriff's
Deputy Diana Torres pulled into the parking lot outside of
a Burger King on Route One. There were plenty of
empty parking spots, but she wasn't there for lunch. She
positioned her patrol car directly behind a blue suv, blocking
(00:29):
it in, and got out of her car. As she
approached the restaurant, the door opened and a man walked out.
Before he had a chance to react, she grabbed him
by the wrist and started handcuffing him. For all his
tough talk online, Brandon Russell went quietly. He would later
(00:53):
say that he just needed to get out of town
to clear his head after what he'd experienced on Friday night.
He'd come home from work to find two of his
roommates dead in their bedroom, murdered by a young man
he'd considered his best friend. But when officers searched the car,
they didn't find the kind of luggage you'd expect someone
to have for a weekend trip to the Florida Keys.
(01:16):
There wasn't so much as a toothbrush in the vehicle.
Instead of t shirts and swim trunks. They found rifles
and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, some of it already
loaded into four high capacity magazines. Three hundred miles away
in a jail cell in Tampa, a murderer was begging
(01:38):
for a meeting with the FBI. He claimed he knew
exactly why his roommate was driving around South Florida with
a car full of guns. I'm Molly Conger in this.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
It's weird. The guys.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
When we left off last week, two men were in
custody and two men were dead. The actual facts of
the story are fairly straightforward, and it would make for
a pretty short episode. Devon Arthur's eventually pleaded guilty to
two counts of second degree murder for the murderers of
Andrew Anoschach and Jeremy Hemmelman, as well as three counts
(02:32):
of kidnapping for the three people he held at gunpoint
at the Strip Mall. Brand and Russell pleaded guilty to
federal charges of possessing an unregistered destructive device and improper
storage of explosive materials. Devon was sentenced to forty five
years in a Florida state prison, and Brandon was released
in twenty twenty one, after serving most of a five
(02:55):
year sentence. The narrative tension in this story. It's not
in what happened, but why and what it might mean.
Hundreds of pages of police reports, years of filings in
their respective criminal cases, scores of news reports, at documentary
(03:16):
TV interviews, There's no shortage of material laying out the facts.
But it all leaves me with more questions than answers.
I've spent some time on the show ruminating on one
of these big questions before. It's one probably better left
to a philosopher than a podcaster. But it's about the
(03:38):
nature of truth. What does it even mean to say
that something is true? In this story? We have a
set of truths. Sure, we know that these men are
guilty of the crimes they committed. We know it because
a court said, so, Devin killed two people, Brandon had
(04:00):
a garage full of explosive materials.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
That's true.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
But because neither of them took their case to trial,
that's all we can really legally speaking say we know
for certain. Maybe at trial there would have been a
more aggressive exploration of Devon's claims that he'd killed his
roommates to prevent the terrorist attack they were planning. Maybe
if Brandon had gone to trial, the government would have
(04:28):
had to prove to a jury what he was going
to do with those explosives, but they didn't, so we
don't know, and we're left trying to construct our own
version of what might be true. Aside from the concrete facts,
(04:50):
the physical evidence, the bullet casings, the autopsy reports, the
crime scene photographs, the rest of the pieces that we
have in this quest to assemble some version of the
truth are probably lies. So let's go back to where
we were last week, May nineteenth, twenty seventeen. The murders
(05:11):
happened on a Friday evening. Tampa police responding to nine
one one calls about an armed man at a strip
mall found eighteen year old Devon Arthur's holding three people
hostage a smoke shop. As he was being handcuffed, he
told the officers that his roommates were dead in his
apartment across the street and he'd be happy to show
(05:32):
them which unit it was if they would.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
Drive him there.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
As the police pulled up out front, another man walked
out the front door of the apartment and collapsed on
the ground in front of them sobbing hysterically. Brandon Russell
had arrived home from work minutes after the murders and
discovered the dead bodies of Andrew Anoshack and Jeremy Himmelman. Inside,
officers found not just the bodies of Devon's murder victims,
(05:59):
but Brandon's bomb making workshop. The crime scene was a
complicated one. When officers first arrived on the scene Friday evening,
they saw the bodies, of course, you couldn't miss them,
but they immediately noticed some other very concerning things lying
(06:21):
around the apartment. Geiger counters an unusually large number of batteries,
electric matches, piles of military gear, gas masks, bookshelves full
of white supremacist literature, a Nazi flag tacked to the wall,
(06:43):
a framed photograph of Timothy McVeigh, a backpack in the
living room with some kind of device inside that looked
like a bomb. Those first responding officers saw all of this,
and they got out of there in a hurry. There
was nothing they could do for the two men lying
dead in the bedroom. That much was very obvious, based
(07:04):
on the state of the bodies, so they secured the perimeter,
evacuated the neighboring apartments and waited for the experts to arrive.
All night. As Brandon and Devon sat waiting at the
police station, officers worked on the crime scene. Members of
the Tampa Police Department's Explosive Ordnance Disposal Team entered first
(07:29):
to try to figure out how volatile the situation was.
The only reports I have access to were written by
Tampa police officers, so I can only see what they
said about their interactions with agents from the FBI and ATF,
but based on the crime scene logs. Bomb technicians from
the FBI arrived a few hours later, and agents from
(07:49):
the ATF arrived after midnight. It was the middle of
the night by the time Devon and Brandon were interviewed
by a homicide detective in the early morning hours of
May twentieth. Brandon Russell asked for a lawyer. He'd been
talking for over an hour already, but when the FBI
(08:10):
agent in the room pressed him a little too hard
about what they might find if they searched his computer,
he didn't want to talk anymore. He wasn't under arrest,
He was there voluntarily. He wasn't being detained. They weren't
technically investigating him at all. He had just happened to
(08:30):
come home from work and stumble into a crime scene,
so if he didn't want to talk anymore, he was
free to go. Around six am, a Tampa police officer
drove him home. The explosives experts had finished their sweep
of the residents and signed off on it being safe
to enter, so detectives were starting to arrive to execute
(08:52):
search warrants. Brandon waited outside in the parking lot while
a detective entered the condo to find his car keys,
and then he was on his way. His apartment was
a crime scene and his mother lived in the Bahamas,
so he planned to drive to Palm Beach to stay
with his dad, or at least that's what he told
(09:14):
the FBI. There's a lot of uninteresting details here about
the memorandum of understanding between the FBI and the ATF,
but they share primary jurisdiction when investigating possible federal crimes
involving explosives, and both agencies have explosives experts. But ultimately,
the decision as to whether the materials found in the
(09:35):
garage constituted a violation of federal law was up to
the ATF. And by the time the ATF briefed the
FBI on what they found, Brandon Russell was gone. The
federal criminal complaint was signed by a judge by midday
on Saturday, just a few hours after Brandon Russell drove off.
(10:00):
No problem though, right he told them where he was going,
and if he drove straight there, he should have already
arrived at his dad's house in Palm Beach. FBI agents
called Brandon's dad, a Palm Beach County Sheriff's deputy. But
not only was Brandon not there, his dad hadn't even
(10:20):
heard from him and had no idea where he might be.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
So how did.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
They find him? He could have gone anywhere. I couldn't
find anything in the court filings that indicated that they
had tried to ping his phone or that they got
a warrant for his banking information. They don't seem to
have tracked him down using his digital footprint. But they
found him pretty damn quick, and he was arrested the
(10:48):
very next day. Here's where we waded into versions of
the truth told by liars, where we start guessing about
what these breadcrumbs might mean. Last week I played some
clips for you of the police interrogation video recorded on
the night of the murders, and in that interview, Devon
(11:09):
Arthur's very quickly settled into a story that positioned him
as some kind of hero. He knew it was wrong
to kill, but he had to do it. It was the
only way to save thousands of innocent lives. And I
told you that. I think he was lying, but it's
a lie built around the truth. Devon shot his friends
(11:35):
because they made fun of him. He'd converted to Islam
a year earlier, and the neo Nazi community did not
take it well. He was pushed out of leadership in
Adam Woffin, a group he'd helped found. He was banned
from Iron March, the online Nazi message board where he'd
found friendship and a sense of belonging, but he stayed
(11:58):
involved with Adam Woffin, and he's stayed best friends with
Brandon Russell, the group's leader. He lived with Brandon. He
traveled with Brandon when he drove cross country to visit
Adam Woffin cells or to buy and sell weapons for
use by the group, And on the day of the murders,
(12:18):
he was chatting online all day with other members of
Adam Woffin. He was very much still involved, despite his
claims after the fact. But as he's sitting there in
this interrogation room, I think a few things are happening. Psychologically,
he's trying to find a way to rationalize his actions.
(12:41):
He needs to find a way to justify what he's done,
and he also realizes that he's made himself a very
nasty enemy. Killing two members of the Nazi terror cell
makes him a target of the Nazi terror cell. It
makes his family a potential target, and he knows what
(13:03):
kind of people he's just crossed, and he doesn't want
to go to jail, so he lands on a story
that potentially solves all three problems. If he tells the
cops everything, they'll take down Adam Woffen. Then he's safe
from retribution and he's a hero. He can convince himself
(13:28):
that he isn't a monster who shot his friends in
the head over a disagreement, and maybe he'll even get
a good deal in exchange for all this information and
won't have to go to prison. So I do think
he's lying about this being his actual motivation for the murders.
He wasn't trying to stop a terrorist attack. But the
(13:49):
lie came so easily because regardless of his intentions, when
he pulled that trigger, he may have actually ended up
stopping a terrorist attack. The things he told that detective
weren't made up. As he's sitting in that room rattling
off a list of explosive materials that he knows Brandon
(14:11):
kept in the apartment, the bomb squad is at the
crime scene and they're inventorying those exact items. And if
that part was true, maybe other parts of his story
were too. When I first saw where Brandon Russell was arrested,
(14:31):
I wasn't sure what to make of it. He's from
the Bahamas, so maybe he was going home. He has
Behamian citizenship, most of his family lives there. Maybe that's
where he was going and he just wanted to avoid
the airport. Admittedly, geography is not my strong suit, so
I thought it might make sense that you would take
(14:53):
a boat from the Keys to the Bahamas. And you
can sure, but it looks like typically you take a
ferry from Fort Lauderdale, not the Florida Keys. And then
you have to ask yourself if he was there because
he was trying to get home to the Bahamas. Why
(15:14):
had he picked up a friend first, Why had they
paid cash for two new rifles, and why hadn't he
contacted anyone to let them know where he was going.
He wasn't going home, And the cops found him as
quickly as they did because they knew exactly where to
look for him, because Devin told them.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
He's planning on building mortar and firing it into a
There was a nuclear plant off the Cosa of Florida,
and it's off the COASA Miami and it's used to
power that entire city in Fort Lauderdale and that kind
of thing, and they're planning on firing that mortar of
nuclear materials in it at that plant into the coolank
things that are in the water.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
The FBI alerted authorities in Monroe County, Florida, to be
on the lookout for Brandon Russell's vehicle. Deputy Torres didn't
find him in that Burger King parking lot by accident.
She was out looking for him. We had his picture.
We were told that he could possibly be.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
Going up near Turkey Point for some type of terrorist act.
That's all we knew.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
Turkey Point is the name of a nuclear power plant
when Brendan Russell was handcuffed outside that Burger King in
Key Largo. He wasn't alone. Documents filed in federal court
don't name his friend, but police reports from this initial
encounter do. He was traveling with another Adam Waffin member
(16:51):
named William Chantra. When Brendon left Tampa on Saturday morning,
he didn't drive to his dad's house in Palm b Instead,
he drove forty five minutes south to Bradenton, Florida, and
he knocked on his friend's front door. He'd been up
all night. He's still wearing his military uniform. Remember, he
(17:15):
discovered the bodies in his apartment when he got home
from work on Friday evening, and work in this case
was National Guard drill. He hasn't slept at all. He
doesn't even have his cell phone. But he drives to
Bradenton and he gets William Chantra out of bed and
he tells him what happened. You can't ever really say
(17:38):
what you would do in someone else's shoes in a
situation you've never found yourself in. But I can use
my imagination, and I think I would probably be pretty
overwhelmed at first. If I'm William Chantra. You know, your
friend is standing there on your front porch, exhausted and traumatized,
and he's telling you that these other two guys, both
(18:00):
friends of yours, are dead and he can't go home
because their dead bodies are in his apartment. I think
my next move would probably be to say, I don't know,
you know, hey, man, come inside, let me get you
some clean clothes, something to eat, maybe some tea. You know,
probably offer to let him stay on the couch for
(18:22):
a few days until he can figure something out. Something
like that, something that involved everyone going inside and sitting
on the couch. Like I said, that's not a situation
I've ever been in, So I don't know exactly what
I would do, but I can tell you with one
hundred percent, ironclad certainty what I would not do, and
(18:46):
that's quit my job, withdraw the entire balance of my
savings account, and get into that man's car heading out
of town. That just doesn't make any sense at all
to me, but that's exactly what William Chantra did.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
He had three.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
Thousand dollars in cash, and on their way out of town,
they stopped at the Chick fil A where he worked
to let them know he wouldn't be back, and then
they hit the road. There's not a lot of specificity
in the timeline, so I don't know what route they took.
But later that day they stopped at a bass pro
shop near Fort Lauderdale, and they spent most of Chantra's
(19:24):
cash on guns and ammunition. After a night in a hotel,
they headed south again toward the Florida Keys. After his arrest,
Brandon wasn't in the mood to talk anymore. He admitted
that there were guns and ammunition in the car, but
when he was asked about Adam Woffin, he stopped talking. Chantra,
(19:48):
on the other hand, he was happy to chat. He
wasn't under arrest, and as far as I can tell,
he's never been charged with anything, and he had no
problem telling the officers about Adam Woffin. He was a member,
of course, and he'd met Brandon on Iron March, that
neo Nazi online forum. In this conversation with FBI agents,
(20:11):
he describes himself as a fascist, a national socialist, and
a neo Nazi. Believes he shares with his best friend
Brandon Russell. Sometimes they would go shooting together and they'd
recently been discussing the possibility of him moving to Tampa
into the condo with Brandon, Jeremy, Andrew, and Devin. They
(20:34):
were all friends and they were all members of Adam Woffin.
He helpfully explained that sure, most members of Adam Woffin
use iron March, but Adam Woffin is actually much more
exclusive than that. Not anybody can just join. In fact,
Brandon screen's potential members to ensure that they share the
(20:54):
group's ideology and aren't quote complete idiots, which is an
incredible statement, really, considering this is behavior that you might
expect from me, a complete idiot. That thing I said
a minute ago about how he quit his job because
he didn't know if he was ever coming home again.
(21:17):
We only know he felt that way because he said
it to an FBI agent. And for the second time
that weekend, the FBI was sitting across the table from
Brandon Russell. This time, though he was in custody, it
(21:49):
took a little bit of time to get through the
process of transferring him from one district to another. He
was arrested in South Florida, but his case was in
a court further north. Back home in Tampa, in the
Middle District of Florida. It was June eighth. By the
time the U. S. Marshals transported him from Miami to
Tampa to have his first real hearing. He'd been in
(22:11):
custody for more than two weeks already, and his attorney
asked that he'd be released on bond. His grandmother owned
a home in Orlando that she was willing to offer
us collateral, and both his mother and grandmother said they'd
watch over him to ensure he complied with any release conditions.
He had no criminal history, he was a member of
the National Guard, his father is a police officer, and
(22:35):
his attorney said, there's just no evidence that he's a
flight risk or a danger to the community, and the
judge agreed. The judge agreed that there was nothing going
on here that convinced him that this defendant should be
held in detention, and he granted the motion for bond.
(22:56):
But before he could sign the final order releasing Russell,
the government filed an urgent motion for a stay. They said, look,
just give us seventy two hours to write a more
detailed explanation. Let's brief this thing a little more thoroughly
before we do anything rash because this case never went
to trial. This frantic back and forth about whether or
(23:19):
not he would be released on bond is actually the
most detailed set of documents in the entire case. It
sounds like the government was maybe phoning it in at
that first attention hearing. They sketched out the details, but
they didn't offer a lot of evidence to demonstrate what
they were talking about. So when the judge initially granted
(23:43):
that motion for bond, he's saying things like, oh, the
government believes that the defendant is a purported leader of
a neo Nazi group. The government asserts that the materials
could be used to make a bomb. The government suggests
that the defendant is active on social media sites, but
doesn't proffer any particulars. It doesn't sound like they did
(24:05):
a great job presenting any evidence at all here. It
sounds like they figured the judge would hear the keywords
Nazi and bomb and not need to hear much more
than that. The judge granted them that three day pause
on the release order, and they returned to court later
(24:25):
that week for another hearing on the issue of bond,
and this time the prosecution brought the evidence The court
needed to see those materials found in the garage weren't
just some odds and ends that could be reasonably explained
away as model rocket supplies. There was a cooler full
of homemade hexamethylene, triperoxide diamine, a highly volatile explosive compound
(24:50):
with no safe or practical use. There were jars of
nitromethane and potassium chlorate, a coffee grinder full of some
unknown white powder. There were bags of potassium chloride, potassium nitrate,
iron oxide, and hexamine. He had several pounds of ammonium nitrate,
(25:11):
much of which was in bags still inside a box
addressed to him by name, and there littered amongst these
bomb making materials there were shell casings that he'd fitted
with fuses, a homemade setup that can be used to
detonate a bomb. In his bedroom, he had flyers for
his neo Nazi group on his dresser. There was a
(25:34):
framed photograph of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy mcveay. In his closet,
there were piles of military gear and cases of ammunition.
In the bedroom where his roommates were found dead, there
was a duffel bag full of homemade fuses. And handwritten
instructions for making a bomb. The prosecution also produced pages
(25:58):
of screenshots of posts that Brandon Russell had made on
Iron March, showing that he was actively recruiting for a
group that, in his own words, he calls fanatical and militant.
And this motion to revoke bond is the document where
we find that anecdote about his friend telling the FBI
agent that when he left home with Brandon he didn't
(26:21):
know if he would ever be back. After reviewing this evidence,
the judge changed its mind. He wrote, upon further consideration,
I am obliged to conclude that defendant's actions in response
to the discovery of the explosive materials and ongoing investigation,
(26:42):
past doubts on suggestions of defendant's innocent intentions. In his
order revoking Russell's bond, the judge gives voice to the
problem I was talking about at the top of the episode.
It's hard to know what's true. A lot of the
connective tissue here is based on claims made by Devon
(27:02):
Arthur's immediately after he was arrested for murder. The judge
watched the same video I did, and he came to
some of the same conclusions. A lot of what Devon
was saying looks like quote attempts by mister Arthur's to
rationalize or justify his unconscionable killing of two people. But
(27:25):
the judge also said there's no denying that some of
what Devon said is definitely true, writing quote Arthur's statements
of potential harm appear consistent with what has been revealed
so far about the defendant and the lifestyle he engaged.
In consistent with other circumstances, defendant is placed at the
head of a small neo Nazi group with a militant bent,
(27:48):
armed for violent confrontation and capable of executing on plans
to harm others or destroy property.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
The judge was.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
A little concerned that the government had yet to preduce
use any proof corroborating Devon's claims that there were internal
Adam Woffin chats containing explicit discussion of some kind of plot,
but he was satisfied at least that Brandon Russell should
remain in custody for the time being, and that was it.
Two months later, Brandon Russell changed his plea to guilty,
(28:20):
just days before he was scheduled to go to trial.
The government never produced any additional evidence because they didn't
have to. They never had to convince a jury that
Brandon Russell was going to do anything in particular with
those explosives. They never had to explain how they knew
they'd find him near that nuclear power plant, or why
(28:41):
he had a car full of guns and ammunition when
they found him. A court never settled the question of
whether or not Devon Arthur's was telling the truth about
Brandon Russell's intentions. Brandon Russell pleaded guilty on the explosive
charges in September of twenty seventeen. A few months later,
(29:02):
in December, a seventeen year old Adam Woffin member in
Virginia shot and killed his ex girlfriend's parents. On January ninth,
twenty eighteen, Brandon Russell was sentenced to five years in prison.
One day later, on January tenth, police in California found
(29:22):
the body of Blaize Bernstein in a shallow grave. He'd
been murdered a week earlier by a member of Adam Woffin.
In a matter of months, three young men connected to
the group had killed and one of those killers is
in jail, insisting the group was planning terrorist attacks, but
(29:45):
the man he said was behind these plots was only
charged with possessing and improperly storing explosive materials. Brendon Russell's
criminal case was resolved in a matter of months, and
he was already serving his sentence before there was much
movement in the case against Devon Arthur's. That case dragged
(30:07):
on for years. The plea agreement was finally filed just
days before the sixth anniversary of the murders. Throughout this process,
though Devon Arthur's never denied committing the murders, but there
was a problem. He'd always been a bit of an
(30:29):
odd kid when he was in middle school. His parents
agreed in mediation during their divorce that he should be
evaluated by a specialist, but it doesn't look like either
of his parents ever followed through on that. On the
night of the murders, he told the detective that he
thought he probably needed to go to a hospital to
get some kind of treatment, and he wished he'd listen
(30:50):
sooner when people told him he needed help. He was
diagnosed with ADHD as a child, but there were no
other mental health diagnoses on his record prior to the murders.
Based on reports written by the doctors who evaluated him
in jail. He rapidly deteriorated after his arrest, but there
does appear to have been some pre existing mental illness
(31:13):
going on. In the interrogation video, he's a little disjointed,
his speech is a little pressured, but he's lucid for
the most part, and his body language is pretty relaxed.
A doctor who evaluated him in twenty twenty wrote that
Devon had developed a habit of pressing his fists into
(31:34):
his neck when he felt anxious. He would apply pressure
to his throat until he felt dizzy, sometimes even losing consciousness.
A TV news camera in the courtroom recorded him doing
it during at least one hearing, and the doctor said
the behavior was compulsive. He couldn't stop doing it, even
when asked by the doctor to try. He also claimed
(31:54):
to be experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations, and said that
he would lie awake at night and communicate with the dead,
even on heavy doses of antipsychotics and sedatives. He exhibited
the rapid, tangential speech of someone who's experiencing mania for
the first few years after his arrest. Most of the
(32:16):
doctors who met with him, agreed he was experiencing severe
mental illness, and for several years the only movement on
his case was related to these competency evaluations. He was
moved back and forth between jail and a state mental
hospital a few times, and doctor after doctor met with
him and reported back to the court that he wasn't
(32:38):
competent to stand trial. Now, there's a difference here between
incompetent to stand trial and insane. Insane is not a
nice word, but it is a word with a particular meaning.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
In a courtroom.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
You're not going to go to a doctor and get
diagnosed insane. That's not really something we say anymore. But
in a courtroom, someone who is insane is not legally
responsible for their actions. That's something that you can argue
at trial. Being legally insane is not the same thing
as being mentally ill. You can be profoundly mentally ill
(33:18):
and still legally responsible for a crime. Someone who successfully
presents an insanity defense has to prove that at the
time of the offense they lacked the ability to understand
that what they were doing was wrong. They couldn't form
criminal intent because they just were not in the same
reality as the.
Speaker 1 (33:39):
Rest of us.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
And so at this stage of the case, before it
goes to trial, we're not talking about insanity. Insanity is
a trial issue, but before there can be a trial,
he has to have the mental capacity to understand a trial,
so they have to get him back to competycy. These
doctors aren't making any kind of finding about whether or
(34:04):
not he was insane at the time of the murders.
They're just saying that right now today he lacks the
ability to communicate effectively with his lawyer, to participate in
his own defense. He doesn't know what's going on in
the courtroom right now. But after a few years of treatment,
the doctors finally agree that he's competent to proceed and
(34:27):
they set the case for trial. In May of twenty
twenty three, the morning the trial was supposed to begin,
he signed a plea agreement. The state agreed to drop
the murder charges down from first degree to second degree murder,
and he agreed to plead guilty to all the charges.
(34:48):
Earlier this year, a reporter from Court TV interviewed Devon
in prison, and in this interview in twenty twenty five,
his story isn't any clearer than it was on the
night of the murders. He's stable now, he says, he
doesn't have hallucinations anymore, and he has his anger under control,
(35:09):
and he sees a psychiatrist in prison once a month,
and he still believes that he did what he had
to do. The reporter plays a clip for him of
his own statements the night of the murder, the part
where he says he did it to prevent the deaths
of even more people, and he asks him, do you
still stand by that claim, and Devin says that he does,
(35:33):
and he gets visibly angry with the reporter when he's
pressed on the issue of the way he's justifying these murders.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
The way you describe it, you're basically turning a brutal
murder into an act of heroism by saying that, by
saying that you were acting to save civilian lives from
future terrorist attacks. Well, I certainly was.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
That's a way of adizing yourself, David.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
I can see where that come from in that context.
Speaker 3 (36:01):
And the thing is, I don't have any intent to
really hurt innocent people.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
He goes as far as to say that he has
sacrificed forty five years of his own life to stop
Adam Woffin. I won't rehash the thoughts I had about
those claims in the last episode. I don't believe him,
I said that, but I spent most of this week
thinking about it, turning it over in my head, and
(36:33):
reading and rereading the documents that I have, And I
found two strange statements buried in the police reports from
that night. The officer who drove him from the Strip
Mall to the apartment complex so he could show her
where the bodies were wrote that during that very brief trip,
I mean it's right across the street, He asks her
(36:55):
if the media would want to interview him, and as
their pull into the parking lot in front of the condo,
he said, quote, it's just a shame I didn't get
to write my manifesto before this. Another report, written by
a different officer who later drove Devon from the crime
scene to the police station, says that Devon was talking
(37:18):
pretty much NonStop. From the portion of the report detailing
Devon's statements immediately after being placed in a holding cell,
the officer wrote, quote, Arthur's expressed how relieved he felt
because he fulfilled his mission and he can now have
peace Arthur's made several statements throughout that he was planning
to do something in the next week or so anyway,
(37:41):
and he was trying to pick a target. So which
is it? Which is it? Was he insane? Did he
snap because he was being bullied? Was he heroically preventing
a terrorist attack? Was this a premeditated ideological act for
what ideology exactly? The only person who really knows is Devin,
(38:08):
and he's still telling a version of this story that
doesn't add up. After last week's episode, I saw a
listener comment online that they'd encountered Devin Arthur's many years
ago while playing Minecraft. Remember Devin converted to Islam in
twenty sixteen when several members of his Minecraft server took
(38:31):
a joke a little too far and ended up meming
themselves into a bastardized version of Islam. I'm not a gamer.
I don't know anything about Minecraft, so I just took
this as written and didn't try to look for more
information about that. That's just a culture I don't understand.
(38:53):
But this listener's message got me thinking. A lot of
people Devin was gaming with back then remember him. This
listener was not the only person to have ever posted
online that they knew Devin from Minecraft. There are posts
where people are processing their shock that someone they'd known
(39:13):
from an online game turned out to be a murderer.
So I started looking for posts made in the immediate aftermath,
and I found some. First of all, it turns out
(39:41):
Minecraft is a lot more complicated than I thought. Don't
laugh at me. I don't play games, but I thought
it was just literally like Legos on the computer. I
thought it was computer legos. I don't know. I didn't
know there was a whole culture with this encyclopedias where
of lore. Devin was active on a Minecraft server called Sivcraft,
(40:05):
where users play a modified version of the game that
includes elements of the game civilization. So in Sivcraft, users
banded together as nations and they do diplomacy. They go
to war against other nations in the game. I don't know.
Don't email me about Minecraft. I'm doing my best. I
read a lot of stuff about games that I didn't understand.
(40:28):
He eventually joined a server called Intcraft, which has similar
gameplay dynamics to Sivcraft, but it was started by people
who met on four Chan, and it turns out Devin
used the same username for years, and his behavior was
weird enough that a lot of people who played sivcraft
(40:50):
remember him. I found four Chan posts going as far
back as twenty thirteen that appeared to be Devin talking
about Minecraft. By October of twenty fourteen, the same month
his dad kicked him out of the house for ordering
a copy of minecomf off Amazon, he's posting on four
Chan trying to recruit more users to his Minecraft server,
(41:13):
where he's playing as a Nazi. He posted an image
containing a swastika in what appears to be a historical
photograph of a mass grave, over which he's written an
antisemitic slogan. Now again, I'm showing my ignorance of Minecraft culture,
I guess. But both int and Sivcraft have kept extensive
(41:38):
histories of their games. There are blogs and wikis and subreddits.
And as I was reading through one of the Intcraft wikis,
because there is more than one, I kept seeing the
name of a particular user. Devin was second in command
(41:58):
of a group of players that call themselves Striker Gang,
named after their leader, a man playing under the username
Striker one two three abc. Interesting maybe, but not relevant.
I'm sure Devin played with a lot of people online,
but just days after the murders, someone posted a link
(42:19):
to a news story about Devin on a subreddit for
a particular Minecraft server. Several reddit users replied, recalling strange
run ins they'd had with him in the game. He'd
been pretty well known for a couple of years already
for being a Nazi. People posted things like I remember
him being a little shit and sieve, but I didn't
(42:41):
realize he'd do anything irl, and I assumed those short
political rants were to come off as edgy. Yes, I
couldn't believe someone could on ironically be like that. But
one user posted something very odd. The account's been deleted,
(43:02):
but the posts remain. He killed two of my friends
and he planned on killing me. This is a very
surreal experience. In a follow up post, the same deleted
account confirms that he was friends with the victims in
real life, not on Minecraft off line. Another user replying
(43:30):
to that post wrote, hope you're doing all right despite
all this. Striker Striker Striker from Minecraft was in Adam
Woffen two. So I looked for Striker in the Iron
March leagues and wouldn't you know it, he's there too.
(43:52):
In twenty sixteen, Striker posted on Iron March that he
was one of three Adam Woffen members in South Florida.
He signed up with his real email address from a
computer with an IP address in South Florida. Now I
have to hand it to him, this man has done
an incredible job wiping himself off the face of the Internet.
(44:17):
But he did leave just enough bread crumbs that appeared
to connect that Minecraft user to the Iron March poster
to a thirty seven year old middle school teacher in
South Florida. That would have made him twenty eight back
in twenty sixteen, which is actually quite old for an
(44:37):
Adam Waffen member. Members tended to be in their teens
or early twenties, maybe because that's the demographic that was
most online in the dark corners where the group recruited, right,
they're more impressionable, less likely to make good decisions, less
likely to have their lives figured out. All that's true,
(44:58):
but it was also very intentional. Brandon Russell was explicit
about this. He preferred to recruit very young members, literal children,
because a child can't be an FBI agent. If you
only recruit teenagers, you don't have to worry that any
of them are an undercover cop. But maybe Striker made
(45:22):
the cut because there was just no way an undercover
cop could spend that much time pretending to lead isis
on Minecraft. But back to that Reddit post, why did
Striker think Devvin planned to kill him too? Another mysterious
Reddit post from a deleted account claims that the leader
(45:45):
of the group talked to some people who knew Devon
on Minecraft and they allegedly told him that the murders
were premeditated. The account is deleted and the post is
not very clear where this information came from, but someone
is claiming that Devin had been talking online about a
plan to kill not only Andrew Jeremy, but several other
(46:09):
members of the group too. I guess we'll never really know.
As far as the hard facts go. Devin pleaded guilty
to murder. His story still shifts with every retelling. He
shot them because he was mentally ill, he shot them
because they were bullies, he shot them because he had
to prevent a terrorist attack. But in one tiny moment,
(46:34):
before those bodies were even cold, he told a police
officer that he'd been planning to carry out an attack
that week, and he told another officer that he wished
he'd found time to write his manifesto first. Maybe there
is no truth here. There is no actual version of
the truth, because what happened isn't something that can be
(46:55):
made sense of. His story changes because even he doesn't
know why he did what he did. In Minecraft, he
role played sometimes as Isis, sometimes as a national socialist
on a mission to kill communists. Sometimes he was a
pony from the My Little Pony animated series. His online
(47:18):
fantasy bled into real life. It wasn't enough to pretend
to be an Isis or pretend to be a Nazi
in Minecraft. He founded a real life Nazi group, and
then he got pushed out of leadership of his Nazi
group for swearing allegiance to Isis. When it came to
his real world ideology, he believed all sorts of contradictory things.
(47:42):
Maybe he really does believe entirely contradictory versions of his
own reality too. In the moment that he became a murderer,
maybe he believed all of it or none of it,
but he'd been thoroughly steeped in the violent rhetoric of
the Nazi group he helped create. Even if he does
(48:04):
believe that he was only trying to stop the group's violence.
That culture of violence is the reason that gun was
in his hands in the first place. In the end, though,
I guess he did kind of prevent something. Brandon Russell's
bomb making workshop was discovered. He was arrested before he
(48:28):
got a chance to do whatever he may or may
not have been planning to do in South Florida at
that nuclear power plant. But Brandon Russell's commitment to kicking
off the race war only intensified during his years in prison,
and within months of his release, he was back online
chatting with impressionable young people about how to blow up
(48:50):
electrical transformers. Brandon Russell was recently sentenced to twenty years
in prison. Devon Arthur's is serving his forty five year
sentence in Florida. He spends a lot of his time
these days in the prison law library. As recently as
last month, he was filing handwritten motions for post conviction relief,
(49:11):
claiming his attorneys failed him by not presenting more mitigating
evidence at sentencing. For what it's worth, I don't think
any version of the truth would have helped him there.
Florida law didn't really give the judge any discretion to
have handed down a lighter sentence even if mitigation evidence
had been presented. But I'll keep an eye on the
(49:31):
docket just to see if he gets that evidentiary hearing
he's been asking for. Maybe this time he'll have a
new version of the truth. Weirdling the Guys see production
(49:56):
of Coolsnow Media and iHeartRadio has researched, written, recorded by
me Molly Coner. Our executive producers are Sophie Lecturement Van
Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented
Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickard.
You can email me at Riddleyguys Podcast at gmail dot com.
I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the
(50:19):
show with other listeners on the Riddle the Guys subreddit.
Just please don't post anything that's going to make you
one of my weird little guys.
Host
Molly Conger
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