August 7, 2025 • 56 mins
In 2017, police investigating a double homicide found more than just bodies in a Tampa condo. The founder of a neonazi group was making bombs in the garage.
Sources:
https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/visions-chaos-weighing-violent-legacy-iron-march/
https://www.bu.edu/articles/2016/police-release-video-of-suspect-in-hate-poster-distribution/
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/all-american-nazis-628023/
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. It was a little after five point
thirty pm on a Friday evening when the first Nine
When One call came in. The property manager at a
gated condo complex in Tampa sounded almost like she was
asking a question when she told the operator that a
(00:23):
man had walked into the leasing office and announced that
he'd just killed two people. What a strange thing to
say to a lobby full of maintenance technicians and a
woman who was just trying to check her mail. Maybe
it didn't quite sink in right away that he meant it.
He left the office and started walking as she dialed
(00:44):
nine when One she followed him, telling the operator that
he kept grabbing the back of his pants as he walked,
as if there was something heavy tucked into his waistband.
The police were already en route when the second call came.
Woman on the other end of the line this time
was calling from a smoke shop and a strip mall
across from the apartment complex. She was crying hysterically, barely
(01:09):
able to get the words out. There was a man
in the store pointing a gun at her. When the
police arrived, Devon Arthur's was holding a handgun in one
hand and a bottle of Coca Cola in the other.
He was ready to surrender, but he wanted to finish
his soda first. Once he was in handcuffs, an officer
(01:31):
asked him if anyone was hurt. He responded cryptically saying
that there were people he'd hurt out back in the confusion,
his hostages had seized the opportunity to run out the
back door away from this ball little situation. So the
officer assumed that he meant one of those people had
(01:51):
been injured, but they were all unharmed. The officer again
asked him, who is hurt. He replied calmly, oh, the
people in the apartment. But they aren't hurt. They're dead.
(02:13):
I'm Molly Conger, and this is weird, Little guys. This
(02:35):
is a story that I've mentioned in passing a few
times before. It's always just a quick aside, a sort
of hand waving acknowledgment of that time two members of
Adam Woffin were murdered by their roommate. It was a
pivotal moment in the history of that now defunct neo
Nazi terrorist organization. So it comes up in just about
(02:56):
any story involving any member of Adam Woffin, but I've
never really bothered to explain it. I'm usually busy trying
to get somewhere else. I was thinking about it again
this week because I was thinking about Brandon Russell, the
founder of Adam Woffen. These murders usually come up when
(03:16):
I mentioned Brandon Russell because they're kind of what put
him in federal prison the first time. Not because he
committed them. He didn't. He wasn't even home when it happened,
but it was his name on the lease at the condo,
and it was his name written in sharpie on the
cooler full of explosives police found in the garage. Brandon
(03:39):
Russell did his time for having that little bomb workshop,
and he's since been convicted again, this time for conspiring
to blow up the power grid in Baltimore. If you're
listening to this episode the day it came out, he
might be sitting in front of a federal judge right
now receiving his sentence. I'm not psychic, so I couldn't
(03:59):
tell you how long he's going away for this time around.
But that upcoming sentencing got me thinking about how he
ended up there, and that story starts with these murders.
I hadn't intended to focus so much on the murders themselves.
I didn't think there was really all that much meat
(04:19):
to the story. Most of the news articles I've read
in the past kind of say the same thing, just
those broad strokes. I was already familiar with Devin Arthur's
shot and killed Andrew Onischuk and Jeremy Himmelman in the
apartment they shared with Brandon Russell. All four men were
members of Adamoffen, and the investigation into the murders led
to the discovery of the explosives in the garage. The
(04:41):
explosives belonged to Brandon Russell, and he was federally charged
for possessing them. His federal case doesn't have a lot
of detail to it because he pled guilty pretty quickly,
and Devin Arthur's criminal case wasn't federal. But then I
remembered this happened in Florida. People love to make jokes
(05:03):
about the Florida Man, the idea that people in Florida
are uniquely predisposed of committing bizarre crimes. Florida man throws
live gator at fast food cashier. Florida man leads cops
on high speed horse chase. Florida man Rob's convenience store
a dressed as Spider Man all real headlines, But people
(05:24):
in Florida aren't actually more likely than people from anywhere
else to crash a car into a grocery store while
high on meth or whatever else. This mythical Florida man
is getting up to. Florida just happens to have some
of the broadest public records laws in the country, making
it incredibly easy for journalists to quickly gain access to
(05:45):
police reports and court records. I wish every weird little
guy would do his weird little crimes in the state
of Florida, because it makes my job so much easier.
In this case, it means I was able to read
hundreds of pages of police reports, watch police interrogation videos,
(06:06):
and view court records not just for this murder case,
but filings from the murderer's parents' divorce. And it painted
a slightly different picture from the one I had in
my head. But as always, let's start before the beginning.
(06:26):
Adam Woffen was an international network of neo Nazis. It
was one of several organizations that formed out of relationships
that started on an online forum called Iron March. Iron
March first appeared online in twenty eleven, launched by a
Russian nationalist named Alisher Mukitnadoff. In its six years online,
(06:49):
it was an incubator for neo Nazi ideology around the world.
Fascist organizations like National Action in the United Kingdom, Adam
Woffen and the United States, Tschidas in Lithuania, and Antipodean
Resistance in Australia were all born on this forum. Existing
organizations grew and networked, and they recruited online posters into
(07:13):
real life terror cells. The site disappeared without explanation one
day in November of twenty seventeen. There was plenty of
speculation about why the site went dark, but Mukitnadov declined
to answer any questions about it when he hung up
on a reporter from the BBC in twenty twenty.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
One.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
Theory popular among American neo Nazis is that there was
international governmental pressure to shut the site down because of
these murders. The birth date of Adam Waffen is typically
offered as October twelfth, twenty fifteen. That's the day Brandan
Russell posted a thread on the forum formally announcing the
(07:55):
group's existence. There were a handful of posts that refer
to the group by name that pre date that announcement thread,
and there are photographs of Russell holding an Adam off
and flag that were taken in the late spring and
summer of twenty fifteen, so it did exist prior to October.
But his claim in that post that the group had
(08:17):
existed for three years already is unlikely, especially considering that
he hadn't founded the group alone. His co founder was
a teenage boy named Devon Arthur's. Devin Arthur's was young.
He was born in nineteen ninety nine. His parents separated
(08:38):
when he was five, but didn't actually file for divorce
until twenty ten. The divorce was contentious, and it dragged
on for years. The court appointed a guardian ad item,
an attorney whose role is to advocate for the best
interests of the child. In one letter to the court
in twenty eleven, the guardian ad litem noted that Devan
(09:00):
was taking the divorce much harder than most children in
his position, and he was having behavioral problems. In twenty twelve,
his parents agreed in mediation that Devon should be evaluated
by a child behavioral specialist, which his mother claimed in
subsequent filings never happened. In the fall of twenty fourteen,
(09:21):
when he was still living primarily with his father, he
ordered a copy of Mine Kampf of of Amazon. When
the package arrived in the mail, his father opened it,
saw what was inside, and refused to let his son
have the book. After Devon physically confronted his father over
the text, his dad kicked him out. According to his
(09:42):
mother's filings in the divorce case, his father abandoned him
at her house. The estranged couple lived in different counties,
so the sudden move meant that he had to change
schools midyear. He only ended up attending his new school
for a few months. He dropped out of school later
that year before finishing the tenth grade. Devon Arthur's joined
(10:06):
the Iron March Forum in March of twenty fifteen, just
a few days before his sixteenth birthday, and the same
month he dropped out of high school. By April of
twenty fifteen, Arthur's and Russell were hanging out in person
after realizing they both lived in the Orlando area. In
the fall of twenty fifteen, when Russell announced that Adam
Woffin was open for new members. He claimed the group
(10:29):
already had chapters in Chicago, Texas, Boston, New York, Kentucky, Alabama, Ohio, Missouri, Oregon,
and Virginia, with more than forty members nationwide. A private
message that Arthur sent another user around that same time, though,
puts that number closer to fifteen, mainly in Central Florida,
though there was a small cell of just three guys
(10:51):
in the Chicago area. When Brandon Russell bragged in November
that the group had met up to do quote a
lot of activism, what he actually meant was that he
and Devon had gone to the University of Central Florida
to hang up racist flyers. It was a group of two,
(11:11):
but the pair were close. In separate police interrogations on
the night of the murder, both Brandon Russell and Devon
Arthur's told police that they were the best of friends,
and they had been for years. When Russell joined the
National Guard in twenty sixteen, he left Arthur's in charge
of Adam Woffin. At first, things seemed to be going
(11:33):
really well for Arthur's as the group's interim leader, he
was recruiting and vetting new members, and he was even
trying to get some new chapters off the ground. In April,
he exchanged messages with a prospective new member in the
Boston area, one of the men he would murder a
year later. In May of twenty sixteen, he organized a
(11:53):
flyering campaign in Boston. There were only two Adamoffin members
in the Boston area at the time, a woman who
posted under the username Rexa, and the young man Arthur's
had just approved for membership, Andrew Onischuk. A few weeks later,
Rexa got a direct message from Slavros, the site's moderator,
(12:15):
who is widely believed to be the site's founder, Alexander Mukitnadoff.
He sent her a link to a now deleted post
on Twitter showing that someone had made the connection between
the flyers and the Iron March users who'd put them up.
The post claims that there were two known Adam Woffen
members in the Boston area and that one of them
(12:38):
was a student at MIT. The post didn't actually reveal
her name, but she was panicking, how could they know
any of that? What else did they know? She begged
Slavros to wipe out her account history, writing can you
delete my account here please? Or delete all my posts please?
(13:00):
I go to university. I cannot be involved with this.
If they find me, my entire life is ruined. But
he refused, saying that it would only make her look
even more guilty if the posts were deleted now, and
she had nothing to worry about anyway. He assured her
that there was simply no way for anyone to access
her IP address. They didn't know it at the time,
(13:24):
but an anti fascist researcher had made an account on
Iron March and tricked several users into clicking a link
that recorded their IP addresses. She clicked it from a
school computer, revealing her to be a student at MIT.
Without knowing how this person knew exactly where she was,
(13:46):
they had to consider the possibility that someone had sold
her out. She insisted in her messages with Slavros that
despite Devin Arthur's recent conversion to Islam, they were still
on good terms, and he assured her that he hadn't
said anything to anyone. The forum was buzzing that week.
The interim leader of Adam Woffen had announced his conversion
(14:09):
to Islam. Sometime in May of twenty sixteen, Devon Arthur's
updated his Iron March profile. Older archived versions of his
user profile show that he'd listed his location as quote
Dixie Land and his ideology as Confederate national Socialism. With
(14:30):
this new update, he now lived in the Land of
non Believers and he identified as a Salophist national socialist.
There was apparently a bit of a blow up over
this conversion in the massive data dump of leaked posts
from Iron March. This threat isn't there. It was deleted
(14:52):
by the moderators pretty quickly, so it wasn't there to
scrape when researchers pulled everything off the site later. But
the moderators didn't delete people's direct messages about the thread,
and those private conversations are in the data. Despite what
Devin Arthurs would later claim, his conversion to Islam wasn't
(15:16):
a renunciation of his prior beliefs, it was a twisted
evolution of them. In one direct message, a user who
saw the thread before it was deleted said that Arthur's
plan to convert other Adam Waffen members to Islam. He
failed to convince the forum that his newfound commitment to
jihad was the right direction for American neo Nazis, and
(15:39):
he was banned from the website. Slavrose threatened to cut
ties with Adam Woffin entirely, but several members of the
group said they'd convinced Arthur's to step down as interim
leader until Brandon Russell returned from army training. Two other
members would step up to run the group. Ironically, one
of those new interim leaders was also a Muslim convert.
(16:04):
David Cole Tarkington had converted to Islam more than two
years before Devon Arthur's did, and it doesn't appear to
have been a secret. Tarkington was a major recruiter for
Adam Woffen, bringing in at least eleven new members to
the group in twenty sixteen, including John Cameron Denton, the
man who would go on to lead the group after
(16:24):
Russell went to prison. But when Arthur's was being interviewed
by that homicide detective, he said that after he converted,
he realized his prior beliefs had been wrong, that the
hate left his heart, and guided by the Koran, he
came to understand that there was no point in wanting
to kill people. Of other races. A lot of the
(16:46):
news coverage takes his statements at face value. He killed
his roommates because they were Nazis, and since his conversion
he wasn't anymore. But I have a really hard time
believing that. We talked a little bit about the idea
of this strange melding of neo Nazism and interest in
(17:07):
Islamic extremism a few weeks ago, in the episode about
Nicholas Young, the DC Metro transit cop with the Nazi
tattoos who went to prison for trying to send gift
cards to Isis. And it seems like an obvious contradiction.
How can a neo Nazi be a Muslim? Don't white
supremacists hate Muslims? They do, of course, But it's more
(17:31):
complicated than that. It's a contradiction, sure, but plenty of
people live in contradiction. And there's a lot of overlap too.
Even neo Nazis who would never entertain the idea of
a conversion are willing to talk about the possibility of
finding common cause with people they see as allies in
(17:52):
anti Semitism, people whose commitment to armed extremism is appealing
to them, and all of the finer points of syncretic fascism,
aside Devon Arthur's didn't know what he believed. His conversion
happened in a Minecraft chat. Several friends he met through
(18:14):
the online game converted around the same time, and it
seems like for some of them it was a bit.
One of those friends later told Rolling Stone that Devin's
version of Islam was weird. Quote. It wasn't true Islam.
It was more about idealizing the prophet Muhammad as a
white arian. You know, Muhammad as an ideal male form.
(18:39):
I don't know, he says, you know, but I don't
know what he's talking about, and it is unkind I
think to cast out on the sincerity of someone's religious conversion,
but I'm going to He was extremely online line. His
(19:01):
exposure to Islam was through memes and jokes in a
chat room populated by teenage gamers who met on four Chan.
He was a high school dropout with absent parents. He
was struggling with mental illness. He never spoke to in
a mom about his religious path. When it came to
reading the Koran, he was entirely self taught, and it
(19:24):
sounds like he didn't get it, but taking a face value,
Devin Arthur's was Muslim in his own way. The other
neo Nazis didn't like it, and he was kicked off
the Iron March Forum. He was forced to step down
as interim leader of Adam Woffin, but he wasn't kicked
(19:45):
out of Adam Woffin, and he didn't even stay off
of Iron March. He still logged in to use the
site under Brandon Russell's account, and he stayed best friends
with Brandon Russell. In October of twenty sixteen, months after
this blow up, he and Brandon traveled to Massachusetts together
to visit Adam Woffin's Boston cell, which at the time
(20:08):
consisted of just two members, Andrew Onischuk and Jeremy Himmelman.
They'd both joined the group that year and quickly became
very close friends. Several of Jeremy's friends in Boston met
Devon Arthur's and Brandon Russell during that trip, and they
all said the same thing. These guys are fucking weird.
(20:31):
They cannot behave in a normal fashion. Jeremy Himmelman's sister
begged him to get these people out of the apartment
that the siblings shared they wouldn't stop drawing swastikas on
things and making Holocaust jokes. Devon kept calling her a
dumpster slut. Another friend of Jeremy's said quote, it was
(20:54):
very obvious that they were mentally unstable people. A few
months later, in January twenty seventeen, Jeremy Himmelman flew down
to Florida to visit Brandon after he faked a suicide
attempt as a joke. It was a cruel joke. I mean,
it would be cruel in any context, but Brandon almost
(21:15):
certainly knew that Jeremy had tried several times in the
last few years to end his own life, so of
course he dropped everything to be there when he believed
Brandon had nearly died. Two months later, in March of
twenty seventeen, back home in Massachusetts, Jeremy Himmelman attempted suicide
for a fourth time after an argument with his roommates.
(21:38):
He survived. His girlfriend and his parents say that it
was a wake up call for him. He was ready
to leave Adam Waffin behind. It wasn't good for him.
These weren't his friends. This wasn't a path forward, but
he didn't have any other path forward either, and he
(21:59):
was having trouble cutting ties. He didn't leave the chats.
He was still best friends with Andrew on Ashuk and
he didn't have a lot else to do, so when
Brandon Russell invited them both back to Florida, they went
(22:31):
that same month. In March of twenty seventeen, Brandon Russell's
grandmother co signed e lease for him. It was a
nice little condo in a gated community in Tampa. Sometime
in early April, he and Devin moved in, and that's
when he started begging Andrew on Ashuk and Jeremy Himmelman
to come down and visit, come down and spend the
(22:52):
summer with us. He promised them a rent free summer
in Florida. They could go fishing, there was a pool,
it would be fun. Andrew and Jeremy regretted it almost immediately.
Barely a week into their stay, they were already talking
about going home early. His two bedroom condo wasn't big
(23:14):
enough for four men. Andrew and Jeremy shared the smaller bedroom,
Devin slept in the living room, and Brandon kept the
larger bedroom for himself. Brandon was gone along on top
of being in the National Guard, he had a job
at a shooting range. Andrew and Jeremy got temporary jobs
at a recycling plant, but Devin just sat in the
(23:35):
living room all day on the computer. The place was messy.
No one did dishes. I was going to say, I
assume they didn't even own a vacuum cleaner, but I
did see one in the crime scene photographs. It was
pushed up against the wall in the living room, underneath
the North Korean flag. They barely even had any furniture.
(23:58):
The room that Andrew and Jeremy shared didn't have a bed.
It was just a futon and a mattress on the floor.
This wasn't the fun Florida summer they'd imagined. Devin was
weird and annoying, and things were tense. They wanted to
go home. On May seventeenth, Andrew Anashuk told his parents
(24:20):
that he was going to come home early. He told
his mom that he planned to stay another week just
to finish out his temp job. He didn't feel right
walking away from it. Just two days later, though, on Friday,
May nineteenth, he'd changed his mind. He had to go,
and he was going to leave on Monday. Jeremy Himmelman
(24:42):
called his girlfriend that day to lament Andrew's decision. He
was going to miss Andrew, but things had gotten too
uncomfortable in the apartment. That same day, May nineteenth, Brandon
Russell left the condo early in the morning. He had
National Guard drill that weekend had to report in that day.
(25:03):
Devin was, as always, at home on the computer all day.
Around five pm, Jeremy was texting with his girlfriend back
home in Massachusetts. At five four pm, she asked him
if they could FaceTime. I'm hanging out with Devin and
Andrew right now, maybe later, he replied with a heart emoji.
(25:27):
She said she might take a nap, and he joked
that she was probably going to fall asleep for seven
hours again like she had last time. His phone was
still resting on his stomach under his right arm when
crime Scene Texts photographed his body a few hours later.
I can't tell you exactly what happened in the fifteen
(25:47):
minutes between five oh five pm and five twenty pm.
When Jeremy sent his last text to his girlfriend at
five oh five, nothing was wrong. He seemed relaxed. He
said that he was hanging out with his roommates, and
he gave no indication that anything was amiss. She knew
all about the ongoing tension in the apartment. Who would
(26:09):
have mentioned it if anything out of the ordinary was happening.
But at five point twenty Devon Arthur's called his father
and told him that he'd just killed two people. There's
no dispute about the basic facts. Devon Arthur's shot Andrew
Anoschuk and Jeremy Himmelman with a Wasser ten that's a
(26:33):
Romanian version of an AK forty seven. Based on the
medical examiner's report, both men would have died instantly from
multiple shots to the head and torso fired from the
rifle at close range. They were both in the bedroom
they shared. Jeremy was lying on the futon and Andrew's
body was on the floor near the bathroom door. Devon
(26:55):
left the rifle on the couch in the living room,
picked up a clock seventeen, and walked out of the apartment.
He walked over to the leasing office, where he announced
what he'd done to two maintenance texts, the property manager
and a resident, and then he walked across the street
into the strip mall and entered the smoke shop, where
he held the store clerk and two customers hostage at
(27:15):
gunpoint until the police arrived. He's never denied what he did.
Quite the opposite. All he wanted to do was tell people.
He called his dad, he called his mom. He told
the people in the leasing office, he told the people
in the smoke shop. He told every officer he encountered
(27:38):
after his arrest. But as he continued to tell and
retell this story, it changed a little. In a report
written by the officer who transported him to the police
station that night, it's noted that Arthur's was talking almost constantly,
offering up spontaneous statements, and though no one was asking
(28:01):
him questions, the officer wrote, Arthur's continued to repeat his
story and would add more details each time. Devon's account
of the actual physical sequence of events remains pretty consistent,
and it mostly matches up with the physical evidence. It's
(28:22):
his recollection of his internal monologue and his motivations that
change Throughout the evening. It was a little after one
in the morning, nearly eight hours after the murder, by
the time a Tampa homicide detective turned on the camera
to record a formal interview with Devon. Arthur's and by
that time he'd had plenty of time alone to think,
(28:46):
and over the course of this two hour interrogation, you
can hear him convincing himself of the story that he's
come up with.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
I hear Jeremy he grabs my karana, he says, you
every book at fairy Tales here, and that set me
over to and I remember kind of b where I
shot them both and I didn't I wasn't thinking clearly.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
This part is probably pretty close to the truth. It's
the same thing he said in the back of the
patrol car right after he was arrested. He killed them
because they made fun of him, because they mocked his religion,
because they disrespected his faith, because they were bullying him
pretty relentlessly, and he'd had enough. And there is plenty
(29:38):
of proof that that had been going on, so it's
no surprise that it would have happened again that evening.
I think this first story is the truth. He was
sitting in the living room cleaning the rifle when Jeremy
and Andrew started teasing him again. He'd spent the entire
(29:59):
day on the computer in an encrypted group chat full
of other members of Adam Woffen, and on that particular day,
the chat was making fun of him again. He was
reaching a boiling point and he snapped. And unfortunately, in
the moment that he snapped, he happened to already have
(30:20):
a rifle in his hands, and in that split second
where he made the decision to pull the trigger, that's
what he was thinking about. He shot them because they
made fun of him. But as the reality of this
situation settled in, that didn't really feel like a good
enough explanation. It may not have even been a conscious choice.
(30:45):
He may have eventually convinced himself that this is true,
but within an hour he's adding details to the narrative,
and the more time he has to think about it,
the clearer his new story becomes.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
I remember what I was sitting in that tube or
whatever He's pacing back and forth.
Speaker 3 (31:03):
I'm like, and I'm like thinking to myself, which cube
in the holding some alcohol? Just data?
Speaker 4 (31:09):
I remember, like I.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
Was thinking, like, you know, how could I have done this?
And stuff like that? And the only things that could
that I could rationalize was.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
Like, you know, if I hadn't done that, if I
hadn't shut this organization down by doing this they'd be
a lot more people dead than just two people.
Speaker 3 (31:26):
From that organization.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
I was really struck by this language. It's a little
too on the nose that he keeps literally using the
word rationalize as he's describing his thought process to the officer.
I think he's still processing what he's done. I guess
witnessing a murder is very traumatic, even if you were
(31:52):
the one who did it. He's still processing that experience.
He's still processing seeing his friend's dead body, and he's
coming to terms with it. He's trying to understand his
own actions and figure out how he's supposed to live
with them, and he's externalizing that entire thought process in
a recorded interview with a homicide detective.
Speaker 4 (32:15):
And the thing that keeps from rational about this is that, like,
I feel what I've done is horrible in the sense
of that human life has been us and I feel sad.
Speaker 2 (32:27):
I feel like an animal, and I feel like they
should be a costal somewhere that's you know, became that
medicine or.
Speaker 3 (32:33):
Something like that to help me.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
And I want you to know that, like I realized
the full extent of like you know, their families are
going to feel very bad about this their loved ones,
and I feel the utmost.
Speaker 3 (32:46):
Bad about that.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
But I also realized that these people, of what they
were planning with the explosives that were down downstairs.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
What would tell me about that's? What's that all about?
Speaker 2 (32:55):
It? Adam thought the division is a terrorist organization. It's
a n Aanazi organization. Part of it before I can
through it.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
By the time he's sitting in that interrogation room at
one in the morning, he's the hero of the story.
He understands that it was a great tragedy to have
had to take those lives, But if you really think
about it, didn't he save countless lives by doing it.
I think it's the only way he can cope. He
(33:28):
told one of the officers on the scene shortly after
his arrest that he couldn't get the image of his
friend's dead bodies out of his mind. He said he
had no idea how much blood can come out of
a human body. He has to find a way to
convince himself that there was a good reason for it.
He feels like a monster, so he's trying to find
(33:51):
a way to be a hero. But he's lying an
organization that he was part of his conversion. He had
converted a year ago, and he still lived with the
group's leader. He still participated in the group's private chats.
(34:12):
He was still privy to the group's secret internal operations.
He went on group outings and road trips. When Adam
Woffin went camping, Devin was there. When Adam Woffin did
training drills in the woods, Devon was there. Just a
month before the murders, he accompanied Brandon Russell on a
(34:32):
trip to Detroit, Chicago, and Boston for the purpose of
buying and selling guns. Remember, they live in Florida. It's
pretty easy to buy a gun in Florida, so I
don't think they were buying guns in places like Chicago
or Boston. So you'll have to use your imagination to
(34:53):
fill in the gaps here. Maybe they were selling guns
purchased in Florida to members of the group operating in
areas where it was harder to buy them. If Devin
Arthur's had abandoned his prior beliefs, if he was so
disgusted with neo Nazism, why was he participating in this.
(35:13):
He could have moved back in with either one of
his parents. He could have called the FBI. He could
have just stayed home when the neo Nazi terrorist group
went out into the woods to practice shooting drills for
the race war, but he didn't do any of that.
He's telling this officer now in May of twenty seventeen,
(35:36):
that he was no longer a member of Adam Woffen
and hadn't been since his conversion a year earlier, and
I just don't think that's true. I think he's lying,
maybe even to himself. He sounds, for the most part,
fairly lucid in this interview, but half a dozen psychiatrists
(35:57):
and forensic psychologists would eventually agree that he was profoundly
mentally ill. So a lot of this is maybe just
trying to cope with his own actions. But I don't
think it's just coping. I think he realizes he has
a bargaining chip here, because throughout the interview he keeps
(36:19):
asking to speak with the FBI, and he says he
has important information that they'll want to hear.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
If I could get like a meeting with an FBI
agent or something like that, I can shut down not
just Adam Vopham, but at several other.
Speaker 4 (36:34):
Organizations, like probably with a bunch dissultates that.
Speaker 3 (36:37):
I would very much like to do that.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
He's pretty relaxed through most of the interview, but several
times he asks if what he's saying in the interview
is confidential, and when he's talking about that, he gets
very anxious, and the officer tells him that police reports
do eventually become public record, but he assures him that
sensitive information like the things he's talking about, can be
(37:05):
held back from public view. And he tells him that
what you say to me here just for the investigation,
nobody's going to see this video. Now. Remember, cops can
lie to you. Cops can always lie to you. It's
always okay for them to lie. Because I watched the
(37:25):
video of this officer telling Devin Arthur's that no one
would ever watch the video. He wants to tell the
FBI everything he knows about Adam Woffen, but he's very
worried that people will know he talked. He's worried that
members of the group will target him if they find out.
Speaker 2 (37:46):
And then on the other hand, if I somehow get
some kind of plea bargain from this and then I
get released, I might get killed by somebody else like
that gets relieved, especially since I know that I unless
whatever information you can rely shuts down the group with
our ladies.
Speaker 3 (38:00):
Guys are just a commission. Well, that's the main thing.
That's why I'm mainly helping y'all.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
Again, he's being very explicit here. You know, when he's
rationalizing his actions, he says out loud, I'm rationalizing my actions.
And now that he realizes he might have information to
trade for favorable treatment, he says, hey, maybe I'll get
a plea bargain out of this. He's saying the quiet
part very loud, and what he's saying is that he
(38:32):
wants to talk to the FBI about the bombs. I
imagine a cop usually takes you pretty seriously if you
start talking about bombs, just in case, even if you
are spinning a pretty fanciful sounding tale. And in this case,
even though what he's saying does sound a little far fetched,
(38:53):
they're listening carefully because they know there's some truth to it,
because they've already seen the explosives. Before Devon Arthur's ever
mentioned the presence of explosive material inside the condo, the
officers who arrived first on the scene saw enough to
make them cautious. The first officer to enter the apartment
(39:14):
wrote in his report that on his initial walkthrough of
the scene, he opened the closet in the other bedroom,
the one that belonged to Brandon Russell, and on a
shelf in the closet where you would normally keep sweaters
or something, there were several Geiger counters, a significant number
of batteries, and a lot of matches. Another officer found
(39:37):
a backpack near the front door that contained electric matches
and some kind of device that looked like it might
be an ied. They weren't entirely sure what they were
looking at, but they knew enough to know that somebody
else needed to be the one looking at it. So
they confirmed that the two victims were deceased and not
(39:58):
in need of any medical help. The apartment was otherwise empty,
and then they evacuated the neighboring apartments while they waited
for the bomb squad And so backing up to this
point in our timeline, When Devon Arthur's was arrested at
the smoke shop, he was put into a police car
and he told the officers that his two roommates were
(40:18):
dead inside their home, which was in the complex across
the street, but he couldn't remember the unit number. They'd
only just moved in a month before, but he offered
to show them which one it was if they would
drive him there. And so, as the police car is
pulling up outside the condo, they can hear someone screaming inside,
(40:40):
and as the officers are approaching the residence, a man
dressed in military fatigues came out the front door. He
is hysterical, unable to respond to their questions, collapses onto
the ground, sobbing, crying, and he's screaming, Jeremy is dead.
That was Brandon Russell. He'd arrived home some time in
(41:02):
that very small window of time after the murders, but
before the police arrived. He wasn't there when it happened,
but by the time the police get there, he is.
The property manager said that she saw him driving erratically
through the parking lot when she was standing outside after
dialing nine one one, so he had to have gotten
(41:24):
home after five thirty, but before five forty five. He
was detained by the officers on the scene for obvious reasons.
They just watched him walk out of an apartment with
two dead bodies inside. They don't know what they're dealing with.
So around six p m. Those officers who first entered
the apartment saw some things they thought they needed a
(41:46):
bomb squad for Brandon Russell and Devon Arthur's are both
handcuffed and sitting in separate police cars right outside, and
both men, separately and for their own reasons, voluntarily disclosed
to the police that there are explosives inside the house.
(42:07):
Devon is starting to realize that he wants the police
to know that the people he killed were very bad men,
and that maybe they were going to use those bombs
to hurt innocent people. And at this point he adds
that I wouldn't kill innocent people. I had plenty of
opportunities tonight to kill innocent people, even those responding officers,
and I didn't do it. For Brandon, he's just trying
(42:31):
to get out ahead of the problem he knows is coming.
The cops already saw some suspicious material inside the condo,
but they hadn't looked in the garage yet, so he
told a detective that they would find some things in
there that they should know about. He said that in
the garage there's potassium chlorate thorium, which is a radioactive material,
(42:55):
rocket propellant, and a compound called h M D T
Hexamethylene triperoxide diamine is a highly volatile explosive compound. It
is dangerous to handle, it is dangerous to store. It
is insane to keep it in your garage when your
garage is directly underneath your living room. He did fail
(43:19):
to mention to the officer that there was also some
ammonium nitrate in there, but the bomb squad found it anyway.
Russell told the officer on scene that they are going
to find that stuff in the garage, but he wants
them to know that it's only there for fueling model rockets.
But as he's sitting there in handcuffs trying to convince
(43:39):
the officer that those explosives in the garage are just
for his hobby, he asks if he's ever going to
see his family again, because he knows what this looks like,
and it looks bad. He's stuck to the li though
he's just a model rocket enthusiast having a very traumatic day.
(44:14):
At some point, both men were separately transported to the
police station to await their interrogations, and during Devin's interrogation,
he has a very clear idea of exactly what the
bomb squad is going to find in the house. He
knew what was in the house, where it was and
how it got there.
Speaker 2 (44:36):
Yes, there is a nuclear materials and in that in
that garage, there is some nuclear material what's in that
garage that in Asia MTD and those explosives, Yes, some
ceremonium nitrate and believe and I know that there's some
radiated materials that he was able to bring in through
the Bahamas and because because he's a Bahamian citizen, he's
able to bring it and bring it in.
Speaker 1 (44:58):
And more than that, he was willing to tell anyone
who would listen what the group planned to do with
those materials.
Speaker 3 (45:08):
But the things that they were planning were horrible. They're
planning bondings and stuff like that on countless people. They're
planning to kill civilian life. Well did they do with
the specific in their blessed.
Speaker 2 (45:19):
Power lines? Nuclear reactors, synagogues? Things like that.
Speaker 1 (45:28):
He knew all the details of the group's plans. He
knew what Adam Woffin was going to do because he
was a member of Adam Woffin. He's in the chats
where these things are being discussed. He's in the living
room where these things are being discussed, and by the
time he's in that interrogation room, he's convinced himself that
(45:48):
that's why he murdered his roommates. It wasn't some petty
personal dispute, It wasn't because they were bullying him. It
was because he had to do it. He had to
stop them before they could hurt innocent people. And of
course the detective did specifically ask about the model rockets.
Speaker 2 (46:10):
You guys, don't build model rockets and go out back
and down them, offer the or amount of the firewors
for the July.
Speaker 3 (46:17):
Now, there's not that, none of that. It's all literally
there specifically to kill Bean.
Speaker 1 (46:25):
Is this probably the truth? I think so to some degree. Yeah.
Not to spoil the ending, but Brandon Russell was convicted
earlier this year for a separate plot to destroy electrical infrastructure.
He's also alleged to have co authored some of the
Terrogram collective manuals that advise other neo Nazis on how
(46:46):
to go about carrying out their own attacks. It's not
at all hard to believe that he was thinking about
and talking about these things as he's building bombs in
his garage in twenty seventeen and wasn't a model rocket enthusiast.
He did work on a project involving a model rocket
as a member of the engineering club at the University
(47:07):
of South Florida, but that was in twenty thirteen and
he had since dropped out because he couldn't pass calculus.
There were no model rockets in the condo. An explosives
expert wrote in a report that no one would use
HMTD to power a model rocket. It's too volatile. It's
(47:29):
too volatile for pretty much everything. The military doesn't use it.
It fell out of favor in mining decades ago, but
it is possible to make it home if you're not
afraid of accidentally blowing your fingers off if the workshop
gets too warm, so it's still popular among terrorists. At
(47:52):
the end of his interview, Arthur says, again quite plainly,
if I hadn't done this, there would have been attacks.
He's sure of it now. That's why he did it.
He's sure at this point that he'd actually always thought that,
and that was what he was thinking before it happened.
Throughout his interview, Arthur's is asking to speak to the FBI.
(48:13):
He's insisting that they need to hear what he has
to say, and they keep sort of pushing him off, saying, yeah,
we can think about that. You know, we'll get to that.
That's later. He doesn't know that an FBI agent is
watching a video feed from the next room, and he's right.
The FBI was very interested in what he had to say,
(48:34):
because shortly after that interview wrapped up, the same detective
sat down with Brandon Russell, and this time that FBI
agent is in the room. They talked to Brandon for
a little over an hour. The detective had him sign
a form confirming that he'd been informed of his Miranda rights,
but he was also told that he wasn't in custody,
(48:55):
he wasn't being detained, he's not under arrest, and he's
free to leave it any time. He signed the form,
and he agreed to talk without a lawyer, which I'm
fine with him doing, but you listener, never talked to
the police without a lawyer. They talked a lot about
the murders. Obviously, he's talking to a homicide detective in
(49:19):
a homicide investigation. They talked about Devin and Andrew and Jeremy,
how they all come to be friends, how they met
online and then in person, how that friendship had fallen
apart over Devon's conversion to Islam. Brandon says Devon's conversion
was never an issue for him, and I think that's true.
(49:41):
He insisted that what was going on in the house
was all just banter, just regular ball busting, teasing between friends.
After the detective rephrases the question half a dozen times,
he reluctantly agrees that, yeah, Jeremy and Andrew crossed the
line sometimes. Maybe they were bullying him and Devin was
(50:02):
having a hard time with it, but he said it
had never gotten physical and he never thought anyone would
get hurt. He also said Adam Waffin was just a
club for people with shared political interests, and they liked
to do outdoor activities together. He did agree that those
shared beliefs were national socialism, and he got a little
(50:23):
animated when he started complaining that schools only teach lies
about Hitler. For the most part, though, Who's mumbling and
his body language is guarded and anxious. He's sitting sort
of folded in on himself, slouching down with his legs
crossed and his arms folded tightly across his chest. He's tired,
(50:44):
he's traumatized, but he's scared, and he insists throughout this
conversation that everything they found was legal, It was legally obtained,
he wasn't planning to do anything nefarious with it, and
it was all related to his hobby of building model rockets.
After about an hour of this, the detective's tone changes.
(51:10):
He's been sort of yes, ending him, just letting him talk,
getting him to open up, talking about his hobbies, not
passing any kind of judgment, and Brandon Russell has been
portraying himself and his organization as what the detective calls,
you know, knuckleheads horsing around, you know, just kids having fun.
But if we look on your computer, what are we
(51:32):
going to find? Is it just jokes and camping trips
or are we going to find that you've made explicit threats?
Are you saying things like he'll all jews right? What
are you saying? Are you making the kind of threats
that could lead to federal charges? And at first Brandon
(51:53):
tries to answer the question. He says, you know, only
ever as a joke, I've never said that non satirically,
and they press him a little hard what kinds of
things are you saying? And then he just mumbles that
maybe he needs a lawyer, So the questions stop there.
He's not under arrest, he can leave at any time,
(52:15):
and if he wants a lawyer, they're not going to
ask him any more questions. He can go, but he
can't go home though. The ATF has only just arrived
and they still haven't finished clearing the house of explosive material.
And until the ATF clears the scene, the medical examiner
can't take the bodies away, so he's not going to
be able to get into that condo anytime soon. So
(52:41):
Russell asks the detective to call his dad. He doesn't
ask if he can use the phone to call his dad.
He a twenty two year old member of the military,
is asking this other adult man, will you call my dad?
He doesn't actually know his dad's phone number, and his
cell phone is still inside the condo, but he says,
(53:03):
you know, you can just call the Palm Beach County
Sheriff's office and ask for him by name. He's a
deputy there, or maybe it's West Palm Beach. He can't
actually remember he and his dad aren't close. He wasn't
around when Branda was a kid, and they don't really
get along now. But he tells the FBI that he's
(53:23):
going to drive to Palm Beach and stay with his dad.
His mom still lives in the Bahamas, so he doesn't
really have anywhere else nearby he can go, so a
little after six am on Saturday morning, a Tampa police
officer dropped Russell off outside the condo. The Explosive Ordnance
Disposal team had finished with the scene, so detectives were
(53:44):
just now arriving to conduct their search. One of those
detectives went inside and got his keys for him. In
her report, she notes that when she entered his bedroom
to look for his keys, she saw a large framed
photograph of Timothy mcveay on his dresser. An explosives enforcement
agent from the ATF confirmed to the FBI sometime early
(54:05):
Saturday morning that the materials they found did meet the
legal definition of a destructive device. What they found in
that garage was enough to bring federal charges, but by
the time the ATF agents were done examining the scene
and writing of their findings, the FBI had already let
(54:25):
him go he was gone. He said he was going
to his dad's house in West Palm Beach, but he didn't.
When FBI agents contacted his family, they said they hadn't
heard from him. Instead of going to his dad's house
to get some rest, he'd driven straight to the home
(54:47):
of another Adam Woffin member. He told him about the murders,
and he said he needed to get away for a
while to clear his head. But his friend didn't just
toss a few T shirts and a toothbrush into a
backpack like you might expect someone to do for a
spur of the moment weekend away. Instead, he withdrew all
of the money from his bank account, quit his job,
(55:09):
and got into Russell's car, heading south. When deputies apprehended
Russell in the Florida Keys a day later, the rifles
they'd bought at a sporting goods store were still in
their manufacturer's packaging. We'll pick back up next week with
the year's long ordeal in court of resolving Devon Arthur's
(55:29):
mental competency and Brandon Russell's first trip to federal prison.
Hopefully by then we'll know how his story ends. He
is scheduled to be sentenced for his second foiled plot
on August seventh. Until then, I don't know. Make sure
your teenage son isn't accidentally converting to a memified version
(55:52):
of Islam in a neo Nazi Minecraft chat, and don't
store volatile explosives in a cooler in your garage. Weird
(56:16):
Little Guys is the production of cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's research, written and accorded by me on the kunger Our.
Executive producers are Sophie Lichtman and Robert Evans. The show
is edited by the wildly talented Bory Gigan. The theme
music was composed by Brad Dickard. You can email me
at Weird Little Guys 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
(56:38):
show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one
of my Weird Little Guys
Cool Zone Media. It was a little after five point
thirty pm on a Friday evening when the first Nine
When One call came in. The property manager at a
gated condo complex in Tampa sounded almost like she was
asking a question when she told the operator that a
(00:23):
man had walked into the leasing office and announced that
he'd just killed two people. What a strange thing to
say to a lobby full of maintenance technicians and a
woman who was just trying to check her mail. Maybe
it didn't quite sink in right away that he meant it.
He left the office and started walking as she dialed
(00:44):
nine when One she followed him, telling the operator that
he kept grabbing the back of his pants as he walked,
as if there was something heavy tucked into his waistband.
The police were already en route when the second call came.
Woman on the other end of the line this time
was calling from a smoke shop and a strip mall
across from the apartment complex. She was crying hysterically, barely
(01:09):
able to get the words out. There was a man
in the store pointing a gun at her. When the
police arrived, Devon Arthur's was holding a handgun in one
hand and a bottle of Coca Cola in the other.
He was ready to surrender, but he wanted to finish
his soda first. Once he was in handcuffs, an officer
(01:31):
asked him if anyone was hurt. He responded cryptically saying
that there were people he'd hurt out back in the confusion,
his hostages had seized the opportunity to run out the
back door away from this ball little situation. So the
officer assumed that he meant one of those people had
(01:51):
been injured, but they were all unharmed. The officer again
asked him, who is hurt. He replied calmly, oh, the
people in the apartment. But they aren't hurt. They're dead.
(02:13):
I'm Molly Conger, and this is weird, Little guys. This
(02:35):
is a story that I've mentioned in passing a few
times before. It's always just a quick aside, a sort
of hand waving acknowledgment of that time two members of
Adam Woffin were murdered by their roommate. It was a
pivotal moment in the history of that now defunct neo
Nazi terrorist organization. So it comes up in just about
(02:56):
any story involving any member of Adam Woffin, but I've
never really bothered to explain it. I'm usually busy trying
to get somewhere else. I was thinking about it again
this week because I was thinking about Brandon Russell, the
founder of Adam Woffen. These murders usually come up when
(03:16):
I mentioned Brandon Russell because they're kind of what put
him in federal prison the first time. Not because he
committed them. He didn't. He wasn't even home when it happened,
but it was his name on the lease at the condo,
and it was his name written in sharpie on the
cooler full of explosives police found in the garage. Brandon
(03:39):
Russell did his time for having that little bomb workshop,
and he's since been convicted again, this time for conspiring
to blow up the power grid in Baltimore. If you're
listening to this episode the day it came out, he
might be sitting in front of a federal judge right
now receiving his sentence. I'm not psychic, so I couldn't
(03:59):
tell you how long he's going away for this time around.
But that upcoming sentencing got me thinking about how he
ended up there, and that story starts with these murders.
I hadn't intended to focus so much on the murders themselves.
I didn't think there was really all that much meat
(04:19):
to the story. Most of the news articles I've read
in the past kind of say the same thing, just
those broad strokes. I was already familiar with Devin Arthur's
shot and killed Andrew Onischuk and Jeremy Himmelman in the
apartment they shared with Brandon Russell. All four men were
members of Adamoffen, and the investigation into the murders led
to the discovery of the explosives in the garage. The
(04:41):
explosives belonged to Brandon Russell, and he was federally charged
for possessing them. His federal case doesn't have a lot
of detail to it because he pled guilty pretty quickly,
and Devin Arthur's criminal case wasn't federal. But then I
remembered this happened in Florida. People love to make jokes
(05:03):
about the Florida Man, the idea that people in Florida
are uniquely predisposed of committing bizarre crimes. Florida man throws
live gator at fast food cashier. Florida man leads cops
on high speed horse chase. Florida man Rob's convenience store
a dressed as Spider Man all real headlines, But people
(05:24):
in Florida aren't actually more likely than people from anywhere
else to crash a car into a grocery store while
high on meth or whatever else. This mythical Florida man
is getting up to. Florida just happens to have some
of the broadest public records laws in the country, making
it incredibly easy for journalists to quickly gain access to
(05:45):
police reports and court records. I wish every weird little
guy would do his weird little crimes in the state
of Florida, because it makes my job so much easier.
In this case, it means I was able to read
hundreds of pages of police reports, watch police interrogation videos,
(06:06):
and view court records not just for this murder case,
but filings from the murderer's parents' divorce. And it painted
a slightly different picture from the one I had in
my head. But as always, let's start before the beginning.
(06:26):
Adam Woffen was an international network of neo Nazis. It
was one of several organizations that formed out of relationships
that started on an online forum called Iron March. Iron
March first appeared online in twenty eleven, launched by a
Russian nationalist named Alisher Mukitnadoff. In its six years online,
(06:49):
it was an incubator for neo Nazi ideology around the world.
Fascist organizations like National Action in the United Kingdom, Adam
Woffen and the United States, Tschidas in Lithuania, and Antipodean
Resistance in Australia were all born on this forum. Existing
organizations grew and networked, and they recruited online posters into
(07:13):
real life terror cells. The site disappeared without explanation one
day in November of twenty seventeen. There was plenty of
speculation about why the site went dark, but Mukitnadov declined
to answer any questions about it when he hung up
on a reporter from the BBC in twenty twenty.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
One.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
Theory popular among American neo Nazis is that there was
international governmental pressure to shut the site down because of
these murders. The birth date of Adam Waffen is typically
offered as October twelfth, twenty fifteen. That's the day Brandan
Russell posted a thread on the forum formally announcing the
(07:55):
group's existence. There were a handful of posts that refer
to the group by name that pre date that announcement thread,
and there are photographs of Russell holding an Adam off
and flag that were taken in the late spring and
summer of twenty fifteen, so it did exist prior to October.
But his claim in that post that the group had
(08:17):
existed for three years already is unlikely, especially considering that
he hadn't founded the group alone. His co founder was
a teenage boy named Devon Arthur's. Devin Arthur's was young.
He was born in nineteen ninety nine. His parents separated
(08:38):
when he was five, but didn't actually file for divorce
until twenty ten. The divorce was contentious, and it dragged
on for years. The court appointed a guardian ad item,
an attorney whose role is to advocate for the best
interests of the child. In one letter to the court
in twenty eleven, the guardian ad litem noted that Devan
(09:00):
was taking the divorce much harder than most children in
his position, and he was having behavioral problems. In twenty twelve,
his parents agreed in mediation that Devon should be evaluated
by a child behavioral specialist, which his mother claimed in
subsequent filings never happened. In the fall of twenty fourteen,
(09:21):
when he was still living primarily with his father, he
ordered a copy of Mine Kampf of of Amazon. When
the package arrived in the mail, his father opened it,
saw what was inside, and refused to let his son
have the book. After Devon physically confronted his father over
the text, his dad kicked him out. According to his
(09:42):
mother's filings in the divorce case, his father abandoned him
at her house. The estranged couple lived in different counties,
so the sudden move meant that he had to change
schools midyear. He only ended up attending his new school
for a few months. He dropped out of school later
that year before finishing the tenth grade. Devon Arthur's joined
(10:06):
the Iron March Forum in March of twenty fifteen, just
a few days before his sixteenth birthday, and the same
month he dropped out of high school. By April of
twenty fifteen, Arthur's and Russell were hanging out in person
after realizing they both lived in the Orlando area. In
the fall of twenty fifteen, when Russell announced that Adam
Woffin was open for new members. He claimed the group
(10:29):
already had chapters in Chicago, Texas, Boston, New York, Kentucky, Alabama, Ohio, Missouri, Oregon,
and Virginia, with more than forty members nationwide. A private
message that Arthur sent another user around that same time, though,
puts that number closer to fifteen, mainly in Central Florida,
though there was a small cell of just three guys
(10:51):
in the Chicago area. When Brandon Russell bragged in November
that the group had met up to do quote a
lot of activism, what he actually meant was that he
and Devon had gone to the University of Central Florida
to hang up racist flyers. It was a group of two,
(11:11):
but the pair were close. In separate police interrogations on
the night of the murder, both Brandon Russell and Devon
Arthur's told police that they were the best of friends,
and they had been for years. When Russell joined the
National Guard in twenty sixteen, he left Arthur's in charge
of Adam Woffin. At first, things seemed to be going
(11:33):
really well for Arthur's as the group's interim leader, he
was recruiting and vetting new members, and he was even
trying to get some new chapters off the ground. In April,
he exchanged messages with a prospective new member in the
Boston area, one of the men he would murder a
year later. In May of twenty sixteen, he organized a
(11:53):
flyering campaign in Boston. There were only two Adamoffin members
in the Boston area at the time, a woman who
posted under the username Rexa, and the young man Arthur's
had just approved for membership, Andrew Onischuk. A few weeks later,
Rexa got a direct message from Slavros, the site's moderator,
(12:15):
who is widely believed to be the site's founder, Alexander Mukitnadoff.
He sent her a link to a now deleted post
on Twitter showing that someone had made the connection between
the flyers and the Iron March users who'd put them up.
The post claims that there were two known Adam Woffen
members in the Boston area and that one of them
(12:38):
was a student at MIT. The post didn't actually reveal
her name, but she was panicking, how could they know
any of that? What else did they know? She begged
Slavros to wipe out her account history, writing can you
delete my account here please? Or delete all my posts please?
(13:00):
I go to university. I cannot be involved with this.
If they find me, my entire life is ruined. But
he refused, saying that it would only make her look
even more guilty if the posts were deleted now, and
she had nothing to worry about anyway. He assured her
that there was simply no way for anyone to access
her IP address. They didn't know it at the time,
(13:24):
but an anti fascist researcher had made an account on
Iron March and tricked several users into clicking a link
that recorded their IP addresses. She clicked it from a
school computer, revealing her to be a student at MIT.
Without knowing how this person knew exactly where she was,
(13:46):
they had to consider the possibility that someone had sold
her out. She insisted in her messages with Slavros that
despite Devin Arthur's recent conversion to Islam, they were still
on good terms, and he assured her that he hadn't
said anything to anyone. The forum was buzzing that week.
The interim leader of Adam Woffen had announced his conversion
(14:09):
to Islam. Sometime in May of twenty sixteen, Devon Arthur's
updated his Iron March profile. Older archived versions of his
user profile show that he'd listed his location as quote
Dixie Land and his ideology as Confederate national Socialism. With
(14:30):
this new update, he now lived in the Land of
non Believers and he identified as a Salophist national socialist.
There was apparently a bit of a blow up over
this conversion in the massive data dump of leaked posts
from Iron March. This threat isn't there. It was deleted
(14:52):
by the moderators pretty quickly, so it wasn't there to
scrape when researchers pulled everything off the site later. But
the moderators didn't delete people's direct messages about the thread,
and those private conversations are in the data. Despite what
Devin Arthurs would later claim, his conversion to Islam wasn't
(15:16):
a renunciation of his prior beliefs, it was a twisted
evolution of them. In one direct message, a user who
saw the thread before it was deleted said that Arthur's
plan to convert other Adam Waffen members to Islam. He
failed to convince the forum that his newfound commitment to
jihad was the right direction for American neo Nazis, and
(15:39):
he was banned from the website. Slavrose threatened to cut
ties with Adam Woffin entirely, but several members of the
group said they'd convinced Arthur's to step down as interim
leader until Brandon Russell returned from army training. Two other
members would step up to run the group. Ironically, one
of those new interim leaders was also a Muslim convert.
(16:04):
David Cole Tarkington had converted to Islam more than two
years before Devon Arthur's did, and it doesn't appear to
have been a secret. Tarkington was a major recruiter for
Adam Woffen, bringing in at least eleven new members to
the group in twenty sixteen, including John Cameron Denton, the
man who would go on to lead the group after
(16:24):
Russell went to prison. But when Arthur's was being interviewed
by that homicide detective, he said that after he converted,
he realized his prior beliefs had been wrong, that the
hate left his heart, and guided by the Koran, he
came to understand that there was no point in wanting
to kill people. Of other races. A lot of the
(16:46):
news coverage takes his statements at face value. He killed
his roommates because they were Nazis, and since his conversion
he wasn't anymore. But I have a really hard time
believing that. We talked a little bit about the idea
of this strange melding of neo Nazism and interest in
(17:07):
Islamic extremism a few weeks ago, in the episode about
Nicholas Young, the DC Metro transit cop with the Nazi
tattoos who went to prison for trying to send gift
cards to Isis. And it seems like an obvious contradiction.
How can a neo Nazi be a Muslim? Don't white
supremacists hate Muslims? They do, of course, But it's more
(17:31):
complicated than that. It's a contradiction, sure, but plenty of
people live in contradiction. And there's a lot of overlap too.
Even neo Nazis who would never entertain the idea of
a conversion are willing to talk about the possibility of
finding common cause with people they see as allies in
(17:52):
anti Semitism, people whose commitment to armed extremism is appealing
to them, and all of the finer points of syncretic fascism,
aside Devon Arthur's didn't know what he believed. His conversion
happened in a Minecraft chat. Several friends he met through
(18:14):
the online game converted around the same time, and it
seems like for some of them it was a bit.
One of those friends later told Rolling Stone that Devin's
version of Islam was weird. Quote. It wasn't true Islam.
It was more about idealizing the prophet Muhammad as a
white arian. You know, Muhammad as an ideal male form.
(18:39):
I don't know, he says, you know, but I don't
know what he's talking about, and it is unkind I
think to cast out on the sincerity of someone's religious conversion,
but I'm going to He was extremely online line. His
(19:01):
exposure to Islam was through memes and jokes in a
chat room populated by teenage gamers who met on four Chan.
He was a high school dropout with absent parents. He
was struggling with mental illness. He never spoke to in
a mom about his religious path. When it came to
reading the Koran, he was entirely self taught, and it
(19:24):
sounds like he didn't get it, but taking a face value,
Devin Arthur's was Muslim in his own way. The other
neo Nazis didn't like it, and he was kicked off
the Iron March Forum. He was forced to step down
as interim leader of Adam Woffin, but he wasn't kicked
(19:45):
out of Adam Woffin, and he didn't even stay off
of Iron March. He still logged in to use the
site under Brandon Russell's account, and he stayed best friends
with Brandon Russell. In October of twenty sixteen, months after
this blow up, he and Brandon traveled to Massachusetts together
to visit Adam Woffin's Boston cell, which at the time
(20:08):
consisted of just two members, Andrew Onischuk and Jeremy Himmelman.
They'd both joined the group that year and quickly became
very close friends. Several of Jeremy's friends in Boston met
Devon Arthur's and Brandon Russell during that trip, and they
all said the same thing. These guys are fucking weird.
(20:31):
They cannot behave in a normal fashion. Jeremy Himmelman's sister
begged him to get these people out of the apartment
that the siblings shared they wouldn't stop drawing swastikas on
things and making Holocaust jokes. Devon kept calling her a
dumpster slut. Another friend of Jeremy's said quote, it was
(20:54):
very obvious that they were mentally unstable people. A few
months later, in January twenty seventeen, Jeremy Himmelman flew down
to Florida to visit Brandon after he faked a suicide
attempt as a joke. It was a cruel joke. I mean,
it would be cruel in any context, but Brandon almost
(21:15):
certainly knew that Jeremy had tried several times in the
last few years to end his own life, so of
course he dropped everything to be there when he believed
Brandon had nearly died. Two months later, in March of
twenty seventeen, back home in Massachusetts, Jeremy Himmelman attempted suicide
for a fourth time after an argument with his roommates.
(21:38):
He survived. His girlfriend and his parents say that it
was a wake up call for him. He was ready
to leave Adam Waffin behind. It wasn't good for him.
These weren't his friends. This wasn't a path forward, but
he didn't have any other path forward either, and he
(21:59):
was having trouble cutting ties. He didn't leave the chats.
He was still best friends with Andrew on Ashuk and
he didn't have a lot else to do, so when
Brandon Russell invited them both back to Florida, they went
(22:31):
that same month. In March of twenty seventeen, Brandon Russell's
grandmother co signed e lease for him. It was a
nice little condo in a gated community in Tampa. Sometime
in early April, he and Devin moved in, and that's
when he started begging Andrew on Ashuk and Jeremy Himmelman
to come down and visit, come down and spend the
(22:52):
summer with us. He promised them a rent free summer
in Florida. They could go fishing, there was a pool,
it would be fun. Andrew and Jeremy regretted it almost immediately.
Barely a week into their stay, they were already talking
about going home early. His two bedroom condo wasn't big
(23:14):
enough for four men. Andrew and Jeremy shared the smaller bedroom,
Devin slept in the living room, and Brandon kept the
larger bedroom for himself. Brandon was gone along on top
of being in the National Guard, he had a job
at a shooting range. Andrew and Jeremy got temporary jobs
at a recycling plant, but Devin just sat in the
(23:35):
living room all day on the computer. The place was messy.
No one did dishes. I was going to say, I
assume they didn't even own a vacuum cleaner, but I
did see one in the crime scene photographs. It was
pushed up against the wall in the living room, underneath
the North Korean flag. They barely even had any furniture.
(23:58):
The room that Andrew and Jeremy shared didn't have a bed.
It was just a futon and a mattress on the floor.
This wasn't the fun Florida summer they'd imagined. Devin was
weird and annoying, and things were tense. They wanted to
go home. On May seventeenth, Andrew Anashuk told his parents
(24:20):
that he was going to come home early. He told
his mom that he planned to stay another week just
to finish out his temp job. He didn't feel right
walking away from it. Just two days later, though, on Friday,
May nineteenth, he'd changed his mind. He had to go,
and he was going to leave on Monday. Jeremy Himmelman
(24:42):
called his girlfriend that day to lament Andrew's decision. He
was going to miss Andrew, but things had gotten too
uncomfortable in the apartment. That same day, May nineteenth, Brandon
Russell left the condo early in the morning. He had
National Guard drill that weekend had to report in that day.
(25:03):
Devin was, as always, at home on the computer all day.
Around five pm, Jeremy was texting with his girlfriend back
home in Massachusetts. At five four pm, she asked him
if they could FaceTime. I'm hanging out with Devin and
Andrew right now, maybe later, he replied with a heart emoji.
(25:27):
She said she might take a nap, and he joked
that she was probably going to fall asleep for seven
hours again like she had last time. His phone was
still resting on his stomach under his right arm when
crime Scene Texts photographed his body a few hours later.
I can't tell you exactly what happened in the fifteen
(25:47):
minutes between five oh five pm and five twenty pm.
When Jeremy sent his last text to his girlfriend at
five oh five, nothing was wrong. He seemed relaxed. He
said that he was hanging out with his roommates, and
he gave no indication that anything was amiss. She knew
all about the ongoing tension in the apartment. Who would
(26:09):
have mentioned it if anything out of the ordinary was happening.
But at five point twenty Devon Arthur's called his father
and told him that he'd just killed two people. There's
no dispute about the basic facts. Devon Arthur's shot Andrew
Anoschuk and Jeremy Himmelman with a Wasser ten that's a
(26:33):
Romanian version of an AK forty seven. Based on the
medical examiner's report, both men would have died instantly from
multiple shots to the head and torso fired from the
rifle at close range. They were both in the bedroom
they shared. Jeremy was lying on the futon and Andrew's
body was on the floor near the bathroom door. Devon
(26:55):
left the rifle on the couch in the living room,
picked up a clock seventeen, and walked out of the apartment.
He walked over to the leasing office, where he announced
what he'd done to two maintenance texts, the property manager
and a resident, and then he walked across the street
into the strip mall and entered the smoke shop, where
he held the store clerk and two customers hostage at
(27:15):
gunpoint until the police arrived. He's never denied what he did.
Quite the opposite. All he wanted to do was tell people.
He called his dad, he called his mom. He told
the people in the leasing office, he told the people
in the smoke shop. He told every officer he encountered
(27:38):
after his arrest. But as he continued to tell and
retell this story, it changed a little. In a report
written by the officer who transported him to the police
station that night, it's noted that Arthur's was talking almost constantly,
offering up spontaneous statements, and though no one was asking
(28:01):
him questions, the officer wrote, Arthur's continued to repeat his
story and would add more details each time. Devon's account
of the actual physical sequence of events remains pretty consistent,
and it mostly matches up with the physical evidence. It's
(28:22):
his recollection of his internal monologue and his motivations that
change Throughout the evening. It was a little after one
in the morning, nearly eight hours after the murder, by
the time a Tampa homicide detective turned on the camera
to record a formal interview with Devon. Arthur's and by
that time he'd had plenty of time alone to think,
(28:46):
and over the course of this two hour interrogation, you
can hear him convincing himself of the story that he's
come up with.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
I hear Jeremy he grabs my karana, he says, you
every book at fairy Tales here, and that set me
over to and I remember kind of b where I
shot them both and I didn't I wasn't thinking clearly.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
This part is probably pretty close to the truth. It's
the same thing he said in the back of the
patrol car right after he was arrested. He killed them
because they made fun of him, because they mocked his religion,
because they disrespected his faith, because they were bullying him
pretty relentlessly, and he'd had enough. And there is plenty
(29:38):
of proof that that had been going on, so it's
no surprise that it would have happened again that evening.
I think this first story is the truth. He was
sitting in the living room cleaning the rifle when Jeremy
and Andrew started teasing him again. He'd spent the entire
(29:59):
day on the computer in an encrypted group chat full
of other members of Adam Woffen, and on that particular day,
the chat was making fun of him again. He was
reaching a boiling point and he snapped. And unfortunately, in
the moment that he snapped, he happened to already have
(30:20):
a rifle in his hands, and in that split second
where he made the decision to pull the trigger, that's
what he was thinking about. He shot them because they
made fun of him. But as the reality of this
situation settled in, that didn't really feel like a good
enough explanation. It may not have even been a conscious choice.
(30:45):
He may have eventually convinced himself that this is true,
but within an hour he's adding details to the narrative,
and the more time he has to think about it,
the clearer his new story becomes.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
I remember what I was sitting in that tube or
whatever He's pacing back and forth.
Speaker 3 (31:03):
I'm like, and I'm like thinking to myself, which cube
in the holding some alcohol? Just data?
Speaker 4 (31:09):
I remember, like I.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
Was thinking, like, you know, how could I have done this?
And stuff like that? And the only things that could
that I could rationalize was.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
Like, you know, if I hadn't done that, if I
hadn't shut this organization down by doing this they'd be
a lot more people dead than just two people.
Speaker 3 (31:26):
From that organization.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
I was really struck by this language. It's a little
too on the nose that he keeps literally using the
word rationalize as he's describing his thought process to the officer.
I think he's still processing what he's done. I guess
witnessing a murder is very traumatic, even if you were
(31:52):
the one who did it. He's still processing that experience.
He's still processing seeing his friend's dead body, and he's
coming to terms with it. He's trying to understand his
own actions and figure out how he's supposed to live
with them, and he's externalizing that entire thought process in
a recorded interview with a homicide detective.
Speaker 4 (32:15):
And the thing that keeps from rational about this is that, like,
I feel what I've done is horrible in the sense
of that human life has been us and I feel sad.
Speaker 2 (32:27):
I feel like an animal, and I feel like they
should be a costal somewhere that's you know, became that
medicine or.
Speaker 3 (32:33):
Something like that to help me.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
And I want you to know that, like I realized
the full extent of like you know, their families are
going to feel very bad about this their loved ones,
and I feel the utmost.
Speaker 3 (32:46):
Bad about that.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
But I also realized that these people, of what they
were planning with the explosives that were down downstairs.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
What would tell me about that's? What's that all about?
Speaker 2 (32:55):
It? Adam thought the division is a terrorist organization. It's
a n Aanazi organization. Part of it before I can
through it.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
By the time he's sitting in that interrogation room at
one in the morning, he's the hero of the story.
He understands that it was a great tragedy to have
had to take those lives, But if you really think
about it, didn't he save countless lives by doing it.
I think it's the only way he can cope. He
(33:28):
told one of the officers on the scene shortly after
his arrest that he couldn't get the image of his
friend's dead bodies out of his mind. He said he
had no idea how much blood can come out of
a human body. He has to find a way to
convince himself that there was a good reason for it.
He feels like a monster, so he's trying to find
(33:51):
a way to be a hero. But he's lying an
organization that he was part of his conversion. He had
converted a year ago, and he still lived with the
group's leader. He still participated in the group's private chats.
(34:12):
He was still privy to the group's secret internal operations.
He went on group outings and road trips. When Adam
Woffin went camping, Devin was there. When Adam Woffin did
training drills in the woods, Devon was there. Just a
month before the murders, he accompanied Brandon Russell on a
(34:32):
trip to Detroit, Chicago, and Boston for the purpose of
buying and selling guns. Remember, they live in Florida. It's
pretty easy to buy a gun in Florida, so I
don't think they were buying guns in places like Chicago
or Boston. So you'll have to use your imagination to
(34:53):
fill in the gaps here. Maybe they were selling guns
purchased in Florida to members of the group operating in
areas where it was harder to buy them. If Devin
Arthur's had abandoned his prior beliefs, if he was so
disgusted with neo Nazism, why was he participating in this.
(35:13):
He could have moved back in with either one of
his parents. He could have called the FBI. He could
have just stayed home when the neo Nazi terrorist group
went out into the woods to practice shooting drills for
the race war, but he didn't do any of that.
He's telling this officer now in May of twenty seventeen,
(35:36):
that he was no longer a member of Adam Woffen
and hadn't been since his conversion a year earlier, and
I just don't think that's true. I think he's lying,
maybe even to himself. He sounds, for the most part,
fairly lucid in this interview, but half a dozen psychiatrists
(35:57):
and forensic psychologists would eventually agree that he was profoundly
mentally ill. So a lot of this is maybe just
trying to cope with his own actions. But I don't
think it's just coping. I think he realizes he has
a bargaining chip here, because throughout the interview he keeps
(36:19):
asking to speak with the FBI, and he says he
has important information that they'll want to hear.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
If I could get like a meeting with an FBI
agent or something like that, I can shut down not
just Adam Vopham, but at several other.
Speaker 4 (36:34):
Organizations, like probably with a bunch dissultates that.
Speaker 3 (36:37):
I would very much like to do that.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
He's pretty relaxed through most of the interview, but several
times he asks if what he's saying in the interview
is confidential, and when he's talking about that, he gets
very anxious, and the officer tells him that police reports
do eventually become public record, but he assures him that
sensitive information like the things he's talking about, can be
(37:05):
held back from public view. And he tells him that
what you say to me here just for the investigation,
nobody's going to see this video. Now. Remember, cops can
lie to you. Cops can always lie to you. It's
always okay for them to lie. Because I watched the
(37:25):
video of this officer telling Devin Arthur's that no one
would ever watch the video. He wants to tell the
FBI everything he knows about Adam Woffen, but he's very
worried that people will know he talked. He's worried that
members of the group will target him if they find out.
Speaker 2 (37:46):
And then on the other hand, if I somehow get
some kind of plea bargain from this and then I
get released, I might get killed by somebody else like
that gets relieved, especially since I know that I unless
whatever information you can rely shuts down the group with
our ladies.
Speaker 3 (38:00):
Guys are just a commission. Well, that's the main thing.
That's why I'm mainly helping y'all.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
Again, he's being very explicit here. You know, when he's
rationalizing his actions, he says out loud, I'm rationalizing my actions.
And now that he realizes he might have information to
trade for favorable treatment, he says, hey, maybe I'll get
a plea bargain out of this. He's saying the quiet
part very loud, and what he's saying is that he
(38:32):
wants to talk to the FBI about the bombs. I
imagine a cop usually takes you pretty seriously if you
start talking about bombs, just in case, even if you
are spinning a pretty fanciful sounding tale. And in this case,
even though what he's saying does sound a little far fetched,
(38:53):
they're listening carefully because they know there's some truth to it,
because they've already seen the explosives. Before Devon Arthur's ever
mentioned the presence of explosive material inside the condo, the
officers who arrived first on the scene saw enough to
make them cautious. The first officer to enter the apartment
(39:14):
wrote in his report that on his initial walkthrough of
the scene, he opened the closet in the other bedroom,
the one that belonged to Brandon Russell, and on a
shelf in the closet where you would normally keep sweaters
or something, there were several Geiger counters, a significant number
of batteries, and a lot of matches. Another officer found
(39:37):
a backpack near the front door that contained electric matches
and some kind of device that looked like it might
be an ied. They weren't entirely sure what they were
looking at, but they knew enough to know that somebody
else needed to be the one looking at it. So
they confirmed that the two victims were deceased and not
(39:58):
in need of any medical help. The apartment was otherwise empty,
and then they evacuated the neighboring apartments while they waited
for the bomb squad And so backing up to this
point in our timeline, When Devon Arthur's was arrested at
the smoke shop, he was put into a police car
and he told the officers that his two roommates were
(40:18):
dead inside their home, which was in the complex across
the street, but he couldn't remember the unit number. They'd
only just moved in a month before, but he offered
to show them which one it was if they would
drive him there. And so, as the police car is
pulling up outside the condo, they can hear someone screaming inside,
(40:40):
and as the officers are approaching the residence, a man
dressed in military fatigues came out the front door. He
is hysterical, unable to respond to their questions, collapses onto
the ground, sobbing, crying, and he's screaming, Jeremy is dead.
That was Brandon Russell. He'd arrived home some time in
(41:02):
that very small window of time after the murders, but
before the police arrived. He wasn't there when it happened,
but by the time the police get there, he is.
The property manager said that she saw him driving erratically
through the parking lot when she was standing outside after
dialing nine one one, so he had to have gotten
(41:24):
home after five thirty, but before five forty five. He
was detained by the officers on the scene for obvious reasons.
They just watched him walk out of an apartment with
two dead bodies inside. They don't know what they're dealing with.
So around six p m. Those officers who first entered
the apartment saw some things they thought they needed a
(41:46):
bomb squad for Brandon Russell and Devon Arthur's are both
handcuffed and sitting in separate police cars right outside, and
both men, separately and for their own reasons, voluntarily disclosed
to the police that there are explosives inside the house.
(42:07):
Devon is starting to realize that he wants the police
to know that the people he killed were very bad men,
and that maybe they were going to use those bombs
to hurt innocent people. And at this point he adds
that I wouldn't kill innocent people. I had plenty of
opportunities tonight to kill innocent people, even those responding officers,
and I didn't do it. For Brandon, he's just trying
(42:31):
to get out ahead of the problem he knows is coming.
The cops already saw some suspicious material inside the condo,
but they hadn't looked in the garage yet, so he
told a detective that they would find some things in
there that they should know about. He said that in
the garage there's potassium chlorate thorium, which is a radioactive material,
(42:55):
rocket propellant, and a compound called h M D T
Hexamethylene triperoxide diamine is a highly volatile explosive compound. It
is dangerous to handle, it is dangerous to store. It
is insane to keep it in your garage when your
garage is directly underneath your living room. He did fail
(43:19):
to mention to the officer that there was also some
ammonium nitrate in there, but the bomb squad found it anyway.
Russell told the officer on scene that they are going
to find that stuff in the garage, but he wants
them to know that it's only there for fueling model rockets.
But as he's sitting there in handcuffs trying to convince
(43:39):
the officer that those explosives in the garage are just
for his hobby, he asks if he's ever going to
see his family again, because he knows what this looks like,
and it looks bad. He's stuck to the li though
he's just a model rocket enthusiast having a very traumatic day.
(44:14):
At some point, both men were separately transported to the
police station to await their interrogations, and during Devin's interrogation,
he has a very clear idea of exactly what the
bomb squad is going to find in the house. He
knew what was in the house, where it was and
how it got there.
Speaker 2 (44:36):
Yes, there is a nuclear materials and in that in
that garage, there is some nuclear material what's in that
garage that in Asia MTD and those explosives, Yes, some
ceremonium nitrate and believe and I know that there's some
radiated materials that he was able to bring in through
the Bahamas and because because he's a Bahamian citizen, he's
able to bring it and bring it in.
Speaker 1 (44:58):
And more than that, he was willing to tell anyone
who would listen what the group planned to do with
those materials.
Speaker 3 (45:08):
But the things that they were planning were horrible. They're
planning bondings and stuff like that on countless people. They're
planning to kill civilian life. Well did they do with
the specific in their blessed.
Speaker 2 (45:19):
Power lines? Nuclear reactors, synagogues? Things like that.
Speaker 1 (45:28):
He knew all the details of the group's plans. He
knew what Adam Woffin was going to do because he
was a member of Adam Woffin. He's in the chats
where these things are being discussed. He's in the living
room where these things are being discussed, and by the
time he's in that interrogation room, he's convinced himself that
(45:48):
that's why he murdered his roommates. It wasn't some petty
personal dispute, It wasn't because they were bullying him. It
was because he had to do it. He had to
stop them before they could hurt innocent people. And of
course the detective did specifically ask about the model rockets.
Speaker 2 (46:10):
You guys, don't build model rockets and go out back
and down them, offer the or amount of the firewors
for the July.
Speaker 3 (46:17):
Now, there's not that, none of that. It's all literally
there specifically to kill Bean.
Speaker 1 (46:25):
Is this probably the truth? I think so to some degree. Yeah.
Not to spoil the ending, but Brandon Russell was convicted
earlier this year for a separate plot to destroy electrical infrastructure.
He's also alleged to have co authored some of the
Terrogram collective manuals that advise other neo Nazis on how
(46:46):
to go about carrying out their own attacks. It's not
at all hard to believe that he was thinking about
and talking about these things as he's building bombs in
his garage in twenty seventeen and wasn't a model rocket enthusiast.
He did work on a project involving a model rocket
as a member of the engineering club at the University
(47:07):
of South Florida, but that was in twenty thirteen and
he had since dropped out because he couldn't pass calculus.
There were no model rockets in the condo. An explosives
expert wrote in a report that no one would use
HMTD to power a model rocket. It's too volatile. It's
(47:29):
too volatile for pretty much everything. The military doesn't use it.
It fell out of favor in mining decades ago, but
it is possible to make it home if you're not
afraid of accidentally blowing your fingers off if the workshop
gets too warm, so it's still popular among terrorists. At
(47:52):
the end of his interview, Arthur says, again quite plainly,
if I hadn't done this, there would have been attacks.
He's sure of it now. That's why he did it.
He's sure at this point that he'd actually always thought that,
and that was what he was thinking before it happened.
Throughout his interview, Arthur's is asking to speak to the FBI.
(48:13):
He's insisting that they need to hear what he has
to say, and they keep sort of pushing him off, saying, yeah,
we can think about that. You know, we'll get to that.
That's later. He doesn't know that an FBI agent is
watching a video feed from the next room, and he's right.
The FBI was very interested in what he had to say,
(48:34):
because shortly after that interview wrapped up, the same detective
sat down with Brandon Russell, and this time that FBI
agent is in the room. They talked to Brandon for
a little over an hour. The detective had him sign
a form confirming that he'd been informed of his Miranda rights,
but he was also told that he wasn't in custody,
(48:55):
he wasn't being detained, he's not under arrest, and he's
free to leave it any time. He signed the form,
and he agreed to talk without a lawyer, which I'm
fine with him doing, but you listener, never talked to
the police without a lawyer. They talked a lot about
the murders. Obviously, he's talking to a homicide detective in
(49:19):
a homicide investigation. They talked about Devin and Andrew and Jeremy,
how they all come to be friends, how they met
online and then in person, how that friendship had fallen
apart over Devon's conversion to Islam. Brandon says Devon's conversion
was never an issue for him, and I think that's true.
(49:41):
He insisted that what was going on in the house
was all just banter, just regular ball busting, teasing between friends.
After the detective rephrases the question half a dozen times,
he reluctantly agrees that, yeah, Jeremy and Andrew crossed the
line sometimes. Maybe they were bullying him and Devin was
(50:02):
having a hard time with it, but he said it
had never gotten physical and he never thought anyone would
get hurt. He also said Adam Waffin was just a
club for people with shared political interests, and they liked
to do outdoor activities together. He did agree that those
shared beliefs were national socialism, and he got a little
(50:23):
animated when he started complaining that schools only teach lies
about Hitler. For the most part, though, Who's mumbling and
his body language is guarded and anxious. He's sitting sort
of folded in on himself, slouching down with his legs
crossed and his arms folded tightly across his chest. He's tired,
(50:44):
he's traumatized, but he's scared, and he insists throughout this
conversation that everything they found was legal, It was legally obtained,
he wasn't planning to do anything nefarious with it, and
it was all related to his hobby of building model rockets.
After about an hour of this, the detective's tone changes.
(51:10):
He's been sort of yes, ending him, just letting him talk,
getting him to open up, talking about his hobbies, not
passing any kind of judgment, and Brandon Russell has been
portraying himself and his organization as what the detective calls,
you know, knuckleheads horsing around, you know, just kids having fun.
But if we look on your computer, what are we
(51:32):
going to find? Is it just jokes and camping trips
or are we going to find that you've made explicit threats?
Are you saying things like he'll all jews right? What
are you saying? Are you making the kind of threats
that could lead to federal charges? And at first Brandon
(51:53):
tries to answer the question. He says, you know, only
ever as a joke, I've never said that non satirically,
and they press him a little hard what kinds of
things are you saying? And then he just mumbles that
maybe he needs a lawyer, So the questions stop there.
He's not under arrest, he can leave at any time,
(52:15):
and if he wants a lawyer, they're not going to
ask him any more questions. He can go, but he
can't go home though. The ATF has only just arrived
and they still haven't finished clearing the house of explosive material.
And until the ATF clears the scene, the medical examiner
can't take the bodies away, so he's not going to
be able to get into that condo anytime soon. So
(52:41):
Russell asks the detective to call his dad. He doesn't
ask if he can use the phone to call his dad.
He a twenty two year old member of the military,
is asking this other adult man, will you call my dad?
He doesn't actually know his dad's phone number, and his
cell phone is still inside the condo, but he says,
(53:03):
you know, you can just call the Palm Beach County
Sheriff's office and ask for him by name. He's a
deputy there, or maybe it's West Palm Beach. He can't
actually remember he and his dad aren't close. He wasn't
around when Branda was a kid, and they don't really
get along now. But he tells the FBI that he's
(53:23):
going to drive to Palm Beach and stay with his dad.
His mom still lives in the Bahamas, so he doesn't
really have anywhere else nearby he can go, so a
little after six am on Saturday morning, a Tampa police
officer dropped Russell off outside the condo. The Explosive Ordnance
Disposal team had finished with the scene, so detectives were
(53:44):
just now arriving to conduct their search. One of those
detectives went inside and got his keys for him. In
her report, she notes that when she entered his bedroom
to look for his keys, she saw a large framed
photograph of Timothy mcveay on his dresser. An explosives enforcement
agent from the ATF confirmed to the FBI sometime early
(54:05):
Saturday morning that the materials they found did meet the
legal definition of a destructive device. What they found in
that garage was enough to bring federal charges, but by
the time the ATF agents were done examining the scene
and writing of their findings, the FBI had already let
(54:25):
him go he was gone. He said he was going
to his dad's house in West Palm Beach, but he didn't.
When FBI agents contacted his family, they said they hadn't
heard from him. Instead of going to his dad's house
to get some rest, he'd driven straight to the home
(54:47):
of another Adam Woffin member. He told him about the murders,
and he said he needed to get away for a
while to clear his head. But his friend didn't just
toss a few T shirts and a toothbrush into a
backpack like you might expect someone to do for a
spur of the moment weekend away. Instead, he withdrew all
of the money from his bank account, quit his job,
(55:09):
and got into Russell's car, heading south. When deputies apprehended
Russell in the Florida Keys a day later, the rifles
they'd bought at a sporting goods store were still in
their manufacturer's packaging. We'll pick back up next week with
the year's long ordeal in court of resolving Devon Arthur's
(55:29):
mental competency and Brandon Russell's first trip to federal prison.
Hopefully by then we'll know how his story ends. He
is scheduled to be sentenced for his second foiled plot
on August seventh. Until then, I don't know. Make sure
your teenage son isn't accidentally converting to a memified version
(55:52):
of Islam in a neo Nazi Minecraft chat, and don't
store volatile explosives in a cooler in your garage. Weird
(56:16):
Little Guys is the production of cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's research, written and accorded by me on the kunger Our.
Executive producers are Sophie Lichtman and Robert Evans. The show
is edited by the wildly talented Bory Gigan. The theme
music was composed by Brad Dickard. You can email me
at Weird Little Guys 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
(56:38):
show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one
of my Weird Little Guys
Host
Molly Conger
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